04/04/06 - Wes Clark endorses Mike Weaver

General Wesley Clark Endorses Mike Weaver Elizabethtown, KY. April 4, 2006 Transcript by Reg NYC A special thanks to Jim Pence at the Hillbilly Report for the photos and multimedia!

GENERAL WESLEY CLARK: You know, I love this country, and I know you do too. And we're very proud of it, and we're very proud to be Americans. And this flag, this is our flag. A lot of us here fought for this flag.

(enthusiastic applause)

We've seen a lot of people we love buried under this flag, and that's why it hurts so much when you see the country going the wrong way. And we've been going the wrong way for a few years now. And this is the year we got to set it right.

Look, this country lost its way in the world. We lost our vision when we won the Cold War. We defeated our adversary, but we never actually created a new vision of where to go and how to deal in the world.

And we took advantage of a tremendous global opening of trade and technology and communications in the 1990s, and under President Bill Clinton we created 22 million jobs in America. It was unprecedented prosperity, but, but we didn't understand the risks that came with that global opening, and that those risks came crashing down on us at 9/11. And since then, I think we've, we went after Osama Bin Laden. We had to. I love our men and women in uniform, and I'll honor them. And they've done a great job in Iraq and Afghanistan.

(applause)

But we got to get the country going in the right direction. We've got important challenges in education and healthcare and taking care of our veterans and creating jobs and dealing with getting ourselves off imported energy and protecting our environment. And if we're going to win the War on Terrorism, honestly, as good as the United States military is - and we're the best in the world - we still can't win that war unless we make more friends than enemies in the world.

(applause)

After I left Fort Knox, and I went to serve in Vietnam, and then I later served in Germany and Belgium and Panama, and I stayed in the military and got to help with Richard Holbrook. I got to help work the peace agreement that stopped the fighting in former Yugoslavia. I got to go and stop ethnic cleansing in the Balkans when I was NATO Commander.

But I'll tell you, what I learned about the world is that if you want to make friends and you want to protect your country, the first place you start is, when you've got a disagreement with someone, if you can find them, you talk to them. You talk to them first before you threaten them or before you bomb them or anything of the sort.

Because once you send our men and women to war, it's permanent. There's things that happen in wars you can't, you can't undo, you can't fix it. And so, war should only be a last, last, last resort.

I think that we need leadership that looks to the future in the twenty-first century to fix education and healthcare to take care of the people of America and to get us ready to compete in a global business environment, that honors and respects men and women in uniform, that takes care of our veterans and understands the rules of the road - talk first, fight last, but when you fight, you fight to win all the way.

(applause)

And that's why I'm so proud to be here with Mike Weaver, because he's a guy who's lived it. He's done it. He's not only been 34 years in uniform, he's spent ten years as a legislator. He's your legislator. You know him, and I know you're proud of him too. And let's give a very, very warm round of applause and say, 'We're going to get, Mike, we're going to get you in Congress. We want you up there.'

(very, very warm round of applause)

MIKE WEAVER: D. Huddleson, I believe you're out there someplace, aren't you? Where's D. Huddleson?

D. HUDDLESON: Way back here.

MIKE WEAVER: D., thank you very much for- (drowned out by applause) And thank all of you for coming.

General Clark said we have to get the country back on track. We most certainly do have to get the country back on the track, and the way we do that is we take back the US House of Representatives. It takes 15 seats to do that. We have four candidates running in Kentucky. If at least two of us win, and we end up taking the Congress, the United States House of Representative back, that will be the huge, huge impact of the Commonwealth of Kentucky that we played a part in doing that and played a part in putting this country back on track.

Now there's another great General that I like to quote from time to time, and his name is George S. Patton. And one of the quotes that I like from him, though the quote was not necessarily aimed at the political audience. It was aimed at his subordinates. He said, "When everyone is thinking alike, someone is not thinking." And I think if you look at all three Houses, not all three Houses -If you look at three branches of our nation's government today, you will find that all three are controlled by one political party, if you include both Houses of Congress. And when that happens, you do not have balance, and when you do not have balance, you do not have people in the Congress - Congressmen and women - who can ask the hard questions and demand the hard answers with authority, and if we had had that in 2003, General Clark, we probably would not be where we are today.

(applause)

We had one of the biggest intelligence failures in our nation's history, and no one has been fired as a result of that. It was probably a failure in intelligence and the manipulation of intelligence, and we are at war because of that, and it effects everything that we do. It effects education. It effects healthcare. It effects jobs. It effects a deficit of 8.2 trillion dollars, and it effects deficit spending, and it effects an unbalanced budget. The way to turn this around is to start it in 2006 and let Kentucky play a significant role in turning this around by electing at least two of us - I hope I'm one of them - electing at least two of us to go to the US House of Representatives, where we can bring balance back to that institution, where we can ask those hard questions, demand those answers, and put this country back on track or start putting it back on track in 2006.

(applause)

So that two years later with the election of 2008, after all of our primaries are over, and we have selected someone like General Wesley Clark ...

(applause)

...as President of the United States then, and he has said he doesn't, he's not sure he's going to do that, but I'm sure with enough support like you can generate in Kentucky, and you can generate in Arkansas, and you can get generated across the South, and this folks is the best year to start that.

If you look at the conditions of 1994, when Bill Clinton did not have the good popularity rating and there was not a lot of trust in the Congress of the United States, and people thought that the country was going in the wrong direction, that was a Democratic President. You look at the Republican President today and do a complete reversal of that, this is the time to make this change.

This is the time to start it, in 2006, and in my opinion, I think that it's essential, essential that we do this for the good of this nation. Thank all of you for coming. Help us get it done. It's very important.

(applause)