In his first public comments on the MoveOn.org controversy, President Bush on Thursday excoriated Democrats for not repudiating the activist liberal group, which ran a newspaper ad attacking a respected U.S. general.
Responding to a question by The Examiner at a White House press conference, Bush ripped last week’s MoveOn.org ad in the New York Times that mocked General David Petraeus, the top commander in Iraq, as “General Betray Us” and accused him of “cooking the books” on Iraq.
“I thought that the ad was disgusting,” a clearly agitated Bush said. “I felt like the ad was an attack, not only on General Petraeus, but on the U.S. military. And I was disappointed that not more leaders in the Democrat Party spoke out strongly against that kind of ad.
“That leads me to come to this conclusion: that most Democrats are afraid of irritating a left-wing group like MoveOn.org — are more afraid of irritating them than they are of irritating the United States military,” he said.
“That was a sorry deal,” Bush concluded. “It’s one thing to attack me. It’s another thing to attack somebody like General Petraeus.”
Eli Pariser, Executive Director of MoveOn.org’s Political Action Committee, took this as an invitation to accuse Bush himself of betrayal.
“What’s disgusting is that the president has more interest in political attacks than developing an exit strategy to get our troops out of Iraq and end this awful war,” Pariser said after the press conference.
“The president has no credibility on Iraq: he lied repeatedly to the American people to get us into the war. Most Americans oppose the war and want us to get out. Right now, there are about 168,000 American soldiers in Iraq, caught in the crossfire of that country’s unwinnable civil war, and the president has betrayed their trust and the trust of the American people.”
The ad has not been denounced by most leading Democrats, including the top-tier contenders for their party’s presidential nomination — Hillary Rodham Clinton, Barack Obama and John Edwards.
Read other stories by Bill Sammon
Read related stories about the MoveOn.org controversy
The controversial MoveOn.org ad. attacking General Petraeus (shown above)
