Watch for yourself: (YouTube URL here)
The exact transcript was:
"I'll tell you my impression. We really in this last election, when I say we...the Democrats, I think pushed it as far as we can to the end of the fleet, didn't say it, but we implied it. That if we won the Congressional elections, we could stop the war. Now anybody was a good student of Government would know that wasn't true. But you know, the temptation to want to win back the Congress, we sort of stretched the facts...and people ate it up."
Representative Kanjorski has just publicly admitted that the Democrats misled their supporters for no other reason that to become the majority in Congress. They did this to get the anti-war voters to vote for them and to fund raise for their campaigns congressional and senate campaigns.
Many asked before the 2006 elections, how the Democrats planned to accomplish this, but those questions were not asked by their supporters who simply took them at their word and this led to many exclaiming disappointment after the elections as funding for the war was approved time and time again.
This disappointment is evidenced by statements made subsequently since the 2006 elections, such as those reported by FinalCall.com news:
A growing number of war opponents complain that Democrats, who now control both the House of Representatives and the Senate, have gone back on their promise to voters last year to end the war outright.
The comments of a member of Code Pink, who identified herself only as “Liz from Arizona,” are typical. “I want to say that I’m very disappointed. We voted for a mandate of peace, and peace platform candidates on Nov. 7, which changed Congress. And we are expecting Congress to do their jobs, and support our troops. Bring them home out of this illegal, failed, endless occupation,” she told The Final Call after a protest at a banquet for Congressional radio and television correspondents held Mar. 28.
Worse yet for people like "Liz from Arizona" is the other statements seen in the video above where Kanjorski says, "Now anybody was a good student of Government would know that wasn't true", in that statement he is also telling them they were not good students of Government and if they had been they would have known full well that the Democrats could not keep those campaign promises.
Much of what I am seeing written about this isn't surprise that the Democratic politicians "stretched the truth" to obtain enough seats in congress to take the majority, most people are more surprised that Representative Kanjorski told that hart hitting truth publicly.
Jeff Emanuel, who I believe broke this story, states:
Now, Rep. Kanjorski has very publicly pulled the curtain back on the Democrat Congress' real intent and objective. "If we won the Congressional elections," he says, "we [implied that we] could stop the war." Yes, they did -- that is why the "Netroots" lined up behind these Democrats with their money and their soapboxes (but more importantly, with their money). That is why the "peace" activist supported them; ending the war NOW was the primary task they took on themselves to carry out, and the promise to do so was the basis on which so many of them were elected or reelected.
Now the mask slips -- and with it comes an admitted level of condescension directed by those Congressional Democrats at those who were gullible enough to support them for something that they themselves knew could not be done.
One has to be wondering why a Democratic Congressman would have said what he did, on camera, at this time, in the midst of an election year?
This whole thing leaves us with another glaring question, what are the anti-war, Democratic supporters going to do about the admitted fact that they were deliberately misled?
[Update] The National Republican Congressional Committee spokesperson, Ken Spain, has issued a statement about this video, via The Hill:
“For Paul Kanjorski to admit that Democrats campaigned in ’06 on a fraudulent agenda to end the war not only exposes his own calculated efforts to fool the voters of his district, but it also raises the question of whether this was a coordinated effort by the Democratic Party as a whole. Paul Kanjorski should be ashamed of himself for using our troops in harm’s way as political pawns for his own partisan agenda.”
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