The Conservative Soldier

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.

Law professor Paul Campos decries the folly of “security theater” at U.S. airports as a purely symbolic response to the ever present threat of terrorism within commercial aviation. His essay appears in the January 9 Wall Street Journal, entitled, “Undressing the Terror Threat”.

He observes that about 6,700 Americans die, on average, every day. Nothing approaching the invasiveness of airport security is imposed on our daily lives in an effort to prevent these randomly occurring deaths, including deaths by murder, suicide and traffic accidents.

The reason is completely logical, yet the logic is not applied to the wanding of your sweet innocent grandmother by a TSA agent.

Writes Campos, a University of Colorado academic:

“We seem to consider 43,000 traffic deaths per year an acceptable cost to pay for driving big fast cars. For obvious reasons, politicians and other policy makers generally avoid discussing what ought to be considered an ‘acceptable’ number of traffic deaths, or murders, or suicides, let alone what constitutes an acceptable level of terrorism. Even alluding to such concepts would require treating voters as adults—something which at present seems to be considered little short of political suicide.”

Treating voters as adults? What a concept. The politics of fear that the Obama White House loves to engage – ”If we don’t pass this or that into law right now, ASAP, look out, America …” — not only covers up the root causes of our vulnerability to Islamic jihadists but conveniently keeps the drums beating for “health care reform” as well.

The politics of fear distracts most Americans from our weakening stature on the world stage. The politics of fear minimizes the shoddiness of our intelligence collection, profiling and analysis, wherein real security occurs, focusing instead on how much hair gel and mouthwash you’re trying to bring aboard an airplane.

Finally, the politics of fear makes it possible for people like Nancy Pelosi and Harry “I Like A Light Skinned President” Reid to hijack the U.S. economy and stoke the fires of Socialism by exploiting the “outrage” over the less than 2% of the American population that might, or might not, be in need of medical insurance coverage.*

So it comes to this. A hard working, law abiding citizen trying to fly to a meeting is treated as a potential threat to aviation security (off with your shoes, capitalist swine!) and is vilified as heartless because his employment package provides medical and dental insurance.

If we consider 43,000 annual traffic deaths “acceptable”, what’s so appalling about five million people who are very much alive but merely uninsured?

* Of the 46 million uninsured, 9.7 million are not U.S. citizens; 17.6 million have annual incomes of more than $50,000; and 14 million already qualify for Medicaid or other programs. That leaves less than five million people truly uncovered out of a population of 307 million. (Karl Rove, Wall Street Journal, 09.03.09)

Writing from Kauai.

Like many Americans, I have been in news blackout mode since just before Christmas, with few exceptions. Less TV. Less web surfing. Virtually no newspapers. While enjoying the tranquility of the Hawaiian isle of Kauai, I received a news alert on my Blackberry on Christmas Day that a Nobel laureate and Eartha Kitt both had died. I am always relieved these days when the news alert is about the passing of some icon, rather than the one that begins, “Dow plunges …”

I can only assume the seductive Kitt made the more tangible contributions during her time on earth. The Nobel Prize and its distinguished “laureates” (such as Al Gore) largely are irrelevant.

If the holiday season is, as the lyricist insisted so many years ago, the “most wonderful time of the year”, it is probably because we can escape the 24/7 news cycles for a week or maybe two. If the mainstream media is trying to destroy our collective sanity, or turn us into a nation of manic-depressives, I fear it is succeeding.

As such, I have been deliberate in trying not to think about, or read news about, Barack Hussein Obama. I even waited until Day 8 of my holiday to don a mostly tongue-in-cheek “Obama/Osama” tee shirt. (Of course, on my morning walk, I immediately encountered some lumpy, pale skinned East Coast lib wearing a Chez Guevara-style Obama-is-God tee. He glared at me as if my shirt said, “Kill Kittens”).

My liberal antagonists howled with laughter upon learning that I was heading to the state of Hawaii for the Christmas holidays after news broke that the Obamas, and a posse of hangers-on to rival the Sinatra Rat Pack, also planned to luxuriate here (on the island of Oahu, thank God).

It is maddening. I have to live in Chicago and endure the hyperventilating of the local, Obama-crazed media — and fellow members who have come from out of town to join them — that has been unrelenting since the tragic events of November 4. And, when I think I am going to finally get away from it, that man of the people Obama boards a chartered United 767 on Dec. 20 that takes off from O’Hare Airport bound for Honolulu precisely 30 minutes before my family and I take off on United’s legendary Flight #1, a regularly scheduled nonstop to Honolulu from O’Hare.

Memo to Al Gore: How many carbon credits did the Obama family use up with that flying symbol of change known as Boeing’s fuel guzzling 767?

The flight attendants on UA #1 were all abuzz about the Obama charter, of course. As they largely ignored me and my wife and daughter, though we occupied their so-called First Class seating, I could only imagine the orgy of Obama worship going on a couple of hundred miles ahead of us, aboard Messiah One.

In flight, I realized why the ascendancy of Obama torments me day and night. It is not only about the fact that he is among the least scrutinized, least tested and most unqualified men ever elected President of the United States. Or that he is radically liberal, an enemy of patriotism, a man who has derided our military men and women. Or that he was a member of a church in which the pulpit was a cauldron of racial antagonism. Or that we have no idea if he is actually a naturally born U.S. citizen. Or that he is unearthing all of the Clinton era weasels to carry out his orders as President (or, perhaps, to tell him what the orders should be). What bothers me, to be brutally honest, is simply this: he is the luckiest man alive.

Why him? Obama is 47. I am 47. He was married on October 3 (1992). My wife and I were married on October 3 (1987). He smoked cigarettes. So did I.  (I was smart enough to quit at age 35; Obama apparently falls off the wagon from time to time, but no one seems outraged. Should we not demand a modicum of discipline from the Commander in Chief?).

The parallels end there, thankfully. As I have grown older, my love for America has become deeper and less compromised. My belief in the greatness of America, in its rightful place as the world’s only legitimate superpower, has become stronger. My tolerance for invasive government and its coddling of the weakest among us has expired. Meanwhile, Obama has grown ever more cynical about America.

For the first time in my life (to borrow a Michelle Obama transition) I am of the same generation of a major political figure, a “world leader”, and it troubles me that he has to be some clown from Chicago who has gamed political, academic and religious institutions all of his life without shame or restraint. And I feel very alone, suddenly, because the circle of people I thought were my friends is disproportionally pro-Obama. People I thought of as solid, educated, American values folks are blindly awash with optimism that Obama and his crowd are going to “restore America” and create an all-inclusive Camelot.

The problem is that Obama is not a “restorer”. He’s a “reformer”. His notion of reform is to dismantle the United States down to its very foundation, taking the Constitution down with it. His dream is to preside over a socialist, economically stagnant nation that shrinks into the shadows in the face of real enemies, and, for now, many seemingly intelligent people are ready to go along with that mission. Bartender, another round of Drool-Aid.

“Has there ever been,” to quote the gifted columnist Charles Krauthammer, “a (President-elect) with a wider gap between his estimation of himself and the sum total of his lifetime achievements?”

Has there ever been a luckier man, a less probable political lottery winner?

Can’t think of one.