If we can’t get bipartisan consensus on this, my friends, then bipartisan consensus is well and truly dead. In fact, in eight years, I’ve been able to come up with only one potential use for it: If the day ever comes when we drop below code yellow, that means every jihadi in the world is dead and the war on terror is over.

One option under consideration is to go to two threat levels instead of five: elevated and imminent. When the threat level would change to imminent under the new model, government officials would be expected to be as specific as possible in describing the threat without jeopardizing national security. And an imminent threat would not last longer than a week, meaning the public wouldn’t see a consistently high and ambiguous threat level…

Over the past four years, millions of travelers have begun and ended their trips to the sound of airport recordings warning that the threat level was orange, an alert that has become so routine that many now simply tune it out. This could be the last holiday season they hear the monotonous message…

In July 2009, Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano ordered a review of the system. Earlier this year, the department decided the best way forward would be to scrap the colors and use more descriptive language to talk about terror threats. With a new system, there would be an understanding with the public that there is a baseline level of vigilance needed in the U.S., but when the government gets information that suggests the threat is more specific, the new system would be used to communicate those details.

The fact that it’s taken months to arrive at this fateful moment, with Obama left to make a final decision, makes me think that that Onion satire from yesterday might be more accurate than we thought. In case you’re wondering, with one brief and very limited exception, the U.S. has only been at code yellow or code orange since the system first went live in 2002. (The exception was when we went to code red for flights from the UK to the U.S. for five days in August 2006, right after the British uncovered a massive airline terror plot.) That makes sense, since there are really only two states of readiness the public can maintain — normal vigilance and heightened vigilance, for when there’s intelligence suggesting something might be in the works. If you wanted to push it you could add a third level of readiness for exceptional cases when the feds think a plot is in motion and they’re powerless to stop it; code red in that case would basically signal to people to stay off the streets if at all possible, which would wreak economic havoc and amount to an admission that U.S. intelligence had dropped the ball. In fact, even the de facto code yellow/code orange binary system has fallen by the wayside in the past few years: Domestically we’ve been at code yellow since 2005 and for air travel we’ve been at code orange since 2006. Follow the chronology at Wikipedia and you’ll see that the feds used to change the threat level fairly regularly in response to intel, but at the beginning of Bush’s second term they essentially gave up on it. And no wonder.

Speaking of ineffective security measures, here’s something timely from Second City. I think a “hot pink” threat level would mean that Al Qaeda’s turned gay.