Yesterday, we learned that an entire California airport went into extreme security lockdown, and two airport security guards fainted and were rushed to the hospital because a man brought honey to the airport. Today, we’re learning that something even sweeter is also regarded as a threat to Homeland Security.

It turns out that Homeland Security launched into a full Code Orange Alert because a man wanted to kiss his honey. Seriously: That’s what a Newark airport security crisis turned out to be about in the end. A man walked the wrong way down a hallway because he wanted to kiss the woman he loves just one more time.

In spite of the discovery that the incident was completely harmless to anyone, except for possible contagion of the woman with cooties, politicians and pundits are still expressing outrage. Sure, they say, it was all just about a kiss, but do you know what could have happened? Do you realize what the consequences could have been?!?

By golly, yes, I understand the consequences. In this dry winter air, that man’s lips might have gotten chapped. Thank goodness the Department of Homeland Security is on the job, protecting us from this menace.

Seriously, when the government’s security measures result in a kiss being interpreted as a national emergency, a potential terrorist threat, it’s a sign that the obsession with security has gone much, much too far. I thought we were going to leave this nonsense behind when George W. Bush went back to Texas. I guess you can’t get the frightened smell of Texas out of the White House so easily.

A clear vision of the benefits of heightened Homeland Security came yesterday in Bakersfield, California, where an entire airport was put under a security lockdown for hours when a gardener attempted to bring a liquid substance through a security checkpoint. The liquid substance? Honey – the stuff Winnie the Pooh likes to eat.

Particularly revealing was the way that two security guards, upon opening a jar of honey, said they detected a “chemical” odor (honey is, like all matter, made up of chemicals), were overcome with nausea, and had to be rushed to the hospital. That’s what the Homeland Security line of defense amounts to – people who faint at the smell of honey.

It’s not just the human component of Homeland Security that failed, though. An expensive machine designed to detect the chemical signature of explosives concluded that the honey consisted of both TNT and the explosive triacetone triperoxide. The honey actually contained neither substance, but was comprised of… honey.

Of course, there is an alternative explanation: That the Transportation Security Administration employees at the Bakersfield airport detected a previously unknown terrorist cell operated within the borders of the United States… by militant honeybees. They hate us for our Nutrasweet.

Does anyone want to take on a hundred dollar bet that Barack Obama does not make a speech in front of the White House press corps declaring that the interference with Americans’ travel by Homeland Security agents who don’t know the difference between honey and a terrorist attack “is not acceptable”, and will not be tolerated? I’ll offer you 2-1 odds on your side of the bet.

Yesterday, President Obama spoke about how upset he was that U.S. intelligence agencies had not been able to stop a Nigerian man from attempting to blow up an airplane as it landed in Detroit. Obama said,

“I will accept that intelligence, by its nature, is imperfect, but it is increasingly clear that intelligence was not fully analyzed or fully leveraged. That’s not acceptable, and I will not tolerate it. Time and again, we’ve learned that quickly piecing together information and taking swift action is critical to staying one step ahead of a nimble adversary. So we have to do better — and we will do better.”

On the face of it, Obama’s insistence on better cooperation and analysis of intelligence gathered by U.S. spy agencies is reasonable. Who could oppose improvement, after all?

However, when I place the demand for these improvements in context, I become extremely concerned. The context is that the White House and Congress have already provided a radical increase in both the ability of the government to gather huge amounts of information, and its ability to analyze that information, with vastly improved communication between spy agencies. It was for this purpose that entities such as the Department of Homeland Security and the Director of National Intelligence were created. Now, Barack Obama is acting as if none of that ever happened, and that yet more investment in spy agencies is required.

Of course, when any government employee gets to work, we’d like that work to be as effective as possible. That includes government spies. However, the degree of effectiveness Americans are now expecting from government spy agencies is now so extreme that it suggests an absolute intolerance for failure.

The American people seem to have forgotten that the most glaring failure in this case was on the part of Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab. He was an incompetent attacker, unable to properly handle his weapon. He only succeeded in burning himself. Airline passengers with no martial arts training were able to easily subdue him.

Americans are worrying that if things had gone differently, Abdulmutallab could have killed hundreds of people, blowing up that airplane. Why? Look at the facts, and it’s clear that no, Abdulmutallab could NOT have succeeded. Abdulmutallab couldn’t explode his way out of a paper bag. That this terrorist who couldn’t shoot straight is the best that Al Qaeda could recruit suggests that we really don’t have very much to worry about.

Yet, in response to this kid’s profoundly inept attempt at an attack, Americans are clamoring to give up their right to protection from unreasonable search and seizure. We’re talking about having strangers running their hands all over the bodies of people before they’re allowed to travel. We’re demanding electronic body scans that will allow security agents to look over every inch of travellers’ digitally unclothed body.

What’s more, we’re demanding more power for American spy agencies who already can, thanks to the Patriot Act and FISA Amendments Act, to track our personal online activities, our purchases, our health, our reading habits; to secretly enter our homes and businesses without ever telling us; and to conduct espionage on Americans based on their political and religious identities. The reason: Americans now expect the government to be able to find out about every conspiracy to commit every violent crime before the crime even happens. Americans are now begging to live in the monstrous world described in Philip Dick’s science fiction classic, The Minority Report. We now expect absolute protection from terrorism, and are willing to sacrifice anything to get that feeling of security – including the rights guaranteed by the Constitution.

The Fourth Amendment to the Constitution, a part of the Bill of Rights, sets up a clear standard for searches and seizures: They have to have a particular target, based on evidence that points to a particular crime that’s been committed or is being planned. Most Americans nowadays, including the President and Congress, seem to believe that this part of the Bill of Rights was a bad idea.

That the founders of the United States passed the Fourth Amendment suggests that they had a different vision. They believed that freedom is more important than security. They looked at the facts of life, and concluded that no government can reasonably guarantee security. They saw that violent crimes continued even under the most autocratic governments. They didn’t believe that citizens should have the legal right of absolute protection from crime – note that there is no right of a crime-free life in the Constitution. Instead, they focused on people’s right to be free from the excessive burdens imposed by unreasonable law enforcement activities.

Most Americans can no longer identify with this freedom-loving perspective. They want absolute security, whatever the consequences. Will they get what they want?

We may well be moving close to an absolute security state, but we will not gain absolute security in exchange for the sacrifice of our liberty. Absolute security is impossible. In a nation of over 300 million people, in a world approaching 7 billion people, it is not reasonable to expect the government to keep a watch on every potential danger in the world. It is not reasonable to expect the government to piece together, in a matter of just a few weeks, that a young man from Nigeria is planning to put explosives down his pants and board a flight to the United States.

Terrorist attacks are going to happen – over and over again. Eventually, one of these attacks will succeed, even if we completely revoke every single freedom that the Constitution provides us.

An intelligent, mature, reasonable nation would understand the limits of security, and accept that it’s not possible for any government to prevent every terrible crime. At present, the American people are in no mood for such ideas – but if our democracy is to survive, they need to learn to grasp the value of freedom once again.

When he was campaigning to become President last year, Barack Obama promised to put an end to the politics of fear. However, in his reaction to the failed attack by Abdulmutallab, Obama has fully embraced the politics of fear.

That’s the politically easy thing to do. Few Americans want to hear that they’re going to have to accept that life of freedom is inherently insecure.

Did we elect Barack Obama because we wanted a President who would take the path of temporary expediency, as George W. Bush did? I hope that’s not what motivated voters to choose as they did, but regardless of what the American people want, it is President Obama’s duty as President to call the American people back to the cause of liberty, to remind them of the wisdom represented in the Bill of Rights. He has sworn an oath to uphold the Constitution, not an oath to impose security or an oath to remain popular.

Once again, Americans who are courageous enough to shake off the thrill of fear need to stand up and tell Barack Obama that we expect strong leadership in the restoration of constitutional liberty. Will you be among those who speak for freedom?

The ongoing problem with the culture of Homeland Security in the United States is summed up rather well in the headline this morning from the New York Daily News:

Hero cop describes fake bomb ordeal

Unpack that phrase lightly. It might contain something explosive.

My favorite line from the story came from the “hero” who had to grapple with a fake bomb: “Anybody who doesn’t stare me in the face, I get a little nervous with.”

Remember that, the next time you see enter an airport. Find a police officer, then walk up and stare the officer in the face. Otherwise, someone might get nervous.

Entering an airport just a little while ago, I was pleased to see that one of the many pointless items of George W. Bush’s Homeland Security routine has been done away with. When I walked through the metal detector, I was told that, as of yesterday, I didn’t need to show the very same boarding pass that I had showed to another security agent just 30 seconds before at the beginning of the line.

The Department of Homeland Security is now willing to trust me that I didn’t use some kind of interdimensional portal to become somebody else while waiting in the enclosed security line. That’s a bit of a relief, but it’s just one little bit of Homeland idiocy down, and about 347 still needing to go.

I’d love to see an official Obama Administration explanation of why the nation’s airports remain at Code Orange, for example. The Department of Homeland Security web site reads, “The threat level in the airline sector is High or Orange.”, but under what definition of the word “high” is the threat in the “airline sector” high?

The Department of Homeland Security admits that “there is no credible information warning of an imminent, specific threat to the homeland.” For those of you who need translation into fear-speak, “the homeland” means the United States of America.

There’s no terrorist threat. There is no… terrorist… threat. So, can we please cut the Code Orange, please? Isn’t it time that we all deserved a little Code Aquamarine, or Code Taupe, or Code Periwinkle?

Memo to America: It’s okay to breathe now.

American activists can look to a group called Plane Stupid to see what creative protest looks like. Back in August, a member of the environmental protest group glued himself to the British Prime Minister in order to get enough time to make his point.

The group is dedicated to pressuring the British government to take serious action to confront the climate crisis. They focus on the role of air travel in contributing to pollution that leads to global warming.

Yesterday, members of the group struck again. They breached security at Stansted airport, just to the north of London, and blocked a runway, stopping flights for several hours, wearing vests that read “Please DO Something”.

That got the government’s attention, all right. Police rammed the protesters with a snowplow.

The Associated Press reports that “Hillary Rodham Clinton’s campaign said she “misspoke” last week when saying she had landed under sniper fire during a trip to Bosnia as first lady in March 1996.”

Hillary Clinton had said in a speech a week ago that, “I remember landing under sniper fire. There was supposed to be some kind of a greeting ceremony at the airport, but instead we just ran with our heads down to get into the vehicles to get to our base.”

The trouble is that what Hillary Clinton remembers happening at that airport never really happened.

So, we’re supposed to believe that Hillary Clinton just misspoke? How does a slip of the tongue lead a person to accidentally say that they landed at an airport under sniper fire and ran from bullets being fired at them, when in fact no such thing ever took place? Is there a neurological explanation?

What did Hillary Clinton mean to say instead of “sniper fire”?

Snacker pie? A cypher file? Cider plier? Snide or flower? Snapper forks? Snoopyfied?

Personally, I think that “snoopyfied” is a very logical explanation. Here’s the statement as Hillary Clinton meant to say it, before she misspoke: “I remember landing undersnoopyfied. There was supposed to be some kind of a greeting ceremony at the airport, but instead we just ran with our heads down to get into the vehicles to get to our base.”

If you don’t understand Bosnian political culture, as Hillary Clinton and I do, then of course this statement doesn’t make any sense. It’s a well-known fact that Bosnians expect to see foreign dignitaries arrive dressed up like Snoopy. Hillary Clinton, because she has lots of experience and will be ready to serve as President from Day One, knew this, and was trying to put on her Snoopy costume before the plane landed. Due to unexpected turbulence, she had to return to her seat, and had to come into the Bosnian airport undersnoopyfied.

Strong leader that she is, however, Hillary Clinton stuck with it, and continued with her duties making the best of her partial Snoopy outfit. The photograph you see here shows her later that day, maintaining a brave face. The Bosnian people still talk about her courage under fire, undersnoopyfied, to this day.

You see, Hillary Clinton was not lying or anything of the sort. Now, will Barack Obama’s attack dogs please back off? We all know that the Hillary Clinton cannot survive being criticized by Obama… although Clinton would be super tough against McCain in a general election contest, of course.