Barack Obama and Rush Limbaugh will both be leaving Hawaii with a better prognosis for the new decade than events of the holiday season might have provided.

If the Christmas Day body bomber had not been thwarted, the President’s vacation would have been cut short to lead the nation in mourning hundreds of victims of what he yesterday clearly attributed to terrorism: “Al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula trained him, equipped him with those explosives and directed him to attack that plane headed for America.”

As daunting as his challenge is to “to make sure our hard-working men and women in our intelligence, law enforcement and homeland security communities have the tools and resources they need to keep America safe,” the President will start that process in an atmosphere without the shock, rage and grief of another 9/11.

There may never be a precise answer to what determined the narrow margin of that suicide bomber’s failure, once again underscoring how much more contingent real life is than political rhetoric.

That realization presents itself again with the emergence of Rush Limbaugh from a Hawaiian hospital after his own near-death experience on Christmas Eve. In a press conference, a relaxed, almost beatific Limbaugh calls the scare a “blessing in disguise..”

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