For a little over a week, an eternity in news cycle dog years, the uproar over TSA pat-downs has dominated the media landscape like the bastard spawn of Rod Blagojevich, Sarah Palin, and Balloon Boy. Heading into the Thanksgiving weekend news dead zone, there seems little chance its momentum will slow, but The Daily Beast’s Howard Kurtz may be ushering in the most welcome phase of this story’s arc: the inevitable backlash against the TSA backlash.

Secretary of Homeland Security Janet Napolitano may have given conservatives a great new t-shirt idea yesterday by claiming that the system “worked like clockwork” once the flight 253 incident had occurred (a disclaimer that rendered the statement meaningless), but there may actually be some truth to the notion that the system worked. Napolitano’s statement (since “clarified”) was a wrongheaded attempt at reassurance, it seems that a whole bunch of other people have an interest in making you as scared as possible.

The biggest question to come from Thursday’s thwarted terrorist attack is how did someone on a watch list manage to get on a plane? This explanation from a senior administration official, via Politico, may go some ways to answering that question: There’s a lot of bureaucracy involved.

Sec. of Homeland Security Janet Napolitano was on NBC’s Today show this morning, back-tracking a bit from her statements about the attempted terror attack made yesterday on several Sunday shows.

She says her comments about how “the system worked” were taken out of context – and she agrees the system actually “failed miserably.”

Where to point the finger over Thursday’s averted terror attack on Northwest Flight 253? How much responsibility for this falls on President Obama? Perhaps this is a good time to point out Obama has been in office three and a half months longer that George W. Bush was when September 11 occurred. So who inherited what?

Hot on the heels of Janet Napolitano‘s “The system worked like clockwork” appearance on This Week, White House Press Secretary Robert Gibbs faced questions from Jake Tapper, who got to the heart of the issue. If the flight 253 suspect was on a watch list, who was watching him? Gibbs’ response was equally on target.

Another incident has been reported on Northwest Airlines flight 253 from Amsterdam to Detroit, CNN and BNO News are reporting. Details are still coming in, but here’s the information that’s available thus far, as gleaned from Twitter.

Jake Tapper interviewed DHS Secretary Janet Napolitano on ABC’s This Week, giving an early indicator of what the administration’s narrative on Flight 523 will be. Caught between the need to reassure a jumpy public, political opponents drooling at the chance to score points, and an unwillingness to tip our hand to those who would do us harm, Napolitano had her work cut out for her. Even given those factors, the Secretary’s overarching message was tone deaf, to say the least.