Republicans should read it, then kick their congressional leadership in the . . . pants.
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The Big Dog, 1996 Dem convention, excerpt:
In the last four years, we have frozen North Korea's nuclear weapons program, and I'm proud to say that tonight there is not a single Russian nuclear missile pointed at an American child.
Now we must enforce and ratify, without delay, measures that further reduce nuclear arsenals, banish poison gas, and ban nuclear tests once and for all.
We have made investments, new investments, in our most important defense asset, our magnificent men and women in uniform. By the year 2000, we also will have increased funding to modernize our weapons systems by 40 percent. These commitments will make sure that our military remains the best-trained, best-equipped fighting force in the entire world. We are developing a sensible nation missile defense, but we must not, not now, not by the year 2000, squander $60 billion on an unproved, ineffective "Star Wars" program that could be obsolete tomorrow.
We are fighting terrorism on all fronts with a three-prong strategy.
First, we are working to rally a world coalition with zero tolerance for terrorism. Just this month I signed a law imposing harsh sanctions on foreign companies that invest in key sectors of the Iranian and Libyan economies. As long as Iran trains, supports, and protects terrorists, as long as Libya refuses to give up the people who blew up Pan Am 103, they will pay a price from the United States.
Second, we must give law enforcement the tools they need to take the fight to terrorists.
We need new laws to crack down on money laundering and to prosecute and punish those who commit violent acts against American citizens abroad; to add chemical markers or taggants to gunpowder used in bombs so we can track the bomb-makers; to extend the same power police now have against organized crime to save lives by tapping all the phones that terrorists use. Terrorists are as big a threat to our future, perhaps bigger, than organized crime. Why should we have two different standards for a common threat to the safety of America and our children?
We need, in short, the laws that Congress refused to pass. And I ask them again: Please, as an American, not a partisan matter, pass these laws now.
Third, we will improve airport and air travel security. I have asked the Vice President to establish a commission and report back to me on ways to do this, but now we will install the most sophisticated bomb detection equipment in all our major airports, we will search every airplane flying to or from America from another nation --every flight, every cargo hold, every cabin, every time.
My fellow Democrats and my fellow Americans, I know that in most election seasons foreign policy is not a matter of great interest in the debates in the barber shops and the cafes of America, on the floors and at the bowling alleys, but there are times when only America can make the difference between war and peace, between freedom and repression, between life death.
We cannot save all the world's children, but we can save many of them.
We cannot become the world's policeman, but where our values and our interests are at stake and where we can make a difference, we must act and we must lead. That is our job, and we are better, stronger and safer because we are doing it.
Full text:
http://www.geocities.com/rickmatlick/nomaclinton96.htm
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