Rudy Giuliani's recent strategy when discussing war has been to be evasive about Iraq preferring instead to focus on what he likes to call "the terrorists' war against us." His message has pretty much been "9/11 9/11 stay on offense 9/11" but that seems to be changing ever so slightly. Perhaps his handlers and pollsters have realized what's been pretty clear for a while now: that while the fearmongering may have worked in 2004, people began to emerge from their post-9/11 fog in 2006 and are even less susceptible to those arguments today. So Giuliani seems to be trying a new schtick -- maintaining support for Bush's wars yet criticizing the way they've been waged, and from the sound of it, he is wholly uncomfortable doing so. He is literally making no sense.

Here's what he had to say in an interview with The New York Times about what he perceives to be our inability to "multi-task" wars:  

"Neither one of these two wars -- the one in Afghanstan/Pakistan or the one in Iraq -- was nearly at the level of the planning we had done for the two wars we would have to fight at once," he said. "We should have organized ourselves so that we could accomplish in Iraq what we had to accomplish without taking anything away from accomplishing in Afghanistan and Pakistan what we had to accomplish."

Now today, Greg Sargent over at TPM Election Central, brings us this nugget from an interview with USA Today:

"This cannot be like a horror movie. You know, in the horror movie you kill the monster, and the hand re-emerges. And if you're not looking, the hand grows back and then the monster's there again. That cannot be allowed to happen."

Check out USA Today's generous translation of what might qualify as Giuliani's point:

Some of Giuliani's comments echoed critics of the war in Iraq who argue that the invasion drew attention and resources away from the battle against the home base of al-Qaeda, which carried out the 9/11 attacks.

Yes, Giuliani speaks for me!

We can no doubt expect more of this maneuvering from the Republican candidates in the coming months although it's hard to imagine any of them doing a worse job of expressing it than Rudy has.