Things I Never Thought I Would Type…

I’ll take “I agree with Ron Paul” for Eleventy-One, Alex:

Quick and dirty, as accurate as I can get with my headphones getting feedback from my converter, transcript (Please feel free to link and repost with attribution):

Unknown Speaker: gentleman is recognized for five minutes

[Ron Paul walks to the podium]

Paul: Thank you Mr. Speaker

I rise, uh, this evening to introduce some legislation today that uh, dealing with the calamity that uh, we have found in our airports dealing with TSA. Something has to be done. The people are fed up, the pilots are fed up, I’m fed up.

I’ve come to this floor many times over the last, um, many years, complaining about the terrible foreign policy we’ve had, the terrible monetary policy we’ve had, the excessive spending and the debt, and also the tax policy, but what we’re doing, what we’re accepting and what we’re putting up with at this airport is so symbolic of us just not standing up and saying “Enough is enough!”.

I know the American people are starting to wake up, but our Congress, those in charge, as well as the Executive branch, are doing nothing. Yes, they are talking about maybe backing off and allowing the pilots to go through, but can you think how silly the whole thing is, the pilot has a gun in the cockpit, and he’s managing this aircraft which is a missile, and we make him go through this groping, x-ray exercise, having people feeling their underwear… It’s absurd.

And it’s time we wake up. The Bill I’ve introduced will take… will take care of this. But we have to realize that the real problem is that the American people have been too submissive, we have been too submissive, that this has been going on for a long time that this [unclear] was to be expected. Even from the beginning of the TSA.

And it’s deeply flawed. Private property should be protected by private individuals, not bureaucrats but the, but the, the bill that I’ve introduced will take care of that. It’s very simple. It’s one paragraph long. It remo, it remo, it remo, it removes the immunity from anyone in the federal government that does anything that you or I can’t do. If you can’t grope another person and if you can’t x-ray people and endanger them with possible x-ray, you can’t take nude photographs of them, of individuals, why do we allow the government to do it? [Voice raises, and he waves his arms emphatically] We would go to jail! If an individual, he would be immediately arrested, if an individual citizen went up and did these things. And yet, we just sit there and calmly “Oh they’re making us safe”. And besides, the argument from the Executive branch is when you buy a ticket you have sacrifice your rights but it’s the duty of the government to make us safe. That isn’t the case. You never have to sacrifice your rights. The duty of the government is the protect our rights. Not to use them and do what they have been doing to us.

The pilots you know, hopefully, will be exempted from this. Another suggestion I have that might help us, let’s make sure that every member of Congress goes through this. Make ‘em take the x-ray and make ‘em look at the pictures and then go through one of those, uh, groping, uh, pat downs. And then I think there’d be a difference. And then have everybody in the Executive branch, anybody, a Cabinet member, make them go through it and look at it, maybe they would pay more attention.

But, this…doesn’t work [shakes head] this is not what makes us safe. This is preposterous to think the TSA has made us safer. Ya know, when you think about it, if you look at what has happened over the last ten years, if you look at what we’ve lost, three thousand on a terrible, terrible day for America, but since that time in this last decade we have also lost six thousand of our military personnel going over and trying to rectify this problem. We have lost four hundred thousand people on our government-run highways, we have lost 150 thousand individuals from homicides so I think there is reason to be concerned, reason to deal with this problem. We’re not dealing with it the right way, we’re doing the wrong thing, and groping people at the airport is not solving the problem. What has solved our problem is basically they put a good lock on the door and they put a gun inside the cockpit. That’s been the greatest [unclear] to our safety. Safety should be the responsibility individual and the private property owner. But right now we assume the government is always going to take care of us and we are supposed to sacrifice our liberties. I say that is wrong, we are not safer, and we also know that there are individuals who are making money off this. Michael Shirtoff, I mean, here’s a guy who was the head of the TSA selling the equipment. And the equist, the equipment’s questionable. We don’t even know if it works and it may well be dangerous to our health.

You know, the way I see this, the way I see this, if this doesn’t change, I see what has happened to the American people is we have accepted the notion that we should be treated like cattle. Make us safe, make us secure, put us in the barbed wire, feed us, fatten us up, and then they’ll eat us. And we’re a bunch of cattle and we have to say we’ve had it. I think this whole idea of an Opt Out Day is great. That’s great, we outta opt out, make the point, get somebody to watch, to take a camera, it’s time for somebody to stand up and shrug off the shackles of our government at TSA at the airport.

[hits the podium with palms and walks away]

 

Of course, I don’t agree with every word here, but the idea that the TSA is not doing things the right way, and the idea that strip searches and sexual assault are not good options. Removing the immunity of federal government agents and allowing them to be charged for sexual assault as long as they actually do it, is not a bad idea.

I wouldn’t vote for his anti-choice, libertarian ass, but I agree with him here.