TSA weasel John Pistole notes that the new pornoscanners are supposed to turn up artfully concealed objects not previously discovered, and which the TSA’s own testing showed were easy to get on planes. I assume he means things like small knives or razorblades too small to trigger the metal detector.

Here’s the thing: I’m sure hundreds or thousands of such objects, if not more, make it onto planes every day. And I’m equally sure it doesn’t make a damn bit of difference to my safety. It’s impossible to hijack an airliner today. That game is over for the bad guys. The 9/11 trick didn’t even work all day on 9/11, and now it’s completely impossible — you can’t get to the cockpit. And the TSA, bless their empty little heads, hasn’t even managed to stop the attempts at airborne violence that have been attempted since then — it was passengers who caught Richard Reid, lest you forget. And the London plot that gave us the bullshit baggie rule was broken up by law enforcement, and probably wouldn’t have worked anyway.

But the TSA has been busily confiscating scissors and screwdrivers and razorblades and pocketknives for 9 years, and they’ve mistaken that for their mission. NONE of the objects they’ve taken were part of terrorist plots. You can’t hijack a plane with a Leatherman, and the TSA knows this; the confiscation is just a giant con on the American people. Taking away pocketknives is busywork. It makes us LESS safe, because it obligates resources that could be better spent elsewhere.

And now they’re going to do MORE of it, with their bullshit scanners pushed on them by lobbyists and completely unlikely to enhance our safety. And they’ll keep doing this until we the people — for whom every bellycrawling TSA jackass works — insist, loudly and repeatedly, that they stop. Write your congresspeople. Yell at your airlines. Opt out of this pornoscanners, and be unpleasant when they touch your junk.