As if Bush’s efforts to deflect responsibility for Al Qaqaa away from him and towards the troops weren’t abundantly clear before, consider what BC04’s top campaign surrogate Rudy Giuliani said this morning on NBC’s Today show:
Asked about the missing explosives in Iraq, Giuliani said: “The president was cautious. The president was prudent…. No matter how you try to blame it on the president, the actual responsibility for it really would be for the troops that were there. Did they search carefully enough? Didn’t they search carefully enough?”
[Update: a video clip of Giuliani’s comment is now online]
I understand that Republicans have no idea how to handle the Al Qaqaa story, and they’re justifiably afraid that this could hurt Bush’s chances on Election Day. But there’s just no excuse for Bush and his surrogates going after the troops like this, holding them responsible for Bush’s catastrophic mistakes.
It wasn’t, unfortunately, the first time Bush tried to use soldiers on the ground in Iraq as pawns in his political game. Tuesday, flailing around to come up with a decent response to the Al Qaqaa controversy, the Bush campaign settled on their favorite refuge: If Kerry is criticizing Bush for Iraq, Kerry must hate the troops.
Almost immediately, KE04 released a statement from Gen. Merrill McPeak condemning the accusation.
“The President seems to think Senator Kerry could not possibly be criticizing him since the President thinks he has never made a mistake. Let’s be perfectly clear: it is the President who dropped the ball. Senator Kerry is being critical of George Bush, not the troops. By embarking on the line of attack, George Bush is deflecting blame from him over to the military. This is beneath contempt.”
As usual with the Bush gang, the buck stops anywhere but the president’s desk. Shameful.