John Kerry needed to apologize for the accidental bungling of a joke about Bush that inadvertently cast aspersions on rank and file troops, and he did.  Good.

The Bush administration, having nothing better to do, pounced on his remarks, in order to deflect attention from their complete ineptitude at governance to Kerry's inability to tell a scripted joke, as anyone with half a brain knew they would.  Par for the course.

But on The Situation Room with Wolf Blitzer, House Majority Leader John Boehner (R-OH), self-confessed believer that Donald Rumsfeld is the "best thing to happen to the Pentagon in 25 years" took Kerry's error in speech an intentional step further and blamed the generals on the ground in Iraq  for the administration's total incompetence in directing our continuously devolving war:

House Majority Leader John Boehner: Wolf, I understand that, but let's not blame what's happening in Iraq on Rumsfeld.
Wolf Blitzer: But he's in charge of the military.
House Majority Leader John Boehner: But the fact is the generals on the ground are in charge and he works closely with them and the president.
Source: US Newswire

Boehner doesn't have the excuse of either bungling a joke or misspeaking.  If Kerry's accidental comment merited an apology, which it did, then Boehner's willfully blind defense of the incompetence that is Rumsfeld, particularly in light of retired generals' multiple avowals that the mulish Defense Secretary listens neither to grounded advice nor to any reason contrary to his own emphatic opinion, is inexcusable.  He owes the generals an apology for his deceitful exculpation of executive inadequacy achieved through shifting the blame from its rightful owners to the guys stuck with carrying out bad orders, he owes the American people an apology for insisting the misguided Rumsfeld is somehow beneficial to the country, and he owes an apology to his constituents for allowing partisan hackery to interfere with his duty to protect their interests.

Unfortunately, whereas Democrats are lately often characterized as weak for being thoughtful people who, even if belatedly, attempt to do the right thing with respect to this disastrous war, Republicans see dishonesty and intransigence as laudable virtues, rendering an apology from Boehner, on even the most superficial of levels, likely a physical impossibility.

In a country where blind partisanship is held in higher regard than ethical assessment, no wonder we have stunted adolescents for leaders.