Read the whole thing here…
Second, take yourself seriously. How many of you are over 18? All right. How many of you are over 21? Okay. Everyone of you is old enough to have been a rifleman in Vietnam. A number of you are old enough to have been platoon leaders, or company commanders, depending on the situation, and how rapidly you move up in rank. This is the same business, we’re just lucky, in this country, we don’t use bullets, we use ballots instead. You’re fighting a war. It is a war for power. In a sense, one of my challenges to the CR’s would be to grow up. Take yourself seriously, you’re not a child.
Don’t run around and play games. When one of your elders comes in and says, “I don’t like what you’re doing,” tell them “Tough”. They ain’t you. Do you like what they do?
Do you like the state of the Republican Party? Do you think you ought to respect Bill Brock because he has done such a great job? Or Richard Nixon, or Gerald Ford, the only incumbent president since Herbert Hoover to lose an election? They have done a terrible job, a pathetic job. In my lifetime, literally in my lifetime, I was born in 1943, we have not had a competent national Republican leader. Not ever! We’ve had some guys who weren’t too embarrassed. But what’s the primary purpose of a political leader, above anything else? In this system, it is to build a majority capable of sustaining itself, because if we don’t do that, we don’t make the laws, we don’t write the taxes, we don’t decide how to start a war, we don’t keep the country strong, we don’t do nothing except carve from these people’s ability. And in my lifetime, we have not had a single Republican leader capable of doing that. Oh, they’ve had opportunities: The Korean War, rapid inflation, the racial crisis of the 50’s and 60’s, the Vietnam war. We’ve had tremendous opportunities and we’ve blown it, but we’re all nice people.
