Federal confusion when Katrina inundated New Orleans further diminished Bush's popularity ratings. Just why it did is hard to say in objective terms. America hadn't seen such a storm since Galveston, 1900. Both city and state officials behaved incompetently. The federal response might have been more immediate and energetic, but hindsight, as we know, is always perfect. Moreover, Bush directed to New Orleans vast amounts of money and supplies. The worst I can see he deserves, on Katrina, is a B minus.

So what is the deal with the Bush-despisers? Here's my own theory, preliminary in the way theories ought to be: All the malice and unforgivingness directed Bush's way grew from the Florida vote count, and from the persistent feeling among liberals and Gore partisans that "We wuz robbed," on account of which larcenous act the Bush administration was somehow illegitimate.

Defeat (adjudicated in the end by five conservative Supreme Court justices) stuck in the losers' craws, and they hadn't the desire to dislodge it. Revenge was what they wanted. They were the political equivalent of the baleful Confederate veteran on the cigarette lighter of some decades ago: "Forget Hell."

I don't say the lynch party set out to take down the president. I say they cut him no slack when stuff happened, demanded of him a perfection to which no politician could rise or aspire. On such terms the Bush presidency was doomed from the start: not least because the talking heads and writing hands of today belong largely to Democrats and other nonconservatives.

Maybe "W" wasn't the right man to start with, even for the GOP nomination. Still, he wasn't half as bad as his enemies seem to think. Question: How many terrorist attacks has America sustained since September 2001? Right, and yet there's more to offer in extenuation of "W" -- more that will be offered when the tumult and shouting die, as in time they always do.