There’s stupid, incredibly stupid… and then there’s the Bush political machine
Hmm… I guess the question Wednesday morning will be whether scheduling the Saddam death announcement for Sunday morning was good or bad timing.
Hussein’s defense attorneys…accused the Bush administration and the Shiite-dominated government of Nouria al-Maliki of colluding to scheduled the verdict so it came two days before crucial mid-term elections, hoping to give Bush’s Republican Party an electoral boost. Iraqi and U.S. officials have denied the charge.
On the plus side for Republicans:
- it’s newsy enough to survive a couple of ‘cycles’, so we can expect they’ll be able to milk it through Tuesday
- it provides a happy distraction… any distraction of any kind would seem a happy distraction
- it’s got "death" in it, so the biblical crowd will feel satiated in a way they just aren’t getting from the latest synthetic fat substitutes
On the minus side, a process that already seemed rather unlikely to result in anything short of a death sentence is colored with yet more appearance of prejudice.
This has been years in the making - couldn’t they have waited a few days knowing that there are elections in America? Of course they could have… that’s the point. It can only be that the timing was manipulated because nobody that is independent and wants to appear independent would ever be so damned stupid or reckless as to conclude what they want to appear as a fair trial in the two days prior to an election they can reasonably expect could be affected.
A hat tip to the first GOP politician in a tight race that points out how he or she represents the party that brought you Saddam’s head on a TV Dinner tray.
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