TSA – The Stupid Administration

One of the major drawbacks of having a job and living in the United States these days is that it means I can’t really travel. The job means that I have limited time off to get to and from anywhere. Living in the United States means that unless I’m willing to give up my freedom, I cannot avail myself of one of the quickest forms of transportation, because I would almost certainly be arrested — possibly for murder — along the way.

That’s because in the United States of America — a country which formerly had a limited form of government protected by a revered document called the “Constitution” — we have become a police state. And not just any police state, mind you, but one that has completely lost all semblance of intelligence.

An affiliate of Fox published, the other day, yet another story concerning TSA — the acronym apparently stands for “The Stupid Administration.” Currently, The Stupid Administration controls travel through virtually all American airports, making it impossible for people who are not stupid to travel.

The story about The Stupid Administration’s harassment of a mentally-disabled 29-year-old is aggravating on so many levels. In the old days, anyone — government official or no — who treated an American citizen this way would have been, at best, bitch-slapped. Frankly, the behavior of The Stupid Administration could be used to sway me from my opposition to the death penalty.

The cause of the aggravation is the sheer stupidity of the encounter. First, I can tell from watching the video just how disabled the young man is, and how unlikely it is that he and his toy hammer are a threat to any flight he should choose — oh, wait, he isn’t functioning at a level so as to actually make this choice — to fly. If I can tell that from a short video encounter, why can’t The Stupid Administration figure it out when the kid is right there in front of them?

Another thing that points to the absolute level of ignorance of The Stupid Administration is the taking of the toy hammer. According to the story and video (which I hope you were able to read; I never know how long those stories will stay online), the mentally-impaired man was carrying his equivalent of Linus’s security blanket: a small child’s plastic toy hammer and a baseball.

The Stupid Administration’s agents told his family they had to either mail the item to their destination, or discard it. Why didn’t they just have the family put the small plastic toy hammer into mom’s backpack and carry it on the plane, like the other one that was already in there? Nobody knows.

Oh, yeah, that was the other part of stupid: mom had a similar small plastic toy hammer, apparently as a backup, in her backpack. That cleared security. She took it on the plane. No problem. Because The Stupid Administration doesn’t have to be consistent. That would contradict their position as The Stupid Administration.

Let’s not forget about the baseball. Inexplicably, he got to keep that.

Now, I don’t know about you, but I’ve never heard of anyone — anyone! — being killed by a small toy plastic hammer. This Google search fails to turn up a single story about any such event. It does turn up a number of links to other blog articles about The Stupid Administration similar to the one I’m writing here.

On the other hand, baseballs kill people frequently. In fact, baseballs can be quite lethal. A new study even suggests that Lou Gehrig — who was once thought to have died from a disease that sometimes bears his name — actually died from repeated hits to the head with a baseball.

I’d like to see the small toy plastic hammer The Stupid Administration refused to pass do that.

Preferably to a few agents of The Stupid Administration.