As if the Bush presidential campaign had not enough troubles, subliminal rats are now gnawing at its credibility.
The campaign has had to drop a TV ad paid for by the Republican party attacking Vice-President Al Gore in which the word "rats" flashes on the screen for one-thirtieth of a second in big letters.
It was the last four letters of the word "bureaucrats", which was in much smaller type.
Mr Bush professed amazement when told about the ad, which was reported on page 1 of the New York Times. "Campaigns take bizarre twists, and this has to be one of the most bizarre accusations," Mr Bush told ABC.
"We don't need to be manufacturing subliminal messages to get my message across."
In fact it was so subliminal that only one person seems to have smelt or detected a rat as the ad ran 4,300 times over the past few months.
An eagle-eyed Democratic supporter in Seattle, Mr Gary Greenup, thought he saw something fishy and taped the ad. Sure enough "rats" showed up when it was played frame by frame.
So what dirty rat is to blame? The ad was produced by Alex Castellanos, a veteran in the business of attacking the Democrats, who said the "rats" were "purely accidental". "We don't play ball that way. I'm not that clever," he said humbly.
Mr Bush's chief media consultant, Mr Mark McKinnon, said he had examined the ad before it ran and he saw nothing. "Rats is not a message," he said. "I just watched it five times in a row and hard as I looked I couldn't see rats."
The Gore campaign claims to be shocked. "We have never seen anything like this," said a Gore spokesman. But, of course, no one really saw anything until they were told about it.
Mr Castellanos is trying to laugh it off. He recalls the rumours in 1969 that Paul McCartney had died and that the news was hidden in a Beatles song if played backwards. So "If you play the ad backwards, it says `Paul Is Dead'," Mr Castellanos jokes.
Mr Bush, like his father, is known to have trouble with words from time to time on the campaign trail, but now the magazine Vanity Fair is claiming that Bush jnr has dyslexia so it is not his fault if he says "hostile" when he means "hostage" or "terrier" when he means "tariff" or "Grecians" when he means "Greeks".
But the Bush spokeswoman, Ms Karen Hughes, will have none of it. While Mr Bush's brother, Neil, does have dyslexia, she says, the Governor of Texas and presidential candidate does not. "In the case of this story," she commented, "fiction is stranger than truth."
Reuters adds: President Clinton cast his first vote in support of Ms Hillary Clinton's political career in Chappaqua, New York, yesterday. Ms Clinton voted for herself in the New York state primary elections.