What’s in Your Stocking This Holiday Season? You won’t need Shawn and the Guster on the case if you are one of the over 50 million US citizens that will travel by air during Thanksgiving and Christmas holidays. That’s because the answer is all too easy- it will be the latex gloved hand of a TSA agent that you will find in your stocking… and inside the waistband of your pants, feeling you up, and patting down your nether regions. However, the question that apparently may require a psychic detective since I don’t see this issue being pushed vigorously is what will be missing from your stocking this year- your rights. Because this Christmas those rights have been gifted to Al-Qaeda (and yes, I know they don’t celebrate the season… or go to strip clubs).

Personally, the touchy, feely smurf hands of the TSA don’t bother me too bad. Yes I have been through the pornoscanner and no, I didn’t feel the need for a shower afterwards. As a fairly frequent business flyer I cannot risk a no-fly/red flag designation on my ID, so I stay in-the-know on current protocols and plan in advance to avoid problems in the security queue. For the most part, I think the TSA is just doing their job. If I had to complain about the TSA it would not be the scanners or pat downs, but instead the occasional soup-nazi glare and attitude they give to inexperienced and foreign flyers for not understanding “the system”. It may be their job and my livelihood, but the occasional traveler is more concerned about getting to grandma’s house or the game on time than the fluid capacity of their shampoo bottle. IMHO, if the TSA and HS spent half as much time on sensitivity training and how to treat all passengers with dignity and respect like they do for adherents to Islam this would greatly ease the current tension.

No my main problem is that we, as in the media, the left, the right, all seem to be fixated on the process instead of the cause- the terrorists. Yes- concerning pornoscanners and body searches I am infuriated that we have to subject ourselves to this indignity, but we need to stop blaming the TSA. Focus our fury instead on the terrorist and how we have gifted them our rights instead of destroying the enemy. So the next time you have a latex glove shoved under your waist band get mad, get furious, and demand a better solution. Demand that our soldiers operate under logical rules of engagement that allow them to efficiently eliminate the enemy. Demand intelligent profiling; certainly this is no worse than any of the other aggressive measures to which we are all now subjected during a time of war. Demand that terrorists are dealt with under the rules of war, not in our civil system where Ahmed Ghailani was appointed better legal representation that any common citizen could have imagined to receive. Demand that our politicians push to prosecute this war with vigor and without apology. Both parties seem so concerned about how you define victory so I’ll lay it out easy for them- victory is when an act of terrorism is considered an aberration, the act of a psychopath instead of the latest success of a known group that has the stated intention of destroying our way of life.

I think we should all focus on the real enemy here which is the terrorist, not the TSA. Yes, I am sure there is improvements they can make to the system but they are a necessary evil as long as these bad people make it a habit of trying to blow planes out of the sky. Let’s drop the PC and sensitivity and make sure our government does the same- we are at war and we need to destroy the enemy post-haste. Next holiday season if we all have to go through the latest TSA protocols, then let’s make sure that Al-Qaeda gets a visit from Sully the Seal instead of a stocking filled by Santa with our rights!