Had enough?

Josh Marshall says that this should be the Democrat campaign slogan. Forget about the whining that Bush is politicizing 9/11, etc.

The response to all of this should be really simple. It might go something like this. "I wouldn't mind if the president were politicizing 9/11 so much if he hadn't failed so badly at rounding up the people responsible for it. The president pulled our troops out of Afghanistan for Iraq when they had Osama in their grasp and he's still at large 5 years later. And he's still pretending that Iraq had something to do with 9/11. People need to make a decision on November 7th. Is five years of failure enough? If people think President Bush is on the right course, they should vote Republican. If they think it's time for a change, they should vote Democratic."

It's that simple. Remember, the issue of politicization should be an afterthought. Failure is the issue.

Had enough?

Or as TPM reader PB says:

If the Democrats are serious about re-taking power they need to stop complaining about what is acceptable in political discourse and start running ads with footage of people standing on rooftops in New Orleans, chaos in Iraq, and bin Laden still on the loose and remind the American people all of these things are Bush's fault. Republicans will go wild complaining that it is not fair and it politicizes tragedies. Let them.

Rather than trying to work the refs, Democrats need to remind the American people over and over that this President has failed at everything he has done: he has failed to capture bin Laden, his policy in Iraq is a monumental failure, and he has failed to make the American people safer. Every level of government has broken down because of Bush's mistakes. These guys can't even get the little things right let alone the big stuff. And voting Republican only means more of the same.

Josh follows up by pointing out what I call GWB's Anus Touch:

Today, the record is really quite clear. Pretty much everything the president has done on the foreign front since 9/11 has been an abysmal failure. Even the things were legitimate successes early on, taking down the Taliban, for instance, have turned into failures.

If the president is politicizing 9/11, which he is, people who are open to seeing that, can see it already. And the way to focus attention on that is not to state the obvious. It is rather to point out the almost countless ways in which his record is one of failure. Where's bin Laden? Where are the weapons of mass destruction? Is Iraq part of the problem or part of the solution in making the United States safer from terrorism? All these questions all but answer themselves. And all in ways profoundly damaging to the president. Start asking them. And stop whining.