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No welcome mat there....

Professor Stephen Walt has a blog on FP.     

In latest blog-post hedeals with his attendance at a global conference, a la the annual one in Davos, in Turkey.     That aside he concludes his piece with this paragraph on the awful state of leaving and arriving at USA airports and the lessons the Americans can learn from some airports elsewhere in the world.    So say all of us who have had to put up with the TSA and the almost disfunctional and unwelcome entree to the USA.

"Finally, I flew here on Turkish Airlines via John F. Kennedy Airport in New York. The flight was fine, but the on-the-ground experience in JFK was one of the more miserable I've had in the past decade. And I couldn't help but wonder -- and not for the first time -- how this affects how non-Americans view the U.S. when they arrive here. So I have the following modest proposal to offer: Every U.S. congressperson should be forced to fly through JFK on their own (i.e., with no staff to help), and to go through the normal TSA procedure (no VIP lines). And then they should be flown to a really first class airport in some foreign country (say, in Singapore, or Munich), so that they can see just how decrepit U.S. transportation infrastructure has become. And a few hours interacting with the Keystone Cops at JFK's TSA checkpoints would be instructive for them too. I'd like them to have those experiences in mind the next time they have to vote on some expensive nation-building project far away."

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