Do YOU feel safer with this guy in charge?

In an interview with The Chicago Tribune, Homeland Security Secretary Michael Chertoff said that he felt the country was increasingly unsafe.

And what, pray tell, was behind this sentiment. Good intelligence? No way. That's soooo 20th century. Nowadays, cabinet secretaries make comments like this based on that most modern of techniques: gut feeling.

Specifically, Chertoff said: We've struck at them and degraded them, but they rebuild. All these things have given me kind of a gut feeling that we are in a period of increased vulnerability.

Despite the probably illegal domestic spying program, shredding of habeas corpus, interrogation of kidnapees at Guantanamo Bay and an unprecedented consolidation of power in the hands of the administration, the man at the top of the so-called national security state can offer us no better than his 'gut feeling.'

But we live in a society where gut feelings and emotions now trump reason and fact. So why should Homeland Insecurity be any different?


Tip of the cap to Scoop over at The Observer blog for noting this.