To comprehend the real hilarity of the current meltdown at 1600 Pennsylvania Ave., review (and relish) the very un-presidential activities of the occupant during the last week.

First, there was this tidbit: Maximum Commandante Dick Cheney sends out invitations to GOP loyalists for a June 19 dinner to honor President-Figurehead "W" for, among other things, confronting and fighting terrorism. Wrapping the administration in the flag and castigating critics as treasonous is, of course, the favorite spin-tactic of this hell-bent-on-authoritarianism administration.

That I got one of these invites (sorry, Dick, but our publisher won't let me write off $25,000 for a table for 10 to my expense account) shows just how utterly incompetent the administration is at assessing friends and foes.

Among the perks for stuffing the GOP's pockets, the White House promised some photos, including one of Bush on Air Force One Sept. 11.

Without a doubt, that's raising campaign cash while standing on a pile of corpses. The awful tastelessness of the gutter-level ploy gagged even the docile, fearful-to-be-called-unpatriotic Democrats and mainstream media.

Just as that rather tepid little bit of Bush smarminess was beginning to subside, the really big, smelly chunk of merde hit the air-circulating system.

Prior to Sept. 11, Bush had had warnings -- oh yes he had -- about a terrorist threat. His mouthpiece, Ari Fleischer, had lied -- oh yes he had and despicably so -- when shortly after 3,000 innocent people died in the World Trade Center and Pentagon attacks, the spokesman proclaimed "no warnings."

The press has acted as if this story smashed into their computers with "no warnings." But it's been there all along. The Los Angeles Times' very savvy Washington reporter, Richard Serrano, reported Sept. 20 -- nine days after the terrorist attack -- that "FBI and CIA officials were advised in August that as many as 200 terrorists were slipping into this country and planning 'a major assault on the United States.'"

No one paid much attention to Serrano, because to have done so would have risked the ire of the administration. As with other emperor-has-no-clothes stories -- such as the suspicious activities of more than a hundred of Israelis, dozens of whom were collared while trying to penetrate federal facilities, reported by CL, Fox News, Salon.com, among others -- most of the establishment suck-up press put on blinders.

Even after CBS broke the story mid-week that there had been credible warnings of a terrorist attack, many in the press did their damnedest to see no evil. The Atlanta Journal-Constitution, for example, buried a teensy report on page B4 of last Thursday's paper. The national press was equally slow to react until the mounting howls of outrage from Capitol Hill made reporting on the debacle unavoidable.

But let's talk about Cynthia McKinney for a minute. This is the fun stuff.

On March 25, the DeKalb congresswoman, who certainly isn't shy about stating her mind (that's called "understatement"), gave an interview on a Berkeley, Calif., radio station in which she raised two points.

First, she made this statement: "We know there were numerous warnings of the events to come on Sept. 11th. What did this administration know and when did it know it, about the events of Sept. 11th? Who else knew, and why did they not warn the innocent people of New York who were needlessly murdered? What do they have to hide?"

And she raised the issue that people close to the Bush administration were "poised" to make a bundle off the war -- especially the Carlyle Group, a sort of shadow government that is the perfect expression of the "military-industrial complex." Carlyle, McKinney commented, made a quarter-billion bucks in one day recently by selling stock in its subsidiary United Defense Industries, a scheme made possible by the post-9-11 arms build-up.

And, yes, W's dad, former President George H.W. Bush, is busily bellying up to the Carlyle feeding trough. And, yes, as Republican Sen. John McCain and others have noted, there is an orgy of arms profiteering going on -- some of it obvious (a Boeing deal that would have gouged taxpayers for $20 billion to lease 100 tankers, then re-gouged us when the company took the planes back) and some not so obvious (the total cave-in to globalization).

What McKinney did not say was that W had allowed the Sept. 11 attack to occur so that Dad and his billionaire buddies could profit. But by putting the two thoughts in relatively close temporal proximity, she all but hung a target on herself.

And, boy, did the critics have a mud-splattering orgy at McKinney's expense! Bush spokesman Scott McLellan called her comments "ludicrous, baseless views." Georgia U.S. Sen. Zell Miller derided McKinney as "loony," "dangerous" and "irresponsible."

In a bit of journalist flatulence, an AJC editorial chided that not only was McKinney the "most prominent nut" among conspiracy theorists, but that merely calling for a congressional investigation of what happened Sept. 11 was "nutty."

(Memo to AJC: Now that Sens. Joe Lieberman and McCain have introduced legislation to create an independent National Commission on Terrorist Attacks Upon the United States, are they also "nutty" or merely fond of overly long names?)

Laying it on even thicker was the AJC editorial page editor, Cynthia Tucker, who harrumphed that "the ability to grapple with complexities -- to ponder a complicated issue and propose rational, nuanced solutions -- should be a prerequisite for service on the national stage. That alone renders McKinney ... unfit for Congress."

(Memo to Tucker: Would your standard preclude Bush from public office, too?)

Creative Loafing joined in the braying, running a piece last week by columnist Richard Shumate, who called McKinney's statement "deluded drivel."

The Atlanta-based, ultra-right Southeastern Legal Foundation called for an investigation -- not of what happened on 9-11 and who knew what when, but of McKinney. "Upsetting and so outrageous," foundation President Phil Kent sniffed about the congresswoman.

The conservative National Review indulged in a bit of racism, declaring this month of McKinney's comments: "The political culture of black America is almost as paranoid as that of the Mideast."

Timothy Noah, writing for the online magazine Slate, dismissed McKinney's suggestion that Bush had warnings prior to 9-11 as "ugly and unfounded."

And, nationally, the most acrid vitriol splattered forth from syndicated columnist Kathleen Parker, who on April 17 positively frothed with indignation at McKinney, calling her "idiotic, absurd and -- under other circumstances, hilarious, if you like slapstick."

(By comparison, the press is almost entirely mute at the most obscene and racist statements by white-guy members of Congress. To wit, earlier this month, House Majority Leader Dick Armey, R-Texas, called for the ethnic cleansing of all Arabs from Palestine and Israel -- something not seriously advocated by any but the most extreme-right Israelis. Did anyone call that Slobodan Milosevic-style bellicosity "idiotic" or "absurd"? Hardly.)

Two more derisive comments deserve note. Carlyle Group spokesman Chris Ullman asked: "Did she say these things while standing on a grassy knoll in Roswell, N.M.?" And Bush arch-dissembler Fleischer proclaimed: "All I can tell you is the congresswoman must be running for the hall of fame of the Grassy Knoll Society."

I find it interesting that the spokesmen for, in effect, two generations of Bushes, use precisely the same allusion, "grassy knoll" -- which, in case you've been in suspended animation for the last four decades, refers to the much-derided theory of other gunmen involved in the assassination of President John Kennedy. If I believed in "X-Files"-caliber conspiracies, I'd wonder if the White House gave orders to Carlyle about how to attack McKinney -- or if Carlyle gave orders to the Bush flunkies.

But observe that neither Fleischer nor Ullman exactly deny McKinney's allegations. It's called the non-denial-denial, a favorite tool of deception honed by Richard Nixon and, now refined by Bush.

So, as the week drew to a close, we see Bush touts and McKinney foes resorting to furious obstinacy and frantic repositioning.

The AJC's Tucker, in what is becoming a Vendetta of the Cynthias, told me she still regards McKinney as "outrageous" and "outlandish." Tucker wouldn't budge an inch on her criticism -- despite the fact that McKinney absolutely hit the bull's-eye in her call for a congressional investigation.

More interesting is what's happening in Washington as the administration confronts headlines such as the New York Post's "Bush knew!" How do you explain a CIA briefing delivered to Bush Aug. 6 while he kicked up his cowboy boots at his Crawford, Texas, ranch? How do you explain Attorney General John Ashcroft heeding warnings and deciding to fly chartered jets -- while leaving the American public uninformed of the threats? How do you explain the FBI memo from Phoenix concerning an unusual number of Arabs in flight training? How do you explain the pay-attention shout from a Minneapolis FBI agent who warned terror suspect Zacarias Moussaoui was the sort of guy who "could fly something into the World Trade Center?"

If you're Bush, the answer is easy. Hoist up the flag. If that doesn't work, obfuscate.

For a start, the Bushies tried claiming that the pre-9-11 warnings had, as National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice maintained, "no specific" details. That didn't work because Rice was forced to concede that the Aug. 6 briefing contained two references -- I guess you could call them "specific" references -- to airline hijackings.

Cheney (bring up the Darth Vader theme music, please) denounced critics as "thoroughly irresponsible" for even hinting that a probe might clear the air.

There's no dispute that McKinney can be strident and abrasive, which last time I checked was still permitted by what's left of the Bush-savaged Constitution. But she made the best summation I can find of last week's events:

"It now becomes clear why the Bush administration has been vigorously opposing congressional hearings. The Bush administration has engaged in a conspiracy of silence. If committed and patriotic people had not been pushing for disclosure, today's revelations would have been hidden by the White House."

By Friday, Bush had waded in by denouncing Democrats whom he said were "second guessing" him. Of course, that raises the question about whether one can "second guess" someone who hasn't got a clue.

Senior Editor John Sugg -- whose motto is, "When criticizing the government, always keep your passport handy" -- can be reached at 404-614-1241 or at john.sugg@creativeloafing.com.