Quotes About Policy

As a turning point, the Bay of Pigs deserves comparison with 9/11 - a moment that created an opening to pose first-order questions, but elicited instead an ill-conceived, reflexive response. As would Johnson, Carter, and George W. Bush, Kennedy in 1961 squandered an opportunity to rethink and reorient U.S. policy, with fateful implications.

The line in the sand that Carter drew along Iran's Zagros Mountains now stretches from Central Asia through the Middle East and across the width of Africa. That the ongoing enterprise may someday end—that U.S. troops will finally depart—appears so unlikely as to make the prospect unworthy of discussion. Like the war on drugs or the war on poverty, the War for the Greater Middle East has become a permanent fixture in American life and is accepted as such.

A witness can be of more value than a policy analyst. An amateur witness, free of conceptual bias, sometimes sees the plainest truth. One should never be blinded by tailoring.

At least three times as many mentally ill people are in jail as are in hospitals.

The problem of depression among the poor leads naturally into specific politics. We legislate ideas of illness and treatment in and out of existence.

I think pot should be legal. I don't smoke it, but I like the smell of it.

Rule #1: The customer is always right. Rule #2: If the customer is wrong, please refer to rule #1. -Duncan Howe

Proposing an immigration policy that serves America's interests should not require an apology.

Somebody's noticing the immigrant crime wave: Google illegal alien crime and you'll get more than 2 million hits. Google immigrant crime and you'll get 40 million. Only our government and media refuse to notice. Then they turn around and denounce anyone else's estimate, saying: You don't know that. So tell us! We "don't know that" only because the people in a position to know have decided to keep it secret.

Then, Republicans should ask Democrats: Why is it so vitally important to keep bringing in new workers to compete with low-skilled Americans and drive down their wages?

In April 2013, Judicial Watch released e-mails proving that the U.S. Department of Agriculture was working hand in hand with the Mexican government to sign up illegal aliens for food stamps.

About a third of pre-1965 immigrants went home—except British and Jewish immigrants, less than 10 percent of whom returned.17 Now no one goes home, they go on welfare. Today's immigrants aren't coming here to breathe free, they're coming to live for free.

As governor of Florida he aggressively pushed a bill that would allow illegal aliens to obtain driver's licenses, less than three years after thirteen of nineteen terrorists in the September 11 attack had used Florida driver's licenses to board the planes.

In 2003, 70 percent of the 2,300 babies born in Stockton's San Joaquin General Hospital's maternity ward were anchor babies.14 By 2013, Stockton was bankrupt. Any politician who opposed our insane anchor baby policy would be smugly denounced by the New York Times—and wouldn't lose a single vote.

The country will have the economy of Uganda, but Democrats will be in total control.

In all, nearly 60 percent of immigrants—legal and illegal—are on government assistance, compared with 39 percent of native households.6 Why would any country voluntarily bring in people who have to be supported by the taxpayer?

immigrants today are immediately sunk into the warm bath of food stamps, housing assistance, Social Security disability payments, and multilingual ballots and street signs.

I'm beginning to suspect the wall is popular. Although

in some states it was illegal to sell contraceptives to those who were unmarried.

And yet, thinkers far more sober than Baudrillard view the events of September 11 as a consequence of American foreign policy.

faith-based initiative

President Bush recently decided to cut off funding to any overseas family-planning group that provides information on abortion.

Our present policy on human stem cells has been shaped by beliefs that are divorced from every reasonable intuition we might form about the possible experience of living systems.

In "A Problem from Hell," I had highlighted the work of Albert Hirschman, the Princeton economist who published the landmark book The Rhetoric of Reaction in 1991. Hirschman's thesis was that those who didn't want to pursue a particular course of action tended to argue that a given policy would be futile ("futility"), that it would likely make matters worse ("perversity"), or that it would imperil some other goal ("jeopardy").