General Abraham Lincoln in Pakistan

Anyone who has read Gen. Musharraf’s autobiography, In the Line of Fire: A Memoir knows that he can give Jerry Sienfeld a run for his money. Recently he set a new record by being the only dictator in Pakistan’s history to enforce martial law twice and in the speech he displayed his comical skills by comparing himself with Lincoln.

“I would at this time venture to read out an excerpt of President Abraham Lincoln, specially to all my listeners in the United States. As an idealist, Abraham Lincoln had one consuming passion during that time of crisis, and this was to preserve the Union… towards that end, he broke laws, he violated the Constitution, he usurped arbitrary power, he trampled individual liberties. His justification was necessity and explaining his sweeping violation of Constitutional limits he wrote in a letter in 1864, and I quote, ‘My oath to preserve the Constitution imposed on me the duty of preserving by every indispensable means that government, that Nation of which the Constitution was the organic law. Was it possible to lose the Nation and yet preserve the Constitution?’” [Musharraf and Lincoln, in Their Own Words]

In his speech Gen. Musharraf justified the martial law with the line that Pakistan is more important than any person and he was forced to do this to control terrorism. But in fact police and intelligence agencies have been hunting down lawyers instead of terrorists. The supreme court was to rule on the legality of Gen. Musharraf’s re-election and according to some insiders, the verdict was against him.Thus to save his own chair he suspended the constitution, fired his nemesis, Iftikhar Mohammad Chaudhary, then merged himself with Pakistan and came up with the statement that it is all being done to save Pakistan.
As Jerry Sienfeld asked Larry King we need to ask Musharraf, “Do you even know who Lincoln was?.”