Last week the Capitol Building, the White House, and the U.S. Supreme Court building were evacuated when a couple of lost Bush supporters in a Cessna light aircraft strayed into Washington D.C.'s no-fly zone. Laura Bush was rushed into a secure bunker, Dick Cheney was hustled from one undisclosed location to another, F-16 fighter jets buzzed the capitol and fired warning flares at the disoriented airmen. It was all very exciting. Fortunately there was one person who wasn't interrupted by all this mayhem - George W. Bush. Turns out Bush was too busy riding a bike around Maryland to be bothered with such things as, oh, the possibly imminent death of his wife.

Believe it or not, Bush wasn't told about the evacuation of 30,000 people in the middle of D.C. until the all-clear was sounded. And according to press secretary Scott McClellan, that's perfectly normal. McClellan told the press last week that, "He was not in danger, a situation where protocols have been put in place to address the situation. The protocols were followed." In fact, Scott uncomfortably lauded the protocols several times, even to questions like, "Might there be something wrong with protocols that render the president unnecessary when the alarm is going off at his house?" Still, even if the president didn't need to know that someone was about to crash an airplane on his front lawn, it made for great breathless cable news coverage - which was especially convenient coming on the same day that Tom Ridge finally admitted what everyone already knew: government-issued terror alerts are used for partisan political purposes. Yes, in the latest in a long line of damning revelations by former Bush cabinet members, Ridge complained last week that "he often disagreed with administration officials who wanted to elevate the threat level to orange, or 'high' risk of terrorist attack, but was overruled," according to USA Today. Overruled? Overruled by whom? Let's see. Tom Ridge was the head of Homeland Security. That means he was the number one head honcho in charge of the safety of the nation - aside of course from the Commander-in-Chief, George W. Bush, who, as we have already established, is not even informed of the possibility that someone's about to fly a plane into his house. So if Ridge wasn't in charge of deciding when to raise the alert level, who was? I'll give you a clue: