Outgoing U.S. Rep.
Kolbe blames GOP
for losing Congress
By AP from kvoa.com
on the Web, December 31, 2006
TUCSON, Ariz. -- U.S. Rep. Jim
Kolbe, R-Ariz., said a river-rafting trip he took at the Grand Canyon with two
former congressional pages in 1996 was "completely aboveboard," and "a terrific
exercise for 12 people over three days."
Kolbe, who spoke to the Arizona Daily Star before leaving office, also repeated
his earlier denial that he had ever read a sexually explicit message written to
one of his former pages by then-Rep. Mark Foley of Florida, who resigned this
fall.
The former page had forwarded the message to Kolbe in 2001, a House ethics
report on the Foley scandal recently concluded.
"The page urged us to `Please ask Foley to stop,' " Kolbe said. "We did
that. The messages stopped coming."
He would not discuss the page issue further.
Kolbe, who spent 22 years in Congress, noted that Republicans lost control of
Congress in part because of their emphasis on gay marriage, abortion, stem-cell
research and other social issues.
He said the American public got tired of watching the Republican party neglect
its basic principles, such as fiscal discipline, smaller government and a strong
national defense.
Kolbe said if he'd known then what he knows now about Iraq, he wouldn't have
voted to authorize going to war in 2002. But he said he still believes the
best information available at that time made a good case for the invasion then.
Kolbe said the United States so far has not done enough to train Iraq's military
forces, police and firefighters to protect the country against the insurgency.
"We've got to get rid of the perception that the security forces over there are
pro-Shiite or pro-Sunni -- they've got to be perceived as pro-Iraqi," he said.
He said the worst thing the United States could do would be to set a formal
timetable for withdrawing troops.
"That would be tantamount to Roosevelt saying back in 1942 that `we win World
War II by 1943 or we withdraw,' " Kolbe said.
He said gay marriage or civil unions will be widespread in this country in a
decade or two because it is a fundamental human right that people should be able
to legally celebrate the commitment of relationships.
"Friends of mine in New York have been together for 45 to 50 years," Kolbe said.
"Shouldn't we celebrate that?"
However, Kolbe said he didn't regret his 1996 vote in favor of the Defense of
Marriage Act, which allows states to refuse recognition of gay marriages
approved in other states. His vote on that bill prompted a gay-oriented
magazine to prepare an article outing him as a homosexual, which led Kolbe to
publicly declare that he is gay.
"I could make a very good argument that marriage belongs in the hands of the
state," he said. "I don't think that should be changed."
|
