Excerpts from Harrison's National Security Speech, Part II

I am traveling today, and had my bags lost, so posting is obviously light. If only Philly International's free wifi actually worked...

This is part II of yesterday's National Security speech by Stephen Harrison. In this section he outlines the faults of this President, administration and Congress in their lack of oversight and accountability.

Stephen Harrison (D) vs. President Bush and his administration;

"And we must get the truth from George Bush. In Congress I will call for congressional hearings to assess blame for this abomination. We must restore congressional oversight of military matters. And we must lay the blame where it belongs, at the feet of Bush and Cheney and Rumsfeld and Rice and Wolfowitz."

"But within no time we lost that good will as George Bush and company set out on an adventurist trek into Iraq. We condoned torture and stripped our own citizens of freedoms in the name of patriotism. We profiled and marginalized Arab Americans as terrorists rather than embracing them as good Americans who could help us in our time of need with intelligence, local knowledge and language skills clearly missing in the inventory of our intelligence community. We shunned the reasonable requests of the UN to wait for the results of weapons inspections and we went to war with what we called the “coalition of the willing”, a term designed to insult those people who, it later turned out were right in asking us to wait."

"While we were at it, the President decimated our military and made our nation more vulnerable than ever before. While we fought an enormously expensive war on the backs of the poor, with the lives of the children of the poor, the Bush administration gave unprecedented tax breaks to the oil companies and the wealthy, resulting in a six trillion-dollar deficit."

"This president loves to praise the troops and thank the troops and encourage the troops and he says he supports the troops. But he has underequipped the troops, understaffed the troops, underpaid the troops and overworked the troops. His actions do not match his words."

"He ordered our freedoms cut and he questioned the patriotism of those who questioned him. He made us look with fear at our fellow citizens on the subway, on the ferry or on the bus. In the world of George Bush, olive skinned people with backpacks became terrorists with bomb packs. Fear became the watchword. I fear that my children and theirs will be fighting this war of fear for generations to come. Fear, war, suspicions, violence, isolation. This is the world that George Bush has planned for us. A dark and bleak world that he says we must live in for generations."

Rep. Vito Fossella, through his lack of desire for accountability has enabled all of these blunders on the part of the President. Only Congress has the ability to investigate and hold the President accountable. If Rep. Fossella wants to spend his time attacking his opponent and screaming "Fear! Terror!" then so be it, because meanwhile Stephen Harrison will be out campaigning and promoting a vision for the people of the thirteenth Congressional district.

UPDATE
Part I
Part III