Rep. Paul Ryan (R-Wis.) said President Barack Obama has failed to produce a workable budget plan, while Vice President Joe Biden said budgets introduced by Ryan...
Vice President Joe Biden and Paul Ryan had their chance to trade barbs last night in the only vice presidential debate of the 2012 election season. The debate came one week after their running-mates, President Barack Obama and GOP challenger Mitt Romney, squared off.
The focus of Thursday’s debate ranged from the domestic — budgets and defense cuts — to foreign affairs — including the attacks on the consulate in Libya and the timetable for troop withdrawals in Afghanistan.
The following are highlights taken from a transcript of the debate.
On the budget:
We’ve got to tackle this debt crisis before it tackles us. The president likes to say he has a plan. He gave a speech. We asked his budget office, “Can we see the plan?” They sent us to the press secretary. He gave us a copy of the speech. We asked the Congressional Budget Office, “Tell us what President Obama’s plan is to prevent a debt crisis.” They said, “It’s a speech, we can’t estimate speeches.”
You see, that’s what we get in this administration — speeches — but we’re not getting leadership.
Mitt Romney is uniquely qualified to fix these problems. His lifetime of experience, his proven track record of bipartisanship.
It does virtually nothing except continue to increase the tax cuts for the very wealthy. And, you know, we’ve had enough of this.
On defense:
If these cuts go through, our Navy will be … the smallest it has been since before World War I.
This invites weakness. Look, do we believe in peace through strength? You bet we do. And that means you don’t impose these devastating cuts on our military.
So we’re saying don’t cut the military by a trillion dollars. Not increase it by a trillion, don’t cut it by a trillion dollars.
So the bipartisanship is what he voted for, the automatic cuts in defense if they didn’t act. …
The military says we need a smaller, leaner Army, we need more special forces, we need, we don’t need more M1 tanks, what we need is more UAVs (unmanned aerial vehicles).
On Afghanistan:
On the attack of the Libyan consulate and death of Ambassador Chris Stevens:
This lecture on embassy security, the congressman (Ryan) here cut embassy security in his budget by $300 million below what we asked for, number one. So much for the embassy security piece.
Number two, Governor Romney, before he knew the facts, before he even knew that our ambassador was killed, he was out making a political statement which was panned by the media around the world.
This is becoming more troubling by the day. They first blamed the YouTube video. Now they’re trying to blame the Romney-Ryan ticket for making this an issue. …
This Benghazi issue would be a tragedy in and of itself, but unfortunately it’s indicative of a broader problem. And that is what we are watching on our TV screens is the unraveling of the Obama foreign policy, which is making the (inaudible) more chaotic us less safe.
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