Kerry Fires Back at White House on Iraq War

President Bush and his former adversary, Senator John Kerry, are again engaged in a war of words.

On Monday, during a campaign rally with college students in California, Kerry launched into a series of one-liner jokes about President Bush, including one in which he said Bush used to live in Texas but now lived in a state of denial. He then said, "You know, education, if you make the most of it, you study hard, you do your homework and you make an effort to be smart, you can do well. If you don't, you get stuck in Iraq."

GOP spokespersons called the remark an insult to our troops. Senator Kerry calls it a botched joke about the President's incuriousness.

In another news cycle, Senator Kerry's remark might have gone down as a relatively benign political gaffe, but with only seven days to go before the mid-term elections, President Bush himself stepped into the fray.

Campaigning in Georgia, Bush said that Kerry had engaged in "troop-bashing" and insisted that Kerry apologize. Bush said, "Our troops did not enlist because they did not study hard in school or do their homework. The men and women who serve in our all-volunteer armed forces are plenty smart and are serving because they are patriots."

Kerry was livid about what he called the "classic GOP playbook" distortion of his statement. In a press conference, he insisted that his comment had been "a botched joke about the president and the president's people, not about the troops . . . If anyone thinks a veteran would criticize the more than 140,000 heroes serving in Iraq and not the president who got us stuck there, they're crazy."

But for a candidate often criticized for his perceived unwillingness to fight back against political attacks during his failed presidential bid, clarification was not enough. Kerry fired back at the White House in no uncertain terms. "I'm not going to be lectured by a stuffed suit White House mouthpiece standing behind a podium, or doughy Rush Limbaugh, who no doubt today will take a break from belittling Michael J. Fox's Parkinson's disease to start lying about me just as they have lied about Iraq . It disgusts me that these Republican hacks, who have never worn the uniform of our country lie and distort so blatantly and carelessly about those who have."

Then Kerry shifted the debate back onto the topic Republicans would most like to avoid: the War in Iraq.

Kerry launched a frontal assault on the administration's policy in Iraq, saying, "The people who owe our troops an apology are George W. Bush and Dick Cheney who misled America into war and have given us a Katrina foreign policy that has betrayed our ideals, killed and maimed our soldiers, and widened the terrorist threat instead of defeating it. These Republicans are afraid to debate veterans who live and breathe the concerns of our troops, not the empty slogans of an Administration that sent our brave troops to war without body armor. Bottom line, these Republicans want to debate straw men because they're afraid to debate real men. And this time it won't work because we're going to stay in their face with the truth and deny them even a sliver of light for their distortions. No Democrat will be bullied by an administration that has a cut and run policy in Afghanistan and a stand still and lose strategy in Iraq ."

Republicans sensing blood in the water, have vowed to attack Senator Kerry until he apologizes for the remark, but some Democratic strategists say this tactic will backfire. They say repeated attention on the phrase "stuck in Iraq" does not play to GOP strengths, and every attack gives Senator Kerry the opportunity to shift the debate back to the Iraq War.

Few believe that the mid-terms are a do-over of the 2004 elections, but it is clear the bitter contest between Senator Kerry and President Bush has left lasting rifts.