Rodentis bureaucratis comes in several species. Most common is the Lifer, the sponge who simply wants to push paper for a career on the taxpayers’ dime, then after a couple of decades of doing nothing, shuffles off to “retirement” to do nothing. Dorothy Parker’s quip when she heard Calvin Coolidge had died (“How could they tell?”) applies to retired bloodsuckers.

Less common but far more dangerous is the True Believer. This moron actually embraces his agency’s stated premise, whether it is restraining all those greedy farmers out there poisoning us with tainted food or preventing turrism. He sees a crisis and bad guys everywhere he looks and tries to zap them accordingly. Nothing else matters: not liberty, expense, other people or principles. True Believer see the world in shades of black and white: “good” folks praise, support and cooperate with him and his “mission” of stopping evil, as his bureaucracy defines it.

That is the unfortunate variety of rodentis that a passenger named Jason Michael Cruz encountered at JFK Airport in New York City this weekend. As he and his buddy rode an escalator, he mentioned the deli he’d visited before coming to the airport and the overstuffed sandwich he’d ordered known as “The Bomb.” A Thief and Sexual Assailant overheard something about a “bomb,” which she duly reported to her accomplices in crime. Naturally, they “detained” poor Mr. Cruz and interrogated him until he had missed his flight.

Such lunacy is precisely why the government’s campaign to have us rat each other out will never catch a single turrist: idiots who haven’t got the sense God gave grass indeed see or hear anything and say something about it to the police-state. Leviathan then busies itself investigating — and intimidating — innocent serfs. Which, of course, is any bureaucracy’s real purpose: showing the taxpayer who’s boss.

So many of you invited me to guffaw over this story that space precludes my listing all of you. But thanks to everyone who sent me a link. And by the way: we aren’t chortling alone. My Google Alert turned up a number of foreign websites carrying this account; once again, the TSA has ensured we’re a worldwide laughingstock. Thank you, TSA! Nice return on the $8 billion of our money you annually squander.

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