politicians-from-denver

"Just nine years ago, I was homeless, and only in America can someone go from being homeless to the House of Representatives in less than nine years."

"We've got only one thing to say: "Klaatu barada nikto.""

"I look forward to the day when I can be Republican again. I'm an Alan Simpson Republican."

"An educated man is thoroughly inoculated against humbug, thinks for himself and tries to give his thoughts, in speech or on paper, some style."

"Any education that matters is liberal. All the saving truths, all the healing graces that distinguish a good education from a bad one or a full education from a half-empty one are contained in that word."

"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 the universal solvent against the abrasive elements of life. That’s what humor is. He never hated anyone — he knew what his mother and my mother always knew: hatred corrodes the container it’s carried in."

"I think you know grandchildren now don't write a thank you for the Christmas presents that are walkin' on their pants with their cap on backwards, listenin' to the Enema Man and Snoopy Snoopy Poop Dogg and they don't like 'em."

"I have had the rich satisfaction of knowing and working with many openly gay and lesbian Americans, and I have come to realize that "gay" is an artificial category when it comes to measuring a man or woman's on-the-job performance or commitment to shared goals. It says little about the person. Our differences and prejudices pale next to our historic challenge."

"As a lifelong Republican who served in the Army in Germany, I believe it is critical that we review — and overturn — the ban on gay service in the military. I voted for "don't ask, don't tell." But much has changed since 1993. My thinking shifted when I read that the military was firing translators because they are gay. According to the Government Accountability Office, more than 300 language experts have been fired under "don't ask, don't tell," including more than 50 who are fluent in Arabic. This when even Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice recently acknowledged the nation's "foreign language deficit" and how much our government needs Farsi and Arabic speakers. Is there a "straight" way to translate Arabic? Is there a "gay" Farsi? My God, we'd better start talking sense before it is too late. We need every able-bodied, smart patriot to help us win this war."

"There is no "slippery slope" toward loss of liberty, only a long staircase where each step down must first be tolerated by the American people and their leaders."

"If you have integrity, nothing else matters. If you don't have integrity, nothing else matters."

"It is utterly hypocritical for Congress to extol the virtues of a color-blind society while officially sanctioning caucuses that are based solely on race and restrict their membership based on race."

"I trust those conversions when they happen on the road to Damascus and not on the road to Des Moines."

"And by the way, there is some irony here, when we are told that we need these workers to support an aging society, yet, over the past three decades we have allowed over 40 million Americans to die in abortion clinics. Why have we turned our hearts on our own innocent babies and embraced the culture of death? We no longer even talk about the tragedy of abortion or its consequences on our mothers, our culture, or our land. Instead, of course, we are replacing- we are seeking to replace the missing with an imported servant class."

"And by the way, unless the United Nations stops becoming simply a debating society for anti-American rhetoric, I'm going to show them the door."

"[The War on Terror is] not a war we started, it's a war we must finish, and it's tough when your enemies are psychopaths and your allies are the French"

"This is our culture; fight for it. This is our flag; pick it up. This is our country; take it back."

"The only word I will accept on the word 'conservative', for me anyway, is 'unapologetic'. Because, I for one, am not sorry that we won the Cold War. I am not sorry that we reduced tax rates and created economic opportunities for millions. I am not sorry that we reformed welfare and put millions of people back to work. And I will never, ever apologize for America. It is the last best hope for Western civilization. Let's face it- no one flees for a better life from the United States, to say, Pakistan or anywhere for that matter. Why is it so hard for us, why is it so difficult for us to take pride in the fact of who we are, what we have created, what Western civilization really means."

"After September 11th, we were told that money was the lifeblood of terrorists, and that we should do everything possible to block their access to financial resources...Today we are hearing a far different message: Bank of America, it’s everywhere terrorists want to be."

"Not only did the administration choose the side of a foreign dope-runner over the agents who stopped him from smuggling a load of drugs into the country - now they've failed to protect that agent while his case is on appeal...If the administration's goal was to deliver a one-two knockout punch to Border Patrol morale, they certainly succeeded"

"Look at what has happened to Miami. It has become a Third World country. You just pick it up and take it and move it someplace. You would never know you're in the United States of America. You would certainly say you're in a Third World country."

"Now, three years later, at the request of the regularly uncooperative Mexican government, your department has decided to use taxpayer resources to send marshals to Hawaii for Dog Chapman? This Administration routinely tells Congress that they cannot secure our borders and immigration system due to a lack of resources. We are told that the U. S . Attorneys offices in Border States are simply overwhelmed with cases and cannot prosecute all the violations even some of the serious ones. Yet somehow they have plenty of time to track down a Mexican drug smuggler and give him immunity so he can testify against our Border Patrol agents."

"Well, what if you said something like — if this happens in the United States, and we determine that it is the result of extremist, fundamentalist Muslims, you know, you could take out their holy sites."

"It is not just for the security of Iraq and the freedom of Iraq. It is for the security of the entire Middle East and for the freedom of the entire Middle East.... We are creating an environment that is threatening to the rest of the fundamentalist regimes in the area. This is an honorable goal on our part, but it is worrisome to the extreme. We do not know what they will do, nor what they have to do it with."

"Once again the powers of light and good have triumphed over the media!"

"Just get me a fucking faith-based thing. Got it?"

"As people do better, they start voting like Republicans...unless they have too much education and vote Democratic, which proves there can be too much of a good thing."

"We face a brutal enemy who will kill the innocent for one purpose and that is to gain control of the Middle East and to use the leverage of oil to bring down the West, and to attack us again."

"I think it was Osama bin Laden’s [idea to start a pre-emptive war in Iraq]."

"Conservatives saw the savagery of 9/11 in the attacks and prepared for war; liberals saw the savagery of the 9/11 attacks and wanted to prepare indictments and offer therapy and understanding for our attackers."

"Karl Rove told me about Valerie Plame's identity on July 11, 2003. I called him because Ambassador Wilson was in the news that week. I didn't know Ambassador Wilson even had a wife until I talked to Karl Rove, and he said that she worked at the Agency and worked on WMD."

"As Rove joins the ranks of discredited politicians who resign "in order to spend more time with family," a retrospective of his dirty tricks might be in order. Much is attributed to Rove, dubbed "Bush's Brain" by Texas journalists Wayne Slater and James Moore -- yet very little sticks to the man."

"Is this just math that you do as a Republican to make yourself feel better. or is this real?"

"I think the president should have stood by his word, and that meant Karl should have left. [...] I think the president should have stood by the word that we said, which was that if you were involved in this in any way, then you would no longer be in this administration. And Karl was involved in it."

"I don’t oppose all wars. What I am opposed to is a dumb war. What I am opposed to is a rash war. What I am opposed to is the cynical attempt by Richard Perle and Paul Wolfowitz and other armchair, weekend warriors in this administration to shove their own ideological agendas down our throats, irrespective of the costs in lives lost and in hardships borne. What I am opposed to is the attempt by political hacks like Karl Rove to distract us from a rise in the uninsured, a rise in the poverty rate, a drop in the median income, to distract us from corporate scandals and a stock market that has just gone through the worst month since the Great Depression. That’s what I’m opposed to. A dumb war. A rash war. A war based not on reason but on passion, not on principle but on politics."

"Karl Rove, George Bush's political mastermind, was crowing about his dream of installing a permanent Republican majority."

"We will fuck him. Do you hear me? We will fuck him. We will ruin him. Like no one has ever fucked him!"

"He (Rove) is way beyond anything Nixon had at his disposal. He is closer to a behind-the-scenes Nixon operator named Murray Chotiner, who could cut off an opponent at the knees so quickly the person did not immediately realize he had been crippled. As I note in the book, the first time I heard the name Karl Rove was when I was asked if I knew anything about him by one of the Watergate special prosecutors who was investigating campaign dirty tricks. I didn't have any knowledge. But I recalled that question when working on this book, and located a memorandum in the files of the Watergate prosecutor's office that indicates they were asking others as well about Rove. Based on my review of the files, it appears the Watergate prosecutors were interested in Rove's activities in 1972, but because they had bigger fish to fry they did not aggressively investigate him."

"All politicians operate within an Orwellian nimbus where words don't mean what they normally mean, but Rovism posits that there is no objective, verifiable reality at all. Reality is what you say it is, ..."

"The aide said that guys like me were "in what we call the reality-based community," which he defined as people who "believe that solutions emerge from your judicious study of discernible reality." I nodded and murmured something about enlightenment principles and empiricism. He cut me off. "That's not the way the world really works anymore." He continued "We're an empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality. And while you're studying that reality—judiciously, as you will—we'll act again, creating other new realities, which you can study too, and that's how things will sort out. We're history's actors … and you, all of you, will be left to just study what we do.""

"At the end of the day, it's of keen interest to me to see whether or not we can get Karl Rove frog-marched out of the White House in handcuffs. And trust me, when I use that name, I measure my words."

"Both pro- and anti-immigrant voices characterize Latino immigrants as not only willing but desirous of the dirtiest, most difficult forms of labor, eager to do the work that no else will do...Karl Rove, Bush's then deputy chief of staff, articulated a more unvarnished version of this logic. Explaining the rationale behind the president's call for immigration reform, Rove told a Republican women's luncheon group: "I don't want my 17-year-old son to have to pick tomatoes or make beds in Las Vegas." Implicit in Rove's quip is the undocumented's presumed willingness to accept toilsome, low-status work."