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Sen. Harry Reid fires back at Bush: 'The president has been giving us doublespeak for years'
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[link to rawstory.com]
Reid fires back at Bush: 'The president has been giving us doublespeak for years'
RAW STORY
Published: January 24, 2006
RAW STORY has learned that Democratic Senate leader Harry Reid is set to slash the Republican Party in a renewed assault -- just a day after President Bush launched a national effort to defend his wiretap program as "terrorist surveillance."
The speech, to be delivered shortly to the Center for American Progress, a liberal thinktank, follows.
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I went to college in the 1960s and studied government. One of the things I remember discussing was a quote by Lord Acton:
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“Power tends to corrupt, and absolute power tends to corrupt absolutely.”
It’s been many years since I graduated college, but I finally understand what Lord Acton meant.
Republicans today control the House of Representatives, the Senate and the White House. They have absolute power, and it has corrupted their Party and led to the culture of corruption that we see now in Washington.
We have the Republican leader of the House of Representatives, admonished three times for ethics violations and under indictment now for money laundering.
We have the White House, where an employee has been indicted for the first time in 135 years.
There’s Karl Rove, who is under investigation… and David Safavian, the man appointed by President Bush to be charge in charge of hundreds of billions of dollars in government contracts who was led away in handcuffs because of his dealings with Jack Abramoff and others.
And then, we have the Republican “K-Street Project, which has invited lobbyists inside our nation’s Capitol….as long as they are willing to pay the right price.
The Republican abuse of power comes at great cost to our country, and we can see it in the present state of our union. Special interests and the well-connected have grown stronger, while our national security… our economy… our health care… and our government have grown weaker.
What is the state of our union in 2006?
We have a national security policy that protects Halliburton’s bottom-line with no-bid contracts | but sends our troops to Iraq without body armor.
We have Vice President Cheney’s energy policy that helped Big Oil make a hundred billion dollars in profit in 2005 | but this same policy has America paying 70 dollars for a barrel of oil and families paying twice as much for heat and gasoline as did in late 2001.
We have students priced out of college by skyrocketing tuition - and Republicans in Congress who want to cut student loans in order to pay for special interest tax breaks.
We have 46 million Americans without health insurance and poverty numbers on the rise – but a President whose economic policies benefit the wealthy and well-connected.
This is what happens to the state of our union when leaders put special interests ahead of the America’s interest.
These are the costs of Republican corruption.
The question…. is will President Bush acknowledge these costs when he delivers his State of the Union next Tuesday night?
If history is any indicator, the answer is no.
Watching the video earlier, I was reminded of another lesson from college, this one taken from George Orwell and his book, 1984.
In that book, Orwell spoke of “doublespeak” - naming something just the opposite, in order to cover how unpleasant it is in reality.
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