The talking heads say the Democrats need to stop criticizing president Bush for wearing a flight suit and arriving in a state of fabricated glory on an airline carrier. Some of the objection to the event has been that the president's show postponed the troops' journey home. Some of it has been that the event was costly to taxpayers. And some has been that the whole thing was done obviously just to get campaign video. All of these criticisms are valid, to a point, but the main reason that the act was scary is that in doing what he did, Bush blurred the line between civil authority and military authority, thus strengthening the White House's message that the military is in charge of all of us.

At first, the White House said that Bush made a jet landing onto the carrier because he couldn't get to it by helicopter, but when confronted with reality, the president's spokespeople changed their story quickly. Some of the president's apologists, like Chris Matthews (who just can't stop talking about how Bush's body build shows off a flight suit to his advantage), say that he had a right to don the suit and make the landing because he flew planes in the National Guard. Only Katrina vanden Heuvel, editor of The Nation, who appeared on "Hardball," bothered to correct this misperception about Bush: he went AWOL during his service with the Guard (the National Guard refuses to release these records to the public).