It was an odd dream: The Bush twins were ten feet tall and peering in my window. They were snickering. "We had a hamster too..." they were saying, as though it were the merriest of threats. They were too close, too manic, too happy. "Let's just say that ours didn't make it," they concluded.

I woke up frightened, the sound of their ominous giggling trailing in my head.

This is a silly dream, I know. And in writing about it here, I have no wish to impute to the daughters my apprehensions about the father. But since the entire presidential campaign seems to be operating at the level of psychic symbols rather than material issues, I want to analyze it anyway. The dream captured precisely my fear of our iconic cowboy Commander in Chief, this Daddy Dearest who's too much of a he-man to do more for a hamster than consider its fur-to-red-meat ratio before taking decisive action to put it out of its pain.

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