"I wrote the book on it"

Lots of diaries and commentary about Bush's worst moment.  Here's my take on Kerry's best moment: Lehrer's last question to Kerry.

"If you are elected president, what will you take to that office thinking is the single most serious threat to the national security to the United States?"

His answer just made me jump and shout that this is my president.

Nuclear proliferation.

Nuclear proliferation. There's some 600-plus tons of unsecured material still in the former Soviet Union and Russia. At the rate that the president is currently securing it, it'll take 13 years to get it.

I did a lot of work on this. I wrote a book about it several years ago -- six, seven years ago -- called "The New War," which saw the difficulties of this international criminal network. And back then, we intercepted a suitcase in a Middle Eastern country with nuclear materials in it. And the black market sale price was about $250 million.

Now, there are terrorists trying to get their hands on that stuff today.

And this president, I regret to say, has secured less nuclear material in the last two years since 9/11 than we did in the two years preceding 9/11.

We have to do this job. And to do the job, you can't cut the money for it. The president actually cut the money for it. You have to put the money into it and the funding and the leadership.

And part of that leadership is sending the right message to places like North Korea.

Right now the president is spending hundreds of millions of dollars to research bunker-busting nuclear weapons. The United States is pursuing a new set of nuclear weapons. It doesn't make sense.

You talk about mixed messages. We're telling other people, "You can't have nuclear weapons," but we're pursuing a new nuclear weapon that we might even contemplate using.

Not this president. I'm going to shut that program down, and we're going to make it clear to the world we're serious about containing nuclear proliferation.

And we're going to get the job of containing all of that nuclear material in Russia done in four years. And we're going to build the strongest international network to prevent nuclear proliferation.

This is the scale of what President Kennedy set out to do with the nuclear test ban treaty. It's our generation's equivalent. And I intend to get it done.

Ladies and gentlemen, I give you the forty-fourth president of the United States.

•  yes- great moment

  Another great moment-

  When he said Laura's a "great first lady" and when he says about daughters "Ive learned you can't put em on a leash"
  

  by jgkojak on Fri Oct 01, 2004 at 12:50:35 PM PDT

•  Bush said that the greatest challenge

  is WMD "in the hands of terrorists".

  Oh, well then there are no worries about nucular weapons in the hands of North Korea, Iran, Pakistan, et al after all. That makes me feel much better.

  by MarkInSanFran on Fri Oct 01, 2004 at 12:56:10 PM PDT

  •  good, that'll save us some money

    Terrorists don't have ICBMs, so we can go ahead and cancel all that money being spent on missle defense. How about spending that money on Head Start?

    Oh, wait, no, that would be a consistent position. Nevermind.
    

    by HarlanNY on Fri Oct 01, 2004 at 01:04:41 PM PDT

•  It was actually a joy...

  ... to listen to a president capable of stringing together a reasoned argument that went over several paragraph. Having listened to Bush for years now, to his struggling with the most basic of words, concepts and thoughts - this was a weatherchange.

  On this site, I have been writing comments about the debates for months now, telling people they would be the defining event. I'm happy to see I was right in that respect - and trust Kerry to keep following this groove in the next two debates.

  And remember, we have Edwards over Cheney to look forward to as well. Kerry-Edwards are going to flatten the incumbents.

  by SteinL on Fri Oct 01, 2004 at 12:56:36 PM PDT

  •  Yes, I actually wrote president referring to Kerry

    Good sign.

    by SteinL on Fri Oct 01, 2004 at 12:57:20 PM PDT

    •  asdf

      Was that deliberate?

      by logorrhea on Fri Oct 01, 2004 at 01:13:42 PM PDT