Quotes from Stuart Stevens

These days the branding of Fox News as "Fair and Balanced" often seems primarily to serve the purpose of proving that irony is not dead.

So what's the difference between Clinton's making a racial appeal in 1992 and Bush's doing the same in 1988 with the Willie Horton attack? The answer is simple and one African American voters seem to understand with great clarity: The modern Democratic Party has fought for civil rights and believes government has a moral role in helping to create

The power a small group of right-wing zealots has over the Republican Party will continue until one of two events occurs: either a critical mass of Republican politicians stands together and stands up to their power, or the party changes such that it is not a white party but a party that looks more like America.

That a national party once largely defined by its seriousness of intent in international affairs would be led by a man who not only was ignorant of the basics of national security but was willfully and unflinchingly proud of his ignorance is just one more milepost marking the journey of Republicans on their way to the junkyard of history.

Buckley was often a more articulate version of the same deep ugliness and bigotry that is the hallmark of Trumpism.

Then there's the whole world of sports madness where billionaire owners somehow manage to get regular taxpayers to underwrite the cost of new stadiums that are basically a license to print money for the monopoly-protected owners.

When the Trump era and the preceding descent of the Republican Party into a legitimizing force for white nationalism are studied, it seems inevitable that the greatest weight of history will rest not with the Trump voters or even the red-faced Trump rallyists screaming their anger at the press, but with those like Anton and the leaders of the Republican Party who failed a fundamental test of civic decency.

Arthur Blank, who co-founded Home Depot and owns the Atlanta Falcons, managed to get more than $700 million in tax breaks and subsidies to build his new sports palace. Some owners do even better, getting more in breaks than the cost of a stadium.

When pundits marvel that the Republican Party could accept a man like Donald Trump, who has five kids from three wives and talks in public about having sex with his daughter, they're missing the point. Trump doesn't signal a lowering of standards of morality by Republican voters.

but Republicans have decided there is a direct correlation between the size of a patriotic heart and the size of the defense budget.

Donald Trump is the most isolationist president since Herbert Hoover, attacking NATO and ridiculing America's need to support allies. But he still supports increased military spending and, in a typically boastful lie, claims that when he became president, the military was running out of ammunition.

One theory had it that Harry Dexter White, the former Treasury Department official who went on to become director of the International Monetary Fund, stole U.S. Mint engraving plates so that Communism could flood the country with excess currency.)

The American political process with its deep dependence on the need to raise money is a system designed not for the best governance but for the selection of the person who can put up with being humiliated the longest.

In the sandbox of Donald Trump's mind, spending more on defense proves he's a tough guy, while working with allies proves he's weak.

In particular, conservatives sensed that liberals had undermined traditional values. This climate was ripe for a politics that celebrated a nostalgic ideal of the home.

You can draw a straight line from that blend of kooky conspiracy theory, anti–foreign alliances, and instinctual victimhood to Donald Trump's worldview

For Republicans, that "home" invariably meant a gauzy view of an idealized America somewhere in the 1950s that never existed.

The GOP is just as culpable as Democrats for the dismal fiscal outlook because the party engages in excessive and simplistic bombast on the budget when it is out of power and then wastes its time on distractions when it has the opportunity to make progress with incremental reforms.

But there is a long history within the far right of right-wing media positioning itself as the only true and honest media. To promote a world viewpoint distinct from that shared by the majority, it was critical to assert that everyone else simply didn't have the correct information on which to base decisions. That is a far easier task than accusing most of the country of being crazy.

Going to the game seemed like being on the inside of the most important secret in the world.

Republicans had promised for decades to control spending, and when given a chance, they decided it was easier to just spend more.

In Trump's world, the internal forces conspiring against the country are the Deep State, not the Communists, but it is a vision of the world through a heavy fog of paranoia and fear.

Falwell, Graham, and others are providing religious cover for moral squalor

The massive breakdown of disaster relief with Hurricane Katrina was rooted in state and local governmental agencies' and elected officials' lying to the public for decades. Read the Brookings Institution's list "Government's Most Visible Failures, 2001–2014"; it is a heartbreaking accumulation of avoidable tragedies and misery in just that short period, almost all rooted in some large, fundamental miscalculation.