For Immediate Release
Office of the Vice President
August 4, 2004
Remarks by the Vice President Followed by a Question and Answer Event to Employees of Billy Goat Industries
Billy Goat Industries
Lee's Summit, Missouri
1:45 P.M. CDT
(Technical difficulties, joined in progress.)
THE VICE PRESIDENT: And they are doing everything they can to try
to launch further attacks against the United States. You've seen a lot
of discussion the last few days about the threats in New York City and
Washington, D.C. aimed at specific financial institutions. There have
been some commentary from some of our critics -- Howard Dean comes
immediately to mind -- saying somehow this is being hyped for political
reasons, that the data that we collected here, the casing reports that
provided the information on these prospective attacks is old data, i.e.
four or five years old. That just tells me Howard Dean doesn't know
anything about how these groups operate. (Applause.)
A lot of the planning for the attack on the embassies in East
Africa, which occurred in 1998, the planning actually took place four
or five years before that. The first discussion of the attacks of 9/11
inside the al Qaeda organization occurred when Khalid Shaykh Muhammad,
the man who oversaw the whole operation, first recommend to Osama bin
Laden using airplanes to strike targets in the United States in 1996,
five years before the attack went down. These people are deliberate.
They are methodical. They're timetable is their own. If you hit them
and push them back, they may retreat for a while, but they will be
back. And they are absolutely lethal.
The only way for us to deal with people that you can't negotiate
with -- there's no arms control treaty here at the end of the day that
guarantees our security. There's no way to appease these people and
have them go away. The only way to deal with them is to destroy them
before they can launch attacks against the United States. (Applause.)
So with that, I think I'll wrap it up. And what I'd be happy to do
at this point is we've got some folks out in the audience now with
microphones. And if you can just holler at one of the people with
microphones. I see we've got -- they've got orange tags hanging on
them that say volunteer. And if you want to ask a question, we'll be
happy to try and answer it. Somebody right down here.
Q Hello. Thank you, Mr. Vice President, I just wanted to ask
-- I'm a mother of two young children, 5 and 3. And as they've
approached the age to go to school, I'm concerned about the Missouri
public education system. I hear teachers routinely complain about the
fact that the No Child Left Behind Act, although it mandates
standardized tests, the adequate funds to back it up are not there for
the new curriculum. And I wanted to know if the administration had any
plans of dealing with that situation and correcting the problem in the
educational system?
THE VICE PRESIDENT: Well, the No Child Left Behind Act is an
attempt to build on something at the federal level that the President
undertook when he was governor of Texas. It basically says we need to
bring high standards and accountability to the public school system,
that for us to accept a situation in which some students are allowed to
fail, where we have low expectations -- or as he refers to it, the
"soft bigotry of low expectation" -- is just wrong, that our public
school systems are perfectly capable. A lot of us, my age, went to
public schools and got first rate educations in small towns all across
America; that what we've tried to do is to establish standards and
accountability through the process of giving tests at certain stages
through the process.
Now, not everybody likes the program. There are those who are not
enthusiastic about trying to establish accountability for what is going
on in our public school system, and the charge is often made somehow we
haven't funded it. But if you look at the facts, the funding for the
elementary and secondary education, which is where the funds would come
out of for supporting these programs during the time that we've been in
office, since 2001, is up 49 percent -- a very significant increase.
(Applause.)
Q Mr. Vice President, first I want to thank you for coming to
Missouri and spending some time with us. A brief comment and then a
question about national security. I served as part of the rescue
effort at Ground Zero. Two days after the attacks, I was in New York
City. (Applause.) And until you climbed on that pile, and until you
were there, you don't have a real perspective of what took place. I
thank you -- and I think I speak for millions of Americans across this
country, there's no other team that I would have preferred to have in
place to clean up and to deal with the aftermath of September 11th than
the Bush-Cheney team.
THE VICE PRESIDENT: Thank you. (Applause.)
Q My question is this, can you explain to us how the creation
of the new national director of intelligence gathering is going to
benefit the country, and how that will change the complexion of our
intelligence agencies here in America and abroad?
THE VICE PRESIDENT: Sure. Basically, the proposition for a
National Intelligence Director comes from the 9/11 Commission that just
completed its work assessing what happened prior to 9/11, what worked,
what didn't work. One of the problems we had, for example, prior to
9/11 is that there clearly was a lack of effective communication
between the FBI on the one hand, and the CIA on the other.
Part of that was built in institutionally, because we've always
wanted to keep the CIA out of our domestic business. Spies are to go
spy against the enemy overseas, not here in the U.S., has always been
our mind set. And the FBI was primarily a law enforcement operation.
They'd go in after the terrorist attack, find the guilty party, such as
Timothy McVeigh, in Oklahoma City, do a great job of prosecuting the
wrongdoer. We needed to change their orientation and get them more in
the business of counter-terrorism and preventing the attacks, not just
cleaning up afterwards, and do a better job of building those links
between the various segments of the intelligence communities. Part of
the idea of this National Intelligence Director is that you'll have
somebody that sits over the about 15 different intelligence agencies
that we have in the federal government. We've got the CIA. The FBI,
obviously, has significant intelligence capabilities. State Department
has something called INR. We got the National Security Agency, the
National Reconnaissance Office, Defense Intelligence Agencies. There
is a need for a lot of intelligence various places in the government.
And we don't want to inhibit those developments. Efficiency is not
necessarily the right answer for intelligence the way it is some other
places. If you got a little redundancy there, that's probably a good
thing. You'd rather err on that side than the other side.
But the purpose of the NID is to do some things that were built
into the statute from the standpoint of the Director of Central
Intelligence years ago that have never really been fully carried out.
The President has embraced the idea. There's still a lot of work to be
done to flesh out the details, and that work will be done with the
Congress in the weeks ahead.
We also have signed up -- we already have something called the
Terrorism Threat Integration Center. We're going to expand that
significantly into what the 9/11 Commission called the National
Counter-terrorism Center, where you pull together the streams of
intelligence from all over the government, and fuse it together into
one piece of analysis that then is available to the President and other
senior policymakers to help us stay on top of the situation and be able
to make those kinds of decisions. So it's an effort to improve
coordination, a better, wiser allocation of resources to make sure the
President and the top policymakers get the best advice possible with
respect to the terrorist threat that's out there.
I think it's an important initiative. The President is prepared,
as I say, to go forward with it, endorsed it just this week. Now the
key is to write the legislation that actually implements the concept.
(Applause.)
Q You've spoken about the tax cuts that the Bush-Cheney pushed
through the Congress in the current administration, and the fact that
-- which few people realize -- that those will all go away without
action by the Congress. But in a second Bush-Cheney administration,
what further would you do to simplify the tax code and lift the burden
of taxation that exists on small businesses such as this one?
THE VICE PRESIDENT: Well, we've already tried in the first term to
cut back on the amount of paperwork that's required on the part of
small businesses with respect to the tax code. One estimate is we've
saved as much as 50 million man hours from an economy-wide basis on
changes that have already been made. But we need to look for other
ways that we can simplify the code, that we can make life easier, if
you will, for those people who have to comply with it.
I know I couldn't possibly fill out my own income tax form. I need
help. And unfortunately, that's true for all too many of us. And so
we need to look for ways to do a better job than we have in the past.
What happens -- the reasons we have the tax cuts expiring is
because the way the Senate rules work. You can't adopt legislation
that goes beyond 10 years, then it automatically reverts back to the
past. It's because the specialized Senate rules with respect to
consideration of the budget. So a lot of those tax cuts that are on
there will expire a year, two, three years down the road. And that's
why we have to move to make them permanent. And that will be a major
source of debate. But going through that process is as good time as
any to look for ways in which we can make the process simpler and
easier for people to comply with. We spend an awful lot of time, and
money, and resources, as an economy, trying to comply with an
increasingly complex system. And we think we can do better.
(Applause.)
Q Mr. Vice President, again, welcome to Lee's Summit. It's
great to have you here, and God bless you and President Bush.
THE VICE PRESIDENT: Thank you. (Applause.)
Q My wife and I are the parents of two teenagers, and we've
talked often about this election and what it means for them and their
future. But like all teenagers, they sometimes need to hear it from
somebody other than their parents to actually have it sink in. And I'm
wondering how you might put it to my 13- and my 17-year-old, and all
the other young people out there about what the choices that we're
going to be making in November mean to them and their future.
THE VICE PRESIDENT: That's a tough assignment. (Laughter.) Lynne
and I have two daughters, and they've moved beyond that stage, and they
still don't pay any attention to us. (Laughter.)
Well, I think there are important lessons in history that I kind of
look to for guidance. And I always like to encourage young people to
read about U.S. history. I think it's one of the best subjects you can
spend time on when you're going to school. And I think about the
period we're now in and I look back for a historic antecedent that
would be a period of time when decisions are being made that have the
same significance or weight or heft for the future as do those that
we're wrestling with now. And I look back at the period right after
World War II. When you think about it, what happened after World War
II, the United States stood astride the world absolutely unmatched in
terms of our military and economic power, and our political influence.
We'd won both in the Pacific and in Europe tremendous victories. We
then moved aggressively to establish democracies in Japan and Germany.
It wasn't easy. It took many years -- seven years, I believe, in the
case of Germany before we got to the point where we had a functioning,
viable democracy that was able to take over, and of course, has been
one of our best allies and friends ever since -- same thing in Japan.
I think of the decisions that were made then during the Truman
administration, especially in the late '40s, when we set up NATO -- the
North Atlantic Treaty Organization that was one of the most successful
alliances in history; when we passed the Marshall Plan that provided a
lot of the basic economic foundation to begin to rebuild -- in that
case, to rebuilt Europe; when we reorganized the federal government and
created the Department of Defense, 1947-1948. We created the CIA, the
Central Intelligence Agency in 1947, the National Security Act in 1947
-- a whole series of basic, fundamental decisions that we made as a
nation in the '40s to deal with our success in World War II, but then
also to organize to win the Cold War. And that ultimately paid off
handsomely, of course, in 1989 after nearly 40 years, when we did, in
fact, prevail in the Cold War. We'd built the military forces we
needed to make certain the Soviets were never able to attack. We
worked those alliances very successfully. We had generations of
Americans who signed to serve in the United States military, to do
their part to be part of the effort. And sort of at the end of the
road, it would have been difficult to see in 1947 or '48, but 40 years
down the road came that point where, in fact, the Soviet Union
collapsed. The Cold War ended. We freed millions of people in Eastern
Europe without a shot being fired, a great success story.
And I guess, if I wanted to convey to children, teenagers, what's
at stake and the kinds of decisions we're making now about the future
of our nation, I think these decisions take on that kind of
significance. A different kind of threat --- the biggest threat we
face today isn't the Soviet Union coming across the inner German border
to invade Western Europe, it's the possibility of an al Qaeda cell in
the midst of one of our own cities with a biological agent, or a
nuclear weapon. That's the threat we face today. Obviously, they'd
wreck havoc if they could smuggle that kind of capability into the
U.S. And we have to do everything in our power to make sure it doesn't
happen.
There's no reason in the world we can't do it. We've been meeting
challenges as a nation for over 200 years. We've got the capacity. I
think we've got the national will. We've got leadership. We've got
men and women who are willing to sign on and take on major
responsibilities to see that we succeed and pull together as
Americans. We can triumph here just like we have throughout more than
200 years of our history. (Applause.)
MODERATOR: Mr. Vice President, we'll take one more question.
THE VICE PRESIDENT: Okay, right back. We got --
Q Mr. Vice President, welcome to Missouri. We're very proud to
have you with us. I'm with Jackson County Veterans for Bush-Cheney.
And I just want to -- (applause) -- tell you how proud and honored I
am to say in person, thank you for your service, sir, and how proud I
was to serve in the United States military while on active duty, while
you were the -- at the Defense Department. And thank you very much for
your service, sir.
The Republicans -- excuse me -- the Democrats most recently now
have claimed that we are not currently funding the benefits for our
servicemen and women. And you've mentioned our great debt to them, and
our debt is truly great to them. Can you mention some of the plans for
the next four years to better serve the needs of our veterans who have
served so willingly and well?
THE VICE PRESIDENT: Sure. Well, let me thank you for your
service. And I enjoyed those days when I was Secretary of Defense.
That's when I had real influence. (Laughter.)
Let me give you just two for instances with respect to our
veterans. We've got veterans hospitals all across the country, some of
which predate World War II, even back to World War I period. And also
the population shift has been such that we got a lot more people living
in the South and West now than we used to have, and a lot more veterans
fall into that category. One of the commitments the President made
when he ran four years ago was that we would commit almost $5 billion
-- $4.9 billion, I believe -- to upgrading and modernizing those VA
hospitals to make sure they were up to snuff to be able to deliver
quality care to that veterans population. And of course, it is an
aging population. The World War II population now, and eventually
Korea and Vietnam.
To date, we've committed -- I believe $2.8 billion has already been
spent. We've got an additional about $1.5 billion entrained to keep
that commitment.
The other point I'd make with respect to veterans, in the four
years since the President took office, since 2001, the spending on the
national veterans programs has gone up $22 billion -- that's twice as
fast as it went up in the previous eight years before we got elected.
So don't let anybody tell you we're not taking care -- (Applause.)
So they're giving me the high sign that I need to get on down the
road. I've got to get back -- one more, all right. I've been lobbied
by my wife. And I never say no to my wife. (Laughter.) Okay.
Q Well, sir, you've outlined to us today a number of successes
that we've had in the war on terror. And I've had the privilege of
meeting a bunch of our veterans as they've come back from the war. And
they tell a great different story than we read in the papers, and that
we hear constantly. And most of these fellows shared with me that
they're kind of outraged that it's always a negative slant that we get
from the media regarding the war on terror and what's really being
done, and what's being accomplished. Can you tell us, first of all,
why you think the media tends to slant things to a negative regarding
the war on terror, as it pertains to the United States? And secondly,
what can we do to get the right word out?
THE VICE PRESIDENT: I thought you'd never ask. (Applause.) I've
got to travel with these folks. We got reporters traveling with us.
(Laughter.)
Part of it is I think the nature of the business these days just in
terms of technology. There's so much demand out there for news by way
of all -- the all-news channels all the time. And you get -- they've
got to fill it up with something, and an exploding car bomb is always
more exciting than reopening a hundred schools in Afghanistan so that,
once again, girls can go back to school in Afghanistan, which they're
now able to do. They couldn't before.
There are tremendous success stories out there. I find that on
balance, I think I'm comfortable with my overall assessment of how well
we're doing. I think we're doing very well. That doesn't mean that
it's cost-free. It's not. Unfortunately, there will be additional
sacrifice required, and additional casualties that we'll suffer before
we get through all of this. And it may run on for several years in
terms of fighting the war on terror globally, because we've still got a
lot to do out there.
But I look at it on balance, and I think about what has been
achieved, and I think the record is pretty remarkable. I'm not trying
to claim that just for a Republican administration. As I say, one of
the things I find most encouraging is to get out and talk to the young
soldiers and Marines just back from an assignment in Afghanistan, or
Iraq.
I had the experience yesterday, I guess, it was in Sioux Falls,
South Dakota. I got off the airplane, and they had four or five people
there to great me when I got off -- one young man who was just back
from 15 months in Iraq. And his basic message was, sir, I'm ready to
go again whenever you need me. And don't let anybody tell you it's not
worth doing. It is worth doing. And thank you very much for sending
me. (Applause.)
So a great way to say thank you to them is invite them into your
homes, or down to the local Lions' Club, the Elks' Club, or whatever it
might be -- get a few of them to come on it, and sit down, buy them a
cup of coffee, and just talk to them about their experiences. Start by
saying, thank you, and then ask them to give you an assessment of how
things are going. Because what I find consistently when they come back
is they find it hard to believe the portrayal of what's going on over
there that they often see when they get home. It doesn't match up with
their own personal experiences over there.
Well, let me thank all of you for coming out this morning. Let me
thank all the folks here at --
AN AUDIENCE MEMBER: Billy Goat.
THE VICE PRESIDENT: Billy Goat. (Laughter.) For some reason I
wanted to say Grizzly. (Laughter.) But Billy Goat Industries in Lee's
Summit, in Kansas City. It really is a remarkable company. You've got
a great story to tell, and again, Lynne and I want to thank you very
much for being here today.
Thank you. (Applause.)
END 2:10 P.M. CDT
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