It's very odd, and very un-Republican-like. The Bush White House, and the Republicans at large, are running scared from their own message on Iraq. For a long time now it's been "stay the course." Now, the White House is running from the phrase and denying they ever used it. Two weeks before the election that looks, and is, and smells, desperate. It reeks of flip-flopping. And it suggests, and is, weakness.
Hate when that happens.
Tomorrow's Washington Post, front page, has a blistering story about Bush's flip-flop.
...the White House is cutting and running from "stay the course." A phrase meant to connote steely resolve instead has become a symbol for being out of touch and rigid in the face of a war that seems to grow worse by the week, Republican strategists say. Democrats have now turned "stay the course" into an attack line in campaign commercials, and the Bush team is busy explaining that "stay the course" does not actually mean stay the course.Josh Marshall does a separate analysis of Bush's panicked last-minute message malfunction, and why Bush (and by extension all of us) is simply screwed in Iraq:
But President Bush can't and won't withdraw from Iraq because when he does, under the current conditions, he'll sign the epitaph, the historical death warrant for his presidency. Unlike in the past there are no family friends to pawn the failure off on and let them take the loss. It's all his. So he'll keep kicking the can down the road forever.
