Check your dignity at the gate

As long as they’ve got a limitless supply of credulous young males who don’t mind cramming explosives into their underpants and trying to kill everybody around them, we’re not going to prevail in this airport-security thing. Because all we’ve got are 50,000 TSA employees who are most concerned with preventing your grandmother from getting through security with an artificial hip. If you’re a radical young Muslim returning from Yemen, don’t have any luggage and are on a terror watch list, basically you’re good to go.

If there’s a bright spot in the Flight 253 incident, it’s that one al-Qaeda-inspired idiot is today having trouble urinating, as the result of a badly burned schlong. Sorry, Umar Farouk Abdul-whatever: That’s what happens when you don’t pay attention in suicide-bombing class. If permanent disability is too much to hope for, then I wish you a long and painful recovery. Good luck with the 70 virgins. I guess we can also hope that this will be a setback for al-Qaeda recruiting.
Presumably, this means the rest of us will soon be exposing our privates, in one way or other, as a condition of boarding an airplane. Personally, I can’t wait. But I wonder: At what level of indignity will travelers finally decide they really don’t need to fly to that business meeting in Duluth? Sure, it’s a long drive, but at least nobody’s frisking you at rest stops, or deciding you’ve got too much styling gel. And usually you don’t have to sit beside some mouth-breathing fanatic with a suspicious bulge in his BVDs.

Look: The terrorists are definitely winning. OK?  Their army of mind-numbed robots is apparently bigger than ours. And certainly more committed.  Anyway, they really don’t have to blow up any planes; they just have to make us all disrobe and bend over at the command of somebody making $13 an hour. So far, that seems to be working.