Did you see what he said today? This man is sooo …”

Dude, leave him alone. The poor man has Herpes.

Ooooh, that explains it.

Actually, I’d prefer him having MS.

What if Bush had intelligence of a huge threat (e.g., as in your example, al-Qaida is much stronger than the public knows). Why would you need a more complicated scenario.

You’d have to explain why Bush doesn’t tell us about the threat. Maybe it’s because he doesn’t want to cause panic (maybe it’s SUCH a big threat, he knows there’s an 80% chance that we’re doomed — maybe the bad guys have nukes or whatever). Or maybe it’s because telling the public would tip off the bad guys and make it hard to gather more intelligence.

Why would you also need to posit traitors in the US government?

If Bush knows that (a) he’s going to have to take extreme, unpopular measures to fight a real threat, (b) he’ll have well-meaning (but ignorant) people in his own country try to stop him, and (c) he can’t explain the truth to anyone, wouldn’t he be pretty much forced to run a “shadow government”?

Let’s say that twenty years from now, it’s uncovered that some terrorist group was threatening to destroy the US with nukes all this time, and that Bush knew about it. My guess is he’d be largely vindicated. People might differ on whether or not he should have kept it a secret, but I doubt he’d be seen as the villain he’s seen as now.

(I don’t really believe any of this. It fail Occams Razor on many levels.)

And to respond to my question to get the ball rolling, I think I’d have to presuppose that al-Qaida would be a far, far, far more robust, diverse and widespread organization than it is. It would have had to have intent to commit repeated malicious homicidal harm — continuous 9/11s, in other words. And it would have had to have “sleeper agents” in high positions in the media, Congress, etc. (To borrow a television series from my childhood, imagine a “serious” version of Cobra from G.I. Joe with a far more intelligent and less comic leader in charge.) These “sleeper agents” would have had to have had some sort of upper-hand not easily undone … most likely a myriad of multiple layers of largescale weapons of mass destruction (multiple explosives hidden, disseminators of various genocidal diseases, etc.) in various concentrations of large populations (megapolises like Chicago, LA, NYC, and certainly DC as the seat of power).

In such a situation, where terrorists were actually undcover within the government, Bush would arguably have had cause to limit his trust to the small circle which he has, and enact a “shadow government” of sorts. His spokespeople would have had cause to repeatedly obfuscate the truth and backtrack, and if they weren’t masters of their trade, then they’d be caught (as they repeatedly have). One might even argue he would have adopted a role of an idiot as a public persona in order to make the terrorists view him and those in his Administration as less of a threat. The high-level push for private prep work of contingency-of-government plans and strong consolidation of executive power would make slightly more sense in such a context as well.

I’m sure with more time I could come up with more, but that’s what comes to mind right off the bat. I’m curious as to what others can envision …

P.S. If you work for the Bush Administration and are coming across this webpage, don’t even think about it. ;-)