"If I find out who it was, they'd pay a serious price," Bush said of the bombing. "I mean a serious price."

"Now, what does that mean?" Letterman asked, a follow-up Bush doesn't often get when he's asked about such bravado.

"That means they're not going to like what happened to them," Bush said, and the crowd went wild.

"Now are you talking about retaliation or due process of law?" Letterman asked.

"Heh-heh," Bush said. "I'm talking about gettin' the facts and lettin' them know we don't appreciate it and there's a serious consequence ... And I'll decide what that consequence is."

Break to commercial; James Brown sang "Get On Up."

The Middle East. Bosnia. Rwanda. The environment. Letterman kept asking serious questions; Bush handled himself fairly well. Sometimes the questions were silly -- comparing ancient ethnic hatreds in the Middle East to Mets fans vs. Yankees fans, for instance, or naive questions about why hate exists. But I swear, Letterman asked tougher questions of Bush than I've seen anyone ask him in a while. And since it was his show, he got to ask follow-ups, and often he did.

"I heard something a couple weeks ago coming out of your campaign and I just thought, 'Well, this is not true, he's not really going to do that,'" Letterman said. "Talking about wilderness lands up in Alaska or the Arctic Circle -- you're going to take trucks up there and drill for oil. And I said, 'Oh, that's a joke! He's not going to do that!'"

"Yeah, well, then you're not going to have any natural gas if we don't do that," Bush said.

"Don't you have bad air pollution down in Texas?" Letterman asked.

"We got a lot of cars," Bush said.

"Is it the worst city in the country for air pollution, is that true?" Letterman asked.

"Well, we're the best in reducing toxic pollutions," Bush said.

"But it's a problem -- isn't it a problem?"

"Well, it's a big city!" Bush whined. "It's a big city!"

"It's not as big as New York! It's not as big as Los Angeles!"

"We're making progress," Bush said.

"But listen to me, governor, here's my point," Letterman said.

"I am listening to you," Bush said, "I don't have any choice but to listen to ya!"

Letterman asked Bush about the time Gore was on the show and pledged to lead the country in efforts to save the planet. "Do you believe him when he said that?" Letterman asked.

"Not really," Bush said. And the crowd went wild.

After a Letterman shtick on the need for alternative energy sources, he brought the segment to a close. "Sooner or later, we're going to have to make a significant change."

"I think we can do that," Bush said.

"Not just lip service, not just an item on a campaign," Letterman said. "The polar ice cap is melting, that's all I know."

By point of contrast, on CNBC earlier in the day, Bush was allowed to yet again make misleading comments about his role in securing the Texas Patients' Bill of Rights, legislation that, among other provisions, allows patients to sue their HMOs or insurance companies.

What happened in Texas on a patient's right to sue is pretty simple. Bush vetoed a patients bill of rights, one offered by a conservative Republican, primarily because it contained a right-to-sue provision. Bush did instruct his insurance commissioner to enact by regulation other, less controversial, provisions of the bill, such as allowing a woman to use her OB-GYN as her primary care physician. But when the right to sue came up once again in 1997, Bush had one of his aides do everything he could to sabotage the bill. Two Republican state senators complained about it on the floor of the state Senate. Then, when the bill passed regardless with what looked to be veto-proof support, Bush let the bill become law without his signature -- as something of a protest.

Thus the report today that had President Clinton saying that he "almost gagged" when he heard Bush claim to have supported the effort in the third and final presidential debate.

"I'm going to use an indelicate quote here, because it was just given to me," CNBC's Ron Insana said to Bush. "I did not hear the president say this myself, but earlier in the day, it was suggested that President Clinton said he 'gagged' on your support for the patients bill of rights, and suggested that you vetoed one in Texas, and can't understand your position."

Bush allowed that he had vetoed "a bill, because it was a lousy piece of legislation. I got my insurance commissioner to write a series of rules and regulations that then became the law -- because of leadership. And I signed it into law. We're one of the first states in the Union to allow a patient to sue an insurance company after there's an internal review process. Now, we've got a good piece of legislation, and so the president needs to take a look at the facts."

Did you catch that? He rightly said that he had signed a "series of rules and regulations" into law. Then he said that "we're one of the first states in the Union to allow a patient to sue an insurance company," without mentioning the fact that he did everything he could to prevent patients from doing that.

Insana let Bush get away with that, immediately changing the subject. Letterman proved way tougher.

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