The Party of Security

The more of these reports I read, the more I think that not only should the US shut down all borders, I should start investing in shovels and titanium sheeting material:

Senators said a report that investigators smuggled enough radioactive material to build two ``dirty'' bombs into the U.S. called into question the Bush administration's efforts to secure the borders.

The sting operation is described in one of three Government Accountability Office reports that was released today. The reports also accuse the Bush administration of being slow to deploy equipment that would detect radioactive materials and say corrupt foreign border officials and poor maintenance of detection devices have left the U.S. vulnerable to terror plots [...]

About 662 known attempts to smuggle nuclear or radiological materials across borders around the world have been made since the end of 2004, said Senator Carl Levin of Michigan, the panel's senior Democrat, citing an International Atomic Energy Agency study [...]

On Dec. 14, two teams of investigators -- one on the Canadian border, the other on the Mexican border -- put radioactive material in rental cars and attempted to cross over into the U.S. Kristi Clemens, a spokeswoman for U.S. Customs and Border Protection, said the radiological material was cesium-137.

Detection equipment alerted authorities at both borders of the radioactive materials. When questioned, the investigators said they needed the material to calibrate construction equipment, a common use.

The investigators presented the authorities with counterfeit Nuclear Regulatory Commission licenses and freight inventories.

This can't be seen as a problem with implementation. We're five years into this Presidency, four and a half years beyond the point where it became urgent to meaningfully secure the borders and ports and chemical plants and water treatment plants and all the rest. There has been bill after bill after bill about this in Congress, practically all of them from the Democratic side, practically of them extinguished or voted down. I don't know how much louder they can be. Today's national security platform press event makes for nice public relations, but it was met with the expected partisan cries. Here's the deal: I don't want to see a dirty bomb set off in this country, and I fear under the current leadership there's literally nothing stopping that from happening. Homeland security has literally become a forgotten stepchild in this Administration, left to Michael Chertoff and his band of bumbling hacks, who still don't check even half the containers at US ports.

And yet we still hear from the media filter that Democrats are trying to "get to the right" of Republicans on security. Security is not a right-wing value. In fact, the body of evidence shows they don't value it at all.