Larry, if there were to be rational profiling at airports, I would be a constant victim of it. Like all bearded men of Caribbean extraction, I look more or less exactly like the profile they ought to be looking for. Alas, the government remains willing to run huge risks to public safety, and inconvenience everyone in the country, just to protect my supposedly delicate ethnic sensibilities.
I cannot tell you how depressed it makes me to walk straight onto an airplane right past the random humiliating of a granny from northern Wisconsin. More than any other aspect of our national and homeland security policies, the rejection of effective profiling indicates not that the country is serious about civil liberties, but rather that it is not yet serious about public safety–or Islamist jihad terrorism in particular.
Terrorism has an ethnic profile. Let’s profile it.
And P.S.: If CAIR doesn’t like it, they can tour the Arab world and tell the extremists over there that they are ruining a good gig for moderate Muslims over here. Success on that front would certainly improve American-Islamic relations.