I have news for America.
News for the irate mobs at town hall meetings, for the television journalists looking for the next three-ring circus at which to point their cameras, and for the former governor of Alaska, who lives in a world constructed by her own broken imagination, grows increasingly incoherent even as she tightens her stranglehold on the national discourse, and still has never been photographed without that ridiculous glossy lipstick, which convinces me she had it tattooed there permanently, which is extremely creepy, and also scares me.
To these good people of our wayward nation, and to everyone reading the Huffington Post, I say: The greatest threat to the health of our citizenry is not the broken health care system. It's domestic airport security.
Think about it. Yes, you can always come down with a terrible disease. Could happen to any of us, at any time. One day you're perfectly healthy, then, the next thing you know, lupus. Just like that. Or, Lou Gehrig's disease. Cancer. It could be anything.
But you can also, at any time, board a domestic flight with some whack job from the birther movement or the LaRouche Party who has decided to release his untethered anger and scattershot rage, not by standing on a street corner with a poster of Barack Obama made up to look like Hitler, but by detonating an explosive device on a domestic flight. It's not that great a leap, when you consider it, and thus even more frightening to contemplate than Sarah Palin's tattooed lip gloss, as frightening as that is.
I mean, think about it. The woman had glossy lipstick permanently tattooed onto her lips. There's just something very, very wrong with that. I can't get over it.
In any case, yes, so diseases are bad. That's my first point. But at least a disease takes a little time to finish you off. You get months, if not years. You get your own bed. You get to say goodbye to your loved ones.
But in the case of a domestic terrorist attack by one of America's birthers/town hall nut jobs/the kind of person who brings a loaded gun to a political rally, your end will be swift and sure. Forget saying goodbye to your loved ones. You won't even get to make a phone call.
Which is why I so ardently oppose the single-payer system for domestic airport security.
Let me explain. There are any number of ways to ensure that passengers are prevented from bringing weapons or explosives onto domestic flights. Some advocate a "single-payer" system, in which a single entity, say, the United States government, becomes the sole source of funding for airport security. Under this plan, it would be the GOVERNMENT that organizes the provision of security services at all American airports.
That's right. GOVERNMENT employees would write the regulations dictating what items can be brought into the cabins of passenger aircraft. GOVERNMENT employees would operate the security checkpoints at America's airports. When someone walked through airport security, the person watching the metal detector to see if it registered an alarm to indicate the presence of metal in that person's pants would be a GOVERNMENT employee.
And who would pay for this system? That's right, there would be complicated formula of taxed contributions from the airline industry, surcharges on tickets for domestic flights, and funding given to the newly-created federal security agency through the Congressional appropriation process. All to fund a vast network of government bureaucrats who would just lounge around America's airport terminals for the sole purpose of telling you what you can and cannot bring onto a domestic flight.
I don't know about you, but the last thing I want is some government bureaucrat telling me I can't bring a can opener on my flight from Chicago to Phoenix.
You don't think it can happen in America? You don't think America's private airport security companies, grossly under-funded by the airline industry and employing mainly recent immigrants from Latvia who barely speak the language and have had five minutes of security training, can be replaced by a system of efficient TSA "white shirts" with stacks of plastic laptop bins and tiny blue flashlights to see if your I.D. is valid, and who will efficiently whisk you through a fast-moving security line and politely ask to look inside your bag if they find something that looks the least bit suspicious? You don't think it can happen here? Well then, I'm afraid you don't really know the length to which our government will go to devote resources to solving complex problems if there's no large industry lined up against the prospect of reform.
Here's what I think we ought to do: Leave domestic airport security to the free market. Let's let a myriad of private security companies compete for this business. Better yet, let's let a group of government-backed non-profits do it. That way we'll be sure that, even if our airport security system is the worst in the world, and practically invites hijackings and domestic acts of terror, at least no one will be making too much money off of it. At least we can say we kept costs down, even if, in the end, almost no one is protected.
But let's not turn this important responsibility over to the federal government. That would the worst thing we could do.
Follow Sean Carman on Twitter: www.twitter.com/seancarman
But Shoe bombs? The guy had a match stuck in his Hush Puppy. Liquids? You'd need to be Marie Curie with a full lab on a perfectly still plane to assemble any liquid-based bomb, but hey--those 4 ounces of Prell could kill us all.
I complained about the shoes and the liquids (after watching 2 nearly full bottles of shampoo and body wash go from my thoughtlessly packed carry-on to the confiscated toilettery store they run at the other end of the airport), to the typically brusque but totally focused lady doing my 124th consecutive "special check" in my last 124 visits to an airport TSA station. Usually I get that "you are THIS close to spending the next four hours in a detention room, sir" look--but she said almost cheerfully, "There's not a single person here wearing blue who would disagree with you about that." I wanted to jump up and shout, "A-HA! I KNEW IT! YOU PEOPLE ARE PEDDLING FAKE SAFETY!!! FRAUDS!!" But I wanted to make my plane.
Airport security should be limited to the big scanner and a bunch of nondescript security pulling suspicious behavior aside. No "you could take the plane hostage with a corkscrew" crap.