Run for your lives. Hide the women and children. Pull the shades and lock up the liquor. The Department of Homeland Security is coming.

It's bigger than The Blob and creepier than the Invasion of the Body Snatchers.

To listen to the feverish far left, it's Big Brother - and he looks just like John Ashcroft with Adolf's mustache.

From the hyperventilating far right, it's Big Government in black helicopters.

I say baloney. What scares me is the way the lunatic left and the far right think Homeland Security is a bigger threat than terrorism. When the fringes meet at the outskirts of sanity, chances are they are in Oliver Stone's neighborhood.

Most pundits are having too much fun comparing Homeland Security to the Gestapo to ask, but here's a question:

Is it possible that it just might be a good idea?

Big Brother? Big deal

Let's face it, Big Brother paranoia is as old as rancid cheese. Anyone can find out anything about anybody just by using a Social Security number as a combination to our imaginary secret information safes. And from what I've seen of our government in action, a monkey with a laptop could open the lock faster than the FBI. I'm just worried that the federal government does not have enough monkeys at computers to track thousands of terrorists who have been invited to America by the Immigration Service Welcome Wagon.

As for big government: Put me down as a yes for consolidation. Putting the Coast Guard in the same bureaucratic ZIP code with the Border Patrol doesn't sound that radical. Call me crazy, but I think 100 agencies doing the same tasks might be slightly inefficient.

"By ending duplication and overlap, we will spend less on overhead, and more on protecting America,'' President Bush said.

Now that is indeed revolutionary. Just imagine if this catches on:

Census goes postal

Why not merge the Census and the Postal Service? Has it never occurred to anyone in Washington that we already have an army of mail carriers who go door to door all over America? Why hire Census takers?

How come the Immigration and Naturalization Service can't keep out terrorists who list Osama bin Laden as their last landlord, but the IRS can find a 14-cent error on line 23 of my 1040? We should combine them. The IRS is an expert at domestic terrorism.

How about a Department of Public Education (DOPE) that merges with the Agriculture Department? We're already paying some schools to not teach students, the same way we pay farmers to not grow corn.

We should merge welfare reform and foreign aid and tell those ingrate freeloaders in the United Nations to get a job.

If we merge the EPA and the FCC, we might finally reduce toxic emissions from Jerry Springer and Howard Stern.

I would suggest merging the U.S. Marines with the weapons inspectors in Iraq. But I think President Bush is already working on it.

E-mail pbronson@enquirer.com or call 768-8301.