The president took an honest and sincere step toward covering up the recent questions of intelligence (the CIA’s, not his) with his creation of a bipartisan (emphasis on the “partisan”) commission this week. But the question remains: Are we supposed to buy this bullshit?

That question aside, and the answer is obviously a resounding “yes,” issues still remain about the quality of intelligence the administration is receiving about terrorism. If the CIA thinks there are large deposits of chemical or biological weapons in an underdeveloped nation like Iraq, based, I might add, on some barbershop rumor floating around Nigeria, what does this mean for the safety of the country? Are we pretty much left at the mercy of the incompetence of terrorists? Much like they are left at the mercy of our own incompetence.

It might be easier for the American public if they knew exactly how intelligence is gathered for the purposes of national security. First and foremost, we buy it. Any episode of Starsky & Hutch should display this adequately. Foreign equivalents of Huggy Bears come nosing around our embassies, and back alley deals galore abound.

The second way is the kind we think of it most often: large, burly American national security agents wearing fake beards and dressed in swami hats and Lawrence of Arabia robes. These are the real heroes, the deceitful, backstabbing undercover agents who get the secretest information straight from the horse’s mouth by putting their lives on the line in barely plausible disguises. There is no more dangerous job in the world, except for being an employee of Phil Spector. Many is the time some jihad-crazy Muslim terrorist flips out and frisks you to yell out, “Abdul’s wearing a wire!” It’s all over then, sir.

There is also what the government calls “option three”: Kicking in doors of suspected terrorists, arresting them on suspicion and searching their base of operations without warrant. Right now this is still hard to do overseas, with their difficult laws preventing illegal search and seizure, at least in the more Westernized countries and some of the third world, but rollback in constitutionally-guaranteed rights in the states has made it a lot easier to fight terrorism on our own turf. We might have to annex the world before they agree.

So whose balls were dropped on this particular outing? Democrats suggest the administration manipulated intelligence to manufacture consent for an unjustifiable war with Iraq. Plausible, yes, and even the most likely case, which makes it a poor choice to discuss in this column. So I point the blame squarely at the acting schools in this country.

What kinds of intelligence operatives are we turning out? Nervous, jittery young rubes who make poor choices in their acting and offer only an overbaked performance any first-year Hamas fanatic could see through. Our guys show up on their doorsteps, spewing anti-American rhetoric in a British accent because it’s all they can do, and the terrorist masterminds of the world are laughing at us. They tell our guys six or seven times a month they’re ready to launch a major attack on our soil, when in fact their biggest effort is not to giggle while they discuss fake plans to use dirty bombs and chemical agents.

Hopefully this nine-person distraction Bush is calling a bipartisan commission will get right to the heart of our off-off-Broadway operatives. We’re the richest nation on the planet, and our security is something we should not be paying half-price for. I say, shell out the $20 million for Pacino. De Niro, Hoffman, any of these guys. We should at least be able to afford Billy Dee Williams. He was fantastic in Mahogany.