(Cross-posted from MLN.)
It’s tough enough to have come back from your eighteenth trip from Iraq only to see the following caricature of yourself on the cover of a weekly local newspaper, with a subtitle asking out loud if you’ve “lost your mind” on the matter:
It’s tougher still to have to look inside the paper and read a quote like this from an Iraq war vet:
“He has more positions on Iraq than Mitt Romney has on abortion,” says Soltz, a veteran of the Iraq and Kosovo wars. “You never know where he sits on Iraq. He can tell you what he wants, but he is lined up with George Bush on this war.”
“He likes to brag about how many times he’s been to Iraq,” Soltz adds, “but he’s never served, and he doesn’t really know how the military works. Shays-all he talks about is tactics, but military people talk about diplomacy; I want to see a policy change, but that is not going to happen by adding more troops.”
But it must really suck to have to read your hometown paper report that the chairman of one of the House committees you sit on is investigating your campaign for possible coordinated impropriety with Karl Rove, while noting that you opposed an investigation into Rove’s political use of government resources even though you had an obvious conflict of interests as one of the officials implicated in the scheme:
A congressional panel is investigating whether the White House misused federal resources to help re-elect Rep. Christopher Shays, R-4, in 2006.
Rep. Henry Waxman, D-Ca., who chairs the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee, sent letters Tuesday to the heads of 18 federal agencies seeking documents to determine if that is so….
Shays has been critical of the investigation, and voted April 25 against issuing subpoenas to the Republican National Committee seeking e-mails that White House officials wrote on RNC e-mail accounts about using federal resources to help Republican candidates.
At the April meeting, Shays complained that “I feel like we are straining out gnats and swallowing camels.”
There are “so many huge issues that we should be debating,” he added.
Worse, this is all taking place on the same day that you’re holding a press conference to try to placate the local press by promulgating your latest tortured rhetorical contortion on the war.
And there are still two days left…