Commenting on Karl Rove's remarks in a speech in New Hampshire where he charged that Democrats are "wrong, profoundly wrong" in wanting to cut and run in Iraq, an increasingly rabid anti-war Congressman John Murtha resorted to a personal attack on Rove on Sunday.
"He's in New Hampshire, he's making a political speech. He's sitting in his air-conditioned office on his big fat backside saying, 'Stay the course,'" said Murtha, D-Pa., in an appearance on NBC's "Meet the Press."
Obviously rattled by criticism from Rove, Murtha said: "I disagree completely with what he's saying. We need to change direction. We can't win a war like this. This guy's sitting back ... getting paid by the public taxpayer and he's saying to us that we're winning this war ... we've got to change direction. You can't sit there in the air-conditioned office and tell the troops fighting in Iraq that we have to stay the course.
Despite recent gains in Iraq, Murtha insisted the U.S. is losing the war in Iraq. When told by "Meet the Press" host Tim Russert that Rove had told the New Hampshire audience that "if Murtha had his way, American troops would have been gone by the end of April" and American forces wouldn't have killed Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, Murtha downplayed the importance of killing the top terrorist in Iraq, saying dismissively: "They built Zarqawi up, they have a thousand foreign fighters" -- that the intelligence "came from the outside" and that all the U.S. did was bomb his hideout and kill him.
Turning to his own plan for cutting and running, Murtha became increasing irrational, suggesting that U.S. troops there be redeployed outside of Iraq yet close enough to be ready to go back in if the situation required it. When pressed by Russert to say where the troops could be deployed if neighboring countries refuse to accept their presence, as Rove had said, he suggested they could be sent to Okinawa, Japan, which is 5,000 miles from Baghdad.
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"We don't have to be right there, Murtha said. "We can go to Okinawa. We could redeploy there instantly."