Wednesday on the campaign trail, responding for the first time to the Al-Qaqaa story, President Bush said that John Kerry, in using the story as he has, was “denigrating the actions of our troops and commanders in the field.” It's an old tactic: Charge the liberal with not supporting the troops.
So who went on the Today show Thursday to blame the troops? Not Ted Kennedy. Rudy Giuliani, speaking thus: “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?”
It's entirely possible that Giuliani was intentionally undercutting Bush. Do not underestimate his potential to do so. The truest and smartest zinger of the Giuliani years in New York was delivered by Al Sharpton in 1997. At the time, Giuliani's aides were floating to reporters the idea that the mayor would make great vice-presidential material. A reporter asked Sharpton about this, and his imperishable reply was that anyone who took on Giuliani as vice president had “better hire a food-taster.” It's entirely possible that, to stop the Bush juggernaut that might logically lead to a Jeb nomination in 2008 if George W. wins this time, Giuliani went intentionally off message.
Or it's possible -- probable, actually -- that Giuliani was on message, dispatched by the campaign to plant a thought seed in the public mind that it would be imprudent for Bush and Dick Cheney to suggest themselves.
But whatever Giuliani's motivation, the juxtaposition of the two quotes tells us a lot about just how dramatically the Times story has rattled the campaign and about what depths the Republicans will descend to warp the debate and smear their opponent. Over here you have Bush, accusing Kerry of blaming the troops, which is an obvious lie because Kerry never did any such thing. And over there you have one of the campaign's chief surrogates doing what? Blaming the troops! And because I mentioned Kennedy: Just imagine the howling on the right if he had made that remark!
I was glad to see the Kerry campaign's Phil Singer strike back. “If George Bush understood what it means to be commander-in-chief, he'd understand that this is his responsibility and wouldn't be dispatching his allies to denigrate our troops," Singer said in a statement. Singer is from New York -- he used to work for Chuck Schumer before joining the Kerry campaign -- so he knows Giuliani's long history of statements blaming the victim: One black teenager shot in the back by cops shouldn't have been out on the streets at 2 a.m., which might well be true but was not an invitation to a shooting (he was waving a plastic gun while riding a bicycle); Patrick Dorismond, another shooting victim, was “no altar boy” (although in fact he had been, literally, when he was younger) and was asking for trouble. They go on and on and on. In the Dorismond instance, Giuliani -- then enmeshed in the Senate race against Hillary Clinton -- went so far as to have (it was always assumed, never quite proven) Dorsimond's juvenile record made public, in contravention of law; again, to plant the thought seed that maybe Dorismond deserved it, and the city was well rid of him.
It's the Giuliani mentality. In Rudy's New York, nothing bad that happened was ever, ever his fault. It was the work of silly, demented Marxists, or lethargic bureaucracies, or some wayward commissioner. And this, of course, is the one thing he and Bush (and Cheney and Donald Rumsfeld and Paul Wolfowitz and Condoleezza Rice) have in common. It's never their fault.
Well, this one is their fault, and they know it. And so they squirm and twist, trying to attack the Times for bias and trying to turn this act of horrifying incompetence on their part into yet another attack on Kerry.
It's not taking. I'm not making any predictions, and lord knows what the Bush campaign will come up with over the weekend (my bets: a leak to FOX News that administration derring-do “prevented” a major terrorist attack over the summer, and maybe an accusation that Kerry fragged a superior in Nam). But the Al-Qaqaa story has the Bushies in a panic, and it should. It's the single most incompetent action in the most incompetent war America has ever fought. It is not the fault of the troops, and Giuliani should be ashamed of himself.
Michael Tomasky is the Prospect's executive editor.
