Steyn, reflecting on border security's seizure of bagpipes and other inexplicable dangers to the republic:
Come to that, US border security devotes more time and resources to my kid bringing in a Kinder chocolate egg from Canada than to Thomas Duncan bringing in Ebola. . . .
If you're wondering why the seizure of my kids' chocolate eggs is in the same book as war and terrorism and all the big-boy stuff, the answer is it's part of the same story. To function, institutions have to be able to prioritize -- even big, bloated, money-no-object SWAT-teams-for-every-penpusher institutions like the US Government. You can't crack down on Kinder eggs, bagpipes and Ebola: At a certain point, you have to choose. My line with the Homeland Security guys is a simple one: every 20 minutes you spend on me, or my kids' chocolate eggs, or Cameron Webster's bagpipe is 20 minutes you're not spending on the guy with Ebola, or Tamerlan Tsarnaev. The price of bagpipe scrutiny is a big hole blown in the lives of American families attending the Boston Marathon, or a bunch of schoolkids in Dallas having to be quarantined for a vicious, ravaging disease with a high fatality rate.
But, of course, giving additional attention to West African visitors would be racist. Not like terrorizing Scotsmen over their bagpipes.
Meanwhile, the Department of Homeland Security expands its curious priorities from raiding Boston strip clubs for selling knock-off Red Sox T-shirts to raiding private homes to seize vintage cars that don't meet EPA standards.
5 comments:
Bagpipes scare people. Well, governments.
Yeah, perhaps they inspire what my favorite Filipino writer refers to as "ba hala na". From what I gather, similar sentiment to the "come on, ya want to live forever?!"
When we adopted foreign children we found that there were two entirely separate sides of the INS - one apparently devoted to creating obstacles for people coming here legally, the other devoted to creating obstacles to sending people here illegally back to their home country. Friends who were adopting from rural China were awaiting water-testing in their home as part of their approval. He thought "what kind of water is she drinking there?"
We have illegal aliens in jails. I still can't fathom why we don't just send a van around every Monday morning to put them on planes. Some would, of course come back. Okay, fine, I'm not opposed to at least making that a little more difficult for them.
How dare they try to smuggle in bag pipes.
Ice and INS is about as corrupt as the ATF and IRS combined, but with power only on certain people they keep shackled in a cage. Perfect for a slave economy and class, nobody notices.
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