A Festival Of Apologies

As long as our corporate media and the freepers continue to dump on John Kerry over his backfired joke attempt, I’d like to mention a couple of other individuals who could show some contrition also.

(That being said, though, I should add that I think Kerry was going a looong way to take a totally unnecessary shot at Bush. No, this isn’t ultimately important and it doesn’t deserve the attention and comment that it has received.

I say “unnecessary” because, at this point, two-thirds of the country, to say nothing of the world, knows George W. Bush as the total, unequivocal, abject failure that he is, and the other third will ALWAYS support him, so there’s no use trying to reach them. Aside from pure spite, I don’t know why Kerry felt that it was necessary to point that out again.)

This takes you to a Daily Kos post that notes the following exchange between House Majority Leader John Boehner (living up to his name here, as far as I’m concerned) and Wolf “The Beard” Blitzer on CNN:

House Majority Leader John Boehner: Wolf, I understand that, but let's not blame what's happening in Iraq on Rumsfeld.

Wolf Blitzer: But he's in charge of the military.

Boehner: But the fact is the generals on the ground are in charge and he works closely with them and the president.

To me, this is like Rudy Giuliani blaming our troops for not securing the cache of Iraqi munitions used to make IEDs, when the fact is that not enough troops were sent over to get that job done in the first place (which was definitely noted by Patrick Murphy, with Patrick quite rightly taking umbrage over that).

So it’s the fault of the generals then, John? How interesting (and kudos to Harry Reid for pouncing all over it).

(Speaking of Reid, I'm utterly shocked that John Solomon of the AP hasn't reported on the latest Reid scandal over his failure to tip a waitress 20 percent when he dined at Red Square in Mandalay Bay in Las Vegas. You're slipping, John! YOU owe us an apology too).

The next person on the apology parade should be Dubya himself, and the text from Media Matters accessible from this link explains why.

During the 2004 presidential campaign, Sen. John Kerry (D-MA) criticized Bush for relying on local Afghan militias to capture bin Laden at Tora Bora rather than using U.S. troops to do so -- which is precisely what happened, according to Ron Suskind's The One Percent Doctrine: Deep Inside America's Pursuit of Its Enemies Since 9/11 (Simon & Schuster, June 2006). Bush angrily denounced Kerry's "wild claim," as the Associated Press reported on October 25, 2004:

He accused Kerry of "throwing out the wild claim that he knows where Osama bin Laden was in the fall of 2001 -- and that our military had a chance to get him in Tora Bora."

That was a reference to Kerry's frequent assertion that the administration "outsourced" the job of hunting down bin Laden to Afghan warlords.

"This is an unjustified and harsh criticism of our military commanders in the field," Bush said. "This is the worst kind of Monday-morning quarterbacking."

Of course, Kerry wasn't blaming "our military commanders in the field" -- he was blaming Bush.

The Tora Bora controversy got a great deal of media attention in 2004, but now that Suskind has reported that Bush was personally warned that bin Laden would escape if Bush failed to send U.S. troops, the nation's leading news organizations apparently couldn't care less.

How typical (THEY sure as hell need to apologize also).

And I'll let Keith Olbermann have the last word on this with his stirring commentary.