Politicians From Texas

"To those who work outside Washington, I would send a special message. At times it may be frustrating when it seems that the head office is thousands of miles away and the message is not getting through. But if I may, I'm going to issue a verbal Executive order: We're going to listen, because the heart of our government is not here in Washington, it's in every county office, every town, every city across this land. Wherever the people of America are, that's where the heart of our government is."

"The Government is here to serve, but it cannot replace individual service. And shouldn't all of us who are public servants also set an example of service as private citizens? So, I want to ask all of you, and all the appointees in this administration, to do what so many of you already do: to reach out and lend a hand. Ours should be a nation characterized by conspicuous compassion, generosity that is overflowing and abundant."

"And let all Americans remember that no problem of human making is too great to be overcome by human ingenuity, human energy, and the untiring hope of the human spirit. I believe this. I would not have asked to be your President if I didn't."

"I say we need more Republicans. But right now, as you know, the Democrats control both the Houses of the Congress; and they control every single committee of the United States Congress. And that's all the more reason for Republicans to work to make this budget now the best possible. We're fighting against the odds. We're fighting against the majorities-the liberal majorities-that control both Houses. We're fighting the entrenched tax-and-spend philosophy on Capitol Hill."

"I think there's a Trojan horse lurking in the weeds, ready to pull a fast one on the American people, and I simply am not going to let that happen."

"Since this is Flag City, let me close with a flag story. During the Gulf war, I received a letter from the Mayor of Stantonsburg, North Carolina. He told me about watching two little girls about 10 years old walking across the school yard. One day, they went across. He was watching, and they were pulling their mom's laundry on a wagon. As the girls passed the pole in front of the town hall, they looked up and saw the United States flag flapping in the wind. Unaware that anyone was watching, these two little girls stopped, placed their hands over their hearts, and pledged allegiance to the flag. One little girl said simply, "It's important to do this, you know, because of the war and all." Well, this election, like all elections, is about that little girl, and all the kids in Findlay, in Lima, and all the kids in America. If we do what is right today, we can take advantage of the opportunity of our global victory. We can build a land where they will be safe and strong and secure, where they can climb the flagpole of opportunity and put their hands over their hearts with pride, knowing that in their land the sun is always just peeking out over the horizon."

"It's like WWE, but for smart people!"

"He's an ass."

"I think Romney is the best choice for us."

"No, I don't know that atheists should be regarded as citizens, nor should they be regarded as patriotic. This is one nation under God.… I support the separation of church and state. I'm just not very high on atheists."

"The sort of man who steps out of the shower to take a piss."

"In 1980 the Democrats were pretty much stuck with Jimmy Carter and Walter Mondale, who ran under the slogan "Four More Years?" The Republicans, meanwhile, had a spirited primary campaign season, which came down to a duel between Reagan and George Herbert Walker Norris Wainright Armoire Vestibule Pomegranate Bush IV, who had achieved a distinguished record of public service despite having a voice that sounded like he had just inhaled an entire blimp-load of helium."

"On Monday in Baltimore, many baseball fans may be tempted to utter a testy little boo when they see yet another politician who seems to be horning in on Opening Day. President George Bush is different. If his First Ball bounces, it was probably a curve. And if he's wearing a glove, it's his own."

"I just couldn't believe that any politician could look that comfortable out there. [...] It was obvious he had played before. You could just tell, the way he shifted his feet and changed position. He had one difficult fielding chance. He knocked the ball down and threw to the pitcher for the out."

"Bush was in many ways the maestro president when it came to foreign policy. With extraordinary dexterity, he handled the fall of the Berlin Wall, the collapse of all the communist regimes in Eastern Europe, German reunification and then the Soviet disintegration. On his watch, Nelson Mandela was set free and apartheid consigned to the history books; and Saddam Hussein’s invasion of Kuwait was reversed. And yet still the presidency was won by a scandal-prone Southern governor with the banal but brilliant slogan: “It’s the economy, stupid.”"

"Of all the thousands of rulers, potentates, strongmen, juntas, and warlords the Americans have dealt with in all corners of the world, General Manuel Antonio Noriega is the only one the Americans came after like... the United States Invasion of Panama... The Bush administration might have quashed the wimp rumors, but now it faced the problem of legitimacy, of appearing to be a bully caught in an act of terrorism. It was disclosed that the U.S. Army had prohibited the press, the Red Cross, and other outside observers from entering the heavily bombed areas for three days, while soldiers incinerated and buried the casualties. The press asked questions about how much evidence of criminal and other inappropriate behavior was destroyed, and about how many died because they were denied timely medical attention, but such questions were never answered."

"We shall never know many of the facts about the... [U.S. invasion of Panama], nor shall we know the true extent of the massacre. Defense Secretary Dick Cheney claimed a death toll between five hundred and six hundred, but independent human rights groups estimated it at three thousand to five thousand, with another twenty-five thousand left homeless... Noriega was arrested, flown to Miami, and sentenced to forty years' imprisonment; at that time, he was the only person in the United States officially classified as a prisoner of war... The world was outraged by this breach of international law and by the needless destruction of a defenseless people at the hands of the most powerful military force on the planet, but few in the United States were aware of either the outrage or the crimes Washington had committed... White House phone calls to publishers and television executives, congress people who dared not object, lest the wimp factor become their problem, and journalists who thought the public needed heroes rather than objectivity."

"Listening to George Bush, toward the end of his speech, read the poetry written by Ray Price with the gestures scripted by speech coach Roger Ailes, I was struck anew by the elaborate charade of emperor's clothing in which the American press is so supinely complicit. Bush has no more sense of poetry than he does of grammar. After the speech there was much division in the pundit corps over whether Bush had just "hit it out of the park" (both sports and war metaphors were much in vogue) or whether we had just heard a load of nasty political drivel without a single redeeming idea. But all hands were solemnly pretending we had just heard George Bush, the nation's most incoherent speaker, stand up and make a fifty-eight-minute political address. George Bush without a Teleprompter can scarcely produce an intelligible sentence. I've been listening to him since 1966 and must confess to a secret fondness for his verbal dyslexia. Hearing him has the charm and suspense of those old adventure-movie serials: Will this man ever fight his way out of this sentence alive? As he flops from one syntactical Waterloo to the next, ever in the verbless mode, in search of the long lost predicate, or even a subject, you find yourself struggling with him, rooting for him. What is this man actually trying to say? What could he possibly mean? Hold it, I think I see it!...The fact is that unless someone else writes a speech for him, the President of the United States sounds like a border-line moron. But the media sit around pretending that he can actually talk-can convince, inspire and lead us."

"But setting aside his relative inaction during the recession, Bush’s long record of supporting policies that benefit the wealthy at the expense of average Americans cemented his legacy. He was no patrician statesman whose example can lead us out of our current dark times. Rather, he was a foot soldier for the ruling class who played a substantial role in bringing us to where we are today. His role as a chief architect of U.S. neoliberal trade policy through ushering in the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) helped to exacerbate global inequality and fuel the loss of over one million manufacturing jobs in the United States and Canada."

"From the beginning of his presidency, Bush built on the legislative victories of the Reagan Revolution, spearheading wealth redistribution programs benefiting the corporate class — and his own family. In 1989, Bush bailed out the heavily deregulated Savings and Loan industry, to the tune of about $124.6 billion in taxpayer funded money. The New York Times later published a report detailing how Bush’s son Jeb had personally benefited from the bailout, noting that the federal government paid ​“more than $4 million to make good” on a loan Jeb had used to buy a Miami office building."

"President Trump’s path to the White House rests in part on the working-class misery engendered by decades of neoliberal trade policies. During the 2016 campaign, Trump ran on an anti-free trade platform. Rather than proposing the dissolution of the entire existing trade system, Trump told voters he’d use his expert negotiating skills to secure a ​"better deal" for them. He cast the blame for inequality not on the greed of capital, but on ​“illegals” desperate and eager to take away jobs away from Americans. While Trump’s rhetoric is appallingly racist and his policies have only benefited the rich, his ascent — along with the rise of far right populism in Europe — helps illustrates the extent of the damage dealt by Bush and other architects of neoliberal trade policy."

"The President made his move. He nominated a man as different from Thurgood Marshall as George Bush differs from Mahatma Gandhi...Among those who detested Marshall and who generally despise Black men there was a willingness to promote Clarence Thomas because Clarence Thomas was not the point: The point is to homogenize the Supreme Court. If someone with Black skin will serve that purpose, then fine! But we, the people, must not yield to judgment without representation. If we yield, there will be no justice. And without justice, believe me, there will be no peace."

"in 1988 George H. W. Bush came to power promising action on acid rain."

"I would often surprise people by citing George H. W. Bush as a recent president whose foreign policy I admired. Bush, along with James Baker, Colin Powell, and Brent Scowcroft, had deftly managed the end of the Cold War and the successful prosecution of the Gulf War."

"I almost wish the Gulf War had gone on a little longer. The first propaganda was so powerful, excessive, overbearing, but a lot of those yellow ribbons would have been frayed, removed from lapels and doorways-and not only because Americans were being killed. Bush never did get rid of the wonderful "Vietnam Syndrome." For that reason, the government knew that it had to be a short war."

"Poor George. He can’t help it. He was born with a silver foot in his mouth."

"Regime change in Iraq wasn't a new idea. It's not something that flew into D.C. with George W. Bush. George Herbert Walker Bush invented regime change in Iraq and Bill Clinton inherited it, and ran with it. The CIA made four concerted efforts to assassinate Saddam Hussein under Clinton's leadership. So it's not like this was a passive program; it was an active program."

"Way back in 1988, on July 3, the U.S.S. Vincennes, a missile cruiser stationed in the Persian Gulf, accidentally shot down an Iranian airliner and killed two hundred and ninety civilian passengers. George Bush the First, who was at the time on his"

"During the parade, George H.W. Bush came over and talked with Carolyn and me at length, as proud a father as could be. It was not quite two years earlier that I'd had the pleasure of celebrating his seventy-fifth birthday with him in what was dubbed Operation Spring Colt, a parachute jump from twelve thousand feet with the parachuting team. What few people realize is that shortly after he jumped from the aircraft, the former President had trouble getting into position and began to tumble uncontrollably. It was only through the extraordinary aerial prowess of one of the Golden Knights, the Army's elite parachute team and a member of the U.S. Freefall Association that they were able to steady the guest of honor so that his parachute could properly deploy, and that happened only at the last possible moment. Once safely on the ground, the former President was aglow, joking with us on how much more pleasurable it was than the first time he'd jumped, which was over the Pacific after his bomber had been disabled by Japanese gunfire in World War II."

"Before the game, they said the V.P. was going to pinch-hit, and he requested me to pitch to him. He even called me "Spahnie" this afternoon. Talk about a thrill."

"Yale teammate Dick Tettelbach has seriously compared him to Keith Hernandez as a defensive first baseman. "Absolutely superb. A real fancy Dan.""

"So the punchline for George Bush is this, you would have wanted him on your side. He never lost his sense of humor. Humor is a universal solvent against the abrasiveness of life. He never hated anyone — he knew what his mother and my mother always knew: hatred corrodes the container it’s carried in."

"I just think that what’s happening right now, inspired by the Republican right and the Bush definition of family values and all other values, is so devastating and so negative and so really scary. And I keep waiting: where is the reaction? Where is the revolt? Where is the, you know, the democracy? And where is all these things? And so, I don’t know where it’s all going to go. But I’ll tell you, that’s one reason I’m going to stay around."

"[George W. Bush] was having lunch with a good friend of mine in 1999 and talking about running for president. he said, "I don't know if I'll run, but if I do, I'll win." My friend, who is a Democrat, thought it was the usual political bragging and said, "why do you say that? Every candidate says that." W turned to him and said, "Because I know exactly who I am and Al Gore has no idea who he is." You know something? W nailed it."

"Some U.S. journalist came up to me and said: 'How can you say this about President Bush?' Well, I think what I said then was quite mild. I actually think that Bush is the greatest threat to life on this planet that we've most probably ever seen. The policies he is initiating will doom us to extinction."

"George Bush is just about everything that is repellent in politics... You have got this super-patriotic hawk who was a coward when his country was actually involved in a war and has the most venal and corrupt administration since President Harding in the 20s. He is not a legitimate president. ... This really is a completely unsupportable government and I look forward to it being overthrown as much as I looked forward to Saddam Hussein being overthrown."

"George W. Bush has inadvertently destroyed only Baghdad, not Washington, and the costs of the Iraq War in blood and treasure are far less than those of Korea and Vietnam. Yet he will be remembered for the Iraq conflict for generations, long after tax-cut-driven deficits, No Child Left Behind and comprehensive immigration reform are forgotten. The fact that Bush followed the invasion of Afghanistan, which had sheltered al-Qaeda, with the toppling of Saddam Hussein, will puzzle historians for centuries. It is as though, after Japan had bombed Pearl Harbor, FDR had asked Congress to declare war on Argentina."

"Bush rose to some pretty big occasions; something that no American leader has quite lived up to since. But it was Bush's decency and insistence on preserving the compassionate side of conservatism that, I think, we are beginning to miss the most... Bush managed to win two elections. For all his flaws, he was classy and serious... I suspect that Bush, like Harry Truman, who also left office as a bit of a joke, will enjoy a bit of a grudging resurgence in popularity in years to come. Do we miss him yet? More and more each day."

"I said that a solution to the problems right now, I told Bush, is a Marshall Plan. He got angry. He said the Marshall Plan is a crazy idea of the Democrats. He said the best way to revitalize the economy is war and that the United States has grown stronger with war. ... Those were his exact words. ... The Democrats had been wrong. All of the economic growth of the United States has been encouraged by wars. He said it very clearly."

"That international criminal, I mean George Bush... If there is any justice in the world, undoubtedly, this man and his ilk, without a doubt, should be sentenced to 100 deaths. There is no doubt about it."

"He knows I have nothing, no mass weapons. He knows he'll never find them."

"He's unusually incurious, abnormally unintelligent, amazingly inarticulate, fantastically uncultured, extraordinarily uneducated and apparently quite proud of all of these things."

"His eyes are so close together he could use a monocle."

"Economy is on the rise, kicking into overdrive / Angry liberals can't believe it's cause of W's policies / Unemployment's staying down, Democrats are wondering how / revenue is going up, can you say "tax cuts" / Bush was right! / Bush was right! / Bush was right!"

"We treat presidential speeches as if they are written by speechwriters, then handed to the President for delivery. If I could show you one experience from my time working for President Bush, it would be an editing session in the Oval with him and his speechwriters. You think that me cold-calling you is nerve-wracking? Try defending a sentence you inserted into a draft speech, with President Bush pouncing on the slightest weakness in your argument or your word choice. In addition to his analytical speed, what most impressed me were his memory and his substantive breadth. We would sometimes have to brief him on an issue that we had last discussed with him weeks or even months before. He would remember small facts and arguments from the prior briefing and get impatient with us when we were rehashing things we had told him long ago. And while my job involved juggling a lot of balls, I only had to worry about economic issues. In addition to all of those, at any given point in time he was making enormous decisions on Iraq and Afghanistan, on hunting al-Qaeda and keeping America safe. He was making choices not just on taxes and spending and trade and energy and climate and health care and agriculture and Social Security and Medicare, but also on education and immigration, on crime and justice issues, on environmental policy and social policy and politics. Being able to handle such substantive breadth and depth, on such huge decisions, in parallel, requires not just enormous strength of character but tremendous intellectual power. President Bush has both."

"President Bush is smarter than almost every one of you. I am not kidding. You are quite an intelligent group. Don't take it personally, but President Bush is smarter than almost every one of you. Were he a student here today, he would consistently get 'HP' grades without having to work hard, and he'd get an 'H' in any class where he wanted to put in the effort. For more than six years it was my job to help educate President Bush about complex economic policy issues and to get decisions from him on impossibly hard policy choices. In meetings and in the briefing materials we gave him in advance we covered issues in far more depth than I have been discussing with you this quarter because we needed to do so for him to make decisions. President Bush is extremely smart by any traditional standard. He's highly analytical and was incredibly quick to be able to discern the core question he needed to answer. It was occasionally a little embarrassing when he would jump ahead of one of his Cabinet secretaries in a policy discussion and the adviser would struggle to catch up. He would sometimes force us to accelerate through policy presentations because he so quickly grasped what we were presenting. I use words like briefing and presentation to describe our policy meetings with him, but those are inaccurate. Every meeting was a dialogue, and you had to be ready at all times to be grilled by him and to defend both your analysis and your recommendation. That was scary."

"I did not expect to ever find much to admire about President George W. Bush. But as a Muslim who has come to work in America, I have recently had to revise my opinion... I never thought I'd say it, but now I long for the Republican Party of George W. Bush."

"President George W. Bush used to say, “Family values don’t stop at the Rio Grande and a hungry mother is going to try to feed her child.” When Hispanics heard that, they knew he cared and were willing to listen to his policies on education, jobs, spending, etc. Because his first sentence struck a chord, Hispanic Americans were willing to listen to his second sentence. We heard this from other demographic groups as well. President Bush got 44 percent of the Hispanic vote, a modern-day record for a Republican presidential candidate."

"President George W. Bush and Vice President Dick Cheney have asserted the president's right to wield virtually unchecked power. They have used the tragedy of 9/11 to implement a radical political agenda, attempting to ram through a right-wing wish list, from gutting social security to delivering tax cuts to the rich, to discarding basic civil liberties. Our government now routinely invades the privacy of its own citizens, then pulls the cloak of national security over its operations to hide its deceptions and blunders from public view. The economy has been trashed, inequality is now at levels not seen since the Great Depression, and at least 5 million more Americans live in poverty than did at the start of the Bush presidency. Many eminent historians and economists are concluding that George W. Bush has earned the distinction of being the "worst president ever.""

"Bush's resurgence is in large part due to mounting opposition to the Obama's presidency's left-wing agenda, but it is also spurred by Obama's image as an out of touch, aloof and elitist president, divorced from economic and political reality on the ground. A lot of Americans frankly miss the down-to-earth and significantly warmer leadership style promoted by President Bush, as well as his unfailing sense of optimism and heart-felt pride in America on the world stage. You certainly won't ever find Bush apologizing for his country or extending the hand of friendship to her enemies."