Krugman gets it 99 percent right

From his column today on the presidential campaign:

"T]he deceptive and dishonest 2000 Bush-Cheney campaign provided an all-too-revealing preview of things to come. In fact, my early suspicion that we were being misled about the threat from Iraq came from the way the political tactics being used to sell the war resembled the tactics that had earlier been used to sell the Bush tax cuts.

"And now the team that hopes to form the next administration is running a campaign that makes Bush-Cheney 2000 look like something out of a civics class. What does that say about how that team would run the country?

"What it says, I’d argue, is that the Obama campaign is wrong to suggest that a McCain-Palin administration would just be a continuation of Bush-Cheney. If the way John McCain and Sarah Palin are campaigning is any indication, it would be much, much worse."

To this I'd just add, among the key Bush personality traits that has shaped his presidency is the fact that he is a natural, lifelong bully. But he does not appear to be a violent bully to quite the same degree as McCain. That's a rather large consideration when one considers that, under the current U.S. government system as it actually operates, the president effectively has plenary and unilateral war-making powers, and has lately been claiming equally plenary and unilateral domestic national security powers.