"One thing I'd like to point out is that," Janet Napolitano, the president's head of Homeland Security, observed on CNN two days after UFA was arrested, "the system worked." Actually, the system is a hopeless complex of bureaucracies that still fail to coordinate with one another, despite the lessons of 9/11. Four days after UFA's attempt to blow up Northwest Flight 253 as it landed in Detroit, President Obama finally got it right when he said, "A systemic failure has occurred, and I consider that totally unacceptable."
Nonetheless, the president is about to give himself an A- for his first-year performance, for he finally has slapped together a complex of bureaucracies even more elaborate than the complex of bureaucracies that just failed to nab one miscreant as he flew across the world with a bomb in his underpants and a multitude of red flags flapping around his journey. The president's health care monstrosity is an even more unwieldy government effort than Homeland Security. Its goals are more various and vaguer. Its protocols are already in chaos.
The lesson that the president should have learned from last week's "systemic failure" is that government is a very imperfect instrument. A government that takes over 16 percent of our economy promising to bring us good health at a reasonable cost is an instrument doomed to failure and at a catastrophic cost.