If one silly Nigerian's failure to ignite his underpants on a plane is all it takes for everyone to turn into shrieking women, it might not be going too far to suggest that the terrorists has already won. Scholars will tell you that the point of terror isn't necessarily to kill a bunch of folks, rather, it is to force them to change the way that they live. That being the case, someone should send bin Laden a giant "Mission Accomplished" banner. I know where a slightly used one can be picked up at a discount.The Christmas Day incident over Detroit may be the single funniest act of terrorism in world history, and the reaction to it is even funnier. Because American security officials are constantly fighting the last battle, I can say with a reasonable amount of certainty that the airlines will compel us to prove that we're "going commando" by the end of the month. You never know, there might just be another West African out there with plans to blow up his banana sack at 35,000 feet.
When confronted with matters of terrorism, I always try to imagine what the Israelis would do. I find that to be helpful because they face more terror before breakfast than most Americans do in their entire lives. As bad as things may seem for the United States, it's important to remember that there has not yet been waves of suicide bombers attacking pizzerias in Wyoming, which is not uncommon in the Holy Land.
The Israelis take terrorism as seriously as they possibly can, but they're not a pain in everybody's ass about it. Your average citizen there lives a fairly normal life, given the circumstances that surround them. In large part, I think this is because the Knesset doesn't distract itself with ridiculous arguments and purposeless finger-pointing. For example, when the second Intifada erupted in 2000, Ehud Barak didn't run around the country blaming Benjamin Netanyahu for it. This is because everyone knew it was Ariel Sharon's fault.
Because it is a serious country where terrorism is concerned, Israel has a permanent, non-political security establishment that doesn't change with the government. The Israelis also don't long tolerate assholes like the junior senator from South Carolina, Jim DeMint. DeMint adorably thinks that he's going to be president someday, which usually takes an ordinary blowhard and makes him weapons-grade insufferable. There's something about a presidential candidacy that turns stupidity into an actual physical force.
The few congressional Republicans that survived the debacle of the 2008 election have spent this past week demanding to know why the Transportation Security Administration remains leaderless after almost a year of the Obama administration has passed.
Short answer: DeMint did it.
An attempt to blow up a trans-Atlantic flight from Amsterdam to Detroit on Christmas Day would be all-consuming for the administrator of the Transportation Security Administration — if there was one.
The post remains vacant because Sen. Jim DeMint , R- S.C. , has held up President Barack Obama's nominee in opposition to the prospect of TSA workers joining a labor union.
As al Qaida claimed responsibility Monday for the thwarted attack and President Barack Obama made a public statement about it, Democrats urged DeMint to drop his objection and allow quick confirmation of nominee Erroll Southers , a counterterrorism expert, when the Senate reconvenes in three weeks.
(...)
Southers, a former FBI special agent, is the Los Angeles World Airports Police Department assistant chief for homeland security and intelligence. He also is the associate director of the University of Southern California's Center for Risk and Economic Analysis of Terrorism Events, and he served as a deputy director of homeland security for California Republican Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger.
Two Senate committees have given Southers their bipartisan blessing. An acting administrator is in place pending his confirmation.
Wow. That's a pretty impressive resume. So what's the problem?
DeMint said in a statement that the attempted attack "is a perfect example of why the Obama administration should not unionize the TSA." He wants Southers to clarify his stand on unionizing the TSA, a shift that Democrats support.Are you fucking kidding me? Is Senator DeMint actually being serious or just pretending? Few people despise organized labor more than I do, but I'm not going to release statements suggesting that the AFL-CIO is a greater danger to public safety than al-Qaeda. This is because I'm neither stupid nor insane, two qualities that appear to be the hallmarks of Senator DeMint's entire career.
Without collective bargaining, DeMint said, the TSA has "flexibility to make real-time decisions that allowed it to quickly improve security measures in response to this attempted attack."
If organized labor got involved, DeMint said, union bosses would have the power "to veto or delay future security improvements at our airports."
But I'll concede DeMint's major point: Of course a minimum wage baggage-handler is going to be more efficient and "flexible" when he has to worry about how he's going to pay for his kid's braces. How can he not be? How can the War on Terror, the Long War, or whatever the fuck they're calling it this week not be subservient to the debate over whether airport screeners get two weeks of vacation time instead of three?
Worse, this isn't the first time this retarded debate has been joined. Immediately after 9/11, the government made the eminently sensible decision that airport security workers would be federalized. The process of actually doing it, however, was stalled for months because the Democrats wanted those workers to to join unions that gave giant bags of money to Democratic campaigns, and the GOP and Bush administration determined that stopping it was more important than preventing really fast airplanes crashing into really tall office buildings. The issue was finally resolved when we learned that Senator Max Cleland was actually Osama bin Laden with cleverly hidden limbs and was promptly returned to Georgia.
Even though Americans have a long and storied history of finding idiotic issues to lose their minds over, this is too much. There are only three answers to the question of whether security screeners should be allowed to join criminal unions: (a)"Yes," (b) "No," and (c)"Who gives a shit?" For those of you keeping score at home, the correct answer is (c).
As I mentioned earlier, Israel has a long history of terror, and you aren't likely to hear many stories about them fucking around about it. There was a fascinating profile of Israel's airport security in yesterday's Toronto Star. It was so interesting that I read through it a couple of times. And I didn't hear employer contributions to 401K plans mentioned once.
Afterward, I got to thinking that if the Israelis are serious about protecting people from terrorism, and if they don't obsess over horseshit like this, maybe - just maybe - the Americans aren't as serious they'd have you believe. And I've already seen how that movie ends.
Just over eight years ago, 3,000 lives were extinguished by evil on a sunny September morning. 3,000 people were gone in little over an hour because, as Richard Clarke put it, their government failed them. Yet within months, the debate had reverted back to the relatively minor evil of the goddamned Teamsters. Both parties in Congress were more than happy to let the largest mass murder ever committed on American soil degenerate into yet another screaming fit about the Taft-Hartley Act of 1947. All of this might sound like liberal nonsense to some of my more allegedly "conservative" readers, but it's not. This is about forests and trees. It's about seriousness of purpose. Big things, like preventing He of the Exploding Underpants from getting anywhere near American airspace, are being ignored because retrograde, sloganeering shitheads like Lord Jim want to personally ensure that people with shitty jobs only get five sick days a year instead of six. This isn't even about unions. It's about how grown-up you expect your government to be. It's about life and death.
I'm a fairly weird guy in that I'm prepared to give the people who are tasked with guaranteeing that the plane I went up in actually comes down in one piece pretty much whatever they want. This past year, Congress went balls-out fighting for the F-22 fighter - a plane that even the Pentagon didn't need or want, since the U.S Air Force hasn't been in an aerial dogfight in decades - yet they insist on nickle-and-diming the folks they expect to keep bombs off of planes.
In the words of President Kennedy, the American government "shall pay any price, bear any burden, meet any hardship" to ensure the safety and security of the people. Y'know, except dental.
You can call that any number of things. "Serious" just isn't one of them. If you're an American citizen, your government failed you on 9/11, and failed in catastrophic ways. It matters not at all to the dead or their survivors that the failure belonged to a horny oaf from Arkansas or a well-born half-wit from Texas, the government "by the people, for the people and of the people" failed spectacularly and three thousand people consequently got dead.
That failure is compounded each and every day that demented demagogues like DeMint and everyone else in Congress plays the penny-pincher with things that will kill you while they spend billions of dollars on nonsense that really doesn't mean anything.
Always remember, the next guy with the 'splodey unmentionables is just around the corner.
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