The "Eastern White House"

In my previous post, I refer to Bush's ranch as the "Western White House." But, given the time Bush spends there, shouldn't "his" little bungalow on Pennsylvania Avenue be called the "Eastern White House."

Fred Kaplan has required reading on our Glorious Leader's "Endless Summer."

Larry Johnson, a former CIA officer and the State Department's counterterrorism chief from 1989-93, explained on MSNBC this afternoon, during a break in the hearings, why the PDB—let alone the Moussaoui finding—should have compelled everyone to rush back to Washington. In his CIA days, Johnson wrote "about 40" PDBs. They're usually dispassionate in tone, a mere paragraph or two. The PDB of Aug. 6 was a page and a half. "That's the intelligence-community equivalent of writing War and Peace," Johnson said. And the title—"Bin Laden Determined To Strike in US"—was clearly designed to set off alarm bells. Johnson told his interviewer that when he read the declassified document, "I said 'Holy smoke!' This is such a dead-on 'Mr. President, you've got to do something!' " (By the way, Johnson claimed he's a Republican who voted for Bush in 2000.)

Not only that, but now we learn that there had been numerous PDBs suggesting that terrorists were planning to hijack planes and fly them into buildings.

Now, of course, we are told that for all the 21st Century environmental features of Rancho Waco, it apparently doesn't have a telephone.

Meanwhile, Presnit makes his very first mistake. I wonder if it really was a turkey farm.