[Congressional Record (Bound Edition), Volume 149 (2003), Part 10]
[House]
[Pages 14118-14123]
[From the U.S. Government Publishing Office, www.gpo.gov]




             REPUBLICANS LOOK AFTER AMERICA'S CHILDREN, TOO

  The SPEAKER pro tempore. Under the Speaker's announced policy of 
January 7, 2003, the gentleman from Colorado (Mr. McInnis) is 
recognized for 60 minutes as the designee of the majority leader.
  Mr. McINNIS. Madam Speaker, first of all, I would like to address the 
preceding comments from the gentleman from New York in regards to 
WorldCom. His remarks are right on point. I would urge the gentleman to 
look even further at the WorldCom situation and take a look at the $27 
million house that Scott Sullivan has off Florida, take a look at 
Bernie Ebbers and the money that guy has put into this. That is a clear 
case of not just corporate fraud but criminal fraud. Any one of us, any 
normal citizen in the United States, in my opinion, would have already 
been put into prison having committed the kind of fraud that cost tens 
of thousands of people their jobs at WorldCom and perhaps one of the 
biggest bookkeeping frauds in the history of corporate America.
  So I think that the gentleman from the other side of the aisle, his 
comments are in order.
  I want to address some of the other comments. For the last hour or 
so, only the Democrats have been speaking on the floor, and their 
remarks time after time after time have been very partisan, very 
political, and full of a lot of rhetoric. Although it is not the main 
topic of my discussion this

[[Page 14119]]

evening, I think it is important that at least some rebuttal be put 
into the record so that the Democratic, which was led off by the 
minority leader over there, that these partisan remarks, which as I 
said earlier were full of rhetoric and, in my opinion, inaccuracies, 
that these remarks do not go into the Record without some type of 
clarification or at least hearing from the other side.
  Let me begin with the minority leader, the gentlewoman from 
California (Ms. Pelosi), and her remarks. Her remarks are the Democrats 
look after the children in this country. As long as I have served in 
politics, as long as I have served in elected office, I have yet to 
find a Republican or a Democrat or an unaffiliated officeholder that 
does not care about children, and for the minority leader to stand up 
here and try and claim a monopoly, that only the Democrats care about 
children, is nothing but pure partisan politics. In fact, I think it is 
fundamentally unfair to play off this type of, in essence, using the 
children to forward a political point that the Democratic Party wants 
to make.
  What this is, that only the Democrats care about children, what this 
effort by the minority leader is is simple spin, S-P-I-N. We can tell 
we are coming up on a Presidential election. All we have to do is 
listen to some of these 5-minute comments. All it is is spin, spin, 
spin, not debate or not discussion as to how to move this country in a 
positive forward manner, but clearly focused on how to defeat President 
George W. Bush in this upcoming election.
  It is fundamentally unfair to stand at this podium and say that any 
of our colleagues, whether they are Democrat or Republican, any of our 
colleagues are against the children, or only one side of the aisle down 
here cares about the children.
  I would say, and I think my comments are 100 percent accurate, that 
every woman, every man, Congressman, every Republican, and I think we 
may have one unaffiliated in these Chambers, every one of us cares 
about the children, and it is unfair in a debate to continue to try and 
put the children in front of them as kind of a screen to push another 
political point. And I wish the minority leader would get off that and 
come back here and debate and discuss the substance of the issue 
instead of standing up here in front of a microphone, in front of us, 
and saying only the Democrats care about the children, only the 
Democrats will help the children, and the remarks go on from there.
  We have got the gentleman from Texas, from San Antonio, a very fine 
gentleman, a good guy, but he gets a little exaggerated when he says 
that the Republicans, they are not investing in the future generation; 
only the Democrats are worried about investing in the future 
generation.
  Give me a break. There are Members on both sides of the aisle back 
here in the Nation's Capital who care very, very much about the future 
generation of this country. In fact, I would say that by far, if not 
unanimously, I would say by far the huge majority, whether they are 
Republican or whether they are Democrat, care about the future of this 
country. And for the Democrats to stand up simply because they know 
nobody is going to debate them, there is nobody to rebut their 
comments, they have been up here 1 hour nonstop, nonrebutted, that is 
why they think it is safe to stand up here and say it is only the 
Democrats who care about the future generation of this country, only 
the Democrats care about the children of this country. Even to go 
further, the gentleman makes the remarks, the working families are left 
out. So the Democrats stand up for the working families.
  The working families are out of this tax cut. My gosh, the majority 
of working families in this country are the ones who are the primary 
beneficiaries of this tax cut. There are working families above $20,000 
income. I think the gentleman believes that in his mind the only 
working families, or at least his comments seem to portray is that the 
only ``working families'' in this country are the families that make 
less than $20,000 or make less than $10,000 a year.
  I want to tell the gentleman and tell him directly, I have got a lot 
of families where both the man and the wife, both of them are working, 
and they have happen to make $40,000 a year, and they would take deep 
offense by the fact that they work 50 hours a week, both of them, the 
one couple I am thinking of, and the gentleman would stand up here and 
say, well, that is not the working families. Apparently, the working 
families are those who make $20,000 and less a year.
  There are a lot of people, regardless of income in this country, 
there are lots of people that are working families. In fact, the 
majority of families in this country are working families, and for the 
Democrats to stand up here, again only because they are not rebutted, 
only because there is nobody to say the other side of the story, they 
stand up here and make it sound like they are the only ones that stand 
for ``working families'' and the only working families in this country 
are those in the low-income bracket.
  Whether it is low-income income or upper-low-income or lower-medium-
income or medium-high-income or higher-medium-income, whatever 
classification, I know families, in fact almost all the families I know 
in any of those income brackets, are hardworking families.

                              {time}  2030

  It is not a sin in this country, and it is not disrespectful in this 
country, and it is not ignoring the future generations of this country 
for us to pass legislation that benefits people that make more than 
$20,000 a year. There are a lot making $40,000 a year; and in a family 
of say two or three kids, that is not a lot of money. That money is 
stretched very, very thin. Just because of the fact that you have kids 
and you and your wife both work and you only manage to bring down 
$40,000 a year does not mean you should be classified by the Democrats 
as the wealthy class in our economy.
  The only reason I can figure out why these remarks were made is 
because they did not think that somebody on the other side of the aisle 
was going to be sitting in the Chamber, as I was listening, to these 
remarks, and they thought they were going to go into this Congressional 
Record completely unrebutted. We have kind of a doctrine of fairness 
around here. Let us talk about the facts.
  They may be against the tax cut, so just say you are against the tax 
cut. Do not come out to the House floor and say the Republicans, 
because of the tax cut, do not care about working families. The 
Republicans, because of the tax cut, it means that only the Democrats 
care about the children of this country, as the minority leader, the 
gentlewoman from California (Ms. Pelosi), said at the beginning of her 
remarks.
  There ought to be a sense of fairness here, and I want to talk for a 
few minutes about what we looked at on that tax cut, what is important 
about that tax cut; and I think when we discuss the reason for the tax 
cut, we have to take a look at where we are. We have an economy that is 
right on the edge. It is not an economy that is in a depression, but it 
is an economy where we are suffering from higher unemployment. By the 
way, although an administration alone does not have enough control, in 
my opinion, to take an economy out of a recession or put it into a 
recession, the fact is this economy, which goes up and down, this 
economy always cycles. There is the old theory, everything that goes up 
has to come down.
  This economy began its downward cycle under the previous Democratic 
administration. That is not to say that administration drove it in 
because the economy was also going in an upswing during a Democratic 
administration. It does say, however, we have to face these cycles. If 
we look at economic history, especially with specific tax cuts, it has 
been proven very effective as a tool to take you out of the downturn of 
the economic cycle; tax cuts are a stimulus to put you in the upturn. 
However, the tax cuts have to be focused. We do not want to go out and

[[Page 14120]]

create a welfare program. The reason that bill did not include income 
tax cuts for people that did not pay income taxes is because that is a 
welfare program. We are focusing on the people who pay taxes. If you do 
not pay taxes, you should not get an income tax rebate or refund or 
credit.
  That does not mean that they should not get some kind of assistance. 
That is up to you to vote whether you want to provide that assistance 
or not; but what we are trying to do with this economy, and by the way, 
there are a lot of people on the Democratic side that want this economy 
to improve regardless of who gets credit for it. We want these people 
back to work. One of the ways to do it is to put in a very targeted tax 
cut.
  This tax cut is a lot like jumping a car with a dead battery. Some 
Members would argue that to be fair to the car, you would take the 
jumper cables and attach them to the bumpers, attach the jumper cables 
to the door handles, make sure all of the car got a jump off the 
battery. The fact is you need to target a specific part of the car. You 
need to put the jolt, the shock, the charge on the battery. So you put 
the jumper cables on the battery. If you get the battery started, the 
whole car benefits and moves along.
  It is the same thing here. This tax cut was designed, for example, 
through the capital gains reduction. Now in our country, it is not just 
the wealthiest people of this economy who benefit from a tax cut on 
capital gains. There are a lot of people out there, lots of people out 
there who benefit from capital gains reduction. But the biggest benefit 
from reducing the capital gains taxation is the economy as a whole, the 
society as a whole. If you take a look at economic history from an 
economic historical perspective, every time the government has reduced 
the capital gains taxation rate, you have seen an up-tick in the 
economy.
  So it is true that only people who have capital assets and sell them 
with a capital long-term gain may directly benefit from that reduction. 
That benefit to that targeted area benefits the economic picture as a 
whole. That is very, very important here. If you take a look at the 
various elements of that tax cut, the dividends, for example, first of 
all, you should have a tax system. Your Tax Code should be fair. It is 
not fair to tax a person with double taxation. Dividend taxation is a 
double taxation. Not even the most liberal of the Democrats argue that 
it was not double taxation. However, the most liberal of the Members of 
Congress argue that is okay because mainly the people above $26,000 a 
year can afford to be double taxed. Remember, anytime you fund one of 
these liberal programs that some of these people want to fund, anytime 
you give money to somebody that is not working, it is a transfer. The 
government does not create wealth. The people that create wealth are 
the people that are working and exchanging their labor for some kind of 
a product, the creative aspect of it. All the government does is act as 
a transfer agent. For example, to give money to people that do not 
work, and there are a number of people that do not work that our 
society thinks have a legitimate case for not working and believes that 
the working people should support; and as you know, there are a lot of 
people that ought to be working and are not, by their choice they are 
not working, but the issue here is anytime you give money to people who 
are not working, you have to take it from people who are working.
  It is the same thing with this tax credit. When you take the money 
from people or give money that are not paying taxes, give them a refund 
or some kind of credit rebate, you are taking it from people who do pay 
the taxes. My point in bringing this up is that is okay for a while, 
but you better be able to look right in the eye of the taxpayer or look 
in the eye of the person that is working and be able to explain to him 
legitimately why you are going to take money from those people, look 
right at them and say you are working, so I am going to take money from 
you and give it to this person over here who is not working.
  Now when you do that, the average Joe or the average Jane over there 
that is working, and you say I am going to take some of your money that 
you have worked hard for and I am going to give it to person A over 
here who is not working, the first legitimate question that the working 
Joe or working Jane is going to say is, why are you giving them the 
money when they are not working? You might say, well, they are 
physically handicapped or mentally handicapped. They are not capable of 
working. You can expect the working Joe or working Jane is going to say 
that is a legitimate reason. Our society ought to help where we can 
with that kind of cause.
  But when you go to working Jane and working Joe and say, look, we are 
going to take money from you because you are working, and we are going 
to give it to somebody over here who is not working, and they say why 
are they not working, and you say, well, because they have chosen not 
to work, then you begin to see problems. It does not work. That is why 
with this tax cut what we are trying to do is target it. It is a good 
plan. It alone will not turn the economy in that up-cycle; but I feel, 
I already feel confidence that the economy is beginning to recover. Our 
stock market is showing some strength.
  The fact is that the people on the dividends, the capital gains, 
speeding up the tax brackets, the caps on the tax brackets which will 
help tens of millions of taxpayers in this country, by doing that you 
are getting the battery jumped and the car moves as a whole. That is 
the issue here. We want this economy to benefit as a whole. This tax 
cut will allow that to happen.
  Now, let me tell you that a few of the people who have opposed this, 
for example the minority leader who continually stands up here and 
spins and bashes this tax cut and bashes the policies of the tax cut, 
what is their answer? You cannot just sit back and complain. You cannot 
just sit back and do nothing. I have always believed that at some point 
you have to quit talking and quit complaining; and at some point you 
have to get up and lead or get out of the way. I think that this shows 
good leadership. There was lots of negotiation that went on with this 
tax cut. There was lots of effort that went into this tax cut.
  As I said, while I do not think this tax cut alone is going to lift 
this economy into that up-cycle, I think it is an important element of 
moving this economy towards that up-cycle. You combine that, and 
hopefully we can get our fuel costs under control, although right now 
we face a natural gas shortage, a pretty significant natural gas 
shortage around this country, but if we can keep oil supplies 
reasonable and a hand on unemployment, consumer confidence is very, 
very critical, if you can get consumer confidence to stay high so 
people go out and buy and if you can effectively, through leadership of 
the interest rate by the Feds, if you can keep the deflation threats 
from occurring, you are going to see this economy improve. But it is a 
fragile economy. We are trying to do something to help it. Because you 
stand up and are trying to help this economy recover does not mean that 
you care less about children. It does not mean that the only working 
families in this country, as expressed by some of the Democrats this 
evening, are those people that earn less than $26,000 a year. That is 
not what it means.
  It means that we recognize that working families are spread all over 
America; that if you can benefit those working families all over the 
income brackets, those people who pay income taxes, those people who 
are out there, and mind you, we will hear the comment, and I heard it 
this evening, that they do pay these taxes, and you can vote one way or 
the other on that. You ought to be accurate about your facts. They do 
not pay Federal income taxes. The group that they are talking about 
getting a rebate for, they do not pay Federal income taxes. They do pay 
State income taxes, sales tax, gasoline tax and 7.5 percent or 7.6 
percent on their Social Security; but they do not pay Federal income 
tax.
  What the minority leader is saying and what some of the Democrats are 
spinning up here, they are making it

[[Page 14121]]

sound as if these people do pay Federal income tax and for some reason 
just because they are poor, they are being cut out of the tax cut. That 
is not accurate. That is a blatant, inaccurate statement.
  Now, whether you vote to give these people a rebate or not, the fact 
is that anybody that enters this debate ought to acknowledge up front 
that the issue is not whether or not they pay income taxes because they 
do not pay Federal income taxes in that income bracket. The issue is 
then do you give them money, even though they do not pay, do you give 
them a tax rebate, even though they do not pay taxes, or should you 
call that program some other type of welfare program and go ahead and 
transfer it under that type of description.
  But to attack the entire tax cut, to stand up here and say that the 
only working families happen to be those families under $26,000 or 
$20,000 a year, to stand up here and attack the tax cut under the guise 
of protecting the children and that the Democrats are the only ones 
that protect the children is a misleading effort, and it is inaccurate. 
On this floor we ought to at least debate on a fair basis. If you take 
a look at this tax cut, it is not perfect; but so far nobody else has 
come up with a better solution.
  It is interesting to hear these people talk about the Federal 
deficit. Let me say something about the U.S. Congress. I think it would 
be interesting for every Member that talks about how terrible the 
Federal deficit is, I think it would be interesting to look at their 
bills that they have introduced and see what their bills do to that 
deficit. Those people that stand up here and criticize, for example, as 
they have done this evening, criticize the Republicans on the deficit, 
whoever does that criticism, take a look and see what their votes look 
like, what programs they vote for and what those programs have done to 
the deficit.

                              {time}  2045

  It is funny how people vote one way and speak another way. When I 
first got elected to office, somebody said, ``The best trick is to vote 
liberal in Washington and speak conservative in your home district.'' I 
do not believe we ought to be running our business that way. I think we 
ought to be as, what was it, McCain that had straight talk? Let's talk 
it straight.
  This tax cut is targeted. This tax cut is targeted to benefit the 
entire economy. This tax cut is targeted to move all of us forward, so 
that our unemployment can go down, so that our stock market can go up, 
so that our consumer confidence can go up, so that the interest rate, 
the prime rate, can stay down. That is what we have in our radar. That 
is what we are trying to accomplish. It should not be attacked by a 
minority leader who stands up here and says, well, it's about the 
children and the Republicans don't care about the children, and only 
the Democrats care about the children. Or from the gentleman from Texas 
that says, only the Democrats care about the future generations of this 
country. Give me a break.
  Let me summarize these remarks by saying obviously everybody in this 
room, even the ones I most ardently disagree with, I would never say 
they do not care about the children. I have never met a person in 
elective office, I have never met an elected officeholder that really 
does not care about children or would do something to hurt the 
children. I have never met them. I have never met one officeholder in 
my career that did not care about future generations. I do not care 
what their party affiliation is. And to stand up here and use those 
kind of statements, you talk about spin, you talk about political 
rhetoric, and that is the definition of it.
  I want to address another subject that I am hearing a lot about 
recently on the news. First of all, let me give you a little 
background. I used to be a police officer. When I went to the police 
academy, we used to have a training exercise, I guess you would call 
it, where they would show a movie on a big screen, and we used wax 
bullets. We had wax bullets in our weapons, our service weapons. On the 
movie screen, the training episode was called ``Shoot or Don't Shoot.'' 
They would have different instances. It was up to you to make a 
determination. The film would depict somebody, for example, coming out 
from a trash can with a weapon. It was up to you within 1 or 2 seconds 
to decide whether that person really was a threat and whether you 
needed to draw your service weapon and, even more serious, whether you 
should discharge your service weapon, and then you would fire your wax 
bullet and it would measure, of course, on this big screen whether or 
not you hit the suspect and saved somebody. It is tough to make that 
decision. There were a number of times where the person would aim a gun 
at you and it would be a toy gun but it looked like a real gun, it 
would be a squirt gun or something, and you had to make the decision as 
the police officer, do I draw and shoot? On a lot of different 
occasions, myself included, we shot and then we found out that the 
person on the film actually, like I said, had a water gun or a toy gun. 
What happened right after that, after you would do that, then more 
likely than not the next person would have what looked like a 
nonthreat, not a serious threat and something that looked obviously 
like a toy gun and it would be a real gun, so you would hesitate and 
the person on the film would go boom-boom, and all of a sudden you got 
docked points because they just shot you.
  My point in talking about this training film is to move into this 
discussion of weapons of mass destruction. We have had incidents in the 
past where a police officer has shot a suspect and after they got 
control of the suspect and they grab the weapon, after they shoot the 
suspect, let us say in the example they kill the suspect, the police 
officer does, and the investigating team seizes the weapon from the 
suspect and they find out the weapon did not have any bullets in it. 
There are always people that with hindsight say, why did that police 
officer shoot old Joey over there? Sure, Joey pointed a gun at him, but 
he didn't have any bullets in it. Why did the cops have to shoot him? 
He didn't have any bullets in that gun. Somehow they think that the 
police officers had 20/20 vision or Superman's vision so that they 
could see right through the weapon and determine that there were no 
bullets in there.
  That is the same thing on these weapons of mass destruction. All of a 
sudden we have weapons experts, kind of the Blame America First crowd. 
We are starting to see them. Oh, my gosh, the United States of America 
has not found these weapons of mass destruction, so they can't justify 
this war. How convenient it is that these very people continue to 
ignore what an evil man Saddam Hussein was. Just take a look at what he 
did to half his population. The women in Iraq, take a look; if we just 
had one incident like that in this country, understandably and 
justifiably, this country would be enraged that a woman was treated 
that way as an American citizen in the United States. But yet this 
crowd, the Blame America First crowd, ignores all of that. They are 
putting on blinders. They are putting on blinders about the mass 
graves. They are putting on blinders about the fact that Saddam Hussein 
on a number of occasions, of which I will show you here in just a 
moment, used weapons of mass destruction to kill his own citizens.
  In this country at Kent State when our National Guardsmen shot, I 
think they shot and killed four students who were protesting back in 
the sixties or seventies, this country went ballistic. What do you mean 
our own military people killed our own citizens? That is four. Yet the 
Blame America First crowd out there is making Saddam Hussein look like 
somewhat of a Robin Hood, ignoring the fact that while maybe he did not 
have these weapons of mass destruction or at least that we have not 
found any yet, that we ought to focus entirely on the gun that did not 
have bullets in it, although it was pointed at us, and criticize us for 
that instead of taking a look at the history of that evil man.
  This guy, Saddam Hussein, even if we do not find weapons of mass 
destruction, and, by the way, it is Saddam

[[Page 14122]]

Hussein, I am going to also show you a poster on that, the weapons of 
mass destruction that he himself admitted that he had. He admitted they 
had them. But for the sake of argument here, let us say that Saddam 
Hussein did not have weapons of mass destruction. Take a look at what 
the proof of the pudding is. Take a look at what he did to his own 
citizens. By the way, on this particular poster to my left, these 
murders were accomplished with weapons of mass destruction. In the 
history, we know, for example, going back to my police officer 
incident, that the guy that is pointing the gun at us on a number of 
occasions used that gun to kill people. So it is a natural and 
justifiable thought process to believe that when this guy points a gun 
at you, considering his history that he used a gun repeatedly, 
repeatedly, repeatedly, it is a logical thought process that that gun 
is loaded and he is going to use it on you.
  Take a look at this. In 1983, mustard gas killed about 100 people. 
Mustard gas in 1983 killed 3,000. These are his own citizens, by the 
way. These are all confirmed. In 1984, 2,500, mustard gas. In 1985, 
mustard gas 3,000. I am skipping down here. Right down here, mustard 
gas 5,000. In 1987 mustard gas, 3,000. In 1988, mustard gas and nerve 
agents, hundreds of people, Iranians and Kurds. This is a country that 
used these type of weapons when they were at war with Iran. So sure, 
maybe we have not gotten our hands on these weapons yet, but the fact 
is there is a long history, a long history of the country of Iraq using 
these types of weapons. It is very clearly justified for you to expect, 
in fact I think you would be negligent not to suspect, that Saddam 
Hussein and his lieutenants had these type of weapons.
  Some are saying, ``Well, it's the Republicans. It's George W. Bush. 
He's a cowboy.'' Let me say to you, first of all, being a cowboy out in 
the West is kind of an honorable title. We do not think it is a 
degrading remark. We kind of look at it in a romantic fashion. But back 
here some people think being a cowboy is a negative term. They say, 
``It must be George W. Bush. He's just a cowboy. He's the one that has 
overstated the threat of Saddam Hussein. He's the one that took this 
Nation into war and it's an exaggerated threat.''
  Let me show you what the leader of the Democratic Party says about 
it. Again, the poster to my left. President Bill Clinton. President 
Clinton on Saddam's threat. He made these remarks, this is an exact 
quote, on February 18, 1998. This is what Bill Clinton says: What if 
Saddam Hussein fails to comply--this is with the inspection process--
and we fail to act? What if Saddam Hussein fails to comply and we fail 
to act? Or we take some ambiguous third route which gives him, speaking 
of Saddam, yet more opportunities to develop his program of weapons of 
mass destruction and continue to ignore the solemn commitments that he 
made? Well, he will conclude that the international community has lost 
its will. He will then conclude that he can go right on and do more to 
rebuild an arsenal of devastation and destruction.
  Let me point out, on the next poster, these are the weapons of mass 
destruction that the country of Iraq admitted in documents that they 
submitted to the United Nations, or to the international community, 
these were weapons that they admitted that they had at some point in 
time. Mustard gas, 2,850 tons. All you need, by the way, of mustard gas 
is about a teaspoonful and you got real problems on your hands. This is 
about 3,000 tons of mustard gas. Not what George W. Bush or Dick Cheney 
or Colin Powell or Condoleezza Rice or our commanders, our chief of 
staff over there, this is not what they said Iraq had, this is what 
Iraq says Iraq had. Sarin, nerve gas, 795 tons. All you need is a 
little whiff of that Sarin and you're a goner. VX, nerve gas, 3.9 tons. 
Tabun, nerve agent, 210 tons. Anthrax, 25,000 tons. We saw in this 
country what happened with just a few little crumbs, a few little 
particles of anthrax stuck in an envelope. We saw what happened in this 
country with that. Iraq, by their own admission again, not a statement 
made by our leadership in this country but an admission made by the 
country of Iraq, they had 25,000 tons of that stuff. Uranium, 400 tons; 
plutonium, 6 grams. Six grams does not sound like a lot but that is 
exactly what you need to create a heck of a nuclear weapon.
  My point this evening with you is to say it is a cheap shot, for lack 
of a better word, it is a cheap shot, it is a comment made from that 
group of people, that Blame America First, the crowd that partially is 
driven for political self-interest, the crowd who believes that America 
can never do right, the crowd who constantly criticizes America, it is 
that Blame America First crowd whose voice has become louder and louder 
over the last 2 weeks about the fact that weapons of mass destruction 
have not been found.
  My point tonight is not to address that crowd. You can talk until you 
are blue in the face and you will never convince the Blame America 
First crowd that America is anything but the devil itself. You are not 
going to get them. They will claim they are good Americans, they will 
claim that they have this patriotism and their patriotism is 
demonstrated by the fact that they have enough guts to stand up and cry 
about America's sins and apologize for this country around the world 
and talk about how horrible we are and this and that, but the fact is 
this: This country, the leadership of this Nation, the Republican 
President George W. Bush, the Democrat President Bill Clinton, all knew 
and had a history of weapons of mass destruction's usage in the country 
of Iraq.
  Again coming back to my example, what has happened here so far, the 
investigation shows, we had a suspect. That suspect, and I am trying to 
draw a comparison here, that suspect had a gun pointed at us. The gun 
was pointed at us. That suspect had a history, like Iraq did, had a 
history of murder, had a history of using that gun. That suspect had a 
history of admitting that he had used that gun to kill people. That is 
a suspect that is looking at us with a gun. So before that suspect, 
Saddam Hussein, could use that gun against us, we fired first. In the 
investigation it may appear, and I say ``may'' because we have only 
been in Iraq 7 or 8 weeks under this kind of a look for a search for 
weapons of mass destruction, it may occur to us or may end up being a 
result, and certainly at this point, the gun appears not to have had 
bullets in it.

                              {time}  2100

  So, what happens? The Blame America First crowd cannot wait to get 
out on the street and say you should have never shot him. Despite the 
fact he pointed a gun at you, somehow you should have had superior 
information that that gun did not have bullets in it, despite the 
history of the person holding the gun.
  This Nation has an absolute right to go out there and preempt a 
threat. We do not have a right for preemption; we actually have an 
obligation for preemption. Do you think we say to our police officers 
in any community in this country that you cannot discharge your service 
weapon until you are fired upon first, you have to be shot first before 
you are allowed to discharge that weapon?
  No. What we say to our officers in law enforcement is we expect you 
to go out there; and if a threat exists, one, we want you to be as 
accurate as you can possibly be as to whether or not a threat exists; 
but if a threat does exist, it is your job, it is your obligation, and 
we expect you to carry out your duty to stop that threat.
  That is exactly what Bill Clinton was talking about when he was 
President of the United States, and that is exactly what George W. Bush 
did now that he is President of the United States.
  So I hope as colleagues begin to hear this rhetoric about we have not 
found any weapons of mass destruction, so blame the United States, 
forget the fact the United States has brought to the Iraqi people 
things they have never seen in their entire lives. Forget the fact that 
the women in Iraq are now going to have rights, are going to be treated 
as individuals over there. Forget the fact that the United States of 
America has stopped the mass murders.

[[Page 14123]]

Forget the fact that the United States of America, if there are weapons 
of mass destruction, will find those weapons of mass destruction and 
will destroy those weapons of mass destruction.
  All of that is ignored by the people that I call Blame America First. 
What they are trying to do is hitch their horse to this one pole; and 
that pole is, ha, ha, ha, you have not found a weapon of mass 
destruction, so everything you have told us is a lie. This is 
exaggerated. We should have never done this.
  They intentionally, not by accident, but they intentionally ignore 
the historical facts of the mass murders that that guy has done. They 
ignore the admissions by Saddam Hussein's country of the weapons of 
mass destruction that they did possess in the past. They ignore all 
that, because they do not want to listen to the facts. They do not want 
the facts to enter this picture.
  What they want to do is use this as a spin, either in their continued 
all-out effort to blame America first, or in a spin for some type of 
political purpose or self-serving political motive, especially in light 
of the fact that we have a Presidential election coming up here in the 
next year or so.
  What I am asking my colleagues to do is stand behind America. Stand 
strong with America. When that suspect pointed a gun at us, we had 
every right to discharge our weapon; and we had a right to discharge 
our weapon first. We knew the history of that individual. To the best 
of our knowledge, we believed that individual had bullets in his gun. 
We could not see in the gun, but the gun was pointed at us, and we do 
not feel and we should stand by this position that we do not think it 
is necessary we get shot at first, like we did on September 11.
  Let me tell you, after September 11, of course, the Blame America 
First crowd came out and said, oh, America's intelligence failed. It is 
because America does not do enough for the poor in the world and 
America is pompous and America does not share its wealth and America 
enjoys too much of the good things and America has too much food. That 
is why September 11 came about. The Blame America crowd came in.
  That is exactly what would have happened if Iraq, by the way, would 
have shot first, had they used a weapon of mass destruction against the 
free world. Blame America would have come out and said where was George 
W. Bush? Where was President Bill Clinton? When they should have known 
about this, why did they not know about it? So no matter what you do, 
you are going to have the Blame America First crowd out there 
criticizing you.
  But the fact here is we should put them aside. What we need to make 
sure is that the average American out there understands that this 
country is a good country. This country did what it believed was in the 
best interests, not just of itself, but in the best interests of many, 
many innocent Iraqi citizens. This country did what we thought was in 
the best interests of many, many citizens who were murdered and so on 
in Afghanistan. We did what we thought was best for the world.
  It is this country that has led the world in standing up when the 
going gets tough. It is the United States of America that is the first 
one out of the foxhole. And it is a little tough, when you are the 
first one out of the foxhole, you are standing on the battlefield 
taking the bullets, and somebody hiding in the foxhole behind you is 
saying, I told you so. You should not be out there. That is kind of how 
I feel about some of this criticism.
  America has no need to apologize. The United States of America has 
done a lot of good for a lot of people for a lot of countries for a lot 
of history for its entire history. Oh, sure, we got a blooper here and 
there. But the fact is, you can stack America up, I will stack America 
up against any other country in the history of the world. Not just in 
the history of the United States, but I will stack America up against 
any other country in the history of the world; and defy you to show me 
a country that even comes close to doing the good that this Nation has 
done.
  The United States of America does not have to apologize for anything 
that we have done. What we have done was for a just cause. What we have 
done, in my opinion, was the right thing. I think the majority of 
Americans believe in that.

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