Political Quotes

“I do feel compelled to respond since Martin Niemoller--the famous German Christian pastor who was quoted after World War II when talking about inaction--was dealing with the issue of the Holocaust, the scale of which was so unbelievably beyond the pale of a small technical fix that we're talking about here that, I believe, the gentleman diminished the value of whatever argument he was making by even quoting him. If I seem to recall my history correctly when I was running a business in 1996, during the welfare debate, Martin Niemoller was resurrected from the dead again, using the same quote that somehow, if we just touch anything that will provide integrity to our programs with which we want to help the poor, that, in fact, this is the march down the slippery slope to the complete takeover and removal of civil rights. Come on, folks. This is a technical business discussion. If we were running a business together--and I believe the government should be run that way--I think we'd be sitting around a table in the operations room while planning ways to legitimately cut costs to more efficiently help our customers and to eliminate waste. In using the gentleman's own argument that he brought up, this is the question again: If the vast majority--and I happen to agree with him-- don't go in those places in the first place, why would we not want to put in a simple program control for that small percentage that does to prevent them from wasting taxpayer dollars?…”