GEMS IN THE KITTY LITTER (via Robert Schwartz):

Kitty Kelley Gives Bush the Sinatra Treatment (Andrew Ferguson , 9/21/04, Bloomberg)

I don't want to suggest that ``The Family'' is completely one-dimensional. Occasionally you come across anecdotes that a lawyer would call an ``admission against interest'' -- charming stories running counter to Kelley's theme of unrelieved Bush depravity and which can therefore, by the rules of evidence, be presumed true.

Since you won't find these in more sensational accounts of ``The Family,'' I will close with three of them.

Story one: Laura Welch, the future first lady, was still a mystery to the Bush family on the day she married George W. in 1978. The Bush matriarch, Prescott's widow, tried to interrogate her after the ceremony.

``What do you do?'' the old lady asked her.

``I read,'' Laura replied.

Story Two: In 1976 CIA Director George H.W. Bush was tired of Secretary of State Henry Kissinger's gold-plated reputation for brilliance -- exemplified by his insistence on being called ``Dr.''

One CIA aide, referring to ``Dr. Kissinger,'' was quickly corrected by his boss.

``The (expletive deleted) doesn't perform surgery or make house calls, does he?''

Story Three: Though he's disdained Yale since his graduation in 1968, George W. Bush agreed to host a 35th class reunion.

One classmate, Petra Leilani Akwai, had undergone a sex change since graduation, and partygoers waited to see the reaction of Bush -- understood by all correct-thinking liberals to be a crude and backward boor.

Akwai greeted the president in the receiving line.

``You might remember me as Peter when we left Yale,'' she said.

``And now you've come back as yourself,'' Bush said.

It has been said by pious historians that we elect not only a man but his family to the presidency. Taken together, I'd say these three anecdotes -- funny and poignant and revealing -- form the best reason yet for President Bush's re-election. All thanks go to Kitty Kelley.