A Quote by Steve Elmendorf
Clearly Democrats are not united in what is the critique of what we're doing there and what is the answer to what we do next. The difficulty of coming to a unified position is that for a lot of people who voted for it, they have to decide whether they can admit that they were misled.
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In 2003 I was saying, where are the ties [between Iraq] and al-Qaida? Where are the ties to 9/11? I knew it; where the f**k were these Democrats who said, 'We were misled'? That's the kind of thing that drives me crazy: 'We were misled.' F**k you, you weren't misled. You were afraid of being called unpatriotic.
I say this. If you're going to disenfranchise all of those people, some of whom have never voted before and they're 50 years old and older, but if you're going to disenfranchise all of those people, Independents, Democrats - you know, we have a lot of Democrats coming over. We have a lot of Independents coming over.
I used to think most Democrats in Congress who voted for [ObamaCare] really believed they were doing something good for the poor and the middle class. Now I wonder. It's crystal clear that just about everything President Barack Obama promised about his health plan was false, his deception deliberate. If Democrats really cared for the people harmed by the law, you'd think they'd admit their mistake, try to fix it. They haven't.
We all deserve credit for this new surveillance state that we live in because we the people voted for the Patriot Act. Democrats and Republicans alike....We voted for the people who voted for it, and then voted for the people who reauthorized it, then voted for the people who re-re-authorize d it.
Every single day, everywhere we went, people were coming up to me and Boyd repeatedly and saying, 'We're life-long Democrats, but we're voting for you. We've never voted for a Republican in our life.'
In the United Nations, when China entered, we voted on the same position, and since then we have maintained the same position, that position has not changed.
I was speaking on the radio in South Texas [in 2016], and I was speaking to Hispanics, and I said 'You know, you probably vote Democrat because your parents always voted Democrat, and your grandparents always voted Democrat, but let me tell you something. Thirty years ago in Texas, there were two parties - liberal Democrats and conservative Democrats. Looking at your principles, your values as Hispanics, in all probability your parents were conservative Democrats. The conservative Democrats of 30 years ago are Republicans today!'
I wish that there was a unified Democratic position on the war in Iraq. I was that there was a unified American position and everybody agreed with me that we ought to be out of there yesterday. But they don't, and that's the fact. I mean, he's stating a fact about what's going on.
A lot of people who voted for Trump, working class people, voted for Obama in 2008. They were seduced by the slogans "hope" and "change." They didn't get hope, they didn't get change, they were disillusioned. This time they voted for another candidate who is calling for hope and change and has promised to deliver all kinds of amazing things.
This is really a twin tragedy both for the people who were misled over there and for those of us who were misled over here.
All of these charges by McCarthy were a way of getting the Democrats out of power. The Democrats had controlled the government for 20 years, and the New Deal had helped a lot of people. So Republicans turned instead to saying that the Democrats were soft on communism, which was ridiculous.
There's a lot of sanctions left that we can start to do, whether it's with oil, whether it's with energy, whether it's with their maritime ships, exports, we can do a lot of different things that we haven't done yet. What we have to do is send a strong, unified message to North Korea that this nuclear tests unacceptable. And I think the international community do that.
I don't tend to offer up a critique unless I have a clearly formulated alternative, because there's nothing worse than people on a set or any kind of artistic life who critique something but who don't have anything to offer.
If I say look unless you change your leaders I will not give you any aid, you are likely to have people who say: "To the hell with you, we will struggle on the way but we will do it". Therefore what I am saying is - and I do not whether it is coming through clearly - there has to be a lot of care exercised by the people who are in the position to give or withhold assistance: if they start throwing their weight around, using extreme language, seeming to order other nations to do their bidding, then there will not be a good result, it will not be done.
There were people who voted for Obama simply because he was the first African-American. We had a lot of people that would not have voted for Obama but who did because they really hoped that the nation, making the statement electing an African-American president, would prove once and for all that this is not a racist nation. I believe that there were all kinds of people that voted for Obama with that hope. That was the reason. Everything else was irrelevant to them.
I think it's up to the parents to determine whether what they're doing is consigning their child to difficulty. It's not as though they were crippling their children after they were born.
