Clinton Security Measures Bomb
President Clinton seems to have a solution to every problem that faces the American people.
Hardly a day goes by that Clinton doesn’t offer up a new program to cure some social ill or alleviate some concern of the voters: teenage smoking, violent TV shows, the rising cost of college tuition, crime-watch programs that aren’t equipped with cellular phones….
Name a problem and the president can solve it - or at least create the illusion that he’s solving it.
It must be an election year.
Most of this stuff can be taken with a grain of salt. It’s pre-election posturing, the art of campaign-promising carried to its most ridiculous extreme.
It is standard operating procedure for incumbent presidents. Who can forget the sorry spectacle of George Bush flying from town to town in the waning weeks of the 1992 campaign to hand out defense contracts and assorted government goodies as if they were gift certificates from Wal-Mart?
But last week, Clinton went too far when he proposed to solve a problem without knowing what the problem is.
Clinton was pretty sure that the problem, in a general sense, is terrorism because most of the clues pointed toward a terrorist act in the recent explosion of TWA Flight 800. But he doesn’t know PRECISELY what the problem is. No one does, or no one did, when Clinton called for extensive new security measures in the hope of preventing similar tragedies in the future.
When Clinton popped up on nationwide TV to declare his opposition to commercial jet explosions and detail his plans to stop them, investigators were still involved in the painstaking process of trying to piece together an explanation of the blast that brought down Flight 800.
Was it a bomb that went off inside the plane? Was it a missile of some kind, fired from outside the plane? Was it a massive mechanical failure? You don’t have to be an aeronautical engineer or an expert in anti-terrorism to see that such questions must be answered before an effective prevention plan can be devised.
But we’re talking common sense here, and common sense always goes out the window when a politician settles into campaign mode. Fully aware that the people will be going to the polls in a few months, the president feels compelled to demonstrate that he’s on top of every problem, even when the problem hasn’t been identified.
The current theory on the TWA crash is that a bomb went off in the cargo hold. If that turns out to be true, it means that Flight 800 was not brought down by a passenger who smuggled a bomb onto the plane in a carry-on bag.
Come to think of it, when was the last time we heard of a plane being blown up by a bomb hidden in a piece of carry-on luggage?
So why does the president of the United States want airport security personnel to start rooting through passengers’ carry-on bags? If Flight 800 was blown up by carry-on luggage, then by golly we need to search carry-on luggage. But it probably wasn’t.
Even if it was, Clinton didn’t know it when he ordered this major inconvenience and intrusion into the privacy of air travelers.
This is classic politician’s logic: Get tough on criminals by cracking down on the victims of criminals.
Some of Clinton’s other proposals, conducting pre-board searches of planes on international flights, for example, are reasonable enough. But the fact remains: He didn’t know what problem he was trying to solve when he announced the solution.
This is worse than politician’s logic. It’s just plain stupid.
It’s also disingenuous, deceptive, exploitive and insulting, all of which make Clinton’s world go round.
If Clinton had wanted to show real leadership, rather than score cheap political points, he’d have gone on television last week and urged Americans to stay calm, to resist the urge to overreact, to be patient while the appropriate authorities took time to study what happened and decide what, if any, changes or improvements might be needed in air travel security.