I am nearly dumbstruck. I can hardly believe people smart enough to get themselves elected would be this stupid. The Intelligence Reform Bill that just past the House had a provision to ban butane lighters from carry-on.
Democratic Sens. Ron Wyden of Oregon and Byron Dorgan of North Dakota had pushed for the change for more than a year after learning the Transportation Security Administration allowed them on planes.
“When I found out that they had explicitly, in their rule, said you could take two butane lighters and four books of matches on board, I thought, ’What have they been drinking?”’ Dorgan said. Matches still are allowed.
Can’t you just hear the Mujahideen? “Oh no! What are we going to do? They won’t let us take butane lighters on planes anymore! We might as well give up Islam and become capitalist Christians!” And another one says, “But remember–we can take our big capitalist cigars onboard airplanes we just can’t use a butane lighter with them!“ And still another one says, “They must think that we are so stupid that if we don’t have a butane lighter for the fuse for the semtex we will bring two rocks onboard to bang against each other to get a spark! Don’t you wonder how these people ever managed higher math? Oh, I forgot, they didn’t! We had to give them algebra!“
The stupidity of this action is so great that I can hardly calm myself to enumerate the issues with this. I console myself with the knowledge that the two Senators quoted above are both Democrats. They were already on my list for political extinction.
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The obvious–if matches, and presumably non-butane lighters, are still allowed what have they accomplished?
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The can’t even find knives, guns, and bombs people get past the screeners. How are they going to stop a butane lighter from getting past security? The plastic and liquid are almost completely transparent to x-rays and the metal portion is smaller than a quarter and could easily be hidden by a handful of coins.
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If you can’t enforce a law you should never pass the law. It breeds disrespect of the law in general, the politicians that created it in particular and it makes life more difficult for the people that are supposed to be enforcing it.
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This will be a moral booster to the Islamic extremists. This will be a joke they tell each other and their children about the stupidity of their enemy.
I once had a reader comment:
I don’t think I’d be _too_ upset to hear that Congress, the White House, and the Supremes had been vaporized.
I’m beginning to wonder if maybe he didn’t have a valid point.
Well the fact that the Bill is at least 3000 pages say it all. Our political system is bankrupt. Our founding fathers put the Constitution and the Bill of rights on less than a dozen pages but these knobs pass one bill and it takes 3000 pages (probably single spaced at that). No one could possibly have read the damn thing.
We need to take the whole lot of them out back and…
I did catch that there were only 8 Nays on the Democrats side of this mess to the 67 Nays on the Republican side… and the one independent voted Aye.
We seem to be in deep shit… Anyone remember where we put the pump…
I lost a perfectly good cigar lighter to the TSA at Dulles. I saw the sign saying “no compressed gasses in check luggage, to I took it with me. Dumped it with the rest of my pocket junk into the little bucket. On the other side of the metal detectors, as I was putting my boots and belt back on, the TSA person asked, “Is this a torch lighter?” Not thinking enough, and hearing a common term used describe such lighters, I said, “Yes.” Wrong answer. Had to leave it there. From then on, checked baggage.
The Mythbusters depressurization experiment should be required viewing for anyone who would presume to author or enforce airline safety regulations. Anyone with less than five pounds of black powder should be waved through security.
Sorry to hear about losing the lighter.
I know where we need to go on this topic of airplane security but I’m nearly clueless on how to get there. Any ideas?