When President-elect Barack Obama announced a little over a year ago that Janet Napolitano was his choice to be the head of Homeland Security, it wasn’t just conservatives who were asking, “What was he thinking?” As governor of Arizona, Napolitano’s record wasn’t exactly one which would encourage those with concerns about our nation’s security. Not only had she done nothing to secure her own state’s southern border, but she had a history of fighting the efforts of Tough Sheriff Joe Arpaio, perhaps the only person in elective government in The Grand Canyon State who had actively worked to enforce the nation’s immigration laws.

Before being appointed by Bill Clinton as U.S. Attorney for the district of Arizona in 1993, Napolitano was known for little more than her part in the Democrats’ campaign to try to destroy Clarence Thomas at his confirmation hearings for the U.S. Supreme Court. Napolitano was the lawyer for Anita Hill, the woman who who told a number of bizarre lies under oath in a failed attempt to shoot Thomas down.

Napolitano was elected to the office of Arizona Attorney General in 1998, but her tenure was focused not on security matters, but on consumer protection issues instead. She won Arizona’s gubernatorial election in 2006, and her record as the state’s CEO is mostly unremarkable, save for earning a reputation for being soft on illegal immigration.

There are many who believe that being named Homeland Security chief was Napolitano’s payback for having endorsed Barack Obama for president in January of 2008. She was appointed to the Obama-Biden transition team in November of last year and named Director of Homeland Security in December.

It didn’t take long for the very liberal Napolitano to become a focal point for controversy. In an interview with Germany’s Der Spiegel in March of 2009, she patted herself on the back for her use of the politically correct euphemism “man-caused disasters” in place of the word terrorism. The following month she offended Canada’s government by suggesting in a CBC interview that the 9/11 terrorists entered the U.S. from Canada.

The rookie Homeland Security chief quickly jumped from the frying pan into the fire that same month with the release of a DHS report titled Rightwing Extremism, which was little more than a shoddy and politically-motivated attack on conservatives and military veterans. The report caused such a furor that Napolitano was forced to apologize to the American Legion and other veterans groups. She finally had to withdraw the ill-conceived report.

Having demonstrated early on that she is little more than a political hack who was placed in an administration post critical to the nation’s security, Napolitano recently proved that she has not the slightest idea of what she is doing. After a Nigerian terrorist trained in Yemen by Al Qaeda attempted to blow up an airliner as it landed in Detroit on Christmas Day, the Director of Homeland Security went on “State of the Union” Sunday morning and stunned even CNN’s Candy Crowley by boasting that “the system worked.”

While it was clear to the rest of the world that the system obviously did not work, a clueless Napolitano had to be given a new script by the Obama White House. By the time she made it to “The Today Show” this morning, the HS Czar had to admit that the system hadn’t worked all that well after all. To the contrary, it was a total failure in this instance. To say we dodged a bullet on the approach to Detroit would be a major understatement.

Conservatives and other security-conscious Americans have been calling for Napolitano’s dismissal for months. Now the calls for her to be fired are growing louder, as we hear from National Review and the Washington Examiner. there is even an entire website dedicated to getting her removed from office.

Napolitano’s ineptitude is just one sign of the Obama Administration’s much too laid-back approach to national security. This is the last place where the United States can afford to cut corners or have incompetents in positions of authority. And Janet Napolitano has proven time and time again that she is not competent to run the Department of Homeland Security. It’s well past time for her to go.

- JP Read more of JP’s posts at our blog!