'WELL, THERE'S ONE TERRIBLE PILOT'

Now we know why our Maximum Leader won't testify under oath, privately or publicly, before the 9/11 Commission, as others are doing. It's not because he wants the executive branch of the federal government to maintain a "separation of powers" between it and a 10-member panel partly appointed by the Congress. It's because he wouldn't know the truth if it walked up to him and said "Howdy."

It's because he might be asked about what he said was his immediate reaction on the morning of 9/11 (when he was in a Florida grade school to promote his education bill). Did he really say what he recalled saying? As he saw an airliner fly into the World Trade Center tower, our Maximum Leader said: "Well, there's one terrible pilot."

It's hard to believe, but it sounds typical of him: the callous frat-boy's smirking reaction, a remark so crude it testifies not just to his insenstivity but to his flat-out stupidity. As reported yesterday by Wall Street Journal reporter Scot J. Paltrow in a lead, front-page article (which is not online, unfortunately), here's the complete picture:

At [a] Dec. 4, 2001, town-hall meeting in Orlando, Fla., Mr. Bush said, "I was sitting outside the classroom, waiting to go in, and I saw an airplane hit the tower -- the TV was obviously on. And I used to fly myself, and I said, 'Well, there's one terrible pilot.'" Several weeks later, he said essentially the same thing at another public event in Ontario, Calif.

Also as reported by the Journal, he couldn't have seen what he said he saw at that moment, because the classroom TV where he was waiting "wasn't even plugged in, according to [the school] principal." In fact, the president's recollection is "just mistaken," his spokesman now says. Probably just as mistaken as his claim that he was the one who put the military on high alert, following the attacks when, in fact, it was four-star Air Force Gen. Richard Myers who "raced back" to the Pentagon's command center and -- "with smoke spreading into the cavernous room" from the airliner that crashed into the Pentagon -- "ordered the officer in charge ... to raise the military's alert status to Defcon III, the highest state of readiness since the 1973 Arab-Israeli war."

Also as reported by the Journal, White House Communications Director Dan Bartlett now says our fearless Leader was merely providing "a description that the public could understand," when he claimed he'd given the order, and was speaking in "broad strokes." Tellingly, neither Gen. Myers nor the Pentagon would comment. Not incidentally, Bartlett is the White House point man attacking the credibility of Richard Clarke, the top anti-terrorism expert who worked for our Leader and has just published a devastating insider's account of both his personal lack of leadership in the war on terror and his administration's prosecution of it.

Also as reported by the Journal, when our fearless Leader was flying around the country in Air Force One on 9/11, first to Louisiana and then to Nebraska, instead of returning to Washington, it was on a fool's mission because a rumored threat against the president's plane was false. But our fearless Assistant Maximum Leader Dick Cheney's office is still claiming "it couldn't rule out that a threat to Air Force One actually had been made." Which sounds just like Cheney's familiar mantra about still not being able to rule out finding weapons of mass destruction in Iraq. Even Bartlett now admits "there hadn't been any actual threat" to Air Force One and that "word of a threat had resulted from confusion in the White House bunker."

What an embarrassment it would be, if our fearless Maximum Leader had to fess up to all this under oath.

Meantime, the Journal's editorial page, ran true to form and totally contradicted the reporting staff in a lengthy editorial. It didn't argue that the confusion about that day, the gaps in what we know, and whether the attacks could have been prevented, be cleared up as soon as possible, or at least by the official deadline of July 26. Instead, the lead editorial yesterday urged the 9/11 Commission to stall. If its members "really wanted to make a public contribution," it said, "they would shut down and resume their probe after the elections."

Actually, we have a better idea. If the commission really wanted to serve the country, it would go on a duck-hunting trip with Cheney and Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia before issuing its conclusions. That would surely guarantee an unbiased report.