To: Peter Dierks who wrote (209693 ) 11/1/2004 2:56:19 PM From: tejek Respond to "Bush is running against the headlines and no amount of spin can make the bad news out of Iraq look good. “He has his finger in the dyke with Iraq, and there was a little leakage this week,” says Marshall Wittmann, a senior fellow with the centrist Democratic Leadership Council. In addition to the revelation about the explosives, Bush’s good friend, Iraqi Prime Minister Ayad Allawi, accused U.S. forces of willful neglect in the deaths of dozens of newly trained Iraqi soldiers gunned down as they traveled in an unarmed and unguarded convoy. Then word leaked that the White House would ask Congress after the election for $70 billion more for Iraq, upping the cost of the war to $225 billion. Defending Bush is getting harder, but that doesn’t deter the diehards. Conservative talk-show hosts were pushing the theory that Russian trucks hauled the missing explosives to Syria before the war. “And that’s the good news: that it’s not in the hands of insurgents in Iraq, it’s in the hands of terrorists in Syria,” says Wittmann, laughing at the absurdity of the claim. In an effort to throw Bush a lifeline, former New York mayor Rudy Giuliani went on the “Today” show and said what Bush had wrongly accused Kerry of saying—that failure to find and secure the weapons was the troops’ fault. “No matter how you try to blame it on the president, the actual responsibility for it really would be with the troops that were there," said Giuliani. "Did they search carefully enough? Didn’t they search carefully enough?” "dev.siliconinvestor.com
