Prominent among the political axioms apparent since the presidential campaign of 2000 is that no one plays the smear game as brilliantly and effectively as Karl Rove, aka Bush's brain, aka the White House's chief political adviser, aka The Man Behind the Curtain.

More pointedly, no one knows the exact limits of what you can get away with in modern politics, or precisely where the demarcation point of public outrage lies better than Karl Rove. The outrage boundary, if crossed, would figure to trigger a blowback that would be poisonous to George Bush's political future.

"I don't plan to lose my job," Bush told America in his news conference a few weeks back.

No one who employs Karl Rove ever does.

But when you look at the attacks on John Kerry's war record, you have to wonder if Rove's instincts have suddenly abandoned him. Even the mighty Yankees are evidently prone to a month in which they hit .220, but can Karl Rove actually think there is no risk of political blowback in questioning the military accomplishments and post-war positioning of a validated American hero?

Now, certainly the glowing military resumes of people like John McCain, whom Bush opposed in the 2000 primaries, and Max Cleland, whom the administration opposed in the midterm elections of 2002, did not spook Rove in the least. In other words, Rove has walked Bush through this political minefield before and has lived to tell about it.

McCain, a fighter pilot shot down and imprisoned by the North Vietnamese, saw his whole family trashed by the Rove machine after McCain had the temerity to beat Bush in the 2000 New Hampshire primary. Soon afterward, phone workers in South Carolina started making calls to potential primary voters there asking hypothetical questions about whether they'd be more or less likely to vote for McCain if they knew he'd fathered an illegitimate black child.

He hadn't, and they didn't say he had; they merely posed a hypothetical, but the fact that McCain and his wife have adopted a dark-skinned Bangladeshi girl who regularly appeared with the McCains at campaign stops all over South Carolina conveniently allowed racists and morons alike to put 2 and 2 together and get 5.

This tactic is what prompted the humorist Al Franken, at the time, to suggest a counterattack to the McCain campaign, in which "independent" pollsters would call likely voters and say, "If you knew that during the 5 1/2 years that John McCain was being tortured in Hanoi, George Bush was snorting 5 1/2 kilograms of cocaine, would you be more or less likely to vote for Bush?"

But when you start out by respecting people, you can't do that kind of thing. Rove and Bush lead a political juggernaut that, unfortunately, respects no one. Not even Cleland, who volunteered for Vietnam and left three limbs there, but when he ran for the Senate against Republican Saxby Chambliss, had to endure seeing pictures of himself in a Chambliss campaign ad next to images of Saddam Hussein and Osama bin Laden. Rove learned this stuff long ago at the hand of redoubtable Nixon dirty trickster Donald Segretti, who in 1972 turned Nixon opponent George McGovern inside out, from a heroic World War II pilot into a "liberal peacenik," words that no one even seemed to understand were pejorative to that point.

This established tradition of just-slimy-enough tactical genius, however, is about to run up against Kerry, who is not McCain, is not Cleland, is not McGovern, is not Michael Dukakis. Kerry will return fire with everything he's got, which is why George Bush's arranged inclusion in the Texas National Guard's "champagne unit" was suddenly back on the table this week.

Bush's attacks are a little hard to take when they're coming from an administration overpopulated by chicken hawks, people who supported the war as long as they didn't have to fight it. Sounds familiar doesn't it?

There is simply no way Rove can make Bush look good next to Kerry on these issues. Bush, assuming he's paying attention, should ask Rove what he's thinking.