Amid dire predictions, Sen. Mark Warner says defense industry shares blame for sequester

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http://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/amid-dire-predictions-warner-says-defense-industry-shares-blame-for-sequester/2013/02/08/1b730860-7235-11e2-a050-b83a7b35c4b5_story.html



Sen. Mark Warner (D-Va.) delivered a message of his own to the defense industry:

Amid dire predictions, Sen. Mark Warner says defense industry shares blame for sequester
By Ben Pershing and Lori Montgomery, Published: February 8

As the Obama administration rolled out a fresh round of dire warnings about the impact of looming budget cuts, Sen. Mark R. Warner delivered a message of his own Friday to the defense industry: This is your fault, too.

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“Yeah, we ought to get 80, 90, whatever percent of the blame,” Warner said. “But you ought to take some of the blame, too. Because every time there’s been efforts to try to build a broader coalition, to say let’s go ahead and take this on and get out of our individual political foxholes and get out of our individual industry foxholes, most of y’all have said, ‘Well, I don’t want to piss off this guy or that guy or this chairman or that chairman.’ ”

Warner complained that many in the defense and technology communities had failed to support the Campaign to Fix the Debt, a nonpartisan group seeking to mobilize support for a debt deal.

When chief executives of many Fortune 500 companies came together to back the group, Warner said, “the thing that just blows my mind . . . the industry that was most absent from that list was the defense industry. . . . It would have been great if you’d been in the fight in more than an ‘attaboy’ way over the last couple of years.”