Year-end Terror Special

Janet Napolitano had an unfortunate little moment of idiocy a couple days back when she said the thwarted Christmas Day airliner attack showed that "the system worked," unless TSA's new super-effective security system relies on incompetent terrorists setting their nuts on fire, immobilizing them long enough for the nearest Dutchman to get them in a headlock. In which case it worked just fine.

Arizona's own esteemed junior senator, Jon Kyl (R-OhForFuck'sSake) piled on yesterday with his own little bout of idiocy.

Sen. Jon Kyl said he doesn't "feel totally safe'' with Janet Napolitano at the helm of the Department of Homeland Security, given that agency's handling of the attempt to blow up a Detroit-bound airliner.

Kyl said it was bad enough that the Nigerian got on the plane in the first place given what should have been warning signals. But in response to a question about whether he feels secure with Napolitano heading Homeland Security, he said that is only part of the problem.

Yes, the guy was dragging more red flags than the entire Pamplona running of the bulls and The Last Samurai combined and still managed to buy a ticket in Africa and get on a plane in Amsterdam. But. Unless Janet Napolitano was personally standing at the jetway door in Lagos saying come in! you fool! and waving Captain Underpants onto the plane without a passport, I'm not sure she's the one who needs to be slapped around here. Except, of course, for saying the parts of the system not involving self-immolation and alert Dutchmen worked.

Frankly, her words may have been more of an inadvertent slip than the up-is-down doublespeak/dumbassery we took them for at first. TSA security is... not thought out perhaps as well as it could be, shall we say, something I've thought ever since Richard Reid failed to ignite his Chuck Taylors and condemned the traveling public to taking off their shoes at security at the rest of forever. I said then that if I ran an al Qaeda cell I wouldn't bother trying to actually kill people, but would simply send a string of flunkies onto planes to pull off increasingly absurd failed attacks involving increasingly intimate levels of undergarments, just to see how far TSA would go with their reactionary rather than preventative rules. OMG a shoe bomber! Everybody take off your shoes! Jesus, a bra bomber! Sorry, ladies, but that's going to have to go into the bin. Holy shit, a hair bomber! Please hop into the barber chair right here at the shoe dropoff, okay?

And then aQ went and spoiled it by ramping up immediately to their underwear bomber, and the best TSA could bring themselves to do is no blankets and no laptops and no paperbacks and no wanking through your pants in the last hour of flight. Because the very first thing that went through everyone's mind when this news broke was underwear bomber = everybody flies naked now and TSA can't make that particular the-jokes-just-write-themselves joke come true. So they slap together more patchwork rules that essentially say okay, don't try THAT particular tactic again, which does pretty much zero to prevent the next new thing aQ will think up to make air travel even more annoying and possibly deadly, and I'm left with the distinct impression that the ultimate fallback system TSA is really counting on is passengers noticing something off and saying oh FUCK no and jumping the next guy who tries to blow up a plane.

Bruce Schneier, whose job is to think about this stuff, thinks the same thing.

"Security theater" refers to security measures that make people feel more secure without doing anything to actually improve their security.

Security is both a feeling and a reality. The propensity for security theater comes from the interplay between the public and its leaders.

When people are scared, they need something done that will make them feel safe, even if it doesn't truly make them safer. Politicians naturally want to do something in response to crisis, even if that something doesn't make any sense.

Happy traveling, America! And hey, keep your hands where I can see them.

But of Course

I'm a little slow on the uptake today, so it took me this long to realize that doucherocket William "time to refresh the tree of Liberty with the blood of patriots and tyrants" Kostric, who showed up at Obama's town hall meeting in New Hampshire yesterday with a giant penis handgun strapped to his leg in a bitchin' Han Solo-style holster and a poster in his hand printed with an only thinly veiled threat against Obama, isn't really a New Hampsherite after all. No, he's from Arizona. Of course.

And he hearts Ron Paul and hates taxes and Social Security and President Wilson but really likes Randy Wilson--well, who among us wouldn't list a white supremacist who survived the Ruby Ridge shootout as one of our heroes on a public website, am I right, ladies?--and lurves that Second Amendment and always straps his piece on when he goes out of doors like everyone else in New Hampshire, unlike his sissy socialist new neighbors next door in the People's Republic of Massachusetts.

Scottsdale, AZ apparently wasn't right-wing enough for him. And as an Arizona resident, that's a scary thought. Of course, somebody wasn't paying attention at Gaby Giffords' townhall in Douglas last week and let his gun fall clean out of his pocket, which is arguably more Wild Wild West than Mr. Kostric's securely-snapped-in-a-holster-but-still-dickish posturing, although it bespeaks maybe a little less competence with firearms, which now has me wondering if that makes me feel better or worse about Arizona.

Anyway. Kostric strikes me as little more than the malevolent little weasel kid on the playground who was always waving the biggest stick he could find just far enough away from your face for him to be able to say innocently what, I'm not doing anything to you, I'm just holding this stick, I'm not touching you I'm not touching you I'm not touching you until an adult happened to notice what he was doing. And the problem is that that kind of behavior exactly epitomizes the healthcare screamers, but now they're showing up with guns instead of sticks, and no adults are around to tell them to put those goddamn things away before someone gets hurt.

Mr. Kostric, you aren't just innocently exercising your Constitutional right to bear arms and your home new state's laws on open carrying, nor your Constitutional right to free speech. You're posturing. You're trying to intimidate. You're quite possibly trying to provoke a confrontation so you can be the new poster boy of the right wing, now that the shine's worn off of Joe the Fucking Plumber and even most of your ilk are starting to see through the carnival sideshow that is Sarah Palin. It's transparent. It's pathetic.

Unfortunately, it's also likely to be pretty fucking successful, if the sidewalk outside your local Planned Parenthood for, oh, say, the last forty years or so is any indication. The right wing's tactics of intimidation and provocation have gone unchallenged enough there to allow them to keep coming back weekend after weekend, egged on by eliminationist rhetoric from their favorite commentators. We know how that ended for George Tiller. Now William Kostric has shown up outside a facility where the president was scheduled to speak, waving a poster with an incendiary message lauding political assassination, with a loaded gun strapped to his leg, and the only sanction he's suffered so far has been getting lectured by Chris Matthews on TV.

Secret Service? Your table is ready.

US Domestic Terrorism Month Continues

We're still in mid-reel from George Tiller's assassination and subsequent closing of his clinic, and just now comes the unfolding story from DC that a geriatric white supremacist shuffled into the Holocaust Museum and unloaded a shotgun on a security guard. Other guards plugged the elderly terrorist, and both he and the wounded guard are in critical condition at the GW medical center. The fact that news crews reported EMTs frantically performing CPR on the guard as his guerney was rolled into the trauma unit is less than optimistic. A bomb-sniffing dog has also apparently shown an untoward amount of interest in a car parked outside the museum, but no word yet on what that means.

Are the two shootings related? Probably not, beyond the creeping suspicion that extremists of more than one rightish stripe might be feeling more emboldened these days, as one white guy after another bravely stands up to call the president a monkey and a Muslim, and his first Supreme Court appointee a racist, after a campaign in which the white male candidate spat out his revulsion over abortion for the sake of the woman's "health" in bitter, angry scare quotes. And of course it doesn't do jack to explain the asshole who murdered the Army recruiter last week in the name of Islam. But that doesn't make our little teeny-tiny watered-down tastes of Baghdad in the past couple weeks any more palatable and less unsettling.