Mr. President -- that has a nice ring to it  -- Mr. President, by the way this is one president I would get in a duckblind with.  I'm not sure I'd be with the other guy, I don't know what the hell I'd do.  I ah--

Well look, let me begin with the absolutely straightforward admission.  You guys own me.  That's a fact; that's a fact.  [applause].  You own me.  In this town you should never admit that because you own me whether your with me or agi'n me or whether you support me or don't support me, because I must tell you, a they say in the Senate, a point of personal privilege here, I owe fire fighters, I owe fire fighters literally everything.

I owe the fire fighters of my state my two grown sons.  When my wife and daughter were killed in an automobile accident they were the jaws of life--got them out, got them to a hospital and after long, long, long recuperations they lived and they're healthy and wonderful men right now.

I owe fire fighters of my state my life, not figuratively, literally.  I had a ruptured aneurysm and it was my fire companies that got me from, in a snow storm got me from Wilmington, DE to Walter Reed Hospital in time for a nine-hour operation that saved my life and I owe you.

I also owe firefighters my home.  A year ago last August lightening struck my home when my wife was in the home.  I was in Washington on "Meet the Press" and it nearly burned to the ground and literally within seven minutes there were two fire companies at my home and they saved the bulk of my home and my wife.  So I owe you guys big time; I owe you more than you will ever know.

I was thinking about that old joke, you know that joke about Clem and Mary sitting on the porch rocking and they're celebrating their 75th -- their 70th anniversary, wedding anniversary, and Clem turns to Mary and he says Mary, remember the time I came back from WWI and I was gassed and you nursed me back to health.  And then we bought the farm and we got going and we lost it in the Depression and you were there Mary to help.  and then we ended up in the 30s, we got that hardware store and then we lost it in that last recession.  And so and so -- he goes through all these events in their life, how Mary was always there, like you guys have always been there for me.  And Clem looks at Mary finally and he says, I was thinking you're bad luck.  I don't know whether you guys are bad luck or not but I know you've saved my ass every single time I've ever needed it.

And until 9-11 you were the single most underestimated, under appreciated and undererewarded group of women and men in this country.  But when that grizzled fireman came out of the debris of human flesh and cement and steel carrying that look, that grizzled look on his face, you became, you literally became the face of America around the world.  You became the symbol of America's greatness; you became the symbol of our unwillingness to yield.  And as a consequence of that you helped lift us off our knees in a time of losing 343 of your own up when the towers went down.  You became the symbol of America.  You became the face of our nation's resolve.  And we promised you that we would never forget.  We promised you that we now understood and that we would do all that needed to be done to allow you to do your job to save us and protect us.

But how quickly we've forgotten.  This year we cut the FIRE Act by $250 million.  This year we're eliminating the SAFER program, to add 75,000 new fire fighters.  We cut, in the last several years, $2 billion for first responders and local police officers.  If anybody's going to find a terrorist, it's not going to be some brave special forces soldier wearing night vision goggles who is there to catch the guy putting sarin gas into the air conditioning system of this hotel.  It's going to be some firefighter responding or some local cop coming from a Dunkin Donuts [laughter] who goes around behind the place there and sees the son of a b-, the son of a gun sliding out of a dumpster.  So folks, we've got it as, excuse my expression, as my uncle Ed used to say, we've got it ass backwards.

You know folks I know there's a lot to talk about that affects you all.  But I also know you're Americans first.  And I want to talk to you about the first fundamental responsibility of any government.  It comes before the obligation to keep healthy, to education, it comes before the obligation to see to it that there's a job.  It is physically to provide for the security, the physical security of the citizens of the United States of America.  And on that day, three years ago today, when the war in Iraq began, we're now as we approach the fifth anniversary of 9/11, two questions have to be resolved in my view.

One, are we meeting that fundamental first and foremost responsibility of government?  And two, if not, why not?

Well folks the winds of Katrina and the shoddiness of the Dubai Port deal coupled with the situation on the ground in Iraq as we find today have answered the question have we done all that needs to be done to protect Americans' physical safety and security and provide our fighting women and men with all that they need when we send them into combat.  I've made six trips to Iraq as recently as a couple of months ago. I'm not going to catalog them on this anniversary, but the critical mistakes we made going in -- too few troops, believing we'd be embraced --  If we had been it'd be the first time in all the history of Iraq's 5,000 years they've ever embraced a liberator.  The idea that oil was going to pay for all of the costs of the war in Iraq and that as Rumsfeld said we'd be down to 30,000 forces and Johnny and Jane would come marching home by Christmas after we left.
 

Ladies and Gentlemen there has been an ideological resistance in this administration to deal with the reality of what exists in Iraq and what they found in Iraq and time is running out.  We can still and we must still win in Iraq but, ladies and gentlemen, it's going to require a fundamental mind shift on the part of this president in order for that to occur.  And with regard to homeland security, where are we?  Well Katrina blew away the illusion that we learned our lessons from 9/11.  Just like your folks at the Pentagon and your folks in New York we were still unable to communicate from the Coast Guard, police, fire services -- go down the list.

It was four years later.  And Dubai demonstrated an incompetence that I found breathtaking.  It wasn't merely a lack of -- or as was said then, a tin ear.  We have become, we have become dangerously, dangerously incompetent.

Ladies and gentlemen, this is going to anger some of you Democrats and please some of you Republicans, but we only get one president at a time.  Bush is our president for the next two and one half years.  So what in the hell are we going to do to turn this around?  Two and a half more years regardless of what happens in these by-elections.  And we need, we need in my view, a wholesale change in priorities and a wholesale change in personnel.  Why do I say that?

These are very bright men.  These are some of the brightest people I've ever dealt with.  I've been a Senator here for 33 years -- I might note that there's still 50 Senators older than me; that's very important for you to know that.  [laughter].  But I've been here for 33 years, 7 presidents and the people advising this president, the so-called neo-cons, the intellectuals, the think tanks -- these are very, very bright people who care about our security, who care about keeping America safe.  So why is it they seem to be failing so abysmally?  Well I'm telling you why.

I believe it's because of their ideology, their arrogance, and the failure to hold anyone accountable.  By ideology I mean they truly believe that the role of the federal government is to see all authority devolve -- they have a fancy term, the devolution of government  -- devolve down to the state level.  That's why you had our Homeland Security director -- I've introduced my bill for the fifth time to deal with rail security -- say no, no, no, rail security's the problem of local officials; local folks take care of their stations, local folks take care of their tunnels.  That's called devolution of government.  When they eliminated my COPS program -- I'm the guy that wrote that bill, putting 100,000 cops on the street, 113 to be exact, they said it worked marvelously.  Why did they eliminate it then?  Because it's not the function and role of the federal government in their view.  And why do they eliminate things that work?  Because if they acknowledge the federal government has a role in dealing with social problems, have to acknowledge it has a role in dealing with education and they want no part of that.  So they're ideologically pure

Secondly they're arrogant.  I have never met a group of women and men after repeated, repeated, repeated mistakes, pointed out to them by Republicans as well as Democrats, and I might add no matter who was president on 9/11, had it been Gore, had it been Clinton, had it been Kerry, had it been me, we all would have made mistakes.  My dad used to have an expression.  He said you measure success not on whether you get knocked down, but how fast you get up.  So what have we done?  After it was pointed out...