Chuck Schumer: “tonight is a sad night for America, but what the President's veto indicated was not that Democrats don't want to support…”

“tonight is a sad night for America, but what the President's veto indicated was not that Democrats don't want to support the troops--we do--but that he does not want a change in direction, a change in mission, a change in course. It indicates the President is still in his bunker thinking everything is going fine in Iraq, and it clearly isn't. The bottom line is very simple: We can do two things at once. We can support the troops and at the same time we can change our mission. The bottom line is simple, and that is that the present policies have failed. Everyone except a handful of supporters of the President, and the President and the Vice President themselves, know that, but unfortunately they stubbornly cling to staying on the same course, to the detriment of about everybody else in this country and the world. The bottom line is very simple: that President Bush, when he asked Americans to go to war, never talked about policing a civil war, and yet that is the largest part of our efforts in Iraq. We on this side of the aisle hope to change that direction so that we are fighting terrorism and directing counterterrorism and not simply policing a civil war. The next few weeks will be momentous in our history.…”