The president was campaigning today in one of the few places where he’s still welcome — a 35% approval rating will do that to a guy — and Mr. “Politics Has Gotten Ugly<\/a>” rolled out his final campaign pitch<\/a> of the season.<\/p>\n Bush said Democrats calling for withdrawing U.S. troops from Iraq aren’t unpatriotic, just wrong. […]<\/p>\n “If they say they want to win the war on terror, but call for America to pull out of what al-Qaida says is the central front in this war, ask them this question: ‘What’s your plan?’ ” Bush said at a rally for Missouri Sen. Jim Talent, who is seeking re-election in one of the tightest races in the nation.<\/p>\n “The truth is the Democrats can’t answer that question,” Bush said.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n Of course we can. In fact, the more pertinent question is, “What’s the president’s<\/i> plan?” The truth is Republicans<\/i> can’t answer that<\/i> question.<\/p>\n Because it didn’t fit in nicely with the GOP’s pre-written narrative, Bush & Co. have chosen to ignore it, but the fact of the matter is congressional Dems have<\/i> laid out a plan for Iraq and the future of the war on terror. Indeed, they’ve done so more than once. A few months later, in September, the entire Dem leadership team and Gen. Wesley Clark held a DC event to unveil a broader national security document (called “The Neo Con<\/a>“) detailing the administration’s counter-terrorism failures and describing a more effective way to keep Americans safe.<\/p>\n So, Dems have put their cards on the table. How about their friendly competitors on the other side of the aisle? Aside from “more of the same,” what, exactly, do we have to look forward to in the Republican vision for the future of Iraq and counter-terrorism measures?<\/p>\n (imagine image of crickets chirping and tumbleweeds rolling by here)<\/p>\n It’s an election season, so I suppose it’s inevitable, but what we have here is the latest example of Bush projecting<\/i>. The strategy he’s embraced has failed, he has no plan for the future, and he has to try and help the GOP win some campaigns. What to do? Accuse Dems of having his<\/i> faults.<\/p>\n No serious person could buy into this, right?<\/p>\n Update<\/b>: On a related note, we’ve reached a point in which a Republican candidate for Congress, campaigning in a Republican district in Florida, told a VFW audience yesterday that the White House has a strategy for the war in Iraq — and the audience literally broke into laughter<\/a>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" The president was campaigning today in one of the few places where he’s still welcome — a 35% approval rating will do that to a guy — and Mr. “Politics Has Gotten Ugly” rolled out his final campaign pitch of the season. Bush said Democrats calling for withdrawing U.S. troops from Iraq aren’t unpatriotic, just […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[617],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-8954","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-general"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8954","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=8954"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8954\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=8954"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=8954"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=8954"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}
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\nIn April, Dem leaders unveiled what they called their “Real Security<\/a>” plan (.pdf), which, oddly enough, explains how Dems would go about winning the war in Iraq. It’s actually a fairly detailed document.<\/p>\n