"Poor people, year after year, vote to make the rich richer and that's crazy.
The way America votes, you'd think 2/3 of us are Fortune 500 CEOs.
Poor people could vote themselves out of poverty - but they choose not to.
and that's why we don't win every election - because American voters are so f-ing stupid."
--Bart of Bartcop.com, really putting the finger on what's wrong with Kansas (and anyplace else where people think voting for a rich wingnut will magically turn you into one.)
"Now, as one functionary to another, this is the second thing that I wanted to tell you: no government, in showing contempt for artists, has ever been able to survive. Not one. One can, of course, ignore them, corrupt them, seduce them, buy them, censor them, kill them, send them to camps, spy on them, but hold them in contempt, no. That is akin to rupturing the strange pact, made millennia ago, between art and politics."
--Wajdi Mouawad, "An open letter to Prime Minister Harper", at The Wrecking Ball
Quotable: Lynda "Wonder Woman" Carter on Sarah Palin
These bracelets deflect bullshit too, bitch!
"Don't get me started. She's the anti-Wonder Woman. She's judgmental and dictatorial, telling people how they've got to live their lives. And a superior religious self-righteousness … that's just not what Wonder Woman is about. Hillary Clinton is a lot more like Wonder Woman than Mrs. Palin. She did it all, didn't she?
"No one has the right to dictate, particularly in this country, to force your own personal views upon the populace — religious views. I think that is suppressive, oppressive, and anti-American. We are the loyal opposition. That's the whole point of this country: freedom of speech, personal rights, personal freedom. Nor would Wonder Woman be the person to tell people how to live their lives. Worry about your own life! Worry about your own family! Don't be telling me what I want to do with mine.
"I like John McCain. But this woman — it's anathema to me what she stands for. I think America should be very afraid. Very afraid. Separation of church and state is the one thing the creators of the Constitution did agree on — that it wasn't to be a religious government. People should feel free to speak their minds about religion but not dictate it or put it into law.
"What I don't understand, honestly, is how anyone can even begin to say they know the mind of God. Who do they think they are? I think that's ridiculous. I know what God is in my life. Now I am sure that she's not all just that. But it's enough to me. It's enough for me to have a visceral reaction. And it makes me mad.
"People need to speak up. Doesn't mean that I'm godless. Doesn't mean that I am a murderer. What I hate is this demonization of everybody but one position. You're un-American because you're against the war. It's such bullshit. Fear. It's really such a finite way of thinking about God to think that your measley little mind can know the mind of God. It's a very little God that way. I think that God's bigger. I don't presume to know his mind. Or her mind."
--Lynda Carter, as quoted in Philadelphia Magazine
This isn't the first time a boss has picked an unqualified woman just because she agrees with him and opposes everything most other women want and need. Feminism has never been about getting a job for one woman. It's about making life more fair for women everywhere. It's not about a piece of the existing pie; there are too many of us for that. It's about baking a new pie.
"There is always some element of bad form in objecting to the destructive course of events, or indeed, in making it a topic of conversation. Thus, in Nazi Germany, even among those most closely identified with the 'final solution', it was considered an act of discourtesy to talk about the killings."
"Fascism may be a purer evil, but empire is a more pervasive one, and ultimately more dangerous because it's able to call on the loyalties of well-intentioned people who'd never go near fascism. But if you're a Vietnamese kid napalmed in 1968, or an Iraqi kid with your hands blown off in 2008, empire is every bit as bad as fascism. Or, for that matter, if you're a Bangladeshi or a Chinese sweat shop worker or an Afghani forced to grow and process heroin to survive, the economic ramifications of empire are as bad as the explicit political repression of fascism. And for decades, what traditional fascism has cropped up around the world — in Central America, in some African nations, for instance — has been made possible only through the support of empire."
"The past week was a good one if you were a courtier. We were instructed by the high priests on television over the past few days to mourn a Sunday morning talk show host, who made $5 million a year and who gave a platform to the powerful and the famous so they could spin, equivocate and lie to the nation. We were repeatedly told by these television courtiers, people like Tom Brokaw and Wolf Blitzer, that this talk show host was one of our nation's greatest journalists, as if sitting in a studio, putting on makeup and chatting with Dick Cheney or George W. Bush have much to do with journalism.
"No journalist makes $5 million a year. No journalist has a comfortable, cozy relationship with the powerful. No journalist believes that acting as a conduit, or a stenographer, for the powerful is a primary part of his or her calling. Those in power fear and dislike real journalists. Ask Seymour Hersh and Amy Goodman how often Bush or Cheney has invited them to dinner at the White House or offered them an interview.
"All governments lie, as I.F. Stone pointed out, and it is the job of the journalist to do the hard, tedious reporting to shine a light on these lies. It is the job of courtiers, those on television playing the role of journalists, to feed off the scraps tossed to them by the powerful and never question the system. In the slang of the profession, these television courtiers are 'throats.' These courtiers, including the late Tim Russert, never gave a voice to credible critics in the buildup to the war against Iraq. They were too busy playing their roles as red-blooded American patriots. They never fought back in their public forums against the steady erosion of our civil liberties and the trashing of our Constitution. These courtiers blindly accept the administration's current propaganda to justify an attack on Iran. They parrot this propaganda. They dare not defy the corporate state. The corporations that employ them make them famous and rich. It is their Faustian pact. No class of courtiers, from the eunuchs behind Manchus in the 19th century to the Baghdad caliphs of the Abbasid caliphate, has ever transformed itself into a responsible elite."
Quotable: Amy Katz on the falsities of the "free" market
"The problem is not the issue of personal choice--it's the doctrine of personal choice. We are constantly being told that change begins with us, that only we can solve our own problems, that we are the authors of our destinies. I believe that these are, in fact, ideological statements, rooted in a free market aversion to collective action. To get ourselves through the next century, we will need to shake off the phantasm of an exclusively personal destiny and couple our individual choices with real, penalty-laden national and international environmental regulations. To get ourselves through the next century, we will need a collective privileging of human lives and futures over corporate profits.
"In other words, we need to make political change, something we can't do as individuals. And something we can't do without challenging, in a serious and uncomfortable way, the existing order. So yes, let's change our lifestyles and reduce our personal impacts on the environment. It will help to nudge us closer to the world we want. But, at some point (and I would argue that point would be now), to prevent a global environmental breakdown, we are going to have to embark on a course of action that questions some of the fundamental tenets of our economic system.
"The logic of the market is destroying the planet. We will not save the planet by turning the free market on itself and buying hybrid cars. We will save the planet by forcing our governments to mandate real environmental regulations. We will save the planet by refusing to allow the requirements of the market to dictate our health, our preferences, our sense of reality and the course of our lives."
--Amy Katz, editor of The Greenpeace Green Living Guide
"In today's America, speech is only 'free' when you are talking down to someone less powerful that you. Speak 'up' — and look out.
"In your work life, they can fire you, as I found out, for quietly saying something that is widely known to be true. Put a lid on it."
--Barry Nolan, who was fired for telling the awful truth about Bill O'Reilly at an awards banquet where the latter was undeservedly honored for being a professional liar
Quotable: Gary Kamiya on what to do about terrorism
"The only effective way to reduce the threat of terrorism is to work to end the conditions that give rise to it. In the case of Islamist terrorism, this means a comprehensive and enlightened political, economic and diplomatic strategy for dealing with the Arab/Muslim world. Only a tiny minority of the world's 1.2 billion Muslims support radical jihadis, but catastrophic errors like invading Iraq make violent fundamentalism more attractive. Follow the physician's credo: First, do no harm."
--Gary Kamiya, "Iraq: The Ten Commandments", at Salon.com
Quotable: Alice W. Flaherty on politicians and brain damage
"The neurologist Oliver Sacks tells of a ward of aphasic patients listening to President Reagan giving a speech on television. Although unable to fully understand his words, the patients compensated by being particularly sensitive to his tone and inflections, which they found farcical. A patient with a right hemisphere lesion who could not judge tone was also present. She concentrated on Reagan's exact words--which she too found ridiculous. Sacks concluded from this that it takes a fully working brain to be deluded by politicians."
"What I dislike most about the trickle-down democracy argument is the dishonor it pays to all the people who fought, and fight still, for genuine democratic change in their countries, whether for the right to vote, or to have access to land, or to form unions. Democracy isn't the work of the market's invisible hand; it is the work of real hands....Real democracy--true decision-making power in the people's hands--is always demanded, never granted."
--Naomi Klein, Fences and Windows: Dispatches from the Front Lines of the Globalization Debate
Quotable: Benito Mussolini on how Jonah Goldberg is full of shit
"Granted that the 19th century was the century of socialism, liberalism, democracy, this does not mean that the 20th century must also be the century of socialism, liberalism, democracy. Political doctrines pass; nations remain. We are free to believe that this is the century of authority, a century tending to the 'right ', a Fascist century."
Quotable: Morley Callaghan on fascism and the church
"It seems to me that those who have tried to make the rebel cause the Christian cause have no shame. All those who are heart and soul with the rebels have made a clear cut choice between the things that are Caesar's and the things that are God's. They are on the side of property rights against human rights."
--Morley Callaghan, Canadian author, writing during the Spanish Civil War as a Catholic in support of the Republican cause. The Vatican notably took the opposite side, and still does.
Quotable: Oskar Lafontaine on the neo-con world order
"The European Left has lost credibility. It has opened itself too much to neoliberalism, which spells destruction for the social order. If it reverts to its origins, it will make gains again."
--Oskar Lafontaine, German leftist politician, in an interview with Aporrea. Translation mine.
"I think the government of Colombia doesn't want peace....Colombia deserves a better president." --about Alvaro Uribe
"The best way to end poverty is--you already know this--GIVING POWER TO THE POOR."
"Let's go after the terrorists, yes. Let's find the terrorists. But not like this. You cannot fight terrorism with more terrorism!" --in reference to the war on Afghanistan
"Globalization is nothing new. We've had it for 500 years. Only now, it has computers."
"There is no solution within capitalism, one must transcend capitalism. Nor is it about statism or state capitalism, which would be the same perversion of the Soviet Union, which was the cause of its fall. We must reclaim socialism as a thesis, as a project and a path, but a new socialism. Humanism, putting humans and not the machine ahead of everything, the human and not the state."
"Nobody should be scared of socialism; it's about equality."
"If this revolution is to succeed, it is all-important that women acquire more power."
"To God what is God's. To Caesar what is Caesar's. And to the people, what is the people's." --upon being restored to his seat by people power, April 14, 2002
"For me this is not a defeat and I don't consider that this is a victory of the opposition. Here what exists is the maintenance of an opening towards a path for a new homeland. What they leave out of their invented accounts of crisis and of people easily defeated and sad, is that Chavez is still here for a while." --about the constitutional reforms which were recently, and narrowly, defeated
"Crackpot realists never learn anything, even when the lessons are cuffing them roughly about the head and shoulders. They continue to pile on more of the same actions that got them into trouble in the first place, expecting to be seen as Churchillian heroes for staying the idiotic course they have set.
"They keep spinning the bad news, year after year after year, wearing out entire battalions of press officers, until they finally escape from the morass by leaving office. Afterward, they heap blame on their successors for "losing China" or "cutting and running."
"Although the crackpot realists are neither wise nor honest, they are politically shrewd and personally vicious. When their malfeasances are exposed, they toss subordinates to the wolves and prepare the ground for their own pardons, understanding that the political winds may shift sharply against them later on.
"They are not squeamish: they digest mass murder as easily as they consume their eggs and toast, and they do not lose sleep by agonizing over the cannon fodder they sacrifice in the service of their own aggrandizement. Other people's children go to war; theirs go to Harvard and Yale.
"Being busy people, they cannot waste time on pity, except when a photo op requires its feigned expression.
"Imperialism appeals to them: if controlling the economic heights at home is good, controlling them throughout the entire world is better. Once ExxonMobil, Shell, Citigroup, J. P. Morgan Chase, Bank of America, Lockheed Martin, Boeing, Halliburton, and Bechtel have made their multinational arrangements, everything else will fall into place nicely.
"If it doesn't, because some uppity mullah or tin-pot dictator has created a snag, the U.S. Marines are always available, in the immortal words of the American Enterprise Institute's Michael Ledeen, 'to pick up some small crappy little country and throw it against the wall, just to show the world we mean business.'"
Or so they say everytime they refuse to give him airtime.
"They", of course, being the lamestream media. Even PBS and NPR (supposedly the long-haired intellectuals of the US broadcasterati) are constantly begging off because, supposedly, Chomsky hasn't got "concision" (translation: soundbite-ability).
There's only one problem with that excuse: It's bullshit.
As you can see (in little more than three minutes!), Chomsky can so give good soundbite. The only problem with his soundbites is that they say things the lamestream media types don't want us to hear. They're not for the faint of heart (or feeble of mind.) If you're hard of thinking, they will force you to think hard.
Go on. Read Chomsky. Hear him talk. Get addicted. What have you got to lose but your phony comfort zone?
Quotable: Studs Terkel on hope in a hopeless world
"I once wrote a book called Hope Dies Last. I believe that. I might feel hopelessness, except for one thing: the young. I don't mean the young as they're portrayed in TV commercials: whores, bimbos and dummies. There are many who do not fall into those categories. The big problem is that there's no memory of the past. Our hero is the free market. People forget how the free market fell on its face way back in the Depression. And how the nation pleaded with its government and got help. Today, all these fat CEOs say we don't need government. And these fat boys get away with it, because of our collective Alzheimer's, and the power of Rupert Murdoch and CNN. There is despair in this country, sure. At the same time, we are waiting."
"Why do all the women get plastic surgery? Why? Why? Why should we look like some freaks with big lips that look like an anus? What is so sexy about that? What is sexy about having something that looks like a goose anus?"
--Marjane Satrapi, interviewed by the New York Times
"What do I say to people who don't know how to interpret my songs? You don't read the Bible literally. I thought parables were very clear, yet a lot of people have problems with them when they pop up today. I can't tell people that maybe they need to read some books, brush up on their archetypes. They could probably go on a website and figure it out. But literalizing is very much part of the patriarchy. If you want something made concrete, I'll give you some shoes and pour some cement in them and we'll drop you off in the river."
--Tori Amos, from the introduction to Tori Amos Piece by Piece: A Portrait of the Artist: Her Thoughts. Her Conversations.
"Private capital tends to become concentrated in few hands, partly because of competition among the capitalists and partly because technological development and the increasing division of labor encourage the formation of larger units of production at the expense of smaller ones. The result of these developments is an oligarchy of private capital, the enormous power of which cannot be effectively checked even by a democratically organized political society. This is true since the members of legislative bodies are selected by political parties, largely financed or otherwise influenced by private capitalists who, for all practical purposes, separate the electorate from the legislature. The consequence is that the representatives of the people do not in fact sufficiently protect the interests of the underprivileged sections of the population. Moreover, under existing conditions, private capitalists inevitably control, directly or indirectly, the main sources of information (press, radio, education). It is thus extremely difficult, and indeed in most cases quite impossible, for the individual citizen to come to objective conclusions and to make intelligent use of his political rights."
"For some time I have been disturbed by the way the CIA has been diverted from its original assignment. It has become an operational and at times a policy-making arm of the government...I never had any thought that when I set up the CIA that it would be injected into peacetime cloak-and-dagger operations. Some of the complications and embarrassment that I think we have experienced are in part attributable to the fact that this quiet intelligence arm of the President has been so removed from its intended role that it is being interpreted as a symbol of sinister and mysterious foreign intrigue and a subject for cold war enemy propaganda."
--Former US president Harry S. Truman, interviewed by the Washington Post, December 21, 1963
"Progressives do not lack for policy experts or committed activists. What they need is an infrastructure whose purpose is not fighting conservatives on this or that issue but battling conservatism itself."
"Because Americans like me were born in freedom, we have a hard time even considering that it is possible for us to become as unfree--domestically--as many other nations. Because we no longer learn much about our rights or our system of government--the task of being aware of the constitution has been outsourced from citizens' ownership to being the domain of professionals such as lawyers and professors--we scarcely recognise the checks and balances that the founders put in place, even as they are being systematically dismantled. Because we don't learn much about European history, the setting up of a department of 'homeland' security--remember who else was keen on the word 'homeland'--didn't raise the alarm bells it might have.
"It is my argument that, beneath our very noses, George Bush and his administration are using time-tested tactics to close down an open society. It is time for us to be willing to think the unthinkable...that it can happen here. And that we are further along than we realise."
"The transnational corporations always provoke conflicts to accumulate capital, and the accumulation of capital in a few hands is no solution for humanity. And so I have arrived at the conclusion that capitalism is the worst enemy of humanity."
Yes, this IS a case of a stopped clock being right for all of two seconds out of a given 24 hours. Savor those two seconds, kiddies. For as soon as they're over, Hitchens will, like Cinderella's coach, revert to pumpkinhood once more.
BTW, Hitchens shares an obnoxious trait with Falwell (besides the fact that if you gave him an enema, you could bury him in a matchbox, too)--both of them made it their mission to bring down Bill Clinton and, as a result, elevate an unholy alliance of theocrats and PNAC warmongers to the White House.
"The modern conservative is engaged in one of man's oldest exercises in moral philosophy; that is, the search for a superior moral justification for selfishness."
"We do not have a statist model [of socialism], that everything will be of the state. Is it possible that there are private businesses in socialism? Yes. Even I would say that in Venezuela it is not only possible, but necessary."
--Hugo Chavez, putting the lie to those who say he's out to commit state capitalism
"Christianity and socialism alike, in fact, prescribe a society dedicated to the proposition that all men, women, and children are created equal and shall not starve."
"I never meant to say that the Conservatives are generally stupid. I meant to say that stupid people are generally Conservative. I believe that is so obviously and universally admitted a principle that I hardly think any gentleman will deny it."
"Foreign policy today, irrespective of what we might wish, in its impact upon our daily lives, overshadows everything else. Expenditures, taxation, domestic prosperity, the extent of social services--all hinge on the basic issue of war and peace."
--John F. Kennedy, campaign speech, 1951.
"It is unfortunate that unity for war against a common aggressor is far easier to obtain than unity for peace."
--JFK, May 4, 1945 (on the formation of the United Nations)
"War will exist until that distant day when the conscientious objector enjoys the same reputation and prestige that the warrior does today."
--JFK, letter to a PT-109 shipmate, May 1945, during the United Nations conference in San Francisco.
"I love the effect this new nuke is going to have on these socialists on the left. They're going to be in utter panic over this, and I am honored to bring this happy news of a brand-new nuclear weapon to you via the EIB Network."
--Rush Limbaugh, celebrating a development which anyone not on drugs would say was a Very Bad Idea.
"This is not a science. We're not making porcelain. We're not out cutting two-by-fours. It's kind of crazy stuff just to sit in a room and click away at a--in my case, if you'll forgive me, a Mac--for eight or nine hours. It is a very unnatural thing to do. And there's no one there to tell you whether what you're doing is right or wrong. It's a very scary thing, to spend a year or so doing that. And the real fear is that you'll look back and say, 'Gee I've wasted a year doing nothing.' So in the midst of that loneliness to have another writer say 'You know, you did all right,' is a great thing."
--Lee Stringer (with Kurt Vonnegut), Like Shaking Hands With God: A Conversation About Writing
Quotable: Eric Fair on torture and its consequences
"American authorities continue to insist that the abuse of Iraqi prisoners at Abu Ghraib was an isolated incident in an otherwise well-run detention system. That insistence, however, stands in sharp contrast to my own experiences as an interrogator in Iraq. I watched as detainees were forced to stand naked all night, shivering in their cold cells and pleading with their captors for help. Others were subjected to long periods of isolation in pitch-black rooms. Food and sleep deprivation were common, along with a variety of physical abuse, including punching and kicking. Aggressive, and in many ways abusive, techniques were used daily in Iraq, all in the name of acquiring the intelligence necessary to bring an end to the insurgency. The violence raging there today is evidence that those tactics never worked. My memories are evidence that those tactics were terribly wrong.
[...]
"Some may suggest there is no reason to revive the story of abuse in Iraq. Rehashing such mistakes will only harm our country, they will say. But history suggests we should examine such missteps carefully. Oppressive prison environments have created some of the most determined opponents. The British learned that lesson from Napoleon, the French from Ho Chi Minh, Europe from Hitler. The world is learning that lesson again from Ayman al-Zawahiri. What will be the legacy of abusive prisons in Iraq?"
"I confess, without shame, that I am sick and tired of fighting--its glory is all moonshine; even success the most brilliant is over dead and mangled bodies, with the anguish and lamentations of distant families, appealing to me for sons, husbands, and fathers ... it is only those who have never heard a shot, never heard the shriek and groans of the wounded and lacerated ... that cry aloud for more blood, more vengeance, more desolation."
"I confess that I am not charmed with the ideal of life held out by those who think that the normal state of human beings is that of struggling to get on; that the trampling, crushing, elbowing, and treading on each other's heels, which form the existing type of social life, are the most desirable lot of human beings."
"Above all, it is the young who succumb to this magic. They experience the triumph of the motorcar with the full temperment of their impressionable hearts. It must be seen as a sign of the invigorating power of our people that they give themselves with such fanatic devotion to this invention, an invention which provides the basis and structure of our modern traffic."
-- Adolf Hitler
So much for the right-wing canard that Hitler was a socialist. A real one would be promoting the tangible benefits of a well-run system of public transportation, not "fanatic devotion" to an invention that depletes resources and drives wedges between classes and individuals.
Sam thought carefully for a minute before he asked his next question. "Virgil, I'm going to ask you something you aren't going to like. But I want to know. How did they happen to take you? No, that isn't what I mean. I want to ask you point-blank how come a colored man got all those advantages. Now if you want to get mad, go ahead."
Tibbs countered with a question of his own. "You've always lived in the South, haven't you?"
"I've never been further than Atlanta," Sam acknowledged.
"Then it may be hard for you to believe, but there are places in this country where a colored man, to use your words for it, is simply a human being like everybody else. Not everybody feels that way, but enough do so that at home I can go weeks at a time without anybody reminding me that I'm a Negro. Here I can't go fifteen minutes. If you went somewhere where people despise you because of your southern accent, and all you were doing was speaking naturally and the best way that you could, you might have a very slight idea of what it is to be constantly cursed for something that isn't your fault and shouldn't make any difference anyhow."
Sam shook his head. "Some guys down here would kill you for saying a thing like that," he cautioned.
Quotable: Michael McCaughan and Che Guevara on class myths
"All across Latin America the poor majority have been conditioned to view their social status as the inevitable outcome of a free, competitive society where winners and losers rub shoulders with no hard feelings. The occasional rags-to-riches story is presented as proof that anyone can make it if they combine persistence with hard work. The business sector creates the nation's wealth and jobs trickle down to the poor. Anyone who questions the consensus is quickly bundled out of view, like a naked man streaking across the Superbowl stadium."
--Michael McCaughan, The Battle of Venezuela
"We get on much better with simple sailors than with that middle class which, rich or not, is too attached to the memory of what it once was to pay any attention to two penniless travellers. They are as ignorant as the next man, but their petty victory in life has gone to their heads, and the banal opinions they utter come with the arrogance of being proffered by them."
Quotable: Sir Elton on the dangers of organized religions
"I love the idea of the teachings of Jesus Christ and the beautiful stories about it, which I loved in Sunday school and I collected all the little stickers and put them in my book. But the reality is that organised religion doesn't seem to work. It turns people into hateful lemmings and it's not really compassionate."
On terror alerts and the futility of color-coded systems:
"I wonder at what point in my life, and after how many years, the echo of the red siren--like a screeching violin that plays mercilessly all over one's body--would cease in my mind. I cannot separate the eight years of war from that shrill voice that several times a day, at the most unexpected hours, would intrude into our lives. Three levels of danger had been established, but I never managed to differentiate between the red (danger), yellow (possibility of danger) and white (danger has stopped) sirens. Somehow, in the sound of the white siren, menace still lurked. Usually the red siren sounded too late, after the bomb had already been dropped, and in any case, even at the university we had no real shelters to repair to."
On discontent:
"We were unhappy. We compared our situation to our own potentials, to what we could have had, and somehow there was little consolation in the fact that millions of other people were unhappier than we were. Why should other people's misery make us happier or more content?"
"Who cares what the media says about anything? They are bought and paid for a thousand times over. They couldn't tell the truth if they could find it."
"I apologize to no one for my criticism of the president and of his broken policy. If anyone owes our troops in the fields an apology, it is the president and his failed team and a Republican majority in the Congress that has been willing to stamp -- rubberstamp policies that have done injury to our troops and to their families.
"My statement yesterday -- and the White House knows this full well -- was a botched joke about the president and the president's people, not about the troops. The White House's attempt to distort my true statement is a remarkable testament to their abject failure in making America safe. It's a stunning statement about their willingness to reduce anything America, the raw politics. It's their willingness to distort, their willingness to mislead Americans, their willingness to exploit the troops as they have so many times at backdrops, at so many speeches in which they have not told the American people the truth.
"I'm not going to stand for it. What our troops deserve is a winning strategy, and what they deserve is leadership that is up to the sacrifice that they're making. Sadly, this is the best that this administration can do in a month when we have lost 100 young men and women who have given their lives for a failed policy. Over half the names on the Vietnam wall were put there after our leaders knew that our policy was wrong, and it was wrong that leaders were quiet then, and I'm not going to be quiet now. This is a textbook Republican campaign strategy: try to change the topic, try to make someone else the issue, try to make something else said the issue, not the policy, not their responsibility.
"Well, everybody knows it's not working this time, and I'm not going to stand around and let it work.
"If anyone thinks that a veteran, someone like me, who's been fighting my entire career to provide for veterans, to fight for their benefits, to help honor what their service is -- if anybody thinks that a veteran would somehow criticize more than 140,000 troops serving in Iraq, and not the president and his people who put them there, they're crazy. It's just wrong.
"This is a classic GOP textbook Republican campaign tactic. I'm sick and tired of a bunch of despicable Republicans who will not debate real policy, who won't take responsibility for their own mistakes, standing up and trying to make other people the butt of those mistakes.
"I'm sick and tired of a whole bunch of Republican attacks, the most of which come from people who never wore the uniform and never had the courage to stand up and go to war themselves.
"Enough is enough. We're not going to stand for this.
"This policy is broken, and this president and his administration didn't do their homework. They didn't study what would happen in Iraq. They didn't study and listen to the people who were the experts and would have told them. And they know that's what I was talking about yesterday. I'm not going to be lectured by a White House or by the likes of Rush Limbaugh, who's taking a day off from mimicking and attacking Michael J. Fox, who's now going to try to attack me and lie about me and distort me. No way. It disgusts me that a bunch of these Republican hacks, who have never worn the uniform of our country, are willing to lie about those who did. It's over.
"This administration has given us a Katrina foreign policy: mistake upon mistake upon mistake, unwilling to give our troops the armor that they need, unwilling to have enough troops in place, unwilling to give them the humvees that they deserve to protect them, unwilling to have a coalition that is adequate to be able to defend our interests.
"Our own intelligence agency has told us they're creating more terrorists, not less; they're making us less safe, not more. I think Americans are sick and tired of this game.
"These Republicans are afraid to stand up and debate a real veteran on this topic, and they're afraid to debate -- you know, they want to debate straw men because they're afraid to debate real men.
"Well, we're going to have a real debate in this country about this policy. The bottom line is, these Republicans want to distort this policy. And this time it won't work, because we are going to stay in their face with the truth.
"And no Democrat is going to be bullied by these people, by these kinds of attacks that have no place in American politics. It's time to set our policy correct.
"They have a stand still and lose policy in Iraq, and they have a cut and run policy in Afghanistan. And the fact is our troops, who have served heroically, who deserve better, deserve leadership that is up to their sacrifice, period."
"That afternoon we went separate ways: Alberto following up the doctors while I went to see an old woman with asthma, a customer at La Gioconda. The poor thing was in an awful state, breathing the smell of stale sweat and dirty feet that filled her room, mixed with the dust from a couple of armchairs, the only luxuries in her house. As well as asthma, she had a bad heart. It is in cases like this, when a doctor knows he is powerless in such circumstances, that he longs for change; a change which would prevent the injustice of a system in which until a month ago this poor old woman had had to earn her living as a waitress, wheezing and panting but facing life with dignity. In these circumstances people in poor families who can't pay their way are surrounded by an atmosphere of barely disguised acrimony; they stop being father, mother, sister or brother and become a purely negative factor in the struggle for life and, by extension, a source of bitterness for the healthy members of the community who resent their illness as if it were a personal insult to those who have to support them. It is then, at the end, for people whose horizons never reach beyond tomorrow, that we see the profound tragedy which circumscribes the life of the proletariat the world over. In these dying eyes there is a humble appeal for forgiveness and also, often, a desperate plea for solace which is lost in the void, just as their body will soon be lost in the vast mystery surrounding us. How long this present order, based on an absurd idea of caste, will last I can't say, but it's time governments spent less time publicizing their own virtues and more money, much more money, funding socially useful projects."
"It's vile," said Rep. Mark Foley, R-West Palm Beach. "It's more sad than anything else, to see someone with such potential throw it all down the drain because of a sexual addiction."
Quotable: Robert Scheer on truth and press freedom
"You know, AJ Liebling said, 'Freedom of the press is guaranteed only to those who own one.' Well, I now own at least half of one, along with Zuade Kaufman, my publisher. So, you know, you can land on your feet. Your show, which, you know, a lot of us listen to as mainstream media now. And my wife, for instance, she's a deputy editor of the San Francisco Chronicle, she sits in her parking lot listening to your show before she goes into her meetings. So alternative media is no longer really alternative, and we're no longer that dependent upon newspapers, like the Los Angeles Times, for our information. You know, go to BuzzFlash or The Nation or TruthOut or TruthDig. There are many, many sites, as you're well aware. So, I don't want people to think, 'Wow! They were able to silence me.' Nonsense.
"Did they try to silence? Yes. The Tribune Company took over the Los Angeles Times. There are issues of media conglomeration. This was a newspaper that I had worked for for 30 years. The interviews in this book, with the exception of the Playboy interview with Jimmy Carter, were all done for the Los Angeles Times. I was nominated by the paper some 20 times for Pulitzer Prizes. You know, I was a finalist. So, you know, I had a very good relationship with this paper. Chicago Tribune, the Tribune Company took it over. They're very conservative. The publisher definitely was ideologically opposed to my view. I was attacked by Bill O'Reilly and Rush Limbaugh, sometimes nightly on O'Reilly. I mean, he called me the most dangerous columnist in the world or something.
"And I think that one of the problems is that I got it right. Now, that doesn't give me any satisfaction. I would have been much happier if we could go into Iraq, and democracy would flourish, there would be no casualties, the oil revenue would pay for everything, the country was reborn as a democracy. I mean, I think most people who are against the war would have been very happy to have been proved wrong. But to have had your column ended after you got it right all those years, it shows where the paper is. "
--Robert Scheer, interviewed by Amy Goodman on Democracy Now!, July 10, 2006
"There's a politician in my hometown, a very nice guy. He used to be a shop steward for the union in the local factory, but for twenty years he represented our town in the county legislature. And he said, 'Pete, if you don't grow, you die.' One o'clock in the morning, I sat up in bed and thought of the next question. If that's true, if you don't grow you die, doesn't it follow the quicker you grow, the sooner you die? Nobody is facing up to that question, but it's very definitely true. Now the first step in solving a problem is to admit there's a problem. Then we can argue about ways it could be solved.
"I suppose one person will say. 'Well, let a few people have trillions of dollars and the rest of the people obediently do the work, and the people in charge will see that everything is done right.' On other hand, I think what was in the Declaration of Independence is true now, just as it was then. Those great lines, they're written by Ben Franklin, you know, not Jefferson. 'We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal; that they are endowed by their creator with certain inalienable rights; that among these rights are life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness; that to secure these rights, governments are instituted among men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed; that when any government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the right of the people to alter or to abolish it.'"
--Pete Seeger, as interviewed by Amy Goodman on Democracy Now!, July 3, 2006
"In the United States you're not allowed to talk about class differences. In fact, only two groups are allowed to be class-conscious in the United States. One of them is the business community, which is rabidly class-conscious. When you read their literature, it's all full of the danger of the masses and their rising power and how we have to defeat them. It's kind of vulgar, inverted Marxism.
"The other group is the high planning sectors of the government. They talk the same way--how we have to worry about the rising aspirations of the common man and the impoverished masses who are seeking to improve standards and harming the business climate.
"So they can be class-conscious. They have a job to do. But it's extremely important to make other people, the rest of the population, believe that there is no such thing as class. We're all just equal, we're all Americans, we live in harmony, we all work together, everything is great."
--Noam Chomsky, interview with David Barsamian, in The Prosperous Few and the Restless Many (Odonian Press, 1994)
