I was driving into work this morning when I heard about government screeners failing to detect bomb-making materials at 21 airports around the country.

The local talk show host on WMAL had an interesting suggestion: contract with the Israelis to run our airport security. While he might have been flippant, it’s not a half bad idea, in my opinion.

Jim: If you’ll permit me to refer back to something I wrote on TKS a few weeks ago:

Peggy Noonan laid out a compelling case as to why the American people have reached a point where they no longer trust the government to protect them. After 9/11, the federal government took the one terrorist threat (airline hijacking) that the American people had devised an effective response to (beating the hell out of them before they can get to the cockpit) and turned it into a massive, bureaucratic system in which unionized federal employees can treat you like East German Border Guards for carrying a nail clipper.

I’m reading a collection of Mark Steyn’s work after 9/11. He observed back on 11/19/01, “The bigger you make the government, the more you entrust to it, the more powers you give it to nose around in the citizenry’s bank accounts and phone calls and e-mails and favorite Internet porn sites, the more you’ll enfeeble it with the siren song of the soft target. The Mounties will no longer get their man, they’ll get you instead. Frankly, it’s a lot easier. And so the INS failed to get Mohammed Atta, but they did get [British citizen and 9/11 widow] Deena Gilbey. Congratulations, guys… We don’t need big government, we need lean government – government that’s stripped of its distractions and forced to concentrate on the essentials.”

I’m reading Glenn Reynolds’s book, Army of Davids, and he talks about how ordinary citizens, acting as “a pack, not a herd” foiled the hijackers of Flight 93, would-be shoe-nibomber Richard Reid, and the shooter at the LAX on July 4, 2002. He also argues that the credit for the capture of the D.C. sniper should go to an alert citizenry, not a police force that spent considerable time complaining about leaks.

Periodically, you get the feeling we need to completely rethink Homeland Security in this country, and stop relying on bureaucracies and unionized federal workers to provide security, and empower an armed, alert citizenry. Clearly, the Bush administration has no appetite for this sort of thing; I wonder if the next president will.