The Cheney Supremacy

And here's another telling scene: When Tenet and some of his briefers initially headed over to the White House to tell Bush about the new threat, Tenet has to go first, to "prebrief Bush for four or five minutes," which Suskind writes is "common practice" so that "Bush could be authoritative and updated when others arrived."

Suskind Watch

This is Suskind's second major book-length contribution to understanding the Bush White House.

His first came in January 2004: "The Price of Loyalty: George W. Bush, the White House, and the Education of Paul O'Neill." That book, which Suskind based mostly on interviews with the former Treasury Secretary, offered the first long, hard look at the workings of the Bush White House from a key insider.

Its two main themes: 1) That the president was disengaged ("like a blind man in a room full of deaf people") and managed by his staff (encircled by "a Praetorian guard"); and 2) That the White House was intent on overthrowing Saddam Hussein long before 9/11 ("It was all about finding a way to do it.")

Both of those points slowly but surely made their way to becoming conventional wisdom in Washington.

Suskind has also authored several seminal magazine articles about this White House.

His October 2004 piece in the New York Times Magazine added the term "reality-based" to the political lexicon.

It described a meeting in 2002 with a "senior adviser" to Bush: "The aide said that guys like me were 'in what we call the reality-based community,' which he defined as people who 'believe that solutions emerge from your judicious study of discernible reality.' I nodded and murmured something about enlightenment principles and empiricism. He cut me off. 'That's not the way the world really works anymore,' he continued. 'We're an empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality. And while you're studying that reality -- judiciously, as you will -- we'll act again, creating other new realities, which you can study too, and that's how things will sort out.' "

Writing for Esquire back in January 2003 , Suskind got the former head of Bush's office of faith-based initiatives, John DiIulio, to spill his guts: "There is no precedent in any modern White House for what is going on in this one: a complete lack of a policy apparatus," DiIulio told him. "What you've got is everything -- and I mean everything -- being run by the political arm. It's the reign of the Mayberry Machiavellis."

Tony Snow, Media Critic

Tony Snow toured the morning talk shows yesterday. His message: That Bush doesn't make decisions based on polls, and that Americans are overly impatient with the war because of all the negative media coverage.

It's a position Snow cleaves to even in the face of evidence that, if anything, the media is understating how dire things are in Iraq.

Here's Snow on CNN 's Late Edition: "The president understands, and I think anybody would understand, that a war that is long and a war that, at many times, has been portrayed not in terms of the successes that are being enjoyed in 14 provinces which are now living peacefully but instead -- what do you see?