Posted on 11/16/2010 6:55:00 AM PST by Kaslin
Time was that telling a government agent not to "touch my junk" was so obvious that citizens didn't need to bother. Thanks to Janet Napolitano, now we have government agents groping nuns and taking naked pictures of the rest of us.
The combination of arrogance, malevolence, and incompetence that has come to define the Obama administration seems to have found a permanent poster girl atop the Department of Homeland Security. DHS and its big government spawn, the Transportation Security Administration, have come under fire lately for insane policies that are literally jokes outside the U.S. If you don’t believe me, take off your shoes as you await security scanning in, say, Japan, and watch the normally stoic Japanese security guards double over laughing at you.
These policies of photographically scanning us down to our skins and touching us in ways that trigger our Stranger Danger reflex really do nothing to make us more secure. They haven’t stopped any known attempts to blow up any airplane anywhere. They don’t put true terrorists off balance. The last couple of would-be bombers, like the Ft. Hood jihadist mass murderer, had all the data points that made them worthy of a global terror watch list, but because we don’t do that sort of thing effectively, they still get to get on their planes or get ahold of weapons and even get promoted in the U.S. military. And meanwhile, we’re having TSA agents grope nuns. Seriously.
While Sister Mary Elizabeth either digitally kicks the habit or feels the fickle hand of Uncle Sam or Aunt Samantha up close and personal, Johnny Jihad with the Yemeni passport stamped with Pakistani, Afghan, and Syrian stops on his journey of self-discovery puts on his shoes and chuckles merrily and unmolested toward gate C-4.
Americans are rightly offended at all this. This not only violates our physical space, it insults our intelligence. Common sense says, if you have folks who are up to no good and they tend to fit a certain make and model, then you use those specifications to detect them and stop them. But because the “p” word — “profile” — has become a political four-letter word, we can’t go there.
Pretty soon we won’t be going anywhere. Travelers are starting to revolt against the DHS’ offensive and malignant stupidity. The latest rebel is John Tyner, the mild-mannered man who told TSA agents that violating his personal space would bring about legal repercussions.
Well, that’s not quite how he said it. He said it a little more pithily: “If you touch my junk, I’ll have you arrested.” Time was, such a thing was so obvious that one seldom if ever needed to say it in public. Those times are gone and now we’re showing the digital peep shows and public gropes on CNN, in what may be the most twisted version of Andy Warhol’s 15 minutes of fame yet.
One wonders what would have happened if the nun pictured above would have issued the warning about touching the chaste junk. Or the three-year-old girl whose body search was captured on video. “Now Sally, I’m a government agent so it’s ok. Mommy and Daddy’s tax dollars pay me to touch your junk.”
Trying to defend the indefensible, Homeland Secretary chief Janet Napolitano, last seen laughing at the governor of Texas for wanting his state’s border with drug war-torn Mexico secured, took to the pages of USA Today. Napolitano insists that the body scan machines are “safe,” and that the pat-downs are “discreet.”
Neither is an argument that they’re either “necessary” or “effective.” And neither is an argument that they’re the best tools we have available.
The best tools we have available will remain in the drawer while the tools of TSA grope granny. We should be 1) arming the pilots to fend off attack; 2) profiling to detect and stop terrorists without hassling the 99.9999999% of travelers who are just trying to get from somewhere to elsewhere; 3) ramping up more public use of air marshals; and 4) helping other countries beef up their own security to match our own, so that fellows like the panty bomber and the shoe bomber can’t get on a plane in the first place.
There are signs that the airlines themselves are aware that the strip and grope is a threat to their bottom lines. One pilots’ union is criticizing the TSA’s rules, slamming the increased scrutiny of pilots and air crew personnel as unnecessary and unacceptable. They’re right but that only covers the airline crews, not the passengers who ultimately pay the bills. And in any case, the pilots’ unions wasn’t there at the beginning of the workers’ struggle alongside Chicago ACORN, the Midwest Academy and the SEIU, so there’s little reason to hope that they’ll ever get the Obama administration’s ear. Perhaps if they’d been funding the Chicago Annenberg Challenge back in Bill Ayers’ day, they would have a seat at the table now.
Eventually this will cause Americans to abandon airline travel except when it’s absolutely necessary for their economic survival. Napolitano seems entirely unconcerned with that, to the point that it’s tempting to put on the conspiracy theory hat and wonder in whispers whether that’s part of the game plan: Make air travel so onerous and unacceptable that the airlines need another bailout, which they’ll get, along with a total federal takeover. The failing and consumed airlines get at least a temporary competitive advantage over thriving, non-unionized airlines like Southwest that won’t need or want the bailout, but might continue objecting to the bodily invasions by the DHS because it annoys passengers and costs them money. With an administration that’s already treating the country like its own personal Monopoly board, to the point of making play money out of King Dollar through the QE2, and headed by folks who’ve never been ones to let a good crisis go to waste, it’s not as if there’s no precedent or reason for suspicion. I mean, it’s not like they lied about whether those body scanners can save and store images of you in your radiated birthday suit.
But in the end, Napolitano’s stance probably is mostly due to incompetence. Janet Napolitano has no real experience in security. Her rise to power within the Democratic Party came about during the Democrats’ high-tech lynching of Clarence Thomas. For that, she ended up failing upwards into a governorship and Obama tapped her to fail upwards again to head up DHS. That’s the Obama way: reward party hacks and left-wing allies without any regard whatsoever for whether they can actually do the job assigned. That’s how we end up where we are, with folks like Napolitano making a laughing stock of America abroad while abusing American citizens here at home — and then telling us it’s for our own good.
It is worth it to the current regime, to touch everyone’s junk if it allows a takeover of the airlines.
This is a story worth clicking through to read in full. The airline takeover is the unsaid covert narrative.
One more aspect of fascist control.
Sometimes I am mesmerized over what is happening to our country and am concerned because I seem not to know what to do. I now understand the Jews not getting out of Germany before the Nazis had full power. I feel like a deer in the headlights.
It disturbs me that NOBODY in the TSA or Homeland Security has publicly stepped forward to resign and say, No, they will NOT participate in treating Americans this way.
That was my complaint from the first Homeland Security discussions. We’re not going to have Compassionate Conservatives as president with some hazy attachment to the Constitution all the time. Clintons and Carters and Kenyans get the job from time to time, too and they are enthusiastic and creative users of any potentially abusive systems that Republicans put in place.
We let Constitutional government slip through our fingers in the name of ‘safety’. Seems to me one of those old white guys that had a hand in forming this nation had a rather specific warning about it. It was disregarded by supposed conservatives who were willing to give up surrender others rights so they could feel ‘safe’.
The .gov just doubled down by going after John Tyner. Now what?
I love how Napolitano repeats that the pat-down will be “same gender”. I think it gets her hot and she’s looking forward to it. Probably the only quasi-sexual relationship she’ll ever have.
Do they really give you a pass on groping if you wear a burka?
Wow. Could there be a profit-making opportunity here? If someone opened a store near the airport that sold cheap burkas, we could just stop and pick one up on the way to our flight.
What if everybody wore burkas to the airport? Would that defeat this policy? Hmmmm.....
From just after 9-11, I was convinced that George Bush was accruing powers to FedGov that would then be turned over to Hillary! and the Democrats when the real abuses would begin.
Exactly right, and many on FR also saw through GWB's misguidance. Not that I don't see him as an honest and personable enough individual, I have a number of things in common with him and would enjoy a tete-a-tete any day, but he is a patrician (read elitist), and is totally beyond the milieu of an ordinary US citizen. Hence an aloof operator, ala the CFR, and not a very wise one at that.
One might conjecture that 9/11 was intended to place this atmosphere of fear and humiliation on the US society, perpetrated by whomever. But there were, and are, far more respectful ways to employ a reasonable risk/benefit ratio regarding the terrorist threat.
Considering that, just think about Janet Napolitano and what a truly arrogant and classless scumbag this person is. But just another appointment of our friends Barack Obama and George Soros.
Is it true that Michael Chertoff, the Rabbi's son, is invested in the body scanners?
Johnny Suntrade, the Suntrade Institute
Drudge article indicates that airports can opt out of TSA. So why don’t they? People are responding as predicted. The govt owns the auto industry and banks, has shut down manufacturing, the EPA is trying to totally take down the energy sector except for ethanol and wind, our educational system is garbage, the housing and construction industry is a disaster and our healthcare is being destroyed. If we quit flying the airlines are SOL. Our country is being taken apart one piece at a time.
It is worth it to the current regime, to touch everyone’s junk if it allows a takeover of the airlines.
No one will resign. They will never work again. Individually there is not strength. Only as a group can this be turned back.
There is no place to run. We have killed Abel. G_d gave us a counterstrategy, but we didn't listen, and still don't.
And G.W. Bush did little or nothing to help the mainstream Republican citizens who are ,I firmly believe,way more conservative than the new world order elitists .
Oh yeah,and he couldn't or wouldn't recognize who are obvious enemies are;of course being in bed with the Saudi oil money sorta limits ones political options.
I am positive the foreign and some domestic oil people conspire to keep America energy dependent on people who want to destroy America.
That was my complaint from the first Homeland Security discussions. We’re not going to have Compassionate Conservatives as president with some hazy attachment to the Constitution all the time. Clintons and Carters and Kenyans get the job from time to time, too and they are enthusiastic and creative users of any potentially abusive systems that Republicans put in place.
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agreed, best thing to do is to change laws and demand power back to the people.
..that's what happens when a bowing Muslim is elected President.
There is no place to run.
I guess I know that. But there is not the will to fight. My children will be enslaved or killed. That seems to be the general direction of things.
The proper response to this is for Americans to boycott the airlines until this BS ceases.
Unfortunately too many working Americans depend heavily on air transport and there isn’t an expeditious alternative. The only way a boycott would work would be for an awful lot of people to be willing to make a very large and costly personal sacrifice, and there are too many travelers who are unwilling or unable to do so.
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If you read the article, that is what the regime wants. To bail out and take over the airlines. Another piece of the power grab.
"it's dat two dollar "tip" ya toss her after that'll get ya in trouble"
...
Eventually this will cause Americans to abandon airline travel except when it’s absolutely necessary for their economic survival.
Because the second quote is 100% true, the shareholders of any airline whose executive board don't understand the first quote should immediately fire that board for failure of fiduciary responsibility. These new security "features" will, without a doubt, wipe out most of the airlines.
It looks as if Obama and company want this to happen, so we can have "AmAir," sister company to "AmTrak." With all the efficiency that would come with that, we'll be looking nostalgically back at the days when flight delays were measured in minutes, not hours.
These new security “features” will, without a doubt, wipe out most of the airlines.
It looks as if Obama and company want this to happen, so we can have “AmAir,” sister company to “AmTrak.” With all the efficiency that would come with that, we’ll be looking nostalgically back at the days when flight delays were measured in minutes, not hours.
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All the charm of AROFLOT.
Also when you control the airlines you better control people’s movements.
Actually the fight has begun - the elections are proof. This whole TSA debacle has awakened many more people - the snowball is gaining speed...
“Only an overwhelming resistance from the public will change policies like this. Silence and avoidance will only encourage them.”
I think women should start yelling, “Oh my God, she touched my clitoris!”
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