Can't See The Forrest For The Trees

It continues to amaze me how we here in the US go about attempting to defend air travelers from the threat of terrorism. All 19 of the 9/11 hijackers were of Saudi or other native Arabic descent. Not one of them was a long haired, sun-tanned south Alabama redneck on vacation nor were they a 95 year old German grandmother in a wheelchair, yet that is exactly who the TSA screeners are assaulting with wands and pat downs at airport checkpoints while Abdul and Mohammed and Rashee breeze through the gates unfettered.

The solders of Allah’s success was not a result of the deadly threat of the “box cutter” knives they wielded, but rather the lemming-like mentality that air travelers had been taught dating back to the “take me to Cuba” hijacking craze of the 1960’s and 1970’s. Pilots and passengers alike had been led to believe that cooperation with the assailant’s demands was preferable to standing up and kicking the asses of anyone that started misbehaving on an airplane.

Not anymore. You get out of your seat and start yelling about Allah while I’m on a flight and you’re going to feel what is like to have my 6’3”, 235 pound carcass opening an industrial strength can of whoop-ass and delivering it to you personally. I don’t care what the legal consequences are. I’ll make bail and then sue what’s left of your stupid butt in court. I might just get re-arrested for assaulting you again when and if I ever see you again.

I believe that most every red-blooded American man feels the same way.

Instead of devoting our law enforcement resources to the task of looking for potential terrorists, we spend most of our time and energy passing new laws aimed at looking for items that could be in some ridiculous way considered weapons. The latest items banned in the latest government’s Intelligence Reform Bill’s new “no fly” list includes cigarette lighters.

Cigarette Lighters…For some reason I don’t feel much safer.

Now, in addition to not being able to clip your fingernails in flight (I bite mine—can they ban teeth?), we are all spared the risk of some rabid cigarette smoker loosing his mind in a nicotine starved fit of insanity and lighting up a cigar or cigarette in the restroom of a Delta 767. The really bad news is that the smokers in the crowd will potentially be prohibited the ability to run to one of those airport “smoker’s aquariums” (you know, the glass walled smoking areas often found in airport concourses) between flights after enduring a white knuckled, nicotine free, two hours on a flight between Atlanta and Chicago.

Some smokers I know may actually become terrorists if they are forced to go too long without a fix of nicotine as a result of this new hair-brained exclusion. In the future, expect to find large roaming herds of wild eyed smokers, feverishly lighting up entire packs of cigarettes outside the front door of an airport near you.

And I’ve got news for you. Nothing has changed relative to the basic security of commercial aviation, except that stupid, careless, or otherwise amateur terrorists like that moron “The Shoe Bomber” are excluded from the list of threats. If a smart guy like me or some of my friends (this means you, Tripp) wanted to assault a commercial airliner, none of the laws and bans we have passed to date would prevent us from doing it. The only thing that has changed is that the price of delivering the threat has gone up.

The Islamofascist terrorists don’t want to kill every single American. They don’t have the time and resources to accomplish that. What they do want to do is to scare us into changing our way of life. They want to cause us to stop supporting Israel. They want to get our military and our influence out of the middle east so that the kleptocrats and other little weird beard dictator wanna-be’s can dominate their people at will.

If we truly want to prevent a future terrorist attack, Al Qaeda or otherwise, we will start carefully screening the origin and background of everyone getting on an airplane—paying particular attention to anyone of middle-eastern descent.

To hell with political correctness. Profiling is not racism—it’s just common sense.