Quotes About Policy

I'd like President Bush to think maybe there's another way to think, that maybe Kissinger was wrong when he says we had to go in there because he was wrong about Vietnam.

When downed American pilots were first taken prisoner in North Vietnam in 1964, U.S. policy became pretty much to ignore them - part and parcel of President Lyndon B. Johnson's determination to keep the costs of his increasingly futile military escalation in Southeast Asia from the public.

Lyndon B. Johnson thought he'd have the boys home from Vietnam by Christmas - for four Christmases in a row (he never shifted course, and lost his presidency for it).

The U.S. invaded Vietnam because many in our government - Lyndon Johnson's best and brightest - imagined it could impose a government on that country that would provide a buffer against China and stop the supposedly rolling dominos of Communism.

A generation ago, American war planners made the mistake of believing that short-term Communist sympathies would unite China and Vietnam. We were wrong, and it tragically misshaped our policy in Vietnam.

American failures in Vietnam and Iraq suggest that it's not really possible to create and sustain a proxy government in a country far from our own borders.

Yes, Obama took over two wars from Bush - just as President Richard Nixon inherited Vietnam from President Lyndon Johnson and President Dwight Eisenhower inherited Korea from President Harry Truman. But at least the war in Iraq was all but won by 2009, thanks largely to the very surge Obama had opposed as a senator.

Thank you for the sacrifices you and your families are making. Our Vietnam Veterans have taught us that no matter what are positions may be on policy, as Americans and patriots, we must support all of our soldiers with our thoughts and our prayers.

The price of gold was fixed at $35 an ounce in 1934, but by the time the U.S. got through the Korean War, the Vietnam war, with all the associated secular inflation, the price level had gone up nearly three times.

Don't forget the Vietnam War was brought to us by Democrats.

If the United States wants access to Chinese, Indian or Vietnamese markets, we must get access to theirs. U.S. protectionism is very subtle but it is very much there.

Government's view of the economy could be summed up in a few short phrases: If it moves, tax it. If it keeps moving, regulate it. And if it stops moving, subsidize it.

It's been my policy to view the Internet not as an 'information highway', but as an electronic asylum filled with babbling loonies.

Well, the right-wing policy with regard to Israel - the people who don't want to deal with Arafat, who don't want a Palestinian state - the whole sort of right-wing view is consistent with the view toward Iraq. It's the same policy and the same people.

Look, I'm very much in favor of tax cuts, but not with borrowed money. And the problem that we've gotten into in recent years is spending programs with borrowed money, tax cuts with borrowed money, and at the end of the day that proves disastrous. And my view is I don't think we can play subtle policy here.

Think tanks do have points of view, and they are absolutely entitled to defend them.

You can't have a rigid view that all new taxes are evil.

We have to take a long view on net neutrality.

In the United States, there is a broadly shared view that the U.N. is one of many potential instruments to advance U.S. issues, and we have to decide whether a particular issue is best done through the U.N. or best done through some other mechanism.

I do not understand those who divide political life from the point of view of political parties.

If strong economic conditions can partially reverse supply-side damage after it has occurred, then policymakers may want to aim at being more accommodative during recoveries than would be called for under the traditional view that supply is largely independent of demand.

Honesty is the best policy. But insanity is a hell of a lot more effective in court. So your set, McMullen

If somebody invented cigarettes today, the government would not legalize them.

Among the defects of the bill, which were numerous, one provision was conspicuous by its presence and another by its absence.