John Kerry should have known this earlier: Anyone who challenges a Bush can expect just about everything – except fairness.

All he had to do was ask his friend and Republican colleague in the Senate, John McCain, about his experiences during the South Carolina Republican primary campaign, where he had been the favored candidate over George W. in 2000. The slanderous claims were popping up faster than McCain could defend himself. According to one claim, McCain left his handicapped wife to produce bastard children with a black whore. In another smear attack, McCain supposedly suffered from venereal disease and enjoyed profitable relations with the Mafia. It goes without saying that McCain lost the race.

Given this history, it was to be expected that, just when challenger Kerry was able to gain the upper edge in the polls during the current campaign, people who had been paid to slander his record suddenly would begin showing up at his campaign rallies and in all the media, spreading lies about his military service in Vietnam.

That's because the Bushs are known as merciless campaigners, and opponents who are afraid of them say: "They're thugs." And they don't necessarily mean it metaphorically. During the Florida recount in November 2000, a group of well-dressed men suddenly showed up at the election board and violently demanded an end to the counting. The incident went down in history as the "Brooks Brothers brawl."

Beginning on Tuesday of this week, President George W. Bush will be forced to swallow some of the same medicine he so likes to prescribe for others. That's when a book that is only half as long as the Clinton memoirs, but twice as titillating, will first appear in bookstores: Kitty Kelley's extensive collection of all the escapades that the presidential dynasty has ever been accused of.*

Which Bush comes off the least favorably will be a matter of dispute: the family patriarch, Senator Prescott Bush, who died in 1972, the 41st US president, George Herbert Walker, or the 43rd president, George W. But it'll most likely be Barbara Bush, revered in the United States as the nation's grandmother, whom Kelley describes as a toxic witch with cojones. One thing is certain: After this book, outspoken Bush critic Michael Moore will come across as little more than a persnickety documentary filmmaker.

Kelley dishes up dirt by the ton, a tactic she employed in her previous bestsellers about Frank Sinatra, his friend Nancy Reagan, and the British royal family. Kelley's book is being published at conceivably the worst time for George W. Most of what she writes about is not entirely new, but it is so lovingly presented – and backed by an astonishingly large number of witnesses who have dared to use their real names – that not everything in it can simply be brushed aside as "made up," as the White House attempted to do last week.

Although it's been obvious for some time that George W. is no intellectual luminary, Kelley quotes scores of his fellow students at Yale and Harvard universities, who just happen to have a few extra insights. "Georgie, as we used to call him, was completely devoid of intellectual curiosity, in any subject," recalls a Tom Wilner. "This is the type of person who has no understanding whatsoever of complex issues." Another former fellow student, C. Murphy Archibald, describes Bush as a "Texas soufflé: blown up and full of hot air."

Naturally, Kelley also writes in detail about the alcohol and drug excesses of a man who once presented himself to the Queen of England as "the black sheep of the Bushs," but who, ever since he was "born again" as a devout Christian, is now supposedly clean. According to the White House, George W. stopped taking drugs after 1974.

Not so, claims Kelley, who writes that Bush snorted cocaine at Camp David while his father was president. She claims to have received this information from a source within the family (among other sources): Bush' former sister-in-law Sharon who, following her bitter divorce from brother Neil, is disclosing the family secrets. Now Sharon is issuing denials, while two other ear-witnesses are denying her denials. Not even W.'s wife Laura, who, according to polls, is the nation's most popular first lady, escapes criticism. According to Kelley, Laura was a small-time drug dealer in college.

Little escapes Kelley's scandal-mongering eye. Although her attorneys, all experts in libel suits, "examined the book with a fine-toothed comb," she still manages to link George W. with a former girlfriend's abortion. She freely quotes from e-mail exchanges between Bush senior and his sons, in which they discuss the principal sexual attributes of Bush predecessor and successor Bill Clinton: "Of course, his penis curves to the left."

There is only part of the book that could seriously spell trouble for the president, who is currently leading in national polls, although he could still be trailing Kerry where it really matters, in electoral votes. The author provides, once again, detailed evidence of how Bush managed to evade military service in Vietnam by joining the Texas Air National Guard as a pilot, an approach taken by dozens of other sons of prominent politicians. Now it's Bush who is being portrayed as the coward, in much the same way paid veterans have been trying to portray his rival with their slanderous claims.