quote:
Op donderdag 14 oktober 2004 14:15 schreef pberends het volgende:
Eindelijk geen maar 8 keer Irak :')
MODERATOR: Mr. President, I want to go back to something Senator Kerry said earlier tonight and ask a follow-up of my own. He said -- and this will be a new question to you -- he said that you had never said whether you would like to overturn Roe v. Wade. So I ask you directly, would you like to?
PRESIDENT BUSH: What he's asking me is will I have a litmus test for my judges, and the answer is, no, I will not have a litmus test. I will pick judges who will interpret the Constitution, but I'll have no litmus test.
MODERATOR: Senator Kerry, you'd like to respond?
SENATOR KERRY: Is that a new question, or a 30-second question?
MODERATOR: That's a new question for -- for President Bush.
SENATOR KERRY: Which time limit are we --
MODERATOR: You have 90 seconds.
SENATOR KERRY: Thank you very much. Well, again, the President didn't answer the question. I will answer it straight to America. I'm not going to appoint a judge to the court who is going to undo a constitutional right, whether it's the First Amendment or the Fifth Amendment, or some other right that's given under our courts today -- under the Constitution. And I believe that the right of choice is a constitutional right. So, I don't intend to see it undone. Clearly, the President wants to leave an ambivalence, or intends to undo it.
Let me go a step further. We have a long distance yet to travel in terms of fairness in America. I don't know how you can govern in this country when you look at New York City and you see that 50 percent of the black males there are unemployed; when you see 40 percent of Hispanic children, of black children in some cities, dropping out of high school. And yet the President, who talks about No Child Left Behind, refused to fully fund -- by $28 billion -- that particular program, so you can make a difference in the lives of those young people.
Now, right here in Arizona that difference would have been $131 million to the state of Arizona to help its kids be able to have better education and to lift the property tax burden from its citizens. The President reneged on his promise to fund No Child Left Behind. He will tell you he's raised the money, and he has, but he didn't put in what he promised. And that makes a difference in the lives of our children.
MODERATOR: Yes, sir.
PRESIDENT BUSH: Two things: One, he clearly has a litmus test for his judges, which I disagree with. And secondly, only a liberal senator from Massachusetts would say that a 49- percent increase in funding for education was not enough. We've increased funds, but more importantly, we've reformed the system to make sure that we solve problems early before they're too late.
He talked about the unemployed. Absolutely, we've got to make sure they get educated. He talked about children whose parents don't speak English as a first language. Absolutely, we've got to make sure they get educated. And that's what the No Child Left Behind Act does.
MODERATOR: Senator.
SENATOR KERRY: You don't measure it by a percentage increase. Mr. President, you measure it by whether you're getting the job done. Five hundred thousand kids lost after-school programs because of your budget. Now, that's not in my gut. That's not my value system -- and certainly not so that the wealthiest people in America can walk away with another tax cut: $89 billion last year to the top one percent of Americans, but kids lost their after-school programs. You be the judge.
MODERATOR: All right, let's go to another question, and it is to Senator Kerry. You have two minutes, sir. Senator, at the last debate, President Bush said he did not favor a draft. You agreed with him. But our National Guard and Reserve forces are being severely strained because many of them are being held beyond their enlistments. Some of them say that it's a back-door draft. Is there any relief that could be offered to these brave Americans and their families? If you became President, Senator Kerry, what would you do about this situation of holding National Guard and Reservists for these extended periods of time and these repeated call-ups that they're now facing?
SENATOR KERRY: Well, I think the fact that they're facing these repeated call-ups, some of them two and three deployments, and there's a stop-loss policy that prevents people from being able to get out when their time was up, is a reflection of the bad judgment this President exercised in how he has engaged in the world and deployed our forces. Our military is overextended. Nine out of ten active duty Army divisions are either in
Iraq, going to
Iraq, or have come back from
Iraq. One way or the other they're wrapped up in it.
Now, I've proposed adding two active duty divisions to the Armed Forces of the United States, one combat, one support. In addition, I'm going to double the number of special forces so that we can fight a more effective war on terror with less pressure on the National Guard and Reserve. And what I would like to do is see the National Guard and Reserve be deployed differently here in our own country. There's much we can do with them with respect to homeland security. We ought to be doing that. And that would relieve an enormous amount of pressure.
But the most important thing to relieve the pressure on all of our Armed Forces is, frankly, to run a foreign policy that recognizes that America is strongest when we are working with real alliances, when we are sharing the burdens of the world by working through our statesmanship at the highest levels, and our diplomacy to bring other nations to our side.
I've said it before, I say it again: I believe the President broke faith with the American people in the way that he took this nation to war. He said he would work through the -- a real alliance. He said in Cincinnati, we would plan carefully, we would take every precaution. Well, we didn't. And the result is our forces today are overextended. The fact is that he did not choose to go to war as a last resort. And America now is paying already $120 billion, up to $200 billion before we're finished, and much more, probably, and that is the result of this President taking his eye off of Osama bin Laden.
MODERATOR: Mr. President.
PRESIDENT BUSH: The best way to take the pressure off our troops is to succeed in
Iraq, is to train
Iraqis so they can do the hard work of democracy, is to give them a chance to defend their country, which is precisely what we're doing. We'll have 125,000 troops trained by the end of this year.
I remember going on an airplane in Bangor, Maine to say thanks to the Reservists and Guard that were headed overseas from Tennessee and North Carolina, Georgia. Some of them had been there before. The people I talked to, the spirits were high. They didn't view their service as a back-door draft, they view their service as an opportunity to serve their country.
My opponent, the Senator talks about foreign policy. In our first debate he proposed America pass a global test. In order to defend ourselves we have to get international approval. That's one of the major differences we have about defending our country. I work with allies, I work with friends. We'll continue to build strong coalitions. But I will never turn over our national security decisions to leaders of other countries. We'll be resolute, we'll be strong, and we will wage a comprehensive war against the terrorists.
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MODERATOR: Mr. President, let's go to a new question. You were asked before the invasion -- or after the invasion of
Iraq if you had checked with your dad. And I don't believe -- I don't remember the quote exactly -- but I believe you said you had checked with a higher authority. I would like to ask you, what part does your faith play on your policy decisions?
PRESIDENT BUSH: First, my faith plays a lot -- a big part in my life. And that's -- when I was answering that question, what I was really saying to the person was that I pray a lot. And I do. And my faith is a very -- it's very personal. I pray for strength. I pray for wisdom. I pray for our troops in harm's way. I pray for my family. I pray for my little girls. But I'm mindful in a free society that people can worship if they want to, or not. You're equally an American if you choose to worship an Almighty, and if you choose not to. If you're a Christian, Jew or Muslim, you're equally an American. That's the great thing about America, is the right to worship the way you see fit.
Prayer and religion sustain me. I -- I've received calmness in the storms of the presidency. I love the fact that people pray for me and my family all around the country. Somebody asked me one time, well, how do you know? I said, I just feel it. Religion is an important part. I never want to impose my religion on anybody else, but when I make decisions, I stand on principle. And the principles are derived from who I am. I believe we ought to love our neighbor like we love ourself. That's manifested in public policy through the faith-based initiative, where we've unleashed the armies of compassion to help seal -- heal people who hurt.
I believe that God wants everybody to be free. That's what I believe. And that's part of my foreign policy. In Afghanistan, I believe that the freedom there is a gift from the Almighty, and I can't tell you how encouraged I am to see freedom on the march. And so my principles that I make decisions are a part of me, and religion is a part of me.
MODERATOR: Senator Kerry.
SENATOR KERRY: Well, I respect everything that the President has said, and certainly, I respect his faith. I think it's important and I share it. I think that he just said that freedom is a gift from the Almighty -- everything is a gift from the Almighty. And as I measure the words of the Bible, and we all do, different people measure different things -- the Koran, the Torah, or Native Americans who gave me a blessing the other day have their own special sense of connectedness to a higher being. And people all find their ways to express it.
I was taught -- I went to a church school, and I was taught that the two greatest commandments are "Love the Lord, your God, with all your mind, your body, and your soul," and, "Love your neighbor as yourself." And, frankly, I think we have a lot more loving of our neighbor to do in this country and on this planet.
We have a separate and unequal school system in the United States of America. There's one for the people who have, and there's one for the people who don't have. And we're struggling with that today. The President and I have a difference of opinion about how we live out our sense of our faith. I talked about it earlier when I talked about the works, and faith without works being dead. I think we've got a lot more work to do. And as President, I will always respect everybody's right to practice religion as they choose, or not to practice, because that's part of America.
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PRESIDENT BUSH: My biggest disappointment in Washington is how partisan the town is. I had a record of working with Republicans and Democrats as the governor of Texas and I was hopeful to be able to do the same thing. And we made good progress early on. The No Child Left Behind Act, incredibly enough, was good work between me and my administration and people like Senator Ted Kennedy. And we worked together with Democrats to relieve the tax burden on the middle class and all who pay taxes in order to make sure this economy continues to grow.
But Washington is a tough town, and the way I view it is there's a lot of entrenched special interests there, people who are one side of the issue or another, and they spend enormous sums of money and they convince different senators to tout their way, or different congressmen to talk about their issue, and they dig in.
I'll continue in the four years to continue to try to work to do so. My opponent said this is a bitterly divided time. It was pretty divided in the 2000 election. So, in other words, it's pretty divided during the 1990s, as well. We're just in a period and we've got to work to bring it out. My opponent keeps mentioning John McCain, and I'm glad he did. John McCain is for me for President because he understands I have the right view in winning the war on terror, and that my plan will succeed in
Iraq, and my opponent has got a plan of retreat and defeat in
Iraq.