DENY AND LIE -- AND CHANGE THE SUBJECT

The oldest trick in the book: Deny and lie -- and when the news is bad, change the subject. That's the Nincompoop in Chief's m.o. So sayeth the experts, above all Paul Krugman. "I had a bad feeling about Bush, from an economic standpoint, as far back as the 2000 presidential campaign," he says. "I just felt -– My God, he's lying through his teeth!"

No wonder today's lead editorial in The New York Times, following up yesterday's report in The Washington Post, begins this way: "President Bush reacted decisively to this month's shockingly bad employment report -- by quickly changing the topic to terror."

No wonder the nincompoop's corporate minions say the latest internal Pentagon audit of Halliburton, first reported yesterday by The Wall Street Journal, is "being used for political purposes" even though:

+ The audit found that the company has "failed to adequately account" for roughly half of "the $4.2 billion it has received so far" for contracts to provide "logistical support to troops in Iraq and Kuwait."

+ The audit found that the accounting system of Kellogg Brown & Root, the Halliburton subsidiary working in Iraq, "was inadequate in nearly every way in dealing with the costs of providing food, shelter and other support for the troops" and "gave the military inadequate cost estimates, incomplete and inadequate reviews of those estimates, poor employee training and 'a lack of current, accurate and complete cost and pricing data,' according to the Pentagon."

No wonder "surveys suggest that Bush's popularity has plummeted among 18 to 29 year-olds in the past four months," according to today's Post, and that the latest Washington Post-ABC News poll shows that John Kerry leads the nincompoop "2-1 among registered voters younger than 30."

No wonder the nincompoop claims not to read newspapers. Otherwise he'd read about another incredible screw-up, reported in today's Los Angeles Times: "Stretched thin by troop deployments in Iraq and Afghanistan and security needs at home, the Army has resorted to hiring private security guards to help protect dozens of American military bases."

Where do these guards (4,300 of them) come from? "Four firms -- two of which got the contracts without having to bid competitively" and "with little previous security experience." And how much are the contracts worth? "As much as $1.24 billion."

No wonder "In Iraq, Strategic Failures" -- as the headline puts it on today's column by Jim Hoagland -- reflect the willingness of the nincompoop's administration "to engage in or condone cynical maneuvering designed not to create democracy in Baghdad but to create political cover at home and fear and turmoil in Tehran."

No wonder the rise in oil prices, described as "a perfect storm," means bad weather for all of us. It has become "an issue in President Bush's reelection. The U.S. Federal Reserve on Tuesday blamed the run-up in oil prices for the recent sharp slowdown in the economy."

And no wonder, in today's pièce de résistance, Dahlia Lithwick writes: "So it has come down to this: You are at liberty to exercise your First Amendment right to assemble and to protest, so long as you do so from behind chain-link fences and razor wire, or miles from the audience you seek to address."

Reflecting on the cordoned-off "free-speech zone" at the Democrat Convention in Boston, and as New York City prepares for the Republican Convention amid turmoil over Mayor Michael Bloomberg's decision to block huge protests in Central Park, Lithwick points out that there is no "meaningful link between domestic political protest and terrorism ... except in the eyes of the Bush administration, which conflates the two both as a matter of law and of policy."

It started with Attorney General John Ashcroft's declaration, shortly after 9/11: "To those who scare peace-loving people with phantoms of lost liberty, my message is this: Your tactics only aid terrorists." This was an early attempt to couple disagreeing on civil liberties with abetting terrorists.

No wonder just one day's minor haul of news and opinion makes you fear for the nation.