WASHINGTON -- So let's see. What's our swell choice here?

A guy who mimed being a fighter pilot on a carrier versus a guy who mimed throwing his medals over a fence?

An incumbent who sticks with the wrong decisions based on the wrong facts versus a challenger who seems unable to stick to one side of any decision, right or wrong?

A Republican who's a world-class optimist, despite making the world more dangerous and virulently anti-American, versus a Democrat who looks like a world-weary loner, even as he pledges to make the world safer and more pro-American?

A president who can't go anywhere without his vice president to give him the answers versus a candidate who can't go anywhere without his campaign butler/buddy to give him peanut butter and jelly sandwiches?

Bush campaign strategists don't seem worried that every positive development the administration predicted would happen if we invaded Iraq has soured into the opposite.

As an article on Monday in The Times noted about the growing ranks of angry Muslims: "The call to jihad is rising in the streets of Europe, and is being answered."

Communing with the Higher Father and the Almighty, President Bush has either stumbled into a Holy War or swaggered into one.

In their new book, "The Bushes," Peter and Rochelle Schweizer, who interviewed many Bushes, including the president's father and his brother Jeb, quote one unnamed relative as saying that W. sees the war on terror "as a religious war": "He doesn't have a P.C. view of this war. His view of this is that they are trying to kill the Christians. And we the Christians will strike back with more force and more ferocity than they will ever know."

Bush strategists seem to believe that the worse Mr. Bush makes things, the better off he is, because nervous Americans will cling to the obstinate president they know over the vacillating challenger they don't know.

Senator Kerry's talent for turning a winning proposition into a losing one is disturbingly reminiscent of Al Gore, who somehow managed to lose an election he won. So is Mr. Kerry's sometimes supercilious manner, and his habit of exacerbating a small thing with an answer that is not quite straight.

When the senator was asked last week whether he owned a gas-scarfing Chevy Suburban S.U.V., he replied, "I don't own an S.U.V.," only to have to admit, when pressed further by reporters, that his wife owns the S.U.V. "The family has it," he said lamely. "I don't have it."

The White House pounds Mr. Kerry for not playing straight on small-bore stuff, even as they don't play straight on huge-bore stuff.

The House Democratic leader, Nancy Pelosi, pronounced the administration "in denial" yesterday, after hearing Condi Rice's briefing for House Democratic lawmakers.

"This is an administration that told us that our troops would be welcomed with roses," Representative Pelosi said. "Instead, it's rocket-propelled grenades. This is an administration that told us that the Iraqi government would be able to pay for its own reconstruction, and soon. And now it's costing nearly $200 billion to the American people."

She added: "And it was expressed by the national security adviser now that yes, there was disappointment — disappointment? — about the Iraqi security forces not being able to secure the region that they were assigned to. And this is the judgment that the American people have placed their confidence in?"

Mr. Kerry errs on the side of giving the answer he thinks people want to hear, even as Mr. Bush errs on the side of giving the answer he expects people to accept as true.

When the president was asked yesterday by a reporter whether it would take an all-out military offensive to put down the violence in Falluja, and whether this would impede the transfer of power on June 30, he was reassuring, despite news of the aerial bombardment of Falluja by U.S. gunships and the 70-ton battle tanks being rushed in to aid marines in the escalating fight.

"Most of Falluja is returning to normal," the president said, presumably defining normal as flattened.

Anyway, is that 10 minutes to normal, as Karen Hughes would say? Or 10 years to normal? And what on earth is normal, when you're talking about Iraq chaos theory?

Copyright 2004 The New York Times Company

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