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Dec. 28, 2009 - Rush Limbaugh Program
36:33
December 28, 2009, Monday, Hour #2
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Yes, America's anchorman is away and this is your undocumented anchorman sitting in.
I'll be here today and tomorrow.
Mark Davis comes in on Wednesday and a New Year's Eve treat will ring out the old with the great Walter E. Williams on Thursday's show.
Happy Christmas bank holiday Monday to the many persons around the world for whom this is not a working day.
Mr. Snadley was shocked to discover that, shocked to discover that not everybody has his nose to the grindstone or grindstone all day long like he has.
But there's really no very little incentive to work a five-day week these days, I find.
I don't know why anybody bothers really.
I mean, looking at the man of tech, my advice is work for the government.
Work for the government.
Get yourself a nice job.
Maybe Department of Homeland Security.
Particularly if you're like of Dutch descent, just go along to the Department of Homeland Security and say you'd like to be the heroic Dutchman sitting on the plane.
I'm sure the pay is good, benefits are good.
It should all work out well.
I want to say one thing, by the way, just a follow-up to what Victoria was saying.
She didn't care.
She's calling from Palm Beach.
She didn't care whether there were four hours, five hours, six hour, whatever delay.
She said four hours, five hours, whatever.
Try and put a price on whatever.
You think of it now.
I used to do, a few years ago, my agent made a mistake and she signed me up to do a radio show for the BBC from Rockefeller Center in New York every Friday and some television thing back in Britain every week too.
And initially she said, well, look, sorry about this.
It's like a bureaucratic mess.
I'll cancel one or I'll pull out of the other.
I said, no, no, no, I'm a fit, vigorous young man.
I can make this work.
So for a while, I was doing my little show at the BBC studios in Rockefeller Center and then dashing to JFK to board a flight to Heathrow.
And this is back in the 90s.
And it was so easy then.
I remember getting there.
I'd stop and chit-chat and flirt with the girl on reception a little too long.
And so I'd get to JFK, my feet would be pounding down to the gate.
I'd get there and they'd close the door.
And they'd say, oh, don't worry about it.
We'll open it up and let you back on again.
You could get there 20 minutes beforehand and take off.
And that's the way it was.
Now they say you've got to be there.
By law, you've got to be there, whatever it is, an hour beforehand for an international flight.
But Victoria, and now they're saying practically with these new procedures, you've got to be there three hours beforehand.
And Victoria says, well, so what if it's four or five hours?
Let's factor in all that time.
Even if you figure that everybody is just like some minimum wage person.
And take out all those $8 per hours out of all the people just sitting around at the airport or all the people on the plane for that final hour who can't, who've got to sit with their hands on their knees.
Is that, by the way, even constitutional in the land of the free and the home of the brave that the government can tell you you've got to sit with your hands on your knees, that you're a grown man, you're 37 and a half, but it's like you're back in second grade and you've got to sit there being good with your hands on your knees, keeping them.
It's like basically like you're the perp.
You're the perp when you're pulled over by the cops.
You know, keep your hands where they can see them.
That's what it's going to be like now for the last hour of the flight.
Factor in the economic, the loss of economic activity there.
Never mind the encroachment upon your personal space.
Just think what it does at eight bucks an hour to the economy.
I was in Belfast and London for quite a part of the IRA's long campaign against the British government.
And by the end of it, they didn't have to blow anything up anymore.
The IRA just had to make a phone call to certain numbers in London hinting that perhaps they'd put a bomb here or there, and everything would shut down.
The entire transportation system of London would shut down, millions of pounds would be wiped off the stock exchange, millions of pounds lost in economic activity, and they didn't even have to blow anything up.
The IRA figured that out pretty quickly.
And now these guys are doing the same thing.
They don't have to blow the plane up anymore.
They just have to do something sufficiently goofy that it requires a whole new level of airline inspection.
So what are you going to do, Victoria?
And I don't mean to pick on you, but you made this point.
What are you going to do the first time a jihadist is detected with a weaponized suppository?
Okay?
Because this is the stuff they're pulling now.
These innovations, innovations, we cannot regulate as fast as they can innovate.
Otherwise, that four hours, five hours, whatever, that whatever is going to be a three-hour, basically a three-day wait at the airport.
We're going to be like Aeroflot in the old Soviet Union, you know, where if you turned up in one of the outlying Soviet republics at Alma Atta, they said, oh, that's great.
You're here in five days' time.
The plane will be landing and it'll develop engine failure on takeoff, but then you'll wait around here for another couple of weeks and eventually it will take off.
We're reducing our transportation system to that same level.
Now, what should we be doing?
What should we be doing?
We've essentially prided ourselves, because we're good little multiculturalists, that we don't distinguish between any particular persons of interest.
So when you go to the airport and you see the 87-year-old stooped wizened old granny from Iowa with the leg caliper and Homeland Security are taking off her leg caliper and running it back and forth through the scanning machine back and forth every time, we think, oh, that's great.
They're treating everybody the same.
That must mean they're really serious.
No, it doesn't.
It means they're totally unserious.
You wouldn't watch a cop show like this, would you?
If you watch a serial killer movie, they're all the same.
The guy, they put little things up on the wall looking for points of similarity between this murder, that murder, this corpse, that corpse, and they find the similarities and they focus on the similarities.
You've never seen a cop show where they pull in everybody, have you?
There's no such thing.
They don't say, there are 8 million stories in the naked city and we won't rest till we've heard all of them.
Bring 8 million people in for questioning and we'll go through them all one by one, painstakingly.
They identify the common features.
What are the common features with the guys 9-11, the shoe bomber, the London plot, and this guy who tried to blow up the flight into Detroit?
They're all Muslim.
That doesn't mean every Muslim's a terrorist, but it means you should at least be able to factor the component of Islam into your security procedures.
And that's going to be tough on people.
Again, to go back to the IRA days, there were internal flying restrictions within the British Isles, within the United Kingdom.
You lived in Belfast and you were a person of interest to the Royal Ulster Constrabulary or the special branch, you wouldn't be allowed to board a flight to Glasgow or to board a flight to London.
They, in fact, had internal travel restrictions within your own country in the interests of public safety.
Now, obviously, that's tough if you happen to be called Paddy O'Flaherty and you're a perfectly innocent fellow, but you happen to have a name that's similar to someone who's a person of interest.
That means, yes, you'll be boarding the plane at Amsterdam or at Vancouver or at LAX and you might be subject to additional delays.
But they didn't bother pretending during that long IRA threat that they were under risk from Fijians and Uzbekistanis and everybody else on the planet.
And that is what we've chosen to do here.
You notice, by the way, these reports, you can see the way these reports go.
They keep calling this fellow a Nigerian man, a Nigerian man.
Look in the reports and see how deep into the reports you get before the word Muslim is used.
Because his defining characteristic is not that he's Nigerian.
Nigeria is split basically 50-50 between Muslims and Christians.
If you happen to be sitting next to a Christian Nigerian on your flight from Amsterdam to Detroit, you can relax.
Well, you can't relax because Janet Napolitano says you've got to keep your hands on your knees where she can see them and everything.
But if you could relax, you would be able to relax because that Christian Nigerian is no threat to you.
The question is, can we circumvent the self-castrating mechanism of political correctness sufficiently?
It's not even about red flags anymore.
I mean, people talk about red flags.
It's now actually common sense.
It's common sense.
We had this business with Major Hassan.
14 people died at Fort Hood because of political correctness.
Because at every step along the way, things that were perfectly obvious about him, like a guy having soldier of Allah on his business card, didn't actually trigger any action from the authorities.
The guy had two, I think it was two anti-terrorism watch teams on his tail who were casing his, who were monitoring his emails to the radical Imam in Yemen.
And they determined, they both, and by the way, that's the kind of money-no object budget that we have in the Homeland Security business here.
In other countries, they just have one counter-terrorism watch team on his tail.
But here we had two.
But it doesn't make any difference because they both concluded in these marvelous words, write these down and chisel them on your country's epitaph.
They both determined that his emails to this radical Imam were, quote, consistent with his research interests, unquote.
And so at every step along the way, a guy who was self-evidently either a publicly declared enemy of the United States was advanced further and further up the chain until eventually at Fort Hood he was able to gun down 14 Americans who died because of political correctness.
At some point it's not it's not smart to be able to say we're going to treat everybody the same.
We're not going to distinguish between the 87 year old granny with the leg caliper and the young Muslim man whose father has reported him to the intelligence agencies and who is paying for his ticket in cash.
It's not smart to be.
You can congratulate yourself on how impeccably multicultural and non-discriminatory you are, but people are going to die because of it.
People are going to die.
And it's stupid, it's time-wasting, it sucks money out of the active economy, and it will eventually reduce the transportation system of this country to a basket case.
If we'd known it was going to be like this, when the Soviet Union went belly up, we might as well have said to the Aeroflot guys, Well, now you're out of a job, why don't you come and run the U.S. transportation system?
Because that's what it's going to wind up like.
Mark Stein sitting in for the rush on the EIB network, 1-800-282-2882.
More of your calls straight ahead.
Mark Stein in for us on the EIB network.
17,000 Muslims had a big demonstration up in Toronto on Christmas Day.
And I like these words by Imam Malik, Imam Malik.
He said, I am going to take an oath to be non-violent, said Imam Malik.
Quote, I refuse as a Muslim to kill another Muslim, unquote.
Well, it's a start.
Let's go to Russ.
Let's go to Russ in Syracuse, New York.
Russ, you are on the EIB network.
Great to have you with us.
How are you doing, Mark?
I just wanted to say, well, you had said that Janet apparently has changed her mind, and now maybe there was a problem with security.
It's kind of interesting this administration that can't even decide whether we're in a recession or not now can't decide whether we have a terrorist or whether it was a terrorist act.
But my point is that if there was no problem, then we wouldn't have had to have any changes at the airports.
Isn't that part of the system?
Yeah, yeah, that's true.
If the system were, why then are we changing everything?
That's, again, yeah, you're right.
It doesn't make any sense.
At some point, we have to stop responding and actually get proactive on this.
And the only way you're going to do it, you can never actually institute enough protections now.
I mean, now what we're going to say is, look, okay, you can't use the bathroom on an airplane in the last hour of the flight now.
Okay, well, in that case, why don't they just pull something when the plane's taking off or when they're over the ocean?
They can adapt faster than we can regulate in this scenario.
And that's why it doesn't make any sense for us.
Yep, that's all I got.
Okay, well, that's great.
Thank you for waiting.
Let's go to Jennifer in Midland, Texas.
Jennifer, great to have you with us.
How are you doing, Mark?
I'm doing good, all things considered.
Well, that's good.
That's good.
It's a pleasure to speak to you.
I wanted to speak on this new change they've made in these international flights where everybody's got to sit still and play the quiet game and everything for like the last hour.
I'm not sure I understand what good that will do.
I do know that I think it just seems like sheep being led to the slaughter.
Well, that's a very good way of putting it, Jennifer, because the way you should look at it this way is that if something goofy happens when you're up in the sky, the federal government isn't going to be up there with you.
You'll be up there, and if you're lucky, some macho Dutchman a couple of rows behind will be up there.
But if you look at what happened on 9-11, everybody did that.
Everybody on the first three planes followed the out-moded 1970s hijack procedures, and they all died.
On the fourth plane, those guys rose up and acted as freeborn citizens and prevented who knows where that fourth plane was headed.
Some people say the Capitol, some say the White House, but they prevented that day from being even worse than it was.
And that's the lesson.
When something happens up there in the sky, no matter what regulations they impose on you, the federal government isn't going to be up there with you.
So you shouldn't be sitting with your hands on your knees.
You should be thinking as a freeborn human individual.
That's what happened with the shoe bomber.
That's how he was stopped.
Yeah, that's what.
The people on the plane rushed him.
Yes, that's right.
And you know, another way to think of it, too, is that the airline cabin is like the advanced state of liberalism.
This is what they want it to be like down on the ground.
That if you basically, the modern airline cabin is an Al Gore Ted Kennedy dream.
You can't do anything.
You can't have a cigarette.
You can't do this.
You can't do that.
You've got to do everything the stewardess says, or there'll be someone waiting when you land to arrest you and you'll be dragged away.
Perhaps they ought to just sedate us all when we get to our seats.
That's right.
Yeah, the old.
Yeah, I'd rather do that.
I'd rather they, instead of having to take off my shoes, because if you can't read a book and you can't look out the window in case you spot a landmark you want to blow up, why don't they just fire an elephant tranquilizer dart into all our butts and then hopefully it'll wear off by the time we're, and then they can just sort of bring us out on the baggage carousel at Newark and we could be taken home by our relatives until we thaw out.
This is all our adult doctors onto the plane and then they can just crank it.
That's a brilliant idea, Jennifer.
I hope you pass that one on to Secretary Incompetado because she needs to hear from you.
That's an excellent idea.
Now you're thinking outside the box.
We've got to stay one step ahead of this.
But sheep to the slaughter is actually a sadly accurate way of putting it.
And thank you for your call, Jennifer.
Mark Steid, infra-rush on the EIB network.
It's interesting to me, this.
The absurdities piled upon absurdities.
Basically, if a guy gets on a plane, he's done it because he's evaded whatever systems were in place.
So if you then are up in the air and you go through those procedures, you're applying out-moded procedures to the current situation.
That's what happened on 9-11.
Three out of those four planes applied the 1970s hijack procedures to a situation that had moved beyond it.
They stuck to the old rules while the terrorists had invented some new rules.
What the brave men on Flight 93 did was to say nuts to that.
We're in a situation beyond that now, and we need to act as freeborn men.
You know, people often talk about 9-11 at the time as a kind of Pearl Harbor, big assault, first assault on the U.S. mainland since the war of 1912.
But thanks to those brave men on Flight 93, it was also the Doolittle raid as well, the day that America began to fight back.
And remember that?
All that stuff was in the news, the Todd Beamer slogan, let's roll, and all the rest of it.
We've forgotten the spirit of let's roll until this Dutchman came along.
But we need more let's roll and less government telling you to sit down with your hands on your knees for the final hour of the flight and banning paperback books.
That's nuts and it's going to get us nowhere.
America's Anchor Man is away and this is your undocumented anchor man filling in with incendiary underpants fully loaded.
Mark Davis will be here Wednesday and the great Walter Williams will be providing a New Year's Eve treat for you on Thursday.
Let's go to Kevin in Columbus, Ohio.
Kevin, you're live on the Rush Limbaugh show.
Great to have you with us.
Yeah, I want to take exception to something you said earlier as far as that Dutchman that so-called averted what could have happened.
I think you're going to run afoul of most of the right and rush because you guys are always trying to hijack God, the flag, whatever.
How come God can't get credit for helping that not to happen?
Why is that that when things like that are happening or about to happen, I never noticed that you guys give God any credit at all.
Well, wait a minute, wait a minute, Kevin.
That's an interesting theological point.
So if you're saying if the bomb fails to go off on the plane, that's God.
No, I'm saying that if whatever happens.
But if the bomb does go off, then that too would be God, presumably.
Exactly.
Now you got it.
Yes, I have got it.
But that's why we have free will.
It is not merely in the hands of God.
That's why insurance companies distinguish between acts of God.
A tsunami is an act of God, for example.
Well, that's man doing that.
Now, the other thing.
Wait a minute.
What do you mean that's man doing the tsunami?
The other thing I wanted to say was you kicking on that lady that called in.
Yeah, okay.
She didn't care how long it took.
Yeah.
What is wrong with that?
Instead of bellyaching about this administration, as a matter of fact, this administration didn't put these rules into effect.
And why not help people and tell them what they can do instead of blaming everything?
Hey, no, I'm being admirably non-partisan here.
I thought our response.
I thought our response to the London plot when we started banning snow globes, which is where I came in, that was 2006.
That was in the days of President Bush, the swaggering cowboy.
And I objected to those regulations then.
I objected to these regulations when they were put on in 2001, in the fall of 2001, when you went to an airport and you'd be standing behind the 87-year-old grandma, a young Saudi male, and you'd be third in line.
And you knew if they pulled someone out for secondary screening, it would most likely be the 87-year-old grandma.
Second, it would be you, and the guy who would just sail through would be the young Saudi male.
That's not a partisan point.
That is just the bone-crushing stupidity of the multicultural, non-judgmental political discourse of our time.
So it's nothing to do, that's not an anti-Bush or anti-Obama point.
That's the stupidity of the airport.
They're only as good as the people that we put in these jobs.
Yeah, well, you can't blame the administration for that.
Why do you not check with the FBI?
They had the information they needed.
It is the same crap that happened before 9-11.
No, no, no.
This is worse, Kevin, because 9-11 has happened.
So 3,000 people have died.
So when a guy, and this isn't to do with red flags, this should have been obvious to whoever's at the security desk in Amsterdam.
Let's give Lagos, Nigeria, a pass, because that airport is a disaster.
They don't deserve a pass either.
I'm just saying.
For some reason, the FBI or CIA, whoever's getting it, who are these people that are not acting on this information?
I do not understand that one bit.
Well, you know why?
They are getting it ahead of time and they're just not talking to each other.
Why do you think they're not acting on it?
I just think they're not going to be able to do it.
Why do you think, for example, probably doesn't deserve the job in the first place?
Why do you think Major Hassan can give an explicitly jihadist presentation to a room full of Army psychiatrists and get promoted to major?
Why do you think that happens?
I think every officer in that room, because I'm a veteran, every officer in that room should something should happen to them.
Somebody, I mean, this guy's an officer in the United States Army, and there's no excuse for someone in that room not acting on that.
I don't understand that.
But you know, I'll tell you why.
Because, for example, the flying imams, do you remember that case in Minneapolis?
The flying imams?
They were these imams who began asking for seatbelt extenders and saying alahu Akbar and praying just before takeoff and whatever the airline was, they threw them off the plane.
They took the flying imams off the plane for suspicious behavior.
And the imams sued.
And so that airline got tied up in litigation for months and months and months on end.
And so every time somebody's doing something stupid like that, the stewardess, whatever you call them now, what do you call them?
I don't know, the flight attendant, whatever you meant to call them.
I like to call them stewardesses.
We had this conversation when I was here a couple of weeks ago.
I like what they call them in Britain, the trolley dollies.
Anyway, the stewardess or the trolley dolly or whatever she was called, just thinking, now, do I want to make a fuss about this guy going alahu Akbar?
Maybe he's a terrorist, but if he's not, I'm going to be in sensitivity training hell for six months, and it'll be a black mark on me and I'll never get promoted.
This is crippling us.
This guy, this guy basically might have had a, might as well have been walking around with a big flashing neon sign on his head saying, jihadist, warning, stand well back, I'm ready to blow.
And it would still have made no difference because we're trained.
We've trained ourselves to look the other way, Kevin.
Well, we need to get out of that mode.
It's just crazy.
I agree with some of the points you're making, but I just think that whoever that FBI and CIA, when they're getting this information firsthand, that's where we need to check.
They're not acting on this intelligence.
Even if the guy, for Christ's sake, the guy's dad called in.
Now, if he doesn't know about his own son, now, that should have been a red flag right there.
He should have never even got on the tarmac.
I mean, I understand that.
Yeah, no, no, you're absolutely right.
Thank you.
Thank you for your call, Kevin.
Great to talk to you.
By the way, by the way, Kevin wound up partially agreeing with me.
I count that as a great, because he was mad with me.
He thought I was rude to Victoria.
I didn't know that.
I thought I was perfectly gracious, actually, to Victoria.
I thought I was charming almost.
Near charming.
Not actually charming, but near charming.
But if you disagree with me, let's call in.
I love hearing, by the way.
I love hearing from liberals.
We're looking back at Obama's first year.
We're going to get into a bit of that as the week goes by here on the EIB network.
So if you still love the guy, because I'm finding it hard to find, my liberal friends sort of want to change the subject now when I bring up President Obama.
So if you still think he's terrific, if you still think he's the Messiah, if you still think like that Newsweek editor that he bestrides the world like God, and we are all just insects in the enormous shade of his fantastic cool, then do call us because I'd love to hear you explain why that's still the case.
Let's go to Doug in Great Falls, Montana.
Doug, you're live on the Russian Board Show.
Great to have you with us.
Hi, Mark.
Thanks for having me on.
And you're by far the best sub there is on the radio anywhere.
And I hate to tell you this, but I do agree with you on this hijacking business.
We're giving them victory after victory, Mark.
And if you extrapolate that out, eventually we just won't have flying anymore.
They'll take away step by step by step until we can't fly.
And then we'll ride trains.
And then they'll attack trains.
And then they can start having more regulations on what we do on trains.
Eventually, they'd like us just to be going around in carts pulled by oxen like that.
Yeah, wagon carts, wagon carts, and then they can just hold up in the hills and fire at us with bow and arrows like in the old days.
It's self-what we're doing, you're right, what we're doing is self-primitivizing.
Because if you think of this, now it's two, three, four, five hours to wait at the airport for your flight.
You've got to get there before you flight.
So suddenly, you start to make different calculations.
A six-hour drive that would have been unattractive 10 years ago is now the quickest way of getting there.
And so the longer it gets at the airport, the more and more they'll be like.
So all the little short-haul flights will fall apart and we'll lose those.
And as you say, then they'll start targeting the trains and then we'll be back on the old wagon cart.
You're right.
Great, great.
Thanks a lot for your call, Doug.
Mark Stein sitting in for Rush on the EIB network.
Janet Incompetano has now revised her story and said that the system, in fact, has failed catastrophically.
This is, by the way, if a Bush administration official had done this heck of a job, Janet routine, the media would be all over it.
It would be the my pet goat moment.
Michael Moore would open his next film with Janet Incompetano saying within the space of 24 hours the system worked and the system failed and looking like an idiot.
But she can get a pass and Obama golfing away when it was Bush golfing.
That showed he wasn't taking it seriously.
When it's Obama golfing, it's an attractive visual cover shoot for the next vanity fair or whatever he's going to be doing.
When he's playing basketball, that doesn't mean he's not taking Homeland Security seriously.
It means that he's taking, as the Washington Post said in its headline, a low-key approach, a nice low-key approach.
Maybe he'll get into his swimming trunks and he'll do a nice photo shoot splashing and gambling and cavorting in the surf off Hawaii to show how well the low-key approach is going.
But by the way, that's maybe the way we all of us ought to fly in future.
We all ought to be fitted out in the Obama swimming trucks.
I mean, admittedly, none of us mere mortals have such fabulously sculpted pectorals as he does.
So it's going to be very distressing when you're sitting in coach.
But that would be the way to ensure that there's less chance of these guys getting all the stuff onto the plane.
We'll talk about that lots more straight ahead.
Mark Stein in for Rush on the EIB network.
Mark Stein in for Rush.
Let's take a call from Pierce in Lincoln, Nebraska.
Pierce, you're live on the Rush Limbaugh Show.
Mark, good to speak with you.
How are you doing today?
I'm doing good, all things considered.
Okay, Mark, I want to ask you a question.
Why is it that you're opposed to airport screening?
I'm not opposed to airport screening, but I'll put it this way, because this is the line I always say when I get more than about three questions when I cross a border thing.
I know I'm not a terrorist.
I know I'm not a smuggler.
I know I'm not an illegal immigrant.
So if the state authorities cannot tell that, that's a reflection not on me, but on them.
And all efficient security, like for example, Israel's security, targets precisely the kind of the nature of the threat.
It doesn't universalize the threat.
What we have done here is universalize the threat and try to apply security inconveniences that should be applied to a very select group instead to hundreds of millions of people.
And that can never work.
An interesting point.
Hey, Cole, come on.
You got something better than that.
What kind of response is that?
Interesting point.
Give me your best shot.
You want a best shot?
Okay.
As I was speaking to your screening caller, I used to work for TSA.
As a matter of fact, I used to work over at Logan International Airport in Boston.
Which is one of the airports in which 9-11 happened.
9-11 started.
Yeah, the 175 in American Airlines 90.
Oh, God, what was the other flight?
No, don't worry about the flight number.
We know that two of the flights took off from Logan.
I worked over at the American Airlines checkpoint.
Gate 36, that's where the flight with Mohamed Ada and his crew took off from.
No, but the thing is, though, that, first of all, one of the things about TSA, the screener's there, we go through a lot.
You basically have to get up, you've got harsh working conditions.
Management and rank and file are at each other's throats all the time.
Then you've also got to deal with the public, and we're always being checked up on as well, too.
And then the final thing, we've got to worry about the terrorists.
It's a fun job.
But I can tell you one thing.
I had the pleasure of working with some of the best people I've ever known in my life.
Yeah, but this is this is look, this is not relevant.
I've seen airport security in many places around the world, including places that you don't think of as being terribly dangerous, like Vienna, where I went through with a just done a TV thing in the street and been running for the plane, and I went through with the microphone, the wireless microphone still in my body, set off the alarms.
I was surrounded by troops, soldiers from the Austrian army within a few seconds.
I've seen all kinds of different levels of airline security.
What matters is the policy imperatives driving what it is that you do.
And the policy imperatives that are driving ours are ones of craven political correctness and attempting the impossible, attempting the impossible.
Now, look, what does the shoe bomber have in common with the 9-11 guys, have in common with the London guys, have in common with the Panty Bomber?
Go on, take a wild guess, Pierce.
What do they have in common?
Islam.
Exactly.
Unfortunately, you're not permitted to make that assertion publicly, or at least not by our government itself.
And you at the TSA are not permitted to profile people on the basis of their support of Islam, which is not just a faith, by the way, but also an explicitly political ideology.
I'll tell you this.
The one thing is, is that I've seen myself that there's a lot of crazy people out there, and a lot of crazy stuff happens.
Let me give you a story.
One day through the American checkpoint, there was a lady that did come through with a Japanese katana.
And she wasn't doing maliciously.
It's just that she didn't realize you couldn't bring one of those through.
Basically, local law enforcement did.
We did call them in.
The issue was resolved.
But the fact is, you know, crazy stuff happens.
Another incident.
No, no, no, wait a minute.
You say crazy stuff happens.
Is that woman going to pull anything?
I was at Heath.
Somebody could have.
No, somebody could have.
But it's the person.
It's like me in Auckland, New Zealand, where they say, well, you could weaponize your snow globe.
Unfortunately, there is no National Snow Globe Association.
We need one, because then they could do the bumper sticker.
Snow globes don't kill people, people kill people.
And that is the point.
That is the point.
Most people traveling with, you know, whatever you care to mention, a Swiss Army knife, a knitting needle.
Most people traveling with knitting needles want to knit on the plane.
Before Janet in Competano said, you've got to put your hands on your knees.
Most people with knitting needles attempting to board a plane want to knit to while away the sheer boredom of being in the care of American airlines or U.S. Airways.
So to ban knitting needles means the state is going to waste its time confiscating and inspecting for something that is absolutely no threat to it whatsoever.
This is absurd.
This is the death of America.
It is essentially the embrace of stupidity.
1-800-282-2882.
Mark Stein in Farash, a spokesperson for the Council on American Islamic Relations, says that this incident with this alleged potential, alleged potential person on the Northwest flight should not be used as an excuse to profile people.
Well, Mr. Spokesperson for Council on American Islamic Relations, I really don't think you have a thing to worry about on that front.
Oh, by the way, Charlie Sheen, who spent part of Christmas Day in jail, I see he's now being investigated for second-degree assault, a felony, and criminal mischief.
Connect the dots, people.
Connect the dots.
The one guy with the courage to tell you the truth about what's happening in 9-11 is now being set up with a spousal domestic incident.
Connect the dots, people.
The one man with the courage to tell you what's really going on.
Mark Stein in Farash, Mark Davis will be here on Wednesday, and then a New Year's Eve treat.
The great Walter E. Williams will be here on New Year's Eve to close out 2009 on the EIB network.
Lots more straight ahead.
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