Leave Your Shoes Home
The increased level of passenger inspection requirements and restrictions to carry-on luggage are George Bush’s fault. Yes, that’s right, and the Republican Congress. If, instead of blasting their way into Iraq, they had spent some of the billions and billions of dollars (no small part of which, by the way, has actually been stolen or is otherwise unaccountable) on actual homeland security – you know, that whole new cabinet post responsibility post-September 11 – we might not have to take our shoes off or leave our shaving cream and portable CD players at home (or at the mercy of the luggage handlers, and you can imagine what’s happening to hundreds of laptops right now, as they’re thrown across a room and otherwise banged around a lot more than those vaguely padded briefcases are designed to manage). We could have proper and effective baggage screening, both for carry-on and checked, but instead, we’re making the world safe for oil companies and putting the burden of preventing terrorism on the many millions who actually aren’t terrorists instead of on the law enforcement personnel and processes that really work. The London plot wasn’t uncovered because somebody discovered an airline passenger with some suspicious Gatorade™, but because of surveillance work by the police. George doesn’t want the travel business to have to install new equipment at the airports, so you’ll have to do the work for him.