TSSA – coming to a highway near you

I don’t know which is more chilling – the reported news, or the headline.

Tennessee Becomes First State To Fight Terrorism Statewide

You’re probably used to seeing TSA’s signature blue uniforms at the airport, but now agents are hitting the interstates to fight terrorism with Visible Intermodal Prevention and Response (VIPR).

“Where is a terrorist more apt to be found? Not these days on an airplane more likely on the interstate,” said Tennessee Department of Safety & Homeland Security Commissioner Bill Gibbons.

Tuesday Tennessee was first to deploy VIPR simultaneously at five weigh stations and two bus stations across the state.

Anyone harboring any illusion that 21st century American media is anything other than the propaganda organs of Big Government is delusional.

But enough criticism of the lapdog media’s fawning. What we have here is the dreaded “next step” in the so-called War on Terror.

Our rulers have moved beyond herding us about at airports. Now they want to slowly get us used to being spot searched on our highways. They start small, with truck inspections at weigh stations. And before you can say, “WTF! Fourth Amendment violation!”, it’ll be random traffic stops of ordinary folks in passenger vehicles.

As if another reason to hate the failed War on Drugs is needed, the power for state police to stop a motorist on the most minimal (or invented) probable cause is already in place, courtesy of “law and order” judges ruling in favor of police in the majority of random stop cases to “stem the flow of drugs”. I suppose our rulers figure that since the War on Drugs has been such a phenomenal success [/sarcasm], they might as well extend those benefits to the far more successful War on Terror personal freedoms.

Like the proverbial frog in a pot of water that is slowly brought to a boil, we sit in bovine stupor as our freedoms are stripped from us. As long as we have American Idol, Dancing with the Stars, and tons of televised sports, we’re content to pretend that we live in the “freest nation on Earth”.

But pretending doesn’t make it so.