We understand that the hard-working hard workers of the Transportation Security Administration are just trying to keep us safe from Muslims and stuff, and that is why they make us take off our shoes and strip down until we are practically nekkid and get X-rayed and put our laptops in their own special little boxes and buy those little itty bitty tubes of toothpaste and why they decided not to permit pocket knives on planes after all, but we did not realize that we also needed to be protected from teen-aged girls in, like, clothes.

Here's what happened, as my daughter described it in text messages to us: she was at the station where the TSA checks IDs. She said the officer was "glaring" at her and mumbling. She said, "Excuse me?" and he said, "You're only 15, COVER YOURSELF!" in a hostile tone. She said she was shaken up by his abusive manner.

Let us put aside the issue of what this girl was wearing, which, as you can see from the photograph, looks more like some retro ode to '90s grunge than, say, professional hookerwear because that is not the point, and no one is paying TSA workers for their slut-shaming fashion tips. Let us even allow for the possibility that the 15-year-old misheard or misunderstood or mis-exaggerated the whole story because you know how teenagers are. On the other hand, you also know how the TSA is, with all of its harassing kids in wheelchairs and putting toddlers on the terra-ist no-fly list and its "Lady, you're going to have to drink that breast milk to prove it's not a bomb!" even though it costs eleventy trillion dollars but does not actually do any good at all.

Let us just say thanks, TSA, for protecting our freedoms and keeping us safe from shirt-wearing teens and their morality/freedom-endangering half-inch midriff gaps. God Bless 'Merica.

[Boing Boing]