If Bush "thinks his deceptive rationale for going to war is a laughing matter, then he's even more out of touch than we thought," said Kerry

WASHINGTON, March 27 (IslamOnline.net & News Agencies) – U.S. President George W. Bush came under heavy fire for making a joke about the failure to find alleged weapons of mass destruction one year after the invasion and occupation of Iraq.

"Seeing our president joke about WMDs at a comedy function was terrible. How can a thinking, caring human being joke about the lie that led to body bags and broken young men and women? I was appalled," Fran, an American citizen from Burlington, Massachusetts, wrote to CNN protesting.

"I couldn't believe my ears when I heard Mr. Bush joking about weapons of mass destruction. It was tasteless and childish," wrote Ron from Pittsburgh.

CNN had received scores of e-mails from angry viewers commenting on the joke made by Bush on Wednesday, March 24 during the 60th annual dinner of the Radio and Television Correspondents' Association.

A non-scientific poll by CNN.com showed 54 percent of the more than 200,000 respondents felt Bush crossed the line.

Bush had narrated a slide show poking fun at himself and other members of his administration.

One pictured Bush looking under a piece of furniture in the Oval Office, at which the president remarked: "Those weapons of mass destruction have got to be here somewhere".

Another one showed him scouring the corner of a room, saying "No, no weapons over there," he said.

As a third picture, this time showing him leaning over, appeared on the screen Bush was heard to say: "Maybe under here?".

No weapons of mass destruction – the main pretext for invading the oil-rich Arab country – have been found more than 12 months after the U.S. and British forces launched their mass offensive.

'Ill-judged'

The joke about the fruitless search for Iraq’s alleged WMDs, has been dismissed as tasteless and ill-judged, said the BBC News Online.

"585 American soldiers have been killed in Iraq in the last year, 3,354 have been wounded and there's no end in sight. George Bush sold us on going to war with Iraq based on the threat of weapons of mass destruction. But we still haven't found them, and now he thinks that's funny?" said Democratic presidential candidate John Kerry.

"If George Bush thinks his deceptive rationale for going to war is a laughing matter, then he's even more out of touch than we thought. Unfortunately for the president, this is not a joke," he added in a statement.

'Despicable'

Other commentators also panned Bush, saying it was a smug and arrogant joke made at a time when American soldiers were still being killed in Iraq because of a war waged on the WMD premise.

Al Sharpton, another Democratic presidential hopeful, branded the joke "one of the most despicable acts of a sitting president."

"Well, that's not a joke to us, Mr. Bush. Five hundred soldiers lost their lives, looking for weapons that weren't there. Billions of taxpayer dollars were spent looking for weapons that weren't there," Sharpton was quoted as saying by the Associated Press.

"But guess what? You gonna look out that window in January and see a moving van to send you back to Texas," he added.

Claire Buchan, a White House spokeswoman, said Bush was not making light of the war in Iraq, but engaging in self-deprecating humor, as is the custom at such dinners.

"There's no question about the president's seriousness about this issue," she was quoted as saying by The New York Times.

U.S. Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld was asked what he thought of this incident at a press conference on Friday, but he dodged the issue, saying that he couldn't comment as he hadn't been at the event.

David Kay, the head of the 1,400-member Iraq Survey Group which has been searching Iraq for alleged WMD, had recently resigned his post over failure to find any truce of such weapons.