I hate Mr. Bush and what he is doing to my country. I cannot believe the range of duplicities involved in his administration; the gratuitous lying to serve profit and political purpose. As the president lies about Iraq, lies about the economy, lies about the environment, lies about his tax cut, lies about the education bill, lies about the budget, lies about his real interests in Africa, lies about Halliburton; he is destroying the American public’s faith in the democratic process. ...

There are too many lies, too many transgressions to list. Richard Nixon, in a less cynical era, told only one. And we were all supremely affronted by what he did to our democracy.

George W. Bush, and Karl Rove, has told dozens, each one of them more damaging than lying about a break-in of a political headquarters. And yes, Bill Clinton lied. But nobody died. He told an all too common male lie about consensual sex. But he did not send the sons and daughters of America marching off to war wearing the boots of a well-told lie.

George W. Bush’s one term will mark a low point in our country’s history. But if we all pay closer attention, and vote, we can recover.

I love my country. But I hate my president.

It is useful at times like this to look back on the road that brought a president into trouble and try to divide bad luck from bad guesses, and both from the wrong turns that stem from the innate nature of the presidency itself. In the case of Iraq, there is a little of each. Early in his term, Mr. Bush was stuck with trouble that was not of his making, including both the terrorist attack and the sinking economy. His judgment about weapons of mass destruction in Iraq appears to have been wrong — and, worse, hyped. But over all, it was a bad guess that was shared by intelligence experts from the Clinton administration and many allies.

Other wrong turns, however, were chosen because of a fundamental flaw in the character of this White House. Despite his tough talk, Mr. Bush seems incapable of choosing a genuinely tough path, of risking his political popularity with the same aggression that he risks the country's economic stability and international credibility. For all the trauma the United States has gone through during his administration, Mr. Bush has never asked the American people to respond to new challenges by making genuine sacrifices.

He committed the military to war, but he told civilians they deserved big tax cuts. He seems determined to remake the Middle East without doing anything serious about reducing our dependence on Middle East oil. His energy policy is a grab bag of giveaways to domestic oil and gas lobbyists. He refuses to ask for even the smallest compromise when it comes to fuel-efficient cars.

The pattern goes further. Mr. Bush rolled out a domestic agenda that included some ambitious programs aimed at lifting up America's least fortunate, particularly his No Child Left Behind education package. But in this — as in the African AIDS initiative and even his controversial faith-based initiative for social services — Mr. Bush has been content to take the credit for proposing, without paying the political dues necessary to get things done. Certainly most American parents, whose public schools are racked by state and local budget crises, are not feeling that their children are enjoying better educational opportunity. The AIDS program that got such a positive response when the president unveiled it has been underfinanced by Congress, with the White House's encouragement.

Even the administration's foreign policy reflects its tendency to go for quick gratification without much thought of the gritty long haul. The invasion of Iraq appears to have been planned by people who assumed that after a swift military assault, Saddam Hussein would be gone and Iraq would quickly snap into a prosperous, semidemocratic state that would be a model for the rest of the Middle East.

When it turned out that things were far more complicated, the president hedged on the price tag — apparently out of fear that if Congress knew how high the bill was going to be, there would not be enough votes for another round of tax cuts. Congress, however, was happy enough to be deluded until it was too late. Now we know the cost is going to be massive, with much of the tab to be paid by the future generations who will be saddled with the Bush debt.

The United States has no clear exit strategy from Iraq or immediate hope of a turnaround in a violent, complicated and expensive commitment. The hard realities of postwar Iraq have convinced Mr. Bush that he needs the United Nations support he snubbed before the invasion. But even there he is avoiding the hard choice of acknowledging his error and ceding real authority to other nations. Diplomats are wondering, with good reason, whether Mr. Bush is embarking on a new era of international cooperation or simply giving them permission to clean up his mess.

Mr. Bush is a man who was reared in privilege, who succeeded in both business and politics because of his family connections. The question during the presidential campaign was whether he was anything more than just a very lucky guy. There were times in the past three years when he has been much more than that, and he may no longer be a man who expects to find an easy way out of difficulties. But now, at the moment when we need strong leadership most, he is still a politician who is incapable of asking the people to make hard choices. And we are paying the price

But the most important concession Mr. Bush should make isn't about money or control — it's about truth-telling. He squandered American credibility by selling a war of choice as a war of necessity; if he wants to get that credibility back, he has to start being candid.

Yet in the speech on Sunday he was still up to his usual tricks. Once again, he made a rhetorical link between the Iraq war and 9/11. This argument by innuendo reminds us why 69 percent of the public believes that Saddam was involved in 9/11, despite a complete absence of evidence. (There is, on the other hand, strong evidence of a Saudi link — but the administration's handling of that evidence borders on a cover-up.) And rather than acknowledge that the search for W.M.D. has come up empty, he declared that Saddam "possessed and used weapons of mass destruction" — 1991, 2003, what's the difference?

So will Congress give Mr. Bush the money he wants, no questions asked? It probably will, but it shouldn't. Mr. Bush created this crisis, and if he were a true patriot he would pay a political price to resolve it. Maybe it's time for him to do a couple of things he's never done before, like admitting mistakes and standing up to the hard right.  

Virtually unmentioned, however, is the fact that the Patriot Act extended the government's powers well beyond the terrorism arena. The creatively named law - USA Patriot stands for "Uniting and Strengthening America by Providing Appropriate Tools Required to Intercept and Obstruct Terrorism" - also handed FBI agents and prosecutors a broad new arsenal for going after garden-variety criminals.

Already, they have used "sneak-and-peek" warrants, wiretaps, Internet surveillance and other Patriot tools in pursuit of thieves, computer hackers, drug dealers and money launderers. And they're exploring how the law can be used in other realms.

That's as it should be, a key author of the Patriot Act says.

Rumsfeld says that the struggle is harder than it should be because domestic critics are making the country's enemies stronger. [National Review Columnist Stanley] Kurtz says our hopes for true success are diminished because the electorate has been degenerated by liberalism.

So here the whole sordid business comes full circle. The administration games the public into an endeavor by exaggerating the gains and minimizing the price. Then the gains are revealed as not quite so great. And the price is revealed as very much greater. And if all that weren't bad enough, the operation is bungled on several fronts. So the gamers and the scammers say it's the fault of the critics who tried to carve through the mumbo-jumbo in the first place. And when the public has a touch of buyers' remorse over a product that was peddled on false advertising, the answer lies in the public's own degeneracy and division.

It's everyone's fault but theirs. 'The terrorists', domestic enemies, cultural declension, the French, perhaps tomorrow the decline of reading, the end of corporal punishment in the schools, permissive parenting, bad posture, rock 'n roll, space aliens. The administration is choking on its own lies and evasions. And we have to bail them out because the ship of state is our ship.

The erosion of sections of the Bill of Rights quickened when the president signed the USA PATRIOT Act on October 26, 2001. With Attorney General John Ashcroft insisting on the crucial need for speed, the House passed the 342-page document by a vote of 356 to 56, although few had the chance to read it. Several members later said that parts of the new law seemed unconstitutional, but in view of the coming elections, they did not want to be attacked as “unpatriotic” by...

Bush has perfected the rhetoric of fear and permanent war, justifying a wartime military budget, using the Patriot Act to negate the Bill of Rights, promoting any and all proposals, and invoking special wartime powers. "Don't you know there's a war on?" has become the all-purpose reply to critics and those who would dare question the leader or his policies. The message of Bush's rhetoric is simple: Be afraid. Be very afraid. But trust me.

Not only have George W. Bush's claims for invading Iraq turned out to be fraudulent: no nuclear, chemical or biological weapons; no proof of an Iraqi link to Al Qaeda; no hint of any Iraqi capability to attack Israel, let alone America. The domino effect he predicted hasn't materialized, either.

America is more hated than before the war. Anti-American Islamists, not secular liberals, have made record gains in elections in Kuwait and Pakistan.

The promised quid-pro-quo of peace in Iraq leading to peace on the Arab-Israeli front is a mirage. The notion that beating down Arabs on one front would cow them on the other has proven to be as false, as predicted. ...

The war on terrorism has one more unsavoury aspect: America's partnership with several repressive regimes, including undemocratic Muslim ones.

Some, such as Egypt, Syria and Saudi Arabia, have been sub-contracted the work of torture. Indonesia and the Philippines have been given millions of dollars to co-operate in the battle against terrorism. They are now using the American support to crack down on separatist movements with genuine grievances. Russia has been given a free hand in Chechnya in return for dropping any opposition to American bases in Central Asia.

America became a great nation through a combination of military and economic might and democratic values. The Bush administration has squandered the moral part of that potent combination.

Attourney General John Ashcroft marked the two-year anniversary of the terrorist attacks of September 11 by launching a national publicity tour to sell Americans on the USA Patriot Act. That he felt the need to do so was itself revealing. The act is, of course, already law, and when it came to a vote just six weeks after the 9/11 attacks only a single senator (Russell Feingold) and sixty-six members of the House voted against it (even though almost no one had had time to read the 342-page bill before voting). But the act has come under increasing grassroots criticism ever since--more than 150 towns, cities and states have enacted ordinances condemning it--and the Justice Department finds itself on the defensive.

Even more telling, however, is the fact that Ashcroft's national tour will not address the public. His speaking engagements are all before closed audiences, primarily law-enforcement officers. The choice to speak to police and exclude the people captures much of the flavor of the Administration's war on terrorism: It has repeatedly sought to maximize police power while minimizing public oversight. But that tactic may be backfiring, as the American people are starting to fight back.