And his name is Lawrence B. Wilkerson, former chief of staff to Secretary of State Colin Powell.

IN PRESIDENT BUSH'S first term, some of the most important decisions about U.S. national security — including vital decisions about postwar Iraq — were made by a secretive, little-known cabal. It was made up of a very small group of people led by Vice President Dick Cheney and Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld.

Little-known? Only if you're surveying the idiots that Jay Leno finds on the streets of Los Angeles for his "Jay-walking" feature.

And you obviously know something is wrong with the world when the secretary of defense and the vice-president are horror making decisions about U.S. national security.

When I first discussed this group in a speech last week at the New America Foundation in Washington, my comments caused a significant stir because I had been chief of staff to then-Secretary of State Colin Powell between 2002 and 2005.

But it's absolutely true. I believe that the decisions of this cabal were sometimes made with the full and witting support of the president and sometimes with something less. More often than not, then-national security advisor Condoleezza Rice was simply steamrolled by this cabal.

OK, so today's storyline is that Bush is an idiot. Sometimes he's an evil genius, so I just needed to make sure what he is today.

Its insular and secret workings were efficient and swift — not unlike the decision-making one would associate more with a dictatorship than a democracy. This furtive process was camouflaged neatly by the dysfunction and inefficiency of the formal decision-making process, where decisions, if they were reached at all, had to wend their way through the bureaucracy, with its dissenters, obstructionists and "guardians of the turf."

Oh my gosh! Efficient decision-making? When it comes to national security? It can't be! We must have gridlocked bureaucracy! This has got to be some sort of crime!

I'm bored now. All outraged-out. That's all I can handle.