Janet Napolitano's Apology to Canada: "More Anger Than Grief"

Rex Murphy takes a metaphorical axe to the credibility of Obama's Department of Homeland Security for her peculiar insistence earlier this week, that, "[to the extent that terrorists have come into our country or suspected or known terrorists have entered our country across a border, it's been across the Canadian border...":

It’s nearly 9 years since the crash of the twin towers, and Janet Napolitano still doesn’t know – still – that all of the hijackers that brought tragedy that day came into the U.S.A. through their own Customs and Immigration. Not one came down through the great forests of Toronto or over the tundra of Montreal, not one of them got access to the U.S. via what Ms Napolitano thinks of as “borderless” Canada.
...
What is Barack Obama doing appointing someone to head Homeland Security, who, eight years after the attacks, does not even now know where the hijackers came from and how they got into their country? Here, it’s not her ignorance about Canada which should be troubling. It’s her ignorance of the most publicized event in modern American history. How can anyone be head of Homeland Security and not know the history of the 19 men who killed nearly 3,000 Americans?

Ms Napolitano acknowledges there are some “slight” differences between the U.S.-Canada border, and the U.S.-Mexico border. To wit: "Yes, Canada is not Mexico, it doesn't have a drug war going on, it didn't have 6,000 homicides that were drug-related last year." To which she might have added, neither have 11 million or so “undocumented immigrants” flowed from Canada to the U.S..

Nonetheless, with this trivial differences in mind, she argues, if they're going to tighten the Mexican border, they must "fix" the Canadian one, too. Ah yes, if the bulb goes out in the kitchen, change the one in the garage. And Pearl Harbour was executed by the Romanian navy.

I’ve sometimes felt we Canadians are too hard on the Americans. We make fun of them for knowing so little of us. That we’re all igloos and Nelson Eddy yodeling-Mounties. Then along comes someone like Janet Napolitano, a former governor, now a major player at the highest levels of the most powerful government in the world, a one-woman storehouse of misconceptions, pseudo-facts, stale rumours and flat-out ignorance.

She says now she’s been misunderstood. She knows the hijackers didn’t come over the border. I take very little comfort from that. There’s probably more anger in Janet Napolitano now about being corrected than grief about being so wrong. That does not spell a happy time for traffic and business over the Canada - U.S. border.

If the man who promised Hope and Change, wants to give Canadians some Hope, he’ll Change the head of Homeland Security.

Since she probably never drove across the US-Canada border with her family for an over-the-border shopping trip, as so many millions of other North Americans have, Mrs. Napolitano may not appreciate that if someone is entering the US from Canada, they are screened by American border guards, not Canadian ones... which would put her complaints about lax security standards in a different light, even if the 9-11 jihadis had come from Canada.

UPDATE: "What's up with Arizona politicians?"

Arizona Sen. John McCain made the dubious claim Friday that Sept. 11 hijackers entered the United States through Canada -- just days after Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano, the former governor of Arizona, said the same thing.
...
[W]hen asked about the gaffe on FOX News Friday, McCain said: "Well, some of the 9/11 hijackers did come through Canada, as you know."