Friday, January 08, 2010

The Butt Bomb...

Brought to you by the Makers of PantyBomb and BriefBomb. You don't think these people are serious? You have to be deadly serious to carry a pound of TNT in your asshole (no, they didn't pack John Edwards with a pound of TNT -- I meant the rectal cavity, you ninny!), knowing it's going to go off.

What's even more surprising, is that this was published on the New Republic website. But then again, pulling things out their collective ass is old hat over at TNR. Inserting and removing all sorts of objects from the Hershey Highway is a popular sport over there, I'm told.

Be that as it may...

Seriously. Full-body x-ray scans didn't find it, and the universal convention that one dude doesn't look up another's jacksey without being a) gay, or b) a prison guard, apparently holds true in Saudi Arabia, too. Civil libertarians will have a field day the first time Homeland Security mentions the words "cavity search", but we're apparently headed that way, slowly, inexorably.

The words "Butt Bomb" evoke all sorts of concepts, some funny, some not so much, but if you extended the logic that began with suitcase bombs, morphed into shoe bombs, and then evolved into underwear bombs, we're headed for something that no one has yet mentioned: the demise of commercial air travel.

Eventually, the terrorists will have honed the craft of bombmaking to include Fingernail Bomber, Back Filling Bomber, False-Teeth bomber, Breast Implant Bomber, and the reaction of Homeland Security will be to demand ever-more intrusive searches and ever-more time-consuming procedures, that will make travel by air an absolute hell (as if it weren't already?). The September 11 attacks further weakened an-already overloaded, overworked, under-capitalized airline industry, technology is cutting into the business traveler market, the lack of service and amenities aboard the plane itself turns customers off. And now this: you'll have to have a pre-flight proctological exam before you board, Because TSA won't limit that sort of intrusive process to those who truly warrant it (Muslims, people who fit a particular profile) because no one wants to be accused of racism or sued for a violation of Civil Rights, you'll need to be at the airport 12-16 hours before your flight actually boards, and pay three times as much for your ticket.

That's the death knell of commercial air travel. Soon, any air travel at all will only be available to the very rich, the very stupid, or people who are able to take advantage of private means of flight...and then the terrorists will figure out how to interfere with that, too. Give them time, and they'll destroy travel by rail, road and horseback, if they see any advantage in it.

When you think of it that way, the words "Butt Bomb" aren't so funny, after all.

But then again, that's why the response to "Butt Bomb" has to be more than "let's get some more x-ray scanners", and has to be more focused on the who rather that the what.

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