The Bush family is very good at character assassination. Back in 1988 when pere Bush ran for President, he used the most despicable political commercial in the history of American elections, the infamous "Willie Horton" television ad, to destroy the front running Democratic candidate, Governor of Massachusetts Michael Dukakas. Massachusetts's law allowed convicts weekend furloughs. During one of those furloughs, a convicted black criminal, Willie Horton, had raped a white woman. Although the law predated Governor Dukakas who had nothing to do with its enactment, the Bush pere's ad, which showed the threatening picture of Willie Horton, implied that Governor Dukakas had no problem with black criminals raping white women! Senior Bush knew that playing the racist ad would reap him an electoral windfall because white males, who overwhelmingly vote Republican, would be incensed! They were. (The last time a majority of the white males voted for a Democratic presidential candidate was forty years ago, in 1964, for Lyndon Johnson).

Taking a cue from his dad, the current Bush ran a series of television commercials to define John Kerry negatively. The ads blamed Senator John Kerry for everything. Higher gasoline prices (now over $2 a gallon)? Kerry's fault. The mess in Iraq? Partly Kerry's fault. This is reminiscent of Napoleon (Stalin) blaming Snowball (Trotsky) for everything that went wrong in George Orwell's "Animal Farm" (Soviet Union). The most outrageous ad, however, is the one accusing Kerry of being soft on national security and of flip-flopping on issues. John Kerry opposed the Vietnam War while a student at Yale in the mid-1960s. When his country called on him, however, Kerry enlisted, went to Vietnam, fought bravely, was injured and won a chestful of medals for his bravery and service to the nation. After returning home, Kerry was consistent and continued to oppose the war. George W. Bush was also at Yale in the mid-1960s and he SUPPORTED the Vietnam War. When his country called on him, however, Bush DID NOT enlist. Bush probably thought that only poor whites and blacks should fight and die in Vietnam. Instead, Bush called his dad, then a Congressman, who used his influence to get his son into the National Guard, which did not fight in Vietnam, in the process queue-jumping over 500 candidates ahead of Bush, who did not have similar political clout. Bush "did" his service by flying planes in the safe skies over Texas, where his attendance was spotty, and in Alabama, where there are no records of his attendance. Therefore, it is a tad hypocritical, if not outrageous, for Mr. Bush to dump on Kerry and to flaunt his own "patriotic" credentials.

Mr. Bush is operating under the not necessarily unfounded assumption that American voters are somewhat gullible, have short attention spans, can be swayed by the right sound bites on TV and can be trusted to trust their "war President," which is how Mr. Bush defines himself. That is why Mr. Bush is still in a statistical dead heat with Senator Kerry in the opinion polls. The writer can never forget the photograph of the two beaming Bushes that was published in the newspapers, the first time the two met after the "victory" in Iraq last year. Senior Bush seemed to be telling Junior: "You did it, son! I did not have the courage to go to Baghdad. You did it, George!" I was reminded of the adage: "Fools rush in where angels fear to tread."

As it turns out, Mr. Bush may have been too clever by half. It is not wise to underestimate the intelligence of all Americans. Critics of Mr. Bush are becoming bolder. Says Richard Cohen of The Washington Post: "(Bush) has been unforgivingly incompetent so far, going to war for one reason, staying for another and layering contradictory facts with Sunday school rhetoric. Fallujah, a compromised compromise, becomes a sterling success in the president's mouth. A systematic failure to abide by the Geneva Convention becomes the kinky work of a few. The war over WMDs become one over terror. And Ahmed Chalabi, the erstwhile George Washington of Iraq, becomes Benedict Arnold virtually overnight. The Bush administrations rap on John Kerry is that he is inconsistent. The president's virtue, on the other hand, is supposedly his consistency. But to stick to the same rhetoric when the facts have changed, to insist on what is palpably false, to render black as white and to say it all with a childlike faith in civics class bromides is not commendable consistency. It is, instead, the mark of a narrow mind overwhelmed by large events."

Mind has always been one of Mr. Bush's problems. This was evident in the juvenile manner he had defined EVERYONE in the world: "Either you are with us or you are with the terrorists." It is as though everyone in the world had to define themselves by either of the choices Mr. Bush had given them! A letter to The New York Times on May 28 holds Mr. Bush responsible for Abu Ghraib atrocities: "When (Bush) indiscriminately depicts our opponents as "evil"; boasts that we will track them down "dead or alive"; and in his State of the Union address in 2003 slyly observes of suspected terrorists who have been arrested or "met a different fate," "Let's put it this way, they are no longer a problem for the United States and our friends and allies," it should be no surprise that those below him in the chain of command take their lead from the commander in chief."

Princeton University Professor and The New York Times columnist Paul Krugman adds in his May 28 column: "People who get their news by skimming the front page, or by watching TV, must be feeling confused by the sudden change in Bush's character. For more than two years after 9/11, he was a straight shooter, all moral clarity and righteousness. But now those people hear about a president who won't tell a straight story about why he took us to war in Iraq or how that war is going, who can't admit to and learn from mistakes, and who won't hold himself or anyone else accountable. What happened? The answer, of course, is that the straight shooter never existed. He was a fictitious character that the press, for various reasons, presented as reality. The truth is that the character flaws that currently have even conservative pundits fuming have been visible all along. Mr. Bush's problems with the truth have long been apparent to anyone willing to check his budget arithmetic. His inability to admit mistakes has also been obvious for a long time. So why did the press credit Mr. Bush with virtues that reporters knew he did not possess? One answer is misplaced patriotism. After 9/11 much of the press seemed to reach a collective decision that it was necessary, in the interest of national unity, to suppress criticism of the commander in chief."

Mr. Krugman concludes: "And some journalists could not bring themselves to believe that the president of the United States was being dishonest about such grave matters. Finally, let's not overlook the role of intimidation. After 9/11, if you were thinking of saying anything negative about the president, you had to be prepared for an avalanche of hate mail. You had to expect right-wing pundits and publications to do all they could do to ruin your reputation. The Bush administration, knowing all this, played the press like a fiddle. But has that era come to an end? A new Pew survey finds 55 percent of journalists in the national media believing that the press has not been critical enough of President Bush. More important, journalists seem to be acting on that belief. Amazing things have been happening lately. The usual suspects tried to silence reporting about prison abuses by accusing critics of undermining troops -- but the reports keep coming. The attorney general has called yet another terror alert -- but the press raised questions about why. (At a White House morning briefing, Terry Moran of ABC News actually said what many thought during other conveniently timed alerts: "There is a disturbing possibility that you are manipulating the American public in order to get a message out.") It may not last. In July 2002, according to Dana Milbank of The Washington Post -- who had tried, at great risk to her career, to offer a realistic picture of the Bush presidency -- "the White House press corps showed its teeth" for the first time since 9/11. It did not last: the administration beat the drums of war, and most of the press relapsed into docility. But this time may be different. And if it is, Mr. Bush -- who has always depended on that docility -- may be in even more trouble than the latest polls suggest."