Marueen Dowd

The whole thing was extremely suspicious.

People here still haven't stopped buzzing about the president's bizarre behavior at the White House unveiling ceremony for the Clintons' official portraits on Monday. Bush acted totally out of character: witty, engaged, amiable, bipartisan and magnanimous. Even to Bill and Hillary.

He gave a sly wink to his own black-sheep past and that of the wayward Rodham brothers, Hugh and Tony, when he greeted the Rodhams' mom, Dorothy: "Welcome, we're glad you're here. And those two boys you're still trying to raise."

W. gave lavish encomiums -- and even a nickname -- to the man he once accused of stripping the White House of dignity and honor. Saying his dad was 41 and he's 43, he grinned and said, "We're glad you're here, 42."

Even Bill Clinton was dumbfounded, not to mention confounded. Maybe that's why the usually articulate 42 declared he felt like "a pickle stepping into history." Shouldn't he have felt like the ham and cheese between two slices of Wonder bread?

Clinton told friends afterward that he was blown away, that W. had never been so nice to him before. There was no smirk, no begrudging. And Clinton pals at a Georgetown restaurant that night alternated between bellowing about getting rid of President Bush and marveling at how great he'd been at the unveiling.

"Maybe after a week of seeing the comparisons of himself and Reagan, in which he did not come out as well," one Clintonista speculated, "he's getting the knack of acting more like Reagan." Clinton used to study Reagan tapes to pick up pointers; why shouldn't Bush?

Perhaps we have a Potomac invasion of the body snatchers. Maybe, like the grumpy wives of Stepford, bristly W. has been replaced by soothing W. With the race with John Kerry so tight, the Republicans were reminded last week of the advantages of a leader with a light touch -- not one who's at odds with the world, and rattled about the prison torture scandal creeping toward Rummy and the sulfurous reversals in Iraq. (Although it would be natural for Bush to feel churlish. After going to war to save Iraqis from an evil dictator who gassed them, now he can't even trust the Iraqis to bring Saddam to justice.)

Like the Stepford husbands, GOP bigwigs could have met in a mahogany-paneled men's club, smoked cigars and decided they wanted a W. who was a little less pushy and a little more sunny. All world domination, all the time, can be wearing.

The Republicans messed up their first attempt at this, when they took Dick Cheney to an undisclosed location to switch him with a replicant. Instead of an affable, reassuring presence, as he was in Bush I, the Bush II vice president is a macabre automaton who keeps repeating, over and over, as contrary evidence piles up, that Saddam and al-Qaida were linked, and that Mohamed Atta met an Iraqi intelligence officer in Prague.

Cheney did it again on Monday in Florida speaking at -- where else? -- a conservative think tank; he said Saddam "had long-established ties with al-Qaida." This claim, used by the White House to justify its gallop to war, was once more flatly contradicted by the 9/11 panel's report on Wednesday: "Two senior bin Laden associates have adamantly denied that any ties existed between al-Qaida and Iraq. We have no credible evidence that Iraq and al-Qaida cooperated on attacks against the United States."

The report says Osama did seek help from Saddam in the '90s, "despite his opposition to Hussein's secular regime." But aside from sending an official to meet with Osama in Sudan, Saddam stiffed his request for weapons and training-camp space.

Cheney isn't programmed to process evidence that shows he was wrong; he simply keeps repeating the same nonsensical claims as if he has a microchip malfunction.

Unfortunately, there's no spouse to give him a knock on the head, as the Stepford husbands do when their Farrah fem-bots go haywire and keep repeating things like, "I'll just die if I don't get that recipe ... I'll just die if I don't get that recipe ..."

Cheney-bot just keeps going and going: "He had long-established ties with al-Qaida ... He had long-established ties with al-Qaida ... brzzzrrrp."

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