Are neo-cons ever NOT going to be clueless? Nope

Neo-cons such as Sarah Palin, John McCain, Lush Windbag, Glenn Beck, Sean Insanity, et. al.  With a list like that, who in God’s name would want to call themselves a neo-con in the first place? Only the clueless, themselves, I suppose, since they do not know which end the round comes out of, anyway!!

 

On National Review’s Advice to Give Thanks to the TSA Employees, and What We Should Really Give Them

Marc A. Thiessen, a visiting fellow at the American Enterprise Institute, writes at National Review:

In the coming days, millions of Americans will travel to celebrate the Thanksgiving holiday with family and friends. May I pose a novel idea? As we go through the airport screening line, let’s stop and say “thanks” to the men and women of the TSA who give up time with their families during the holidays to keep us safe from terror.

In the past few weeks, these patriots have been compared with Big Brother and accused of sexual assault. They’ve suffered the same kinds of public indignities the Left has heaped on the men and women of the CIA–being accused of engaging un-American and unlawful behavior for doing the difficult and unpleasant work of protecting the country. They deserve better.

He continues:

If a passenger who is supposed to be seated near us on our next flight has a bomb in his underwear, I suspect most of us would prefer that the explosive be uncovered when he tries to get through airport security–not when a Dutch tourist sees the passenger in the row ahead of him try to set it off and dives across the plane to stop him, as happened on a flight to Detroit last Christmas.

In the last two weeks, I have been through TSA screening eight times–and not once was I asked to go through the millimeter-wave machine, or undergo an enhanced pat-down. Odds are that most of the 2.2 million passengers who will go through airport security each day during this holiday weekend will have a similar experience. On the last leg of my trip, I finally asked to go through both procedures to see what all the fuss was about. No one touched my junk.

First, it is idiotic to claim, “No one touched my junk.” When his “junk” has been radiated in a fashion where the consequences are unkown.

When it comes to my body, I am really am a very late adopter, even when tests have been done, which they haven’t with the porn scanners. Let Thiessen get his balls exposed to the scanner once a week for the next 10 years, and then let him write an article about the condition of his balls, and I might consider stepping into one of those things.

But the bigger picture is that Thiessen simply has a facsist mentality. He sets up the strawman argument that if government dosesn’t provide security for passengers, no one will. That’s simply absurd.

Security needs to be turned over to the airlines. That’s how innovations in products come about and a common respect for a customer comes about. Not by turning it over to an organization, the government, that is the embodiment of coercion with bad attitude.

Using basic economic principles, Bill Anderson called it in 2002:

Once screeners become full-fledged government employees, however, the incentives structure will change dramatically. The inspectors will be working for the federal government and will have no obligations at all toward passengers, except to treat all of them like criminals…In this new atmosphere, one can expect a number of things. First, searches will be slower and more cumbersome, since the fewer people who actually get through, the lower the probability that a plane can be hijacked. Empty seats on flights will not matter to federal employees whose paychecks will come courtesy of the taxpayers.

Second, it is quite likely that screeners and other government security personnel will be more rude toward passengers than they are at present. While some of us have suffered through some brutal searches, I fear the worst is to come.

It is the same basic economic principles that Anderson used to warn us, that we can use to understand how to remove these abusive, possibly dangerous to our health, searches. Get government out of the equation. As many have pointed out before me, the airlines have plenty of incentive to protect their passengers. They don’t want to lose multi-million dollar aircraft and they don’t want to become known as an airline that loses its passengers to bombings.

Americans may get a kick out of ordering soup from a “Soup Nazi”, but they don’t want that attitude in all parts of their lives. And they certainly don’t want to be told they have an “option” between a “grab up”  and a radiation scan. The real option is to let the airlines handle it, in whatever new and creative ways they choose.

This Thanksgiving the only thing the TSA employees deserve from us is a kindly warning.

First, ask them, why TSA superiors won’t let them where radiation badges to check how much radiation they are exposed to. And then point them to scientists who question how difficult it is to control the radiation bursts from those machines and the unkown consequences of the particular radiation coming from those machines.

You see, I suspect Joe Pistole, Janet Napolitano and Michael Chertoff are messing big time with the heads of the average TSA employee, and possibly putting them at great risk. After all, what’s the harm in wearing a tiny radiation badge?