Political Authors From The United States

"From the very beginning, President Obama has relentlessly tried to play down and deny the nature of the terrorist threat we continue to face. […] Hence, Guantanamo will close, CIA interrogators will face a special prosecutor, and Khalid Sheik Mohammed will bask in a civilian trial in New York — a trifecta of political correctness and image management. And just to make sure even the dimmest understand, Obama banishes the term "war on terror." […] Obama may have declared the war over. Unfortunately, al-Qaeda has not. Which gives new meaning to the term "asymmetric warfare.""

"Obama’s NASA budget perfectly captures the difference between Kennedy's liberalism and Obama's. Kennedy's was an expansive, bold, outward-looking summons, Obama's is a constricted inward-looking call to retreat. Fifty years ago, Kennedy opened the New Frontier. Obama has just shut it."

"Ideas matter. Legislative proposals matter. Slick campaigns and dazzling speeches can work for a while, but the magic always wears off."

"To his credit, Obama didn't just come to Washington to be someone. Like Reagan, he came to Washington to do something -- to introduce a powerful social democratic stream into America's deeply and historically individualist polity."

"It is an old liberal theme that conservative ideas, being red in tooth and claw, cannot possibly emerge from any notion of the public good."

"For liberals, the observation that 'the peasants are revolting' is a pun. For conservatives, it is cause for uncharacteristic optimism. No matter how far the ideological pendulum swings in the short term, in the end the bedrock common sense of the American people will prevail."

"The joy of losing consists in this: Where there are no expectations, there is no disappointment."

"Baseball is a slow, boring, complex, cerebral game that doesn't lend itself to histrionics. You "take in" a baseball game, something odd to say about a football or basketball game, with the clock running and the bodies flying."

"As the romance of manned space exploration has waned, the drive today is to find our living, thinking counterparts in the universe. For all the excitement, however, the search betrays a profound melancholy — a lonely species in a merciless universe anxiously awaits an answering voice amid utter silence."

"For all the sublimity of art, physics, music, mathematics, and other manifestations of human genius, everything depends on the mundane, frustrating, often debased vocation known as politics (and its most exacting subspecialty — statecraft). Because if we don't get politics right, everything else risks extinction."

"We grow justly weary of our politics. But we must remember this: Politics – in all its grubby, grasping, corrupt, contemptible manifestations – is sovereign in human affairs. Everything ultimately rests upon it. Fairly or not, politics is the driver of history."

"An oil crisis looms, prices are spiking — and our president is extolling algae. After Solyndra, Keystone and promises of seaweed in their gas tanks, Americans sense a president so ideologically antipathetic to fossil fuels — which we possess in staggering abundance — that he is utterly unserious about the real world of oil in which the rest of us live."

"This administration came out opposing military tribunals, wanting to try Khalid Sheik Mohammed in New York, reading the Christmas Day bomber his Miranda rights and trying mightily […] to close Guantanamo. Yet alongside this exquisite delicacy about the rights of terrorists is the campaign to kill them in their beds. You festoon your prisoners with rights — but you take no prisoners. The morality is perverse. Which is why the results are so mixed."

"The greatest threat to a robust, autonomous civil society is the ever-growing Leviathan state and those like Obama who see it as the ultimate expression of the collective. Obama compounds the fallacy by declaring the state to be the font of entrepreneurial success. How so? It created the infrastructure — roads, bridges, schools, Internet — off which we all thrive. Absurd. We don't credit the Swiss postal service with the Special Theory of Relativity because it transmitted Einstein’s manuscript to the Annalen der Physik."

"I was a Great Society liberal on domestic issues. People ask me, 'How do you go from Walter Mondale to Fox News?' The answer is, 'I was young once.' End of answer."

"I believe in what I believe, and I think after all these years I've heard a lot of arguments, and I'm convinced by the superiority of the arguments that are made on the conservative side. I think that's a better way to run a society."

"We live in an entertainment culture soaked in graphic, often sadistic, violence. Older folks find themselves stunned by what a desensitized youth finds routine, often amusing. It’s not just movies. Young men sit for hours pulling video-game triggers, mowing down human beings en masse without pain or consequence. And we profess shock when a small cadre of unstable, deeply deranged, dangerously isolated young men go out and enact the overlearned narrative."

"It’s the jihadists who decided to make the world a battlefield and to wage war in perpetuity. Until they abandon the field, what choice do we have but to carry the fight to them?"

"I’m not against a global pact to reduce CO2. Indeed, I favor it. But in the absence of one — and there is no chance of getting one in the foreseeable future — there is no point in America committing economic suicide to no effect on climate change, the reversing of which, after all, is the alleged point of the exercise. For a president to propose this with such aggressive certainty is incomprehensible. It is the starkest of examples of belief that is impervious to evidence. And the word for that is faith, not science."

"It doesn’t take a genius to see what happens when the entitlement state outgrows the economy upon which it rests. The time of Greece, Cyprus, Portugal, Spain, the rest of insolvent social-democratic Europe — and now Detroit — is the time for conservatives to raise the banner of Stein's Law and yell, ‘Stop.’ You can kick the can down the road, but at some point it disappears over a cliff."

"The free lunch is the essence of modern liberalism."

"If a bare majority can change the fundamental rules that govern an institution, then there are no rules. Senate rules today are whatever the majority decides they are that morning. What distinguishes an institution from a flash mob is that its rules endure. They can be changed, of course. But only by significant supermajorities. That’s why constitutional changes require two-thirds of both houses plus three-quarters of the states. If we could make constitutional changes by majority vote, there would be no Constitution. As of today, the Senate effectively has no rules. Congratulations, Harry Reid. Finally, something you will be remembered for."

"Politics, the crooked timber of our communal lives, dominates everything because, in the end, everything — high and low and, most especially, high — lives or dies by politics. You can have the most advanced and efflorescent of cultures. Get your politics wrong, however, and everything stands to be swept away. This is not ancient history. This is Germany 1933. […] Politics is the moat, the walls, beyond which lie the barbarians. Fail to keep them at bay, and everything burns."

"The results of the Great Society experiments started coming in and began showing that, for all its good intentions, the War on Poverty was causing irreparable damage to the very communities it was designed to help."

"To understand the workings of American politics, you have to understand this fundamental law: Conservatives think liberals are stupid. Liberals think conservatives are evil."

"We no longer have to search for a name for the post-Cold War era. It will henceforth be known as the age of terrorism. Organized terror has shown what it can do; execute the single greatest massacre in American history, shut down the greatest power on the globe and send its leaders into underground shelters. All this, without even resorting to chemical, biological or nuclear weapons of mass destruction. This is a formidable enemy. To dismiss it as a bunch of cowards perpetrating senseless acts of violence is complacent nonsense. People willing to kill thousands of innocents while they kill themselves are not cowards. They are deadly, vicious warriors and need to be treated as such. Nor are their acts of violence senseless. They have a very specific aim: to avenge alleged historical wrongs and to bring the great American satan to its knees."

"Remember how Democrats were complaining that Republicans were trying to overturn Obamacare, it was somehow unpatriotic, because it was an attack on the law of the land. This law of the land doesn’t even exist. It exists in Obama’s head. It’s whatever he thinks. He wakes up in the morning and decides what the law is gonna be."

"The left is entering a new phase of ideological agitation — no longer trying to win the debate but stopping debate altogether, banishing from public discourse any and all opposition. The proper word for that attitude is totalitarian. It declares certain controversies over and visits serious consequences — from social ostracism to vocational defenestration — upon those who refuse to be silenced."

"I never had a Marxist phase. If I did it lasted a weekend, and it must have been a hell of a weekend because I don’t remember it..."

"There’s a reason why the French are on their fifth republic, and we are on our first, and that’s because we did not have a worship of reason at the beginning of the Founding as the French did, and then discovered that the purity, the Rousseauian idea is simply not one for the real world, or not one that avoids the guillotine..."

"[P]eople misunderstand Israel, and see it now in colonial, imperialist terms is because it’s a unique event in human history. The British colonization of North America, New Zealand, Australia, the Dutch in South Africa, they came to places that they had never been to. That’s colonialism. You put your people in there. You takeover. You marginalize the natives if you can. You may not succeed. In South Africa, that’s colonialism. So they see the Jews arriving in what’s called Palestine, and that’s the parallel, the only one they understand. They can’t put their heads around the fact that this is a people returning to their home. That they never gave up title to. They never gave up their longing for. It was repeated in their rituals three times a day, it wasn’t like once a year, let’s remember the homeland."

"Donald Trump, the man who defied every political rule and prevailed to win his party’s nomination, last week took on perhaps the most sacred political rule of all: Never attack a Gold Star family. Not just because it alienates a vital constituency but because it reveals a shocking absence of elementary decency and of natural empathy for the most profound of human sorrows — parental grief. Why did Trump do it? It wasn’t a mistake. It was a revelation. It’s that he can’t help himself. His governing rule in life is to strike back when attacked, disrespected or even slighted. To understand Trump, you have to grasp the General Theory: He judges every action, every pronouncement, every person by a single criterion — whether or not it/he is “nice” to Trump."

"Of course we all try to protect our own dignity and command respect. But Trump’s hypersensitivity and unedited, untempered Pavlovian responses are, shall we say, unusual in both ferocity and predictability. This is beyond narcissism. I used to think Trump was an 11-year-old, an undeveloped schoolyard bully. I was off by about 10 years. His needs are more primitive, an infantile hunger for approval and praise, a craving that can never be satisfied. He lives in a cocoon of solipsism where the world outside himself has value — indeed exists — only insofar as it sustains and inflates him."

"A gaffe in Washington is when a politician inadvertently reveals the truth, especially about himself."

"In 1980, Reagan had to do just one thing: pass the threshold test for acceptability. He won that election because he did, especially in the debate with Jimmy Carter in which Reagan showed himself to be genial, self-assured and, above all, nonthreatening. You may not like all his policies, but you could safely entrust the nation to him. Trump badly needs to pass that threshold. If character is destiny, he won’t."

"I believe that the pursuit of truth and right ideas through honest debate and rigorous argument is a noble undertaking. I am grateful to have played a small role in the conversations that have helped guide this extraordinary nation’s destiny. I leave this life with no regrets. It was a wonderful life — full and complete with the great loves and great endeavors that make it worth living. I am sad to leave, but I leave with the knowledge that I lived the life that I intended."

"@krauthammer: On sale today. Things That Matter in paperback. With a new section on the Obama years."

"Over the more than twenty years that I knew him, Charles thought about death every day. He told me that once. If that sounds morose, it was just the opposite. Because he was one of those rare people with the courage to look reality squarely in the face, Charles radiated a calm cheerfulness. He knew what was coming. He'd been very close to it before. He didn't want to leave, but it didn't scare him. […] 'I lived the life that I intended,' he wrote, and there is no higher achievement than that."

"He was literally in a class by himself. He was […] one of a kind. And […] for all of the sharpness of his thought and writing […] he was extraordinarily kind and gentle. And the combination made you love him. And we did. All of us did. The audience did. You couldn't help it. […] He was a giant of our time, and of our trade. […] He wrote beautifully ; he was careful about his facts ; he thought things through ; and he conducted himself with extraordinary dignity and grace. […] You couldn't dislike him. You couldn't help but admire him. […] Even if you disagreed with him, you recognized the power of his thought, the thoroughness of his research, and the quality of his writing. And […] if you knew him personally, there was that wonderful quality that he had – that kindness, that gentleness, that grace – and […] if you knew what he’d been through, and you could see what he’d overcome, and you saw the way he’d handled all that, […] you admired him as you probably didn’t admire anyone else. I can’t think of anyone on earth that I admired more than Charles Krauthammer, and I admire him to this day."

"Charles was a conservative intellectual, and he looked at things the way they were. He wasn't a knee-jerk anything. [...] I think that his passing is such a loss for conservatism - it's such a loss for public discourse, which, as Mort {Kondracke] just said, is getting more toxic and tribal and ugly by the day - Charles was the antidote to all of that. [...] He also had an incredibly sweet, sunny disposition. I don't think I ever saw Charles dark or angry at anything. And I think that's why he was able to [...] persevere through all of the incredible obstacles that life handed out to him, which he did not dwell on for a second."

"He was one of the most intelligent and honest men I have ever known. […] Charles led a life of change, breaking away and rebuilding with every new generation. He succeeded out of sheer will and a type of quiet passion. His was a life of growth and discovery. And, for the many of us who knew him or followed his writings, there was a genuine genius to his 68-year journey."

"I worked for him as a research assistant out of college. I was scared the entire time. Not because he did anything to make me feel uncomfortable – he'd be incapable of that – but […] he had a formidable dignity to him, and you always knew you were in the presence […] of a superior intellect. I think he ranks with Bill Buckley, Irving Kristol – as among the top conservative intellectuals of the last fifty years. He was one of the great defenders of our civilization and he represented what was best about it, and his voice will be missed and never replaced."

"Where he's wrong is that we went into Iraq at the invitation of the government, not as an invasion."

"No candidate can win a presidential race advocating gay marriage and opposing the military action in Iraq."

"Jon Stewart: But I can show you a prediction that's wrong today. It comes via Dick Morris, King of Wrong Mountain. And it concerns accountability for pundits. Dick Morris (clip): Romney's going to win. He's going to win by, I believe, more than 5 points. I believe he's going to get more than 300 electoral votes. Dick Morris (clip): You know, after the election, either I'm going to have to go through a big reckoning, or they are. Jon Stewart: No, you won't and they won't. Nobody will, because you're pundits. You live in a reckoning-free zone. One thing we learned is that punditry is like musical chairs. The only difference is, in musical chairs, when the music stops, nobody ever moves the chair. They just keep adding more chairs."

"Bill O'Reilly: Do you realize if President Obama wins, you're through? Dick Morris: I'm through. Bill O'Reilly: Yeah, you're gonna be— You'll be selling refrigerators in Topeka."

"We're going to win by a landslide. It will be the biggest surprise in recent American political history. It will rekindle the whole question on why the media played this race as a nailbiter where in fact Romney's going to win by quite a bit."

"It should come as no surprise that President Obama will raise taxes if he is reelected. But here's the shocker: he will invite the United Nations to tax Americans directly. And the proceeds would go directly to the Third World."

"Mike Gallagher: Hey Dick Morris, you sound intrigued by a Donald Trump candidacy. Dick Morris: Oh I am. I am. I take him very seriously. I think he's going to run, I think he's got a good shot at the nomination, and I think if he were nominated, he could beat Obama."

"Dick Morris: Look, I believe that -- and I've said this before and everybody either gives a sigh of a relief or a cynical laugh — there is no chance that Obama will get re-elected. Sean Hannity: I don't agree that's true. I think it's possible. Dick Morris: Zilch, none, zip, nada."