From Left Field

The Manichaean Candidate's convention was a brazen bizarro masterpiece. The case to sack John Kerry featured the same shady tactics used to build the case to whack Saddam - cherry-picked facts, selective claims and warped contexts.

W. took a page from Arnold Schwarzenegger's "Total Recall," a futuristic movie about inserting fully formed memories into the minds of unsuspecting victims.

The president and vice president ignored all the expert evidence now compiled indicating no link between 9/11 and Saddam, and no Saddam threat to U.S. security. After talking about "the fanatics who killed some 3,000 of our fellow Americans," Dick Cheney boasted: "In Iraq, we dealt with a gathering threat, and removed the regime of Saddam Hussein."

Though the convention mythologized Mr. Bush's bullhorn moment at ground zero, there was no mention of Osama, the fiend W. vowed to catch that day. The speakers did not acknowledge the brutal spiral in Afghanistan and Iraq, or the re-emergence of the Taliban, now finding sanctuary with our ally, Pakistan.