Published today under the sick-making headline, “A ‘Third Term’ for Bush,” Fred Barnes has drafted a plan to help Dear Leader salvage his presidency by re-arranging the same set of incompetents who ran up the deficit; okayed torture, spying and black bag jobs; bungled Iraq and Katrina:

• Condi Rice becomes vice president; Cheney retires or…
• Cheney moves to secretary of defense; Rumsfeld is out
• Sen. Joe Lieberman replaces Rice as secretary of state
• Glenn Hubbard to Treasury, John Snow out
• Dan Senor or Dan Bartlett to replace Scott McClellan as White House spokesman
• Economic adviser Al Hubbard to replace Andy Card as chief of staff
• Replace national security adviser Stephen Hadley with U.S. ambassador to Iraq Zalmay Khalilzad
• Move Karl Rove to chairman of the Republican National Committee; move current chair Ken Mehlman to head of White House communications

This would be funny if the situation weren’t so dire. As a partisan, I hope the president either does nothing or takes Fred Barnes’ advice. Both courses would lead the GOP to doom and damnation.

But we have a leadership team at the White House that has a record of dereliction of duty and criminal negligence for which no one has taken responsibility or suffered consequences. The re-shuffling Barnes recommends would result in more of the same and worse.