Here, a few choice quotes from George Pataki on the war in Iraq:

“Saddam Hussein was one of the most evil, barbaric dictators who engaged in terror against his own people and was apparently even engaged in a plot to assassinate former President Bush, and there is no question that Al Qaeda operatives have been and are in Iraq.”

“One of the Democratic candidates said that this is the wrong war at the wrong time, and the other Democratic candidate for president said that America should go to war not when America wants to go to war but when America has to go to war. Well, the firefighters who responded on Sept. 11 didn’t want to go to war, they had to go to war, a war they didn’t even know existed.”

“I honestly believe it’s something that transcends the normal political issues because it’s a matter of life and death. It’s a matter of the success of our way of life and the freedom of America.”

Now, here’s the NY Press:

Pataki’s son Teddy is, with supreme guts and righteousness, seeking a three-year law school deferment from the Marines, which last week commissioned the recent Yale grad as a second lieutenant.

The governor, who himself received a medical deferment during the Vietnam War because of poor eyesight, has said he hopes his son is granted the deferment. Of course he does. No doubt all the parents of New York’s nearly 100 war dead also wish their children could have gotten deferments. But they couldn’t. They got killed instead.

During the run-up to the invasion, Pataki was one of Bush’s biggest war whores in the Northeast, taking his pro-war stump speech on the road to warn New Yorkers about the imminent threat posed by Saddam Hussein. Since the governor’s support for the war has yet to waver, it is more than a little annoying to hear him publicly wishing for his son’s deferral.

“Annoying” does’t begin to describe it.

Via Atrios. More here.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, July 6th, 2005 at 10:07 am by Radley Balko and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.