Political Quotes

“Mr. Speaker, I want to talk a little bit today about accountability. Accountability is something we teach our children. Let me burden you with a short story. About 20 years ago, I am sitting in my kitchen. I think it was a Saturday morning. My son, Mattie, who is 4 years old, was in the middle of the kitchen floor and dropped a plate. It landed at his feet. He was wearing shoes. He looked up at me, I looked at him, and he said to me, Dad, I didn't do it. Well, it is a funny story and it is cute, but the point is that you teach your children about accountability. You teach them to accept responsibility, to make things right that they have done wrong, and to move on with their lives. My wife, Marion, and I have two boys, and we like to say we have done a marvelous job teaching them about accountability and taking proper responsibility. But there is a poison in this country. There is a pestilence that has been occurring for at least a couple of generations. I want to say it started with the Watergate era back in the seventies, when people didn't want to take accountability and they didn't want to take responsibility. You heard phrases come up like ``plausible deniability.'' And then we went on into the corporate world and we had the Enron scandal. Rather than taking accountability and responsibility, standing up and admitting what they did and making it right, no, what did they do? They were shredding the documents as fast as they could shred them.…”