Political Quotes

“I want to thank my colleague, Senator Merkley, a son of Douglas County, and reflect for a few minutes on the horrendous events of the last week. My colleague has eloquently talked about this, and I am grateful for that. Senator Merkley and I will be returning home tomorrow, but I want to talk a little bit about some of what was inspiring last Friday. My colleague and I and our colleague from the House, Congressman DeFazio, went to Mercy Medical Center, and we saw all of the staff. My own sense is that there is no way you can truly prepare for something like this. You can go through as many training programs, have as many drills, have as many handbooks as anybody can invent, but you are never truly prepared for it. When Senator Merkley and I and a colleague from the other body, Congressman DeFazio, walked into that mayhem, there were probably 150 staff there, and I said: This is the face of Douglas County. These are the people--the doctors and the nurses and the pharmacists and the volunteers--who were there in a time of extraordinary stress giving those individuals the very best of care and that little extra touch of Douglas County caring that my colleague knows much more about than anyone else here in the Senate. I so appreciated what we saw at Mercy Medical Center because it told me that even at a time of such pain and after such carnage, we know Douglas County is going to come back. Roseburg is going to come back.…”