Columnists From The United States

"But Trump will not stop. He continues to single out Jewish lawmakers (e.g., House Intelligence Committee Chairman Adam B. Schiff (D-Calif.) is "shifty") and his Republican Party routinely invokes Jewish billionaire George Soros as a maniacal force behind progressive Democrats. This is today's Republican Party: a cesspool of right-wing nationalist rhetoric, anti-Semitic tropes that find favor in certain circles (since America is a white, Christian nation in their eyes, Jews are "outsiders"), as well as anti-immigrant screeds and conspiracy theories. They overlap and reinforce one another."

"There is a reason that American Jews overwhelmingly voted against [[Donald Trump|[Donald] Trump]]. These Americans voted their values, which include opposition to racism in all forms, a concern for the poor and the stranger, and a reverence for the rule of law."

"Cleveland is a formidable city. It is a city with the biceps of industry and it has a rough-hewn manner that is indigenous to the Midwest of America. Cleveland also has some of the charm and grace of an old European city and, withal, it shows indisputable traces of its New England heritage as no other city west of the Alleghenies does."

"I cannot forget the words of a New Yorker who ventured as far west as Cleveland a few years ago. He looked at the vast sweep of the forested city, the soft gray-blue lake lapping at the foot of the high bluffs, the ubiquitous placement of beautiful residential neighborhoods and parks, and he blinked. 'This Cleveland,' he said, pondering, 'has to be the best kept secret in the United States.' What he meant to say, of course, was that it was a secret to other Americans. Not the Russians. That is one thing you have to say about those Russians – they are quick to notice a good thing like Cleveland."

"For all practical purposes, though – and hang the technicalities – everything east of the [Cuyahoga] river constitutes the East Side. Everything west of the river can be considered the West Side. That is the realistic view taken by Clevelanders. When two Clevelanders meet for the first time, they fence conversationally until the vital question of East or West is answered. Knowing which side of town a new acquaintance comes from makes a subtle difference."

"It may be said that the people of Cleveland are opposites to the people of Texas; instead of boasting about the city's attributes, they dwell eloquently on its deficiencies to the extent, often, where outsiders feel compelled to take up the Cleveland cause in a curious reversal of normal American procedure."

"The Cuyahoga's serpentine course and narrow physical limitations did not blind early observers to its special credentials and its great potential. Among the far-sighted ones were Benjamin Franklin, who in 1765 saw the military advantages in the establishment of an army post at the place where the Cuyahoga flows into Lake Erie, and George Washington, who recognized the practicability of a trade-and-travel connection of the Ohio River and the Great Lakes by way of the Cuyhoga and the Muskingum rivers and foresaw the day when a great city would rise on the site."

"This sharia supremacist agenda, which is the destruction of those that they believe Allah has said are enemies, are vile, and the most heinous of the infidels – whether it’s homosexuals or whether it’s Jews or whether it’s women, feminists and the like, all of these are people you’d think the left would be all about protecting because they are, after all, core constituencies on the left, but instead, they are turning on them. They are turning a blind eye to them in some cases, at the very least and at worst, they’re actually encouraging Islamists to think that with the left’s support, they’ll be able to oppress – and ultimately, hopefully, they think – impose sharia here."

"The question is, will he have Republicans in charge who want to help him succeed, or will he have guys who, you know, we’ve been wrestling with for whatever it’s been now, the past four or six years, who have been more concerned about getting along with the Democrats than in trying to respond to this popular sentiment and protect our Republic against the global statists."

"Can water and oil mix? In the same manner, pure Islamic teachings and pure Western values are often antithetical to one another. For example, the West believes in freedom of religion, whereas in Islam those who seek to apostatize are penalized, including by death; the West believes in freedom of speech, whereas in Islam any critical talk concerning Muhammad can get one killed. One can go on and on but the point should be clear. Of course, a nominal/secular Muslim may be able to assimilate in a Western society, but that is not a reflection of Islam, which is hardly nominal but rather a full way of life based on sharia."

"Do we love one another enough to say that all life has value, and that dignity lies in respecting that truth until the very end? It’s suffering and heart-wrenching, but amazing things can happen in those final months and days and hours. I’ve seen it, and I’m far from alone. Don’t deprive the vulnerable of love. There should be no off-ramp, but lots of roadside assistance."

"Because the American people have traditionally taken a warlike, but not military, attitude to battle, and because they have always coupled a certain belligerence - no American likes being pushed around - with a complete unwillingness to prepare for combat, the Korean War was difficult, perhaps the most difficult in their history."

"Yet every democratic government is reluctant to face the fact. Reservists and citizen-soldiers stand ready, in every free nation, to stand to the colors and die in holocaust, the big war. Reservists and citizen-soldiers remain utterly reluctant to stand and die in anything less. None want to serve on the far frontiers, or to maintain lonely, dangerous vigils on the periphery of Asia. There has been every indication that mass call-ups for cold war moves may result in mass disaffection."

"The United States will be forced to fight wars of policy during the balance of the century. This is inevitable, since the world is seething with disaffection and revolt, which, however justified and merited, plays into Communist hands, and swings the world balance ever their way."

"For the first time in recent history, American ground units had been committed during the initial days of a war; there had been no allies to hold the line while America prepared. For the first time, many Americans could understand what had happened to Britain at Dunkirk."

"To make a war, sometimes it is necessary that everyone guess wrong."

"To continue to utilize the forces of our Air and Navy without an effective ground element cannot be decisive."

"There had been many brave men in the ranks, but they were learning that bravery of itself has little to do with success in battle."

"The problem is to see not what is desirable, or nice, or politically feasible, but what is necessary."

"A nation that does not prepare for all the forms of war should then renounce the use of war in national policy. A people that does not prepare to fight should then be morally prepared to surrender. To fail to prepare soldiers and citizens for limited, bloody ground action, and then to engage in it, is folly verging on the criminal."

"America is rich and fat and very, very noticeable in this world. It is a forlorn hope that we should be left alone."

"It is the nature of peoples to see the ancient foes, and to ignore those newly arising."

"War was to be entered upon with sadness, with regret, but also with ferocity."

"Revolution and terror are synonymous; only with the passage of time does any revolution become respectable."

"Collective security had a fine sound, but it was still little more than a word; it would still be the United States, and the United States alone, that held the far frontier. No one else had the will or the power."

"Americans in 1950 rediscovered something that since Hiroshima they had forgotten: you may fly over a land forever; you may bomb it, atomize it, pulverize it and wipe it clean of life—but if you desire to defend it, protect it, and keep it for civilization, you must do this on the ground, the way the Roman legions did, by putting your young men into the mud."

"If war is to have any meaning at all, its purpose must be to establish control over peoples and territories, and ultimately, this can be done only as Alexander the Great did it, on the ground."

"History has shown very clearly that for democracy to continue, the people, and not the generals or even the executive authority, must have control over the military."

"Well, it is humiliation reflection, that the straightest road to a man's heart is through his palate."

"We can’t have two things at the same time. We can’t have businesses in China, and we can’t have a free marketplace of ideas in the United States. You can have one, but you can’t have both at the same time, and because we need to protect our democracy, I think we need to get our companies out of China."

"What we’re seeing is what I call information warfare. It’s basically the kind of warfare that’s gonna dominate our society because we live in an information age, and we’re under assault from all quarters, not just the Russians. The Chinese, the Iranians, and I even put the liberal left in the kind of domestic information warfare. It’s a broad-scale assault, and the United States is ill-prepared to deal with it. We just don’t have anything that can counteract these lies and disinformation the way we did during the Cold War."

"Many of the most profound truths come not in shouting and scandal but, rather, in a whisper. In our noisy world, they are easily missed or dismissed."

"People often have trouble finding lasting satisfaction from worldly rewards, because as soon as we acquire something, our desire resets and we are looking to the next reward."

"A veteran Justice Department prosecutor told one of the authors that while there was never an official memorandum delineating the Clinton administration’s policy on [voter fraud], the unofficial word had come down from the Clinton political leadership to the career prosecutors that there was ‘no interest’ in pursuing voter fraud cases."

"Two of the biggest barriers to the prosecution of voter fraud are the misapplication of resources within the Justice Department and the political and ideological bias of too many of its lawyers."

"The 93 offices of the U.S. Attorneys located throughout the country share responsibility for prosecutions with the Election Crimes Unit. But given their many other responsibilities, vote fraud is not high on their priorities, particularly because they are well aware of the enormous criticism prosecutors receive from the civil rights community when they pursue election cases, as happened during the Bush administration. There is a Designated Election Officer in each office, an Assistant U.S. Attorney, who is supposed to deal with election crimes. But the vast majority have never investigated or prosecuted a voter-fraud case, and have no experience or interest in doing so."

"Actual election results in Georgia and Indiana confirm that suppositions about voter ID hurting minority turnout are wrong. In 2008, in the first presidential election after their voter ID laws went into effect, both states saw turnout increase more dramatically in both the presidential preference primaryandthe general election than turnout increased in some stateswithoutthe photo-ID requirement."

"The double-voting problem was illustrated, to the great embarrassment of the League of Women Voters, by an amicus brief the League filed in Crawford v. Marion County Election Board, the Indiana voter ID case. One of the Indiana voters highlighted in the League’s brief was used as an example of someone who had difficulty voting because of the voter ID requirement. But when and Indiana newspaper interviewed the voter, it discovered that her problems stemmed from her trying to use a Florida drivers’ license to vote in Indiana. Not only did she have a Florida driver’s license, she was also registered to vote in Florida, where she owned a second home and had claimed residency by filing for a homestead exemption on her property taxes, normally only available to state residents. So the Indiana law worked as intended: It prevented someone from voting twice who might otherwise have done so illegally without detection."

"The California secretary of state reported in 1998 that two to three thousand of the individuals summoned for jury duty in Orange County each month claimed an exemption from jury service because they were not U.S. citizens, and 85 to 90 percent of these individuals were summoned from the voter registration list, rather than DMV records. While some of those individuals may have simply committed perjury to avoid jury service, this represents a significant number of potentially illegal voters: 24,000 to 36,000 noncitizens summoned from the voter registration list over a one-year period."

"Voter ID might also help prevent double-voting by someone who is registered in two states. In 2004, a comparison of the voter registration rolls in North and South Carolina by the Charlotte Observerfound more than 60,000 people who were registered in two states, at least 180 of whom were listed ‘as having voted in both states in either the 2000 or 2002 general election.’"

"One of the witnesses before the New York grand jury described how he led a crew of eight individuals from polling place to polling pace to vote. Each member of his crew voted in excess of 20 times, and there were approximately 20 other such crews operating during that election. This extensive fraud could have been stopped if New York required voters to authenticate their identify at the polls, and there had been poll watchers making sure that election officials were verifying voters’ IDs. The grand jury explained that ‘the ease and boldness with which these fraudulent schemes were carried out shows the vulnerability of our entire electoral process to unscrupulous and fraudulent manipulations.’ As a recent, thousands of fraudulent votes were cast in New York legislative and congressional elections."

"A similar investigation by the New York Daily News of voting rolls in New York City and Florida found 46,000 individuals registered in both states, 68 percent of whom were Democrats; 12 percent were Republicans, and 16 percent didn’t claim a party. Between 400 and 1,000 individuals voted in both states in at least one election—this in Florida, where the presidential election was decided in 2000 by 537 votes—and some of the registered voters double-voted in multiple elections."

"Absentee-ballot fraud in particular is difficult to control. It is ‘the tool of choice’ for those who are engaging in election fraud,’ as the Florida Department of Law Enforcement concluded in its investigation of the 1997 Miami mayoral election. The results of that election were thrown out because of massive fraud involving more than five thousand absentee ballots, andThe Miami Heraldwon a Pulitzer Prize in 1999 for its innovative investigation into the voter fraud. With the increasing use of no-fault absentee voting and all-mail elections, there is the real risk that fraud will affect more election results and potentially wipe out voting rights hard won by the civil rights movement."

"Jimmy Carter knows the issue of voter fraud well. His first run for office, in a Democratic primary in Quitman County, Georgia in 1962, was stolen by voter fraud that local residents said ‘had been going on on election days as long as most people could remember.’ He went to court and got the election overturned, and ended up winning in the general election. Newly minted state senator Carter helped sponsor a comprehensive reform of the state’s election code; the culprit responsible for stealing the primary election was later convicted of voter fraud in a previous congressional election. As Jimmy Carter learned, fraudulent voting does exist, and criminal penalties imposed after the fact are an insufficient deterrent."

"There is no question that every individual who is eligible to vote should have the opportunity to do so. It is equally important, however, that the votes of eligible voters are not stolen or diluted by a fraudulent or bogus ballot cast by an ineligible or imaginary voter. The evidence from academic studies and actual turnout in elections is overwhelming that—contrary to the shrill claims of opponents—voter ID does not depress turnout, including among the ranks of minority, poor, and elderly voters, which exist; the real myth is the claim that voters are disenfranchised because of voter ID requirements."

"The Department of Justice prosecuted its largest voter fraud case ever in Chicago—prosecutors estimated that 100,000 fraudulent ballots were cast in the 1982 gubernatorial election. The conspirators came within five thousand votes of changing the race to the losing Democratic candidate, and a federal grand jury found that ‘similar fraudulent activities’ had occurred in prior elections. Ten of thousands of individuals had voted twice; thousands of other bogus votes had been cast in the name of individuals who were dead, in prison, or whose registered addresses were vacant lots. Absent voters were impersonated, voters’ signatures on ballot applications ‘had been forged wholesale in many precincts,’ and votes were fraudulently cast under fictitious voter registrations and in the names of transients, the incapacitated, and senior citizens."

"The 2000 recount was more than merely a national embarrassment; it left a lasting scar on the American electoral psyche. A Zogby poll a few years ago found that 38 percent of Americans still regarded the 2000 election outcome as questionable."

"In recent years, the biggest battle in election reform has been over voter ID—requiring voters to present a government-issued photographic identification when they vote at their polling places on Election Day."

"In addition to voting in the names of fictitious people, the crews used several other methods of casting fraudulent votes involving voting under the names of legitimate voters. By reviewing voter registration records at the Board of Elections prior to Election Day, conspirators were able to identify newly registered voters. Crews would go to the appropriate polling places as soon as polls opened in the morning to vote under those names: The reasoning behind this method, according to the experience of one witness, was that newly registered voters often do not vote. By arriving at the polling sites early, the bogus voter would not need to worry about the possibility that the real voter had actually voted."

"The Alabama voter fraud described by former Congressman Davis, which occurs in predominately black, poor counties, is vividly illustrated by a criminal prosecution that occurred in the 1990s in Greene County, Alabama, when local citizens, reform political candidates, federal and state prosecution, and a hometown newspaper banded together to fight absentee-ballot fraud in the county, one of the poorest in Alabama. Unfortunately, liberal groups including the NAACP and the Southern Christian Leadership Conference worked equally hard to undermine the effort, as they have worked to undermine voter ID requirements and other reforms intended to ensure the integrity of elections… But in the end, justice prevailed, with the conviction of 11 conspirators who had fixed local elections for years… The Greene County case proves that absentee-ballot fraud is real, and not a cover story for an imagined voter-disenfranchisement conspiracy."