Steinberg Digs at J-Fed, Cops

The baying of the hounds only gets louder:

• Security is important, but so is doing your job, and the more effort you expend on the former, the less effective you are at the latter. One reason air travel is such a god-awful mess is that they put so much energy into checking our shoes that they forget to make flying a pleasant experience. You can cover your ass, or you can move it, but you can't do both.

  Not to indulge in too much tea-leaf reading, but what I take away from this whole episode is that if Mayor Daley is forcing Jody Weis to kneel on a rail over a clever teen, then the sands of patience must be running out on our FBI-bodybuilder-turned-ineffectual-superintendent.

  The shame about the masquerading kid is that, had he been an actual cop doing something amiss, his colleagues would have smoothly and automatically covered for him, swearing they knew his identity all along and were being indulgent. But because he was an outsider, the time-honored system of reflexive police prevarication failed.

  Too late for that now, though if it nudges Weis toward his overdue retirement, I will not be alone in feeling the embarrassment is worth it.

Of course, Neil has to get in his dig at the police - had he been an actual cop doing something amiss, his colleagues would have smoothly and automatically covered for him, swearing they knew his identity all along and were being indulgent - completely ignoring the fact that a majority of cops called for Abbate to be fired, were disgusted by the towing scandal arrests, and are unhappy about the unlawful behavior exhibited by less than one-half-of-one-percent of the Chicago Police Department.

It's not like we're drunk and crooked aldercreatures. Or wife-beating columnists.