Journalists From The United States

"I grew up with the phrase "Believe the woman." It was almost a slogan. You didn't hear it much during the Clinton years."

"One more word on talking, before I stop talking, at least about this subject: You or I may not like the talker, but talk matters, much of the time. It is especially significant when the talker is lonely — when most around him are keeping mum."

"More and more, I like Utah."

"Individuals are responsible for their actions. And yet . . .No man is an island. We are all subject to influences, good and bad."

"Maybe baseball has to accept that it is now more like classical music than popular music, with football and basketball — and soccer? — being the Justin Biebers and Lady Gagas of sports. Baseball need not hang its head in shame. A lot of things that are good and worthy are not popular. And baseball is plenty popular, for heaven's sake."

"Too often, claims of “fake news” are the real fake news. We are taught, rightly, to be skeptical of the media (and indeed of most things). But it pays to be skeptical of their critics, taunters, and defamers, too.Jay Nordlinger added,"

"[T]he entire country should man up. We are drowning in weenification and snowflakiness. Shall we grow a national pair?"

"Talk can be cheap, very cheap. It can also be costly. “Speak out!” we say. “Why are you afraid to speak out?” we say. In dictatorships, it can be very, very hard to speak out. Many people have been imprisoned or worse for talk. But even in democratic societies, talk can be hard. It can be hard not only in politics but also in high schools and families and churches and professional communities and other arenas. But even in democratic societies, talk can be hard. It can be hard not only in politics but also in high schools and families and churches and professional communities and other arenas."

"I cannot be associated with a publication that dumps a staff member simply because his work has upset some readers. Journalism, when done well, always angers some readers, and it is the duty of the newspaper or magazine’s editors and managers to stand by writers and other members of the staff when readers complain about the analysis and opinions expressed by its staff. This is all the more true in the case of editorial cartoonists, whose very job is satire—and a good satirist never pauses to worry about angering the citizenry."

"After nearly four hours of gunfire, there was silence. There was silence, even though the order only applied to American soldiers. There was silence because none of the in the village were firing back. There was silence because the Viet Cong had never fired on US troops that day. There was silence because there were no Viet Cong in the village that day. There was silence because most of the people who were in the village that day were dead."

"The My Lai killings weren’t indiscriminate. The GIs weren’t killing just anyone. They were killing everyone. They were killing everything: chickens, pigs, dogs, rabbits, cows, water buffalo, grandmothers, and children. Young girls, wounded boys, toddlers, infants. More than half of the 504 people murdered in Pinkville that morning were minors. The GIs were following orders and the orders were: to kill everything. Kill everything that breathes. Kill everything that moves."

"I have three dogs, and to see some of the videos or go online and research how animals are treated for fur, the cruelty is worse than torture. I think it’s right that NFL players—with the platform that we have—can [spread] awareness that animals have lives and souls and they go through pain and suffering just as humans do, and they need to be treated accordingly. A lot of people think [that] wearing a fur is expensive, but you don’t know how expensive it is—lives are priceless. … Protecting animals is definitely something that in America we need to step up and do a better job of."

"My own path over the past two decades – prompted in reaction to my experience with him – has been to help business leaders become more wholly human, and to humanise workplaces."

"Whatever happens, may the worst of Trump inspire the best in us."

"There’s no more pungent symbol of the corrupt nature of the Bush administration’s invasion and occupation of Iraq than , the -based oil services conglomerate, which has made billions from the war even in the face of charges of massive , shoddy work, official bribery and political influence-peddling. The remarkable thing is that Halliburton’s looting of Iraq and the happened in broad daylight, right under the nose of the press, the Democrats and Michael Moore, who made Dick Cheney’s former company the bete noir of his film “9/11.” Nothing deterred the company from capitalizing on the war it helped orchestrate."

"In the face of fear, it is a fact that our most primitive and selfish instincts emerge. Control of our behaviour shifts from the prefrontal cortex to the emotionally driven amygdala – sometimes referred to as “fear central”. As we move into fight-or-flight mode, we become more self-centred, and our vision narrows to the perceived threat, which in the modern world is less to our survival than to our sense of value and worthiness. We lose the capacity for empathy, rationality, proportionality and attention to the longer-term consequences of our actions. ... It is when we feel safest and most secure that we think most clearly and expansively. It’s also when we are most inclined to look beyond our self-interest, and to act with compassion, generosity, consideration and forgiveness."

"About the only thing Trump truly has in common with his base is that he feels every bit as aggrieved as they do, despite his endless privilege. No amount of money, fame or power has been enough to win him the respect he so insatiably craves. His anger over this perceived injustice is visceral and authentic."

"In the ever-expanding universe of Pentagon contracting, cost is never the problem, public exposure is."

"The fearful divide Trump has exacerbated is not simply between his supporters and his detractors, the rich and the poor, or Democrats and Republicans, but between the best and the worst in each of us."

"There are two Trumps. The one he presents to the world is all bluster, and certainty. The other, which I have long felt haunts his inner world, is the frightened child of a relentlessly critical and bullying father and a distant and disengaged mother who couldn’t or wouldn’t protect him."

"Trump’s temperament and his habits have hardened with age. He was always cartoonish, but compared with the man for whom I wrote The Art of the Deal 30 years ago, he is significantly angrier today: more reactive, deceitful, distracted, vindictive, impulsive and, above all, self-absorbed – assuming the last is possible."

"Even those closest to Trump recognise his utter lack of fitness to be president, even if they are too cowed and cowardly to do anything about it."

"I put lipstick on a pig. I feel a deep sense of remorse that I contributed to presenting Trump in a way that brought him wider attention and made him more appealing than he is. I genuinely believe that if Trump wins and gets the nuclear codes, there is an excellent possibility it will lead to the end of civilization."

"The president of the United States just threatened the safety and security of immigrants the world over."

"So now we know. The reason Trump ordered the separation of thousands of immigrant children from their parents – some never to be reunited again – was because they better watch themselves. They are changing the culture and it better stop or else they’ll get hurt. Trump has mused before about how good it would be to deport people without judges messing things up. He doesn’t consider his own country’s ample s to be actual laws that he respects. It’s one short step for a president – but one long step for democracy – to go from disrespecting the laws to ignoring them. This is the language and mentality of so many and neo-Nazi parties in Europe. So in the Trump spirit of saying it loud, it’s time to drop the euphemisms: Trump is today’s first major government to be led by the racist far right. It’s not some kind of new populist politics; it’s the old National Front."

"Fear is the hidden through-line in Trump’s life – fear of weakness, of inadequacy, of failure, of criticism and of insignificance. He has spent his life trying to outrun these fears by “winning” – as he puts it – and by redefining reality whenever the facts don’t serve the narrative he seeks to create. It hasn’t worked, but not for lack of effort."

"The moral choices that Trump poses to anyone with a conscience or love of country are only made more clear by the ludicrous irony of his own story."

"Trump is a walking contradiction – but his nativism is consistent."

"Watching this pinball president ricochet around Europe, you could be forgiven for thinking there’s no method to Donald Trump’s madness. Nato is both a rip-off and very strong. Theresa May’s is both pathetic and terrific. Trump’s interview with the Sun was both and generally fine. Trump has all the consistency of Katy Perry’s Hot N Cold, except when it comes to two things: immigrants and Vladimir Putin."

"Immigration is where Trump’s journey begins and ends: the message running all the way through this stick of rock."

"There was a time when politicians like you preferred to use a dog whistle, but those days seem quaint now. There’s something to be said for using a foghorn to blast your racism across the continents. At least we all know what kind of politics you represent."

"Because the office Trump now occupies makes him the most powerful man on Earth, his fears, and the way he manages them, have necessarily become ours. We fear Trump because he is impulsive, irrational and self-serving, but above all because he seems unconstrained by even the faintest hint of conscience. Trump feels no more shame over his most destructive behaviours than a male lion does killing the cubs of his predecessor when he takes over a pride. Trump has made fear the dominant emotion of our times."

"The beginning of the end of Trump’s presidency arrived on March 11, 2020, when he addressed the nation for the first time on the subject of the pandemic and showed himself to be completely out of his depth. The virus was a fact that Trump couldn’t lie into oblivion or forge into a political weapon—it was too personal and frightening, too real."

"Trump’s legacy includes an extremist Republican Party that tries to hold on to power by flagrantly undemocratic means, and an opposition pushed toward its own version of extremism."

"Progressives find it hard to imagine that there are others who in good faith don’t want the better world they’re offering and will fiercely resist it."

"America under Trump became less free, less equal, more divided, more alone, deeper in debt, swampier, dirtier, meaner, sicker, and deader."

"Trump’s lies will linger for years, poisoning the atmosphere like radioactive dust."

"At the heart of Obama’s narrative was a belief that progress, in the larger scheme of things, was inevitable, and this belief underscored his position on every issue from marriage equality to climate change. His idea of progress was neither the rigid millennial faith of Woodrow Wilson nor Bush’s shallow God-blessed optimism. It was human-scale and incremental."

"It’s hard to build a narrative around actions not taken, disasters possibly averted, hard realities accommodated. The story of what didn’t happen isn’t an easy one to tell."

"In a sense, Americans expected a degree of fabrication from their leaders. After Jimmy Carter, in his 1976 campaign, promised, 'I’ll never lie to you,' and then pretty much kept his word, voters sent him back to Georgia. Ronald Reagan’s gauzy fictions were far more popular."

"More than any modern President, Barack Obama had a keen sense of the limits of American power—and of his own."

"Trump’s barrage of falsehoods—as many as 50 daily in the last fevered months of the 2020 campaign—complemented his unconcealed brutality. Lying was another variety of shamelessness. Just as he said aloud what he was supposed to keep to himself, he lied again and again about matters of settled fact—the more brazen and frequent the lie, the better."

"Monopoly of public policy by experts—trade negotiators, government bureaucrats, think tankers, professors, journalists—helped create the populist backlash that empowered Trump."

"After Afghanistan, Iraq, and Libya, the burden of proof is on anyone who would make the case for military action as a force for good."

"Barack Obama was a writer before he became a politician, and he saw his Presidency as a struggle over narrative."

"Barack Obama was always better at explaining the meaning of democracy than at fighting its opponents."

"From the Nordic perspective, it’s not this Nordic approach that is unsustainable—it’s the American approach that’s eventually going to implode. For in the United States more than half of fast-food workers rely on some form of public assistance to get by, meaning that American taxpayers are actually subsidizing the fast-food industry in the United States, to the tune of billions of dollars per year. If we’re hunting for countries practicing socialism, the United States appears to be a pretty strong contender."

"[...] Markus Jäntti, a Finnish economist at the University of Helsinki, who with his colleagues looked at inherited disadvantage—in other words, how much worse your chances are for success if you’re born into a low-income family. They found that in the United States, 40 percent of men who were born into the lowest income bracket stayed in it. In the Nordic countries, that figure was only 25 percent. [...] America is no longer the land of opportunity, northern Europe is. This is the reality that led the British Labour Party leader Ed Miliband to make his surprising statement in 2012: “If you want the American dream, go to Finland.”"

"This approach creates fewer strains between family members, because those individuals don’t have to make the sort of extreme sacrifices that can cause them to lose their independence, which so often forces families in America to fall apart—or stops them from forming in the first place."

"For example, for all the gender equality in Nordic societies, Nordic women are still less likely to work as managers than are American women. So, is the answer for Nordic women to become American-style supermoms, “leaning in” more at the office while also doing full duty as parents?"