Bush Finds New Excuse

Andrew Sullivan offers us the latest in Bush reasoning, which is rather like the latest gopher banjo music. The Daily Dish: "Glenn Reynolds is busy blaming the New York Times for losing the war in Iraq, but the president isn't going to stoop to that level. He knows the NYT hasn't been planning the occupation, just criticizing it. In a recent speech, the president clearly signaled a new p.r. strategy to explain the chaos in a country we've been ineptly occupying for four years:

'When the decision was made to liberate Iraq, I was going on what my advisers were telling me and what everyone has said for nearly a century—that the U.S. military is the best in the world,' Bush said. 'But if that were the case, and we did have the most powerful army, navy, marines, and air force on the globe, we would be winning, right?'

The president admitted that he'd been toying with the idea that a thorough lack of quality in personnel, from the top U.S. commander to the lowest-ranked private, is the only way to account for the colossal failure in Iraq, given that everything on the administrative side of the war has been carried out with the utmost care and precision."