Political Aspirations
Page 9
- [Wendy] Davis [pursued] higher education, as her campaign website says, with ‘the help of academic scholarships, student loans, and state and federal grants.’ Now that she is in a high-profile and hotly partisan race, it has come out that she also benefited from the moral and financial support of her second - now ex - husband. In the process, though, behavior we would expect and hardly notice in a man is being portrayed as freakish and problematic in a woman.
- Today, unfortunately, the right to vote seems to have become a partisan issue. Democrats seek to guarantee and expand voting rights. Republicans try to undermine and suppress voting rights.
- All political movements are like this: we are in the right, everyone else is in the wrong. The people on our own side who disagree with us are heretics, and they start becoming enemies. With it comes an absolute conviction of your own moral superiority. There's oversimplification in everything, and a terror of flexibility.
- We have got to be advising our male candidates. We cannot have any stupid comments this year. No stupid comments!
- You can’t build a base for a candidacy in a year, or two years, or even four years. The only way to get candidates worth having is to build the social force that will create candidates worth having.
- I think Hillary Clinton has juggled so many jobs in her life that adding grandmother to her bio would not deter her from running.
- [Monica] Lewinsky writes of how her whole personhood, her whole adulthood, was marked and shaped by the sexual actions she took in her early twenties. It may seem, in comparison, that Hillary [Clinton]—already powerful and accomplished by the time the scandal erupted—escaped comparatively unscathed. Her power has surely only grown in the decades since the impeachment saga. But the legitimacy of that power is constantly questioned, by those on the right and on the left, based on the time her husband dallied with Lewinsky.
- The coming firestorm over new power-plant regulations won’t be a genuine debate — just as there isn’t a genuine debate about climate science. Instead, the airwaves will be filled with conspiracy theories and wild claims about costs, all of which should be ignored. Climate policy may finally be getting somewhere; let’s not let crazy climate economics get in the way.
- If I were in charge, they would know that waterboarding is how we'd baptize terrorists.
- They didn't promise a per diem or payment. Only free food, clothing, weapons, and a guarantee that they would transport our bodies to Rostov-on-Don and give them to our relatives. If, of course, they found them.
- Jeb Bush is my friend. I think he'd make a great president. I've nudged him for some time.
- Being a patriot doesn't mean prioritizing service to government above all else. Being a patriot means knowing when to protect your country, knowing when to protect your Constitution, knowing when to protect your countrymen, from the violations of and encroachments of adversaries. And those adversaries don't have to be foreign countries.