For most of the three decades since Watergate, Americans have retained a healthy, democratic skepticism about their Presidents. In this new era of apprehension and insecurity, however, White House flacks and their friends in the national media have seized on the changed public mood to encourage an opposite tendency. We are now supposed to admire the occupant of the Oval Office, mostly because he is there, and to believe things about him that are very unlikely to be true. This recent trend scraped the nadir of credibility the other day when George W. Bush’s aides provided a press briefing about...