The Manichaean Candidate

      Maureen Dowd's column in today's NYTimes has a doozy of an attack on President Bush's deliberate mystification of facts -- a doozy, however, that (as so often with Ms Dowd) drifts from its strengths and gets trapped on the shoals of the ranting and the familiar. Notice the summa-cum-peripeteia that happens with the paragraph "Mr. Bush Swift-boated her."   A shame, really, because her first part was the stuff of head-slamming retort before she lapsed into the trite and yawn-inducing.