Garrison makes some good points. Peace, D. Mindock
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The way to stop terrorists on planes is to encourage passengers to bring
loaded firearms aboard. Where's the NRA when you need 'em?
By
Garrison
Keillor
Sep. 13, 2006 | And now you can't bring your cup of
coffee on board the
airplane. It's the latest new rule laid down by the
nation's security
wizards. Everyone knows it's ridiculous -- the notion that
you can toss
together a few liquids and make an explosive is a fiction from
late-night
movies. You might as well prohibit bald men on the grounds that
the evil
Lex Luthor was bald and so was Blofeld, the head of
SPECTRE.
But we ditch our venti latte in the trash barrel (goodbye, four
bucks) and
board the flight, and there we read in the paper that aggressive
CIA
questioning of an al-Qaida bigwig -- stripping him, turning the air
conditioner to 40 degrees, blasting him with Red Hot Chili Peppers music
-- broke him, so he ratted on Jose Padilla, a terrorist who set out to
make a dirty bomb and who believed that by swinging a bucket of uranium in
a circle over his head he could separate plutonium. It's like a
cartoon.
The way to stop terrorists on planes is to encourage passengers
to bring
loaded firearms aboard: guys in orange vests sitting in exit rows
with
deer rifles on their laps, ladies with
Mr.
Colt in their purses, kids with
peashooters. Somebody wake up the NRA. Does the Second Amendment say "The
right of the People to keep and bear arms shall not be infringed except on
commercial airliners"? Where is the right wing when you really need
them?
This way, if some guy in a burnoose sets up a chemistry lab in Row
24 and
mixes hydrogen peroxide, sulfuric acid and acetone in a big beaker
that is
packed in 15 pounds of dry ice to keep it cool, and cooks up some
triacetone triperoxide, or TATP, the passengers will be able, in the
several hours it will take him to make the deadly explosive, to bring him
under control, assuming the fumes haven't knocked Ahmed out. And they
could nab the mastermind too, the monocled guy in first class petting the
white cat.
It all began with the name Homeland Security. Somebody
with a tin ear came
up with that, maybe the pest exterminator from
Texas, or Adm.
Poinduster,
because, friends, Americans
don't refer to this as our homeland. It's an
alien term, like Fatherland or
Deutschland or Tomorrowland.
Irving
Berlin
didn't write "God Bless Our
Homeland." You never heard John
Wayne say,
"Men, we're going over that
hill and we're going to kick those krauts out
of there. And we're going to
raise the flag of the homeland."
"Homeland" was a word you heard shrieked
by a cruel man flicking his
riding crop against his shiny black boots: "Zie
homeland -- ve shall
defend it at all costs, achwohl!" Americans live in Our
Country,
America,
the
nation of nations, the good old
USA.
But
they couldn't call it the Department of National Security because
there was
one of those already, so they created this new Achtung bureau to
make us
take off our shoes and put the toothpaste in the checked luggage
and dump
the coffee. The jihadists we're afraid of are, so far as we know,
young
Muslim men from the Middle East, not old grandmas named Evelyn and
Gladys
married to soybean farmers, and not even old white guys like me,
but
nonetheless they pat us down for plastic explosives under our
Sansabelts and
have us raise our stockinged feet to be wanded for possible
toe bombs. It's
all to make us feel we're in a movie and it will have a
happy
ending.
God forbid, somebody shows up at an airport somewhere in the
world with an
explosive tucked up in his lower colon. The Achtung people
will come up
with some new security procedures that will effectively kill
airline
travel, and then this enormous bureaucracy can turn its attention to
the
nation's highways. Pull over at the checkpoint, get out of the car, open
the trunk, take off your shoes, put your hands on the top of the car, turn
your head to the right, and cough.
They can search each laptop for
possible terrorist-type writing and
confiscate cellphones, white powder,
shoelaces, car keys, pencils,
anything sharp or cylindrical or made of
glass, and interrogate people
randomly, putting them naked into cold rooms
with ugly music played at top
volume. It's all fine with me. I'm a liberal
and we love ridiculous
government programs that intrude on personal freedom.
But where are the
conservatives who used to object to this sort of
thing?
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