Profiling.

It’s a loaded word that describes action considered politically incorrect, and there was considerable hand-wringing over the weekend as congressman and security analysts made the talk-show circuit to wax on about whether it’s finally time to acknowledge that profiling be done.

Why the angst? Isn’t it basic human nature to take one look at a person and reach a conclusion about them, for good or bad? Profiling is a first impression of a person, so is it wrong? Or is it right?

Is it evil, or is it perfectly normal?

You better believe that the in-store security teams cruising through every Wal-Mart in the nation are profiling teen customers as potential shoplifters. Overt profiling goes on in bars as people cruise to hook up. Profiling is quietly done in just above every employment interview ever conducted.

If it’s routinely done in seeking a mate or considering who might be stealing a lipstick, why, then, should it be banned at airports to keep the traveling public safe?

Sen. Susan Collins skirted the question when appearing on Sunday morning’s “This Week” on ABC, saying “the problem with profiling is that if you take that approach you’re going to miss the Richard Reids, who do not fit the profile,” referring to the 2001 shoe bomber in context of the Christmas Day in-flight terrorist act.

Collins considers the real failure in the Christmas Day attack on a Detroit-bound jet was a failure to act on “a very credible report, from the terrorist’s father, that should, at the very least, have caused the State Department to revoke his visa.”

Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano said she had been surprised that there was no information or evidence of threat to air passengers, which Collins said Sunday was a bizarre and inappropriate response because not only was there information, there was credible information. Nevertheless, Collins said she believes “Napolitano is working very hard and that she will cooperate with our efforts to ensure that these breaches in our defense cannot happen again.”

That’s nice. Napolitano is a hard worker, but she and her agency ignored credible information about an attack on Northwest Airlines flight 253 that, if the bomb went off as planned, could have been disastrous.

John Brennan, deputy assistant to the president and deputy national security advisory for Homeland Security and Counterterrorism, on his talk show schedule, attributed the attempted attack on Christmas Day to “human error and system lapses.”

He said, very clearly, that “there was no single piece of information that could have pointed law enforcement officials to Christmas bombing suspect Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab” in time to have stopped his actions. The world knows now that simply isn’t true, that Abdulmutallab’s own father was raising the alarm — rather loudly — that his son might be involved with Islamic extremists.

So we have an utter failure on the part of the nation’s vast security team to either hear or recognize the threat posed by Abdulmuttalab and his relationship with al-Qaida, which is not the first time this nation has failed to heed true signals, and we have some deeply self-inflicted refusal to talk about what could be another very effective layer of safety: profiling.

Isn’t it time that this nation, at the very least, talk candidly about it?

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