“Airline security personnel at Phoenix’s international airport questioned a retired general and war hero about the Medal of Honor he was carrying before he boarded a flight to Washington, D.C.,” The Washington Times reports.

“‘They just didn’t know what it was but they acted like I shouldn’t be carrying it on,’ retired Marine Corps Gen. Joseph J. Foss of Scottsdale, Ariz., said yesterday in a telephone interview.”

‘I kept explaining that it was the highest medal you can receive from the military in this country, but nobody listened,’ he said.

Gen. Foss, an 86-year-old former South Dakota governor whose resume also includes stints as president of the National Rifle Association and as commissioner of the old American Football League, said he was ‘hassled’ about the medal by two separate security crews at Sky Harbor International Airport in Phoenix. He was trying to board an America West airliner Jan. 11 to attend an NRA meeting in Arlington.

‘I received the medal in 1943 from President Franklin Roosevelt,’ after shooting down 26 enemy planes in the Pacific, said Gen. Foss, who was a Marine fighter pilot during World War II.

‘It states all that stuff on the back of the medal,’ he said.

Shiny start to our spanking new federalized airline security upgrade, huh? An 86-year old retired U.S. General and former desert-area guv’nah, stopped for “security” reasons…

Mmmm… Talk about an unlikely candidate to hijack a plane — What? the screeners are thinkin’ this old dude’ll maybe wrasssssssle a few flight attendants to the ground, kick the shit out of some bulked-up, akido-trained air marshal with all the force of his still-fearsome 86-year old’s physique (and without breaking a hip!), put a shoulder through the newly reinforced cockpit door, then — once inside — stab the stunned (and armed?) pilot and co-pilot with the ninja-sharpened edges of his 50-year old Congressional Medal of Honor — all before flying the plane into … oh, a Boca Raton retirement village, maybe? To protest the hegemony of constant sunshine? ‘T Seems to me my man would need a power nap somewhere over Colorado…

Listen: I’m as sensitive to profiling as the next guy… Which is precisely why I think it’s high time we stopped treating all metals as if they’re somehow equally likely to be used in a threatening manner. A Medal of Honor carried by an elderly retired U.S. General, for instance, is not the same as a box cutter carried by a disaffected Yemeni student; nor for that matter is a nail clipper carried by an 8-year old from Montgomery County, MD. In fact, in this atmosphere of hightened passenger dilligence, if a terrorist is able to take over a flight by force using nothing more than a nail clipper …well, then he’s earned it, wouldn’t you say? Besides, there are some pretty despicable plastics and fiberboards and wool blends out there — not to mention a whole host of synthetics — each of them intent on doing us harm, and each likely to be missed by security crews taught to look too single-mindedly at metals…

No. It’s just plain wrong to “profile” an object based on its essential elemental composition and appearance. Afterall, I have some spoons who hold steady culinary jobs and who were born and raised in this country… should they be subjected to the targeted humiliation of closer scrutiny simply because they share a common metallurgic bond to box cutters…?

My message to the airlines: forget appearances! Find a better way! For instance, might not the security personnel in Phoenix have checked to see if General Foss’ Medal of Honor had, say, paid cash for it’s ticket? Or, couldn’t they have cross-referenced it against a list of known, rogue Congressional Medals of Honor?

There must be a better way. Shameful…

(Now… time for some Raider/Patriot football, y