Here's some advice to flyers this holiday season and beyond: You're on your own. Don't look for Washington or the Obama administration to protect you.

That's one of the big lessons that can be drawn from the frightening episode in which a Nigerian Muslim with reported ties to al-Qaida hid an explosive compound in his underwear, then ignited it as the trans-Atlantic airliner on which he was a passenger was landing in Detroit on Christmas Day. Fortunately for the other 277 passengers and the 11 crew aboard the Northwest Airlines jet, the chemicals failed to detonate after being ignited. A Dutch passenger put a headlock on Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab until authorities could detain him after the plane landed.

Another by-the-skin-of-our teeth miss. And no thanks to Washington - which seemed extremely slow to get the message.

Abdulmutallab "stopped before any damage could be done," declared Obama's Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napalitano. "I think the important thing to recognize here is that once this incident occurred, everything happened that should have."

Really? It never should have happened in the first place. Consider: The suspect's father warned U.S. Embassy officials in Nigeria about his son's radical beliefs, but the warning was ignored, apparently all the way up the command chain. Despite being well-known to his friends, family and U.S. officials for his radicalism, his name was not placed on the "no-fly" list. The suspect paid for his expensive airline ticket with cash, and checked no luggage.

The Democrats liked to say of the Bush administration in the years just after the 9/11 attacks, Bush "failed to connect the dots." Now, it seems, that shoe is on the other foot - Obama's.

Napolitano's initial remarks were an insult to every American, and her later corrective that the system had not worked was too little, too late. Obama should demand her resignation.

The airliner incident follows barely a month after an Army doctor with radical Islamist sympathies massacred 13 unarmed U.S. soldiers at Fort Hood, Texas. As in the airline-bomber case, evidence of the doctor's radicalism was well-known to authorities, but ignored; and then down-played after the fact.

The president, who is vacationing in Hawaii, came in off the golf course on Monday to tell reporters he has ordered "a sweeping review" of how the airliner incident happened and what more could be done to protect travelers, and added that the government was doing everything in its power to try and keep them safe. Somehow, considering the events of recent days, that's not reassuring.

Obama and Napalitano can talk all they want about "no-fly lists" and adding air marshals and making travel more onerous for everyday people, but the bottom line will still be this: Once you're in the air, you're on your own. That message is especially apt in this community, what with the world's busiest airport practically in our own backyard and thousands of county residents who fly on a daily or weekly basis for various reasons.

There's another lesson here as well. Obama and his Democratic cohorts have been working feverishly to remake the U.S. health care system, which, though far from perfect at present, is still the world's best. Yet if Obama & Company cannot keep from making a muddle of something as basic as airline security, one can just imagine what the U.S. health system will look like in another year or two.