If you talk to god, you are praying. If god talks to you, Pat Robertson, you have schizophrenia.
You just can't make this stuff up...
Religious broadcaster Pat Robertson said "he believes God has told him President Bush will be re-elected in a 'blowout' in November," the AP reports.
Says Robertson: "The Lord has just blessed him. I mean, he could make terrible mistakes and comes out of it. It doesn't make any difference what he does, good or bad, God picks him up because he's a man of prayer and God's blessing him."
In a reference to Bush's political adviser, a Robertson critic said, "Maybe Pat got a message from Karl Rove and thought it was from God."
Our first New Year’s resolution should be to find out if the stated reasons for our pre-emptive strike – Iraq's purported weapons of mass destruction and Saddam’s connection with al-Qaeda – constituted a real threat to our national security. Because, contrary to public opinion, the present administration hasn’t yet made the case that Saddam and his sadists aided and abetted al-Qaeda's attacks on 9/11. We also need to know why our $30 billion-a-year intelligence agencies didn’t read the tea leaves correctly, as well as what’s being done besides upgrading the color code to prevent other similar strikes.
Almost daily we’re told that another American soldier has sacrificed life or limb in Iraq. For way too many of us – unless we have a white flag with a blue star in our window – these casualty reports have become as big a yawn as a TV forecast of the weather in Baghdad.
Even I – and I deal with that beleaguered land seven days a week – was staggered when a Pentagon source gave me a copy of a Nov. 30 dispatch showing that since George W. Bush unleashed the dogs of war, our armed forces have taken 14,000 casualties in Iraq – about the number of warriors in a line tank division.
We have the equivalent of five combat divisions plus support for a total of about 135,000 troops deployed in the Iraqi theater of operations, which means we’ve lost the equivalent of a fighting division since March. At least 10 percent of the total number of Joes and Jills available to the theater commander to fight or support the occupation effort have been evacuated back to the USA!
Lt. Col. Scott D. Ross of the U.S. military's Transportation Command told me that as of Dec. 23, his outfit had evacuated 3,255 battle- injured casualties and 18,717 non-battle injuries.
Of the battle casualties, 473 died and 3,255 were wounded by hostile fire.
Following are the major categories of the non-battle evacuations: Orthopedic surgery – 3,907 General surgery – 1,995 Internal medicine – 1,291 Psychiatric – 1,167 Neurology – 1,002 Gynecological – 491
Sources say that most of the gynecological evacuations are pregnancy-related, although the exact figure can’t be confirmed – Pentagon pregnancy counts are kept closer to the vest than the number of nuke warheads in the U.S. arsenal.
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So at the end of this turbulent year, we must ask ourselves: Was the price our warriors paid in blood worth the outcome? Are we any safer than before our pre-emptive invasion?
Even though Saddam is in the slammer and the fourth-largest army in the world is junkyard scrap, Christmas 2003 was resolutely Orange, and 2004 looks like more of the same. Or worse.
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Our Iraqi casualties deserve nothing less than the unvarnished truth. Only then will their sacrifices not have been in vain. And only then can we all move on with the enlightenment we need to protect and preserve our precious country’s future.
