Garrison Keillor on homeland security

It’s not just funny. I think he spent quite a while thinking this through. It’s a good short course in what’s wrong with our security model, though he’s wrong about the profiling. Competent terrorist would use plain looking euros, we’ve just been lucky current crop is no more competent than the Bush administration…

Guns on a plane | Salon.com

... Sept. 13, 2006 | And now you can't bring your cup of coffee on board the airplane. It's the latest new rule laid down by the nation's security wizards…

But we ditch our venti latte in the trash barrel (goodbye, four bucks) and board the flight, and there we read in the paper that aggressive CIA questioning of an al-Qaida bigwig -- stripping him, turning the air conditioner to 40 degrees, blasting him with Red Hot Chili Peppers music -- broke him, so he ratted on Jose Padilla, a terrorist who set out to make a dirty bomb and who believed that by swinging a bucket of uranium in a circle over his head he could separate plutonium. It's like a cartoon.

The way to stop terrorists on planes is to encourage passengers to bring loaded firearms aboard: guys in orange vests sitting in exit rows with deer rifles on their laps…

This way, if some guy in a burnoose sets up a chemistry lab in Row 24 and mixes hydrogen peroxide, sulfuric acid and acetone in a big beaker that is packed in 15 pounds of dry ice to keep it cool, and cooks up some triacetone triperoxide, or TATP, the passengers will be able, in the several hours it will take him to make the deadly explosive, to bring him under control, assuming the fumes haven't knocked Ahmed out. And they could nab the mastermind too, the monocled guy in first class petting the white cat.

It all began with the name Homeland Security. Somebody with a tin ear came up with that, maybe the pest exterminator from Texas, or Adm. Poinduster, because, friends, Americans don't refer to this as our homeland…

"Homeland" was a word you heard shrieked by a cruel man flicking his riding crop against his shiny black boots: "Zie homeland -- ve shall defend it at all costs, achwohl!" Americans live in Our Country, America, the nation of nations, the good old USA.

… God forbid, somebody shows up at an airport somewhere in the world with an explosive tucked up in his lower colon. The Achtung people will come up with some new security procedures that will effectively kill airline travel, and then this enormous bureaucracy can turn its attention to the nation's highways. Pull over at the checkpoint, get out of the car, open the trunk, take off your shoes, put your hands on the top of the car, turn your head to the right, and cough.

They can search each laptop for possible terrorist-type writing and confiscate cellphones, white powder, shoelaces, car keys, pencils, anything sharp or cylindrical or made of glass, and interrogate people randomly, putting them naked into cold rooms with ugly music played at top volume. It's all fine with me. I'm a liberal and we love ridiculous government programs that intrude on personal freedom. But where are the conservatives who used to object to this sort of thing? ...

I think we know where those old conservatives are nowadays …