Top 36 Quotes & Sayings by Sidney Blumenthal
Explore popular quotes and sayings by an American journalist Sidney Blumenthal.
Last updated on November 21, 2024.
Dick Clarke, who was head of counter-terrorism in the National Security Council, pushed constantly for the Principals Committee, which is the key national security group of top officials to take up the issue of terrorism.
Even on education, his one accomplishment, the Leave No Child Behind Act, and he has left it unfunded.
It's absolutely crucial for the Democrats to have a sense of their history, of who they are, in order to be able to project their values and stand up for them.
But presidents matter. That's one of the biggest lessons I learned being in the White House.
Every decision that they take has enormous consequences, and ripple out from the White House.
And Louis Freeh was a completely dysfunctional FBI Director, who was actually waging his own private war against the Clinton Administration.
At the same time, Clinton was doing a lot things right, like the economy.
Bill Clinton was in the line of great progressive presidents who faced the realities in his own time and applied innovative solutions to problems.
Clinton was very early on aware of the problem of international terrorism.
We barely missed killing Bin Laden. There were numerous findings issued by the President to kill him. We rolled up terrorist cells. We stopped the millennium bombings.
As I said, if you don't stand up for yourself, people aren't going to think that you can stand up for them.
If there were any clear investigation of 9/11, they wouldn't let Louie Freeh off the hook.
Clinton took very tough decisions on the economy.
It was an absurd theory that by cutting taxes you would increase government revenues, because the growth of the economy would create an overflow of taxes that would fall into the government coffers.
22 million new jobs under President Clinton. 3 million lost under Bush.
Clinton was a president who used his office, in creative ways, to try to reinvigorate the federal government to benefit the majority.
What happened to the Bush Administration regarding terrorism is that they regarded it as a secondary issue, and associated with Clinton. One of those Clinton issues.
The biggest mistakes, early on, involved foreign policy and involved the strategy for health care.
On health care, virtually every political error that could be made was made.
On the contrary, it might even be a projection of what the truth is of the Bush Administration's complacency and ineptitude on the terrorism in its first 9 months in office.
The Democrats need to remind people of where were, in terms of our progress, as markers against where we are, and where we've fallen, and how we've declined under Bush.
The book shows Clinton in the presidency as a profile in growth.
The attack on Clinton on terrorism is entirely politically inspired by the right-wing of the Republicans, and has no basis in fact whatsoever.
It wasn't simply that Clinton created the greatest prosperity in the country's history. Or that we created 22 million new jobs, more than ever before. Under Clinton, poverty was reduced 25%.
It was the biggest suppression of voting rights in our country's history since Jim Crow. And the thread of race runs from the beginning to the end of my book.
The conservative argument is that the economy is like the weather, that it just operates automatically.
The George W. Bush universe of threats is a constantly expanding universe as he moves to politically higher ground, escaping from failure after failure. He's not only radical, but the consequences of his radicalism have been catastrophic.
George W. Bush has exhibited hostility to science that no other president has ever displayed.
Who was it in Afghanistan who screwed up in Tora Bora and let bin Laden escape? It was the Bush Administration. Who leached all the resources, military and civil, from Afghanistan, creating the instability that we see there today in order to prepare for the misbegotten invasion of Iraq? It was the Bush administration. If there's a terrorist problem today, who is responsible now? Bush has not done the job.
I call George W. Bush a radical because he is undertaking a fundamental transformation of our Constitutional system of government and of our longstanding policies that have been accepted for literally generations. He thinks to concentrate unaccountable power in the Executive. He thinks you alter the laws so that, as Commander in Chief, he can determine, under what he says are wartime conditions, what the laws are, which laws should be enforced, and declare by fiat what our policy should be, even abrogating longstanding international treaties.
When most people see the word "radical," they think that it must refer to something left wing. Some people also may think of it as referring to far right-wing marginal groups. But here we have a president of the United States [George W. Bush] at the center of power, sitting in the White House, who is a radical.
In every single case, the truth is that the atmosphere created by the Iraq invasion and the staggeringly mismanaged occupation has incited terrorists to act. It's been a contributing factor. It's unavoidable throughout Europe - in Spain, in Germany, in Britain. The truth is that we need long-term American policy to shift in order to really soak up and get rid of these sources of terrorism that threaten our Western allies.
In a sense, George W. Bush has used the tragedy of the terrorist attacks of September 11th and the nightmarish expansion of his idea of a war on terror to overshadow his actual conduct in office on the redistribution of wealth upward through progressive tax cuts that actually penalize the vast majority of the public, and shift their resources to a narrow band at the very, very top.
The incubator for terrorism, after the Middle East, is Europe, partly because of proximity, partly because of the existence of large Muslim communities there.
The Bush Administration, and particularly Bush's chief political strategist and Deputy Chief of Staff, Karl Rove, have been expert in both galvanizing and mobilizing the fears and resentments of people. A good part of their politics consists of being against others who are defined in stereotypical terms. These others don't, in actual reality, exist. The so-called Democratic elitists, for example, are a stereotype who they can hate. Anyone who watches Fox News or listens to Rush Limbaugh knows that this hatred of the other is at the core of their politics.
George W. Bush has deliberately polarized and divided America for political purposes, politicizing the most basic questions of war and peace for partisan advantage.
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