Peggy Noonan revives the long-simmering issue of why we’ve given our border security and disaster recovery agency the creepy and un-American name “Department of Homeland Security”:
By the way, [Barack Obama] should both reorder the Department of Homeland Security, that hopeless bureaucracy, and change its name. Homeland is a Nazi-ish word, not an American concept at all. And at this point “Homeland Security” is associated more with pointless harassment than safety. No one knows who came up with it.
Steve Benen observes that there’s no mystery here — it was Joe Lieberman. I say we call it “The Department of Lieberman.”
Meanwhile, I saw Punisher: War Zone last night. Predictably, it’s bad. But beyond that, you can add it to the pile of the large number of films that portrays the Department of Homeland Security as some kind of incredibly badass intelligence or paramilitary outfit. I don’t understand why this keeps happening. We have all kinds of badass agencies — intelligence, special forces, SWAT teams, etc. — but DHS does border security and disaster relief, not the FBI’s counterintelligence and counterterrorism functions.
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