Last week (Nov. 7, 2005), the traditionally Republican Time magazine had a lead article, by Nancy Gibbs and Mike Allen, that noted of American history, "Second terms have a way of veering into wild and menacing terrain, spiked with indictments and scandals and betrayal and grief. Some friends become less friendly because they know you are on your way to retirement while they are on their to the next campaign. Your team gets tired, the ideas stale, and the fumes of power more toxic. It was through those badlands that President George W. Bush trudged last week . . . " The way that paragraph is written suggests that even the erstwhile journalistic ally of Bush, fils, is growing a little tired of him. Had he read a bit of American presidential history, he would have known in advance that maybe it was a dangerous risk to run for a second term. What, one asks, could he have been thinking? Could the fumes of power have gone to his head, convincing him that the second four years would surely enshrine him in the hearts of his countrymen?

Mr. Bush (am I showing enough respect for the man?) has tried to convince us that we are winning in Iraq, but most of us, I think, in watching the evening news, wonder how we ever got mired in that lose-lose conflict (remember Bre'r Rabbit and the tar baby?), and don't believe Mr. Bush one whit. The Iraqi insurgents, instead of dwindling in power, are obviously growing stronger, more able to inflict, not one fatality a day, as in the war's early days, but rather tens or even dozens. Maybe, if one of his military advisers had told him before he ordered the invasion of Iraq, that Iraqi insurgents were almost eager to trade their lives for a place in their inscrutable heaven, he would have thought twice about sending now more than 2,000 American boys and girls to their death for a society that ! has nothing in common with our own. When is enough enough? Fact is, a growing number of American voters are fully fed up with Mr. Bush‚s war. His advisers are cooking up a plan whereby American soldiers will be sent home just as soon as Iraqi soldiers can protect their own homeland. Will that be in our century? Able to plan an "Exit strategy?" Lord, Mr. Bush hasn't even figured out a "winning strategy."

And for this country to leave the Iraqi army and people at the mercy of the almost literally blood-thirty insurgents is, I hope we all agree, unconscionable.

Maybe it's a mis-perception on my part, but when I see Mr. Bush these days midway through his second term, I see a befuddled man standing somewhat dazed, like a big cardboard figure, on the periphery of a crowd of cronies watching the parade go by, as if he were a kid at the Macy's Thanksgiving parade. You're known by the company you keep, it's correctly said, and it's informative to consider who's standing arou! nd Mr. Bush these days. To begin with, there was what Chief of Staff for Secretary of State Colin Powell (now, there's a straight arrow) Colonel Lawrence Wilkerson called "a cabal of Dick Cheney and Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld, who had flumoxed a President who is not well versed in international relations and not too much interested in them either." Gosh, Bush must say at each war strategy session, how awfully boring.

Another truism in American politics ought to be, You're known by the people you sponsor and plan to shoe-horn into political office. The United States Supreme Court is rightly considered the most revered court of law in the land. Throughout our history, our presidents have nominated, and Congress quickly confirmed, some of the most learned and wisest men in America -- John Marshall, in the early days; Oliver Wendell Holmes and Louis Brandeis, in the middle years; Thurgood Marshall, most recently. It‚s a team to be reckoned with. But Mr. Bush's nomin! ee Harriet Miers? Not even in the same league. And, I'm afraid, when she let it be known that she considers her crony George Bush, and I quote, "one of the most brilliant men" she has ever known, she let the cat out of the bag and committed political suicide. So, George Bush has unwittingly gathered around himself a gang not terribly unlike the sleazy old "Teapot Dome Gang" of the 1920's, that, in political terms, are something like barnacles stuck to the hull of an old boat --ugly and hard to scrape off.

Referring to President Teddy Roosevelt in his analysis of Mr. Bush, one Time reporter wrote last week, "one of the good things about being President of the United States is that even when you're down, you have the ability to control your own destiny through the bully pulpit,." the "bully pulpit" being the public media. Well, that was certainly true of Franklin Roosevelt and John Kennedy, both master speakers who could address the whole country with such soaring rhetoric that we all felt we had climbed aboard the president's flagship and were embarked on a grand national destiny. Having snored my way through many a speech by Mr. Bush, fils, however, I doubt this is true of the second Mr. Bush, who bumbles through his every speech, as if he were having trouble reading what Will Rogers once called his "idiot cards."

None of his speeches fires the imagination in the slightest; rather they dampen the very enthusiasm his listeners bring to it. The reason he offers next to no press conferences is because he‚s a poor speaker, and both he and the press know it. And here the word "cabal" may apply: instead of sharing his ideas and plans with the whole electorate, he prefers, instead, to limit his circle to cronies like his vice-president and Donald Rumsfeld -- and maybe "Scooter" Libby.

I'm not alone in worrying about what George Bush, fils, is doing to our country on all fronts. For one thing, and not the least important, he's spending our money like a drunken Texas cowboy, evidently completely oblivious or indifferent to the fact that sometime in the future, some generation of future Americans is going to have to pony up to pay the piper. It angers me to know it may be the generation of my daughter Jessica. Polls show that people "very interested" in the 2006 national elections are already at 57 percent, as compared to 39 percent last October. Gee, I wonder what that means!? Well, maybe "Scooter" Libby or Karl Rove can explain it to him.

In times past, America, according to Puritan Governor John Winthrop used to be "a little Citie upon a Hille," gifted by God and envied by all the world for our abundance and religious and political freedoms.. Europeans flocked here for what we offered their "huddled masses yearning to breathe free." in the words of Emma Lazarus. They were our ancestors, and that promise was America's chief export. But now, America's chief export for countries like Iraq is death. Wouldn't you welcome the chance to vote for a U.S. president who will take the money we now spend on killing and turn it to saving people struggling for survival, in ravaged countries on our little planet, like Pakistan and any of Africa's countries. Mr. Bush claims to be a Christian. Well, if so, then, in his last years as president, let him behave like one.

History, over the long haul, has a strange way of reversing our decisions about presidents. A case in point is Dwight Eisenhower, who, when he left office in 1960, to be replaced by John Kennedy, was considered pretty much a "duffer" as Chief Executive. (Ike was the one, you may remember, whose chief interest toward the end of his administration, was golf.) Ike's now, however, generally considered to have been quite a good President, whereas Kennedy, romanticized by an assassin's bullet, is now considered just a "duffer."

Well, so it goes. As for the second Bush, it's too bad Shakespeare couldn't live long! enough to write a play about him called "George II."

It would, I think, be a sad, sad story.