CHUCK HERRICK’S POST made me wonder: Have I been too hard on Homeland Security? And then the answer came to me: No, I haven’t been.

Some political advice for the Administration: Homeland Security is a joke. It’s the butt of jokes (and worse) on talk radio, which is inhabited mostly by people inclined to support you. It’s treated (unfairly, as I noted in the post that somehow precipitated all this) as fascism descending by the Left. And, it’s not going to work.

September 11th, 2002 is coming up fast. After the networks are done with their commemoratives, people are going to notice that a year has passed. On the home front, at least, what they’re going to see is a record of screwups and pointless intrusiveness, summed up in many people’s minds by the airline tweezer-ban, and the mentality it represents. If there’s a major terrorist event in America between now and then, all this stuff will look stupid and ineffective (which it is). If there’s not, well, it will still look stupid and ineffective. And there’s no sign that the people who dropped the ball are ever going to be held accountable, even as ordinary Americans are called to account for all sorts of things.

Not long after that, there’s going to be an election.

UPDATE: Here’s an email I got in response, from Clayton Cramer, who I didn’t realize read InstaPundit. But I get these kinds of things all the time:

I really want to support Homeland Security. But they are clearly applying rules in a way that suggests that they have hired a bunch of robots. My son is 14. (And no, his name is not Mohammed, nor would anyone mistake him for one of the suspect nationalities.) He flew to California recently. On his return flight, he left his skateboard adjusting tool in his backpack. Picture something rather like a multipart socket wrench. They confiscated it as a weapon. They didn’t even give him a chance to check it. It was only $10 down the tube, but it shows what morons the TSA has doing this work.

This is the face of Homeland Security, folks.