Apparently realizing that it had been a few months since she'd made an ass of herself on the national stage, Janet Napolitano showed up over the weekend to reassure Americans that "the system worked" in responding to alleged Christmas Day wiener-bomber Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab.
What system is that? Apparently, it's the system that's been built to respond when a terrorist attack is attempted but fails.
How about that other system, though? You know, the one that's been built to keep guys off of U.S.-bound planes when: (a) they are known to federal officials to have ties to terrorist groups; (b) they buy a one-way ticket; and (c) they have explosives in their pants?
No reassuring comments from J-No on that.
Footnote: It's a bit of a mystery to me why American politics doesn't give birth to more demagogues. I think someone could light a serious prairie fire in this country if he or she mounted a campaign for national office on the basis of three or four issues: (1) pulling the U.S. out of the U.N. and out of Copenhagen-style meetings, in which we are treated as the world's pinata; (2) shutting the southern border immediately, dramatically reducing future immigration levels, and being much more selective (in terms of education levels, mainly) about who gets in; (3) scaling back the amount of money we spend on the poor; and (4) deporting (or denying entrance to) Muslims who give even the faintest hint of having been radicalized...with "the faintest hint" being defined as having one of those hard-to-say Arab names.
I'm not saying that I support any of this--except for #1, which I've advocated for five or six years. What I am saying, though, is that I'll bet a very large chunk of America would support it, particularly if equipped with a handful of juicy, inflammatory anecdotes.
Public opinion data suggest--to me, anyway--that Americans are willing to embrace isolationism, indulge in xenophobia and racial/ethnic stereotyping, and restrict civil liberties when issues are presented to them in a particular way. I mean, just think about #4. In the wake of the wiener-bomber attack and the incident at Ft. Hood, you don't think 25 or 30 percent of Americans are ripe for an anti-Muslim appeal?
In other countries, politicians are much more entrepreneurial about this sort of thing. In Europe, for example, far-right parties are booming.
It may be that countries with multi-party systems create a space for demagoguery that the U.S. doesn't have. Still, I'm guessing that a third-party presidential candidate who adopted the issues I described above could, under the right circumstances (continuing high unemployment, for example), get some kind of boomlet going.