QUOTE OF THE WEEK ARCHIVES

"'Charlie Savage's 'Takeover: The Return of the Imperial Presidency and the Subversion of American Democracy' makes urgent a question virtually absent from this campaign so far: how does the next president rebuild a constitutional order dismantled by executive coup in the name of a false security?'"
--Katrina Vanden Heuvel

"The entire idea of a 'war on terror' is a misleading concept that got this country off on the wrong track.   It is responsible for our invading Iraq under the wrong pretenses and for a decline of our political influence and military power that has no precedent."
--George Soros

"The Iraq War has cost an estimated $3 trillion.  If I were to give someone $3 trillion and tell him that he had to spend $100 million each and every day, seven days a week, 365 days a year, and then told him not to come back to me until he had spent every last penny, said person would not return for approximately 82 years."
letter to editor of Vanity Fair, June, 2008
Talkback:  And this wretched administration tells us that it can't afford to extend health insurance to poor kids.

"It would be a noble thing for the United States to support Israel's efforts to stop an Iranian bomb or, if it comes to that, to back Israel's response to an attack."  
--Zev Chafets, the director of the Israeli press office under Manachem Begin
Talkback: American forces already are hanging on by their  fingernails in Afghanistan and Iraq.   Noble or not, the United States must not allow itself to be goaded into another war that it cannot win. 

In the past year or so, the U.S. government has engaged in extensive diplomatic efforts to find acceptable homes for detainees of lesser interest.  Hundreds of prisoners have left this way...."Now that it's clear that Guantanamo is such an embarrassment, they are just shipping as many of them out the door as they can, and just keeping enough of them to save face.  It's a political process that has little to do with terrorism."
--Clive Statford Smith, who has long represented detainees at Guantanamo, in the New Yorker, April 14, 2008, p. 36

"We need language to remind us that this is our government, and that we thrive because of the schools and transit systems and 10,000 other services that exist only because we have joined together.  Instead of denouncing taxes, politicians would do better to appeal to the patriotic corners of our hearts..."   Richard Conniff

"In the speech in question, Mr. Obama was describing small towns in Pennsylvania and in the Midwest where jobs have been lost for 25 years, yet residents vote against their own interests.  In those towns, the frustrated workers repeatedly vote for the Republicans, who are less likely to protect their jobs and safety, while being more likely to benefit the worker's corporate employers.

"How do the Republicans do it?  Through the use of conservative opinion makers who divert attention from bread-and-butter issues that really affect frustrated voters and instead focus on guns, gays, and immigrant blaming, and whether a candidate was wearing a flag pin in his lapel"  Joel Peskoff (letter to editor)

 "...The Catholic Church for more than a thousand years held on to political control of the 'papal states,' the central portion of Italy.  They were the worst-governed political entity since the 16th century.   Finally, in the unification of Italy of the 19th century, there were wrested from papal control and Italy was unified... Now they (the popes) were free to be moral leaders alone.  The Dalai Lama ought to resign as political leader of Tibet and be solely 'the pope' of Tibetan Buddhism." 
--The Rev. Thomas Francis (letter to editor)

"O'Reilly, Hannity, and Rush are spewers of hate.  My problem with them is not a question of left or right.   William F. Buckley, the father of modern conservatism,  was a man of the right, but he was deeply read, thoughtful, and intellectually honest--a joy to listen to.  These men are narrowly read, driven by emotion, and intellectually dishonest.   By demonizing their fellow Americans who happen to hold views different from their own, they create bitter divisions, and do harm to the nation they profess to love."
--Will C. Justice

"A serious discussion of the issues would cast a negative light on the Republicans, who so successfully use the issues of guns, God, and immigration to win the votes of working-class people and then reward their support by giving tax breaks to the wealthiest while sending the children of working-class America to fight the war that Mr. Kristol and his fellow neoconservatives misled us into"
--Patricia Kenney (letter to the editor in response to William Kristol's recent attack on Barack Obama)

"It seems, as we've always suspected, that Mr. Bush's only real strategy for Iraq has been to hand the mess off to his successor.  Mr. Bush gave himself all the time he needs to walk away from one of the biggest strategic failure in American history." 
        --Editorial, The New York times   April 13, 2008

"There is one glaring omission from the list of things that President Bush could do "to give his successor a better shot at containing the chaos" in Iraq.  He could apologize for deceiving the American people into supporting a completely unnecessary war."--Ken Swensen  (letter to editor)

"As is the case in many regions that have been colonized or invaded by foreign powers, it will take generations to repair the damage we have done.  I hope that future presidents will learn from history, Vietnam and Iraq, and will never again try to 'liberate' a country from its own dictator."  --Susan Stern

"To those of us who spoke out against the war and have marched, protested and voted to end this disaster, last week's hearings were frustrating and depressing.  Yet President Bush continues to insist that we will succeed and that victory (whatever that means) will be ours...We have no energy left to challenge the lies that this administration continues to spin and can only wait for the end of this disastrous presidency."
--Cindy L Harden  (letter to editor)

"General David H. Petraeus"s own words spell out the situation in Iraq quite clearly.  If it is 'fragile and reversible' after five years, 4,000-plus lives of American service people and untold billions of our treasure, then it is fruitless and futile to continue." 
--Bob Newman

"When the abuses at Abu Ghraib became public, we were told these were the depraved actions of a few soldiers.  The Yoo memo makes it chillingly apparent that senior officials authorized unspeakable acts and went to great lengths to shield themselves from prosecution."  The New York Times Editorial Page, 4-4-08

(The Yoo memo, written in 2003 by then Pentagon lawyer John C. Yoo, attempted to justify President Bush's decision to ignore federal law and international treaties and authorize the abuse and torture of prisoners. That memo has just been released.)"The president's trumped-up and wholly unnecessary war was supposed to be good for the economy and our national security. It was supposed to ensure the supply of oil and keep prices down.   And it was to have been a war waged on a budget.   Disgraced former secretary of defense Donald Rumsfeld estimated the invasion would come in around $50 to $60 billion tops.  Paul Wolfowitz, Rumsfeld's disgraced former deputy, laughably stated that oil revenues would cover the cost of postwar reconstruction.  In fact, the war has already cost American taxpayers $600 billion."  --Graydon Carter, Vanity Fair  April 2008  (Italics added)
   
"Q: Do you feel bitter about your service for the Bush administration?
 A:  No.  I'm thankful I got fired when I did, so that I didn't have to be associated with what they subsequently did."
--former Treasury secretary Paul O'Neil, who was appointed secretary of the Treasury in 2001, then forced out after challenging President Bush's tax cuts.

"He's (Bush) over there arguing about who should get into NATO, and the American people are focused on what's in their pocketbooks."
--Kenneth M. Duberstein, chief of staff to President Reagan in his second term, commenting on Bush's NATO speeches in early April 2008
Talkback thinks it's a good thing that Bush has not been heavily involved in solving the financial crisis.  Everything Bush touches gets worse.

"Americans are bone-weary of a patriotism defined exclusively by flag lapel pins, the fear of terrorism and the prospect of perpetual war."   --Frank Rich

"To initiate a war of aggression is not only an international crime; it is the supreme international crime differing only from other war crimes in that it contains within it the accumulated evil of all crimes of war."   --The Nuremberg War Crimes Tribunal

"So!?" 
--Vice President Chaney, when reminded by a reporter on ABC's Good Morning America that two-thirds of Americans say it's not worth fighting in Iraq because the cost in lives exceeds the gains. 

"When the United States invaded Iraq and overthrew Saddam Hussein in 2003, it destabilized the whole Middle East.   The American military had taken over the one Arab state with plenty of oil and a large population.   Washington threatened to overthrow the government of Iran and Syria.  The first Shiite government to hold power in the Arab world in 800 years was soon installed in Baghdad.   The entire region was engulfed by a tidal wave of anti-Americanism."   Patrick Cockburn 

"Now that he's mucked up the world and the country, he can finally stop rebelling against his dad and relax in the certainty that the Bush name will forever be associated with crash and burn presidencies."
--Maureen Dowd

"These days, even free-market enthusiasts are talking about increased regulation of securities firms now that the Fed has shown that it will rush to their rescue if they get in trouble.  But Mr. McCain is selling the same old snake oil, claiming that deregulation and tax cuts cure all ills."--Paul Krugman

"By removing Saddam Hussein--the prime enemy of Iran in the Middle East and installing friends of Tehran in Baghdad--we have established Iraq as a willing satellite state of Iran and permanently altered the balance of power in the Middle East.  It is now time to pull out before we do any more harm."  --Arthur L. Yeager (letter to editor The New York Times, March 25, 2008)

"The president's trumped-up and wholly unnecessary war was supposed to be good for the economy and our national security.
It was supposed to ensure the supply of oil and keep prices down.   And it was to have been a war waged on a budget.   Disgraced former secretary of defense Donald Rumsfeld estimated the invasion would come in around $50 to $60 billion tops.  Paul Wolfowitz, Rumsfeld's disgraced former deputy, laughably stated that oil revenues would cover the cost of postwar reconstruction.  In fact, the war has already cost American taxpayers $600 billion." 
--Graydon Carter, Vanity Fair  April 2008  (Italics added)