At Friday's conservative Values Voter Summit in Washington, D.C., speakers like Rep. Michele Bachmann (R-Minn.), Delaware GOP Senate candidate Christine O'Donnell and Rep. Mike Pence (R-Ind.) urged attendees to turn out and vote in November in order to elect more conservatives to office. But the most extreme call came from onetime presidential candidate Gary Bauer, now the president of the right-wing group American Values, who equated the importance of turning out in November to defeating the 9/11 hijackers:
BAUER: From the cell phone calls that were made and the tapes that we have [from 9/11], we know that those passengers went to the back of the plane. Being good Americans, they started a debate. "Well," some of them said, "we need to get back to our seats. We can't do anything about this. You don't fight hijackers. The plane will land. And then there will be negotiations. We'll get out of here." Other people said, "No, no, the country is under attack. We've got to fight." And you know what they did? Nobody won the debate! So somebody said, "Let's vote."
That's what we're going to do in 45 days, right? We're going to vote. If you get up that morning and you're tired, you're sick, it's raining -- remember these Americans on the plane. They voted to fight back. So they made weapons with whatever they can -- leftover utensils from breakfast. The flight attendant was still alive; she boiled the water for the coffee. That was going to be her weapon. They took the drink cart, used it as a battering ram. They ran down the aisle of that plane, throwing the water, fighting as hard as they could, into the teeth of men armed with box cutters!
They brought that plane down. They spared this country more pain, more sorrow, more deaths. God bless them! Don't forget them!
WATCH:
Bauer is a fixture in the religious right, having served in the Reagan administration and in leadership positions at the Family Research Council and Focus on the Family. He was recently in the news for speaking out against building an Islamic cultural center in lower Manhattan, advocating for a "mosque-free buffer zone around Ground Zero.
"[H]ere's my suggested compromise: Back up the mosque one yard for every life that was lost at Ground Zero on 9/11," he proposed. "Three thousand lives lost equals three thousand yards away. If the organizers of the Ground Zero mosque would accept that compromise, the controversy would be over."
Bauer is also on the board of Weekly Standard editor bill Kristol's Emergency Committee for Israel, a group devoted to opposing President Obama's policies in the Middle East. In the past, he has expressed reservations about a two-state solution.
(HT: Political Correction)
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