Better safe than sorry

Only two events to cross my television screen in the past year have been so momentously stupid that I've wanted to cast about for the nearest grapefruit spoon, gouge my eyes out and hurl them at the screen. The first was back in November when, out of an abundance of caution, Lloyd Carr decided to punt on 4th-and-3 rather than go for it. And the less said about that the better.

The second was today. I turned on CNN to find luggage handlers tossing bags onto a runway _ a runway _ at Logan Airport in Boston. Why? Because a woman apparently had smuggled aboard vaseline and a screwdriver, was acting strangely and possibly even possessed something written in Arabic.

Out of an abundance of caution, our nation's security decision-makers decided to shit themselves silly.

Seriously. Now, even if she had been the Al Qaeda version of Angus MacGyver, I'm thinking vaseline, a screwdriver and a Post-It aren't getting her too far. But she didn't even have those nefarious devices, the existence of which was breathlessly splashed across the bottom of the screen. She was simply an simply freaking out about being in an enclosed metal tube with nowhere to go. For this, she was tackled like a kicker on a naked bootleg.

Passengers said two plainclothes men on board and flight attendants ran up
the aisle and tackled the petite woman, slamming her into the bathroom door,
throwing her to the ground and putting her in handcuffs, passengers said.

And, as if that weren't enough of an overreaction ...

Two F-15s were sent from Otis Air National Guard Base on Cape Cod to escort
the airliner, said Master Sgt. Anthony Hill, spokesman for the North American
Aerospace Defense Command in Colorado Springs, Colo. He said the fighter pilots
can intercept, shadow or escort commercial aircraft and, if ordered, shoot down
an aircraft deemed to be a threat.

So, let's see, on a day of miscommunication and misinterpretation, we've got armed fighters poised to splash a jetliner, 200 people detained and a runway at a major aiport shut all because no one has the sense to react sensibly. Care to guess how many more mistakes it would have taken for an order to fire to be contemplated, motherfuckers, or are we be better safe than sorry?

Oh, and the reason for all this insanity is the supposed major plot to bomb planes with Sierra Mist or Pepsodent or Axe Shower Gel or whatever. Well, let's hold whatever horses remain on that front.