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Both of Arizona’s U.S. senators teamed up today to throw some punches at how the Obama administration — namely former Arizona Governor and Homeland Security Chief Janet Napolitano — handled the Christmas terror scare in Detroit.
At an end-of-the-year press conference at John McCain’s Phoenix office, he and fellow Senator Jon Kyl ripped the O a new A, saying they expected the president to speak out about the terror incident sooner than he did.
Obama was in Hawaii at the time of the failed attack and issued no formal statement until three days later.
As if a public statement from the president within minutes of the attack would have caused al Qaeda operatives to throw down their arms and surrender, John and Jon expressed horror and outrage.
“These are extremists and they’re terrorists, and he should call them what they are,” McCain snarled.
Kyl then criticized Nappy. When asked if he felt safe with Janet in charge of securing the homeland, Kyl said “not totally.”
Can you blame him? The woman insisted that “the system worked” after a known radical on government watch lists managed to buy a one-way ticket to Detroit and sneak a bomb on an airplane. She then said there was no evidence of a wider conspiracy, despite the fact that the guy who did it, Umar Farouk Abdulmatallab, claimed to be working for al Qaeda.
“I don’t understand how those comments could have come from the head of Homeland Security immediately the way they did,” Kyl says. “Hopefully, what they’ve done is to retrench and to say maybe we should acknowledge the obvious here.”
