I’m really getting sick and tired of people who bitch and moan about two things, usually at the same time:
- Homeland Security is a clear and present danger to our precious civil rights; and
- Homeland Security is woefully inept at just about anything it tries to do. How will we ever protect ourselves from terrorist activities?
The Professor, whom I normally think is a fairly smart cookie, links today to Brock Yates, who talks about how confiscating nail files and cuticle scissors from airline travellers doesn’t protect us from people crossing our undefended borders (well, that’s simplistic, but read Yates’s piece and you’ll see that he really doesn’t have a whole lot else to say).
Think about this for just a moment: How does a country with a tradition of liberal democratic civil rights, fairly open borders, and ease of access, overturn all that in just over a year to a system that is so tightly-regulated that nobody gets in or out? How do we build a Berlin Wall across 2000 miles of undefended and unsecured Canadian border? We can’t even build a six-foot-high fence along the Mexican border, or station troops along it to guard it, for crying out loud, because our wimpy libs and the Mexicans cry boo-hoo every time we talk about it.
What really makes you think that “the gummint” is going to turn the United States into the People’s Republic of North America? Have you read the Patriot Act and realized that it isn’t the fascist, jackbooted Hitlerian/Soviet manifesto people said it was when it was going through Congress? Do you have any idea how much information swampage is going to be involved in TIA? (Those people are going to be lucky to see the forest for the trees if they plan to use that database to try to predict terrorist activity.)
God damn it, people. Wake up and smell the fucking coffee. Our civil liberties are only in danger from the people who hate us and would do us ill. And I think our president, legislators, and courts are smart enough to realize that (well, maybe not the 9th Circuit, but the exception usually proves the rule).