It’s been very interesting to watch over the last five years as the liberals have tried to figure out an appropriate label for President Bush. After his election in November of 2000, he was labeled an inexperienced, almost dumb person who had stolen the state of Florida to win the presidency. This was always surprising to me; on the campaign trail, he was too dumb to be president compared to the fact-rattling Al Gore, and yet at the same time, he had managed to “steal” an election in Florida to win. After he became president and the election fervor went down somewhat, the liberals again decided he was just a very dimwitted person who did not have enough smarts to run our country.

As we headed into Bush’s first couple of years in office, the liberals and the press begrudgingly admitted that Bush was, surprisingly, accomplishing much of the agenda he had laid out on the campaign trail. This was a disturbing development. How could such a dumb person have passed a major education bill and a large tax cut so quickly in his first term if he was as stupid as he was supposed to be?

Thus a new theory was born. Bush was still dumb, but Vice President Cheney was the one really running the show in the White House, and Bush was just his useful puppet.

This became especially apparent as we went to war with Iraq. Many liberals in the media were delighted to float the theory that Cheney was the only brains in the Bush White House and that Cheney was actually orchestrating the war.

However, the liberals still couldn’t settle on the dumb Bush theory. During the 2004 campaign and into 2005, Bush was accused of falsifying evidence to go to war with Iraq. This supposedly “unintelligent” man was supposed to have been smart enough to concoct a scheme that fooled a majority of both houses of Congress, the American public and our foreign allies.

It is hard to believe that the dumb man the liberals had portrayed Bush to be could come up with such a plan. But here he was, this diabolically clever president, constantly plotting new ways to pull the wool over the public’s eyes. “He betrayed our country,” Gore cried, and multiple Democrats accused the president of deceiving us into an unjust war.

All this was very interesting to keep in mind when, in December of 2005, Bush was interviewed by Brit Hume on the Fox News Channel and asked whether or not Cheney had fallen out of favor with the president.

The press had been floating the idea that month that Cheney was suddenly not on the inside of the president’s circle of close advisers. Bush responded by saying that he found it interesting that one day Cheney was running the government, and the next day the story was that he was no longer a trusted adviser to the president and had been cut off.

The president explained that Cheney had always been, and would continue to be, one of his trusted advisers and they were still good friends. So the liberal press, which had just been saying that Cheney was running the government, was now questioning whether he even was allowed a seat at the table of ideas in the Bush White House.

Finally, when the National Security Agency spying story about the president authorizing wiretaps on suspected terrorists phone calls overseas broke, the scale tipped even further to the theory of the clever, plotting Bush. Once again the liberals portrayed the president as the cunning, diabolical dictator who was tapping every American’s phone he could get his hands on. However, the liberals never answer a major question – if this program is so criminal and illegal, then why did Bush repeatedly brief members of both parties of Congress about his activities? The liberals don’t have a good answer.

So it continues, the constant search by the liberals for an appropriate label for Bush. They so desperately want it to be true that this man, who graduated from Yale and Harvard, is dumb that they have convinced themselves it’s true.

Yet, they still find times when it is politically expedient for them to paint him as clever, cunning and smart. Stay tuned in 2006 to see what the label is for Bush this year: clever diabolical schemer or uneducated dolt. We can only wait and see .