Quotes About Rhetoric

Health care has become a political football that is being tossed back and forth by both sides in Washington. And it's divided our country.

Washington has thrown their soldiers on the fire.

Washington is paralyzed by extreme political rhetoric that creates powerful sound bites but poor policy.

When Mr. Obama entered office, he said all the right things about getting Washington spending under control. He even promised to cut the deficit in half by the end of his first term. Obviously, that didn't happen.

I would be with a bunch of Kennedy fans watching the debate, and their comment would be, 'He's really slaughtering Nixon.' Then we would all go to another apartment, and the Nixon fans would say, 'How do you like the shellacking he gave Kennedy?'

Orators are most vehement when their cause is weak.

When our governments want to sell us a course of action, they do it by making sure it's the only thing on the agenda, the only thing everyone's talking about. And they pre-load the ensuing discussion with highly selected images, devious and prejudicial language, dubious linkages, weak or false 'intelligence' and selected 'leaks.'

I don't think there could've been a pitch as crass as Trump's 'I can fix America because I'm rich' without that groundwork laid by Davos and the Clinton Global Initiative.

The New Deal exists principally on an emotional plane for Obama. To him, the New Deal is something you play like a song, to make you or your constituents feel better.

Spend hundreds of millions; talk endlessly about issues; present 12-point plans for education, the economy, and the environment. But in the end, the election of our next president can turn on a gaffe.

Many senators have developed a canny sense of what will play best for the audience.

Conservatives, please. Let's not duplicate the manias of the Left as we figure out how to deal with Mr. Obama. He is not exactly the anti-Christ, although a disturbing number of people on the Right are convinced he is.

Believe me, I bash liberals for being mean-spirited and angry, but there are plenty on my side who are the same way.

My Democratic colleagues, many of whom hold law degrees, should know better than to intentionally oversimplify court rulings to mislead the public and score political points.

I understand that Republicans-running-against-Obamacare-in-order-to-save-Medicare is a clever jujitsu. But how long will they play out that argument before they get back to the economy?

The cliche in American politics is that one week is an eternity.

What faith has not been used by demagogues as a club over somebody's head?

One of the things that makes me horrified about a Trump administration is the continued use of code words like 'law and order.'

Let's face it - Donald Trump is a very, very good con man.

Political rhetoric leads only to confusion.

Palin, Limbaugh, Glenn Beck and others have made an art form of convincing far too many Americans to suspend their disbelief, and they have severely damaged the ability of our country to have serious discussions about serious challenges.

I'm always a bit suspicious of writers who have the gift of the gab.

We live in an age that's very suspicious of preachy political rhetoric, which means that there's room for art that approaches these issues from the side - as satire, as parody, or as a kind of outlandish speculative proposition.

But now sustainability is such a political category that it's getting more and more difficult to think about it in a serious way. Sustainability has become an ornament.