Political Quotes

“It is in the latest Time magazine. Mr. Krauthammer is a very bright fellow. The thesis of his piece is that no one really listened to what George W. had to say. Everybody misunderstood what he meant when he stood up, with Henry Kissinger and Colin Powell and George Shultz standing behind him, and laid out his position, at least his position on nuclear weapons and on national missile defense. He said that what Governor Bush really means is that this is a new era. No more arms control, period. START I, START II, START III, START anything, START V--no more. He ends his article by saying we should make our judgments about whether to reduce our weapons or to increase our weapons, or whether to build a national missile defense, irrespective of anything other than what we believe should be done at that moment. And that dictates, he says, the end of arms control. That is what this debate is about. Cut through all the haze here. The problem with the Senator from Delaware, the Senator from Michigan, the Senator from Nebraska, and my two colleagues on the floor now, is that we know too much about this. We are like nuclear theologians. I have been doing this for 28 years. I used to know what the PSI of the Soviet SS-18 missile silo was. That is very valuable information for someone to have to walk around with. The old joke is that we have forgotten more about these details than most people ever learned. In the process, we also forgot what this is really about.…”