From Ports to Airports

Our masters really have no idea what they're doing. And the five cent Nazis who man the TSA are practically a purpose-built illustration. Peggy Noonan experiences it regularly and writes about it here. Spot-on and a pretty good description also of my experience and my wife's.

I don't think most of us get extra screening because they think we are terrorists. I think we get it because they know we're not. They screen people who are not terrorists because it helps them pretend they are protecting us, in the same way doctors in the middle ages used to wear tall hats: because they couldn't cure you. It's all show.

. . . . . .

So we're all talking about port security this week, and the debate over the Bush administration decision to allow United Arab Emirates company to manage six ports in the United States. That debate is turning bitter, and I wonder if the backlash against President Bush isn't partly due to the fact that everyone in America has witnessed or has been a victim of the incompetence of the airport security system. Why would people assume the government knows what it's doing when it makes decisions about the ports? It doesn't know what it's doing at the airports.


This is a flying nation. We fly. And everyone knows airport security is an increasingly sad joke, that TSA itself often appears to have forgotten its mission, if it ever knew it, and taken on a new one--the ritual abuse of passengers.


Now there's a security problem. Solve that one.

I'm old enough to remember when it was a free country just like the anthem says.

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