some words to ponder

Collin

DPrival78 wrote:

"If this were a dictatorship, it would be a heck of a lot easier - just so long as I'm the dictator."

George W. Bush - December 18, 2000

He's the decider, though.

PaperPlates

RainDog wrote:

I see. So I guess it is "much easier to attack the man and his failures than it is to admit his accomplishments and successes." No president was a complete failure after all.

Noper. Never said one was. Did I? I mean, Bill was one of the best presidents for our economy ever. Gates that is.

Reagan had communism, not a manufactured threat, but a real one.
Clinton rode the Microsoft wave.
Bush got handed 9/11.

Every president has his obstacles. Some just more so than others.

RainDog

PaperPlates wrote:

Noper. Never said one was. Did I? I mean, Bill was one of the best presidents for our economy ever. Gates that is.

Reagan had communism, not a manufactured threat, but a real one.
Clinton rode the Microsoft wave.
Bush got handed 9/11.

Every president has his obstacles. Some just more so than others.

"Bush got handed 9/11." I wonder who you think handed it to him - other than Osama, of course.

Again, interesting. Still can't bring yourself to do it, can you? Don't worry, I don't blame you. Just don't act all surprised when those on the other side of the fence find it difficult praising yours.

RainDog

Besides, Reagan (and every president since about 1945) had "the Soviet Union" - which collapsed under Reagan's watch, to his credit. Last I checked, though, authoritarian communism still exists.

trappedinmyradio

Thanks, A - below are my three favourite...very nice...i hope some people will print out their favourites and look at them every day.

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"The means of defense against foreign danger historically have become the instruments of tyranny at home." - James Madison

"Patriotism means to stand by the country. It does NOT mean to stand by the President or any other public official save exactly to the degree in which he himself stands by the country. It is patriotic to support him insofar as he efficiently serves the country. It is unpatriotic not to oppose him to the exact extent that by inefficiency or otherwise he fails in his duty to stand by the country." - Theodore Roosevelt

"Every gun that is made, every warship launched, every rocket fired signifies in the final sense, a theft from those who hunger and are not fed, those who are cold and are not clothed. This world in arms is not spending money alone. It is spending the sweat of its laborers, the genius of its scientists, the hopes of its children. This is not a way of life at all in any true sense. Under the clouds of war, it is humanity hanging on a cross of iron."
-- Dwight Eisenhower

Abookamongstthemany

"And in the general hardening of outlook that set in ... practices which had been long abandoned - imprisonment without trial, the use of war prisoners as slaves, public executions, torture to extract confessions ... and the deportation of whole populations - not only became common again, but were tolerated and even defended by people who considered themselves enlightened and progressive."
George Orwell, 1984


"The American public has become so conditioned by crises, by warnings, by words, that there are few, other than the young, who protest against what is happening."
Senator J. William Fulbright

"The people will believe what the media tells them they believe."
George Orwell

"Politicians and the media have conspired to infantilize, to dumb down, the American public. At heart, politicians don't believe that Americans can handle complex truths, and the news media, especially television news, basically agrees."
Tom Fenton, former CBS foreign correspondent

"The American press, with a very few exceptions, is a kept press. Kept by the big corporations the way a whore is kept by a rich man."
Theodore Dreiser

" never saw a foreign intervention that the [New York] Times did not support, never saw a fare increase or a rent increase or a utility rate increase that it did not endorse, never saw it take the side of labor in a strike or lockout, or advocate a raise for underpaid workers. And don't let me get started on universal health care and Social Security. So why do people think the Times is liberal?"
veteran New York Times reporter John Hess

"People of privilege will always risk their complete destruction rather than surrender any material part of their advantage."
John Kenneth Galbraith, American economist

Abookamongstthemany

"Economic hit men (EHMs) are highly paid professionals who cheat countries around the globe out of trillions of dollars. They funnel money from the World Bank, the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID), and other foreign "aid" organizations into the coffers of huge corporations and the pockets of a few wealthy families who control the planet's natural resources. Their tools include fraudulent financial reports, rigged elections, payoffs, extortion, sex, and murder. They play a game as old as empire, but one that has taken on new and terrifying dimensions during this time of globalization. I should know; I was an EHM."
John Perkins, Confessions of an Economic Hit Man

"While free markets tend to democratize a society, unfettered capitalism leads invariably to corporate control of government."
Robert Kennedy. Jr.

"We were not born critical of existing society. There was a moment in our lives (or a month, or a year) when certain facts appeared before us, startled us, and then caused us to question beliefs that were strongly fixed in our consciousness-embedded there by years of family prejudices, orthodox schooling, imbibing of newspapers, radio, and television."
Howard Zinn

"There is a hard core of people in the United States who will not be moved, whatever facts you present, from their conviction that this nation means only to do good, and almost always does good, in the world, that it is the beacon of liberty and freedom."
Howard Zinn

"Look, if you think any American official is going to tell you the truth, then you're stupid. Did you hear that? - stupid."
Arthur Sylvester, Assistant Secretary of Defense for Public Affairs, 1965

" The news and truth are not the same thing. "
Walter Lippmann

"America will never be destroyed from the outside. If we falter, and lose our freedoms, it will be because we destroyed ourselves."
Abraham Lincoln

"If fascism ever came to the United States, it would be wrapped in an American flag."
Huey Long

"fascism - A system of government that exercises a dictatorship of the extreme right, typically through the merging of state and business leadership, together with belligerent nationalism."
The American Heritage Dictionary, 1983


"The biggest political joke in America is that we have a liberal press. It's a joke taken seriously by a surprisingly large number of people... The myth of the liberal press has served as a political weapon for conservative and right-wing forces eager to discourage critical coverage of government and corporate power ... Americans now have the worst of both worlds: a press that, at best, parrots the pronouncements of the powerful and, at worst, encourages people to be stupid with pseudo-news that illuminates nothing but the bottom line."
Mark Hertzgaard

" The crisis of modern democracy is a profound one. Free elections, a free press and an independent judiciary mean little when the free market has reduced them to commodities available on sale to the highest bidder."
Arundhati Roy

PaperPlates

These guys will love these..................


Democrats always assure us that deterrence will work, but when the time comes to deter, they're against it.
Ann Coulter

Democrats couldn't care less if people in Indiana hate them. But if Europeans curl their lips, liberals can't look at themselves in the mirror.
Ann Coulter

If we're so cruel to minorities, why do they keep coming here? Why aren't they sneaking across the Mexican border to make their way to the Taliban?
Ann Coulter

Liberals are stalwart defenders of civil liberties - provided we're only talking about criminals.
Ann Coulter


Usually the nonsense liberals spout is kind of cute, but in wartime their instinctive idiocy is life-threatening.
Ann Coulter

We've finally given liberals a war against fundamentalism, and they don't want to fight it. They would, except it would put them on the same side as the United States.
Ann Coulter

and to shake it up just a bit........

It has been said that democracy is the worst form of government except all the others that have been tried.
Sir Winston Churchill

One ought never to turn one's back on a threatened danger and try to run away from it. If you do that, you will double the danger. But if you meet it promptly and without flinching, you will reduce the danger by half.
Sir Winston Churchill


When the eagles are silent, the parrots begin to jabber.
Sir Winston Churchill

The proposition that the people are the best keepers of their own liberties is not true. They are the worst conceivable, they are no keepers at all; they can neither judge, act, think, or will, as a political body.
John Adams

Cosmo

"To-day, after two thousand years, with deepest emotion I recognize more profoundly than ever before the fact that it was for this that He had to shed His blood upon the Cross. As a Christian I have no duty to allow myself to be cheated, but I have the duty to be a fighter for truth and justice... And if there is anything which could demonstrate that we are acting rightly it is the distress that daily grows. For as a Christian I have also a duty to my own people."
-Adolf Hitler, in a speech on 12 April 1922

Pearl Jam and toast

I was reading those thinking "CMON WHERE'S DWIGHT?" and then he came up brilliantly.

Thanks, I loved reading that.