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Steyn Online ^ | 29 July 2014 | Mark Steyn

[Lorianne]

On Friday, writing about the four-hour detention by US Customs & Border Protection of a troop of Iowa boy scouts, I put it this way:

American life is bifurcating into the undocumented and the overdocumented. On the southern border, the bazillions of US laws are meaningless - proof of identity, medical tests, none of it matters. And the less it matters on the Rio Grande the more the zealots on the 49th Parallel will take apart your car if they think you've got a Kinder egg in there. Anyone who thinks that attitude can be confined to the border and not work its way deep into the rest of American life is deluded.

Thirteen years ago, I opposed the creation of the "Department of Homeland Security" - on the classic Thatcherite ground that if you create a bureaucracy to deal with a problem you'll never be rid of it. I had expected the usual "mission creep" but that term barely covers what's happened in the last decade. There is no "homeland security": At the southern border, the homeland is wide open, and ICE and the Border Patrol, which (like CBP) are both part of DHS, are actively colluding in homeland insecurity.

[mojito]

I find it more than a little sinister that Steyn, the finest conservative voice writing today, has been effectively banished from all the “mainstream” publications he used to write for even just a few years ago.

Coincidence?

I think not.

[ifinnegan]

This is so true.

Victor Davis Hanson has written about this same dynamic in California’s Central Valley.

[meadsjn]

Steyn: In the Second World War, when the Japanese took Singapore and inflicted what Churchill called the most ignominious defeat in British military history, it was famously said of the colony's ill-prepared defenses that the guns were pointing the wrong way. In America today, the guns seem to be pointing the wrong way.

I suspect we're going to hear some more about this, soon.

[BitWielder1]

Stein nails it again.
DHS has become a monster.
Law enforcement has become arbitrary, either under reacting or over reacting. And increasingly brutal.
DHS is more concerned about inside threats than foreign threats; they are like a porcupine hide, meant to protect our nation, but with the quills pointing inwards.

[ifinnegan]

DHS was never a good idea.

Even the term Homeland struck me as distinctly anti-American.

[VRW Conspirator]

From the article:

The Department of Homeland Security doesn’t get anyone at the southern border. But they’ll get you instead. Frankly, it’s a lot easier. So, in Boston, they didn’t get Tamerlan Tsarnaev, even after the Russians fingered him to the feds, but they did get Misty and Candy at the Foxy Lady strip club.

[T-Bird45]

FTA: "Thirteen years ago, I opposed the creation of the "Department of Homeland Security" - on the classic Thatcherite ground that if you create a bureaucracy to deal with a problem you'll never be rid of it."

Exactly - the old saying about everything being a nail if the only tool you have is a hammer has never been more true.

Even the term Homeland struck me as distinctly anti-American.

QFT ^^^^^^^ To the point: GEheimSTAatsPOlizei "Homeland State Police" and we know what it became.

[Louis Foxwell]

We live in dangerous times.
The likelihood of imprisonment for dissidents is fast upon us.
Tyranny is justified by those in power.
We will become a nation at war.
This is the first time in the history of our nation that we have been threatened from within by those in authority.
This will not stand.