You might think that a cabinet-level intelligence officer who learns about terror plots from the news, lies to Congress about domestic spying, mistakenly characterizes an Islamist political movement taking power in a nation that’s a strategic ally as “largely secular,” and then fails to warn the President of the United States about the rise of a terror group unlike any seen since al-Qaeda destroyed the World Trade Center, might lose his job. In the Obama administration, you would be wrong.

On Sunday’s 60 Minutes, President Obama blamed “the intelligence community” for failing to assess the threat from ISIS, a/k/a “the JV team.” Passing the buck to the Director of National Intelligence, the president said: “I think our head of the intelligence community, Jim Clapper, has acknowledged that they underestimated what had been taking place in Syria” (my emphasis).

Now, you will recall, James Clapper, the overlord of our great virtual panopticon, is the fellow who learned about the London subway bombing arrests from Diane Sawyer, who misled Congress about the scope of the NSA’s electronic surveillance programs, and who infamously declared the Muslim Brotherhood (since overthrown by the Egyptian Army) to be “largely secular.”