Rafael in Bushworld

Even people who voted for the guy have to admit that George W. Bush isn't exactly tethered to conventional reality.

That's not necessarily a negative attribute — you could say basically the same thing about Albert Einstein, Galileo, Thomas Edison, or any other visionary.

But in Bushworld, to use a term coined by New York Times columnist Maureen Dowd, global warming is a myth, "intelligent design" is a scientific concept, Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction, and George Tenet, the man in charge of an intelligence service that never saw the Sept. 11, 2001 terror attacks coming, deserves the Medal of Freedom.

And Rafael Palmeiro is telling the truth when he says he never intentionally took steroids, or at least that's what the President thinks, according to a statement released within days of Palmeiro's positive test became public.

Anyone who is aware of the Downing Street Memo knows that, for Bush, gut feelings trump inconvenient fact — such as Palmeiro's positive test for stanozolol, the same powerful steroid that got sprinter Ben Johnson stripped of his Olympic 100 meters gold medal in 1988 — every time.

Stanozolol, known generically as Winstrol, doesn't appear in any over-the-counter supplements, which blows a massive hole in Palmeiro's story that he "accidentally" took the steroid prior to a positive test that netted him a 10-game suspension from Major League Baseball.

The notion that any professional athlete would ingest or inject something into his body without knowing exactly what is in it strains credulity.

Palmeiro's excuse would be far more believable coming from Barry Bonds' mouth. Bonds' supplement supplier — BALCO co-founder Greg Anderson, who pleaded guilty to federal steroid trafficking charges earlier this year — was his personal trainer and longtime friend.

If Anderson came at Bonds with a syringe and said it was a protein-B complex compound, the Giants' outfielder just might drop his pants and bend over, no questions asked.

That story is hardly believable, either, but compared to it, Palmeiro is telling fairy tales.

If Jose Canseco's book is to be believed — and we have less and less reason to doubt it — he's the one who initially provided Palmeiro with steroids.

And what does it say about baseball's drug problem that the most credible guy in the room isn't Palmeiro, Bonds, Baseball Commissioner Bud Selig, or even Commissioner wannabe George W. Bush, but Jose Canseco?

Palmeiro, who logged his 3,000th career base hit earlier this year to become only the fourth player in major league history with more than 3,000 hits and more than 500 home runs, is by far the most prominent player to test positive.

But that cloud hangs over other players — Jason Giambi and Bonds, who were reportedly named in leaked grand jury testimony from the BALCO case, just to name two. Sammy Sosa and Mark McGwire are also under suspicion.

The good news — or, to be more accurate, the least bad news — is that Palmeiro and most of the players who are merely under suspicion of using steroids are at or near the ends of their careers.

Last month, Bonds said he wouldn't return this year, thus ending speculation on whether he would overtake Babe Ruth on the all-time home run list this year.

He is expected to return in 2006. But Bonds is on the wrong side of 40, at least for a professional athlete, and not by a little bit. He's also had multiple knee surgeries.

And, if the suspicions are correct, he's also been robbed of the security blanket that enabled him to be a more dangerous hitter at age 40 than he was at 30.

There's a chance, a long-shot one, that Bonds might just walk away and turn his back on the immortality that getting his 756th home run would bestow.

That's the best news baseball, and its fans, could get. Bonds' retirement, and that day isn't far off in any event, would mean the beginning of the end of baseball's Monsanto — better baseball through chemistry — era.

The sooner he goes away, the sooner fans can focus on the next generation of (presumably) untainted superstars. Some of those players, like Luis Pujols and Mark Teixera, are already on the scene.

Maybe that cast will include Pittsburgh phenom Zach Duke, who won five of his first six starts (and got a no-decision in the other) with a sub-1 ERA for a team 20 games below .500, or the Braves' Jeff Francoeur, who has been knocking the ball lopsided since being called up last month.

At the beginning of last baseball season, fans argued about whether Cubs' star Sammy Sosa was on steroids. With any luck, the talk heading into next season will be about whether Cubs' star Derrek Lee's 2005 performance was a fluke.