The great Mark Steyn filled in for Rush Limbaugh today and he made a great point about TSA screening past and present. Steyn said U.S. airport security measures are geared to profiling, but profiling objects, not people. Ever since 9/11, we’ve been forced to remove our shoes, belts, other metal objects, coats, lighters (on my last trip, both my wife and I got our lighters through security at O’Hare and Tuscon International). Then liquids were required to be in certain size containers, put into baggies, and so on. Now this. Steyn also mentioned that he was observant enough to notice that the TSA people never actually look at people. Again, they are profiling objects. This hasn’t just came about under the Obama administration, but has been the case for a long time and exacerbated by the Bush and Obama administrations.

Steyn says this is nuts, and I agree. Does anyone, especially anyone in the current administration, know how many potential objects there are in the world that could possibly be used as a terror weapon on an airplane? The number defies description. If you think about it, the government is using an after-the-fact whack-a-mole strategy to stop certain objects from going on an airplane when the answer to the problem has always been in front of them. In most cases, objects can’t do any harm unless there is a person wielding that object. Obviously, it makes sense to do scanning of baggage being checked and stored in the belly of a plane, so screening objects shouldn’t be completely taken out of the picture. But the increasing methods being authorized by the government upon people not even suspected of having committed a crime is beyond the pale.

Liberals complain about how states are firing cops and fireman and teachers while states are tightening their budgets. Well, why couldn’t the federal government hire these cops, as non-union employees of course, as TSA screeners? For the most part, policemen are already trained in looking for the types of people the TSA is obliged to keep off of airplanes.

Just my two cents.