Joe Cunningham: “the young lady from San Francisco said that she is not going to vote for this bill. That did not surprise me a bit. When…”

“the young lady from San Francisco said that she is not going to vote for this bill. That did not surprise me a bit. When a person has a 35 percent defense rating, the highest ever in a career, it does not surprise me that this young lady would vote against this bill. The troops know, they know each and every one of us and what we do. I became a Republican, I was a Democrat, because of the folks in this body that turned their backs on us, many of us in Vietnam, some of those Republicans, too. To say, well, I am not going to vote for a bill that gives me the tools to do my job and survive, all these kids want to do is to be able to complete their mission, do their job and get home safely, and to deny them these funds that will do that, they know, and they know what their mission is every single day. Mr. Speaker, I think to deny the many, many positive things that are going on, the gentleman from California (Mr. Lewis) took a whole group, as he said, Republicans, Democrats, conservatives, liberals and others, to Iraq and you know what, even those that were opposed to Iraq when they got there and saw what was going on there, the positive things, the men and the women that were walking down the streets free. Now, there are some bad areas, Tikrit and Baghdad, but if my colleagues go to the south and go to the north, we have got young girls going to school now. They could not do that before. That is the plan, and these kids that are over there know that.”