Political Quotes

“Mr. President, it is not going to surprise any of my colleagues or the public at large that a lot of times I come to the Senate floor to speak about agriculture and to speak about ethanol. What brings me to the floor today is the ongoing crusade by the Wall Street Journal, in an intellectually dishonest way, to put out a lot of facts about ethanol that are not true. The latest barrage comes from an interview published last Saturday in the Wall Street Journal with C. Larry Pope, CEO of Smithfield Foods. In this article, there are a lot of misstatements about ethanol and about ethanol causing the price of food to rise dramatically. I take the floor now to rebut some of those misstatements and also to set the record straight so that when a very fine CEO such as Mr. Pope, even though I disagree with him on this article--he is a decent person, and he is a good corporate executive--the next time, he will not speak. But I can also say I do not like to have confrontations with Smithfield Foods because they do provide a lot of good-paying jobs in the Middle West, and they do a good job of adding value to agriculture. There has been a tradition at Smithfield to kind of not appreciate American agriculture. It goes back to some conversations I had with the previous CEO by the name of Joe Luter.…”