"I was never pressured," Ridge said in an interview with USA Today. And in an appearance on "Good Morning America," the former Pennsylvania governor says people "are hyperventilating" about the assertion in his book, saying, "A consensus was reached. We didn't go up. The process worked."

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Big surprise, right? By 2004, anybody who didn't grasp that crying wolf was the Bush/Cheney administration's basic game plan was probably also astonished last January when the "Texas cowboy" who's never been seen on a horse chose a Dallas mansion over his beloved ranch. Golly, who's doing all that brush-cutting?

Indeed, the most fascinating aspect of the Ridge revelations has been a flame war that's broken out between establishment Washington pundits and less-reverent bloggers. The Atlantic's Marc Ambinder started it by observing in smug inside-the-Beltway fashion that he and like-minded colleagues were actually right to be wrong about fake terror warnings.

People who smelled a rat, see, "based their assumption on gut hatred for President Bush, and not on any evaluation of the raw intelligence." Whereas, sober-sided thinkers like him credited the Bush administration's good intentions.

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Ridge, who was also the governor of Pennsylvania, has a new book coming out at the beginning of next month. U.S. News & World Report's Paul Bedard reports on some details from the book:

Ridge was never invited to sit in on National Security Council meetings; was "blindsided" by the FBI in morning Oval Office meetings because the agency withheld critical information from him; found his urgings to block Michael Brown from being named head of the emergency agency blamed for the Hurricane Katrina disaster ignored; and was pushed to raise the security alert on the eve of President Bush's re-election, something he saw as politically motivated and worth resigning over.

Update: Via Marc Ambinder, the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette has more information on what concerned Ridge:

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"There is danger from all men. The only maxim of a free government ought to be to trust no man living with power to endanger the public liberty" -- John Adams, Journal, 1772.

"All men having power ought to be distrusted to a certain degree" -- James Madison, speech at the Constitutional Convention, July 11, 1787.

"All governments lie" -- journalist I.F. Stone, addressing journalism students on the one truth they'd be well-advised always to recall.

"Information asymmetry is always going to exist, and, living as we do in a Democratic [sic] system, most journalists are going to give the government the benefit of some doubt, even having learned lessons about giving the government that benefit" -- The Atlantic's Marc Ambinder, today, reacting to Tom Ridge's confession that the Bush administration heightened terror alerts for political gain, and justifying why journalists such as himself "were very skeptical when anti-Bush liberals insisted that what Ridge now says is true, was true."

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After the senator's decision to switch parties and become a Democrat, Republicans were pushing former Gov. Tom Ridge to run against him in 2010, and according to early polling, Ridge would have proven a formidable opponent. But on Thursday, Ridge announced that he's decided against throwing his hat in the ring.

Ridge's decision means that former Rep Pat Toomey, R-Pa., a conservative favorite whose entry in to the Republican primary was the key in driving Specter to the Democratic Party, might not face a seriouis opponent in his quest for his party's nomination. That's good news for conservatives, but probably bad news for the GOP generally.

Though Toomey would almost certainly have beaten Specter in a primary, polls show him trailing badly in the general. There's still plenty of time for him to make up that difference, of course, but Pennsylvania has gotten bluer and bluer in recent years, and it will be very hard for a virtually unknown conservative to beat a moderate who also has the advantage of incumbency.

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If Ridge -- who also served as director of Homeland Security in the last administration -- does decide to mount a campaign, the whole dynamic of the race would be affected. He'd have to take on former Rep. Pat Toomey in a Republican primary, which could be touchy; Toomey is a favorite of conservatives in the state and nationwide, while Ridge is more of a moderate. That could lead to the same kind of pitched battle that would have gone on between Specter and Toomey if the incumbent hadn't decided to switch parties.

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Over the past few days, however, the reaction to Biden's selection by the national press corps and Republicans set parameters of fairness for John McCain's vice-presidential choice. Discussion of Biden's real achievements and policy perspectives got short shrift while journalists repeatedly revisited his verbal stumbles and minor scandals.

If we must we pretend that the Republican ads tweaking Obama and Biden represent a serious argument, then we should apply the same standards to the Republicans. If we must constantly revisit the plagiarism flap that drove Biden from the presidential race more than 20 years ago, or the occasional stupidities he has uttered over the years, then we should likewise examine every error and embarrassment that have plagued Republican vice-presidential nominees over the past two decades.

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"If we just pick up like Ned Lamont wants us to do, get out by a date certain, it will be taken as a tremendous victory by the same people who wanted to blow up these planes in this plot hatched in England. It will strengthen them and they will strike again.''

Ned Lamont makes the obvious point: Lieberman's words sound "an awful lot" like something Dick Cheney would -- and did -- say. "It seemed almost orchestrated," Lamont tells the Associated Press. "It's sort of demeaning to the people of Connecticut ... I thought the senator and the vice president were both wrong to use that attack (strategy) on the voters of Connecticut."

Lamont isn't the only one. As Think Progress notes, even former Homeland Security Secretary Tom Ridge thinks Cheney and, by extension, Lieberman are off the mark in concluding that Lamont's primary win somehow emboldens the enemy. "That may be the way the vice president sees it," Ridge says, "but I dont see it that way, and I dont think most Americans see it that way."

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On Tuesday, Ridge was named to the board of directors of Savi Technology, a privately held Sunnyvale, Calif., multinational. The company supplies RFID (radio frequency identification technology) to the U.S. military. It's used to track and manage shipments of supplies and equipment to American forces in Iraq and elsewhere around the world.

In his new role, Ridge will be the latest and most high-profile RFID evangelist. "It's clear his experience and expertise in government and Homeland Security ... will be a great contribution to our strategies and developments," says Mark Nelson, a Savi spokesperson.

It was certainly savvy to sign up Ridge to endorse RFID, as the technology has many controversial applications. The Bush administration is in the process of adopting RFID technology as a way to keep track of not just things but also people.

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But they've also got one hell of a "To-Do List" for Bush's new security chief. For starters, the mammoth agency of 180,000 staffers is, by some accounts, still an organizational disaster zone ("The DHS is far from the nimble, integrated agency it needs to be," they note.) That's due at least in part to turf wars causing chaos and inertia inside the agency.

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Washington is getting a taste of life in a police state. My neighbors are used to security. We live in the "bubble" around the federal buildings on Capitol Hill. We always get extra attention from the U.S. Capitol Police, the Supreme Court Police, the Park Police, John Ashcroft's security detail (he lives around the corner) and D.C.'s city police, so we don't worry too much about petty crime on my block. But terrorism? We can't help thinking of it now.

Since Ridge raised the national threat alert level, we're living in a lockdown here: cement "Jersey" barricades with guards, some toting automatic rifles; ubiquitous surveillance, seen and unseen; and random searches, K-9 sniffs and I.D. checks. And thanks to banks of new floodlights, the sun no longer sets on Capitol Hill.

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Then additional information was released: The intelligence was mostly three to four years old (was the World Trade Center in this latest batch of targets?), al-Qaida's surveillance of U.S. buildings had been mostly conducted through the Internet and other "open sources," someone had opened the computer file again in January of this year for uncertain reasons, and Pakistani officials said that the captured material indicated no new al-Qaida planning.

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Citing "very credible" intelligence regarding terrorism threats, U.S. intelligence canceled 15 international flights in the last couple of weeks, diverted at least one more flight to Canada, and had F-16s shadow others as they approached their final destinations.

These seem to have been a bunch of false alarms. Sometimes it was a case of mistaken identity. For example, one of the "terrorists" on an Air France flight was a child whose name matched that of a terrorist leader; another was a Welsh insurance agent. Sometimes it was a case of assuming too much; British Airways Flight 223 was detained once and canceled twice, on three consecutive days, presumably because that flight number turned up on some communications intercept somewhere. In response to the public embarrassment from these false alarms, the government is slowly leaking information about a particular person who didn't show up for his flight, and two non-Arab-looking men who may or may not have had bombs. But these seem more like efforts to save face than the very credible evidence that the government promised.

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Yet on the Op-Ed pages and the propaganda chatter channels, we're assured that the world is a far safer place since the overthrow of Saddam Hussein. We're told that the Bush administration's muscular policies have forced Libya into surrender, but nobody mentions that Libya hasn't been a significant threat for at least a decade.

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A little more than six months later, the administration of President George W. Bush is making only a limited commitment to reduce the threat of shoulder-launched missiles, and critics both inside and outside the government say he is putting both passengers and the airline industry at risk.

The administration recently blocked two congressional measures to address the threat, including a comprehensive $9 billion plan to begin outfitting passenger jets with sophisticated anti-missile equipment. Instead, a new report by Bush's Department of Homeland Security says the administration is proposing a timetable in which the study and planning would not be completed until 2005, and the first widespread installation of anti-missile technology would be years away, at best. Only $2 million would be spent in the next few months to assemble staff and data on the risk posed by portable missiles; up to $60 million would be allocated next year to continue the study.

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In February, the Center for Public Integrity uncovered a confidential Justice Department draft of the Domestic Security Enhancement Act of 2003. The legislation picks up where the PATRIOT Act left off -- more wiretaps and secret searches, government access to credit reports and other personal records, a database of DNA samples, and provisions allowing the attorney general to revoke the U.S. citizenship of anyone who provides assistance to a group the government considers a "terrorist" organization.

The draft drew a barrage of criticism from across the political spectrum. The Lawyers Committee for Human Rights called it a "Department of Justice wish list" that would "endanger core civil liberties," while William Safire denounced it as both an "assault" and an "abomination."

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Nothing, generation after generation of them have concluded, brings alive a great moment of the past, or helps the reader to understand its context, better than an irony or twist in its minutia.

Who writes about the First World War without mentioning the assassination of Archduke Ferdinand? And who writes about Ferdinand without mentioning that his chauffeur hung a right at the wrong intersection and had to pull to a stop directly in front of the place where Serbian terrorist Gavrilo Princip was standing?

What story of the Civil War is complete without the journey of Wilmer McLean? He was a Virginia farmer who had a house near Manassas Junction, Va. After the first major battle of the war was fought along the banks of the stream that McLean's home overlooked -- Bull Run Creek -- Wilmer moved his family far away, for safety's sake. He picked a place called Appomattox Court House. Grant and Lee would use his new home for the signing of the armistice four years later.

Edmund Morris opened his first book on Theodore Roosevelt not with his subject's first day as president, nor the occasion of his charge up Kettle Hill in Cuba, but rather on Jan. 1, 1907, as T.R. shook hands with hundreds of ordinary citizens as part of the "open house" tradition of New Year's Day at the White House.

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