Please excuse the disorganization — and lack of paragraph phormat — in this post; it’s just a dump of a few things that have been bouncing around in my head since the Christmas attack (and, in some cases, longer).

For years, Democrats have told us that one of the biggest problems in America is that we’re not taken care of well enough by our government. From government health care, to Social Security, to further reduced minimum ages of mandatory government school attendance, to tighter restrictions on the rights of personal armament and self defense, the left has long sought — and continues to seek — to wrap every American in a governmental security blanket from which there can be no escape.

Thank goodness there were a few Americans on flight 253 from Amsterdam on Christmas Day who had the wherewithal, the independence, and the assertiveness to take down a wannabe killer instead of simply sitting idly by like lambs awaiting slaughter, unsure of what to do in the face of their government’s failure to prevent them from being put in such an awful situation.

Janet Napolitano’s “The System Worked” comment — which she repeated on multiple Sunday shows following the failed Christmas bombing — has to far surpass President Bush’s infamous “heckuva job, Brownie” as the most infamous statement of its type by an administration official in recent memory.

The fact that Napolitano said that in the first place isn’t actually all that surprising; after all, in a culture of total governmental dependence such as that the Left has been trying for so long to create in America, the only thing that need be offered after such a colossal breakdown is a verbal reassurance that the government actually is responsible for whatever it was that went right on that Christmas Day flight. However, the fact that she kept digging in and repeating the statement despite its obvious absurdity served to as just another example of this administration’s inability to “rethink” its own clearly impotent talking points and counterfactual claims (for other examples, see the repeated health care cost containment claims, or the latest “saved or created” job numbers from the abysmally failed “stimulus” package).

Napolitano’s “system” comment reflected her dangerously incorrect view of the Department of Homeland Security as being responsible for disaster response only, rather than also having a role in the prevention of both “natural and man-caused” (her terms) disasters. The fact that the rest of us in America disagree has, of course, little or no bearing on Ms. Napolitano’s view of her own organization’s purpose; however, it would be nice to think that all the shoe-taking-off, water-bottle-trashing, liquid/gel/aerosol-separating screening we go through every time we fly anywhere is conducted for a purpose other than providing the TSA with a record of our clothing and possessions that they can use when performing their actual job of cleaning up and identifying bodies after we’re blown up in flight by a terrorist it apparently wasn’t their responsibility to actually stop.

Applying this to government health care — as we should — suggests scenarios I don’t even want to think about, such as a Health Czar going on the Sunday show and bragging about how well the state-run health care “system worked” when it came to beautifying corpses for viewing and interment.

Speaking of the TSA, has there ever been a better example of how reactive a bureaucratic organization can be? Three years after the sports drink suicide plot was uncovered in Britain, we’re still separating our 3 oz. liquids for screening and throwing away our water bottles before passing from ticketing into the gate area; 8 years after Richard Reid failed to ignite his Doc Martens on AA63, we’re still removing our shoes and shuffling through the X-ray in stockinged feet. The immediate response from Napolitano and TSA to the Christmas attempt — temporarily banning electronics on flights, and restricting passengers to their seats with nothing on their laps for the last hour of inbound international flights — was no less ridiculous. Because one terrorist decided the last hour of the flight was the best time to set his pants on fire, that’s the only portion of any flight that will be at risk in the future? Really?

I think (clearly) conflicted Obama voter Megan McArdle put it best when she said, “The TSA’s obsession with fighting the last war is so strong that I expect any day to see them building wooden forts at our nation’s airports in order to keep the redcoats at bay.”

Speaking of Napolitano: Does anybody else find it interesting that, in the wake of an attempted terrorist attack on a US plane, carrying US citizens, over US soil, which would have worked had the detonator the Nigerian terrorist carried on board along with his security-beating underpants bomb not malfunctioned, the head of Homeland Security’s top priority remains….unionizing the employees under her aegis? Message to Janet Napolitano: If unionizing TSA employees wouldn’t have prevented the Christmas bombing, you have other priorities to worry about.

Does anybody else find it interesting that President Obama needed nine months to conduct a “review” of a single front in the War on Terror and to decide on a strategy, when he had the best military minds available to him (not to mention a full top-to-bottom review handed to him by the outgoing Bush Administration in December 2008), but that he only needed a week to conduct a “top-to-bottom review of security” at 19,500 US airports, and to decide on a new airport security policy?

Those new security procedures  are only slightly less ridiculous than their still-active predecessors. Yes, people flying from 14 countries in the Middle East and Africa (as well as Cuba, which could provoke and interesting reaction from the Castrati on the Left) will receive additional security screening; however, travelers everywhere who are headed to the US will also now be subject to “tightened random screening.” This means your 87-year-old grandmother, your five-year-old son, and millions of other people who do not fit the well-defined profile of an international terrorist will still be subject to random searches. This policy is in place, of course, because the worst thing the TSA could do would be to limit their searches to those who are actually threats to blow up the planes they are attempting to board.

Does anybody else think President Obama’s first reaction to the news of an attempted bombing on Christmas Day was to wonder who he missed on his international bowing tour?

Yemen is one of the 14 countries on the Obama Watch List, meaning that people flying from Yemen to the US will be subject to extensive security screening. Given the fact that the president is determined to give back Yemeni terrorists currently residing at Gitmo at the same time he is calling for additional screening of people flying back from that nation, would it be safe to say that Mr. Obama’s prime concern isn’t that those terrorists he is releasing not murder innocent people, but that they not do so on (or over) American soil? Doing so, of course, simply consigns more Muslims in the Middle East and elsewhere — who already make up ” well over 50 percent of the victims” of terrorism, according to the NCTC — to grisly deaths at the hands of these dangerous extremists?

Speaking of Muslim victims of terror and the NCTC report, the vast majority of victims of terrorism in 2008 were Muslims living “in Iraq, Pakistan, and Afghanistan.” Does it strike anybody else that these are precisely the countries that the Michael Moores, Sean Penns, and Patty Murrays of the American Left have been telling us for years are supportive of bin Laden and other terrorists because they see them as “freedom fighters,” rather than as terrorist killers? The tens of thousands of Muslims killed in those countries by terrorists committing mass murder in the name of Allah might disagree with such an assertion, were they able to speak for themselves from beyond the grave.

It’s just too bad our “Citizen of the World” president isn’t all that interested in protecting all innocent human life, be it Middle Eastern or Western.

Does anybody else find it interesting that President Obama, who is so fond of demanding that everybody else “rethink” their assumptions, values, and conclusions (and who “today will press intelligence community to constantly challenge its assumptions”), never seems willing to “rethink” any of his own positions, beliefs, or policy prescriptions?

Fin.