Dan And The TSA

Uber-rightwinger Dan Reihl had a run in with the Transport Security Administration recently.

It seems I inadvertantly carried an item prohibited by the Transportation Security Administration, a butane lighter, halfway across the country by commerical airliner without realizing I was breaking the law.

...Other than a thorough document review, I traveled from the Northeast to the mid-west without incident, going through the standard security check without a problem. That wasn't the case on my way home.

The document glitch led the TSA agent to require me to go through advanced security ... no problem, right? So, when I took out the same butane lighter I carried on the outbound part of my trip and handed it to him, the TSA agent said, "What are you doing trying to carry this on a flight?"

I sort of gulped, "Uh, the same thing I was doing when I carried it over a thousand miles to here by air yesterday?"

Apparently, not. Scratch one butane lighter now sitting in a garbage bin in the mid-west ... and scratching my head as to why I was allowed to carry it in my front shirt pocket without incident on the way out ...

TSA? Maybe not quite so much as we'd like to believe.

So all the blame goes to the TSA for not stopping Dan sooner...what a typically neocon position. "I did something wrong but it's everyone else's fault for not stopping me". It's just like the recent neocon mea culpaes over Iraq, where it was their plan that messed up in the first place but the blame falls on the rest of us for pointing out their mess, somehow.

Dan headlines his post "It Wasn't Like A Bomb Or Anything". But as we all know, that's hardly the point.

If poor Dan happened to have been carrying a Koran as well, his big pal Alberto Gonzales would have by now revoked his right to habeas corpus and his other pals in the rightwing nutosphere would be happily blogging him a happy wish for his trip to Gitmo. After all, that lighter could have been used to fire off any number of terrorist Nikes. What is Dan, an aider and abettor of terrorists?

I mean, let's 'fess up here Dan. Any political blogger worth his blogroll knows about the lighter ban because we all read stories about it and blogged about it way back at the time of the original shoe-bombing retard.

So your claim that you didn't know is either "economical with the truth", as we Brits put it, or reveals a woeful lack of knowledge about the "war on Islam terror"...which seems to be the main subject of your blog.

Tsk, tsk.