Hard to believe it finally happened, but the Czar is elated that DHS Secretary Janet Napolitano is resigning to go into academia. Ironically, she should have been there the entire time, if for no other reason than her threat assessment skills were solely lacking.

Forgive the Czar for being less than charitable; he has read many eulogies for her DHS career, with many critics saying—if nothing else—she did a pretty good job holding down acts of terror in the US.

But this is like saying the plumber did a good job getting the toilet to not violently spray upward. Yes, that would be the basic part of the job. Attempts to salute her service wind up sounding little more than faint-praise damnation, no?

The sad fact is that she was divisive: her solution to preventing acts of terror was to point the finger at anyone likely to vote Republican: it was her department that accused Christians, returning veterans, libertarians, and Tea Partiers of likely terrorist activities, while on her watch the Army allowed a radical jihadi Muslim be promoted to colonel simply because he was too scary to kick out; after all, this was the same guy who basically announced he intended to kill people right on his business card.

It was her department that wanted to employ euphemisms for terror, rather than call things for what they were. Napolitano wanted to sanitize the importance of homeland security so that it could mean anything, and therefore prosecute anything. Her vision treated lobbing drone bombs at jihadis as interchangeable as denying some veterans ownership of firearms because, well, the PTSD thing, you know?

All in all, her tenure was marked by a strange predilection for PowerPoints and PDFs that accused anyone who was not a liberal Democrat of being a security risk. How can that be celebrated except by its termination?

Sadder still is that she was exactly the person the President wanted in that position: someone who shared his view that the real enemy out there wasn’t someone committed to killing innocent people, but anyone who might dare vote against his administration.

Good riddance.

The Czar of Muscovy

Божію Поспѣшествующею Милостію Мы, Дима Грозный Императоръ и Самодержецъ Всероссiйскiй, цѣсарь Московскiй. The Czar was born in the steppes of Russia in 1267, and was cheated out of total control of all Russia upon the death of Boris Mikhailovich, who replaced Alexander Yaroslav Nevsky in 1263. However, in 1283, our Czar was passed over due to a clerical error and the rule of all Russia went to his second cousin Daniil (Даниил Александрович), whom Czar still resents. As a half-hearted apology, the Czar was awarded control over Muscovy, inconveniently located 5,000 miles away just outside Chicago. He now spends his time seething about this and writing about other stuff that bothers him.