Savaging Even Celebrities

Inspired by its Nazi mentors, the TSA usually victimizes the poor, the sick or the otherwise vulnerable at the nation’s airports. Whether it’s nonagenarians the TSA strip-searches or little girls it molests, the agency’s atrocities hit the headlines accidentally and haphazardly—or, far more often, not at all—because it abuses ordinary serfs.

But this month, in little more than a fortnight, the Thieves and Sexual Assailants have inexplicably hassled three “celebrities” (or so the corporate media terms them. I’ve never heard of any of the trio; if you haven’t, either, remember that the outlets insisting on their notoriety also asserted that Hitlary would be Amerika’s next Liar-in-Chief). All three enjoy platforms from which they could call for abolishing the TSA—if only they would.

The first to literally feel the bureaucracy’s heavy hand was “Denise Albert, a morning show contributor and co-host of The Moms, a SiriusXM radio show.” She was trying to catch a flight on December 4 from Los Angeles International Airport.

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Like so many of the TSA’s prey, Ms. Albert is recovering from cancer; she wears a wig, has a “port” in her chest, and was also battling a rash, for which she carried a remedial cream. That last furnished the TSA with an excuse to humiliate her.

Its goons “said she would have to take off her shoes and undergo a full body pat-down ‘with pressure’ if she wanted to take the medical cream with her …” They also commanded “her to take off her shoes, leaving her bare feet freezing for 20 minutes due to her medical treatment, she claimed. Albert asked to sit down since her chemotherapy has left her feet covered in sores, which she did not want touching the ground. … The radio host said the agents then told her they would ‘apply pressure from head to toe’, and she decided to take her wig off, saying: ‘I didn’t want them to touch it, move it, or ruin it’. At a certain point, one agent ‘forceab[ly] [sic] and aggressively put her hands down my jeans in the back’ …  [and] ‘aggressively attempted to do a body cavity search in public’. Video footage showed one woman touching her chest, despite Albert’s medical port.” Ah, the faith Ms. Albert and other patients show in medicine’s inviolability. “Doctor’s orders” used to be sacrosanct; out of compassion if not obedience to those orders, Americans exempted people seriously sick from such insults as the TSA’s. But no longer. The agency also unconstitutionally rifled Ms. Albert’s luggage. “…[A]nother agent joked about the fake eyelashes in one of Albert’s bags. ‘I told her, it’s because I don’t have real ones from my cancer treatment’ … I would have thought at that point, the humiliation would have ended,” with the brutes abashed at mocking her illness. But feeling shame requires a conscience.

A few days after Ms. Albert’s travail, an actor named Judge Reinhold “became uncooperative when TSA agents attempted to give him a random pat-down” at Dallas Love Field Airport (a name almost as risible as Newark’s “Liberty International”). Good for him! If more passengers “became uncooperative” with the TSA, we might free ourselves of these perverts.

Perhaps because they fear exactly that, said pervs called the cops on Mr. Reinhold. Post-9/11 Amerika has turned resisting its depredations into a crime that can land you in handcuffs and jail.

As it did Mr. Reinhold. Alas, his night in the pokey took all the starch out of him. He emerged the next day to “[apologize] … He says he walked through a TSA scanner but refused to let agents examine his backpack, which contained DVDs and CDs” because he “did not understand why he needed to be patted down after he had gone through the scanner without incident.” Poor guy: he actually expects logic from these morons. Then he blamed his “‘self-righteous indignation’” on “an adverse reaction he had to medication for a respiratory infection earlier in the week.” In other words, but for the drug’s lending him a spine, Mr. Reinhold would have supinely submitted as usual. I suggest we liberally dispense whatever pill he popped at all the TSA’s checkpoints.

Our final victim is “CNN commentator Angela Rye,” whom the TSA “’randomly selected’ for a full-body search at Detroit Metropolitan Airport en route to New York.” Note that Ms. Rye had paid the extortion known as “TSA PreCheck,” which supposedly exempts her from such mortification; ditto for Ms. Albert. Those of you planning to cough up the $85 this scam costs may want to reconsider.

At any rate, “even after clearing two security scanners — ‘I didn’t beep,’ [Ms. Rye] clarified in a later tweet — she was still selected for random screening when the scanner lit up around her crotch. Rye said when she repeatedly asked the TSA agent not to perform a pat-down of the area, the agent contacted supervisors and then the police, who threatened to escort her out if she didn’t comply.”  

Lest she miss her flight, Ms. Rye finally succumbed after asking one of the cops who’d responded earlier to videotape the gate-rape. So invasive was it that she cried.

Ms. Rye not only posted the video to Twitter, she also wrote about her molestation for CNN (warning: both accounts flaunt graphic anatomical terms. The lady apparently spurns both reticence and modesty).  She says she’s trumpeting her trauma to help others: “I began to think about friends of mine who are victims of sexual assault. I worried that if they were subjected to the same kind of search it could have a disastrous emotional impact.” She “hop[es] my humiliation will fix the system.”

Ms. Albert also “[spoke] out so it doesn’t happen to others.” In fact, many serfs exploit their five minutes of fame as the TSA’s plaything to prevent such abuse thereafter. When the agency’s deviants pawed a man recovering from cancer of the bladder in 2010, they broke his urostomy-bag, drenching him in his own urine. The TSA mollified him by promising that “screeners [would] undergo more training to better understand travelers with medical conditions.” Instead, they broke his bag again. Two years later, “a Michigan woman dying of leukemia” also “hope[d] her embarrassment during a Seattle airport security pat-down might change the way the Transportation Security Administration treats travelers with medical conditions.” Obviously, it didn’t.

It won’t now, either. What these would-be reformers don’t understand is that Our Rulers will never “fix” the TSA because it isn’t broken.

Indeed, it’s working exactly as designed.

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