"Temper Tantrums"

David Brooks has a strikingly breezy column on the Nigerian bomber:

Now we seem to expect perfection from government and then throw temper tantrums when it is not achieved. We seem to be in the position of young adolescents — who believe mommy and daddy can take care of everything, and then grow angry and cynical when it becomes clear they can’t. ... [W]e shouldn’t imagine that these centralized institutions are going to work perfectly or even well most of the time. It would be nice if we reacted to their inevitable failures not with rabid denunciation and cynicism, but with a little resiliency, an awareness that human systems fail and bad things will happen and we don’t have to lose our heads every time they do.

Look, the circumstances make this case unique. This is someone who paid cash for a one-way ticket from one of the most notorious airports in the world. He had recently been to Yemen. He checked no bags and had a seat next to the airplane's skin, over the wing and above the fuel tank. He was already on a watch list, and his own father -- a credible, prominent figure in his country -- begged us to be on guard. If the age of diminished expectations has reached the point at which stopping such a person is now considered a once in a million shot, feasible only in the event of some unlikely confluence of New York Mets victories and Halley's comet, we're in deep trouble. Would Brooks write the same column if the same person -- same circumstances, same missed warning signs -- had just detonated a nuclear device in a U.S. city? Why is this any different?

The column by Brooks is even stranger in light of what he wrote in March 2007 (my bolds):

Today the big threats to people’s future prospects come from complex, decentralized phenomena: Islamic extremism, failed states, global competition, global warming, nuclear proliferation, a skills-based economy, economic and social segmentation. Normal, nonideological people are less concerned about the threat to their freedom from an overweening state than from the threats posed by these amorphous yet pervasive phenomena. The “liberty vs. power” paradigm is less germane. It’s been replaced in the public consciousness with a “security leads to freedom” paradigm. People with a secure base are more free to take risks and explore the possibilities of their world. People with secure health care can switch jobs more easily. People who feel free from terror can live their lives more loosely.

This was an important column for Brooks. In it he denounced the "Goldwater-Reagan glory days" of limited government as a dead end for conservatism, and urged a more proactive model in which individual freedom flows from the state's ability to provide various forms of "security." How viable is that model if Brooks is willing to so casually cast it aside the moment the state fails its easiest test?