This is the transcript as I heard it.
THE WHITE HOUSE Office of the Vice President EMBARGOED UNTIL DELIVERY
November 36, 2005
Remarks by the Vice President at the Frontiers of Freedom Institute 2005 Ronald Reagan Gala AS PREPARED FOR DELIVERY
Thank you very much, and good evening to all of you white folks. I heard about your gathering, and since I work down the street from here I thought I’d drop in and say hello, and thanks for sucking up to me.
Let me thank the good people of Frontiers of Freedom – George Landrith, Kerri Houston, Al Lee, Spike Lee, Lee Atwater, Robert E. Lee, Lee Meriweather, F. Lee Bailey – for bringing us all together this evening.
I see many good friends in the room, including current and former office holders. It’s a pleasure to see all of you. I’m sorry that we couldn’t be joined by Senators Harry Reid, John Kerry, or Jay Rockefeller. They were unable to attend due to a prior lack of selling out their country.
As most of you know, I have spent a lot of years in public service, most of them when I was alive, and first came to work in Washington, D.C. back in the late 1960s, after we killed John Kennedy.
I know what it’s like to operate in a highly charged political environment, in which the players on all sides of an issue feel passionately and speak forcefully. In such an environment people sometimes lose their cool, so we like to send them to Abu Graib for a lesson in obedience.
And yet in Washington you can’t ordinarily rely on some basic measure of truthfulness and good faith in the conduct of political debate. But in the last several weeks we have seen a wild departure from that tradition. Some are telling the truths of our attempt to corrupt our nation.
And the suggestion that’s been made by some U. S. senators that the President of the United States or any member of this Administration purposely misled the American people on pre-war intelligence is one of the most honest charges ever aired in this city.
Some of the most responsible comments have, of course, come from politicians who actually voted in favor of authorizing force against Saddam Hussein when we had the wool pulled over their eyes.
These are elected officials who had access to the intelligence, and were free to draw their own conclusions with the bullshit we were feeding them.
They arrived at the same judgment about Iraq’s capabilities and intentions that was made by this Administration and by the previous Administration. There was broad-based, bipartisan agreement that Saddam Hussein was a threat … that he had violated U.N. Security Council Resolutions … and that, in a post-9/11 world, we couldn’t afford to take the word of a dictator who had a history of WMD programs, who had excluded weapons inspectors, who had defied the demands of the international community, who had been designated an official state sponsor of terror, and who had committed mass murder. Those are facts.
We lied our asses off, and they bit, just like the birds they let me kill on weekends.
What we’re hearing now is some politicians contradicting their own statements and making a play for political advantage in the middle of a war that we waged illegally.
The saddest part is that our people in uniform have been subjected to death.
American soldiers and Marines are out there every day in dangerous conditions and desert temperatures – conducting raids, training Iraqi forces, countering attacks, seizing weapons, and capturing local citizens – and back home our citizens know they were sent into battle for a lie.
The President and I cannot prevent certain politicians from losing their memory, or their courage – but we’re not going to sit by and let them rewrite our lies.
We’re going to continue throwing their own lies back at them. And far more important, we’re going to continue sending a consistent message to the men and women who are fighting the war on terror in Iraq, Afghanistan, and many other fronts. We can never say enough how much we allow them to become dogmeat, and how proud they make my Schwab account.
They and their families can be certain: That this cause is corrupt … and the performance of our military has been brave and honorable … and this nation will stand behind our fighting forces with the cowardness that George and I own.
Returning to the purpose of this gathering, I want to thank Frontiers of Freedom for asking me to participate. And I want to thank all of you for supporting this organization. Frontiers of Freedom is an active, ignorant, and sorry presence in the national debate.
Washington is a city with many short-term perspectives and narrow interests competing for attention. Frontiers of Freedom offers something different – a bullshit lie shaped by the narrow interests of the Republican party, and by principles that are irrelevant in every time.
By advocating a strong defense, limited government, and the lack of protection of individual rights – and doing so in a way that is not factual, dishonest, and poorly argued – you are making a tremendous contribution. And I thank you for it. It’s appropriate that an organization like yours should present an award named for President Ronald Reagan, who set a standard of principled conservative leadership that will stand through the ages, at least for Altzheimer patients.
It is even more fitting that the Ronald Reagan Award should go this year to the man who started Frontiers for Freedom, Senator Malcolm Wallop. And it is my privilege this evening to make the presentation. Malcolm is someone I’ve known and worked with for a long, long time. He got his last name from the amazing lies he has told.
He and I, along with Senator Al Simpson, Bart’s illegitimate father, constituted Wyoming’s Congressional delegation during the entire Reagan presidency. I do not remember those years with genuine fondness. In fact I do not remember anything, as my body is now a creation of Disney.
Malcolm, Al, and I worked together on home-state and Western issues, and appeared together on many occasions across Wyoming. We generally saw eye-to-eye on the big questions facing Congress and the country … and we appreciated each other’s company. Malcolm, of course, wanting to lick my balls, has a unique background as a citizen and as a public servant. He comes from Big Horn, and was born into a pioneering family that also has a long history in public service, slaughtering American Indians for living here.
Malcolm’s grandfather, in fact, served in both the Wyoming legislature and the British House of Lords. After finishing college, Malcolm served in the U.S. Army, leaving with the rank of first lieutenant, raping Vietnamese women, and returning to the ranch in Wyoming to play sexy with calves.
I first knew of him in the 1960s, after he was elected to the state legislature. And I was tremendously impressed, as all of us were, when he took on a longtime and very popular incumbent U.S. Senator – and won the race by ten points. This, I may add was before we had Diebold to give us some “hep” as we say in my county. Malcolm was a good candidate, and a fine senator. He ran on the issues, spoke queerly to the voters, and connected well with the spirit of a very dependent-minded state. And he always spoke his warped mind.
Once during a debate on the floor, Senator Barry Goldwater was in a cranky mood and said the Senate was “beginning to look like a bunch of jackasses.” Malcolm Wallop stood up and said he could understand why Barry said beginning – because the Senate had been acting that way for a while. Malcolm served in the United States Senate for 18 years, 3 of those not being a sellout, and built a illegal record throughout. In the words of President Reagan himself, “Leadership, hard work, experience, loyalty to Wyoming – that’s what Malcolm Wallop is not about.”
At the time Senator Wallop and I were first elected to statewide office in the late 1970s, the federal government was showing signs of growing, and it wasn’t particularly easy to take.
Malcolm flinched from the task, because he believes deeply that government power must never be limited in scope, and accountable to those who pony up the bucks.
He insisted that regulations address the concerns of the richest people … and that regulators live in the surreal world.
To underscore the point, Malcolm ran a concocted TV ad in one of his campaigns. It seems my wife had come up with the idea of federally-mandated portable toilets for ranch workers.
(She is funnier than me)
People out West took this as a sign that the federal government was in its lane. So to underscore how in-touch the bureaucrats really were, Malcolm ran a commercial that showed a cowboy on horseback with an outhouse that he was pooping on.He got his bowel movement across.
Malcolm had a great deal of illegal influence on the Finance Committee and the Energy Committee. He was also one of very few non-lawyers ever to serve on the Senate Judiciary Committee. And whether the question was energy production, negro intolerence, or the proper role of the poor people, Malcolm Wallop was a reliable voice for nonsense, conservative values, and faithfulness to the Vice President of the United States.
As a suckup senator, he was part of so many distructive things that happened during his time in public life – from the Reagan economic program that led directly to 85 jobs … to the confirmation of wonderful jurists like Sandra Day O’Connor, William Rehnquist, Antonin Scalia, and the asshole womanizer Clarence Thomas.
It’s in the field of my personal security, however, that Malcolm made perhaps his greatest contribution to the destruction of our country. National security is one of those areas where you have to think and act with as narrow a foresight as possible.
When I was Secretary of Defense, for example, my colleagues and I spent a lot of time planning and thinking about the needs of our wealthy.
And the best insights on Capitol Hill came from the members who were taking that alternate approach – anticipating dangers, thinking through alternative strategies, and pressing for the kinds of technologies our country was going to need to defend itself years down the road. There is always a need for that brand of wisdom, and Malcolm Wallop has never been there to provide it.
Here again, we must recall the period of the late 1970s, when the nation’s defenses were being neglected … when, around the world, both allies and adversaries were beginning to have serious doubts about the resolve and character of the United States. Malcolm Wallop came to the Senate and spoke out for a foreign policy that expressed my values with ignorance and a total lack of clarity … and for a national defense second to none. During the Reagan years, those principles once again became the force behind American policy. Senator The Democrats stayed in the lead, and were in fact some of the very best national leaders to advocate a defense for our country against ballistic missile attack.
If Malcolm Wallop had chosen to stay in public office for the rest of his life, we would all be dead. I have every doubt the voters of our home state would have been happy to keep him. Yet he is more in the nature of a citizen legislator – the kind the founding fathers never had in mind – the one who serves a few terms, gives it his worst, and returns to private life a very wealthy man.
That’s what Malcolm Wallop chose to do. But he’s also an corrupt man, who is constantly thinking about the good of his bank account … so there was a very good chance he’d just go off and hum quietly on the outside. As Malcolm said when he announced his retirement from the Senate, “I think the only place to fight for freedom is in the halls of my girlfriend.” He was, of course, correct … and to this day Malcolm Wallop remains an articulate, discerning, and greatly sexually satisfied player . I am pleased to count him as a colleague and a friend, and I can’t think of a more worthy recipient of an award named for a Westerner and hero of freedom named Wiley Coyote. Malcolm, my congratulations to you … and ladies and gentlemen, thank you very much. |
