So what, you say? So what if the President fudges the name of a western painting, and so what if he uses the theme of the Christian cowboy in his official campaign biography, and in his scripted talking points to Oval Office visitors?

Well, this carefully constructed myth of the Christian cowboy is the central metaphor and theme that Bush artfully employs to rally the Christian conservative base with whom he's identified himself. This is the President's brand: the Christian cowboy is his logo and "A Charge To Keep" is his tagline. And the President's brand is built around a manufactured image - a lie - created to pander to his base for crass political gain. There is no truth, no authenticity to the Presidential brand. It is, in a word, horseshit.

So what's the real story behind this once-obscure but now famous western illustration by a German immigrant named William H.D. Koerner, and what was the artist's true inspiration? Bear with me through the details; the revelation will be worth the wait.

Gergen: 'Is he leading up a mountaintop...or over a cliff?'

David Gergen believes that Bush's identification with Mr. Koerner's painting says something important about the qualities of his leadership. And Mr. Gergen knows something about what presidential leadership requires. He advised Presidents Nixon, Ford, Reagan, and Clinton, and now directs the Center for Public Leadership as a professor at the John F. Kennedy School of Government at Harvard University. In the Fall 2003 issue of the school's magazine Compass: A Journal on Leadership, Gergen wrote:

"Bush's personal identification with the painting, which now hangs in the Oval Office, reveals a good deal about his sense of himself as a political leader--who he thinks he is, the role he plays, and the centrality of his religious faith.... His followers today tend to see in Bush what he sees in the painting: a brave, daring leader riding fearlessly into the unknown, striking out against unseen enemies, pulling his team behind him, seeking, in the words of Wesley's hymn, "to do my Master's will." They see him as a straight shooter and a straight talker. They take comfort in his religious faith and think he is leading us toward a mountaintop."

Ah, horseshit. He's riding recklessly up a cliff, believing he's on a God-given mission and enjoying it so much that he does not heed whether his horse is about to get crippled on the slick shale underfoot. The President, in macho mode, cannot imagine the possibility of leading his imaginary Christian nation right off a cliff. And so that is just what happens. As the Good Book says, "They are a nation without sense, there is no discernment in them.... In due time their foot will slip; their day of disaster is near and their doom rushes upon them." (Deuteronomy 32:28, 35)

Writing for Compass, Gergen concludes:

[Bush's] style of leadership encourages short-term thinking, and as we are now realizing, the flip side of boldness can be recklessness. Inevitably, as we step back and see Bush whole, our imaginations are drawn again to that painting by W.H.D. Koerner: should we celebrate the daring young rider as he scrambles up that tough terrain? Is he leading up a mountaintop...or over a cliff? Bush may have been more provocative than he knew in hanging it in the Oval Office.

The painting hangs to the left of the President's desk, above a bust of President Eisenhower, and Mr. Bush invariably ends his guided tours of the Oval Office by reciting a few ta