Today Stephen Harrison gave, in my opinion, his best policy speech and potentially the best speech of his campaign to date. This was not just another speech hitting home runs with the screw up and mismanagement of this administration and Congress, but a speech that starts to define to the public the difference between another two years of Republican representation in the thirteenth congressional district and what Democratic representation for this district could look like. Hope is on the way.
These excerpts are directly from Stephen Harrison, Democrat running against Rep. Vito Fossella for the NY-13 Congressional seat;
"Our nation is threatened by an enemy as cruel as any we have ever faced. Nearly five years ago, our city was scarred by the worst attack ever to fall on American soil. Only two weeks ago the British cracked a terrorist plot to bomb multiple planes over the Atlantic. Looking back on the years between these two attacks, I must ask, what has our leadership done to make us safer? Three and one-half years after Pearl Harbor, Japan was defeated and the threat to our nation removed. So why is it, that almost five years after 9/11, we are still facing new attacks?
The only answer can be that our nation's leaders have made tremendous mistakes in the war on terror. Throughout the last five years, armchair warriors in the White House and in Congress have wrapped themselves in an obsession with Iraq that has left all of us less safe. They refuse to listen to our allies, or even to their own generals. They push aside brave, experienced men, like Colin Powell, who questioned the wisdom of their course. Most unforgivably, they have chosen to set aside facts, and live in a fantasy world of their own making for political advantage."
"Despite years of war in Iraq, at a cost of tens of thousands of mostly innocent lives and hundreds of billions of dollars, at the price of our moral leadership of the world and the shattering of our close alliances we are no closer to defeating terrorism. We are no safer because of Iraq. Indeed we are less secure. There is no evidence that terrorists operated from Iraq before the war but there is much to suggest that terrorist organizations now do."
"Al Qaeda used Afghanistan as a training ground for terrorist operations on American shores and the Taliban protected them. I supported that war and I still do. We left Afghanistan too early to enter Iraq. As a result, the Bush administration left UBL free to this day and we see a reemergence of the Taliban. That's unconscionable. Osama bin laden caused 9/11. For the sake of our nation, for the children and mothers and spouses of those who died that day, we, as a nation, must hunt down and capture or kill him. It is that simple. It must never be said that an attack on our land stood unavenged. Had a competent president been in charge, he would have listened to his generals on Afghanistan. We would have gone in with overwhelming force and we would have won and captured UBL."
"Iraq, regardless of whether you initially supported it or opposed it has been a colossal failure of leadership."
"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."
This is one of the most articulate statements on the reality of what Bush and by extension Congress has brought upon us. His connection to New York City, the subways and Arab citizens and the overall fear we are expected to demonstrate goes to show just how local this national issue is.
While he lambasts this Congress and this administration he go on to lay out a clear three step solution, which is the heart of his policy and the reason for this declaration he gave today.
First, we must restore our military capability and be prepared to defend America from rogue sovereign states and stateless terrorists. The mere existence of this military gives America the necessary upper hand in negotiations with rogue states. We must have the strongest military in the world and we can again. But to do this we must reverse the Bush tax giveaways to the oil corporations and the rich. Then we must use that money to build the military to the levels necessary and to properly equip the troops to do their jobs. And when we get that military we must only use it for just actions with clearly defined objectives so that we know we can win. With that restored military we can rein in the likes of Iran and North Korea rather than empower them.
Second, we must have an energy policy that eliminates America's dependence on foreign oil within a decade - just like that good Democrat John F. Kennedy asked for when he wanted to put a man on the moon. He succeeded, and so can we with the same kind of focused program. Now I know that the usual goal of alternative energy sources is for environmental reasons, to stop global warning and clean our planet. It is also becoming an economic must. As oil disappears, its price will forever climb. The price of energy will only come down when we switch to alternative fuels. But rarely is this cited as a national security or national defense issue. It is. Indeed, we fund both sides of the war on terrorism right now as we buy the oil to fuel our tanks and jeeps from the same countries that use the petro dollars to buy the arms they use against us. Fifty years ago we had no problems in the Middle East because we were not dependent on their oil. Fifty years from now the dependence will disappear as oil disappears. But the next fifty years will be brutal as we fight more oil wars in the Middle East - make no mistake that Iraq was an oil war - so that we can heat our homes in the winter. In the Middle East we are unwanted guests who have taken their wealth and diminished their rich culture. When we finally complete our withdrawal from oil the terrorist attacks will disappear because our interest in the Middle East will fade away. Arabia and America will be free to pursue their separate destinies This is not cut and run, it is common sense.
Third, we must have secure borders and effective homeland security and a good, well funded, nationwide, second responder system like CERT to spring into action when disasters do occur. I started this speech with the success of the British in cracking the London plot. Now I will mention a failure. Last week a cloud of gas covered Staten Island. It took days before our responders knew anything about it, and important questions still remain. What if this had been a chemical or biological attack? It is unconscionable that five years after 9/11 we're still so poorly prepared to defend our homeland. George Bush and the Congress Members who supported him, must be held accountable for this.
We can solve this problem, but it will take money, many billions that would be available had George Bush not squandered hundreds of millions in the sands of Iraq. If we end that war and reverse the Bush tax giveaways to the rich, we can swiftly implement the necessary scans to detect radiation in 100% of the containers coming into our ports and to Staten Island rather than the current 5% as supported by the Republicans who generally don't live anywhere near our district and also by Congressman Fossella.
The truth is that it is George Bush and the Republicans who are cutting and running from the American people. They cutting and running from his responsibility to the American people to protect them, to give them hope, to fulfill the promise of the Declaration of Independence to allow Americans to pursue happiness in its simplest form, freedom from fear, normalcy.
You can find more about Stephen Harrison, another great race that is part of the Northeast strategy.
This seat has a partisan index of 50.5 leaning Dem. via Superribbie
Volunteer if you are in the NYC area.
Donate if you can, and add the .01.
Last, and maybe most important, support us local bloggers covering this race and read a few entries;
NY13 covers this race and the democratic bench in this district
BlueSpot who has been covering this race on Kos a lot recently, and covers politics (and more) from NYC and NJ
Daily Gotham which covers grassroots politics in NYC
Take Back NY a state-wide group blog dedicated to flipping every Republican House seat here in New York State.