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"It is just beautiful to me how people are coming to the defense of an industry who has taken the abuse of its customers to an art form."

LOL! As opposed to the sterling "customer service" record of the feds! I hate airlines and air travel more than anyone I know, and I'm madder than heck about the multi-billion-dollar pat on the back we just gave them for their incompetence. But when it comes to picking whether the airlines or the feds are more trustworthy, it's a coin toss. In fact, I believe both sides, because their stories don't contradict on the important point: The agent verbally abused the pilot. That's all the information I need to "pick sides," but I guess for some noblesse oblige prevents them from expecting SS agents to maintain even a veneer of civility.

What bemuses me is the way people—some of them self-avowed Libertarians, no less—are coming to the defense of a federal agent with anger management problems. If a citizen with a CCW permit got hostile and abusive when asked to show his license to carry, he'd get tossed in jail. Heaven help him if he even set foot in an airport. We the Sheeple are forced to stand in line for hours and strip ourselves of anything sharper than Al Gore's wit, just so that we can create a false sense of security while we enjoy our freedom of travel—a freedom which for us, we are informed, is a privilege not a right. But a federal agent throws a temper tantrum because he was expected to fill out a form correctly just once out of three tries, and everyone's ready to contribute to his CAIR-backed legal defense fund.

Another frequent assertion here is that everyone would be on the agent's side if he were WASP. Well, first off, we wouldn't be having this discussion if the agent were WASP, because the media wouldn't have touched the story. But even if it had spun it from the gun-control angle, then no, by G_d, I absolutely would not be on the SS agent's side. If you're going to keep me from carrying so much as my Swiss Army Knife on the plane, and if you're not even going to let the pilot have a weapon, then any fed who wants to carry a gun on board had better be calm, professional and polite, no matter how many times he's asked to document and authenticate this special "right" that he has and we peons don't.

As for this "protocol" that the SS theoretically have: I wish I didn't believe that was true, but that's exactly the sort of boneheaded system I expect out of the government. For "verification," I'm supposed to call a random phone number the purported SS agent himself gives me, and trust whatever the anonymous voice on the other end of the line says. Only Democrats could have come up with that "protocol," because only Democrats have that much blind faith in everything the government tells them.

Asking the pilot to leap to the conclusion of calling the White House itself is equally absurd. First, I don't see why any random person who's never tried should expect to be able to get through and get a response in mere minutes—it doesn't matter whether he can get through, what matters is that there's no reason to believe that he can, and he does after all have a plane to fly. Second, let's say the pilot called the WH and found out the ID was bogus: What then? Is the pilot expected to wrestle the armed terrorist to the ground? No, instead the pilot called BWI airport police and handed the entire matter over to them to confirm the ID, which was absolutely the right thing to do. When the police officer became the fifth person to ask to see the agent's ID, the SS agent became hostile and abusive, at which point the pilot told him to wait for the next plane while he cooled off.

Spare me all this bleating about the pilot's "motivations" for checking the ID, or how the agent's "feelings" were hurt, because that's neither here nor there. The bottom line is very simple: If you want to carry a gun on a plane, no matter who you are, then you had better demonstrate that you are cool, calm and collected under stress, because flying is an inherently stressful experience. But of course now, having filed his little lawsuit, this SS agent is completely immune to any reprimand for his unprofessional behavior, lest this turn into an Arab affaire Drefus. Pretty savvy move on his part.