Krugman - Must Read As Always

Today's Krugman column is a nice anthology of the news stories that have helped make this week Bush's week from hell. There's the "missing AlQaqaa munitions," of course, and "Letting Osama get away," "Letting Zarqawi get away," "The situation in Iraq," and "70 Billion more." He sums it all up:

The story of Al Qaqaa has brought out the worst in a campaign dedicated to the proposition that the president is infallible - and that it's always someone else's fault when things go wrong. Here's what Rudy Giuliani said yesterday: "No matter how you try to blame it on the president, the actual responsibility for it really would be for the troops that were there. Did they search carefully enough?" Support the troops!

But worst of all from the right's point of view, Al Qaqaa has disrupted the campaign's media strategy. Karl Rove clearly planned to turn the final days of the campaign into a series of "global test" moments - taking something Mr. Kerry said and distorting its meaning, then generating pseudo-controversies that dominate the airwaves. Instead, the news media have spent the last few days discussing substance. And that's very bad news for Mr. Bush.