Normally, This Would Initiate a Resignation

However, because the next one in line is Joe "Plugs" Biden, we'd prefer that you stay until 2012, then we'll decide who gets to lead the most powerful nation on the planet.

More after the jump.

PRUDEN: There's no penalty for sleeping on the job

If it's true, as Dr. Johnson famously told us it was, that the prospect of hanging focuses the mind in a wonderful way, maybe the prospect of facing angry voters sharpens a politician's instincts (if not necessarily his mind).

After first treating the Detroit panty bomber as if it were merely an amusing story ("an isolated incident") that an airline passenger could dine out on for a few days, President Obama is giving a good imitation now of a man getting a late education. Maybe the education will take. It's too soon to say. He said late Thursday that he won't fire anybody. "Ultimately, the buck stops with me. When the system fails, it's my responsibility."

Smooth talk is easy for Mr. Obama, and he often confuses words with deeds. He's taking responsibility for what happened aboard Northwest Airlines Flight 253 on final approach over Detroit, but it's not clear what that means. He's not likely to fire himself (perhaps to spare us Joe Biden). So nobody pays a price for some serious sleeping on the job. Sleeping on the job is serious, but not that serious.

The president and his Democrats are closing ranks behind top national security officials who are begging to be thrown into the street with their briefcases and keys to the executive washroom.

The solution they prescribe is to build the intelligence bureaucracies a little bigger and thicker, layering incompetence with impotence, giving a little relief to the intelligence minions "who have worked so hard." Some no doubt have, but where were the intelligence analysts who saw nothing suspicious when the panty bomber bought his one-way ticket to the U.S.A. with cash, leaving a subtropical city bound for icy Detroit with no luggage?

The State Department, warned by the terrorist's father that he had fallen in with evil companions and was up to no good, finally did its best work Thursday, revoking the visa of Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab. If he is released for more jihad, he won't be able to return to the United States without a new visa. This sounds like a bad joke, but it isn't. That's how the Foggy Bottom fudge factory works.