Kerry, Senate in Mutual Farewell Salutes

[WestVirginiaRebel]

Yahoo News:

Choking up twice during a farewell speech on the Senate floor, Sen. John Kerry delivered a dissenting opinion about Washington's so-called dysfunction days before taking over as the next secretary of state.

"On occasion, we have all heard a senator leave here and take their leave condemning the Senate for being broken, for having become an impossible setting in which to try to do the people's business," said Kerry, D-Mass. "I do not believe the Senate is broken, certainly not as an institution. There's nothing wrong with the Senate that can't be fixed by what's right about the Senate."

Kerry, a 29-year Senate veteran, admitted that when he first came to the Senate in 1985 everything seemed to work easier. These days, he said, part of the problem on Capitol Hill is a lack of "courage" from individual senators.

"If the Senate favors inaction over courage and gimmicks over common ground, the risk is not that we will fail to move forward," he said. "It is that we will fall behind, we will stay behind and we will surrender our promise."

But the senator, 69, said those problems are not insurmountable, avoiding casting the whole Senate as a body paralyzed by dysfunction like so many of other departing senators have done recently.

If anything, Kerry said he believes the spirit of the Senate is starting to turn around.

"There are new whispers of desire for progress, rumors of new coalitions and a sense of possibility, whether it is on energy or immigration," he said. "I am deeply impressed by a new generation of senators who seem to have come here determined not to give in to the cynicism but to get the people's business done."

Kerry called on his colleagues, many of whom were sitting at their desks on the Senate floor to watch his speech, to make the change within themselves in the bitter debates that are ahead for the Senate.

"Only senators, one by one in their own hearts, can change the approach to legislating," Kerry said. "The Senate cannot break unless we let it."

________

 

Ah yes, the Everyman:

[Draggingtree]

The Least We Can Do

Daniel GreenfieldFull Story

The one thing that Hagel, Kerry and Brennan all have in common, besides being Washington insiders, is that they all agree that terrorism is basically a misunderstanding. All three fancy themselves men of the world who know more than the peasants back home because they have spent a few days being shepherded through high level meetings in Brussels, Riyadh and Beijing.

They have spent decades marinating in talking points and they know, for example, that terrorism is due to poverty and that Islamic terrorists aren’t really Muslim, they just try to convince us that they are to trick us into going to war with Islam. Most of all they know that we can’t beat the terrorists

http://www.canadafreepress.com/index.php/article/52789