MISUNDERSTER PRESIDENT

How does Bush get away with this stuff?

Plenty of people gleefully and glibly note when the president mangles his native language (“They misunderestimated me”), but so long as he speaks clearly, his most outrageous assertions seem to slide by unquestioned. In a speech Tuesday in Iowa, as quoted by The New York Times, he told a cheering crowd that:

“In the campaign, you’ll hear, we’re only going to tax the rich ... And only taxing the rich, first of all, creates a huge tax gap, which means buyer beware. You see, if you can’t raise enough by taxing the rich, guess who gets to pay next? Yes, the not-rich. That’s all of us.”

Hmm. My answer would have been phrased somewhat differently: “The people who are paying all the taxes now?”

There are so many things wrong with the president’s blast at Democratic presidential candidate John Kerry -- including the basis for the whole statement, that Kerry plans to tax only the rich -- that it becomes overwhelming to point them all out and easier to tune it out completely.

Sadly, Bush can count on that and still come out ahead in November, and we will have misunderestimated him again, whatever that means.