Then, adding insult to injury, Education Secretary Paige has glibly characterized school teachers as terrorists. (He subsequently said he was only kidding, but this administration's systemic disconnection between rhetoric and reality gives us ample cause to wonder.)

Bush eagerly credits his policies with the recent creation of hundreds of thousands of jobs, though most of these offer lower pay than the millions previously lost. Attempting to shine the best possible light on the figures, he has proposed reclassifying fast-food preparation as a "manufacturing" job. Yet no matter how he juggles it, G.W.Bush can't squirm away from the fact that he is the first president since Herbert Hoover to preside over a net job loss.

Rather than addressing the abusive policy, the Bush White House has instead launched an assault against the soldiers and journalists who exposed the wrongdoing, claiming that such reporting "is undermining support for the war."

(So maybe you're not a senior. Do you have parents who are?)

However, NASA will indeed have to shift emphasis in one important sense.  Due in part to Bush's funding cuts, it will have to shut down the Hubble Space Telescope, whose astounding images have over the past 14 years reshaped the human vision of the universe.

Fair or not, this latest attempt at supply-side strategy has been remarkable only in the duration of its ineffectiveness. Because trickle-down does little to stimulate broad consumer demand (without which business has little incentive to increase production and hiring), its real value as an economic stimulus is minimal to non-existent.

To be fair, Bush can't be blamed for the onset of cyclical economic contraction. But the economy has languished, for far longer and at far greater overall cost in debt, jobs, and capital, than would likely have been the case with prudent and timely targeting of resources. Now that the economy is finally struggling to rebound in its natural cycle, Bush is predictably eager to take credit.

In addition, Bush initiatives have reduced IRS audits of corporations while increasing audits of individuals.

Bush's habit of playing fast and loose with the truth has squandered the good will of the world following the 9/11 attacks. American credibility has been eroded nearly to levels characteristic of China and Iran, whose peculiar notions of truth are traditionally defined more by policy than by reality. Victims of Bush's web of confusion and deceit include not only the men and women of the American armed forces, but also the coalition allies, whose leaders are now suffering the domestic political consequences for having allied themselves with an impulsive warmonger.

(Comment: It is the misfortune of these allied leaders to be so accused by their countrymen, when in fact the grim specter of an unchecked superpower, led by a man with no clear concept of reality and apparently few scruples, has forced them into the unpleasant role of damage control. While they fully understand the threat that the Bush "Axis of Evil" crusade poses to world peace, they nevertheless realize that it is only through their active involvement that there can be any hope of mitigating that threat. Deluged by public criticism, they daily struggle to keep Bush from losing his focus on terrorism, tossing diplomacy out the window, and turning the entire Middle East into a war zone. Blair and the others, of course, cannot defend their unpopular stance by publicly discussing the situation's full implications, for to do so would certainly destroy what limited leverage their alliance provides to restrain the Bush loose cannon. But this American applauds these dedicated, far-sighted, self-sacrificing statesmen, who place the welfare of the world above their own political futures. Would that we Yanks had the wisdom to elect such leaders!)