Maxine Waters: “I am here this evening because I came to defy the President of the United States of America. I came to talk about what…”

“I am here this evening because I came to defy the President of the United States of America. I came to talk about what is happening in Iraq. I came to do that, understanding that this President does not want this kind of discussion. I recognize that the President does not want us to continue to remind him of this disaster in Iraq. This is a President who has tried to intimidate the news media and told them to stop writing about the bad things that were going on in Iraq, and he told them to write about good things that are happening in Iraq. But thank God that the news media of this country has continued to report on what is really going on in Iraq. Oh, yes, they have talked about some of the children returning to school, and they have talked about the book bags. But the American people want to know about what is happening with our soldiers. The American people are terribly upset about the loss of the lives of our soldiers. So I am here in defiance of the orders and the attempts to keep us from talking about what is going on. The President's unilateral invasion of Iraq and his administration's subsequent mismanagement of the Iraq conflict have left our Nation in a quagmire. According to the Pentagon's own figures, 422 American servicemen and -women have been killed in Iraq since the beginning of the war and 2,041 have been wounded.”