WASHINGTON, D.C. — "Don’t touch my junk" seems destined to become the shriek of protest as millions of Americans start crisscrossing the country to be home for Thanksgiving.
But this year, it promises to be a Thanksgiving trip from hell because on Christmas Day 2009, a terrorist packed explosives in his underwear and tried to blow up Northwest Airlines Flight 253 and its 289 passengers and crew over Detroit.
That the would-be mass murderer merely managed to sear his groin is neither here nor there. This near-miss shook up President Barack Obama so hard, he ordered an all-out program of screening everybody boarding a plane at all American airports.
Recently, John Tyner, a 31-year-old computer programmer, put a cap on the revulsion of the screening the administration has imposed on passengers.
Everybody gets screened in what can amount to a strip search or they don’t fly. Mr. Tyner would have none of it. "If you touch my junk, I’ll have you arrested," he warned the Transportation Security Administration’s agent.
For good measure, the irate would-be passenger blew off the agent’s supervisor with the observation that he "could not understand how a sexual assault can be made a condition of my flying."
That was not the end of it. The supervisor rebutted the assault assertion and reminded Mr. Tyner that "by buying your ticket, you gave up a lot of rights."
Them’s fightin’ words and "don’t touch my junk" already looks to be the battle cry of American airline passengers’ — perhaps as a rapidly forming battalion in the ranks of the Tea Party.
As of now, millions of passengers and thousands of pilots and crewmembers are to undergo electronic or intimate pat-down body searches for explosives like those the Detroit bomber hid in his shorts.
Eleven months later, the underwear bomber’s legacy is emerging in its full ugliness and absurdity as bottom-wage TSA screeners’ searches below the belt threaten to turn into a passengers’ revolt against the powers-that-be — that is, the Obama Administration.
The easy thing to say about all this is that America has gone moon-barking mad and that it took only one half-baked terrorist to make it happen.
But there is more. In his inaugural address, the President Obama emphasized respect for justice and the rights of individuals and branded "as false the choice between our safety and our ideals."
He signed an order to close the Guantanamo detention camp for terrorist prisoners two days later and banned the phrase "war on terror" from his administration’s vocabulary.
The underwear bomber changed Mr. Obama’s soft-on-terror world in one cruel moment that could have blown his presidency sky high only 339 days later — at Christmas.
Yes, the underwear bomber brought Mr. Obama at least partially back to reality. He had sounded soft on terrorism from the day he took office, seemingly without a second thought about the encouraging effect his words would have on al-Qaida and its copycats — especially those safely domesticated as citizens of the U.S.
There is no question Mr. Obama’s own words and public policy directions de-emphasizing the danger posed by terrorism have come home to bite him.
Nor has he helped himself by trying to rationalize his gentle approach as a pursuit of peaceful ways and openings to tame the conflict with the Islamic fundamentalists on the warpath.
Like any leader chastened by reality, Mr. Obama may have recognized his misjudgment and half-baked ideas about war and terror. But if so, he has not told Americans about his new realism. Meanwhile, travelers seem ready to give Mr. Obama a thrashing he did not expect.
He is not alone in this sad situation, but that is cold comfort. Prime Minister Stephen Harper and Angela Merkel, the chancellor of Germany, may share in Mr. Obama’s fear of terrorism, but Canadians and Germans flying to the United States are likely even more revolted at the cold reception awaiting them in Arizona and Florida where they came for warm sunshine in winter.
As Mr. Obama attends the consecutive NATO and United States-European Union summits in Lisbon will the air travel hassle pop up somewhere on the sidelines of the exalted discussions? Hardly!
But will he feel the chill in future polls? You can bet on it.
Bogdan Kipling——
Bio and Archives
Bogdan Kipling is veteran Canadian journalist in Washington.
Originally posted to the U.S. capital in the early 1970s by Financial Times of Canada, he is now commenting on his eighth presidency of the United States and on international affairs.
Bogdan Kipling is a member of the House and Senate Press Galleries.
