It's Time to Dismantle the Department of Homeland Security

In the wake of the 9/11 terrorist attack, Washington D.C. bureaucrats decided to go forth and multiply, giving birth to a new entity, the Department of Homeland Security in perhaps the second most expensive overreaction to a problem since the Spanish-American War. Those of you who payed attention in history class will recall that we used an explosion on a ship called The Maine as a predicate for seizing some of Spain's possessions. Spain was such a dessicated power by that time that taking them on was a bit like me punching out Jessica Tandy. Not a fair fight. We then went and killed over 100,000 Filipinos in a follow up aborted revolution.

As it turned out, though, what caused the detonation of The Maine was spontaneous combustion down below in the coal magazine. Whoops!

While Americans are likewise thinking that the Iraq War was the wrong conflict at an ill fitting chronological juncture, making it the most costly snafu in response to a conundrum in American annals, just below it was the creepily named DHS. I will be buying a couple of bags of chips and some dip in preparation for the visit I will probably get from national security cops after posting this piece so as not to be a bad host. I must admit that since I don't drink I'm not sure what wine you are supposed to serve during an interrogation.

Homeland Security was a tacit admission that Boy George didn't have the leadership to do what he needed to as President of the United States. It was ostensibly (a word meaning somebody is making up a lame excuse) originally devised as a way to more efficiently enact security measures and enable closer collaboration between foreign (CIA) and domestic (FBI) intelligence agencies. What is wrong with this is that we already have a defense department. It used to be called The Department of War, but that was no doubt changed to make it more warm and fuzzy to Mr. and Mrs. Gapejaw American. So have they become incapable of defending American shores now? God only knows they haven't been able to keep a lid on Iraq since the mission was pronounced accomplished by Bush nor are they exactly up to holding off a resurgent Taliban.

In any event, when we are sold a Department of Defense we want an actual Department of Defense. Donald Rumsfeld, who will go down in history as a joke, has some explaining to do on that front.

Then there is the FBI, which is supposed to handle domestic spying. Now we didn't seem to have any problems in that area during WWII or during Vietnam, when the number of constitutional rights they violated was equal to the digits you see on a McDonald's sign.

When someone becomes president, he is supposed to fulfill the role that the DHS does. If you can't crack heads to get the CIA and the FBI to share information with you that might affect the safety of citizens on the American mainland and Hawaii then you should resign. It is called dereliction of your duty in that office. You shouldn't need a multibillion dollar agency to pass the buck to. Bush is the commander in chief even if he has tried to run the country like it was a college fraternity Monday Through Saturday and a pentacostal church on Sunday.

Bush then politicized the new bureaucracy by using it as a go to conduit with which to stir up fear among the electorate to fortify his party's electoral position. Bush didn't just cry wolf, but also pretty much every other animal that you can see in a decent sized zoo and now people just roll their eyes when the words, "according to the Department of Homeland Security...." are uttered. The Katrina debacle didn't exactly help people take it any more seriously.

Let's face it: terrorism wasn't on Bush's radar and he didn't want to hear about it. Instead, he was obsessed with getting ruinous tax breaks passed so that we not only had 9/11, but we also now have an accumulated budget deficit that gives the Saudis, the Chinese and other holders of the bonds that are used to finance that red ink a measure of leverage over us and our currency. Boy, I feel so much safer knowing that.

Cheney? Hard on for Iraq to the exclusion of just about everything else except aiding his energy buddies in reaming the American consumer. Cheney was so busy cooking up the phony rationale for toppling Saddam Hussein that he wasn't available to be Bush's intelligence factotum.

So with a chance to give more cronies and people he owes favors to a chance to take up space in the bureaucracy, the DHS was created with the aim of: 1) looking like they were doing something; 2) had something to pawn responsibility off on if there was another large scale terrorism incident on U.S. soil. As usual, however, Bush was doing nothing and making taxpayers pay through the nose for it.

And get this, the U.S. military was firing interpreters with Arabic skills because they were gay despite a shortage in that vital capability. Jerry Falwell might feel better that latrines weren't being used as what homesexuals call "tea rooms (bathrooms where trysts take place)," but it further eroded out intelligence gathering ability. In a funny way, that means that Falwell, James Dobson, Ted Haggard and Pat Robertson are threats to national security due to their urge for a gay purge and holding Bush's feet to the fire to get it done. Call them "Focus on the Faggots."

If we had a REAL president (Bill Clinton, say), the DHS wouldn't have happened and that would have been a good thing. That is because a real president knows what questions to ask and who to read the riot act to. America found out, though, that when you ride with stupid you're on the hot rails to hell.