Modo Prediction time...


Tough one.

I'm thinking good.


Update: The results are in!


GOOD:




I think it would be far more useful, however, if we had a wheel with five colors to warn against incompetence.

Holy heather: At this level, John Ashcroft stays so busy whiting out lines of the Constitution, diluting Justice's civil rights division, lionizing the Second Amendment and robing naked statues that he forgets to give the president a detailed F.B.I. memo describing the time and place of the next terrorist attack.

Squeal teal: At this level, George Tenet, a rare Clinton holdover, so assiduously ingratiates himself with the president (he named the C.I.A. building after Poppy and keeps him in the loop) and has his minions spin the blame toward the F.B.I. that he can't manage to find even an hour to figure out how to infiltrate Al Qaeda.

Top-secret taupe: The president and vice president keep secret all the data that Americans need, on the spurious assumption that They Know Best (The Bush family motto). The Bushies become so obsessed with drawing attention to Bill Clinton's failure to eliminate Osama that they have no energy to eliminate Osama.

Bureaucratic balsam: Tom Ridge works so hard trying to prove his relevance that he becomes unable to do his irrelevant job, which is teaming with Norm Mineta to hire more of the highly trained airport professionals who drag 85-year-old dowagers and eight-month-old infants out of the security lines and make them remove their orthopedics and booties.

Visas-for-everyone violet: I.N.S. employees continue to show up for work, exponentially ratcheting up the risks to the American public.