Jonah Goldberg is a person of no morals, who traded on his mother’s 15 minutes of notoriety so that he could feed from the Republican trough.

He’s the poster child for the word “hack.”

That doesn’t mean we shouldn’t form an alliance with him, however.

Sure, these guys are all for personal accountability, small government and free-market solutions until it’s their survival that’s on the line. Then they expect 100% security from the Feds.

Oh, wait—Jonah’s just using this as an opportunity to try to make America forget Bush appointees like Chertoff, Brown, Rumsfeld, Wolfowitz and (almost) Bernie Kerik.

This situation is a gift to wingnuts, since “socialism” doesn’t scare anyone anymore. But they know they can always get some traction with the “Obama’s Soft on Muslims/Obama Makes Us All Less Safe” angle. Jonah knows his audience, which is typified by this FreeRepublic commenter:

Compounding the problem is that this particular miscreant was not only a Muslim but a black guy from Nigeria. And the American president is _________ (fill in the correct color) and, having been born to a Muslim father and raised in a Muslim country, sympathetic to the religion of _________. (fill in the appropriate term).

Napolitano tried to clarify her remark today, but “The System Worked” is already fixed in the matrix as a “Heckuva Job, Brownie” moment.

BFD. Tomorrow it’ll be something else. As I’m sure you’ve noticed, rational discourse is a thing of the past—and, in Jonah’s case, it was never the point of the conversation.

I didn’t see Napolitano yesterday either but I’ll guess she meant the system kept the guy from bringing aboard something that could actually bring the plane down, forcing him to make a statement by giving himself a large blister.

Unfortunately, there’s a fine line between calming the public and avoiding a potentially crippling transportation panic, and appearing to be a bit silly. While Napolitano’s statement was accurate in the sense that she intended it, but it could have used a few sage disclaimers and caveats at the head-end.

The “system worked” line came up in an interview with CNN’s Candy Crowley:

CROWLEY: So, just to finish up on the question—I do want to talk to you about security measures—but do you think—has there been any evidence of the Al Qaida ties that this suspect has been claiming?

NAPOLITANO: Right now, that is part of the criminal justice investigation that is ongoing, and I think it would be inappropriate to speculate as to whether or not he has such ties.

What we are focused on is making sure that the air environment remains safe, that people are confident when they travel. And one thing I’d like to point out is that the system worked. Everybody played an important role here. The passengers and crew of the flight took appropriate action. Within literally an hour to 90 minutes of the incident occurring, all 128 flights in the air had been notified to take some special measures in light of what had occurred on the Northwest Airlines flight. We instituted new measures on the ground and at screening areas, both here in the United States and in Europe, where this flight originated.

So the whole process of making sure that we respond properly, correctly and effectively went very smoothly.

On ABC’s This Week, she said essentially the same thing, but without the killer soundbite.

First of all, we are investigating, as always, going backwards to see what happened and when, who knew what and when. But I think it’s important for the public to know, there are different types of databases. And there were simply, throughout the law enforcement community, never information that would put this individual on a no-fly list or a selectee list.

Number two, I think the important thing to recognize here is that once this incident occurred, everything happened that should have. The passengers reacted correctly, the crew reacted correctly, within an hour to 90 minutes, all 128 flights in the air had been notified. And those flights already had taken mitigation measures on the off-chance that there was somebody else also flying with some sort of destructive intent.

So the system has worked really very, very smoothly over the course of the past several days.

To the extent that the system has responded to the event and we haven’t all collectively shit ourselves and declared war on Nigeria, she’s right. The fact that a bomber was able to get on the plane with bomb-making materials is a bit harder to sidestep or spin in a tactful manner…even though that’s pretty much what you have to do as a public safety official in this sort of situation.