And remember, the TSA is led by a guy who thinks singing & dancing are sins!

A flight attendant is being investigated for spiking a crying baby's apple juice with Xanax. I guess this means all flight crews are now trying to drug loud and annoying passengers.

You are too quick to judge. Then, you make the mistake of assigning the behavior to all "Feds." If the person who placed the note in the suitcase is also the person who wrote the comment, then their behavior shouldn't be linked to all Feds. I'm willing to bet this is an isolated incident carried out by a single individual.

The truly appaling aspect is the knee-jerk reaction this incident has received.

Oh yes, surely indignation over an abuse of authority by a member of a new federal agency that is not subject to public oversight, equipped with sweeping powers in great excess of those afforded by the Constitution and charged with maintaining the security of millions of fliers from terrorist attack is FAR MORE APPALING than the actual abuse itself. Jesus.

The person who was hired to screen our luggage was put there BY THE TSA and granted incredible amounts of authority -- we effectively suspended the Search and Seizure restrictions of the Constitution so that this person could do her/his job. And we discover that rather than devoting her/his time to keeping bombs and boxcutters out of the sky, s/he is off on a one-person crusade to intimidate the public into embracing a political position s/he feels is representative of rightthink.

Every time I hear that the new aircops have overstepped their authority, behaved irrationally or abusively, and failed to treat their office with the gravitas and responsibility it deserves, it makes me scared to be a frequent air-traveller. These people have been afforded billions and had their path cleared of legal hurdles in order to getone with one very specific and vital task, and instead of engaging themselves in the pursuit of that task, they are confiscating nail-clippers, harassing political opponents, and barring people whose taste in literature they dislike from flying.

An isolated incident? What rock have you been living under? Have you flown lately? Have you missed the litany -- the fucking OCEAN -- of complaints of irrational, abusive, often inexcusable behaviour engaged in by our soi-disant Guardians of the Sky?

The Constitution presumes that human beings are subject to human folly and foibles, and so it restricts the authority of the government such that the risks of this folly is mitigated by hard limits on power. We have removed those checks and balances and unsurprisingly, we find ourselves living in a world where imperfect humans in positions of unparalleled authority with unprecedented absence of accountability are behaving as badly as can be expected.

Isolated incident? It's the tip of the iceberg.

Edited by author 03-15-2003 05:05 PM
"A flight attendant is being investigated for spiking a crying baby's apple juice with Xanax. I guess this means all flight crews are now trying to drug loud and annoying passengers."

Well, since we're engaging in absurd slippery slope arguments, I guess that means the baby drugger shouldn't be investigated? Cause otherwise we have to suspect everybody, and since that's wrong, we should just let this one go.

The rest of your argument is up to that level as well. This is a very serious thing here (the baggage incident). I saw this on the news last night, and I was appalled. People in these positions have been given special powers, and you saw Spiderman, right? There was a case a few years back where a police officer stopped a couple, and finding they were on their way to an abortion clinic, held them and harangued them for 45 minutes about abortion -- they complained and he was punished for his gross abuse of the powers given him. These people are not our parents, there to help instruct us in the "proper" way to act and think. When they do this kind of thing, it should be treated incredibly seriously.

Edited by author 03-15-2003 05:14 PM
(l)user wrote:
"And remember, the TSA is led by a guy who thinks singing & dancing are sins!"

Who is this leader? The TSA is headed by James M. Loy. Norman Minetta (sec of transportation) is Loy's boss. Neither person holds such views.

Perhaps you're thinking of John Ashcroft-- but Ashcroft evidentally doesn't believe that singing is sinful. (Dancing, maybe, but not singing)
http://www.cnn.com/video/us/2002/02/25/ash...sings.wbtv.med.html

I think its fair to judge the entire TSA on this. Nico Melendez's first public act was telling people they're looking into it and, unbelievably, he said something to the effect of : its a jump to think it was a TSA employee. Oh man, cut the bullshit already. This pro-GOP letter writing is the kind of thing federal employees should be afraid to do for fear of being fired, not something that will be protected and possibly covered up by some embarassed TSA officers.

Off-topic:

"Perhaps you're thinking of John Ashcroft-- but Ashcroft evidentally doesn't believe that singing is sinful. (Dancing, maybe, but not singing)"

I don't know, his singing is pretty sinful...

What also amazes me to no end is that with the defense that it wasn't an TSA agent, but rather somebody else at the airport who did it, they have just shot down their entire reasoning for searching the luggage in the first place.

If it's that easy to tamper with luggage AFTER it has been inspected, what's the inspection worth?

Edited by author 03-15-2003 09:26 PM
Cory--

The TSA is responsible for the security of each one of the 762 million passengers that the FAA has estimated will travel via airliner in the United States during 2003.

What constitutes your "litany"--your "fucking OCEAN"--of complaints? Is it 10,000? No, wait--that percentage was so small my calculator couldn't display it. Let's say your "fucking OCEAN" is 100,000 complaints this year. Nope. Still too small. OK--let's say your "fucking OCEAN" is one million complaints.

That equals a whole, whopping, oppressive, fascistic .13% of all air travellers. That's not even one percent. That's one tenth of one percent. You'd have to have a little under 10 million complaints to equal just one, single percent of all passengers that will travel via airliner in the U.S. this year.

An "iceberg"? Prove it. You can't, because your ceaseless spouting about the jackbooted government has its foundation in a fantasy world wherein all authority is always Bad. Your repeated objections to the any mistake on the part of any representative of any government authority at any time in any place is dogmatic at best.

The point of the American system of governance is not that humans need to be controlled by checks and balances. It is that humans make mistakes, and that there needs to be a mechanism in place to correct those mistakes. They often need several tries to get it right. The system allows for the correction of imperfections over time. Your emphasis on the continual need to control imperfect humans, rather than acceptance of them as they are and the need to make allowances for their growth, betrays a political philosophy that is of the same root as every totalitarian experiment in history.

The TSA will be sixteen months old this coming Wednesday. Clearly, you expect every employee of the TSA to immediately meet the same exacting standards of human perfection to which all representatives of governmental authority should stringently adhere.

However, if you would focus on the realities of human imperfection, rather than the ephemerally perfect ideals of which you are so passionately enamored, you might see the way that leads to the offering of effective, constructive criticism, instead of the repetitive mouthing of predictable objections.

Ian, your argument might have a small leg to stand on if the TSA hadn't taken the tack they did. Instead of accepting responsibility for the actions of their employees, they try to weasel their way through. What the employee did was wrong, really wrong. The TSA response was so wrong it's off the scale -- as others have pointed out, for it to be a valid defense means that they are completely ineffective at their job.

Of course, your response also tries to make the claim that 10,000, 100,000, or even nearly a million complaints a year would be no big deal. That's just weird.

No, the TSA response was typically bureaucratic, one example among countless others found throughout our government's history since its inception. That's the nature of bureaucracies, and people have been complaining about it since the invention of written records that required filing. To insinuate that this example is an indicator of some new effort to oppress people--as happens so often here--is overreaching.

And no, my response tries to make no such claim: I contend only that Cory's hyperbolic "fucking OCEAN" of complaints is no such thing.