Edwards: Bush almost delusional

Edwards, not being a psychiatrist, used the words, "borders on delusional."

Bush is delusional or criminally insane. We don't have to be so polite.

Democratic presidential candidate John Edwards slammed President Bush for connecting insurgents in Iraq with the terrorists who attacked the US on Sept. 11, 2001. The former Democratic senator said that the president's remarks "border on the delusional," and accused him of ignoring his own key role in allowing al Qaeda to gain strength in Iraq.

"The president's remarks today defending his Iraq policy without regard to actual facts border on the delusional," Edwards said in a statement released Thursday, hours after a Bush press conference. "The president claimed that the same people attacking U.S. troops today are the ones who perpetrated 9/11."

Speaking to reporters in the newly opened White House briefing room, Bush defended his war strategy and continued to conflate the war in Iraq with the terror attacks that brought down the World Trade Center.

"The same folks that are bombing innocent people in Iraq were the ones who attacked us in America on September the 11th," Bush said.

Edwards said that assertion ignores recent history, and the fact that there was no relationship between Iraq and al Qaeda prior to US troops invading.

"It must be nice to live in a world where your actions have no consequences," he said. "There was no group called Al Qaeda in Iraq before the president's disastrous mismanagement of the war gave them a foothold, a fact the president flagrantly ignores."

Democrats in the Senate this week are debating a Pentagon funding bill to which they are attaching measures aimed at reducing the US presence in Iraq. Keying off an interim report issued today that shows the Iraqi government is meeting less than half is required benchmarks for political progress, war critics are saying now is the time to begin bringing troops home.

"We've been told over and over again we can't expect a military victory in Iraq; it will take a political victory for us to finally see stability," Sen. Dick Durbin, D-Ill., said at a Capitol Hill press conference Thursday. "And yet, as the benchmark assessment reports tell us, there's little evidence of political progress in Iraq today, and certainly more violence and more death."

Sen. Hillary Clinton, the frontrunner for the Democratic presidential nomination, said Bush's report was an attempt to "put the best face on a failed strategy."

"Even the President's own portrait cannot paint over the reality on the ground: our strategy in Iraq is failing," Clinton said in a prepared statement.

Sens. Carl Levin, D-Mich., and Jack Reed, D-R.I., have introduced an amendment this week that would begin a drawdown of US forces within four months with a goal of having only a limited US presence in Iraq by April 31, 2008. That amendment has drawn support from some Republicans, including Maine Sen. Olympia Snowe, as public opinion continues to turn against President Bush's strategy in Iraq.

Tying the war in Iraq to the hunt for al Qaeda, Sen. John D. Rockefeller, who chairs the Senate Intelligence Committee, said invading Iraq prevented the US from "finishing them off when we had the chance in 2002 and 2003." He pinned the blame for reports of al Qaeda's increasing strength firmly on the decision to continue occupying Iraq.

“If we really want to protect our homeland and our citizens from attack, we must end our involvement in the Iraqi civil war and refocus on destroying the al Qaida organization that still wants to attack us here at home,” Rockefeller said.

President Bush indicated that he would continue his policy of vetoing any Congressional measure that attempted to establish a deadline for the withdrawal of US troops from Iraq.

At a White House press conference, a reporter asked Bush if he was still "committed to vetoing" any deadlines.

"You mean in this interim period? Yeah," Bush said. "I don't think Congress ought to be running the war. I think they ought to be funding our troops."

Bush insisted that he was "interested in their opinion" and would continue to work with Congress, but Bush said he hoped an amendment that would have nearly all troops out of Iraq by the end of April does not pass the Senate.

The only way Congress will be able to end the war, Bush implied, would be to cut off funding for the military mission.

"Congress has all the right in the world to fund. That's their main involvement in this war, which is to provide funds for our troops," Bush said. "What you're asking is whether or not Congress ought to be basically determining how troops are positioned. ... I don't think that would be good for the country."

(In accordance with Title 17 U.S.C. Section 107, this material is distributed without profit to those who have expressed a prior interest in receiving the included information for research and educational purposes. The Lantern has no affiliation whatsoever with the originator of this article nor is The Lantern endorsed or sponsored by the originator.)

....And The Truth Shall Set Us Free

No wonder Dobson is such a maniac!

Beat ‘em for Jesus! The unhappy childhood of Dr. James Dobson
Posted 9:18 am
Guest Post by Morbo

Have you ever wondered why Dr. James Dobson of Focus on the Family is such a nutcase? Why is he so obsessed with the sex lives of people he doesn’t even know? Why does he hate gay people so much? Why does he claim to love Jesus so much, and then behave in a vicious manner so unlike Christ?

A recent profile of Dobson sheds some light on these questions. As it turns out, Dobson’s parents physically and mentally abused him as a child, and he once got beaten up in school by a kid even Dobson admits was widely acknowledged to be a “sissy.”

The article in a Denver magazine called “5280″ makes Dobson’s mother, Myrtle, sound like a real piece of work. Notes writer Eileen Welsome:

Myrtle Dobson was an amiable and social woman, but she didn’t hesitate to whack
her son with a shoe or belt when she felt it was required. Consequently, Dobson
writes, he learned at an early age to stay out of striking distance when he
back-talked to his mother. One day he made the mistake of mouthing off when she
was only four feet away and heard a 16-pound girdle whistling through the air.
“The intended blow caught me across the chest, followed by a multitude of straps
and buckles wrapping themselves around my midsection.” The girdle incident did
not dampen his defiance, however. One evening, after Dobson’s mother forbid him
from going to a dance, the recalcitrant teenager told her that he was going
anyway; she picked up the telephone and called her husband. “I need you,” she
said.

The article continues: “‘What happened in the next few days shocked me down to my toes,’ writes Dobson.”

His father canceled the next four years’ worth of speaking engagements, put the
Oklahoma house up for sale, and took a pastor’s job in San Benito, Texas, a
small town near the Mexican border. Dobson had two years of high school left,
and when he started classes he found himself the target of a couple of bullies.
Rather than turn the other cheek, Dobson wheeled around and threw his
schoolbooks in the face of one annoying youth. “By the time he could see me
again I was on top of him,” Dobson writes. Dobson also tried a little bullying
himself, targeting a boy whom he sized up as a “sissy.” But the boy gave him
such a thrashing that Dobson concluded bullying wasn’t for him.

Elsewhere the story notes that in the Dobson household there were “a million rules…regulations and prohibitions for almost every imaginable situation.” Dobson recalls being “chewed out for using the expression ‘Hot dog!’ and forbidden from uttering ‘darn,’ ‘geez,’ or ‘dad-gummit’ because they were considered shorthand swear words.”

Even more alarming, Dobson admits in one of his books that as a child he arranged a fight between two mismatched dogs. The battle involved a tenacious bulldog and a “sweet, passive Scottie named Baby,” and Dobson provoked it by throwing a tennis ball toward Baby. He writes what happened next: “The bulldog went straight for Baby’s throat and hung on. It was an awful scene. Neighbors came running from everywhere as the Scottie screamed in terror. It took ten minutes and a garden hose for the adults to pry loose the bulldog’s grip. By then Baby was almost dead. He spent two weeks in the animal hospital, and I spent two weeks in the doghouse. I was hated by the entire town.”

As any child psychologist will tell you, this type of cruelty toward animals is a sign of a serious psychological disturbance.

So Dobson got smacked around with shoes and belts — for the heinous crime of exclaiming “hot dog!” His parents were uptight fanatics who mistreated him, and his mom even threw intimate undergarments at him. He got abused at a new school and lost a fight to a smaller kid. On at least one occasion, he was mean to a dog.

This is all a shame, and now I think I better understand why Dobson constantly tries to use the raw power of the state to cram fundamentalist Christianity down our throats: He had a lousy childhood.

There is a better way, Jim. Admit that these childhood demons still haunt you. Get help. Find a counselor. Talk it out. You have issues, dude. There’s no shame in that. Get the help you need and quit trying to gloss over your crummy upbringing by messing up the entire country.
Let this be a lesson to all of us as well. I’ve complained on this blog before about parents who use corporal punishment on children. Children certainly do misbehave at times, but nothing excuses physically assaulting youngsters. If the moral arguments against beating kids do not persuade you, consider this: As you spank your child, you may be shaping the country’s next James Dobson.

Tags: James Dobson, Focus on the Family, Dobson, childhood

(In accordance with Title 17 U.S.C. Section 107, this material is distributed without profit to those who have expressed a prior interest in receiving the included information for research and educational purposes. The Lantern has no affiliation whatsoever with the originator of this article nor is The Lantern endorsed or sponsored by the originator.)

....And The Truth Shall Set Us Free