Wampum

ABC's The Note of today has the following:

From Friday night's Hootie and the Blowfish onward the schedule became fraught with travel delays. Due to a snafu en route to New Mexico early Saturday morning, the entire press corps was individually searched by airport security. The Senator sat, shoes off, feet up and wand waving, as all reporters, photographers and camera crews removed item after item for the monitors then went through their own wand check.

At one point a pocketknife was found in the Senator's luggage, which he promptly passed off as belonging to body man Hunter Pruette. Pruette, meanwhile, had trouble of his own when his shoes tested positive for TNT.

So here's the deal. No one, other than John Gilmore, has belled the cat. None of the candidates is ready to attempt to use commercial air carriers without undergoing the "I am a potential terrorist" ritual. Dennis Kucinich made sort of a go at a critique of the protocol last August -- that opposition party leaders, co-authors of the Homeland Security and Patriot Acts, former commanders of American Forces in Europe, become anonymous potential terrorists while in the jurisdiction of the TSA, and consent to interrogation and search, including searches of the body cavities. However, Dennis limits his critique to quips delivered to the captive audience of other potential terrorists -- the other nice folks trying to get from point A to point B with the least fuss and bother.

This isn't enough. One of these candidates should be very, very clear in his heart of hearts, that he is neither anonymous nor a potential terrorist, and that the TSA protocol that requires that the next POTUS be an anonymous potential terrorist, sometimes several times a day, for the 500 days from June 2003 to January 2005, needs retooling.

There's another side to this story. Some idiot at the TSA (or higher) decided to take out one of the competitive campaigns for two hours and perhaps longer. Perhaps someone in John Edwards' detail, or one of the reporters, photographers and camera crews, who were coming from a rock concert, did something more than step in an old cow pattie -- the gold standard for setting off nitrogen detectors. Someone decided to roll the dice on John Edwards. A player, somewhere in the Administration, and no where else, just tried to game some or all of the 2/3 contests.