Air Force Doug

A couple of days ago, I questioned why public resources were invested in ensuring that Doug Mirabelli make it from Logan Airport to Fenway Park to start a game pitched by knuckleballer Tim Wakefield (Mirabelli received a police escort, allegedly paid for by the Sox, but obtained the same day and clearly reflected preferential treatment accorded to the Sox). Now we read this in the Boston Herald:

The private jet carrying Red Sox savior Doug Mirabelli from the Left Coast to Fenway the other night got priority clearance to land ahead of some 20-odd commercial flights headed for Logan at the time. Nice to have fans in the control tower!

I'm sure people will again criticize me for not seeing the social importance of Red Sox games, but what kind of message is being sent here? How about all of the air travelers who may have been delayed--there were "some 20-odd commercial flights" that apparently fell behind in landing priority--were those people simply irrelevant? Was their time less important than that of a baseball player who had just been traded? I would bet that there were doctors and police on those flights. And if we are going to make value-judgments about people's social worth (as was clearly done for Mirabelli), shouldn't their time have been considered more "important"? And what about, I don't know, security issues with air travel? Were they at all implicated by Mirabelli's special flight status? I would hope and expect that they weren't, but needless to say, Logan Airport is the last airport that should be fooling around with security.

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