Ken TSA motto: Close enough for government work
Let’s see. A man passes through airport security with:
- a clock with a 9-volt battery taped to it
- a copy of the Quran
- shoes with the soles gutted out
- a Middle Eastern name
- incorrect responses to security questions
TSA response: "All set, sir. Have a nice flight."
Unbelievable.
The story can be found below the break, or here.
Here at GraniteGrok, we are big believers in history (especially the "…doomed to repeat it" part. This posting will be the first of a series on a REAL war time reporter during WWII as retold by Ken, a new contributor to GraniteGrok! We hope that you enjoy it, and learn something from it. -Skip
And That’s The Way It Was…
Perhaps today’s journalism majors aren’t required to pass a course in American History. It seems that journalism schools don’t care about the past, at least not the war-time past. According to a report on FoxNews, five prominent journalism school deans said that The New York Times’ decision to publish sensitive – heretofore secret – details of a U.S. program to track terrorist financing with the cooperation of the financial industry-owned SWIFT organization was "in the public interest." And that made it a-okay…or so our future journalists are being taught. My question: When did "in the public interest" and "interesting to the public" become synonymous?
It wasn’t always this way.
The morning news tells us that Islamofascists in Iraq not only brutalized and killed two of our soldiers in June, they video taped the barbarous act. Arab networks are running segments of this latest display of man’s inhumanity to man, this time against Pfc. Thomas Tucker and Pfc. Kristian Menchaca. There seems to be an audience for that sort of thing among segments of the Muslim world. For us civilians sitting safely at home in America, this act – and so many others like it – serve as a reminder of the nature of our enemy. We should also be reminded – forcefully, constantly – that we have faced evil before, and that we once had the will to destroy it.
I wish that President Bush would address the county in prime time and give us a history lesson. I wish he would use news reel footage and military reports from World War II to show the nation what it took to win a war against an evil, determined adversary. In this address he would talk about the massive aerial bombings of European cities, the vicious combat on islands in the Pacific, the civilian casualties, the military casualties, the destruction of religiously-significant places, of loss of irreplaceable artifacts from our own culture. He would explain why this destruction was required, and why our culture, our political philosophy, was worth defending in this manner. Behind him on a big screen would be shown the fire bombings of Dresden, the destruction of Monte Cassino, Marines on Tarawa, and eventually the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki.