Political Quotes

“Mr. Chairman, first, the gentleman from Ohio [Mr. Kasich], for whom I have great respect, said the cold war is over and the B-2 is a cold war relic. The problem with the Soviet Union dissolving is they did not dissolve their SAM production. That is surface-to-air missiles. They are designed to do one thing, and that is kill American aircraft. That is how they shot down Scott O'Grady over Bosnia. Basically a little batch of teenagers in uniform with 3 weeks' training time in SAM missiles delivered from the Soviet Union, now Russia, were able to shoot down an American high-performance aircraft. Mr. Chairman, the red on this map of the world denotes all of the nations that have SAM sites: Libya, Syria, North Korea, and China have lots of SAM sites. That means that if Americans drive nonstealth aircraft into those SAM sites as the gentleman from California [Mr. Cunningham] said, a number of them are going to die. Second, the gentleman from Ohio [Mr. Kasich] should be happy to know that we have saved in the reform part of this budget according to CBO $15 billion over the next 5 years. That is enough according to CBO to purchase the $12 billion buy of B-2's and, once more, it is 1/35th of what we are going to spend for short-range aircraft.”