'Scare Force One' and the Taggart Tunnel disaster

[Mister A]

I recently read through the part in Atlas Shrugged where a politician bullies the railroad company to run a coal-burning train through a poorly ventilated tunnel with fatal results.

It got me thinking of the 'Scare Force One' incident last month where the President's plane flew around downtown Manhattan at low altitude, supposedly for a photo-op. Just like in the novel, the situation involved many professionals performing a complicated, costly procedure (i.e. moving the President's mobile command center) in a way that was obviously dangerous and imbecilic (though luckily not deadly in this case).

As much as I found such a feat of collective idiocy mysterious and fascinating at the time, it's with Rand's insight that I realize its true horror: those normally-intelligent professionals could only have been acting out of fear to appease the arbitrary whims of a tyrant -someone who was told that the operation would cause a panic and answered, "That's your problem not mine!" Someone who initiated a game of "pass the buck" with the responsibility. Someone who had to have had more pull in the Obama admin than that unfortunate chair-warmer who had to resign.

[Jake_Ellison]

That's actually a pretty damn clever observation, but more amusing than constructive, in my opinion.

[Maximus]

Amusing is good sometimes. We have to laugh to keep from crying.