Have you seen this kid trying to board an airplane?:

Can you see the evil in his eyes? Apparently our Transportation Security Administration can, because according to them, he’s a potential terrorist:

“Meet Mikey Hicks,” said Najlah Feanny Hicks, introducing her 8-year-old son, a New Jersey Cub Scout and frequent traveler who has seldom boarded a plane without a hassle because he shares the name of a suspicious person.

Michael Winston Hicks’s mother initially sensed trouble when he was a baby and she could not get a seat for him on their flight to Florida at an airport kiosk; airline officials explained that his name “was on the list,” she recalled.

The first time he was patted down, at Newark Liberty International Airport, Mikey was 2. He cried.

After years of long delays and waits for supervisors at every airport ticket counter, this year’s vacation to the Bahamas badly shook up the family. Mikey was frisked on the way there, then more aggressively on the way home.

“Up your arms, down your arms, up your crotch — someone is patting your 8-year-old down like he’s a criminal,” Mrs. Hicks recounted. “A terrorist can blow his underwear up and they don’t catch him. But my 8-year-old can’t walk through security without being frisked.”

See…this is why I am done flying. Frisking EIGHT YEAR OLDS? Are TSA agents not even allowed to use their common sense in “keeping us safe”? (OK, don’t answer that…we all know your average TSA employee doesn’t possess “common sense”)

This is what Mikey has to do to get on an airplane:

A third grader at a parochial school in Clifton, N.J., Mikey recites the drill like the world-weary traveler he is. Leave early for the airport, always with his passport. Try to get a boarding pass at the counter. This will send up a flag. The ticket agent, peering down at tiny bespectacled Mikey, will apologize or roll her eyes, and call for a supervisor. The supervisor, after a phone call — or, more likely, a series of phone calls — will ultimately finagle him onto the plane. But the Hickses are typically the last to select seats and the last to board, which means they sometimes can’t sit together.

The TSA’s response to this lunacy?:

A spokesman for the T.S.A., James Fotenos, said that as a rule, “there are no children on the no-fly or selectee lists,” but would not comment on Mikey’s situation specifically.

Of course not. You see if Fotenos let’s this blonde-haired Cub Scout off the hook and then little Mikey DOES blow up an airplane, Fotenos would actually have to answer to someone…

(Update): Thanks to Buffet reader 11B40 who directs our attention to this bit of irony:

Courtesy of our friends at The Jawa Report

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