It’s hard to think of a single government policy that has engendered a more sustained universal outrage then Janet Incompetano’s latest airport security procedures which have produced anecdotes such as a videotape of a screaming five-year old little girl being groped by an adult TSA official. It a perfect storm of outrage because what is welling in response to airport gropers is a collective primal realization that our freedoms and national security are rapidly disappearing.
The river outrage is so fulsome because it emanates from three large tributaries. First, is the realization that if an anonymous government official can grope you without any probable cause, what can’t they do to you? What could be a more perfect statement signifying that we no longer control our own government, that it controls us.
Second, being groped by a government official is an outrageous example of politically correct bureaucratic ineptitude. Unlike the Israelis who have used advanced profiling techniques to keep terrorists off their planes successfully for decades, we are outraged when the TSA spends its time patting down a ten-year old kid from Des Moines while the underwear bomber and the Times Square bomber who both traveled numerous times to and from Pakistan and Yemen respectively, were allowed to travel freely.
Third, our outrage comes from fact that this policy shines a bright light on the fact political correctness is a form of cowardice and that we are losing the war with resurgent militant Islam. CAIR (Council of American Islamic Relations) has already put the government on notice—there will be no groping underneath Islamic women’s garments. And we know this government will be cowed into submission. So while some of the Muslims among us plot our demise, they will be left alone and we Judeo Christians will be treated with feigned suspicion. We are outraged to realize that this entire airport security apparatus is a charade; all staged to make us think our government is taking our security seriously when in fact it is too cowardly to do so. We are outraged to realize that the freedoms so fundamental to an America we once knew are under siege.
“I did not react negatively to this at all and I was surprised when it first happened to me. Since then it has taken on another life of people being outraged. The problem is POLITICAL CORRECTNESS. We cannot profile like Israel due to sheer volume. We cannot profile other than 1-way tickets bought with cash or someone who has a BEHAVIOR profile like having just flown in from the middle east.
I do not think our data proves that grandmothers, nuns and most people flying are suspicious. If anyone really want to hurt us they could just explode in line and achieve their twisted goal. My vote (an unpopular one) is to PROFILE the OBVIOUS and pull a few random people out of line to soften that blow for the politically correct.”
As always, excellent post on the outrage toward the TSA. I would add a few more lines with which I suspect you might agree.
1. Lack of seriousness – This is a painful spectacle to watch…truly painful. To see how far we’ve fallen in only 60-70 years. After 12/7/41 we were so committed to defeating our enemy (that didn’t even attack an American city or kill civilians!) that we rounded up 200,000 loyal Americans because they were members of the same race as our attackers and we put them in internment camps for the duration of the war that followed. Not very sensitive…eh? But it surely was a message as to how serious we were about defeating those who had attacked us.
2. Lack of common sense – one listens to the clownish TSA director (a career FBI man) explain with eloquence the effectiveness of the new “procedures” and takes him seriously because it takes a monumental lack of common sense to think as he does. Imagine…a career FBI man being so stupid. We see the same kind of lack of common sense in the administering of full body scans to 3 year old girls, deep gropes to crippled 86 year old women, and the disassembling the walkers of white-haired septuagenarians. Do you think our enemies are not laughing their heads off at how The Big Satan is handling airport screening?…or how The Satan has established withdrawal deadlines in Afghanistan? And maybe that’s it, viz., we are no longer a serious people.
3. Video: A little 3-year old girl kept screaming, “Quit touching me!” Did they really think this little girl was packing a bomb? Is this a good way to defend yourself from your enemies? Really? Have we lost our minds? http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2TCHSGvNwRY&feature=player_embedded
4. Larry, starting to see a pattern here?
Airline security forces removal of shoes at security check points – 12/2001
Banning of liquids in – 2006
Pat downs and body scans – 2010
But there may be some common sense on the horizon: they have now determined that airline pilots don’t need to be subjected to these rules; they seem to have deduced that pilots don’t need a bomb to bring down the plane they are piloting.
5. We mirandize captured combatants; we refuse to prevent terrorists from sneaking over our southern border; but we have no problem taking apart the wheel chair of a mentally retarded 12 year old French teenage boy who wants to return home with his family at SFO (this one I witnessed one year ago while his family stood by helplessly in horror and my wife in tears over it). We are now living in a very stupid nation.
BTW, your Alexander Tyler quote is excellent viz., “The world?s great civilizations have progressed through the following sequence: …from courage to liberty, from abundance to selfishness, from selfishness to complacency…” Think about it for a minute: we now live in a society where the single most pervasive health-problem plaguing America’s poor is…wait for it…obesity. Throughout all of human history, “poverty” has been synonymous with hunger, starvation, haggard-skeletal-emaciated human figures. Where do you think we are on Tyler’s continuum? :-)