I see where you’re confused.
It’s like this, you understand: The Department of Defense is for offense.
Now the Department of Homeland Security, see that’s for defense.
Our National Guard? Well see, we send them out to attack.
And the Federal Emergency Management Agency? Well, we’re not sure what that’s for.
Pork distribution/management to Federal friends during emergencies.
It’s actually Federal Emergency Spin Management Agency, but the Spin function is silent.
Do you write stand-up? That was beautiful.
Why would we want to call it the Department of Hampshire Security? And didn’t you just say you’d prefer that it be eliminated?
No, it only seems that way to my clients.
Hear, hear!
Let’s just get it over with and call it the Ministry of Peace.
How about the measure of sharing a several-thousand miles long border? She is in Canada.
Oh, but I agree with OtakuLoki that a President Hillary Clinton is not likely to remove the department, much as we might hope.
Maybe she’d rename it, and maybe Congress will grow a pair and take away some of the pseudo-fascist overtones, not to mention restore its own time-honored position as a check and balance to the executive branch. After this administration, the executive branch is due to be knocked down a peg or two.
My problem is with the “Security” part. A “Ministry of Security” is a common name for a police state’s secret (anti-political-dissent) police force.
I don’t know if you’re whooshing me or not - Canada is the number one importer of oil to the United States. As for threatening to kill someone’s father, well, we might talk about him behind his back, but outright threats just aren’t our style.
And you can’t have our snow and poutine. 
What?! How can Canada IMPORT oil TO the United States? What kind of a scam are you Canucks running up there?
This means war.
This is where we need to remember that, in The Sound of Music, “homeland” is Austria independent of the Nazis, the one that is about to get trampled. The Nazi party used “fatherland”, not “homeland”, to refer to Germany.
Thanks for spotting my poorly word post.
The “homeland” reference in Edelweiss is a positive statement and evokes genuine patriotism and even a sense of loss perhaps. However, the connection with the song is a wartime (Nazi rise to power at least) theme and thus it dovetails in time (and memory) with the “Fatherland” connotations of the Third Reich.
I find it difficult to separate the two sentiments. To me, the Homeland appeal is more negative than the Edelweiss one and it borrows from the Fatherland overtone. Unless the PTB recognized those overtones and hoped to evoke them by choice of the name, they did a sloppy job of selecting a name.
As I perceive it, Country or Nation and maybe even Continent would be less emotionally loaded than Homeland and would serve to avoid the Nazi connection.
Butter. Denmark.
Yeah, but they’d sound weird in the context of a departmental name.
“Department of Country Security” - nonstarter.
“Department of National Security” - taken by an existing agency.
“Department of National Defense” - taken by two existing agencies.
“Department of Continental Security” - Hawaii, Canada, and Mexico wouldn’t be too happy.
“Department of Counterterrorism” - maybe, but calling it that would invite criticism of a too-narrow mission for a cabinet-level department.
“Department of Home Defense” - again, interagency clash, and it sounds like a department in charge of everyone keeping a shotgun next to the bed.
“Department of Internal Security” - if people didn’t like “Homeland Security”, imagine how they’d react to this gem.
“Department of Civil Defense” - another interagency naming clash, and has very little to do with the original Civil Defense program.
What else would you call this thing? It’s supposed to handle immigration (INS was rolled into it), research in asymmetric warfare defense (it has its own research funding agency), airport security, public health, FEMA, coast guard, nuclear materials detection, internet stability, and a whole bunch of other stuff. It was originally conceived as an lean interdepartmental coordinator to boost government efficiency, and grew into an unwieldy conglomerate that took over the roles of DOD, DOE, DOT, CDC, USCG, INS, FEMA, and even more alphabet soup. I’d say that “Homeland Security” is a remarkably apt name for the department. It is vague, can be spun to mean nearly anything, and is used to justify an ever-larger budget. The only department with a vaguer name is the Department of the Interior - and, now that I think about it, DHS could probably have been neatly folded into DOI.
Crescend, you raise legitimate concerns and I’m not jealous of having the decision to make. All I was trying to say was in response to the thread title. It leaves me with negative connotations that make me feel uneasy. I suggest that rather than defending the choice as “what else could we call it” we should have some people who are clever enough to avoid the negative connotations to do the naming. If we can’t find such a group of name-choosers, I suggest we have another problem.
What if we decide in the near future to abandon the term President for the head of our government and decide (after some process like you have suggested) to adopt the one that the government selects and it turns out to be Fuhrer. Do you imagine the connotations would go away because “we did the best we could”?
There is no Department of National Security.
No. It should be named for the thing we are defending and the thing of which “they” are jealous and the thing we are surrendering to keep it out of “their” hands:
Department of Freedom.