It's hard to listen to George W. Bush and not think about the Wizard of Oz.

What comes to mind is the weak, fallible human being who was revealed when Toto pulled the curtain.

There, in the small booth, a small, ordinary man, not an omnipotent sorcerer, frantically yanks at levers and dials. When the ''wizard" finally admits the obvious fraud, Dorothy says, ''Oh, you're a very bad man." Replies the wizard, ''Oh, no, my dear, I'm a very good man. I'm just a very bad wizard."

Of course, ''The Wizard of Oz" -- published first in 1900 as a children's story by L. Frank Baum, then made world-famous by the classic 1939 movie starring Judy Garland -- has long been debated as political allegory.

Today, some people will see presidential adviser Karl Rove as the man behind the curtain.

But I see President Bush -- a decent, but flawed man with grandiose intentions, who is looking right now like a very bad wizard-president.

Like the wizard, he huffs and puffs in an attempt to maintain bamboozlement in the Land of Oz. But once the curtain is pulled, the people of Emerald City can never look at the fellow behind it the way they did before.

The curtain has been pulled on Bush, not by a tiny, black terrier, but by the outcome of presidential decisions and policies.

In recent weeks, Hurricane Katrina revealed a nation unprepared for natural catastrophe. Bush looked weak and ineffective in his initial response to the hurricane. And he was further weakened by the bureaucratic ineptitude televised from New Orleans and personified by Bush's longtime friend, Michael Brown, the deposed head of the Federal Emergency Management Agency. It all raised serious questions about the nation's preparedness for terrorist attacks.

Bush's most recent Supreme Court nomination adds to the sense of a weakened president. Harriet E. Miers is known chiefly as a friend of Bush, not as a well-known attorney, judge, or legal scholar. In that, she is the opposite of John Roberts, who was confirmed as chief justice on the basis of his credentials and intellect.

But it is Iraq itself that pulled the curtain on Bush. His recent speech before the National Endowment for Democracy is yet another attempt to push the levers and turn the dials to gin up support for a ''war on terror" fought in Iraq. Instead of lions and tigers and bears, it is Osama bin Laden, Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, and ''a dictator who hated free peoples" (Saddam Hussein). Bush once again links the US invasion of Iraq to the ''great evil" of the 9/11 terrorist attacks. Bush also tries to reverse the creeping feeling of national insecurity by telling Americans that the United States and its partners have disrupted 10 serious terrorist plots since the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001. But the damage is already done.

What the president referred to in his speech as ''self-defeating pessimism" is reality. He cited some examples of reality in his speech -- Iraqi children killed in a bombing, Iraqi teachers executed, hospital workers attacked as they treat the wounded. But in that, he wants us to see a country fighting for democracy, with Iraqis ''arguing with each other." Bush must be living in Oz if waves of suicide bombings look to him like citizens ''arguing" rather than a country imploding.

Whatever remaining strength Bush has lies in the American reluctance to pull out of Iraq and watch a bloodbath of nightmarish proportions unfold. The country is becoming desensitized to death as it occurs now in Iraq; and the Bush hope is that we see progress when the body count per suicide bombing is reported in single digits, rather than scores. It's a mad, mad, mad world. We are in Iraq to stop terrorists who are there because we are. And we can't leave because if we do, they win, we lose, and Bush is officially a failed president.

In the fictional land of Oz, the wizard revealed as charlatan makes one last promise to Dorothy. He will take her to safety, via hot air balloon. In the end, he cannot deliver on that pledge and floats off. Dorothy is left behind to find out that with three clicks of the heels of her ruby slippers, she can go back home to Kansas.

If only it were that simple in real life.

© 2005 Boston Globe