Bush? He's happy:

"He turned to me several days ago and he said, 'Do you think John Kerry's enjoying himself?' " Karen Hughes, Mr. Bush's longtime confidante and communications adviser, said. "And I was sort of taken aback and I said, 'What do you mean?' And he said, 'Well, I'm really having a good time.' ..."

--Richard Stevenson in today's New York Times

That's Bush in a nutshell. Is he enjoying the campaign? Yes, but that's not enough: He wants to be told that he's enjoying it more than Kerry. Everything's a competition. Even joy.

*****

I have a related thought, inspired not by the quote above but by Bush's behavior over the last four years.

You know the standard line on the Bushes: so competitive they even treat horseshoes as a fight to the death. I can't help wondering if we need to flip that over -- I wonder if George W. Bush sees everything not just as a competition but as competitive horseshoes: something at which you fight like hell to win even though it's just a game.

When you've never been to war, when you've never even missed a meal, when, in short, you've been insulated all your life from pain and suffering, as George W. Bush has been, maybe you literally can't tell that there's a profound difference between a game of horseshoes and a war. Maybe you literally can't imagine how much more pain is caused by war than by horseshoes. Competition is life and everything is competition, and you always want to go for the kill because, well, everything in your own life has always been like horseshoes, and nothing has been the slightest bit like war.

And maybe this is why Bush invaded Iraq: It was just a competition, and in a competition you just blindly seek to win without worrying about the consequences -- after all, it's just horseshoes.