BUT WE WILL ANSWER THEM CRYPTICALLY, MUAHAHAHAHA!

An apparent change of policy for Bush and the time, or lack thereof, he intends to spend with the 9/11 commission?

President Bush will answer all the questions of a federal commission investigating the Sept. 11 attacks, the White House spokesman said today, suggesting that the president will be more flexible in his approach to the commission.

Commission members said late last month that President Bush and Vice President Dick Cheney had placed strict limits on the private interviews they will grant to the commission, saying that they would meet only with the panel's top two officials and that Mr. Bush would submit to only a single hour of questioning.

The apparent shift in the president's position today followed accusations by Senator John Kerry, the presumptive Democratic presidential nominee, that Mr. Bush was hindering the commission's investigation by not agreeing to more than an hour of questioning about intelligence and law enforcement blunders in the months and years before the 2001 attacks.

"He's going to answer all the questions they want to raise," the White House spokesman, Scott McClellan, told reporters today. When pressed, Mr. McClellan repeated this statement but did not clarify whether the time restriction had been dropped.

That's an impressive summation of this morning's gaggle.

So in short, they've gone from "one hour" to "answer all questions", which may or may not mean "all the time the panel needs". Still, at this point they've only agreed to have Bush meet with just the two co-chairs.

Lo and behold, we have stumbled onto the "pay stubs and dental records" strategy yet again!

What the hell does that mean? It means that the Bushies are following their usual trend of backing away from an unpopular position or decision in as politically incremental and cryptic a manner as humanly possible. This is the reason why Scotty-doo was so reluctant this morning to come out and actually tell Helen Thomas and the rest of the press corps that yes, Bush is willing to sit with the commission for more than an hour. "Not an hour", compared to "An hour" would be too much of an about-face for Bush's purposes. Especially since he's trying to attack John Kerry as being a flip-flopper.

By the way, someone needs to start a Scott McClellan "unprecedented cooperation" drinking game. Of course, mentioning "unprecedented cooperation" as a phrase doesn't mean much when the context of the cooperation is a virtually unprecedented event in American history. It means even less considering that Gerald Ford testified before the House Judiciary Committee when he was running the show.

So let's give it a week or two, and we'll eventually have McClellan on record measuring Bush's committment to the panel in terms of time ("As long as...") and not just by amount of questions ("As many as..."). And maybe we can get the whole panel in there too. Clinton and Gore were happy enough for such stipulations. And the right has been screaming about how they were the ones who were responsible for 9/11, so Bush should be fine, right?