Obey Smacks the Washington Post Editorial Board
This is David Obey's speech on the floor this morning. Smackdown.
Speaker, yesterday a number of members on the Republican side of the aisle sought to belittle the legislation before us because in addition to funding the needs of the troops in Iraq it contains money to address a number of domestic priorities. To ridicule that legislation, they suggested -- they tried to belittle items such as funding for levees in New Orleans and agriculture disaster payments . And in that they have been joined by editorial writers at papers such as "The Washington Post."Like The Post, the Republican speakers of yesterday indicated that their main objection to this legislation is the way it tries to create pressure to end our military involvement in an Iraqi civil war. Those speakers and the Washington Post editorial writers make no effort to understand why these additional items are there. They simply ridicule them for their own purposes...Let me submit to you the problem we have today is not that we didn't listen enough to people like the Washington Post. It's that we listened too much. They endorsed going to war in the first place. They helped drive the drumbeat that drove almost 2/3 of the people in this chamber to vote for that misguided, ill-advised war. So I make no apology.
If the moral sensibilities of some people on this floor, or the editorial writers of The Washington Post are offended because they don't like the specific language contained in our benchmarks or in our timelines. What matters in the end is not what the specific language is. What matters is whether or not we produce a product today that puts pressure on this Administration and sends a message to Iraq, to the Iraqi politicians that we're going to end the permanent long-term dead end babysitting service. That's what we're trying to do. And if The Washington P ost is offended about the way we do it, that's just too bad. But we're in the arena. They're not. And this is the best we can do given the tools that we have. And I make absolutely no apology for it. And I would say one thing, those of us who voted against the war in the first place wouldn't have nearly as hard a time getting us out of the war if people like The Washington Post and those who criticized us on the floor yesterday hadn't supported going into that stupid war in the first place. And I reserve the balance of my time.
Can I get an 'amen'! There's lots of great video on The Gavel.
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