Oct. 25 - George W. Bush should not be re-elected because he lied to the American people, has presided over record deficits, has removed scores of environmental regulations and is incapable of rethinking his positions even when confronted by new information.

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But for once, don’t take it from me. Take it from his second cousin. "He’s guided by an extreme narrow-mindedness and an inability to consider the full depth of an issue," says Chris House, whose grandmother, Mary House, was a sister of the president’s grandfather, Prescott Bush. That makes him the president’s second cousin twice removed—although he’ll settle for removing the president just once. "He may be a relative of mine, but nowhere in my side of the family do you see that sense of entitlement that he has," says House, who lives in Olympia, Wash. "He just projects this feeling that this job belongs to him and that he can do whatever he wants."

House is one of six members of his branch of the family that set up a Web site—bushrelativesforkerry.com—to help spread the news that not everyone in the Bush clan supports the president. Of course, Bush Relatives for Kerry is not a scientific survey of the entire Bush family tree. One can be reasonably certain that many of the president’s blood relatives think he’s doing a great job as president. I’m pretty sure that his father thinks so. And the twins, definitely. Laura probably. And, if pressed, Barbara Bush would probably have a few nice words to say (while still wishing Jeb was the commander in chief). But from a purely journalistic standpoint (that is to say, something that allows reporters to appear to be providing election coverage while avoiding any real analysis of the current administration’s shocking incompetence), this Bush Relatives for Kerry Web site is great. As I always say, thank goodness Al Gore invented the Internet!

None of the Bush relatives for Kerry has ever met the president—although several were in the same room during the inauguration of his father, George H.W. Bush—but all have a reason for disliking the way he’s running the country.

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"I wish I could support him," says Jeanny House, a pastor in Wisconsin. "Wouldn’t it be the coolest thing to be proud to say, ‘The president is my cousin!’? But I’m not proud because I fundamentally disagree with the way he’s running the country." Disagreeing with a member of the family is often thought of as a cardinal sin, whether your family is the Corleones, the Bushes or even the Kuntzmans. (On second thought, let’s leave the Kuntzmans out of this. My father and I disagree on everything. He thinks Bush has been our second greatest leader, after Reagan, of course, while I feel that the president ranks very favorably—as long as he’s being ranked against William Henry Harrison and Warren Harding.) Certainly, the Bush Relatives for Kerry have received plenty of angry emails that have recalled Don Corleone’s famous advice, "Never go against the family," but they’re happy to eschew omerta to oppose a man whose latest campaign ad features wolves pouncing on an America weakened by a Kerry presidency (subtle, huh? Why not just hand out sledgehammers at campaign rallies?).

"I feel like we have a responsibility as family members to say we don’t agree with him," says Hilary House, of the Seattle branch of the family. "But, yes, some people have said we should be ashamed to disagree with a family member in public." Hilary House says her cousin’s tax-cutting, environment-ravaging, deficit-ballooning, ally-spurning policies bothered her, but not nearly as much as exploitation of the September 11 attacks, which, we are often quick to forget, happened a month after he received a memo entitled, "Bin Laden Determined to Strike in U.S." That memo included sentences like, "FBI information . . . indicates patterns of suspicious activity in this country consistent with preparations for hijackings." Even the black sheep of the dumbest family in the country might have been able to come up with a way of securing cockpit doors or making sure names on our "watch lists" were actually—oh, I don’t know—being watched. Or that after invading Iraq, he would make sure to, at least, guard munitions dumps with hundreds of tons of explosives.

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But again, who cares what I think? You could hear it directly from one of the president’s blood relatives.

"I just don’t like the way everything in his campaign gets back to September 11," Hilary House says. "He goes around saying that if you don’t vote for him or accept everything he’s done in the War on Terror, we’ll be attacked again. After September 11, he told the world that ‘You’re either with us or against us.’ Well, my family doesn’t share that value."

After talking to all the Houses, it finally dawned on me what their campaign is mostly about. Sure, they want to deny the president a second term, but clearly they want to eliminate any guilt that might be associated with their family connection. It’s as if they were all wearing "I’M DEFINITELY NOT WITH STUPID" T-shirts. "In my family, we don’t feel like changing your mind when you learn something new is a sign of weakness, but a sign of strength," says Jeanny House, a pastor from Wisconsin. "His inability to consider the complexity of issues is definitely not a family trait—at least in my part of the family."

As a woman of the cloth, House splits with her cousin on issues of religious faith, which the president wears like a crown of thorns. "I understand Christian faith differently. I believe that Jesus calls us to a concern for the poor, for peace, for acceptance. The president doesn’t."

Imagine what they’d say if they weren’t related to him!

Gersh Kuntzman is also a reporter for The New York Post. Check out his rudimentary website at http://www.gersh.tv

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