...and that's not even how you spell "viper" anyway.

It's hard to decide what would win the prize as the single dumbest artifact of the Global War on a Noun.

The knee-jerk response would be the way everybody has to take their shoes off at the airport like it's a teppanyaki restaurant and not a flying bus station, all because some guy tried to set off a "shoe bomb" a decade ago and got the crap pummeled out of him by his fellow passengers (which seems to be the standard penalty for Allahu akhbar-ing while flying these days anyway.) I'd gladly sacrifice the occasional planeful of strangers to not have to shuffle through everybody's foot funk any time I wish to avail myself of the marvels of Twentieth Century transportation.

But no, the winner of the prize by far is the "VIPR" team, headed up by the same TSA that brought you the goofy shoe thing above.

Taken off guard when the events of Summer '04 in Spain showed that bombs could be placed in conveyances other than airplanes and seized by the governmental imperative to Do Something (and, more importantly in a nominally democratic society, to Be Seen Doing Something) they came up with the idea of random mobile checkpoints made up of transit cops, federal poultry truck inspectors, Coast Guardsmen, anyone else who fell in the loose catch-all bailiwick of the TSA, and local po-po.

Said clusters of Keystone Kops would descend upon some "intermodal transit point" (bus or train station, truck weigh station, or wherever) and Look Busy, protecting us from terr'rists and "Never you mind about the Fourth Amendment, little Missy, this is for your own good. Are you with us or with the terr'rists? [Cue Lee Greenwood.]"

Fourth Amendment issues aside, this is akin to pulling over to the side of the highway and everybody running out into the field and tearing apart a random haystack because you heard there might be a needle in one, then billing the farmer for keeping him safe from needles.

It'd be nice to think that there was a malevolent plan behind this, meant to accustom Americans to probulation, but sadly that's probably just an unintended side effect. The whole thing doesn't really have that "plan" vibe about it at all, "lack of planning" having become practically the thumbprint of the TSA. No, the TSA is the Maginot Line of federal agencies, always reacting, ever-vigilant against the previous tactic.

It'd also be nice to think that at some point we'll declare victory on the terr'rists and disband the TSA like it was Pershing's AEF, but... Hahahahahahaha! Eliminating federal jobs! That's a funny one! No, the TSA and its VIPR teams aren't going away like the World War I army; they'll linger on like the Korean War-era mohair subsidies that made sure Mark Clark's boys had warm wool trenchcoats to wear in the trenches along the 38th Parallel (where they still squat today, with nary a stitch of wool in sight.) A federal bureaucrat is the only thing known to dig in tighter than an Alabama tick.

As a bonus? The catchy acronym intended to make a bunch of glorified federal meter maids sound sexy and dangerous to those evil jihadists also makes it easy to come up with conspiracy theories, like this Euro website that is to our own domestic Reynold's Wrap yarmulkes what a Bentley is to a Buick when it points the finger at Obama's VIPER death squads.