Wolves have been long portrayed as rapacious predators, but we humans better fit that bill. At the time Europeans arrived in North America, some 400,000 wolves lived on the continent. Today, after centuries of being shot, poisoned and slaughtered, there are only about 60,000 left, mostly in Canada and Alaska.

And while wolves have been portrayed as evil, they are very like humans, breeding for life and working cooperatively (though they never divorce or kill for "sport").

The big knock against wolves is that they eat meat, and that means killing deer, elk, and the rare sheep or calf. (Contrary to myth, there are no documented wolf attacks on humans in North American history.) Meanwhile, humans blow away thousands of tasty ungulates and eat millions of animals every year without a grain of regret. Talk about hypocrisy.

Despite all that, President Bush's campaign is now demonizing wolves and John Kerry in one fell commercial. In a new TV spot, shadowy wolves are seen slinking through a forest as a woman gravely intones, "... weakness attracts those who are waiting to do America harm."

At this point, five (beautiful; how can anyone fear these amazing, intelligent animals?) wolves rise and lope toward the camera. Get it? Fade to the president: "I'm George W. Bush and I approve this message."

But trashing wolves is just a serendipitous side effect for those who fear nature. The real message is this: "Even after the first terrorist attack on America ... John Kerry and the liberals in Congress voted to slash America's intelligence operations."

The claim is nearly as baseless as myths about wolves. The "first terrorist attack" does not, as viewers are intended to assume, refer to Sept. 11, but to the first World Trade Center bombing, in 1993. Kerry did propose to cut intelligence spending, as a part of post-Cold War deficit-reduction measures supported by both parties, but 3.7 percent hardly qualifies as "slashing"; ultimately, a Republican version of the cuts passed. (Meanwhile, President Bush's new CIA chief Porter Goss co-sponsored a bill in 1995 to cut CIA staff by 20 percent.)

But fear is the only arrow left in the president's re-election quiver. Never mind our record, he says, cast your vote based on what we say about Kerry; and be very afraid.

Talk about crying wolf. Sept. 11 took years for the fanatical killers to bring off, and unlike the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, there was never any reason to view it as the opening salvo of a sustained war. Other countries, remember, have endured terrorist attacks for decades, and when we mope that "everything's changed" we only expose our national self-centeredness and childlike delusions of invulnerability. (Anyway, what's "changed"? The president hasn't asked me or any American — except soldiers mired in the hellish Iraq war — to make the kind of sacrifice you'd expect in such a supposedly dire "time of war.")

Terrorists will try to strike America again, and if they succeed, they will hurt us. But they can't destroy us; rather, they hope we'll destroy ourselves. They hope to goad us into misdirected, retributive military assaults, like the one on Iraq, which puts U.S. targets in easy reach and inflames Muslim hatred.

I supported President Bush on Sept. 20, 2001 when he told the world, "We will direct every resource at our command — every means of diplomacy, every tool of intelligence, every instrument of law enforcement, every financial influence and every necessary weapon of war — to the destruction and to the defeat of the global terror network."

He hasn't done that. Instead, he waged a throwback war on a toothless nation that did not attack us because ideologues told him it would be easy — and help him win re-election.

So now he preys — sorry, prays — we'll tremble in fear of what he says might happen, instead of holding him accountable for what has happened on his watch. And that makes me howling mad.

© 2004 The Daily Camera