perfidy

Instapundit's alterego, Glenn Reynolds, had this to say about the utility of the Homeland Security agency. I agree completely:

Now Tom Ridge is proving me right, with a new plan to pervert Homeland Security from its antiterror mission to an unrelated one: "The initiative, dubbed Operation Predator, will target pornographers, child prostitution rings, Internet predators, immigrant smugglers and other criminals."

What can we learn from this? Two things. One is that the Department of Homeland Security apparently thinks the War on Terror isn't important enough to occupy its full energies anymore, and that -- in the interest of bureaucratic survival -- it's branching out into the kind of operations that have generally been associated with, well, ordinary law enforcement, even if the targets, in this case, are foreigners...

Since Ridge has, with this initiative, essentially admitted that Homeland Security is no longer urgent enough to occupy the Department of Homeland Security, let's abolish the Department, and pass the savings on to the taxpayers. Not only will this save money, but it will serve as a salutary warning to future Tom Ridges that overstepping the bounds of a mandate is politically dangerous.

Of course, that isn't going to happen.