Airport Security. Part 3

I’m tired of taking my shoes off at the airport. Yes, it is easy to do. Yes, a guy tried to blow up his shoe, but how long is our security policy going to be a series of reactions to past threats? Can you imagine if Richard Reid, the shoe bomber, tried to blow up his underwear instead of his shoes. We would all be stripping naked at the airport security checkpoints. When do we cross the line from safeguard to ridiculous?

Rumsfeld: Mr. President, In light of the Richard Reid incident, we need to take extra precautions at our airports.
Cheney: Mr. President, we need to carry out an executive order to screen the underwear of every passenger that flies over American soil. Frankly, congress just doesn’t have the balls to do something like this.
Bush: Was this guy wearing tighty whities or boxers?
Rumsfeld: Tighty Whities, Mr. President. Hanes.
­Bush: The “tighty whitey bomber”. Doesn’t have a good ring to it. If he was wearing boxers we could call him “the boxer bomber”. Boxer bomber. Richard Reid, Boxer bomber. I like the way that sounds. Double R, Double B. Hey, what is that when two words start with the same letter? Illiteration, right?
Rumsfeld: I believe the word is Alliteration, Mr. President. Illiteration is a more complex word, it means….it refers to….oh, (smirking) Dick, it’s been so long since I heard that word in English class, what does illiteration mean?
Cheney: It means the use of words that one cannot read. So if someone were illiterate, it would essentially be every word. And if they were in English class and discussing a book they could not read, they would refer to the author’s use of Illiteration. Shakespeare used it a lot.
Bush: I just got an idea for my speech today, let me write this down, “The No Child left Behind Act will erase the word Illiteration from the dictionary.”
Cheney: I wouldn’t quite put it in those exact words, Mr. President. Let’s just assume it’s already been erased from the dictionary.
Bush: All right then, (smiling with thumbs up) Mission Accomplished.
Rove: (laughing) Heh heh. That’s right.
Cheney: But back to the matter of the underwear…..
Bush: Yes, The Hanes Bomber. Can we call him that? Hey, did we get any contributions from Hanes that can be linked to us?
Cheney: We prefer to call him the underwear bomber, Mr. President. It’s a more general term. It gives us more leeway, so to speak, in the broader War on Terror. What this allows us to do is to listen to phone conversations where people are talking about any underwear, whether it is Hanes, Calvin Klein, or Fruit of the Loom.
Rove: This also lets us deliver to our core supporters. Once the underwear threat is out there, we can go after phone sex operations when they say things like “I’m wearing see-through black lace panties, Karl, what are you wearing?”…….of course……..using the name Karl merely as an example. Anyway, Victoria’s Secret is practically a warehouse for Weapons of Mass Destruction.
Bush: Rummy, find out if there are any Victoria’s Secret stores in the Middle East. There’s gotta be one in Iraq. Do they have outlet malls in the middle of the desert?
Rove: I’ve already looked into that, sir. Nothing.
Bush: Damn, thought we were on to something.
Cheney: Mr. President, the fact of the matter is that we need to tighten security at our airports. Any one of our, quote unquote, innocent civilians, could be wearing an underwear bomb. Now, while we aren’t advocating patting them down or cavity strip searching…
Rummy: (interrupting) Unless of course there’s a spleen or liver bomber out there…
Cheney: what we are advocating is that passengers remove their underwear and pass it through the x-ray machines prior to boarding.
Bush: Let me get this straight. You want people to take off their underwear in the airport?
That sounds a little extreme, Dick. Some people aren’t going to like that idea.
Rummy: With all do respect, sir, you’re starting to sound like a damn Nazi or a terrorist. Maybe I should just call you Adolf Bush. Or Osama Bush.
Cheney: Donald.
Rummy: What about all of that, “If you’re not with us, you’re against..”
Cheney: DONALD!
Rummy: I apologize, Mr. President. I didn’t mean to imply that you were a Nazi or a Terrorist.
Bush: Apology accepted. Ya know, that’s why I hired you, Rummy. I know you won’t hold back.
Rummy: Thank you, sir. It’s just that wearing underwear through airport security is exactly what the terrorists want. If we give in and let them wear underwear, then they’ve won.
Bush: You’re right. Dammit. The Liberals and even some conservatives aren’t going to like this. But it's the right thing to do.
Rummy: Sympathizers! They’re sympathetic to the terrorists. They’re like the Nazi appeasers in WWII.
Rove: and the Romans when they killed Jesus!!
Rummy: Not quite along the same lines as what we’re talking about, Karl.
Bush: That’s ok, Rummy, I know what he means. (Pauses) Damn. This is a difficult decision, but I hear the lord calling. Do you think we can have a baptism pool at the end of the security line so all of the naked passengers can become Christians? Oh heck, what time is it? I have to page my trainer. (paging) “Hans? Yeah, it’s me. What are we working on today? Chest and Back? OK, Add 20 pounds to everything. And for cardio, I want to run for 2 hours today, instead of the usual hour and a half. And is Lance Armstrong around? No? Ok, nevermind.”
Cheney: Mr. President, if you’re working out that long, you’ll miss that meeting with Vladimir Putin.
Bush: Dick, I know, but America needs me. We can’t really think about relations with Russia when the terrorists have brought the war to the streets of America. From now on, nobody in this administration wears underwear.
Cheney: I’m already freeballin.
Rummy: I don’t need to know that.
Rove: I believe the term is “going commando”.
­Cheney: It’s less work on my heart if I don’t have to put on underwear.
Rummy: Well, you know me, sir. I’m always in favor of going commando.
Bush: No, I've got a better idea. From now on, if someone isn’t wearing underwear, we refer to it as “Freedomwear”.