Quotes About Politics

They said Indonesia was a failure," Al Pope reflected bitterly. "But we knocked the shit out of them. We killed thousands of Communists, even though half of them probably didn't even know what Communism meant.

There weren't any moderates left in the government of Iran.

On October 20, 2011, the rebels overran Qaddafi's last stronghold, found him hiding in a drainpipe, sodomized him with a bayonet, and killed him, capturing his last moments on video. Putin watched that tape over and over again, probably thinking that this was what happened when America wanted to change a regime—Miloševi? dead in a prison cell, Saddam with a noose around his neck, Qaddafi on the wrong end of a spear.

and throughout the summer and fall of 2002, the president and his aides prepared the battlefield of the American mind with apocalyptic warnings about Saddam Hussein's weapons of mass destruction: Baghdad had chemical and biological weapons, and it could build a nuclear weapon in a few years. The alarms were terrifying, and utterly false. The cause for war was an illusion.

Bush casually pronounced a political death sentence upon the CIA in 2004 when he said that the agency was "just guessing" about the course of the war in Iraq. No president had ever publicly dismissed the CIA that way.

almost every president, almost every Congress, and almost every director of central intelligence since the 1960s has proved incapable of grasping the mechanics of the CIA. Most have left the agency in worse shape than they found it. Their failures have handed future generations, in the words of President Eisenhower, "a legacy of ashes." We are back where we began sixty years ago, in a state of disarray.

He saw "new propaganda" emerging, and he said its goal was "not to convince or persuade, but to keep the viewer hooked and distracted, passive and paranoid." RT, which received more than $1 billion a year from the Kremlin, began to fine-tune its English-language shows, targeting the fringes of the American political spectrum on the right and the left.

Under Cheney's direction, the United States moved to restore the powers of secret intelligence that had flourished for fifty-five years under J. Edgar Hoover. In public speeches, the president, the vice president, and the attorney general renewed the spirit of the Red raids. In top secret orders, they revived the techniques of surveillance that the FBI had used in the war on communism. The

granted him a broad and unspecified authority. In his sunny way, Creel would take that authority and run with it, going to extremes that must be described as alarming. In 1917, the United States remained intensely divided over

It is very good, Wisehammer, it's very well written, but it's too-too-political. It will be considered provocative." "You don't want me to say it." "Not tonight. We have many people against us." "I could tone it down. I could omit 'We left our country for our country's good.'" "That's the best line.

In politics, everyone regards themselves as a moderate, because they know some other sumbitch who's twice as crazy as they are.

What should have been shattering news—a Klansman dictating orders to elected officials and leaders of the dominant political party—barely caused a stir.

The governor of Georgia, Clifford Walker, told a Klan rally in 1924 that the United States should "build a wall of steel, a wall as high as heaven" against immigrants.

He scoffed at the pictures of fruit vendors on city streets; they were selling apples at five cents apiece, he said, because it was more profitable than working a regular job. The Republicans had been routed in the 1930 midterm elections, losing seventeen seats in the Senate and control of the House.

With a campaign slogan that railed against what he called "The Three C's—Corporations, Carpetbaggers, and Coons," Murray won by a huge margin, 301,921 votes to 208,575.

Most members of the incoming state legislature took orders from the hooded order, as did the majority of the congressional delegation.

In Muncie, the "Constitution had ceased to function," wrote the Chicago Tribune, after the Klan had established a "super-government" not based on the rule of law.

The house was thick with politicians and thick with Klansmen, one and the same.

Among the 150 members of the General Assembly of 1925, only two were women and four were Catholics; there were no Black or Jewish representatives.

In Marion County, every major elected official but two was a Klansman.

The Republican Party as now constituted is the Ku Klux Klan of Indiana," he wrote in his influential paper, the Indianapolis Freeman. "The nominees for governor, house, the senate and city offices are all Klansmen.

They pored over a list of Klan-backed candidates for high office next year—governors in the West, the South, and the Midwest, senators from ten more states, and the presidential ticket. About seventy members of Congress were faithful to the hooded order

In the balloons of grandeur that kept Stephenson aloft, the presidency was just a few puffs of helium away. "Boys, I'm not in this for the money," he told his cronies. "You're going to put me in the White House.

And here was yet another plum: Ed Jackson, the Republican whose name had first appeared on membership rolls of the Klan in 1923, had been swept into the governor's office. He owed it all to D. C. Stephenson.