A questioner wants to know what the president’s biggest domestic challenge is.

“The biggest domestic challenge is to protect america from attack. My job is to do everything i can to rally forces to protect you.”

“I never thought I’d be a war president. I never wanted to be a war president.”

Congress has to give troops and intelligence agencies funding, equipment and access. He references the debate over phone tapping and the complicitness of phone companies.

“If Al Qaeda is making a phone call into America, we better know why.”

“There must be some in the country who don’t agree that the enemy is a threat. I just completely disagree with you.”

He thinks the American people need to understand the facts. He hedges that the phone companies have “allegedly” helped the government monitor phone calls. Then he says they’re being sued for billions.

“This is bad for America.” 

He gets loud  applause by suggesting that Congress, by not allowing this phone monitoring, is extending U.S. civil liberties to “thugs that want to kill people.”

He doesn’t mention that many domestic to domestic calls have also been tapped. 

He’s moving to the preemptive war. “We need to deny safe haven….We’re pressuring them all the time… Afghanistan was denial of a safe haven. And I saw an existential threat in Saddam Hussein.”

“Now the question is: Will we help the 50 million people in Afghanistan and Iraq?”

He’s casting the war in terms of ideologies, that Muslim extremists want to kill Americans who support liberty and freedom to worship. He says that the U.S. is about saving people from hopelesness.

Fighting AIDS in Africa ending hopelessness. So are the campaigns in Afghanistan and Iraq. “Helping the people of Afghanist and Iraq realize the blessings of freedom is a corner stone of Bush foreign policy.”

 Then a jab a Democrats, and really a majority of the country that wants the war to end. “It’s going to happen unless America grows tired and weary. Unless we become isolationist and protectionist.”