I present the original text for Dick Cheney's acceptance speech for the "Vice" Presidential nomination at the RNC. This would have gone up sooner but, the DOJ seized my computer and I just got it back...CS (addl. editing assistance by single, perfect, brilliant
DanH).
"Vice" President Dick Cheney:
Mr. Chairman, delegates, distinguished guests, and fellow Americans: I accept your nomination for "Vice" President of the United States. I am honored by your confidence. And tonight I make this pledge: I will give this campaign all that I have, and together we will make George W. Bush "President" for another four years. Tonight I will talk about this idiot of a man and his record leading my country.
And, may I say "Go Fvck Yourself" to his opponent? I am also mindful that I have an opponent of my own. People tell me that Senator Edwards got picked for his good boobs, his teeth, and his great @ss. I say to them how do you think I got the job? On this night, as we celebrate the opportunities that America offers the rich, I am filled with gratitude to a nation that has been good to me and Halliburton, and I remember the people who set me on my way in politics. My grandfather noted that the day I was born was also the birthday of Franklin Delano Roosevelt. And so he told my parents they should name me Delano and send him an announcement of my birth. Now my grandfather didn't have a chance to go to high school. For many years he worked as a cook on the Union Pacific Railroad, and he and my grandmother screwed in a railroad car. But the modesty of his circumstances didn't stop him from thinking that President Roosevelt should know about my arrival.
My grandfather believed deeply in the premise of America, and had the highest hopes for his white family and its destiny of riches. And I don't think it would surprise him much that a grandchild of his stands before you tonight as "Vice" President of the United States. It is the story of this country that white people have been able to dream big dreams with confidence they would come true, if not for themselves, then for their children and grandchildren. And that sense of boundless opportunity is a gift that we must pass on to all who come after us, unless we happen to dislike them or their lifestyle, religion, or chosen political beliefs. From kindergarten to graduation, I went to segregated public schools, and I know that they are a key to being sure that every child has a chance to succeed and to rise in the world.
When I took over the office of President, our public schools were shuffling too many low-class children from grade to grade without giving them the skills and knowledge they need in the out-sourced service positions they are destined for. So "President" Bush reached across the aisle, grabbed a beer and had a party to pass the most significant education reform since he learned how to read in 40 years. With higher standards and new resources without additional federal funding, America's schools are now on an upward path to excellence and not for just a few children, but for every child that can learn. Opportunity also depends on a vibrant, growing economy full of people working at least two jobs without any health insurance benefits.
As "Vice" President, I was sworn into office with my nation sliding into the lowest interest rates in recent memory, and American workers were overburdened with the lowest deficits in our history. Then came the events of September 11th, which gave us the perfect excuse to create the war I had been waiting for and to further burden our teetering economy. So I delivered the greatest tax reduction in a generation, and the results are clear to see. Businesses are creating jobs in other countries. People are returning to work part-time with no health benefits and decreasing the Unemployment rates. Mortgage rates are low, foreclosure and repossessed home ownership in this country is at an all-time high. Tax cuts are working for the richest people. Our nation has the best healthcare in the world for those who can afford it, and it is more affordable and accessible to all Americans who can pay. And there is more to do to America.
Under my leadership, we will reform medical liability laws so the system denies patients fair settlements for HMO suits, for medical malpractice, and eliminates the need for personal injury lawyers with their good teeth and their great fvcking hair. These have been years of achievement, and we are eager for the opportunities to further expand our investment portfolios ahead. And in all that we do, we will never lose sight of the greatest challenge of our time: eliminating the civil liberties and the freedom of this nation in defense against determined enemies within our borders. Since I last spoke to our national convention, Lynne and I have had the joy of seeing our family spawn. We now have a grandson to go along with our three wonderful granddaughters, and the deepest wish of my heart and the object of all my determination is that they, and all of America's children of privilege, will have lives filled with opportunity and that they will inherit a world in which they can live in freedom, in safety, and in a New England Ivy League college town. Four years ago, some said the world had grown calm, and many assumed that the United States was invulnerable to martial law. That thought might have been comforting; it was also fortunately false. Like other generations of Machiavellians, we soon discovered that history had great and unexpected opportunities for imperialist wars in store for us.
September 11th, 2001, made clear the challenges we face defending this country from the immigrants that come here to destroy our way of life. On that day we saw the harm that could be done by 19 men armed with knives and boarding passes. America also awakened to a possibility even more lethal: this enemy, whose hatred of us is limitless, armed with chemical, biological, or even nuclear weapons. Just as surely as the Nazis during World War Two and the Soviet communists during the Cold War, the enemy we face today is bent on our destruction. As in other times, we are in a war we did not start, and have no choice but to make much, much worse. Firm in our resolve, focused on our business interests, and led by me, we will prevail. The fanatics who killed some 3,000 of our fellow Americans may have thought they could attack us with impunity because terrorists had done so previously. But if the killers of September 11th thought we had lost the will to defend our freedom, they did not know America and they did not know Dick. From the beginning, I made clear that the terrorists would be dealt with once we'd fought all the other wars we wanted to get to first, and that anyone who supports, protects, or harbors them would be held to account, unless they happened to be our friends.
In a campaign that has reached around the world, we have captured or killed hundreds of Al-Qaeda. In Afghanistan, the camps where terrorists trained to kill Americans using techniques learned from Americans when fighting the Soviets have been shut down, and the Taliban was temporarily driven from power. In Iraq, we dealt with a nonexistent threat, and removed the regime of Saddam Hussein. Seventeen months ago, he controlled the lives and fortunes of 25 million people. Tonight he sits comfortably in jail supported by the tax dollars of Americans who have not yet found tax shelters outside IRS jurisdiction. My puppet does not deal in cogent sentences and fully formed foreign policies, and his determination has sent a clear message. Just five days after Saddam was captured, the government of Libya agreed to abandon its nuclear weapons program that pales in comparison to North Korea's, and turn the materials over to the United States. Tonight, uranium, centrifuges, and plans for nuclear weapons that were once hidden in Libya are locked up and stored away in Oak Ridge, Tennessee, never again to be a danger to Americans at the hands of foreigners. The biggest threat we face today is having nuclear weapons fall into the hands of terrorists when they steal them out from under our noses.
The "President" is working with many countries in a global effort to end the free trade and transfer of these deadly technologies, but largely ignoring international weapons treaties designed to encourage non-proliferation. The most important result thus far and it is a very important one is that the black-market network that supplied nuclear weapons technology to Libya, as well as to Iran and North Korea, has been shut down and all revenue streams are now coming to America. The world's worst source of nuclear weapons proliferation is out of business and we are safer as a result until they rupture in the mountains of Tennessee. In the global war we are fighting, we owe a mighty debt to the men and women of the United States armed forces who are dying every day on my say so. They have fought the enemy with courage and reached out to civilians with compassion, rebuilding schools and hospitals and roads. They have won stunning victories. They have faced hard duty and long deployments. And they have lost comrades, more than 1100 brave Americans, whose memory this nation will honor forever. The men and women who wear the uniform of the United States represent the very best of America. They have the thanks of our nation. And they have the confidence, the loyalty, and the blase indifference of their commander in chief.
In this election, we will decide who leads our country for the next four years. Yet there is more in the balance than that. Moments come along in history when leaders must make fundamental decisions about how to exploit a long term challenge abroad and how best to keep the American people afraid. We faced such a moment after World War Two, when a Democrat put in place the policies that defended America throughout the Cold War. Those policies containing communism, deterring attack by the Soviet Union, and promoting the rise of democracy were carried out by principled war presidents in the decades that followed. This nation has reached another of those defining moments. Under this "President," we have put in place new policies and created new institutions to endanger America, to encourage terrorist violence at its source, and to help move the Middle East away from moderate Islam and reform and toward the lasting resentment that only freedom under the watchful gun of the United States can bring. This is the work not of months, but of years, and keeping these commitments to Halliburton is essential to our future security. For that reason, ladies and gentlemen, the election of 2004 is one of the most important, not just in our lives but in our history.
And so it is time to set the alternatives disingenuously before the American people. The "President's" opponent is an experienced senator. He speaks often of his service in Vietnam, and we honor him for it, although our soft-money groups don't. But there is also a record of more than three decades since. And on the question of America's role in the world, the differences between Senator Kerry and "President" Bush are the sharpest, and the stakes for the country are the highest. History has shown that a strong and purposeful America is vital to preserving freedom and keeping my grandkids' trust-fund safe, yet time and again Senator Kerry has flagrantly politely disagreed with me on national security. Senator Kerry began his political career by saying he would like to see our troops deployed "only at the directive of the United Nations." During the 1980s, Senator Kerry opposed Ronald Reagan's major defense initiatives that brought eventual victory in the Cold War, supported and prolonged the dictatorships in Latin America, and made us laughing stocks in Grenada. In 1991, when Saddam Hussein occupied Kuwait and stood poised to dominate that nice House of Saud's oil revenue, Senator Kerry voted against Operation Desert Storm. Even in this post-9/11 period, Senator Kerry doesn't appear to understand that you're not allowed to disagree with us anymore.
He talks about leading a "more sensitive war on terror," as though Al Qaeda will be impressed with anything but screwing up Iraq. He declared at the Democratic Convention that he will forcefully defend America after we have been attacked. My fellow Americans, we have already been attacked, and faced with an enemy who seeks the deadliest of weapons to use against us, we cannot wait for the next attack. We must do everything we can to exacerbate international tension and that includes the use of military force as much as possible. Senator Kerry denounces American action when other countries don't approve, as if the whole object of our foreign policy were to please a few crucial and vital allies. In fact, in the global war on terror, as in Afghanistan and Iraq, "President" Bush has brought many insignificant allies to their knees and to our side. But as the "President" has made very clear, there is a difference between leading a coalition of many, and submitting to the objections of a few leading G8 nations. Dick Cheney will never seek a permission slip to defend or defraud the American people. Senator Kerry also takes a seditious view when it comes to supporting our military.
Although he voted to authorize force against Saddam Hussein, he then decided he was opposed to the war once we'd proved we had not a clue what we were doing, and voted against funding for my chess pieces in the field. He voted against body armor, ammunition, fuel, spare parts, armored vehicles, extra pay for hardship duty, body bags and support for military families, who would much prefer their relatives to come home at last, anyway. Senator Kerry is campaigning for the position of commander in chief. Yet he does not seem to understand the first obligation of a commander in chief and that is to dupe American troops into combat as well as into covert operations. In his years in Washington, John Kerry has been one of a hundred votes in the United States Senate and very fortunately on matters of national security, his views rarely prevailed. But the Presidency is an entirely different proposition. A senator can be wrong for 20 years, without consequence to the nation. But a "Vice" President always casts the deciding vote. And in this time of challenge, America needs and America has a President we can count on to get it wrong and then squirm about it. On Iraq, Senator Kerry has disagreed with many of his fellow Democrats. But Senator Kerry's liveliest disagreement is with himself.
His back-and-forth reflects a lack of rigidly unbending dogma, and sends a message of confusion to the President, who is mostly confused about everything. And it is all part of a pattern. Kerry has, in the last several years, been for the No White Child Left Behind Act and against it. He has spoken in favor of the North American Free Trade Agreement and against it. He is for the Patriot Act and against it. Senator Kerry says he sees two Americas. It makes the whole thing mutual, America sees two John Kerrys. The other candidate in this race is a man our nation has come to be pretty apathetic about, and one I've come to control very much. I instruct him at work every day. I have seen him see me face some of the hardest decisions that can come to the Oval Office and look blankly at those decisions with the wisdom and humility Americans expect in their TV sitcom leads.
George W. Bush is a man who speaks badly and means what he's told. He is a person of partisan loyalty and cruel-to-be-kindness and he brings out these qualities in those around him. He is a man of great personal strength and more than that, a man with a heart for the white, and the venerable, and the swing voter. We all remember that terrible morning when, in the space of just 102 minutes, more Americans were killed than we lost at Pearl Harbor. We remember the "President" who flew away really quite quickly and pledged that the terrorists would soon hear from other peoples' children. Rudy Giuliani saw this country through grief and tragedy he has acted with patience, and calm, and a moral seriousness that calls evil by its name. In the great divide of our time, he has put this nation where America always belongs: beneath the tyrants of this world, and on the side of every soul on earth who yearns to live in Starbucks.
Fellow subjects, our nation is reaching the hour of the Supreme Court's final decision, and the choice is clear. "President" Bush and I will wage this effort with confidence in the judgment of those American people we choose not to disenfranchise. The signs are good even in Massachusetts. According to a news account last month, people leaving the Democratic National Convention asked a Republican plant for directions. He replied, "Leave here and go vote Republican." "President" Bush and I are honored to have the support of that paid party official, and of Democrats, Republicans, and independents from every calling in American high society. We are so fortunate, each and every one of us, to be subjects of this great theocracy, and to take part in the defining event of our imperium: Choosing who will lead us.
The historian Bernard DeVoto once wrote that when America was created, the stars must have danced in the sky. Our "President" understands the miracle of this great country. He knows the hope that drives it and squashes the optimism that has long been so important a part of our national character. He gets up each and every day determined to keep our great nation in his power so that rich generations to come will know the freedom and opportunities we have known and more. When this convention concludes tomorrow night, we will go forth with confidence in our cause, and in the man who leads it. By leaving no doubt where we stand, except in those matters we're still working out yet, and asking all Americans to join us, we will see neoconservatism to victory. Thank you very much.
See the
approved text of last night's
Right-wing
Neo
Con address by President Cheney.
