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Us Politics Quotes

Browse 48 quotes about Us Politics.

Us Politics Quotes

“Consider the blundering anarchic system of the United States the stupidity of some of its lawmakers, the violent reaction, the slowness of its ability to change. Twenty-five key men destroyed could make the Soviet Union stagger, but we could lose our congress, our president, and our general staff and nothing much would have happened. We would go right on. In fact we might be better for it.”

“We've been called radicals, terrorists. We've been dismissed as an impossible fringe movement. But now we are a multi-racial, multi-ethnic, multi-generational, multi-faith mass movement united in demanding change, in demanding accountability, in demanding that our police, our government, our country recognize that Black lives do indeed matter. (From election victory speech)”

“The term '20/20 vision' implies good if not perfect sight. May the advent of 2020 - a new year, a new decade - see a lifting of the fog which has recently blurred the edges of what can be described as 'acceptable political discourse', and in the process refocus voter attention on the clear need to demand from elected representatives, a display of basic decency and decorum in public life - both of which have been seriously lacking in the behaviour of some high profile politicians on both sides of the pond, on an eye-watering number of occasions. That indeed would be a sight for sore eyes.”

“Anyone who thinks there's no difference between Democrats and Republicans is a dingdong, Lots of people generalize that they're the same because they both pander to corporate interests. It's true: we live in a plutocracy condoned by a totally ignorant public...I'm not saying Democrats are perfect, but I think there are a lot of good, well-meaning people trapped in the system (2002 interview in Attitude)”

“The long-term effect of Hillary’s loss could be more beneficial to the future of America than one might think. For if Obama’s reign placed hope in the hearts of the young and instilled in them a belief that differences must be embraced then Hillary’s crushing defeat has awakened them to the harsh realities of a hopeful indifference and raised their voices in opposition of all those ideals that would not only darken their future but the future of the entire world.”

“As noted in Chapter 4, there’s abundant evidence that presidents use their disaster-declaration authority under the Stafford Act to aid their own reelection prospects. Presidents direct more disaster relief to politically important states and declare more disasters in election years—and the average number of yearly disaster declarations has been increasing over time.35 Bill Clinton still holds the election-year record, with 75 disaster declarations in 1996; George W. Bush came in a close second in 2004, and has declared disasters at a faster rate overall than Clinton.”

“There were two kinds of cases before the Supreme Court. There were abortion cases—and there were all the others. Abortion was (and is) the central legal issue before the Court. It defined the judicial philosophies of the justices. It dominated the nomination and confirmation process. It nearly delineated the difference between the national Democratic and Republican parties.”

“All the Democrats who voted for him [Clarence Thomas] were from the South, the opposite of what had happened in 1967, when Southern Democratic senators opposed [Thurgood] Marshall. By 1991, blacks had become a core constituency of Southern senators, and Democrats feared alienating them with a vote against Thomas.”

“The UK needs a post Brexit US trade deal like a hole in the head. Given America's out-of-control opioid crisis, fuelled by prescription drug addiction, along with an obesity epidemic like the world has never seen, why on earth would the UK want to open its doors to US healthcare companies ? So that they can wreak untold havoc and destroy our National Health Service ? No thanks !”

“We should drop the bizarre American fiction that corporations are people, enjoying all the rights of citizens, including unfettered campaign donations as a form of free speech. Indeed, corporations possess greater rights than do people, as they cannot be jailed or executed, while citizens can and do suffer those fates. As the legal historian Zephyr Teachout has observed, the founders would have considered corporate campaign spending the essence of political corruption.”

“...Ironically, three decades later President Barack Obama introduced a universal health insurance bill modeled closely after the Carter bill. Mondale´s former aide Richard Moe wrote that Obamacare ¨bore a striking resemblance to Carter´s proposal three decades before."The legislation pass Congress in 2009 with the support of Senator Kennedy, by then diagnosed with fatal brain cancer. In retrospect, Kennedy´s refusal to support Carter´s incremental, catastrophic national health insurance bill in 1978-79 condemned the country to wait three decades for meaningful healthcare reform. By any measure, this was a tragedy for the country. ¨The miss opportunity,¨ Eizenstat later wrote, ¨haunts me to this day.”

“What is the endgame of all these megaconstructions? Well, in ancient Egypt, the late 6th-dynasty state had not only become so large that it was nonfunctional (think of the giant cable company that never answers the phone), it had also become a mass of intercompeting elites who used the government to serve no one but themselves. (Think of today´s relentless multimillion-dollar bonuses, payoffs, bribes, insider trading, and fraud, all happening openly with no one going to prison.) As the competition ramped up, and as the Egyptian state became impoverished from mismanagement, the end result was nothing less than war.”

“After it was all over, the Carter people were stunned by Kennedy´s conduct. Why? Why would the Kennedy crowd persist in defeat, knowing that their displays of rancor would only further weaken a Democratic president in the face of the Reagan challenge from the right? Well, Kennedy partisans hated to see all the romantic notion of the Kennedy mystique coming to an end. Camelot was dying, and most ignobly, at the hands of these crude Georgia boys. And on the other side of the equation, the Georgia boys could not fathom the animosity. They felt their man was not only a liberal and a populist but a politician of integrity and intelligence who had accomplished much in his few years in the White House. For the Georgians, Kennedy´s behavior at the convention was all about ego. As Jody Powell later said, ¨We neglected to take into account one of the obvious facets of Kennedy´s character, an almost childlike self-centeredness.¨”

“As it stands, the United States is facing a crisis of identity unlike any before. The country is headed toward an inversion of its demographics, with its powerful white majority expected to be out-numbered by people not of European descent within two decades. This is unknown territory for everyone in the hierarchy, an ethnic distribution that could potentially look closer to that of South Africa than to what Americans have grown accustomed to. Anticipatory fear seems already to have surfaced, but if history is any guide, a change in demographics might have less of a material effect on the dominant caste than imagined. A 2016 study found that, if disparities in wealth continue at the current pace, it would take black families 228 years to amass the wealth that white families have now, and Latino families another 84 years to reach parity. Thus, as in South Africa, there would be no reason to believe that economic, social, and, in America, political dominance would not still remain in the hands of those who have held it for the entirety of the country's history. This will be a test of the cherished ideal of majority rule, the moral framework for caste dominance in America since its founding.”

“Texas representative Louie Gohmert declared in a December 2017 floor speech, 'The Supreme Court looked at all of the evidence and declared in an opinion that the United States was founded as, and is, a Christian nation.' He added to this gross misstatement by insisting that 'the only way any people can truly have freedom of religion is if they have a constitution that is founded on Judeo-Christian principles.' The opposite is true.”

“The term POTUS used to be viewed around the world with a degree of respect. Unfortunately the current US president has junked any last remnant of that image. Instead he seems only too happy to trash the environment; to scrap age old alliances promoting peace and prosperity; to discard internationally binding treaties; to toss aside like garbage hard won civil liberties. Maybe DETRITUS is a more fitting acronym for the current occupant of the White House - 'Deranged egotistical tyrant ruining & isolating the U.S.”

“NO DIVINE BOVINE ! The clumsy creature currently inhabiting the White House is a distinctly dangerous animal. Part boneheaded raging bully, part dastardly coward showing signs of advanced stage mad cow disease. Neither of good pedigree nor useful breeding stock, there is essentially very little of substance between the T (bone) and the RUMP, except of course for an abundance of methane and bullshit. It's high time brave matadors for you to enter the bullring, with nimble step and fleet of foot. Take good aim and bring down this marauding beast once and for all. Slay public enemy number one and we will salute you forever. A louder cheer you will not hear from Madrid to Mexico City, from Beijing to Brussels, from London to Lahore, from Toronto to Tehran and ten thousand cities in between.”

“As the 2018 World Cup Championship in Russia draws to a close, President Trump scores a hat-trick of diplomatic faux pas - first at the NATO summit, then on a UK visit, and finally with a spectacular own goal in Helsinki, thereby handing Vladimir Putin a golden propaganda trophy. For as long as this moron continues to queer the pitch by refusing to be a team player, America's Achilles' heel will go from bad to worse. It's high time somebody on his own side tackled him in his tracks.”

“REMOVE THE LOUDHAILER ! If the Democrats really want to beat Donald Trump, how about getting some of their wealthy backers to buy up or take down Twitter ? The Twit-in-Chief without Twitter is nothing - a songbird without a song. No self-respecting news organisation would stoop to plug the gap. All that would be left is a pretentious peacock eunuch strutting around aimlessly with no fawning admirers. Desperate times call for desperate measures.”

“...It was no accident that some of the first bureaucracies took shape in the West: the National Forest Service, the Bureau of Indian Affairs (which gradually took modern form as the older Indian Service sank beneath its long heritage of fraud and corruption), and the U.S. Geological Service. Mythologized as the heatland of individualism, the West became the kindergarten of the modern American state.”

“As Elvin T. Lim noted in his 2002 study of presidential rhetoric, by the late 20th century, it was ‘‘all about the children,’’ with ‘‘Presidents Carter, Reagan, Bush, and Clinton [making] 260 of the 508 references to children in the entire speech database, invoking the government’s responsibility to and concern for children in practically every public policy area.’’ Granted, George Washington had mentioned children in his seventh annual message, protesting ‘‘the frequent destruction of innocent women and children’’ by Indian marauders.107 But in the modern State of the Union address, references to children have a different tenor,”

“In business or in politics, responsibility without authority is any chief executive’s worst nightmare. That was the political nightmare that gripped the Bush administration in the weeks after Katrina. As the National Post’s Colby Cosh put it, ‘‘The 49 percent of Americans who have been complaining for five years about George W. Bush being a dictator are now vexed to the point of utter incoherence because for the last fortnight he has failed to do a sufficiently convincing impression of a dictator.’’93 Small wonder, then, that President Bush promptly sought the authority to head off future political disasters by overriding the decisions of state and local officials and using the military at home.”

“There was a revealing moment in the first presidential debate in September 2008, moderator Jim Lehrer asked the candidates, ‘‘Are you willing to acknowledge, both of this financial crisis is going to affect the way you rule the country as president of the States?’’Neither McCain nor Obama objected to Lehrer’s phrasing. Both, it seemed, perfectly comfortable with the idea that it’s the president’s job to ‘‘rule the country.”

“Over and over again, we begin by looking to the president as the solution to all our problems, and we end up believing he’s the source of all our problems. If history is any guide, when Obama fails to fully heal our financial troubles, stop the oceans’ rise, and rescue us from spiritual malaise, his hope-addled rhetoric will seem all the more grating, and the public will increasingly come to see him as the source of all American woes. As his popularity dwindles, many of Obama’s supporters will view attacks on him through the prism of race, forgetting or ignoring the fact that nearly every president eventually morphs from superhero to scapegoat in the public mind. Race will take on undue relevance because the presidency is far more powerful and far more important than it ought to be. Perhaps, then, we ought to rethink what we ask of”