No more protection for me, thanks

US Homeland Security Secretary Michael Chertoff thinks freedom is frivolous. He would rather build steel and concrete walls on our borders, send threatening letters to employers, and check our documents.

Chertoff says he is frustrated by the growing number of "people who say, 'Yes, protect us, but not if it inconveniences me'"

He says he will launch a campaign to spread a message of shared sacrifice "in as plain English as I can, as often as I can and in as many places as I can" from now to January 2009, when his tenure will end with a new presidency.

At first blush this looks like a change in policy, since Chertoff and his friends still haven't asked us to share in the sacrifice of paying for any of their paranoid security programs so far, especially Bush's war in Iraq. Instead, they are still borrowing and asking our children to pay for it.

But is anyone really asking Chertoff for more "protection?" His brand of protection is the same type that was offered to the citizens of the old Soviet Union during the reigns of Stalin and Khruschev. Chertoff wants to build his own Iron Curtain.

Looking at the track record of his "protections" so far, I don't see a whole lot of payoff from the loss of freedom. If these "protections" were working, we would see our government turning away from fear, expressing more confidence in our future, finding ways to restore the freedom they have taken away. There would be less need to ask us to give up even more liberty. I wouldn't be sitting in an airport at this very moment hearing the tired announcement that "the Homeland Security threat level has been raised to orange."

Chertoff has had six years now to show that his approach to "protection" will make us safer. That's quite enough. By his own admission, by his orange "threat level," he is telling us his massive government program has failed. Time to move on.