Abolish the TSA and adopt Archie Bunker security

Glenn Reynolds, perhaps only half tongue in cheek, says,

ABOLISH THE TSA. TELL PASSENGERS “IF SOMEONE TRIES TO HIJACK THE PLANE, BEAT THE CRAP OUT OF HIM.” WE’D BE BETTER OFF.

This was in response to Jeffrey Goldberg's column, "TSA’s Forced Indignities Don’t Make Us Safer." But maybe Archie Bunker had the right idea about 40 years ago.



Passengers are the first, and sometimes last, line of defense. Remember Richard Reid, a.k.a. the Shoe Bomber?

A few minutes later, Moutardier found Reid leaned over in his seat. Her attempts to get his attention failed. After asking "What are you doing?" Reid grabbed at her, revealing one shoe in his lap, a fuse which led into the shoe, and a lit match. She tried grabbing Reid twice, but he pushed her to the floor each time, and she yelled for help, and then ran to get water. When another flight attendant, Cristina Jones, arrived to try to subdue him, he fought her and bit her thumb and Moutardier threw water in his face. The 6 foot 4 inch (193 cm) tall, 200+ pound (90+ kg) Reid was next subdued by several passengers on the airliner, and then bound up using plastic handcuffs, seatbelt extensions, and headphone cords. A physician on board the airliner administered to Reid a tranquilizer that he found in the emergency medical kit of the airliner.

And how could you forget Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab, popularly known as the Underwear Bomber who tried to blow up NWA 253 on Christmas Day, 2009?

Abdulmutallab spent about 20 minutes in the bathroom as the flight approached Detroit, and then covered himself with a blanket after returning to his seat. Other passengers then heard popping noises, smelled a foul odor, and some saw Abdulmutallab’s trouser leg and the wall of the plane on fire. Fellow passenger Jasper Schuringa, a Dutch film director, jumped on Abdulmutallab and subdued him as flight attendants used fire extinguishers to douse the flames.[121] Abdulmutallab was taken toward the front of the airplane cabin, was seen to have lost his trousers due to the fire, and had burns on his legs.[122] When asked by a flight attendant what he had in his pocket, he replied: “Explosive device.”

But surely we are safe now that the TSA strips 95-year-old, dying women of their Depends.

The high-speed rail fetish

High Speed Rail is not about transportation. It's about government.

Despite VP Biden's assertion that the United States can lead the 21st century only if it imitates China, I have always suspected that something else was in play with the Left's fascination with high-speed rail (HSR). What could it be?

Joel Kotkin pretty much demolishes the notion that the HSR system that President Obama has proposed at a going-in cost of $53 billion will ever be practical or profitable. For example,

Arguably the biggest problem with high-speed rail is its extraordinary costs, which would require massive subsidies to keep operating. Unlike the Federal Highway Program, largely financed by the gas tax, high-speed rail lacks any credible source of funding besides taxpayer dollars.

Part of the pitch for high-speed rail is nationalistic. To be a 21st century super power, we must emulate current No. 2 China. But this is a poor reason to indulge in a hugely expensive program when the U.S. already has the world’s most evolved highway, freight rail and airline system. ...

Spending billions on a conveyance that will benefit a relative handful of people and places is not just illogical. It’s obscene.

Not so, that last. Well, it is obscene, but the Left's fetish with high-speed rail is entirely logical when one realizes that HSR is not about transportation. It's about government.

Obama et. al. and his long line of Democrat predecessors who have also promoted HSR surely know the financial realities, yes? One would hope so, but I am far from convinced. One of the most prominent dysfunctions of the Left is its self-conviction that we proles really do want to be controlled and managed by our betters.

Obama, like all "progressives," thinks that the masses are actually eager to be embrace statist control of their lives. The progressive world view is that ordinary people are basically incapable of living rightly. Therefore, they must be managed for their own good, and the more closely the better. Furthermore, they think that the masses agree. But we don't and we won't.

So they really may think that so many riders will flock to HSR that it will be self supporting. But that is simply fantasy, the triumph of runaway imagination over empirical data of other government-funded rails in the country.

Second, the fact that HSR is a perpetual black hole of taxpayer money is likely, to Obama and Co., a feature, not a bug. As Will Rogers said long ago, the closest thing we have in this life to immortality is a government program. If HSR guarantees a government agency in perpetuity and a suitably large budget to keep it running, so much the better!

Finally, riders on a train need not be considered as individuals. They are collectively the masses. There few things that give the Left more salivating joy than the prospect of the masses moving together as one under government control, according to government schedules, to and from government-selected terminals, at government-set speeds, with their on-board activities strictly controlled (no smoking, etc.). While aboard the train, the rider-masses are more completely, physically under the government thumb than they'll ever be the rest of the day. And that is a true dream of the Left.

So HSR is a threefer in the minds of the Left:

A. The masses want it to begin with, so we will "serve" them by controlling them,

B. It permanently enlarges the size, scope and expense of government,

C. It incrementally gives us greater control over the actual bodies and activities of the rider-masses at least for a significant part of the day.

Personally, I think that C is the main attraction. As the Denver Post's David Harsanyi put it, "Progressivism is the belief that we have too much freedom with which to make too many stupid choices."

"Nothing outside the state"

Benito Mussolini, dictator of Italy from 1922 until April 1945 (when Italians shot him and strung his body up by the heels in a public square), invented a particular form of progressivist politics that he called Fascism.

Fascism's name was derived from an Italian word meaning, "bundle, band or group," which is why he took a symbol from the ancient Roman empire, right, as the symbol of the Fascist party. It is a depiction of a fasces, a bundle of reeds tied together with an axe, used by the Roman magisterium to symbolize the power of Roman law over life and death.

Mussolini had grown up a strident socialist and maintained a vigorous and cordial correspondence with Vladimir Lenin practically until Lenin's death. After World War One, however, Mussolini broke with socialism because he considered it inherently ineffective because of its internationalist-movement nature.

The result was a variant of socialism that was nationally chauvinistic, entirely anti-democratic, relied on military conquest and allowed for private businesses, though only under close government supervision and regulation.

In 1932, Mussolini defined Fascism for the Italian Encyclopedia. It included this nugget:

The foundation of Fascism is the conception of the State, its character, its duty, and its aim. Fascism conceives of the State as an absolute, in comparison with which all individuals or groups are relative, only to be conceived of in their relation to the State. The conception of the Liberal State is not that of a directing force, guiding the play and development, both material and spiritual, of a collective body, but merely a force limited to the function of recording results: on the other hand, the Fascist State is itself conscious and has itself a will and a personality -- thus it may be called the "ethic" State....

...The Fascist State organizes the nation, but leaves a sufficient margin of liberty to the individual; the latter is deprived of all useless and possibly harmful freedom, but retains what is essential; the deciding power in this question cannot be the individual, but the State alone....

Mussolini also summed the Fascist principle another way, explained in March of last year by the "Classic Liberal" blog:

A popular slogan of the Italian Fascists under Mussolini was, “Tutto nello Stato, niente al di fuori dello Stato, nulla contro lo Stato” (everything for the state, nothing outside the state, nothing against the state). I recall this expression frequently as I observe the state’s far-reaching penetration of my own society.

What of any consequence remains beyond the state’s reach in the United States today? Not wages, working conditions, or labor-management relations; not health care; not money, banking, or financial services; not personal privacy; not transportation or communication; not education or scientific research; not farming or food supply; not nutrition or food quality; not marriage or divorce; not child care; not provision for retirement; not recreation; not insurance of any kind; not smoking or drinking; not gambling; not political campaign funding or publicity; not real estate development, house construction, or housing finance; not international travel, trade, or finance; not a thousand other areas and aspects of social life. ...

As the nationalized "Healthcare" debacle nears its end game, the people of America are increasingly shocked and disgusted by the raw ugliness of the Obama "governing" philosophy. Those platitudes of "hope and change" are gone, and in their place a thoroughly regretful American populace now witnesses, to its horror, the total desecration of this once triumphal constitutional republic.

At last, the stark reality of liberalism is unmasked in its undiluted form. What cannot be discussed honestly and succinctly is couched in lies and fraud, and then sold to the public as benevolence and compassion. Those in Congress who cannot be convinced, based on the merits of the effort, to participate and support it are coerced or bought off. The means of garnering "votes" in the Senate or House is irrelevant. In the end, all that matters is that the leftist agenda, of which Obamacare is a cornerstone, becomes the law of the land.

In a saner time, decorum and respect by the government for the will of the people would have necessitated that the effort be dropped, and the socio-economic fabric of the country be allowed to remain intact. But as the nation is realizing, the current "leadership" in Washington is significantly different from anything ever contended with in the past. These people have never had the slightest intention of "deriving their governing power from the consent of the governed," as advised in the Declaration of Independence.

The Washington Post reports the February 2011 governing version of fascisti ideology:

The president's political machine worked in close coordination Thursday with state and national union officials to mobilize thousands of protesters to gather in Madison and to plan similar demonstrations in other state capitals.

Their efforts began to spread, as thousands of labor supporters turned out for a hearing in Columbus, Ohio, to protest a measure from Gov. John Kasich (R) that would cut collective-bargaining rights.

By the end of the day, Democratic Party officials were working to organize additional demonstrations in Ohio and Indiana, where an effort is underway to trim benefits for public workers. Some union activists predicted similar protests in Missouri, New Jersey and Pennsylvania. [...]

The White House political operation, Organizing for America, got involved Monday, after Democratic National Committee Chairman Timothy M. Kaine, a former Virginia governor, spoke to union leaders in Madison, a party official said.

The group made phone calls, distributed messages via Twitter and Facebook, and sent e-mails to its state and national lists to try to build crowds for rallies Wednesday and Thursday, a party official said.

As Matt Welch asks, "Is This How a President Should Act?" No, it's not how an American president should act, but it is just how you'd expect an Imperial president to act.