Thought The First: It was much easier to get into a second-row seat -- a seat 15 feet from the president-elect -- at the inaugural than it is to get on an airplane. For instance: No one cared about my shoes. Or my belt. Or whether I had four ounces of contact solution on my person. This is also true when trying to get into Congress: It takes seconds rather than minutes. We value our politicians much less than we value our planes. That, or the current stack of airport security regulations is a mixture of the paranoid and opportunistic and everyone knows we need to roll them back but no one wants to be responsible for easing security and being blamed for a future attack. Also, read Jeffrey Goldberg. Thought the Second: It's hard to say whether the event was well-planned or poorly planned. Some folks got onto the Mall with ease and some were trapped in the Purple Tunnel of Doom. The metros overloaded, but they overloaded because there were too many people, not because they didn't expect lots of people. Which is all to say that if some sort of terrorist attack required the rapid evacuation of the Capitol, we'd be screwed. If this was the best we could do planning for the orderly movement of huge masses of people, it's scary to imagine the chaos that would result from the panicked fleeing of huge masses of people.
