In recent years, presidents have pardoned two turkeys from facing the chopping block on Thanksgiving Eve.  This year, President Barack Obama should lower the ax on two of his most disastrous cabinet officials: Attorney General Eric Holder and Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano. 

By any measure, Holder’s tenure at the Justice Department has been foul.  Soon after being installed he set off a national firestorm by calling racist any American who would rather live in a color blind society than one constantly defined by skin tones.  He shielded New Black Panthers thugs from prosecution even though his own prosecutors had evidence the group broke numerous election laws.  So busy was he with distributing injustice that he didn’t have time to read Arizona’s tough anti-illegal immigration measure, which merely enforces the laws he swore to uphold.  Of course, that didn’t stop him from suing the state for highlighting the Justice Department’s repeated refusal to faithfully execute the laws. 

But his most recent failure makes his ouster inevitable.  Echoing the hard left’s perverse spin on American Exceptionalism, Holder continues to argue that the nation is at its best when voluntarily weakening itself to benefit our enemies.  Exhibit A is his steadfast refusal to prosecute terrorist detainees in the congressionally created, court-approved military tribunal system.  Instead, Holder prefers the civilian court route, strewn as it is with defendant-favoring rules and procedures.  Have no fear, Holder assured Americans.  He “guaranteed” the terrorists would be convicted. 

Last week, Ahmed Ghailani was acquitted on all but one charge: conspiracy to damage government property.  No doubt, Ghailani’s 1998 bombing of an American embassy in Africa deserves punishment, but the 12 Americans among the more than 200 dead deserved a prosecution and a trial that fit the crimes.  What they got was a politically mandated, jurisdictionally constrained process that equated an Al-Qaeda terrorist with Timothy McVeigh.  Yet Holder is still making venue decisions for the trials of 9/11 plotter Khalid Sheikh Mohammed and Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab (aka the Christmas Day bomber). 

For its part, the Transportation Security Administration (TSA) is trying to help out the Attorney General.  In an effort to justify the embarrassingly indiscrete pat downs of airline travelers, TSA Administrator John Pistole told the Senate Homeland Security and Government Affairs Committee that the intrusions would have caught the underwear explosives worn by the Christmas Day bomber.  Leave it to a government bureaucrat to fight the last war in today’s trenches. 

No one thinks that requiring every airline passenger to take off his shoes is going to catch the next Richard Reed because the next would-be bomber will do something different.  Like hide explosives in his underwear.  This holiday season, while the government makes millions of law-abiding Americans decide between being groped in public or shot through with radiation that is believed to be unhealthy, at least to some groups, the terrorists have undoubtedly won. 

But don’t blame Pistole.  He’s just following orders.  The buck on this issue stops with Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano.  If Napolitano cared about helping Americans feel confident in their security and their government she would stop sending her TSA flak into committee hearings armed with backward-looking reasons for obliterating travelers’ dignity. 

Perhaps Napolitano is too busy tracking alleged threats to the liberal establishment.  Already she’s issued warnings about members of the limited government movement, gun enthusiasts, pro-life advocates and, of course, returning veterans from the Afghanistan and Iraq wars.  Now she can add disgruntled airline travelers to her ever-growing enemies list. 

To use Napolitano’s phrase, both she and Holder are “man-made disasters.”  President Obama is the man who made them.  With the nation about to commemorate the Pilgrims’ progress, it’s time to ax the ideologues.  Right now, America needs two eagle-eyed professionals running Justice and Homeland Security, not turkeys.