I’m going have a T-shirt made that says: “I’m not a terrorist. I just drink too much coffee.”

My original objection to first-class lines was simple. Access to government services — and security screening by the Transportation Security Administration is a government service, even if it doesn’t always feel like one — should be distributed evenly and fairly to all citizens.

As business travel guru Joe Brancatelli subsequently explained to me, the current arrangement is a compromise between the airline industry and the government. The airports control the lines to reach security screening and the TSA controls the screening process itself.

I get the concept, but I still think it’s wrong. Why should people who pay more money to an airline, which is a private corporation, get faster access to a government service?

Turns out, United Airlines has made this inequity more obvious and more annoying. United is selling access to the priority lines at 18 airports in the United States. (“Other airports may be added in the future,” United’s Web site says.) For $19, you too can be a line jumper.

Now I recognize that government can charge extra for expedited government services, say to get a passport in a rush. And I recognize that private corporations can charge extra for expedited services, say to get in the VIP lines at Disney World.

But since when can a private corporation charge for an expedited government service? That just isn’t right.

There was a separate line for first-class passengers that allowed them to walk right up to the screeners while hundreds of people waited in the general line.

Now, as I understand it, funding for the TSA and airport screening comes from three sources: the 9/11 security fee on each ticket, fees levied directly on airlines and direct taxpayer support. So I don’t see much of a case for giving first-class passengers preferential treatment. This is, after all, a government service.

The security fee of $2.50 per segment or a maximum of $10 per ticket is the same for all classes of ticket. As for direct taxpayer support, you could argue that first-class passengers usually (though not always) tend to pay more taxes. But this country has never apportioned its public services to favor those who pay more taxes. Rich people don’t get an extra vote, better highways, more garbage pickups or more protection from the armed services. It’s a nation, not a department store, and some things are supposed to be suffered equally.

So that leaves us with the airlines’ contribution. Certainly, the airlines would want first-class customers to have a better experience at security. And you might argue that their contribution to the cost of security screening might be grounds for making that happen.

But I don’t think that’s sufficient. All kinds of industries pay all kinds of taxes, but in no case should that buy privileges for some citizens over others. A fundamental principle of democracy — though admittedly not of capitalism — is that all citizens have basically the same rights.

So I, as a taxpayer,  don’t think first-class passengers should get to walk ahead of the rest of us at security. Even when (very occasionally) I’m the first-class passenger.

This is not an objection to the preferential treatment that premium-class travelers get from the airlines. They paid for that, and in our private sector you should get what you pay for. That’s the difference between a customer and a citizen.

I might be persuaded to make a distinction between special pass programs for frequent travelers and this system of shunting all first-class passengers to the front of the line. At least the frequent-traveler programs are supposed to be funded entirely by the fees paid by those travelers.

I’m not entirely convinced that the government should be engaged in selling express passes through security, but it would certainly be less objectionable as a separate and self-supporting system that does not interfere with the rights of the rest of us in our regular security line.

At least two travel bloggers — Chris Elliott and Steve Frischling — have received subpoenas from investigators asking who gave them a  directive about increased security measures after the Christmas Day attempted bombing, the Atlanta Journal-Constitution reports. Never mind that the document was widely disseminated to airline staff, that its major points were reported by traditional media outlets and that some of its provisions were spectacularly stupid. What’s important is to find someone to blame for making it public.

If the TSA and the Department of Homeland Security need something to  investigate, here’s a suggestion, if I may quote Maureen Dowd of the New York Times:

If we can’t catch a Nigerian with a powerful explosive powder in his oddly feminine-looking underpants and a syringe full of acid, a man whose own father had alerted the U.S. Embassy in Nigeria, a traveler whose ticket was paid for in cash and who didn’t check bags, whose visa renewal had been denied by the British, who had studied Arabic in Al Qaeda sanctuary Yemen, whose name was on a counterterrorism watch list, who can we catch?

Oh, wait. I know. Bloggers!

The main question here is how Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab got a valid U.S. visa and how his name was cleared on the flight manifest by U.S. authorities. The other really important question would be how he managed to get on board with his shorts full of explosives.

The first question is what the authorities need to focus on, investigate and fix. They can acknowledge that their procedures allowed a man already under suspicion for terrorist sympathies to get a U.S. visa and travel legally to the United States. They blew it, and they need to fix it.

The answer to the second question is important, too, but harder to fix. It’s going to involve security procedures in foreign places, procedures that this country can’t fully control. The United States can exert pressure on other nations to tighten security, and no doubt it will.

What the United States shouldn’t do is prevent people from using lavatories and (presumably) reading books on airplanes. These are ridiculous, punitive restrictions that don’t take one single step toward answering these questions: How did Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab get on a commercial airliner with those explosives? And how are we going to make sure it doesn’t happen again?

In this matter, I find myself in rare agreement with the American Spectator. As Doug Bandow declared on its blog, “inconvenience should not become a substitute for vigilance.” Amen.

It will of course be particularly important to know how he got the explosives past security at Schiphol Airport in Amsterdam, and whether he had enough to bring down the jet.

To those posting on message boards about lax European airport security, I have to say that I have never been as closely questioned and screened for a flight as at Schiphol. Lax really isn’t a word that comes to mind in that context.

Put them all together, and you end up with an email about how a courageous passenger thwarted a terrorist dry run by a group of Arab men on an AirTran flight out of Atlanta last month.

Except it was very clearly a simple misunderstanding with a man who didn’t understand a flight attendant’s instructions to turn off his camera. And he apparently spoke Spanish, not Arabic. And the self-proclaimed “hero” who wrote the email wasn’t even on the flight, as the Atlanta Journal-Constitution reports.

It’s frightening that so many people fall for unsubstantiated stories, as long as those stories reflect what they want to believe. They reject anything professional journalists in the ”mainstream media” tell them that fails to support their biases. And they accept any random distortion, exaggeration or fabrication served up by partisan hacks and Internet nut cases as long as they agree with it.

In this world, facts are irrelevant. The original email, which went viral,  makes no sense. Why would Arab terrorists dress, as the email described, “in full attire” and scream “infidel dog” at a flight attendant? That kind of behavior tends to blow one’s cover. Not much of a dry run.

What’s even more frightening is that once the lie has been completely exposed and discredited, the believers can’t let go of it. On blogs and online comments, they continue to insist that it’s all true and that AirTran and the government are engaged in a cover-up. A sample:

I fear thou dost protest too much. I believe the Petruna. Don’t trust the Mooslims. They want us all dead. I’m sick of this suicidal political correctness we now live under.

This crap doesn’t all come from the extreme right. The far-left nuts who insist that the Bush administration was behind the 9/11 attacks are just as bad.

This country was built on the right to a difference of opinions, not a difference of facts. Yet many people now seem to believe they can construct a set of facts to fit their opinions. They do not understand their obligation — their patriotic duty – to accept obvious facts and then argue out our differences in a civil manner based on those facts. If we can’t do that, our civilization will truly be lost.

In other words, if we don’t cut through the crap and get real, the crap wins.

So if you get that email, send it back “reply all” and tell everyone it’s a lie. Don’t tell yourself that you can’t be sure, or that it’s AirTran’s word against the passenger’s word, or it’s better for people to be frightened by a lie, or who are you to say. Stand up for the truth. Before it’s too damned late. 

And if you really believe that Arab terrorists are conducting dry runs on U.S. flights — not an impossibility, I suppose, even if terrorism experts believe the targets have shifted — ask yourself what possible good can it do to make up stories that cry wolf.

This is why I applaud the authorities for keeping Bradley International Airport open when somebody called in a bogus bomb threat on Friday, as The Hartford Courant reports.

There was a long time after the traumas of 9/11 and the anthrax attacks that all it took to shut down a public facility and inconvenience thousands of people was a phone call or a dash of talcum powder.

Never mind that terrorists don’t advertise their attacks because that would be inconsistent with the goal of frightening and killing people. Better safe than sorry. Never mind that the authorities often recognized right away that a threat was bogus. Better safe than sorry. Never mind that giving in to the scare tactic only encouraged more wing nuts to get a thrill out of all that disruption and attention. Better safe than sorry.

At Bradley on Friday, the authorities searched the place with bomb-sniffing dogs which found nothing. The Courant reported that “[t]wo parking garages were closed to incoming traffic during the search, but airport operations were not disrupted.”

Police  traced the call. On Saturday they arrested a guy from Springfield and charged him with a lot. That ought to take care of that.