Date: 2005-10-28
Speaker: WASSERMAN SCHULTZ (democrat)
Chamber: H

It has cooled down. There was a cold front that pushed Wilma and made her go faster. reached us right after that. It has not been. mercifully. hot. It has been in the upper 60s. But the way our climate is. when that cold front leaves. they could be hot again. The earliest anticipation that my constituents are expected to have power restored completely is November 22. This is from the model.State. That is how we started out. We are talking about FEMA that is still woefully unprepared to respond to natural disasters. Let me move to the very next day. where we now unfortunately have had our 2.000th casualty in the Iraq war. And today. sadly. we have had the Vice President of the United States Chief of Staff indicted on five counts. one of which was leaking the name of a covert CIA agent with the express. clearly the intent of advancing the administrations agenda that they were hellbent on to get us into the Iraq war. because that CIA agents husband had just come back from Niger and said there was no evidence that weapons of mass destruction were being acquired by Saddam Hussein and his allies in Iraq. So the most sinister of intentions .that the Vice Presidents Chief of Staff clearly had was to continue to advance the administrations agenda to get us into a war that was illadvised. that was entered into under false pretenses with misinformation. and now the 2.000th American has died as a result of that. When is the partisan politics and the people in the administration who are hellbent on being right. hellbent on having it their way. when is it going to stop? When are we going to have some bipartisan outreach? I have been here for 11 months. and it has been incredibly shocking to me that we have folks like the gentlewoman from Tennessee. who was willingly lambasting a group of her colleagues on our side of the aisle who have no ability to do the things like she is accusing. When are people like her going to sit down around the negotiating table and agree that we can and should agree on more things than we disagree? It is so sad the Republican leadership in this country is only concerned about being right. is only concerned about having it their way. Clearly. as the results of this week show. they will do anything. will do anything including lie to the government. lie to the press and expose an undercover CIA agents identity in order to have their way and get us into an illadvised and unfortunate war. which now we have no idea how long we will be in the midst of. I am raising young children. as are many. many people across this country. I was fortunate and used to be able to say at every Veterans Day ceremony and Memorial Day ceremony that my generation was the first generation in decades that were able to say thanks to the efforts of our predecessors. of the generations before us. that we did not have to get called to war. that our generation was not thrust in the midst of an illadvised confrontation. The Vietnam War was the last serious conflict we entered into. Obviously the Gulf War in 1991 was not as Widespread and serious and ended quickly. But we cannot say that anymore because the administration has submerged us into chaos.