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The economy! The sinking of the Dow! Enron! Halliburton! Harken! Worldcom! The trampling of civil liberties! John Ashcroft! The intelligence failures of September 11! Indecision on the Northern Alliance! Israel! Anthrax! Tom Ridge! Budget deficits! Iraq! By any standards, the high approval ratings of President George W. Bush are remarkable. Obviously, the Cowboy President has convinced Americans he is a leader. They're buying his talk of good versus evil, his talk of those who aren't with us are against us. Texas talk, right out of the movies. "When I take action, I'm not going to fire a $2 million missile at a $10 empty tent and hit a camel in the butt," Bush said shortly after September 11. It was something his father would never--could never--say. You have the genetic heritage of Barbara Bush's sharp tongue to thank for that. For George W. Bush the notion of going after Saddam Hussein is not an act of jingoism, but raw and natural instinct. Texas is native habitat for every category of poisonous snake found in the Lower 48. (continued on page 166)W(continued from page 124)

That fact is drummed into the brain of every school kid down here from first grade on. It's a point of pride. The highway sign that greets out-of-state visitors reads don't mess with texas. And the unofficial slogan of the Texas Dental Association is: "If you want to maintain healthy teeth, brush after every meal and mind your own business." That's an ethos encrypted into the cell structure of anybody who ever amounted to anything in Texas.

Those people who now persist in burning the effigy of George W. Bush in places the president cannot pronounce need to understand his Lone Star streak. In 1941 Lyndon Johnson lost a race for the U.S. Senate to W. Lee "Pass the Biscuits, Pappy" O'Daniel, who traveled the state reciting the poem The Boy Who Never Got Too Old to Comb His Mother's Hair. Texans are a druid-like bunch, after all, and you have to be one of us to comprehend why we do some of the things we do.

The first time I met the president of the United States, he was holding a small radio to his right ear. This was in 1990, at the Texas Republican state convention, and 44-year-old George W. Bush was listening to a ball game. His father happened to be occupying the Oval Office at the time.

A genuine political marvel and honest-to-God cowboy named Clayton Williams was enjoying his coronation as the Republican nominee for governor. From a political standpoint, Texas at the time was a state of personal disasters.

The year before, Texan Jim Wright, Speaker of the U.S. House of Representatives, had resigned from Congress over a scandal that began when the House Ethics Committee investigated a deal in which he wrote a skinny book for oddly fat royalties. And poor John Tower had been disgraced in confirmation hearings for the post of Secretary of Defense, characterized as a chronic hoister of skirts and cocktail glasses--the party boy of the Senate.

Now came this Clayton Williams cat, a man who had sprung to political fame from the vast nothingness of west Texas, the prairie primeval, on the basis of television spots in which he issued a blood oath to introduce Texas potheads and punks "to the joys of busting rocks." The actors employed to play the convicts in the memorable TV ads were actually members of the rodeo team at Sul Ross State University in Alpine, Texas.

Regular Republicans, the regents of the realm, were appalled by the sudden rise of Claytie, as he was known to his adoring fan base, in 1990. It was well known that Williams had been involved in at least two fistfights. He'd smoked his foes in the Republican primary, but by convention time Williams had flown his balloon into some righteous flak by cracking a joke about rape and confessing to banging Mexican bordertown whores. Williams was proof that attempting to insert decorum into Texas politics was like trying to outlive Bob Hope.

While Claytie spoke, I approached George W. Bush and was able to divert him from his game just long enough to talk about Williams. Bush said, "The question on my mind is how has he dealt personally with the adverse stuff that happened after the primaries"--presumably Claytie's bad press on his "relax and enjoy it" comment--"has all that changed him? Has this changed his zest for politics?" And right then, I learned something about our future president.

Allow me to share this secret: It is impossible for Bush to tell a lie. His eyes betray him every time. So, while Bush was hardly presenting a resounding endorsement of Williams, what his eyes were declaring, with unmistakable clarity, was, "If this hayshaker actually becomes the governor, he'll set the Republican cause in Texas back 50 years."

When Williams finished his speech, he offered a resounding tribute to pols who had helped push Texas into the corral of rock-ribbed Republican states. He listed Bill Clements, the first Republican to occupy the Governor's Mansion since Reconstruction, and he talked about Phil Gramm, and then he mentioned two or three other names. Williams somehow omitted the name of George Herbert Walker Bush, and even though our 41st president was about as Texan as Charles DeGaulle, he owned a mailing address in Houston.

Claytie walked offstage and smack into W., who promptly eviscerated him in no uncertain terms. "He told Claytie to get his you-know-what-ing ass back up there on that stage and recognize his father," is how one of Claytie's campaign aides remembers it.

While George W.'s ferocious allegiance to his presidential father was obvious, the extent of his involvement in the administration has been underestimated. It was George W., in fact, who personally confronted John Sununu, the old New Hampshire egghead, as George H.'s White House chief of staff. After Sununu began experiencing media heat for alleged excesses with government-funded perks, W. paid a call and personally asked Sununu to "step aside because you're hurting my dad."

I like to think now that I was on the spot at the moment when George W. Bush experienced his grand epiphany to grasp the banner and mount his own political destiny. When Clayton Williams was having his butt reamed by George W. on that summer Saturday in Fort Worth, I was watching from a distance of about 100 feet. I could not hear what Bush was saying nor could I read his lips. But from that distance, I could sure read George W.'s eyes, and they strongly suggested that when it came to politics, the man was becoming impatient with the best seat in the house and now desired to enter the game.

People in these parts like to say that the reason rich Texans pack their offspring away to the Ivy League is that they will be taught to say "That's interesting," rather than "No shit."

In the particular case of George W. Bush, multitudes of instances can be cited in which that lesson didn't take. That's because George W. is Texan all the way down to his tonsils and toenails, with his cultural and spiritual taproot set deep into that state's western regions, the Lone Star outback.

When George Herbert Walker Bush finished college and heeded Horace Greeley's advice that if you're looking to cash in, head for the sticks, he didn't do it in half measures. He landed way out in Midland, amid the sand fleas and tarantulas, where the wind will blow the mustard off your hot dog. It gave young W. the experience of growing up around individuals who are proud to think of themselves as oil field trash but also as good people.

Parts of west Texas were made even better by the fact that the water supply contained natural dosages of lithium. "More so around El Paso, but it's still a minuscule amount. Theoretically, it may help them to be more relaxed or mellow. I've heard people say there's less violence in that area, but I haven't seen any studies to support it," says Dr. Joel Holiner, a Dallas psychiatrist.

While we are presented with the image of a population of blissed-out zombies riding in pickups, no one is suggesting that a taste for lithium lured George W. back to the harsh landscape of his youth after college in New England. Nor does anybody promote the notion that Bush was giddy on ground-water when he decided to run for Congress out there in 1978.

"I was sort of a professional politician, and I'd never heard of George W. Bush, and hadn't heard that much about his father, when he decided to run," says Kent Hance, who can now claim to be the only person to whup W.'s ass in a political campaign. Hance was the Democrat and Bush, of course, the Republican in the congressional race in 1978. The Democrat had grown up in the most distant reaches of the Panhandle, in the community of Dimmitt--where the road ends and the West begins. The congressional district that Bush sought to represent is larger than most Eastern states.

"George had beaten an opponent in the Republican primary who was an exmilitary guy who offered a campaign platform promising a missile in every yard. But George made a mistake early in the general campaign against me. He ran a TV ad that showed him jogging," says Hance. "Nobody out in that part of the country jogs. If folks see somebody jogging, they figure his truck broke and they'll offer him a ride because he's late to work." Hance speaks with the most refined, palace elements of west Texas elocution. With dry teeth and an even drier throat, the people of the high plains avoid putting pressure on the larynx, and speak through their noses instead. When agitated, the sumbitches sound like Jed Clampett on helium.

Poor Bush. In 1978 he was a newlywed, and pretty much devoted his honeymoon to traveling in a station wagon to dirt-floor towns like Happy, in Swisher County (yes, such a place does exist). He was glad-handing the locals, the cotton and peanut farmers who had creases that ran across the backs of their necks like dry creek beds. All the while, Bush was holding his marriage in place on his solemn oath to Laura that, win or lose, he'd never press her to speak in public.

"Still, George was a quick study, and his campaign caught on because he liked the people out there and the people liked him," Hance says. "We tried to depict him as an outsider. A transplanted rich Yankee. My slogan was, 'I'll take Dimmitt High School over Andover and Texas Tech over Yale and the Harvard Bizniss School anytime.' We hit him hard on the notion that he was getting outside money, too, from places back East. Places like Dallas. Our Campaigns crossed paths in Levelland, near where the flying saucer landed on the highway in 1957. Bush asked me if I had ever seen a spaceship. I told him, 'I may see one, I may even go riding in one, but I sure as hell ain't going to tell anyone about it.' He asked me about the outside money issue. He said, 'So, how are your finances? Are you running out of money?' George wasn't being snotty. He was just curious. For a minute there, I thought he was going to offer me a loan."

Hance was the last person to successfully press the case that George W. Bush was not a 24-karat Texan. Hance collected 53 percent of the vote, beat Bush and moved to Washington. Looking back, he recalls an incident that foreshadowed events to come. "All the freshmen congressmen went to this orientation session in the Cannon Building near the Capitol, and when we came out, the rain was pouring hard, like a cow pissing on a flat rock," Hance says. "We all stood there under this awning, staring at the rain, and saying stuff like, 'Goddamn. Jesus. Look at that shit come down. We're all gonna fucking drown.' And this other congressman named Al Gore came out, looked around and said, 'My goodness gracious! What a terrible storm!' I knew then that Congressman Gore was a complete stiff."

By the year 2000, Kent Hance, like most Texas politicians with reasonable survival instincts, had switched his label to Republican. Even so, Hance swears that because of the awning episode he still would have voted for George W.

For years after I first met George W., his public identity remained linked to the Rangers and to baseball. "Bush had an absolute reverence for the game, which I am sure was not diminished when he made a profit of about $15 million from selling his share of the team," says Frank Luksa, a sports columnist for three Dallas--Fort Worth newspapers for 40 years. "He'd sit out at the old ballpark in Arlington, right beside the dugout, wearing his Rangers hat, not like the luxury-box bean counters who run the franchises now. He'd take a lot of heckling from the drunks in the stands, inviting them down to his seats to talk ball."

Then came 1993, and George W. announced that he was running for governor. Claytie Williams had lost the election in 1990, defeated because he had refused to shake hands with his opponent, Ann Richards. What kind of Texan wouldn't shake hands with a lady?

Richards, of course, is a tough old hide. John Collins is a past president of the Texas Trial Lawyers and, because of smaller events in his litigation career, could carry a business card that read, "He dug up Lee Harvey Oswald and buried Jerry Jones." In September 1991, at a Democratic fund-raising event in Austin, Collins was standing with Governor Ann Richards and Mary Beth Rogers, who had head-coached Ann's big win in 1990. Bill Clinton, not yet even a gleam in the Iowa caucus, delivered a speech. "Both Ann and Mary Beth had a friend involved with politics in Arkansas, and she had heard about Clinton's activities with women. They were thinking he wanted to be like the Kennedys.

"So when Clinton walked over after his speech, Ann looked right at him and said, 'Bill, we've been hearing about all this womanizing and we want to know what you're going to do about that.'

"Clinton tried to grin and make light of it. He mentioned that Richards herself had been targeted in smear campaigns about drug use and said, 'That's all just a bunch of made-up tales.' Then he walked away." The exchange was typical of the kick-'em-in-the-cojones attitude that made Richards seem invincible in 1994.

Before the campaign really started, when Richards was out of sight in the polls and Bush was perceived as the advance man for the earth-hating magnates of Big Oil, I went to Austin to interview people for a quickie Richards biography. My profit margin was based on the notion that Ann would win and, hell, maybe run for president. During that visit, I stopped to see the new house of a friend who had moved down from Dallas, a lawyer named Jerry Hughes. His wife is Karen Hughes, and she was handling media relations for the Bush campaign. "Ann Richards," Karen told me cheerfully, "is going to lose. There will be three key issues in the campaign, including school finance, and she's on the wrong side of all three." I left the Hughes house with (as the politicians like to say) a heavy heart and a seriously diminished enthusiasm for the biography project. Karen Hughes always knows what she's talking about. Later I would learn that Richards felt the same way. "Ann certainly did not underestimate Bush," says a confidant. "Early in the campaign, she looked at me and said, "This guy could beat me."'

The Bush campaign established momentum just as Hughes had predicted. It didn't hurt that the Republican candidate made frequent statewide appearances with Chuck Norris, the kung fu hero of CBS' Walker, Texas Ranger. While some diehard Texans harbored reservations about this Walker character--"He drives around all day with a black dude and fights like a Chinaman"--the show gathered a multitude of fans. Not since The Untouchables has a television series established such a clearly defined line between good and evil, a concept that seems to be the enduring trademark of the Bush presidency.

Ann Richards, meanwhile, waged a listless campaign against George W., and like Al Gore, disappointed pundits by failing to show any fancy footwork in TV debates. Ann exited quietly, and through the back door.

The Texas Governor's Mansion, like most ceremonial residences of its era, lacks closet space, is drafty and is infested with ghosts. In 1985 Governor Mark White was giving Ted Kennedy a tour of the upstairs portion and declared, "And in this room, Senator Kennedy, legend has it that Sam Houston himself used to consort with Indian women!"

Kennedy, sensing the presence of the spirits, grinned and asked, "Would there be any about now?"

Friends of George W. Bush contend that Sam Houston stands paramount among his idols. In political ideology, the two men seem opposite. Before his tenure as president of the Texas republic, Houston helped author the constitution that outlawed banks. Bush was more tolerant toward large business. His oil-re-finery-and-cement-plant-police-thyself platform was unsettling to advocates of clear skies and fresh water. Thus, the summertime air quality in and around Houston and Dallas remains reasonably acceptable by the standards of Chernobyl. Bush's Texas-style view of tort reform amounted to a judiciary devoted to the unfettered well-being of entities such as Enron and Worldcom. In Texas, His or Her Honor gains access to the bench via the ballot box, an ungainly situation that produces small Page Six headlines such as Gravel haulers assn. Endorses judge klemm.

And so, on the Halloween weekend of 1997, Bush stood on the steps of the Governor's Mansion, shaking hands with an assembly of writers invited to Austin for the Texas Book Festival. The whole affair was Bush's wife's idea. Laura's passion was the promotion of the impossible dream of advancing the cause of literacy in Texas. The governor seemed genuinely glad to see these odd-looking critters wandering through his house, amused but slightly wary, like Johnny Carson when some exotic little creature from the San Diego Zoo appeared on his program.

Sandra Brown, a former TV weather girl who had become a best-selling romance novelist, was there. She looked great. But nobody else did. Nobody except the governor himself, whose agenda of nondrinking, nonsmoking and jogging had paid off. George W. appeared fit and confident. Like all true Texans, he vowed to quit drinking after his 40th birthday. And Bush did it, too. He actually quit drinking and didn't just switch to wine.

We had a good long talk. He told me that he had enjoyed reading a book I'd written, Seasons in Hell, a history of the early years of the Texas Rangers baseball franchise that included the F word in practically every sentence. So enchanted was I with the governor that I stayed to continue that conversation rather than appear in a group photo that included the likes of Jim Lehrer, Carlos Fuentes and Willie Morris. Mostly, we talked about sports.

He said that one of the happiest moments of his adult life came when he watched the White Sox' Robin Ventura charge to the mound to challenge Nolan Ryan. "Ventura," he said, "must have been out of his mind. Nolan cleaned his clock."

He discounted talk that Roger Staubach would seek the Texas governor's office. "I can't see that," Bush said. "Roger is way too thin-skinned to make it in politics." He also expressed bemusement that a Dallas sports columnist had implored the governor to reunite the recently disbanded Southwest Conference. "What in the hell does he want me to do about it? The governor's authority does not extend over football."

Before the end of the conversation, I'd already placed Bush on my all-time top five of engaging public personalities, joining Timothy Leary, Vince Lombardi, Joan Blondell and Mel Tillis. No president in history has been more cruelly mischaracterized by the political cartoonists, the ones who portray the president as a pinheaded mutant with the ears of a pachyderm, a supporting actor in an action scene in Deliverance. You can disagree with his politics until your balls fall off, but the real-life George W. Bush spits forth a spark, an ingenuous elan, and to meet him is to remember him.

Another oddball Texas writer was similarly impressed. Kinky Friedman of Kerrville, author of mystery novels and self-described as the Oldest Living Jew in Texas Who Doesn't Own Any Real Estate, says, "I met George at that Texas Book Festival thing at the mansion. I was loaded on Chivas that morning. Larry McMurtry was a no-show, so I put on his name tag. People formed a circle around me, telling me how they loved my works, and I shook all of their hands, and said, 'Thank you kindly. Thank you kindly.' Bush was watching all that. He didn't know who I was, but he knew that I sure as hell wasn't Larry McMurtry, and he told his security people that he wanted 'that guy' to manage his next campaign. We've been friends ever since."

Friedman says that he wrote a column about George W. for Texas Monthly, and received a letter from the president thanking him for mentioning his name without using profanity. "He also invited me to sleep at the White House. So I wrote him back, and said I was bringing my four dogs, my four women and four editors. And he wrote back and said, 'Come on up, and you can bring the dogs.'

"Then September 11 happened, so I thought the deal was off. But, no, he followed up. I didn't stay in the Lincoln bedroom, but I did get to bounce on the bed. I gave him some expensive Cuban cigars, reminding him that by smoking them, we weren't aiding Castro's economy. We were burning his crops.

"Bush is every bit as quick-witted and sharp as Bill Clinton, or Don Imus," says Friedman, who, incidentally, once wrote a song called They Ain't Making Jews Like Jesus Anymore and has a new book coming out called Kill Two Birds and Get Stoned. "He understands the general perception that he's no genius and works that to his total advantage. He's like Columbo, and the person who underestimates George W. Bush does so at his or her grave personal peril. And he loves and understands baseball, and that's the mark of a well-balanced and sane individual."

Looking back, the White House seems to have always been Bush's destiny--if only for the lack of viable challengers. The thing that seemed to give him fits was not a rival politician, but the state's habit of authorizing too many exit visas to Peckerwood Hill (the cemetery that adjoins Texas' infamous death house), which drew national media attention. During the six years of Bush's gubernatorial tenure, the state of Texas executed inmates at the rate of about one every two weeks. Bush stood in the way of one--exactly one--execution.

"I was interviewing Bush when I told him he faced a sticky problem with the scheduled execution of a man named Henry Lee Lucas," says journalist and true-crime author Hugh Aynesworth. "Lucas was an alleged serial killer who had confessed to the murder of everybody but JFK, but I had uncovered clear evidence that Lucas was not within 1000 miles of the scene of the crime he was scheduled to die for. Bush was interested right away, and asked me to send him what I had." Through Aynesworth's efforts and what the writer describes as the governor's diligence, Lucas was spared his ride on the journey gurney. "Bush impressed me on that," Aynesworth said. "There was no political gain in it for him whatsoever. In fact, the whole thing was really an embarrassment to the law enforcement community that so strongly backs Bush."

By the mid-Nineties Republicans were warming to the notion of a Texan in the White House. "Republicans were still angry about Bush I losing to this crummy, Southern white-trash guy named Bill Clinton, and the notion of replacing him with Bush I's son had a nice element of payback to it," says a prominent Texas Republican.

Soon, the Lone Star tougher-than-a-bus-station-steak persona would emerge in full, and Bush came forth as a Nolan Ryan-Chuck Norris amalgam. The wagon train was fixing to roll out and cross the old Red River. Bush's reputation for forcefulness had made the rounds. Early in his political career, he was stumping in Fort Worth. "Our paper had a new publisher, so we went to visit the governor and introduce ourselves," recalls Mike Blackman, then editorial director of the Fort Worth Star-Telegram. "He said, 'I know who you are, and I hate your goddamn newspaper.'

"We were stunned and later went to visit Governor Bush in his office to see if we could establish a clearer or more amiable understanding," says Blackman. "When we got down to Austin, it was more of the same. The governor peeled the paint off the ceiling for about half an hour, and then Karen Hughes met us coming out, and did the same, only she used more-polite language."

I had doubts about my Texan's chances of capturing the White House during the Bush-Gore campaign. The Bush people noted that if Texas were a country, it would rank as the 11th-biggest economy in the world. However, it ranked first among states in adults without health insurance, second for children without insurance, third for children living in poverty and, naturally, dead last in funding for the arts.

I was concerned, too, that the nation would perceive W. as a daddy's-boy elitist. The truth was that, despite his bonanza from the sale of his stock in Harken Energy and his $14 million profit that came with his sale of the Texas Rangers, Bush was a pauper compared to many Texas boosters--men like Richard Rainwater (a billionaire and a principal investor in the Texas Rangers), Rusty Rose (another of Bush's partners in the Rangers) and Tom Hicks (a man whose investment firm profited greatly during the Bush years and who later paid top dollar for the Rangers). Before and during his tenure as governor, Bush maintained a second home at the ultraprivate Rainbo Club. The Rainbo Club is situated in Henderson County, near the Koon Kreek Klub, which is apparently off-limits to all but the oldest and deepest pockets in the state. (Sometime in the late-Nineties, the name was changed to Coon Creek Club.) The Koon Kreek Klub could exist only in Texas, because there aren't enough rich guys in Mississippi to sustain an ugly deal like that.

But after a debate during the 2000 campaign, when Al Gore had come across as a mix of Chattanooga televangelist and some guy operating a Rodeo Drive pedicure salon, a friend of George W.'s, a guy who had sat immediately behind him for years at Rangers games, turned to me and said, "Can you believe that sumbitch is going to become President of the United States?"

Meaning George W., of course. The question was presented not as an expression of horrified disbelief, but amazement that a person with such a downhome presentation would be, as Dallas lawyer Vincent Perini expressed it, "placed in charge of civilization." Like Bush, Perini is a native west Texan who had gone off to Yale. "That Yale thing helps the Texan a lot," Perini says. "It's your passport to the East. LBJ never had it, and that's why, even though he would never admit it, he felt intimidated by people like the Kennedys."

On election night 2000, I went to Austin, on the invitation of a person due to be secondarily connected with the new White House, who offered assurances that if the returns came in as anticipated, there would be plenty of free scotch.

As the rain and the darkness gathered around the Texas capital, it was soon clear there would be no free scotch. Austin seemed a city under siege, and the air was brutally tense. The town went nuts when the networks declared Bush the winner, but the shrieks of relief and joy subsided quickly. The omen was crystal clear that even if George W. should get in, his presidency was preordained as a crisis-a-day marathon.

And so it has been.

Texans are hardly a novelty within the Capitol Building and Oval Office. However, a Texan whose administration leans as far to the right as perhaps any in U.S. history and a Texan who seems dead set on global dominance? That's new.

Take political strategist Karl Rove. He's George W.'s witch of Endor, a person known to cast dire spells on anybody who does not travel the paths of political righteousness in the far right lane. Bush calls him Turd Blossom. You don't want to get on the wrong side of Rove. Somehow, camera crews received advance word from Washington about the perp walk of John Rigas, head of Adelphia Communications, shortly before his arrest in New York. The next night Rove told a fund-raising crowd, "Wait until you see what's next--orange jumpsuits!"

September 11 was a turning point for Rove, as it was for the president. People still tell the story of how Cheney went on Meet the Press and issued a cogent appraisal of the situation. Rove then scalded Cheney's staff for allowing him to upstage the president. After that, Cheney seemed to disappear. He was sent back into the bunker when the Halliburton mess surfaced. He recently emerged to help sell regime change in Iraq.

In January, after news broke of Enron's collapse, Rove told the Republican National Committee this year's election had to be about the war on terrorism, not corporate scandal. So, as Afghanistan faded from the public eye, the administration heavies began the Hussein-Iraq mantra and never addressed such messes as Enron, Harken, Halliburton, looming deficits, unemployment or the withering of retirement savings.

While talk of an invasion has yielded political dividends that will probably be better than a war itself, Tom Pauken, former Reagan official and now a Texas businessman, sees trouble. Pauken contends that many Republican notables share his views, but he adds that so far, he is one of the first to go on the record and say what he thinks.

"The political downside for the Bush administration is that it might wind up being more similar to the Nixon administration in its outcome than even the first Bush administration. You had a lot of people in the Nixon administration in high positions with some real insecurities, including the president himself. Now you have Karl Rove, who is very similar to the people I saw in the Nixon administration--the Haldeman crowd who wanted very much to be in control. Control the media, control the message. Politics dominating over policy.

"Unlike his father, who is not insecure, the son, who is very bright, is nonetheless uncomfortable in the arena he's in because he doesn't have the background, the knowledge or the strategic vision to know what to do when a crisis hits. Well, the argument has always been, he has brilliant advisors. But what happens when the advisors disagree between and among themselves? How does Bush render a decision?"

Increasingly, the focus on Iraq seems less like an attempt to fix Dad's mistake and more like a classic misdirection. The public aims of the administration are military, while the private agenda rarely surfaces--like expediting logging in national forests, or pushing to open the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge to drilling, or walking away from the Kyoto agreement on global warming.

The thought behind the president's message of regime change is that we'll replace Saddam Hussein with a democratic government. Iran will follow, and then, perhaps, the Saudis. "We can easily turn people who were friendly or neutral toward us into enemies by failing to discriminate between them and our enemies," says Pauken. "It's important to make the distinction between radical Islamic fundamentalists, who are a real strategic threat to us, and the entire Arab world, which is not. The argument was that the shah of Iran had to be replaced in the Seventies. It hasn't been a whole lot better since he was replaced. Do we want to be responsible for all that?"

If the Texas president proposed a Middle East military takeover as a midterm election ploy, imagine the pyrotechnic display that will be scheduled for the reelection show of 2004. But one fellow who was spotted recently on a North Dallas median probably summed up the prevailing attitude in Texas toward international hostilities. The homeless Texan's sign read howdy. I'm hungry! and he could care less about Iraq.