Can We Officially Make a Bomb Out of Anything?

File this under You Have to Laught to Keep From Crying:

A sports drink and some hair gel are reportedly what "terrorists" were using to create explosive devices on about 10 flights between here and Great Britain. I think it's official: If Gatorade and Pantene Pro-V can combine to make a nuclear weapon, every bored 9 year old boy in this country has a de facto license to kill. At this point it's just embarrasing- we spend 89 gadzillion dollars a year on weapons to defend ourselves and it can all be taken down with a approximately $3.89 and a CostCo membership. As per ususal, I'm less disturbed by the plot than I am with our response to it, which has been pretty much as ridiculous as ever. Our administration has no imagination. Their responses to these attempted attacks are basically just to restrict our rights to the point where any trip to Grandma's most closely resembles a chapter from A Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovitch meets 1984. They leap into action like your third grade teacher- punishing everyone because one wackjob thought this would be a good idea. The shoe guy wanted to use his tennies to create a fire, so everyone has to take off their shoes. These cats were going to create bombs out of the contents of a Walgreens, so no one gets to take lotion, hair gel, water, makeup, anything on a flight. I don't know about you, but that puts a major cramp in my style. Airplane flights are notorious dehydrating, and I for one need to apply lotion, drink some water, smooth down the do, and usually put on some makeup towards the tail end to avoid emerging from the plane like some sort of diminuitive Yeti. Doesn't this administration figure that if they stopped the plot Al Qaida might move onto some new material?

Which of course leads us into scary, new territory ducklings: maybe our government is misdirecting our attention in an attempt to get us all to fall in line and give up some of those pesky personal and political liberties that have been causing Georgie-Boy so much trouble lately. I don't doubt that there are people out there that hate America (oversimplification alert)and want to destroy us. I don't doubt that there are madmen and zealots who will stop at nothing to crush that which they disagree with. What I do doubt is that any amount of security checkpoints, gel-less hair styles and flip flops are going to keep us safe. Lets face it, we have the modern day equivalent of Barney Fife performing the general operations of the TSA. I wouldn't trust the security people at airports to feed my fish, let alone with the last line of defense between me and some psycho. I don't think these people even have to have a high school diploma, and I'm going to trust them to stop a terrorist attack at 50,000 feet. Right. Your ass would be history, and we all know it. If a terrorist wants to get on that plane, they are getting on that plane, end of story.

So is this all a song and dance to make us feel more safe or less safe? Is it an exercise in pretending to be protecting us so we'll feel satisfied with our security, or is it an attempt by the powers that be to raise anxiety and create the feeling that we would collectively stop at nothing just to be able to relax again. You decide. I know what I think.