May 17, 2004 - “America is ushering in a New Responsibility Era where each of us understands we’re responsible for the decisions we make in life. You’re beginning to see the consequences of people making irresponsible decisions. They need to pay the price for their irresponsibility.”

 The President was talking about the likes of Martha Stewart when he said it. Martha made plenty of decisions that the President considers irresponsible. She has been no Pioneer. It is pretty clear that he wasn’t talking about anybody above the rank of Staff Sergeant.

 When it comes to Iraq there have been plenty of the President’s “irresponsible decisions” made at lots of levels. You could start with the decision to declare the war virtually over on May 1, 2003. There was the decision to disband the Iraqi Army and send them home. There was the decision to ignore the advice of career army officers and not make the commitment of forces necessary to police an occupied country. There was the decision to authorize the SAP program in Iraq – Copper Green. There was the decision to blur the nation’s commitment to the rule of law and declare that some prisoners are not subject to the Geneva Conventions. There was the decision to put ill-trained and ill-supervised reservists in charge at Abu Ghraib’s “hard site”. There have been plenty of “irresponsible decisions” in the course of this splendid little war that is no longer little and is certainly not splendid. Who is paying the price for those?

 Well it is not the Secretary of Defense. It is not the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs. It is not the big guy at the head of Central Command. It isn’t America’s viceroy in Baghdad. Irresponsibility, it seems, only goes so high.

 We know who is paying the price. It is the families of thousands of National Guardsmen and Reservists from all around the country whose husbands and wives are deployed to Iraq – families whose resources are being stretched to the breaking point. It is the families of the men and women who won’t come home – that expanding gallery of names and faces published by CNN. There were 777 Americans on that list as of last Friday. The weekend’s toll hasn’t been totted up yet. The President of the Iraqi Governing Council paid the price this morning. Iraqis are paying the price right along with us.

 We are paying the price at the gas pumps every day. Every penny of price increase sucks $1.8 Billion a day out of the US economy and ships it overseas. Our kids and grandkids will pay the price when our deficit comes due for their generation. That is the way it is in the President’s New Responsibility Era.

 The “New Responsibility” means no one is responsible and everybody else pays the price.