Jaunted

In any case these are the kinds of absurdities that prompted former Delta adviser Ben Brandt to go public with his concerns over TSA's wastefulness and inefficiency. Brandt has declared, presumably based on figures stored in a very exciting spreadsheet, that the security agency has largely wasted $56 billion worth of taxpayer money over the last few years.

All TSA has accomplished over that time, he argues, is that they've learned how to put on an okay show of security theater. They certainly haven't made anyone appreciably safer, and by diverting resources away from different programs they might actually have increased the risk to the public.

The problem, as always, is that no politician wants to be the first to advocate dismantling or shaking up TSA. What if a terrorist attack happened during the "transition" from one system to the other? TSA officials have already shown that they're not bashful about working media outlets to get their narratives into the public. If they were forced to tighten their belts by Congress and there was subsequently a terrorist attack, you can be quite sure they'd lead journalists into connecting the second to the first.

The punchline to all of these stories is that 58% of Americans still think that airport security is about right. That's despite the annual and not totally unfair drip drip drip of stories about TSA incompetence that come out during the holiday season. And now you see, boys and girls, why we can't have nice things.

[Photo: U.S. Navy photo / Wiki Commons]