After his arrest on Tuesday for attempting to seduce an undercover cop, Deputy Press Secretary Brian Doyle was suspended by the Department of Homeland Security (DHS). This is clearly a mistake. The DHS should merely demote him: far from being a criminal, Brian is just another victim of the Peter Principle. He belongs at an airport, wielding a wand and a uniform, rather than in the PR office at DHS headquarters. I predict that with a wee bit of training, Brian will quickly become Screener of the Year at the DHS’s most infamous bureaucracy, the Transportation Security Administration (TSA).

Consider the skills Brian has demonstrated in his enthusiasm for teen-aged girls, and ask yourself whether these talents should wither in prison rather than enhance airport security. For instance, AP tells us that “on several occasions, Doyle instructed [the undercover cop] to perform a sexual act while thinking of him and described explicit activities he wanted to have with her…” Ergo, Brian should excel at ordering passengers to spread their legs so he can stick his wand between them. I see him eagerly studying passengers’ stockinged feet, too, la Dick Morris. Brian may need help with the next step, that of actually molesting folks, because, unlike screeners, he has heretofore contented himself with pecking out words on a keyboard. Confronted with living, quivering flesh, he may be temporarily paralyzed with ecstasy, akin to an alcoholic who finds himself alone with a full bottle. That’s where the training comes in. With the right attitude, however, our hero should soon be patting down his victims with the best of them.

Brian also likes dirty pictures. The Tampa Tribune reports that “Doyle repeatedly request[ed the undercover cop]… to purchase a Web camera so that she could send explicit images to Doyle… Doyle promised to reciprocate…” Here again, Brian’s hobby admirably fits him for work as a screener since enthusiasm for “explicit images” is fast becoming a job requirement. For almost a year now, the TSA has been threatening to install “backscatter X-rays machines” at airport checkpoints nationwide. These refrigerator-sized gadgets peer through clothes to the flesh beneath, virtually stripping the passengers forced to walk through them while screeners watch.

All in all, Brian ought to be commended and put on the TSA’s fast track. Instead, he was entrapped by “two full-time computer crime detectives” in the Polk County (FL) sheriff’s office with nothing better to do than “pose online as teenagers.”

“He chose us. He initiated the conversation,” a spokesgal for the cops said. “This is how we catch predators.” No word on whether fear’s spreading among the approximately 45,000 screeners still at large and preying on us.

Actually, regardless of the crimes Brian has committed against our freedom and the Constitution, he is innocent of the felonies for which he was arrested. He did nothing but email pornography to another, very willing adult, one who eagerly responded and who played on his emotions by pretending to have survived cancer. True, Brian “believed” the cop to be a 14-year-old girl, but only fascists prosecute a man for his thoughts.

Unfortunately for Brian, fascists now run the country. Russ Knocke, Brian’s fellow spokesliar at the DHS, solemnly intoned, “We take these allegations very seriously, and we will cooperate fully with this ongoing investigation.”

On the other hand, perhaps a sort of cosmic justice is at work here. The Polk folks who nailed Brian hail from the county next door to Orlando’s. And Orlando was home to Rigoberto Alpizar, whose murder last December Brian helped cover up. When Federal air marshals gunned down this passenger for disembarking from his plane, Brian stepped up to the DHS mike and shamelessly lied: "[Alpizar] threatened that he had a bomb in his backpack.” This completely contradicted testimony from eyewitnesses aboard the flight, some of whom vigorously denied that Mr. Alpizar said anything whatever and all of whom agreed he never uttered the word “bomb.” Yet the marshals were never charged in Mr. Alpizar’s death, and the lie has been told so often it is now “true”: a story in USA Today earlier this week mentioned “the case last December in which a man who falsely said he had a bomb was shot and killed by a federal air marshal in Miami.”

In his arrest as a pedophile, Brian may not reap exactly what he sowed. But it’s close enough for government work.

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