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WASHINGTON -- No shortage of hyperbole has accompanied the ongoing budget debates threatening to end in a government shutdown this week. And the perpetrators, it can reasonably be argued, come from both sides of the aisle.
Rajiv Shah, the president's administrator of USAID, raised the specter of 70,000 children dying as a byproduct of passing the Republicans' budget. Delegate Eleanor Holmes Norton (D -D.C.) called the idea of a shutdown the "functional equivalent of bombing innocent civilians." And House Appropriations Committee Chair Hal Rogers (R-Ky.) equated support of a one-week stopgap measure that would fund the Pentagon for the remainder of the year with lawmakers' personal appreciation of the armed forces.
"If you vote against this bill," Rogers said Thursday on the House floor, "you are voting against the troops."
And yet a statement Rep. Allen West (R-Fla.) released on Thursday made even those outlandish statements appear relatively benign in comparison. The freshman Republican drew historical analogies between current times and pre-World War II Europe, comparing those who were unwilling to sign off immediately on the one-week stopgap measure -- which ended up passing the House in a near-party-line vote -- to Neville Chamberlain and his fellow appeasers.
The congressman's office had the following statement placed in the Congressional Record with respect to the stopgap measure, alternatively known as the "Department of Defense Appropriations Bill."
Read more at The Huffington Post