JAY AMBROSE says he’s worried we’re heading for a Howard Hughes homeland security plan:

Howard Hughes, you may recall, was the billionaire movie-producer-businessman-aviator whose paranoia about germs eventually ushered him into a reclusive life as ultra-sanitized as his money could buy. Instead of cheating death, he probably hastened it, and in the meanwhile cheated himself out of the kind of full, active, interesting existence disallowed by the excessive precautions of outsized fear.

We could do much the same thing to this society of ours if we delude ourselves into thinking that we can be perfectly safe if we work hard enough at it – if we spend enough money, expand the government sufficiently, put up enough inconveniencing roadblocks of various kinds, curb enough freedoms, look under enough stones.

It’s a fraud, this frame of mind, and it won’t deliver.

He’s right. Fortunately, more and more Americans — encouraged by the tweezer-confiscating air security example — are waking up to this reality.