Political Quotes

“I thank the gentleman from California and the ranking member of the Armed Services Committee. Let me start out by just quoting General Amos a couple of days ago, who's the commandant of the United States Marine Corps on this issue. He said, I don't want to lose any marines to distraction. I don't want any marines that I'm visiting at Bethesda Naval Medical Center with no legs to be the result of any type of distraction. Mistakes and distractions cost marine lives. So there's that quote from the commandant of the United States Marine Corps. The marines are in part of the heaviest fight in Afghanistan right now, and they were part of the heaviest fight in Iraq between 2004 and 2007. This is not about race. Let me quote somebody else that we've been quoting, General Colin Powell. General Colin Powell said, skin color is a benign, non-behavioral characteristic. Sexual orientation is perhaps the most profound of human behavioral characteristics. Comparison of the two is a convenient, but invalid, argument. It sounds good to make that comparison, that this is like the civil rights movement. The problem is the United States military is not the YMCA. It's something special. And the reason that we have the greatest military in the world is because of the way that it is right now. We are not Great Britain. We are not France; we are not Germany.…”