I Want to Ride My Bicycle, I Want to Ride It Where I Like

Over at a diary for Daily Kos, Magorn adds some interesting context to the DC panic/Bush bike ride story. It turns out that the President probably wasn't as far into the distant wilds of rural Maryland as has been implied. According to Magorn, W was biking in a wildlife refuge adjacent to Fort Meade, which is also the home base of the National Security Agency. To let Magorn tell it himself:

While all this is going on GW is less than five minutes away even by bike from the absolute Nerve center of America's entire secure communications and electronic intelligence network. And nobody even bothers to tell him what's going on.

There's really no reasonable explanation for this except that his handlers made a deliberate decision to keep him away from the reins of power while the grown-ups handled the crisis.

He (or she, who knows on the Internet) has more to say on how this echoes the President's experience on September 11. The whole diary entry is good.