NEWSLETTER

June 27, 2011

TSA Obergropenführers

Contrary to popular (and uninformed) opinion, history and common sense show these TSA gropefests at our airports (see below) do NOT make us safer.

As to those who say it makes them feel safer, we would suggest that next time you're waiting on line, you take a look around and see who it is that's being groped. That should eliminate any and all delusions of safety you may have.

If TSA folk can't be trusted to identify and screen only those who genuinely warrant suspicion, how can we trust them to identify innocent-looking items that could be used for nefarious purposes, which includes just about everything? [In any case, screeners should be focusing on individuals, rather than the “items” they’re carrying on.]

Adding insult to injury, the gropers are now unionized, which means good luck firing anyone who’s doing a particularly lousy job. Public unions today do not necessarily represent the best of the best, and while we’ve come to accept shoddy service in most things public, when it comes to matters of safety and survival, we should tolerate nothing less than the best.

Government’s #1 responsibility is to keep us safe and secure, without unnecessarily demeaning or harassing us in the process, which is what these gropefests do.

National Review Online  |  June 27, 2011

TSA Obergropenführer of the Day

By Mark Steyn

TSA_Obergropenfhrer.jpg
Jean Weber says TSA officials forced her 95-year-old
mother, pictured here, to remove her adult diaper.

Photo: Courtesy CNN / Family Photo 

At a small airport the other day, I saw a passenger with a popular attitudinal T-shirt slogan patiently submitting to an enhanced gropedown from the TSA. It was a poignant image of the republic at twilight: a man in a “Don’t Tread On Me” T-shirt being trod all over. I wonder why more Americans aren’t outraged by this:

Her 95-year-old mother was detained and extensively searched last Saturday while trying to board a plane to fly to Michigan to be with family members during the final stages of her battle with leukemia. Her mother, who was in a wheelchair, was asked to remove an adult diaper in order to complete a pat-down search.

There is a term for regimes that submit law-abiding wheelchair-bound dying nonagenarians to public humiliations without probable cause and it isn’t “republic of limited government.” Given everybody’s touchiness over Kathryn’s North Korean comparisons, I’ll say only this: George III wouldn’t have done this to you.

Amy Alkon posts a response from a bureaucratic bozo to her own experience at the airport. Caution for sensitive types: The word “labia” is included. But that’s because in 21st century America the anatomical feature “labia” are included in a trip to the airport – and that’s what should concern you. As the crack TSA agent informs Miss Alkon, “We go thru sensitive areas with back of hand.”

That’s great news! Somewhere on page 273 of the handbook, there’s a graphic detailing the precise point on the upper thigh where the licensed state groper is obliged to invert his paw.

My weekend column concluded with some thoughts on American government’s culture of excess. Big Government – more-more-more money-no-object government — will by definition be profoundly stupid government. Lean, constrained government would not only be affordable but smarter. The bloated moronic airport security regime is a particularly ugly example. In a decade of existence, it has never stopped a single terrorist, but it can successfully cow a dying woman born during the Wilson Administration into removing her diaper.

We can all sleep easier knowing that.

Original article here.


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