If events of the last year have made anything apparent it is that those who claimed that Bush was an idiot were not, as the saying goes, "misunderestimating" him.

If we can be bothered to remember that far back, much of the first years of Bush's reign were filled with voices from the left cautioning us that Bush was secretly a lot more savvy than he appeared to be in public--or even sitting alone eating pretzels. I'm sure that some people still think that Bush is just playing dumb to lull us into a false sense of security. But now Bush and crew have gotten us in such a frenzy of insecurity that even hardcore Bush denigrators like me have begun to wish that he really was at least a little bit smart. I'd gladly admit being wrong (just this once) if Bush were to pull off his Alfred E. Neumann mask and appear in his true guise as the Scarecrow from the Wizard of Oz. Heck, maybe instead of another useless email petition, we ought to send him a diploma and see what happens.

While I have never doubted the unplumbable dumbness of the Littlest Caesar, the real surprise is that his bosses, like Dick Cheney and Donald Rumsfeld, aren't the evil geniuses we thought they were. They may be even dumber than Bush since all Georgie ever really wanted to be was Baseball Commissioner while the neo-loons figured they were going to take over the whole world without breaking a sweat. As Dick Cheney once said, "hey, how hard can it be, especially once we trick the Russians and French into helping with the heavy lifting in Iraq?" And who can forget Donald Rumsfeld, who spent the last couple of years bragging about sophisticated American weapons like the digital video camera equipped Predator unmanned aircraft and now, in the wake of the Abu Ghraib torture scandal, is complaining to anybody who will listen that the American war machine was completely unprepared for the havoc caused by digital cameras?

At least we can finally answer the question that the 9-11 commission can't seem to convincingly convey: the mere fact that the hijacked airliners didn't get lost and crash into the Kremlin or a Sudanese aspirin factory lays to rest any questions about Bush's involvement in some kind of nefarious conspiracy.

The realization that the whole Bush administration is composed of imbeciles is not very comforting, mainly because, since this gang of ill-mannered doofuses has managed to gain control of the country and wreak such havoc, we the American people might not be as smart as we like to think we are--and I'm not talking about Bush's supporters. If we are to believe our own worst nightmare, we of the left opposition are clearly as dumb as gypsum drywall. No wonder so many lefties kept insisting, despite all evidence, that Bush was really pretty smart--it's downright embarrassing to have the country so easily taken over by people so absurdly inept. But at least I've finally figured out the problem the American left has always had in pushing its agenda--to echo the words of the replicant character Pris in the movie Blade Runner, "we are stupid and we will die." (I should point out that while in the movie Pris doesn't die, that was only because the studio executives insisted on tacking on a happy ending, a luxury which we in real life don't have, despite the best efforts of Karl Rove, inventor of the famous "mission accomplished," banner once described as the opening salvo in Bush's unstoppable 2004 reelection victory).

As either Abraham Lincoln or PT Barnum once said (I forget which one), "You can fool all of the people some of the time, and some of the people all the time, but you can't fool all of the people all of the time." The intervening century and a half makes it incumbent to attach an addendum to that morsel of wisdom, "unless you're talking about Americans, in which case anything is possible."

How else do you explain the fevered support for an "anybody but Bush" candidacy featuring a man whose every policy is an almost word for word plagiarism of Bush's own agenda. "But at least he's not Bush," say people when that uncomfortable fact is pointed out (and if they suspect you are thinking of voting for Ralph Nader they usually add "you fucking asshole").

Of course, John Kerry is clearly not George Bush. Their names are different, the two men don't look alike, they are demonstrably married to completely different women, and Bush is considered "likeable," an accusation which has never been leveled at John Kerry. The real watershed is of course that John Kerry actually fought (and committed war crimes) in an illegal and immoral war, while Bush managed to skip the whole thing (though for the life of me I can't figure out why that particular lack of hypocrisy on Kerry's part is supposed to be comforting).

Of course there are worse things Americans could be than just simply dumb. Things like, for example, being largely ignorant of the outside world, uninterested in expending effort to maintain their own democracy and equipped with a lifetime supply of weaponry that is smarter than they are. Oh, wait, that's us, too. Never mind. I've developed my own slogan for the 2004 election, "anybody but the American voter."