2016 could be the election year of political straight talk that Americans have been longing for since John Nance Garner, who became FDR’s vice president in 1932, described his then largely ceremonial office as “not worth a bucket of warm piss.”
GOP presidential candidate Sen. Rand Paul (KY) likes to speak his mind even when it may be impolitic or even self-defeating to do so. And Sen. Bernie Sanders, the Vermont independent who is running for the Democratic nomination, isn’t one to sugar-coat his many opinions.
Related: Rand Paul Unfiltered: 6 Straight-from-the-Hip Quotes
But judging by Lincoln Chafee’s speech declaring on Thursday that he, too, is a candidate for the Democratic nomination, Paul, Sanders and any of the other umpteen hopefuls vying for the Oval Office will have to go a country mile to out-straight-talk the former Rhode Island governor and senator.
Chafee, whose Marine father fought on Guadalcanal and went on to become a senator and Secretary of the Navy under President Nixon, was the only Republican senator to vote against going to war in Iraq. And he continues to march to his own drummer.
Here are edited excerpts from Chafee’s prepared remarks announcing his candidacy at George Mason University in Virginia:
On why he voted against going to war in Iraq in 2002
The first reason is that the long painful chapter of the Viet Nam era was finally ending…and the very last thing I wanted was any return to the horrific bungling of events into which we put our brave fighting men and women. Too many senators forgot too quickly about the tragedy of Viet Nam.
A second reason was that I had learned in the nine months of the Bush/Cheney administration, prior to September 11th, not to trust them at their word. Sadly, the lies never stopped. This was an administration not to be trusted.
On the neocons who pushed for an invasion of Iraq
Many of the cheerleaders for the Iraq war in the Bush administration had been writing about regime change in Iraq and American unilateralism for years.
It’s bad enough that the so-called neocons, most of whom had never experienced the horror of war, were so gung ho. But worse yet, was that they didn’t have the guts to argue their points straight up to the American people. They knew there were no weapons of mass destruction but wanted their war badly enough to purposely deceive us.
I asked for a briefing from the CIA. I said, “I have to vote on this war resolution in a few weeks, show me everything you have on Weapons of Mass Destruction”. The answer, after an hour-long presentation out at CIA headquarters in Langley, was: not much. “Flawed intelligence” is completely inaccurate. There was NO intelligence. Believe me I saw “everything they had”.