Joe Cunningham: “there is nobody in this House on the other side of the aisle that I respect more than my colleague, the gentleman from…”

“there is nobody in this House on the other side of the aisle that I respect more than my colleague, the gentleman from Missouri (Mr. Skelton). He knows that that is true. White House treason? No. But I would say to my colleague, I think that there has been some very poor decisions made, decisions that should concern every American family. It is not just in the China issue, it deals with foreign policy, it deals with national security that in my estimation, our defense forces are the worst off than I have seen them in 30 years that I have been associated with it. That is both from taking money out of defense, and the deployments that take money like Haiti, Somalia, Bosnia, that take money out of the operation and maintenance, already out of a low budget. I think those kinds of decisions are made when you surround yourselves with very left-wing oriented members of your cabinet and staff, like Strobe Talbott. The decisions that you make, you need people there that have some kind of sense of what is good. Let us face it, China is not the same China it was 20 years ago. There have been a lot of changes in China. I would tell the gentleman from Missouri (Mr. Skelton), today China is still one of the biggest threats the United States faces. So is the former Soviet Union. They are not our friends. We have to keep working in that direction, but they are very, very dangerous. It is like a pit bull that you put inside a fence to guard you at night.”