Folks, there’s nothing in this paragraph that is true! Bush didn’t go to the right! If he had, he would be leading in these polls and he would be up 55-42. But he expanded spending. It went out of control on the domestic side. Ted Kennedy wrote the education bill. We’ve got this drug entitlement now, this prescription drug entitlement. First entitlement in, what is it? How many years, 40? We’ve got farm subsidies. We’ve got steel tariffs. We’ve got campaign finance reform. Can you believe this? In 1994, the Republicans win the Congress for the first time in 40 years, and ten years later, they create the first entitlement in 40 years, and this is called “moving to the right”? But that’s not even what I want to focus on. Let’s take…
Now, but let me go back to this whole notion that the Bush administration “walked away from our allies” in attacking Iraq. Not only did we not do that and not only did the president go to the United Nations, the Democrats demanded a brand-new debate on this, in the summer of 2002. Remember this? He already had a resolution post-9/11 to go wherever he thought he had to to wipe out terrorists. He didn’t need a new resolution. But the Democrats wanted to get in on it, because they wanted to pick up some of the favor and some of the gain if Iraq was successful.
This was typical of these people. They wanted a new debate so that they could get on record as either opposing it or supporting it, but those who wanted to support it also wanted to bask in the glory of victory — and, remember, it was a great rope-a-dope because it was in the middle of the 2002 election cycle, and the Democrats willingly took their big “kitchen table issues” and the economy off the table and put on the table Iraq, Bush’s issue, and they went on to a stinging defeat in November 2002. There’s no way Bush abandoned anybody.
Didn’t abandon allies, didn’t abandon the Democrats, didn’t unilaterally do anything. This one assertion that Clinton made last night is just factually inaccurate — and nobody…nobody on any network that I saw last night delved into the substance of what he said at all because everybody was going gaga over his “style,” and what’s new about his style? He’s a con man, of course everybody thought it was great! There’s nothing new. So we’re looking. We want to be entertained. We want to see the great theatrics.
Fact of the matter is the press is bored with Kerry. He’s a dryball. He’s a dead weight. He’s a charismatic dud. They don’t think Bush is very smart and gives good speeches so they’re excited to have Clinton up there. You should have heard the love fest. “Oh, man was this great!” When I saw these TV ratings today, you know what I thought? Not only are the anchors of the big three networks going to be disappointed nobody watched them — because they are oh-so-important — they’re also going to be disappointed nobody cared to watch Bill Clinton.
They think Bill Clinton is the greatest thing since sliced bread and the country doesn’t anymore, and this is another thing that nobody can get through their heads. People, when they see Bill Clinton they see Monica Lewinsky sitting down to a foot-long hot dog tube steak on their 31st birthday. That’s what they see. They don’t see a great speaker. They don’t see a man who saved the world from terrorism. They don’t see this great legacy that is trying to be created for this guy.
They see he’s never going to be able to wipe his legacy clean of what happened in that little anteroom in the Oval Office — which I’ve seen, been to — with Monica Lewinsky. That is his legacy no matter how hard they try and it was on display last night. He had aaaaall of this prepub. It was Clinton night at the conventions, and the numbers fell in the 10:30 to 11 o’clock half hour when both Bill and Hillary came on. Now, I didn’t even mean to say any of that. That just came out, ladies and gentlemen. I want to stick with the substance. I’ve only gone through one of the elements of that one paragraph I read to you that’s phony.
BREAK TRANSCRIPT
I want to go back just to assertion #1. There are in fact four of these, actually five of these. In this one paragraph there are five assertions made that are totally inaccurate. They’re totally wrong — and I just need to close the loop on the first one. This is where Clinton claims the Bush administration walked away from our allies in attacking Iraq. We did not walk away from allies! We begged; we went to the UN. We spent 14 months at the United Nations trying to put together a coalition. We walked away from nothing, but at some point the president decides that the defense of this country is our responsibility and he’s not going to leave it up to France and Germany. France and Germany made an aggressive and conscious effort to undermine our efforts at the United Nations, and I wonder this. Why exactly does President Clinton side with the French and the Germans rather than his own country, particularly when the merits of the argument are on the side of his own country?
Well, let me tell you why he didn’t use the real word. It’s the Kyoto protocol, and the reason he didn’t use the Kyoto protocol is because when you use that word polling data suggests that the American people are not even for it. “Climate change treaty” is just the Kyoto protocol, and let’s take a brief look at the facts of that. The United States’ participation in the Kyoto protocol was effectively killed at the Hague conference in November 2000, two months before George Bush took office, four months before his decision to withdraw the U.S. signature on the agreement, after European governments refused to accept a U.S.-backed pollution credit trading system considered by many to be the only cost effective way for us to have met our emissions obligations in the short-term.
In fact, the Russians didn’t sign this. None of the rest of the big three or big four industrial nations have signed this, because it is punitive to them. We are by no means the only one. Here is an assessment, by the way. I looked this up. Frank Loy, who is head of the U.S. delegation in the Hague and U.S. undersecretary of state for global affairs during the Clinton administration, he said: “We showed real willingness to compromise, but too many of our negotiating partners held fast to positions shaped more by political purity than by practicality, more by dogmatism than pragmatism. We felt very frustrated by a lot of the stereotypical thinking that we encountered here about our country. Yeah, we may be the world’s biggest polluter, but that does not tell you how we’re making important progress in cleaning up our emissions, which is now moving to a rate below that of most European nations,” above, actually. “It was troubling to see how some of our partners ignore some fundamental realities.”
And in July of 1997, during the Clinton administration, the U.S. Senate voted 95-zip against accepting a treaty if it exempted developing countries from emission controls and would cause economic harm to America. Bush had nothing to do with killing Kyoto. Bush’s fault was not killing Kyoto. It was announcing its already determined demise. It had been determined by the Clinton administration at the Hague before Bush even took office that the thing was unworkable and undoable. Since that time, there have been no improvements in it that would warrant our signing it and in fact the Russians have said “to hell with this” and they are out of it, too. The fact of the matter is that the Kyoto protocol can’t get the big industrial nations to sign on because it’s too punitive — and yet here is Clinton in this speech last night, making it sound like Bush abandoned our allies. If it weren’t for us, why, there’d be a Kyoto protocol and if it weren’t for us there would be a cleaner world because Bush is stupid and mean he walked away from our allies! This assertion flatly false.
Assertion #3: President Bush walked away from our allies in withdrawing from the international court for war criminals. Now, this one, folks, this is a beat. Why? Because on the last possible day for signatories — now, get this. This is psychopathic, sociopathic for Clinton to say this. On the last possible day for countries to sign the international court for war criminals, December 31st, 2000, Bill Clinton signed the treaty establishing the International Criminal Court, despite what he called “concerns about significant flaws.” Clinton said he would not submit the treaty for Senate ratification or even recommend ratification until these concerns were addressed, which they never were.
Bush made the proper judgment that the ICC was beyond repair because it would subject U.S. soldiers to criminal charges in the International Criminal Court and were not going to let the world determine whether or not our soldiers defending the freedom of the United States are acting in a criminal manner. We’ll do it ourselves. We’re not going to subordinate our defense. The fact is Clinton simply signed it along with all those pardons on December 31st, 2000 just to say he did, but he never sent it to the Senate, never recommended it go to the Senate because he said it wasn’t worth it. There were too many things wrong with it. It was typical show, substance over style. How can we fool ’em today? And he comes back in his speech last night and accuses Bush of abandoning this by walking away from our allies when Bush had nothing to do with it.
Assertion #4: These get even weirder. Clinton claimed the Bush administration walked away from its allies in withdrawing American support for the ABM treaty. Do you want the facts? In December of 2001, Bush gave formal notice to Russia that in accordance with the treaty the U.S. was withdrawing from it. Now, do you people remember this? There was no Soviet Union anymore! The ABM treaty was with the Soviet Union. There was no Soviet Union. There was a new Russia, Vladimir Putin. The whole structure of the Russian nuclear arsenal — it was irrelevant.
This was as irrelevant, you know, as an agreement between the horse-and-buggy industry and the whip industry to make sure that they always made sure there was — it’s irrelevant! And the Dems harped on this, and the reason they harped on this back when it happened is because their playbook is 30 years old, and to them, arms control is nirvana. I mean that’s why they shined. It was simply flat out irrelevant. There was no person, country or group to continue the agreement with. It was invalidated. It made no sense. That’s the shortest version of this I can give. This is just a sample. Every paragraph he uttered last night contains similar misstatements.
BREAK TRANSCRIPT
Instead, the president helped engineer a huge reduction in nuclear arms, while at the same time allowing the U.S. to move ahead on deploying a missile defense. Sounds like a win-win to me, and here is Clinton totally distorting it and misstating it under this banner that Bush has abandoned our allies that we’re a nation alone in the world and the world hates us and they used to love us, and (sobbing) now they hate us, and we’re (crying),” and they cry about it because they’re living through fear and it’s maddening to me because — and this is just one paragraph for this speech that was about 25 minutes long last night.
END TRANSCRIPT
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