"Thank You, Sir, May I Have Another?"

A nameless ninny at The Week chides us: "Quit picking on the TSA," claims random pat-downs and full-body searches protect us all from the scourge of blue-eyed jihadiots and concludes by chirping, "If any of these allegedly outrageous pat-downs had occurred on October 11, 2001, the general reaction would have been, 'What an awful shame that things have come to this, but you can't be too careful.'"

O rilly? Aw, let's break it down:

1. The odds of a random closer-look finding Bad Guys (not just Mr. Albert Qaeda and his singing incendiaries, but D. B. Cooper and the addled hippie who just wants to go to Cuba, too) are, well, random.

2. Honest to Murgatroyd, the writer tells us, "It is indisputable that the ranks of violent Islamist jihadists include people who definitely do not look the part.... While it may well be true that the entire population of, say, white-western-mom-violent-Islamist-jihadists would fit into a booth at McDonald's, it is also true that it doesn't take more than that to bring down an airplane." This implies A) all swarthy passengers ("looks the part") are being closely scrutinized, which is both manifestly untrue and would be greeted by cries of outrage (and forsooth, the world has both zillions of dark-complected, dark-haired people who aren't Muslims and Muslims who don't look like "Arabs"); and B) that plane-bombers are a statistically greater risk than hamfisted maintenance and pilot fatigue or wind shear, enough risk to randomly deep-search some but not all airline passengers. How d'ye suppose the feddies calibrate that?

3. Pining for the panicky, over-wrought days immediately after the filthy bastards adopted airplanes as mass-murder weapons is preposterous; flying was never safer than it was at that time, when the first passenger to even look like he was in a skyjacking mood would -- and on several occasions did -- find himself bottom man in an impromptu game of pile-up. The element of surprise was lost and passengers were not in a just-go-along mood. They still aren't.

Looky here, you anonymous, nanny-state-worshiping witling, if pat-downs and nudie-scanners are the answer, they otta be doin' 'em to everybody before they get on a plane -- ground crew, pilots, flight attendants, all passengers. --And if they do work so blamed well, how many would-be malefactors have they caught? Anyone? Oh, I'll tell you: none. Zero.

Security theatre: it's what they do instead of something; and the victims, some of them, cheer 'em on.