WAS BUSH PLAYING CHESS WHILE THE REST OF US WERE PLAYING CHECKERS?

Not likely, right? But Vanity Fair editor Graydon Carter, nobody's fool, asks that in the October issue in an Editor's Letter entitled No, He Is Not The Paris Hilton Of U.S. Presidents. Graden posits the improbable-- that he is neither stupid nor incompetent, nor, least probable of all, even venal, but a fighter for Truth, Justice and the American Way.

Let's say he "bungled" the Katrina evacuation and recovery on such an epic scale not because he was incompetent—nobody could be that incompetent—but rather as a tough-love gesture to force the good people of Louisiana and Mississippi to stand on their own two feet. Let's say he trampled on 30 years of legislative safeguards for our air, land, and water not to pay off the polluting interests that put him in office, but rather as a means of galvanizing America's environmental movement. Let's say the quotidian ineptitude across myriad government departments—not enough flu vaccine, passport and visa backlogs, and so forth—is not a hands-on way of demonstrating the administration's "starve the beast" theory, that we would be better off with less government, but an attempt to teach the convenience-obsessed American public the virtue of patience.

Pure genius, I tell you. Bush makes the dollar weaker so Americans can't afford to holiday abroad. Result: they see more of their own country. By vetoing stem-cell research and making it ever more expensive for his fellow citizens to get decent health care, the president is in truth asking us to read his lips. Message: Get healthier, America! And by consistently making such a fool of himself, he has selflessly given us someone to laugh at during these troubling times, the way screwball comedies did during the Great Depression.

And then he gets to the meat of the matter: what happened to the 363 tons of hundred dollar bills that were shipped over to Iraq? Billions have "gone missing." Many billions. That's generational wealth for an awful lot of Republican scum, people who don't deserve the comforts of warm prison cells, just last cigarettes and blindfolds (after trials, of course).

Did Pelosi know about this when she gave the Bush Regime a pass on impeachment? Does she know about it now?