"You Can't Impeach Me, I'm Delusional!"Marty Kaplan
Posted June 29, 2007 | 10:23 AM (EST)
I was wondering why swing Justice Anthony Kennedy abandoned the Supreme Court's right wing and blocked the execution of a delusional Texas killer yesterday, but then I saw the accounts of President Bush's Iraq speech at the Naval War College on the same day, and it suddenly became clear: SCOTUS is handing POTUS a lifeline in case he's impeached.
In his speech, Bush referred to Al-Qaida 27 times, saying "it is the main enemy for Shia, Sunni and Kurds alike. Al-Qaida's responsible for the most sensational killings in Iraq." But as Jonathan S. Landay of McClatchy's Washington bureau, committing an act previously known as journalism, pointed out,
"U.S. military and intelligence officials, however, say that Iraqis with ties to al-Qaida are only a small fraction of the threat to American troops. The group known as al-Qaida in Iraq didn't exist before the U.S.-led invasion in 2003, didn't pledge its loyalty to al-Qaida leader Osama bin Laden until October 2004 and isn't controlled by bin Laden or his top aides...Bush's use of al-Qaida in his speech had strong echoes of the strategy the administration had used to whip up public support for the Iraq invasion by accusing the late Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein of cooperating with bin Laden and implying that he'd played a role in the Sept. 11 attacks. Administration officials have since acknowledged that Saddam had no ties to bin Laden or 9/11. A similar pattern has developed in Iraq, where the U.S. military has cited al-Qaida 33 times in a barrage of news releases in the past seven days. In his speech, Bush referred only fleetingly to the sectarian violence that pits Sunni Muslim insurgents against Shiite Muslim militias in bloody tit-for-tat attacks, bombings, atrocities and forced mass evictions from contested areas of Baghdad and other cities and towns. U.S. intelligence agencies and military commanders say the Sunni-Shiite conflict is the greatest source of violence and insecurity in Iraq."
In other words, Bush is just as delusional as the Texas murder, Scott Louis Panetti.
Panetti, who served as his own lawyer in court, said "that his body had been taken over by an alter ego he called Sarge Ironhorse and that demons were bent on killing him for his Christian beliefs."
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