As an occasional air traveler, a bit of experience swimming in the tepid dimwit pool of federalized airport security has turned me into a “Transportation Security Agency” skeptic, to say the least.
We’ve all either read about or lived through situations in airports where political correctness or just plain incompetence took precedence over the TSA’s stated goal, which is transportation security (it’s right there in the title so you’d think somebody would notice).
Why is airport security subject to constant logic breakdowns and inherent idiocy? Because it has to be. Airport security is federalized – in other words, the government is in charge of your in-flight safety. The long and short of the current system is this: Pretend you’re in an airport and all the screeners are members of Congress. Feel safer? Me neither.
A story I read about last week helps address part of the reason why the TSA needs an overhaul, and to be reminded that it’s the “TSA” and not “T and A.”
Here’s a short description of “the nipple ring incident” from ABC News:
- A Texas woman who said she was forced to remove a nipple ring with pliers in order to board an airplane called Thursday for an apology by federal security agents and a civil rights investigation.
“I wouldn’t wish this experience upon anyone,” Mandi Hamlin said at a news conference. “My experience with TSA was a nightmare I had to endure. No one deserves to be treated this way.”
This is comical on many levels, but first, I think we all owe the TSA big thanks for finally putting the collar on the dreaded ta-ta-bomber.
There’s a scene in the movie “Airplane” where two heavily armed men in berets and one sweet old lady are walking through a metal detector. The buzzer goes off, and security grabs the elderly woman and throws her up against the wall as the two would-be terrorists proceed unimpeded. Substitute the nipple ring woman for the old lady, and this could be one of those situations.
Some security measures are completely understandable. For example, we must take our shoes off for scanning because somebody once actually had a bomb in his shoe, so this precaution actually makes sense. But is there precedent for nipple ring removal and confiscation? If the TSA could at least point to an example where a terrorist hijacked a plane to Istanbul with a nipple ring, maybe I’d understand this a little better.
In the meantime, as several TSA employees tended to this one woman (if she wants her breasts to look like Pinhead from “Hellraiser,” that’s her business), keep in mind how many people were not being watched. Bin Laden could have walked on past, but the TSA was busy saving us from another 9/11 by forcing Penny Pincushion to remove her areola studs.
In all fairness, though, not to be outdone, Hamlin’s attorney, the idiotically ubiquitous attention whore, Gloria Allred, said that her client was “publicly humiliated.”
Publicly humiliated? That’s rich. Consider that Allred’s client is a woman who once entered a tattoo/piercing parlor, took off her shirt and put her naked rack on a card table while a total stranger, who’s perhaps covered in cheap tattoos and goes by the name “Stinkfist,” poked holes in her nipples and used a ball-peen hammer to tap pieces of metal through them, subsequently dousing her lanced bosoms in peroxide. Given that, wouldn’t you think this woman’s humiliation threshold would be just a tad higher?
In a perfect world, we’d all probably feel a bit safer if the TSA would end the fixation with nether-region jewelry and the half-used tube of Colgate you forgot was in your carryon and instead focus on other things that would actually make us safer.
For example, earlier this year, the General Accountability Office report on Aviation Runway and Ramp Safety found that runway incursions in 2007 were up 12 percent compared to 2006. How about telling Deputy Fife to stop frisking Aunt Bea and instead get his rear end out to the runways to help make sure the planes don’t smash into each other? That might help make people feel safer.
Until there’s evidence that the Austin Powers’ fembots and their machine-gun jubblies exist in real life, the TSA should forget about any imminent nipple ring threat. This would give them more time to focus on frisking that nun over there. She looks kind of shifty if you ask me.
