It looks like the press has gone through the batting order because Lawrence Wilkerson is up again:

WASHINGTON - Former Secretary of State Colin Powell's chief of staff says President Bush was "too aloof, too distant from the details" of post-war planning, allowing underlings to exploit Bush's detachment and make bad decisions.

In an Associated Press interview Monday, former Powell chief of staff Lawrence Wilkerson also said that wrongheaded ideas for the handling of foreign detainees after Sept. 11 arose from a coterie of White House and Pentagon aides who argued that "the president of the United States is all-powerful," and that the Geneva Conventions were irrelevant.

Wilkerson blamed Vice President Dick Cheney, Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld and like-minded aides. Wilkerson said that Cheney must have sincerely believed that Iraq could be a spawning ground for new terror assaults, because "otherwise I have to declare him a moron, an idiot or a nefarious bastard."

Wilkerson suggested his former boss may agree with him that Bush was too hands-off about Iraq.

"What he seems to be saying to me now is the president failed to discipline the process the way he should have and that the president is ultimately responsible for this whole mess," Wilkerson said.

Yada, yada, yada. I'm not even going to check if what Wilkerson says here is much different than what he said during his last at-bat because it's all recollection and unless he went to a shrink to get some help retrieving some memories, it's all the same.

What likely is slightly different is that it is shriller because the last time he got a base-on-balls and then was thrown out. It sounds like he's swinging for the fence now.

What gets me is that this isn't even news, in the traditionally professional sense. It's manufactured news -- an AP press interview for God's reporters' with BDS sake. (Is that you, Anne Gearan?) I'd really love to have someone ask how this news joke was initiated.

Look for it in the one of the hundreds of dead tree versions that subscribe to the AP 'news' wire, nearest you.