Alan Grayson Is Very Shrill

REP. GRAYSON: Well I’m in favor of a four-letter foreign policy — MYOB, mind your own business. I think that covers just about any interaction that we need to have with other countries. This idea that we can micromanage our foreign relations, and micromanage the lives of other independent people, I thought that went out with colonialism.

DYLAN: How then do you get there? In other words if you look at American foreign policy right now as defined by George Bush and Donald Rumsfeld in the hours and weeks following 9/11 and everything really having been derived from that grand architecture, how do we even begin a path toward a new foreign policy whether it is your version or anything else?

REP. GRAYSON: Well we begin that task by bringing our troops home. We don’t need to occupy two other countries 8000 miles from our shores, and it has cost an amazing tremendous amount of harm both in dollars and in blood. There was a study that was done a couple of years ago of troops returning to the United States from Iraq. The study found that 15% of all the troops come back from Iraq with permanent brain damage. I am not talking about headaches, I am talking about things that you can see on a CAT scan — and it is permanent. Now we’ve had almost two million Americans serve in Afghanistan, in Iraq. It means, if you do the math, that we’ve heard about a quarter of a million young Americans permanently scared for life for brain damage — and for what? And why do we need to spend four trillion dollars pursuing the war in Iraq? How is that necessary? We are a country now with a net worth about 50 trillion dollars. We spend 8% of all the wealth accumulated over the course of two centuries. And we dropped into the sands of Mesopotamia. It just doesn’t make any sense. We have to bring the troops home — and we have to mind our own business.

DYLAN: What do you see as the greatest political barrier to moving in that direction?

REP. GRAYSON: I think the greatest political barrier is the fact that the right wing keeps throwing up “leaders,” so called “leaders” to prove, I think they have to prove their manhood by invading and lording it those foreign people. And that was basically what was happening with George W Bush. He know that he was AWOL from service for over a year, and he felt that he could somehow cover that up and make up for it by invading two other countries.

Clearly, this man was unfit to be in Congress.