Americans have been told that we’ve abandoned the War on Terror. Thanks, Barack. Take a bow.
But the ‘War on Tax Paying Suburbanites Who Travel With Tooth Gel and Acne Meds’ is positively raging. That’ll put your mind at ease, won’t it?
Mayor Bloomberg can’t bring himself to believe that an Islamic Jihadist born of affluent parents and trained in Pakistan would try to blow up Times Square. Has to be a Tea Partier from Omaha, no?
Liberals can’t comprehend that violent drug dealers from Mexico should be cuffed and printed by no-nonsense Arizona law enforcement officials. Why, that might be “profiling”. Is that any way to treat a professional landscaper?
But, by golly, when three white people in a suffocating tax bracket from DuPage County, IL, pay roughly $700 to board a jetliner from Washington-Dulles to Chicago-O’Hare with various personal hygiene products in their carry-ons, the TSA head crackers will positively bring the world to a dead stop to interrogate my wife and daughter as to their gels and liquids.
According to the uniformed female TSA employee at Dulles Airport, our Mother’s Day bliss needed a puncture wound because my teenager has acne meds containing evil peroxide(!) and tooth gel that is dispensed using an aerosol mechanism. AquaFresh, indeed! Never mind that our SUV parked back at O’Hare is devoid of alarm clocks and fertilizer. Who cares that our underwear is not rigged with explosive crotch lotions. Or that our shoes have no hidden detonation compartments, or that we don’t even know how to pronounce, “Allahu Akbar”.
Theater security, aka, TSA reverse profiling (go after the least likely perpetrator), is rivaled for its alienation of the flying public only by flight attendant harassment of passengers, what with the new War on Carry Ons raging, as well. Our country is done a disservice when the terrorist scum are living in undisclosed locations while being tutored by government attorneys, and reading ‘Thank You’s from Michael Bloomberg. (Dear Mr. Disaffected Youth, Thank you for bungling that car bomb in Times Square. I can’t express my gratitude in words.). Meanwhile, we subject citizens to increasingly invasive screening.
You know it has gotten out of control, when I arrive at the airport and find myself suffering beard and turban envy. “Damn it, if I had one or both of those, I would have been out of this security line 15 minutes ago — with all my stuff.”
The TSA agent at Dulles was polite but unwavering. Too much peroxide in the acne meds, she said. And that toothpaste, well, it just looks borderline. Today, I visited the TSA web site, at her suggestion, and could find no specific ban on peroxide-based skin meds. I did find a rather definitive statement referring to gels and aerosols. They are “permitted through the security checkpoint in reasonable quantities.” In thimbles, actually.
Unless you are frequent fliers who voted for McCain. Then all bets are off.
So I guess we can only assume there was some kind of Trainee Sweepstakes event going on at Dulles on Sunday night. The guy monitoring the X-ray screen was beside himself with misgivings about our quart-sized bags and their contents. Who knew one could be an infidel and a suspect all in one afternoon?
The legendary columnist Mark Steyn brought this insanity into focus today in his latest column exposing the hypocrisy of the PC Age.
“America is so un-Islamophobic that at ground zero they’re building a 13-story mosque — on the site of an old Burlington Coat Factory damaged by airplane debris that Tuesday morning (on 09/11). So in the ruins of a building reduced to rubble in the name of Islam, a temple to Islam will arise.”
While, nearby, the Lady in the Harbor is wanded. Repeatedly.