Reality-Based World vs Bush

It's been an interesting week for the Bush campaign. First, there was this small problem of missing explosives, then there was Osama bin Laden, free, healthy and thumbing his nose at Bush for all the world to see.

The rhetoric has been hot and heavy.

Osama bin Laden needs his own post, so this one will focus on just the explosives:

Enough explosives to take down every airplane in the world were left unguarded by the Bush administration. These explosives happened to be in a convenient place for those who want to harm us and our troops. So, those people came along and took the explosives. Thank you GW!

What's the right wing response?

"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," Mr. Giuliani said. "Did they search carefully enough or didn't they search carefully enough? We don't know."

The Frame
This frame doesn't just imply it's the troops fault, it says it point blank.

There you go. The terrorists have fresh boatloads of high-explosives to use against us because we have incompetent troops. That's just the kind of support we've all come to expect from this administration.

Now, in the reality-based world, troops follow orders, whatever those orders may be. It's highly unlikely for some wayward troops to sneak off someplace to stand guard over something whose significance they don't know. As a matter of fact, sneaking off to do something other than what you're told has a name: AWOL for "absent without leave," something the President might know something about.

Anyway, when something like leaving a massive munitions dump unguarded happens, it's NOT the troops' fault.

A U.S. military unit that reached a munitions storage installation after the invasion of Iraq had no orders to search or secure the site, where officials say nearly 400 tons of explosives have vanished.

It's the fault of their superiors, for not passing down the orders that such things are supposed to be guarded. Since the low-level commanders involved in the region of Al QaQaa were also not told that they should be looking for and securing such facilities, they are also not to blame. The blame rests squarely at the feet of the head honcho: George Bush, Commander-in-Chief.

If George bush is the leader of this country, he would have been informed about the IAEA report - before we invaded.

The United States Government has been informed of these observations, and clarifications are expected.

As leader, George Bush should have told his chain of command to make sure folks secured or destroyed such facilities when we invaded.

He didn't.

I can think of two possible reasons:

1. He's not the kind of leader who cares enough to require that his subordinates inform him of significant threats, and thus he was uninformed. This is a sign of incompetence.
   
2. He knew about the facilities and didn't give orders to ensure they were secured. This is also a sign of incompetence.
   

In either case, because of one type of failure or another in Bush's so-called "leadership," the troops never received orders, and thus never followed them. That's not the troops' fault.

It IS Bush's fault.

What would a real leader do now? A real leader would send people to find the missing explosives! A real leader would not spend time trying to shift the blame to his subordinates.