IMG]
6th Grade
“Now, there is a terrorist group in another country, Lebanon, that we believe also sort of may not take orders exactly, but it gets its direction from the Ayatollah Khomeini’s government. And they are holding some Americans as hostages. They’ve kidnaped them, and they’re holding them there. They’ve had them there more than a year. And we thought this was an opportunity—if we could establish a better relationship with these people in the Iranian Government who wanted to have a better relationship, or said they did. And, so, we sent some people over to start talking to them. And they wanted us to prove that we really were serious. And, so, they asked us to sell them some weapons. We hadn’t been doing that because they’re engaged in a war. But these people said they were opposed to the war themselves, and they would like to see it ended. So we agreed, but on a basis that we said you can prove your qualifications, as you’re asking us to prove ours, by seeing if you could get this terrorist group to free our hostages. And we would each do this for each other.
Well, this is what we started. And I’m afraid it wasn’t carried out the way we had thought it would be. It sort of settled down to just trading arms for hostages, and that’s a little like paying ransom to a kidnaper. If you do it, then the kidnaper’s just encouraged to go kidnap someone else. And finally, all of this came out into the open. Up until then, we’d had to keep everything very secret because we felt that the people who were talking to us from Iran would be executed by their government if they were found doing this. And it all came out in the public. I don’t know what has happened to all those people there or not. And I have to say that I still think that the idea was right to try and establish a friendly relationship, try and bring about peace between the two countries that are at war, and try and get our people freed. But it kind of deteriorated into something else, and as I said the other night on television, I won’t make that mistake again.”
3rd Grade
“You see, what they’re all teasing me about is the fact that our government is spending more than it takes in. And each year the debt gets greater. And I would like to say back to them—because they’re trying to tackle me because we’re having deficits now—we’ve been having deficits in our country for the last 56 years, spending more than we’ve been taking in. So, we now owe over $2 trillion. And what we’re trying to do right now in Washington, people like the Secretary and myself, is persuade the Congress to get back to where we’re not spending more than we take in. Because if you did that with your orange stand, you’d be out of business the first day.”
more:
http://www.presidency.ucsb.edu/ws/index.php?pid=34021Nope…no discussion of public policy here! Best analogy I have heard today:
"If Obama says we should all brush our teeth these people would let their teeth rot right out."