No cake, and rotting fish

Seth Godin provides anecdotal evidence that the brainiacs at the TSA are spending waaaaay too much time thinking up new ways to be total asshats:

Just on the other side of the line are the bureaucrats at the TSA. They tell a story too, but it couldn’t be intentional.

“No Cake!” the screener yells. “No pie either!” and they make the person traveling to her family throw out her home-baked cake.

We got up to the line. I had an ounce of gel left in a five ounce bottle. They made me throw it out because the label said 5 ounces though it was clearly more than half empty.

The story?

• We don’t care. We don’t have to.
• We don’t make judgment calls. We’re not allowed to and we don’t care that management treats us this way.
• Don’t you dare say anything.
• Be afraid.
• Bothering everyone is smarter than hiring talented people to find the .0001% of the population that’s harmful.

No Cake!

Is this the sort of government we want? We deserve? We should pay for?

Well… no. We deserve a competent government. We deserve a government that actually protects us, rather than spending our tax dollars on security theater.

I learned a lesson in corporate America a long time ago: The fish rots from the head down. Whatever an organization does, it does only because the people at the top issue certain directives and create a certain culture. The culture of the Bush administration is one that cares about appearances, not results — about theater, not security.

We will suffer another terrorist attack someday. If it happens during the last years of the Bush administration, there will be much finger-pointing from the wingnuts on the right about how the Terrible Awful America-Hating Leftists™ are to blame. This will be nothing but more theater, designed to obscure the simple truth: The people in charge, meaning Bush and his syncophants, will have failed to discharge their most fundamental duty of protecting America.