Political Quotes

“Mr. Speaker, with this veto, President Bush has once again failed to safeguard our families. And what is this ``waterboarding'' that the President so readily embraces? It sounds a little like a cousin of skateboarding or snowboarding. But, in fact, it is a new name for an old water torture in which a human being is drowned. The drowning is controlled to force a response, but waterboarding is simply a euphemism for torture by drowning. Now, President Bush is not the first Texan to think of this and to believe that horrific wrongs can justify drowning of the culprit. An earlier Texas waterboarder is not in the White House; he was sent to the Big House. A Texas judge said that this waterboarding Texas sheriff put law enforcement ``in the hands of a bunch of thugs'' that would ``embarrass a dictator.'' The sheriff was sentenced to 10 years. That judge was right, and this administration is so very wrong. America seems to have been sentenced to 8 years of Dick Cheney, who claims that such water torture is a ``no brainer.'' ``No brainer''-- that sounds like a good way to describe how so many of this Administration's policies have been made. Torture is no proper tool in the arsenal of democracy. Torture is foreign to our values, foreign to our history, foreign to our religions, foreign to our laws, and it is foreign to our international commitments. There can be no compromise, no middle ground. We must have zero tolerance for torture.”