Dale Bumpers: “I will use my 3 minutes, and we will get this show on the road. Let me just say, in the 6 years I have stood at this…”

“I will use my 3 minutes, and we will get this show on the road. Let me just say, in the 6 years I have stood at this position saying we ought to cancel the space station, for all the reasons I enumerated all day long, one of the opponents' arguments consistently has been that we are going to cure breast cancer, prostate cancer, cervical cancer, warts, ingrown toenails, psoriasis, you name it. It reminds me of that old Huey Long story about the medicine doctor coming through Louisiana. He was selling Low Poplarhirum and High Poplarlorum. 'What's the difference?' someone asked him. He said, 'Well, the High Poplarlorum will cure anything from the waist up, and Low Poplarhirum will cure anything from the waist down.' They said, 'Where do you get it?' He said, 'We get it from the Poplar tree.' 'How do you get a medicine out of one tree that cures everything from the waist up and the waist down?' He says, 'Well, we take sap from the bottom half of the tree, that is Low Poplarhirum, and we take sap from the top of the tree, and that is High Poplarlorum, and that's the way it works.' Low Poplarhirum and High Poplarlorum reminds me of the debate going on about the space station today. It is going to cure everything under the shining Sun and it isn't going to cure anything. I will eat my hat--and I wish I was going to be in the Senate to do it--if it ever cures anything.”