In the days since the failed Christmas airline bombing by a Nigerian national, bloggers from both sides of the ideological fence have come out with disapproval of the Department of Homeland Security and Janet Napolitano.
Following news that 23-year-old terror suspect Umar Farouk Abdulmutalla had been on a U.S. terror-suspect list since November and a U.K. watch list since last spring but had managed to procure a U.S. visa anyway, bloggers seem to be questioning the judgment of equivocation-prone DHS Secretary Napolitano.
Michelle Malkin ran news of Napolitano’s Sunday remarks along with a doctored picture of the politician in a red clown nose and hat. “The “system,” like Napolitano, was an epic fail,” Malkin blogged Sunday.
HuffingtonPost.com ran news of the apparent about-face on its main page in bolded red font and titled it “On Second Thought…In Turnaround, Napolitano Now Says Security System Failed”
“Janet Napolitano needs to go,” theblogprof wrote on Sunday. “After a suicide bomber failed in detonating an explosive on a plane … Napolitano hailed the response of bureaucrats … AFTER the attack. Uh - excuse me, but isn’t she supposed to get the bureaucrats to thwart the attack in the first place?”
Responding to reports that Abdulmutallab had avoided “pat-down” detection at airport security by wearing in his underwear the 80 grams of pentaerythritol explosives used in his failed plot, a DailyKos.com blogger on Monday lamented the less-than-effective anti-terror-attack measures undertaken at airports over the past eight years: “All shoes must be removed since the shoe bomber. I suppose now that there is a pants bomber, going through security is going to be a lot more interesting. … I don’t feel safe. I feel annoyed. I feel hassled. … I’m done with it.”
