US History 1973 - 2014 Commonplace Book: Lecture 24, 9/11 (Con't)

War Is a Force Which Gives Us Meaning

—Chris Hedges (book title)

Introduction to (and explanation of) this quote series can be found here.  Read this tag to see all of them.

US History 1973 - 2014 Commonplace Book: Lecture 24, 9/11 (Con't)

Tell the Taliban we're finished with them.

—George W. Bush, September 11, 2001, to the National Security Council

Introduction to (and explanation of) this quote series can be found here.  Read this tag to see all of them.

US History 1973 - 2014 Commonplace Book: Lecture 24, 9/11 (Con't)

We will make no distinction between the terrorists who committed these acts and those who harbor them.

—George W. Bush, September 11, 2001, addressing the public

Introduction to (and explanation of) this quote series can be found here.  Read this tag to see all of them.

US History 1973 - 2014 Commonplace Book: Lecture 24, 9/11 (Con't)

More than any of us can bear

—NYC Mayor Rudy Giuliana, September 11, 2001, estimating the number of casualties from the attacks

Introduction to (and explanation of) this quote series can be found here.  Read this tag to see all of them.

US History 1973 - 2014 Commonplace Book: Lecture 24, 9/11 (Con't)

Every year without knowing it I have passed the day
When the last fires will wave to me
And the silence will set out
Tireless traveller
Like the beam of a lightless star

—W. S. Merwin, "For the Anniversary of My Death" (1993)

Introduction to (and explanation of) this quote series can be found here.  Read this tag to see all of them.

US History 1973 - 2014 Commonplace Book: Lecture 24, 9/11

The [World Trade Center] towers didn't seem permanent. They remained concepts, no less transient for all their bulk than some routine distortion of light.

—Don Delillo, Players (1977)

Introduction to (and explanation of) this quote series can be found here.  Read this tag to see all of them.

US History 1973 - 2014 Commonplace Book: Lecture 23, American Politics, 1999 - 2001 (Especially Florida, 2000) (Con't)

There is no precedent in any modern White House for what is going on in this one: complete lack of a policy apparatus. Besides the tax cut, which was cut and dried during the campaign, and the education bill, which was really a Ted Kennedy bill, the administration has not done much, either in absolute terms or in comparison to previous administrations at this stage, on domestic policy. What you've got is everything, and I mean everything, being run by the political arm. It's the reign of the Mayberry Machiavellis. [They] consistently talked and acted as if the height of political sophistication consisted in reducing every issue to its simplest black-and-white terms for public consumption, then steering legislative initiatives or policy proposals as far right as possible.

— John DiIulio, Director of the director of the White House Office of Faith-Based and Community Initiatives through August, 2001

Introduction to (and explanation of) this quote series can be found here.  Read this tag to see all of them.

US History 1973 - 2014 Commonplace Book: Lecture 23, American Politics, 1999 - 2001 (Especially Florida, 2000) (Con't)

On taxes, on education, it was the same. On Social Security, Bush's position was exactly what Reagan always wanted and talked about in the 1970s. I just cant think of any major policy issue on which Bush was different.

— Martin Anderson (aid to Reagan)

Introduction to (and explanation of) this quote series can be found here.  Read this tag to see all of them.

US History 1973 - 2014 Commonplace Book: Lecture 23, American Politics, 1999 - 2001 (Especially Florida, 2000) (Con't)

Although we may never know with complete certainty the identity of the winner of this year's Presidential election, the identity of the loser is perfectly clear. It is the Nation's confidence in the judge as an impartial guardian of the rule of law.

—Justice John Paul Stevens, dissenting opinion in Bush v Gore

Introduction to (and explanation of) this quote series can be found here.  Read this tag to see all of them.

US History 1973 - 2014 Commonplace Book: Lecture 23, American Politics, 1999 - 2001 (Especially Florida, 2000) (Con't)

Our consideration is limited to the present circumstances, for the problem of equal protection in election processes generally presents many complexities.

—Unsigned per curiam majority decision in Bush v. Gore

Introduction to (and explanation of) this quote series can be found here.  Read this tag to see all of them.

US History 1973 - 2014 Commonplace Book: Lecture 23, American Politics, 1999 - 2001 (Especially Florida, 2000)

Somewhere along the line the dominant political reporters for the most dominant news organizations decided that they didn't like [Gore], and they thought the story line on any given day was bout his being a phony or a liar or a waffler.

—Mark Halperin, Political Director of NBC News

Introduction to (and explanation of) this quote series can be found here.  Read this tag to see all of them.

US History 1973 - 2014 Commonplace Book: Lecture 22, Two Big Trends: Immigration & Demographic Change & The Rise of the Conservative Counter-Instiutions (Con't)

Public perception of a biased news media, particularly media biased in a liberal direction, has increased over the past 3 presidential elections. To examine what might be influencing this public opinion, the authors look at shifts in public perception of media bias, press coverage of the topic of media bias, and the balance in valence coverage of presidential candidates—all during the 1988, 1992, and 1996 presidential elections. Their results suggest that the rise in public perception that news media are liberally biased is not the result of bias in valence news coverage of the candidates, but, rather, due to increasing news self-coverage that focuses on the general topic of bias in news content. Furthermore, the increased claims of media bias come primarily from conservative elites who have proclaimed a liberal bias that is viewed as including the entire media industry.

— Abstract for Mark D. Watts, et. al., "Elite Cues and Media Bias in Presidential Campaigns: Explaining Public Perceptions of a Liberal Press", Communication Research, April 1999 (vol. 26 no. 2 144-175)

Introduction to (and explanation of) this quote series can be found here.  Read this tag to see all of them.

US History 1973 - 2014 Commonplace Book: Lecture 22, Two Big Trends: Immigration & Demographic Change & The Rise of the Conservative Counter-Instiutions (Con't)

The conservative press is self-consciously conservative and self-consciously part of the team. The liberal press is much larger, but at the same time it sees itself as the establishment press. So it's conflicted. Sometimes it thinks it needs to be critical of both sides.

—Grover Norquist

Introduction to (and explanation of) this quote series can be found here.  Read this tag to see all of them.

US History 1973 - 2014 Commonplace Book: Lecture 22, Two Big Trends: Immigration & Demographic Change & The Rise of the Conservative Counter-Instiutions (Con't)

I've gotten balanced coverage, and broad coverage--all we could have asked. For heaven sakes, we kid about the 'liberal media,' but every Republican on earth does that.

—Pat Buchanan (1996)

Introduction to (and explanation of) this quote series can be found here.  Read this tag to see all of them.

US History 1973 - 2014 Commonplace Book: Lecture 22, Two Big Trends: Immigration & Demographic Change & The Rise of the Conservative Counter-Instiutions (Con't)

There is some strategy to it [bashing the 'liberal' media]. ... if you watch any great coach, what they try to do is 'work the refs.' Maybe the ref will cut you a little slack on the next one.

—Republican Party Chairman Rich Bond (1992)

Introduction to (and explanation of) this quote series can be found here.  Read this tag to see all of them.

US History 1973 - 2014 Commonplace Book: Lecture 22, Two Big Trends: Immigration & Demographic Change & The Rise of the Conservative Counter-Instiutions (Con't)

Our own country is undergoing the greatest invasion in its history, a migration of millions of illegal aliens yearly from Mexico... A nation that cannot control its own borders can scarcely call itself a state any longer.

—Pat Buchanan (1992)

Introduction to (and explanation of) this quote series can be found here.  Read this tag to see all of them.

US History 1973 - 2014 Commonplace Book: Lecture 22, Two Big Trends: Immigration & Demographic Change & The Rise of the Conservative Counter-Instiutions (Con't)

This bill that we will sign today is not a revolutionary bill. It does not affect the lives of millions. It will not reshape the structure of our daily lives, or really add importantly to either our wealth or our power. Yet it is still one of the most important acts of this Congress and of this administration. For it does repair a very deep and painful flaw in the fabric of American justice. It corrects a cruel and enduring wrong in the conduct of the American Nation.

—Lyndon Johnson, Remarks at the Signing of the Immigration Bill, Liberty Island, New York, October 3, 1965

Introduction to (and explanation of) this quote series can be found here.  Read this tag to see all of them

Quote of the Day

Is that really that, then? he thought, looking down into the brown slow river. Was he really now disburdened of history as an occupation?

Maybe the old bookstore would take him back. He really had a lot longer to live. What was he to do?

— John Crowley, The Solitudes (1987)

_____________________
(Incidentally, The Solitudes was originally published under the title Aegypt. The latter is the title of the four-volume novel of which The Solitudes is the first part. After the completion of the whole, The Solitudes was republished under its current title.)

US History 1973 - 2014 Commonplace Book: Lecture 22, Two Big Trends: Immigration & Demographic Change & The Rise of the Conservative Counter-Instiutions (Con't)

I don't think we have a particular picture of a world situation where everybody is just straining to move to the Unites States.

—Secretary of State Dean Rusk, testifying about likely impact of proposed immigration reforms

Introduction to (and explanation of) this quote series can be found here.  Read this tag to see all of them.

US History 1973 - 2014 Commonplace Book: Lecture 22, Two Big Trends: Immigration & Demographic Change & The Rise of the Conservative Counter-Instiutions

Nothing that happened in the United States over the last third of the twentieth century—not terrorism, the explosion of new technology, or the transformation of politics or the end of the Cold War. nor even the profound changes in the status and expectations and role of American women—will have more long-term consequences for the future of the United States than the new immigration.... [I]n the long run the consequences would be comparable with those of, say, the Louisiana Purchase or even the Civil War.... [A] United States where more than half the population is not of European descent will be, in very many significant ways, a different nation from the country led by Franklin Roosevelt or even by Ronald Reagan.

—Godfrey Hodgson, More Equal Than Others (2004)

Introduction to (and explanation of) this quote series can be found here.  Read this tag to see all of them.

US History 1973 - 2014 Commonplace Book: Lecture 21, Tabloid Nation II: Monica (Con't)

What the fuck were we doing paying attention to this shit for a year?

—The American people, 1999

Introduction to (and explanation of) this quote series can be found here.  Read this tag to see all of them.

US History 1973 - 2014 Commonplace Book: Lecture 21, Tabloid Nation II: Monica (Con't)

I wonder if, after this culture war is over that we are engaged in, an America will survive that will be worth fighting to defend.

—Rep. Henry Hyde (R - Il), speaking in favor of impeachment before Senate

Introduction to (and explanation of) this quote series can be found here.  Read this tag to see all of them.

US History 1973 - 2014 Commonplace Book: Lecture 21, Tabloid Nation II: Monica (Con't)

In most districts in the country, a majority was against impeachment, maybe a majority of Republicans. But a majority who voted in the Republican primaries was for impeachment. When you put individual members under the gun, a lot of them could get killed in a primary.... I heard of Christian radio stations going after the Republicans.

—Rep. Peter King (R - NY)

Introduction to (and explanation of) this quote series can be found here.  Read this tag to see all of them.

US History 1973 - 2014 Commonplace Book: Lecture 21, Tabloid Nation II: Monica (Con't)

You can almost read it as a novel in the classic tradition... Not since Richardson's "Pamela; or, Virtue Rewarded," one of the first novels, has so much ink been spilled on a pas de deux between a guy who owns a big manor house and the girl who works there, with the difference that this girl, unlike that one, succumbs. (So, "Monica; or, Sin Punished.")...

—Adam Gopnik, reading the Starr Report as a work of literature (1998)

People seem to be trying to parse "The Report" from scratch, as though its subject were entirely new. But there is a whole literature devoted to the question of adultery, transgression, and the law, and that literature is called "literature." It has what are called "points" and "morals," and first among them is to be extremely suspicious of anyone who tries to compress the erotic life into overly pointed morals.

—Ibid.

Introduction to (and explanation of) this quote series can be found here.  Read this tag to see all of them.

US History 1973 - 2014 Commonplace Book: Lecture 21, Tabloid Nation II: Monica (Con't)

On the day Congress received the Starr report, MSNBC alone began continuous coverage at 9am that only ended at 10pm when its regularly scheduled two-hour show "White House in Crisis" aired.

—William O'Neil

Introduction to (and explanation of) this quote series can be found here.  Read this tag to see all of them.

US History 1973 - 2014 Commonplace Book: Lecture 21, Tabloid Nation II: Monica (Con't)

He couldn't stop thinking about the thong underwear. He couldn't believe Monica had pulled up her jacket to show it off. It so inflamed his imagination. At meetings, at briefings, at the most unlikely times, his mind suddenly reverted to the image of those straps, quickening his pulse, making him catch his breath. But it was the cigar that undid him. He was driven by the thought of what had been done with it. Suddenly the capital became a city of cigars. He saw them wherever he went. They ignited his desire. When he was alone or talking to other people, he took secret pleasure in letting smoke rings drift through his mind.... And, of all those naughty words he loved to hear, none filled him with more pleasure than ''impeachment.'' After all, nobody could impeach him. He was Ken Starr.

—Maureen Dowd, The New York Times, "Legacy of Lust" (September 23, 1998)

Introduction to (and explanation of) this quote series can be found here.  Read this tag to see all of them.

US History 1973 - 2014 Commonplace Book: Lecture 21, Tabloid Nation II: Monica (Con't)

We have to wait now for the farce to run its course.... But the damage is done. The nation handed its highest office to a man who embodies the narcissistic extremes of the baby-boomer generation. It's all about Bill. And like everyone else who has had a relationship with this irresponsible and self-absorbed individual -- his wife, his friends, his loyal aides, his party -- the nation is paying the price.

—Bob Herbert, The New York Times, "The Damage is Done", August 6, 1998

Introduction to (and explanation of) this quote series can be found here.  Read this tag to see all of them.

US History 1973 - 2014 Commonplace Book: Lecture 21, Tabloid Nation II: Monica (Con't)

Clinton hadn't performed the groveling mea culpa the pundits demanded. We wanted Clinton on his knees to justify seven months of pursuit.

—Dana Milbank, Washington Post reporter, on Clinton's August 17, 1998 public statement

Introduction to (and explanation of) this quote series can be found here.  Read this tag to see all of them.

US History 1973 - 2014 Commonplace Book: Lecture 21, Tabloid Nation II: Monica (Con't)

A well-constituted court for the trial of impeachments is an object not more to be desired than difficult to be obtained in a government wholly elective. The subjects of its jurisdiction are those offenses which proceed from the misconduct of public men, or, in other words, from the abuse or violation of some public trust. They are of a nature which may with peculiar propriety be denominated POLITICAL, as they relate chiefly to injuries done immediately to the society itself. The prosecution of them, for this reason, will seldom fail to agitate the passions of the whole community, and to divide it into parties more or less friendly or inimical to the accused. In many cases it will connect itself with the pre-existing factions, and will enlist all their animosities, partialities, influence, and interest on one side or on the other; and in such cases there will always be the greatest danger that the decision will be regulated more by the comparative strength of parties, than by the real demonstrations of innocence or guilt.

— Federalist 65 (Alexander Hamilton)

Introduction to (and explanation of) this quote series can be found here.  Read this tag to see all of them.

US History 1973 - 2014 Commonplace Book: Lecture 21, Tabloid Nation II: Monica (Con't)

We were terrified that [Paula] Jones would settle. It was contrary to our purpose of bringing down the president.

—Ann Coulter, one of several unofficial advisor's to Jones's legal team

Introduction to (and explanation of) this quote series can be found here.  Read this tag to see all of them.

US History 1973 - 2014 Commonplace Book: Lecture 21, Tabloid Nation II: Monica (Con't)

As a novelist, I never think of Monica Lewinsky, that once-everyday young woman, without a sense of dread at the freakish, occult fate that overtook her. Imagine what it must be like, to wake up being her, to face the inevitability of being That Woman. Monica, too, transgressed in apparent safety and then she had the utter foolishness to brag to a lethal enemy, a trusted confidante who ran a tape machine and who brought her a mediated circus of hells. The titillation of that massive, shattering scandal has faded now. But think of the quotidian daily horror of being Monica Lewinsky, and that should take a bite from the soul.

—Bruce Sterling (2010)

Introduction to (and explanation of) this quote series can be found here.  Read this tag to see all of them.

US History 1973 - 2014 Commonplace Book: Lecture 21, Tabloid Nation II: Monica (Con't)

Bill Clinton's secret emerged in every last mortifying detail—every last lifelike detail, the livingness, like the mortification, exuded by the pungency of the specific data.... Ninety-eight... [was] the summer of an enormous piety binge, a purity binge, when terrorism—which had replaced communism as the prevailing threat to the country's security—was succeeded by cocksucking, and a virile, youthful middle-aged president and a brash, smitten twenty-one year-old employee carrying on in the Oval Office like two teenage kids in a parking lot revived America's oldest communal passion, historically perhaps its most treacherous and subversive pleasure: the ecstasy of sanctimony. In the Congress, in the press, and on the networks, the righteous grandstanding creeps, crazy to blame, deplore and punish, were everywhere out moralizing to beat the band... all of them eager to enact the astringent rituals of purification that would excise the erection from the executive branch, thereby making things cozy and safe enough for Senator Lieberman's ten-year-old daughter to watch TV with her embarrassed daddy again. No, if you haven't lived through 1998, you don't know what sanctimony is.... It was the summer when a president's penis was on everyone's mind, and life, in all its shameless impurity, once again confounded America.

—Philip Roth, The Human Stain (2001)

Introduction to (and explanation of) this quote series can be found here.  Read this tag to see all of them.

US History 1973 - 2014 Commonplace Book: Lecture 21, Tabloid Nation II: Monica

Hegel remarks somewhere that all great world-historic facts and personages appear, so to speak, twice. He forgot to add: the first time as tragedy, the second time as farce.

—Karl Marx, 18th Brumaire of Louis Bonapatr

Introduction to (and explanation of) this quote series can be found here.  Read this tag to see all of them.

US History 1973 - 2014 Commonplace Book: Lecture 20, Tabloid Nation I: OJ (Con't)

Black America applauded the acquittal. It was not about you, brother O.J.; it was about Johnnie Cochran.

- Al Sharpton, speaking at Johnnie Cochran's funeral (2005)

Introduction to (and explanation of) this quote series can be found here.  Read this tag to see all of them.

US History 1973 - 2014 Commonplace Book: Lecture 20, Tabloid Nation I: OJ (Con't)

I saw white rage, even in the faces of my liberal colleagues, even in the faces of people who had donated money to [defense attorneys Peter] Neufeld and [Barry] Scheck's Innocence Project. I saw rage in their faces when they said that they were never going to send those guys another dime again, even though the work that these guys do is absolutely critical to fixing precisely the problems in the criminal justice system that we saw in the O.J. Simpson trial. And they said, "Well, you all should have thought about that before you cheered." Group punishment.

— Kimberlé Williams Crenshaw (2005 interview)

Introduction to (and explanation of) this quote series can be found here.  Read this tag to see all of them.

Some Historical Echoes Really Undermine Your Own Case

Segregation now, segregation tomorrow, segregation forever.
— George Wallace, 1963

Israel today, Israel tomorrow, Israel forever.
— Rep. Hakeem Jeffries (D-NY), Yesterday

Yes, apparently he really said that. They have video and everything.

The echo is so strong that I have to admit to wondering whether he was trying to subtly signal that he thinks he's on the wrong side here. (Although if so, he ought to remember that "Hell's just a place for kiss-ass politicians who pander to assholes.") Or maybe his unconscious is working overtime?

'cause really, if this is an honest attempt at pro-Israel hasbara, I kinda got rate this a big 'ol FAIL.

Wallace didn't recant as much as quickly as he was given credit for (there's a whole chapter of my dissertation on this), but he did start shifting positions to some degree within a decade. I wonder how long Rep. Jeffries will take?

US History 1973 - 2014 Commonplace Book: Lecture 20, Tabloid Nation I: OJ (Con't)

...the only reason we will care about this case 10 years after, 20 years after, is what it told us about race in this country. The rest is passing entertainment.... The case represented a referendum on what we [thought] about race in 1995.

— Jeffrey Toobin (2005 interview)

Introduction to (and explanation of) this quote series can be found here.  Read this tag to see all of them.

US History 1973 - 2014 Commonplace Book: Lecture 20, Tabloid Nation I: OJ (Con't)

The jurors had discussed the merits of the case against O. J. Simpson for about two hours—less time than most other adults in America.

— Jeffrey Toobin, The Run of His Life: The People vs. O. J. Simpson

Introduction to (and explanation of) this quote series can be found here.  Read this tag to see all of them.

US History 1973 - 2014 Commonplace Book: Lecture 20, Tabloid Nation I: OJ (Con't)

There was another man not too long ago in this world who had those same views, who wanted to burn people, who had racist views, and ultimately had power over people in his country. People didn't care. People said he's crazy. He's just a half-baked painter. And they didn't do anything about it. This man, this scourge, became one of the worst people in the world, Adolf Hitler, because people didn't care, didn't stop him. He had the power over his racism and his anti-religionism. Nobody wanted to stop him....And so Fuhrman. Fuhrman wants to take all black people now and burn them or bomb them. That's genocidal racism. Is that ethnic purity? We're paying this man's salary to espouse these views...

—Johnny Cochran, summation to the O. J. Simpson Jury

Introduction to (and explanation of) this quote series can be found here.  Read this tag to see all of them.

US History 1973 - 2014 Commonplace Book: Lecture 20, Tabloid Nation I: OJ (Con't)

OJ is in massive denial. He obviously did it. He should do a diminished-capacity please and he might have a chance to get out in a reasonable amount of time.

—Johnny Cochran, in private, prior to being hired as Simpson's lawyer

Introduction to (and explanation of) this quote series can be found here.  Read this tag to see all of them.

US History 1973 - 2014 Commonplace Book: Lecture 20, Tabloid Nation I: OJ (Con't)

I'm not black, I'm OJ

—O. J. Simpson, 1968

Introduction to (and explanation of) this quote series can be found here.  Read this tag to see all of them.

US History 1973 - 2014 Commonplace Book: Lecture 20, Tabloid Nation I: OJ

OJ, Monica, Iraq war runup. 3 media events impossible to explain to The Kids Today. had to have been there

—Atrios (Duncan Black) on Twitter, March 19, 2014

Introduction to (and explanation of) this quote series can be found here.  Read this tag to see all of them.

US History 1973 - 2014 Commonplace Book: Lecture 19, The Gingrich Revolution and the Clinton Restoration: Politics, 1994 - 1996 (Con't)

I can't think. I can't act.... I can't focus on a thing but the next fund raiser. Hillary can't. Al can't — we're all getting sick and crazy because of it.

—Bill Clinton, speaking to Dick Morris, during 96 re-election campaign

Introduction to (and explanation of) this quote series can be found here.  Read this tag to see all of them.

US History 1973 - 2014 Commonplace Book: Lecture 19, The Gingrich Revolution and the Clinton Restoration: Politics, 1994 - 1996 (Con't)

The era of big government is over.

—Bill Clinton, 1996 State-of-the-Union address

Introduction to (and explanation of) this quote series can be found here.  Read this tag to see all of them.

US History 1973 - 2014 Commonplace Book: Lecture 19, The Gingrich Revolution and the Clinton Restoration: Politics, 1994 - 1996 (Con't)

Any Republican urge to negotiate a “least bad” compromise with the Democrats, and thereby gain momentary public credit for helping the president “do something” about health care, should also be resisted. Passage of the Clinton health care plan, in any form, would guarantee and likely make permanent an unprecedented federal intrusion into and disruption of the American economy–and the establishment of the largest federal entitlement program since Social Security. Its success would signal a rebirth of centralized welfare-state policy at the very moment we have begun rolling back that idea in other areas.… But the Clinton proposal is also a serious political threat to the Republican Party. Republicans must therefore clearly understand the political strategy implicit in the Clinton plan–and then adopt an aggressive and uncompromising counterstrategy designed to delegitimize the proposal and defeat its partisan purpose.... But the long-term political effects of a successful Clinton health care bill will be even worse–much worse. It will relegitimize middle-class dependence for “security” on government spending and regulation. It will revive the reputation of the party that spends and regulates, the Democrats, as the generous protector of middle-class interests. And it will at the same time strike a punishing blow against Republican claims to defend the middle class by restraining government.... The first step in that process must be the unqualified political defeat of the Clinton health care proposal. Its rejection by Congress and the public would be a monumental setback for the president; and an incontestable piece of evidence that Democratic welfare-state liberalism remains firmly in retreat.

—William Kristol, Memo to Republican Leaders, December, 1993

Introduction to (and explanation of) this quote series can be found here.  Read this tag to see all of them.

US History 1973 - 2014 Commonplace Book: Lecture 19, The Gingrich Revolution and the Clinton Restoration: Politics, 1994 - 1996 (Con't)

There is nothing patriotic about hating your country, or pretending you can love your country but despise your government, How dare you suggest that we, in the freest nation on earth, live in tyranny?

—Bill Clinton, May, 1995

Introduction to (and explanation of) this quote series can be found here.  Read this tag to see all of them.

US History 1973 - 2014 Commonplace Book: Lecture 19, The Gingrich Revolution and the Clinton Restoration: Politics, 1994 - 1996 (Con't)

Powerful forces [are] threatening to bring down [Clinton's] administration. I think that they are called "hormones".

—Jay Leno, The Tonight Show, 1994

Introduction to (and explanation of) this quote series can be found here.  Read this tag to see all of them.

US History 1973 - 2014 Commonplace Book: Lecture 19, The Gingrich Revolution and the Clinton Restoration: Politics, 1994 - 1996

[With their health care plan, the Clintons] were going against the entire tide of Western history. I mean, centralized, command bureaucracies are dying. This is the end of that era, not the beginning of it.

—Newt Gingrich, 1994

Introduction to (and explanation of) this quote series can be found here.  Read this tag to see all of them.

US History 1973 - 2014 Commonplace Book: Lecture 18, From Clinton to Gingrich: Politics, 1992 - 1995 (Con't)

[Reply to question about Democrats in Congress:] We're owned by them. Business. That's where the campaign money comes from now. In the nineteen-eighties we gave up on the little guys. We started drinking from the same trough as the Republicans. We figured business would have to pay up because we had the power on the Hill. [pause] We were right. But we didn't realize we were giving them power over us. And now we have both branches of government, and they have even more power. It's too late now.

—Marty Sabo, Chairman of House Budget Committee, to Secretary of Labor Robert Reich, 1993

Introduction to (and explanation of) this quote series can be found here.  Read this tag to see all of them.

US History 1973 - 2014 Commonplace Book: Lecture 18, From Clinton to Gingrich: Politics, 1992 - 1995 (Con't)

I cannot believe you could live on this earth and know that you were responsible for electing a slime, a scum, a philandering, pot-smoking, draft-dodging pig of a man. . . . You make me sick. I hate your guts.

—Bush Campaign Manager Mary Matalin to her future husband, Clinton Campaign Manager James Carville, after Clinton's election

Introduction to (and explanation of) this quote series can be found here.  Read this tag to see all of them.

US History 1973 - 2014 Commonplace Book: Lecture 18, From Clinton to Gingrich: Politics, 1992 - 1995 (Con't)

[It's] the economy, stupid.

—Sign in W. Clinton's campaign headquarters, 1992

Introduction to (and explanation of) this quote series can be found here.  Read this tag to see all of them.

US History 1973 - 2014 Commonplace Book: Lecture 18, From Clinton to Gingrich: Politics, 1992 - 1995

Friends, this election is about more than who gets what. It is about who we are. It is about what we believe and what we stand for as Americans. There is a religious war going on in this country. It is a cultural war, as critical to the kind of nation we shall be as the Cold War itself. For this war is for the soul of America. And in that struggle for the soul of America, Clinton & Clinton are on the other side, and George Bush is on our side.... And as those boys took back the streets of Los Angeles, block by block, my friends, we must take back our cities, and take back our culture, and take back our country. God bless you, and God bless America.

—Pat Buchanan, 1992 Republican National Convention

Introduction to (and explanation of) this quote series can be found here.  Read this tag to see all of them.

US History 1973 - 2014 Commonplace Book: Lecture 17, The Culture Wars of the Early 90s (Con't)

People used to think that television was aimed at the mind of a 12-year-old. Now it seems aimed at the hormones of a 14-year-old.

—Robert Lichter, director of the Center for Media and Public Affairs (1998)

Introduction to (and explanation of) this quote series can be found here.  Read this tag to see all of them.

US History 1973 - 2014 Commonplace Book: Lecture 17, The Culture Wars of the Early 90s (Con't)

Thomas had effectively walled himself off from embarrassing questions about his private life. Hill would not be so lucky.

—Jane Mayer & Jill Abramson

Introduction to (and explanation of) this quote series can be found here.  Read this tag to see all of them.

US History 1973 - 2014 Commonplace Book: Lecture 17, The Culture Wars of the Early 90s (Con't)

You all have a much tougher rode to travel. Not only do you have to content with the ever-present bigotry, you must do so with a recent tradition that almost requires you to wallow in excuses. You now have a popular national rhetoric which says that you can't learn because of racism, you can't raise the babies you make because of racism, you can't get up in the mornings because of racism. You commit crimes because of racism. Unlike me, you must not only overcome the repressiveness of racism, you must also overcome the lure of excuses.

—Clarence Thomas speaking at Savannah State College, 1985

Introduction to (and explanation of) this quote series can be found here.  Read this tag to see all of them.

US History 1973 - 2014 Commonplace Book: Lecture 17, The Culture Wars of the Early 90s (Con't)

Without the Cold War, what is the point of being an American?

—John Updike, Rabbit at Rest (1991)

Introduction to (and explanation of) this quote series can be found here.  Read this tag to see all of them.

US History 1973 - 2014 Commonplace Book: Lecture 17, The Culture Wars of the Early 90s (Con't)

Our ideals are triumphing but American wealth, influence, prestige and power are all declining.

—William Schneider

Introduction to (and explanation of) this quote series can be found here.  Read this tag to see all of them.

US History 1973 - 2014 Commonplace Book: Lecture 17, The Culture Wars of the Early 90s

Where appropriate I employ the term "Tabloid Nation," which I did not originate, to categorize media firestorms such as those surrounding the Gulf War, the O.J. trial, and Monica Lewinsky.... When really important news took place, such as presidential dalliances with interns, electronic avalanches overwhelmed the populace. It remains true today and will be event truer tomorrow that never before have there been so many ways of acquiring information. Yet enough time has already passed to make it clear that the multiplication electronic outlets does not lead to a better-informed public, except in the area of celebrity gossip where giant strides have been made. While everyone knows more than any human being should about the failings of Britney Spears, the percentage of Americans who don't believe in evolution, who think the sun revolves around the earth, or who cannot find Iraq on a map remains huge.... The irony of Tabloid Nation is that we are all wired, all digital, all the time, learning more and more about less and less, a legacy that has been a long time building but never more so than now. The nineties offer many distressing examples of this.

—William L. O'Neill, A Bubble in Time: America During the Interwar Years, 1989-2001 (2009)

Introduction to (and explanation of) this quote series can be found here.  Read this tag to see all of them.

US History 1973 - 2014 Commonplace Book: Lecture 16, The Gulf War & Bush 41's Foreign Policy (Con't)

The First Gulf War, precisely because it was so easy, taught the military little and the future Bush II administration nothing.

—Historian William L. O'Neill

Introduction to (and explanation of) this quote series can be found here.  Read this tag to see all of them.

US History 1973 - 2014 Commonplace Book: Lecture 16, The Gulf War & Bush 41's Foreign Policy (Con't)

This seems to be the Any Warhol War... A quarter-hour of fame and maximum attention and, in retrospect, horrendous losses of life on the other side, but remarkably trivial in its consequences otherwise.

—Historian John Shy, quoted in The New York Times, January 16, 1992

Introduction to (and explanation of) this quote series can be found here.  Read this tag to see all of them.

US History 1973 - 2014 Commonplace Book: Lecture 16, The Gulf War & Bush 41's Foreign Policy (Con't)

SAVANNAH, Ga., June 15 — The yellow ribbons, now frayed and faded, are still wrapped around the oak trees near the Hunter Army Air Field here where horn-honking, flag-waving crowds lined the streets in the early morning hours last March to greet the first troops returning from the Persian Gulf war.

But here as elsewhere, the war seems like something from another era these days, and the talk is of other things: the sluggish economy, the dreary stretch of empty buildings on Broughton Street downtown, the record-breaking local murder rate.

A year after it began in fear and ambiguity and ended in relief and jubilation, the Persian Gulf war has receded to a degree that few people expected, replaced by fears about the economy and doubts about the country's ability to handle problems at home as easily as it dispatched Saddam Hussein's overmatched military forces.

At the Raytheon plant in Andover, Mass., where the Patriot missiles that helped decide the war are manufactured, the talk is of possible layoffs....

—Peter Applebomes, "Year After Gulf War, Joy is a Ghost", The New York Times, January 16, 1992, opening grafs

Introduction to (and explanation of) this quote series can be found here.  Read this tag to see all of them.

How to Survive

Every time I rewatch the trailer for How to Survive a Plague (2012) — and I find it compulsively rewatchable; I keep playing it in the background as I prepare for my lecture on AIDS on Tuesday morning — I tear up when I get to the part where Peter Staley, speaking in 1990 at the Sixth International Conference on AIDS in San Francisco, says "Some day, there will be a people alive on this earth who will hear the story that once there was a terrible disease, and that a brave group of people stood up an fought, and in some cases died, so that others might live and be free."



Well, one small slice of those people will be the students in the course I'm teaching, on Tuesday afternoon. All of them are younger than the drug cocktail that produced the so-called Lazarus effect in 1996; that has shaped their world. But they should hear the story behind.

And if you haven't seen the movie yourself, see it. If you have seen it, see it again. Not only because it is an amazing story. But we have a lot of terrible evils that plague this world. This is how we'll survive them: by acting up. And fighting back.

US History 1973 - 2014 Commonplace Book: Lecture 16, The Gulf War & Bush 41's Foreign Policy (Con't)

By God, we've kicked the Vietnam syndrome once and for all!

—George H.W. Bush

Introduction to (and explanation of) this quote series can be found here.  Read this tag to see all of them.

US History 1973 - 2014 Commonplace Book: Lecture 16, The Gulf War & Bush 41's Foreign Policy (Con't)

Interviewer: Do you think the U.S., or U.N. forces, should have moved into Baghdad?
Cheney: No.... Because if we'd gone to Baghdad we would have been all alone. There wouldn't have been anybody else with us. It would have been a U.S. occupation of Iraq. None of the Arab forces that were willing to fight with us in Kuwait were willing to invade Iraq. Once you got to Iraq and took it over, and took down Saddam Hussein's government, then what are you going to put in its place?... It's a quagmire if you go that far and try to take over Iraq. The other thing was casualties.... And the question for the president, in terms of whether or not we went on to Baghdad, and took additional casualties in an effort to get Saddam Hussein, was how many additional dead Americans is Saddam worth? And our judgment was, not very many, and I think we got it right.

—Bush 41's Secretary of Defense, Dick Cheney, in 1994

Introduction to (and explanation of) this quote series can be found here.  Read this tag to see all of them.

US History 1973 - 2014 Commonplace Book: Lecture 16, The Gulf War & Bush 41's Foreign Policy (Con't)

...XVIII Corps also made good progress, the chief problem being mobs of surrendering Iraqis who kept getting in everyone's way.

—Historian William L. O'Neill

Introduction to (and explanation of) this quote series can be found here.  Read this tag to see all of them.

US History 1973 - 2014 Commonplace Book: Lecture 16, The Gulf War & Bush 41's Foreign Policy (Con't)

...The Gulf War now has a logo and a theme song. We had gone frm Vietnam horror to mainline entertainment. No wonder the networks push war so hard. Desert Storm's a hit show.

— David Hackworth, retired army colonel & commentator on CNN

Introduction to (and explanation of) this quote series can be found here.  Read this tag to see all of them.

US History 1973 - 2014 Commonplace Book: Lecture 16, The Gulf War & Bush 41's Foreign Policy (Con't)

I'm going to pop some popcorn and watch the war.

—College student, 1991

Introduction to (and explanation of) this quote series can be found here.  Read this tag to see all of them.

US History 1973 - 2014 Commonplace Book: Lecture 16, The Gulf War & Bush 41's Foreign Policy (Con't)

This [is] no time to go wobbly.

—Margaret Thatcher to George Bush '41, referring to Iraq, 1990

Introduction to (and explanation of) this quote series can be found here.  Read this tag to see all of them.

US History 1973 - 2014 Commonplace Book: Lecture 16, The Gulf War & Bush 41's Foreign Policy (Con't)

What's the difference between the US and Russia? The US has a communist party.

—Popular joke, circa 1991-1992

Introduction to (and explanation of) this quote series can be found here.  Read this tag to see all of them.

US History 1973 - 2014 Commonplace Book: Lecture 16, The Gulf War & Bush 41's Foreign Policy

[In contrast to the Brezhnev doctrine:] We now have the Frank Sinatra doctrine. He has a song, I Did It My Way. So every country decides on its own which road to take.

—Soviet Foreign Minister Gennadi Gerasimov, October 25, 1989

Introduction to (and explanation of) this quote series can be found here.  Read this tag to see all of them.

US History 1973 - 2014 Commonplace Book: Lecture 15, Bush 41 (Con't)

My opponent won't rule out raising taxes. But I will. And The Congress will push me to raise taxes and I'll say no. And they'll push, and I'll say no, and they'll push again, and I'll say, to them, "Read my lips: no new taxes."

—George H. W. Bush, Nomination Acceptance Speech (1988)

Introduction to (and explanation of) this quote series can be found here.  Read this tag to see all of them.

US History 1973 - 2014 Commonplace Book: Lecture 15, Bush 41 (Con't)

This election is not about ideology: it's about competence.

—Governor Michael Dukakis, Nomination Acceptance Speech (1988)

Introduction to (and explanation of) this quote series can be found here.  Read this tag to see all of them.

US History 1973 - 2014 Commonplace Book: Lecture 15, Bush 41

I'm following Mr. Reagan — blindly.

—George H. W. Bush, as quoted by reporter Sydney Blumenthal (1988)

Introduction to (and explanation of) this quote series can be found here.  Read this tag to see all of them.

US History 1973 - 2014 Commonplace Book: Lecture 14, Cultural Wars of the 1980s (Con't)

The issue presented is whether the Federal Constitution confers a fundamental right upon homosexuals to engage in sodomy... to claim that a right to engage in such conduct is "deeply rooted in this Nation's history and tradition" or "implicit in the concept of ordered liberty" is, at best, facetious.

—Bowers v Hardwick (1986), majority opinion

Introduction to (and explanation of) this quote series can be found here.  Read this tag to see all of them.

US History 1973 - 2014 Commonplace Book: Lecture 14, Cultural Wars of the 1980s (Con't)

We let the marketplace decide whether it's in good taste or bad taste.

—FCC commissioner James Quello

Introduction to (and explanation of) this quote series can be found here.  Read this tag to see all of them.

US History 1973 - 2014 Commonplace Book: Lecture 14, Cultural Wars of the 1980s (Con't)

What Jesse Helms has done has backfired. I now know more about lesbian sexuality than I had hoped to know, quite honestly, because I have seen artist upon artist find the authentic voice that has been told it cannot speak out. And because they have defined what the territory is, we're now in their territory, pushing, pushing, pushing.

—An activist quoted in Steven Dubin, Arresting Images (p. 248)

Introduction to (and explanation of) this quote series can be found here.  Read this tag to see all of them.

US History 1973 - 2014 Commonplace Book: Lecture 14, Cultural Wars of the 1980s (Con't)

Identity politics amounted to demobilization into a cloister.... Marching on the English Department while the Right took the White House.

—Todd Gitlin

Introduction to (and explanation of) this quote series can be found here.  Read this tag to see all of them.

US History 1973 - 2014 Commonplace Book: Lecture 14, Cultural Wars of the 1980s

Robert Bork's America is a land in which women would be forced into back-alley abortions, blacks would sit at segregated lunch counters, rogue police could break down citizens' doors in midnight raids, schoolchildren could not be taught about evolution, writers and artists could be censored at the whim of the Government, and the doors of the Federal courts would be shut on the fingers of millions of citizens for whom the judiciary is—and is often the only—protector of the individual rights that are the heart of our democracy.

—Sen. Edward Kennedy (D-Mass)

Introduction to (and explanation of) this quote series can be found here.  Read this tag to see all of them.

US History 1973 - 2014 Commonplace Book: Lecture 13, Iran-Contra and the End of the Cold War (Con't)

How wildly wrong [Reagan] is about what is happening in Moscow. Reagan has accelerated the moral disarmament of the West—actual disarmament will follow—by elevating wishful thinking to the status of a political philosophy.

—George Will, January, 1989

Introduction to (and explanation of) this quote series can be found here.  Read this tag to see all of them.

US History 1973 - 2014 Commonplace Book: Lecture 13, Iran-Contra and the End of the Cold War (Con't)

I take full responsibility for my own actions and for those of my administration. As angry as I may be about activities undertaken without my knowledge, I am still accountable for those activities. As disappointed as I may be in some who served me, I'm still the one who must answer to the American people for this behavior. And as personally distasteful as I find secret bank accounts and diverted funds -- well, as the Navy would say, this happened on my watch....

A few months ago I told the American people I did not trade arms for hostages. My heart and my best intentions still tell me that's true, but the facts and the evidence tell me it is not....

[N]o one kept proper records of meetings or decisions. This led to my failure to recollect whether I approved an arms shipment before or after the fact. I did approve it; I just can't say specifically when.

—Ronald Reagan, oval office speech on Iran-Contra, March 4, 1987

Introduction to (and explanation of) this quote series can be found here.  Read this tag to see all of them.

US History 1973 - 2014 Commonplace Book: Lecture 13, Iran-Contra and the End of the Cold War (Con't)

Mistakes were made.

—Reagan, 1987 state-of-the-union address, about Iran-Contra affair

Introduction to (and explanation of) this quote series can be found here.  Read this tag to see all of them.

US History 1973 - 2014 Commonplace Book: Lecture 13, Iran-Contra and the End of the Cold War (Con't)

If such a story gets out we'll all be hanging by our thumbs in front of the White House until we found out who did it.

—Reagan at early meeting on Iran-Contra

Introduction to (and explanation of) this quote series can be found here.  Read this tag to see all of them.

US History 1973 - 2014 Commonplace Book: Lecture 13, Iran-Contra and the End of the Cold War

They were victims just as surely as the victims in the concentration camps.

—Reagan, at a press conference, April 18, 1985 (referring to German soldiers buried in Bitburg)

I am convinced, as you have told us earlier when we spoke that you were not aware of the presence of SS graves in the Bitburg cemetery. Of course, you didn't know. But now we all are aware. May I, Mr. President, if it's possible at all, implore you to do something else, to find a way, to find another way, another site. That place, Mr. President, is not your place. Your place is with the victims of the SS. Oh, we know there are political and strategic reasons, but this issue, as all issues related to that awesome event, transcends politics and diplomacy. The issue here is not politics but good and evil. And we must never confuse them, for I have seen the SS at work, and I have seen their victims.

— Elie Wiesel to Ronald Reagan, upon being given the Congressional Gold Medal, April 19, 1985

Introduction to (and explanation of) this quote series can be found here.  Read this tag to see all of them.

US History 1973 - 2014 Commonplace Book: Lecture 12, AIDS in America (Con't)

They have spoken against you everywhere,
But weight his song with the great and their pride;
I made it out of a mouthful of air,
Their children's children shall say they have lied.

— W. B. Yeats, "He Thinks of Those Who Have Spoken Evil of His Beloved",
quoted as an epigraph to Larry Kramer, Reports from the Holocaust (1989)

Introduction to (and explanation of) this quote series can be found here.  Read this tag to see all of them.

US History 1973 - 2014 Commonplace Book: Lecture 12, AIDS in America (Con't)

[Regarding] the gay civil rights movement in the last twenty years.... None of it would have happened as it did, if we had not been radicalized by mass death, stripped of fear by imminent death, and determined to bring meaning to the corpses of our loved ones by fighting for the basic rights every heterosexual has taken for granted since birth. No spouse was ever going to be turned away from his husband's deathbed again, as far as I was concerned. Never. Again. For me, marriage equality is not an abstract concept. It has always been my attempt to make my friends' deaths mean something more than tragedy. And it is non-negotiable.

— Andrew Sullivan, 2012

Introduction to (and explanation of) this quote series can be found here.  Read this tag to see all of them.

US History 1973 - 2014 Commonplace Book: Lecture 12, AIDS in America (Con't)

I meet young gay guys today and they don't know what it's like to watch your best friend pound the floor with his fist in agony because the pain won't stop; to pick up a buddy off the carpet when you drop by after work, and see his brittle bones covered in fresh gray diarrhea; to see a friend wake up one day and be unable to tie his shoelaces because toxoplasmosis had eaten half his brain away; to have your shirt cuff brush past a friend's skin and have him scream in agony because of neuropathy; to dance on a disco floor next to a rail-thin guy covered in KS lesions who knows this is the last time he'll dance to anything; to open up the local gay rag and find 10 pages of obits where the real estate ads now sit; to hear a friend speak of watching as a needle is pushed into his open eyeball to alleviate the threat of CMV; to see your date consume two handfuls of toxic drugs twice a day to do something about a virus that would nevertheless kill him at the age of 29; to hear of couples torn apart and bereaved lovers thrown out of their homes because their in-laws hate them and their husbands just died; to scan the eyes of a doctor to see if he's lying to you about your prognosis; to catch the face of an old man on the street and realize seconds later that he was a friend who looked 25 only a few months before; to attend more funeral services than happy hours; to feel shame because of an illness; and to endure sickness knowing that there is no end or future except pain and death.

—Andrew Sullivan, 2007

Introduction to (and explanation of) this quote series can be found here.  Read this tag to see all of them.

US History 1973 - 2014 Commonplace Book: Lecture 12, AIDS in America (Con't)

I suspect -- I know -- my funeral will shock people when it happens. We Americans are terrified of death. Death takes place behind closed doors and is removed from reality, from the living. I want to show the reality of my death, to display my body in public; I want the public to bear witness. We are not just spiraling statistics; we are people who have lives, who have purpose, who have lovers, friends, and families. And we are dying of a disease maintained by a degree of criminal neglect so enormous that it amounts to genocide.

I want my death to be as strong a statement as my life continues to be.

I want my own funeral to be fierce and defiant, to make the public statement that my death from AIDS is a form of political assassination.

We are taking this action out of love and rage.

—Mark Fisher, "Burry Me Furiously", published anonymously a few weeks before his death

Introduction to (and explanation of) this quote series can be found here.  Read this tag to see all of them.

US History 1973 - 2014 Commonplace Book: Lecture 12, AIDS in America (Con't)

AIDS demonstrates how economics and politics cannot be separated from disease; indeed, those forces shape our response in powerful ways.... AIDS will be a standard by which we may measure not only our medical and scientific skill but also our capacity for justice and compassion.

—Alan M. Brandt, 1986

Introduction to (and explanation of) this quote series can be found here.  Read this tag to see all of them.

US History 1973 - 2014 Commonplace Book: Lecture 12, AIDS in America (Con't)

If you ask me, I think they all deserve to die, because they took it up the butt.

—Mentor to bond trader (& future ACT-UP member) Peter Staley

Introduction to (and explanation of) this quote series can be found here.  Read this tag to see all of them.

US History 1973 - 2014 Commonplace Book: Lecture 12, AIDS in America (Con't)

It was my friends. My circle was hit hard and hit early. By 1985, almost everyone I knew was dying or already dead. This feeling of people disappearing was terrifying, because it wasn't just my friends and colleagues…. It was also the people I saw every day but whose names were not known to me -- the bus driver, the mail delivery person, the baker, the guy I would see walking his collie every day in the park on my way to work. One by one, all these familiar faces disappeared. And there was no treatment, and people died very quickly.

—Cleve Jones

Introduction to (and explanation of) this quote series can be found here.  Read this tag to see all of them.

US History 1973 - 2014 Commonplace Book: Lecture 12, AIDS in America (Con't)

If this article doesn't scare the shit out of you, we're in real trouble. If this article doesn't rouse you to anger, fury, rage, and action, gay men may have no future on this earth. Our continued existence depends on just how angry you can get....

—Larry Kramer, "1,112 and Counting...." (1983)

Introduction to (and explanation of) this quote series can be found here.  Read this tag to see all of them.

US History 1973 - 2014 Commonplace Book: Lecture 12, AIDS in America (Con't)

If I had written this a month ago, I would have used the figure '40'. If I had written this last week, I would have needed '80'. Today I must tell that 120 gay men in the United States -- most of them here in New York -- are suffering from an often letheal form of cancer called Kaposi's sarcoma or from a virulent form of pneumonia that may be associated with it. More than thirty have died.

—Larry Kramer, NY Native, August 24/September 6 issue, 1981

Introduction to (and explanation of) this quote series can be found here.  Read this tag to see all of them.

US History 1973 - 2014 Commonplace Book: Lecture 12, AIDS in America

In this respect our townfolk were like everybody else, wrapped up in themselves; in other words they were humanists: they disbelieved in pestilences. A pestilence isn't a thing made to man's measure; therefore we tell ourselves that pestilence is a mere bogey of the mind, a bad dream that will pass away. But it doesn't always pass away, and from one bad dream to another, it is men who pass away...

—Albert Camus, The Plague (1947), trans. Stewart Gilbert
Quoted in Randy Shilts, And the Band Played On: Politics, People and the AIDS Epidemic (1987)

Introduction to (and explanation of) this quote series can be found here.  Read this tag to see all of them.

US History 1973 - 2014 Commonplace Book: Lecture 11, ((Re)new(ed)) Cold War, 1978 - 1986 (Con't)

[Reagan] surely saw what would have been obvious to anyone in his position: You can't tell the American people that you will make them half safe. You can't say that defenses are "more moral" than offenses if they are designed to protect ICBMs. And you can't promise "to protect American lives rather than avenge them" unless you can propose to make nuclear weapons obsolete.

—Francis Fitzgerald, Way Out There in the Blue

Introduction to (and explanation of) this quote series can be found here.  Read this tag to see all of them.

US History 1973 - 2014 Commonplace Book: Lecture 11, ((Re)new(ed)) Cold War, 1978 - 1986 (Con't)

It's not just the hippies and the crazies anymore, it's everybody.

—Nuclear Freeze demonstrator, quoted in the New York Times

Introduction to (and explanation of) this quote series can be found here.  Read this tag to see all of them.

US History 1973 - 2014 Commonplace Book: Lecture 11, ((Re)new(ed)) Cold War, 1978 - 1986 (Con't)

Sir, do we get to win this time?

—Rambo, in Rambo: First Blood Part II (1985)

Introduction to (and explanation of) this quote series can be found here.  Read this tag to see all of them.

US History 1973 - 2014 Commonplace Book: Lecture 11, ((Re)new(ed)) Cold War, 1978 - 1986

[Reagan] was an actor, the quintessential actor. What he said was what he believed. He didn't stand in front of his mirror in the morning while he shaved wondering whether that was the truth or not.... It's very unusual to have a president who is not interested in policy at all.

—Henry Kissinger

Introduction to (and explanation of) this quote series can be found here.  Read this tag to see all of them.

US History 1973 - 2014 Commonplace Book: Lecture 10, Reaganomics & Domestic Policy in Reagan's First Term (Con't)

Greed, for lack of a better word, is good. Greed is right. Greed works. Greed clarifies, cuts through, and captures, the essence of the evolutionary spirit. Greed, in all of its forms; greed for life, for money, for love, knowledge, has marked the upward surge of mankind and greed, you mark my words, will not only save Teldar Paper, but that other malfunctioning corporation called the U.S.A.

—Fictional character Gordon Gekko is the film Wall Street (1987)

Introduction to (and explanation of) this quote series can be found here.  Read this tag to see all of them.

US History 1973 - 2014 Commonplace Book: Lecture 10, Reaganomics & Domestic Policy in Reagan's First Term (Con't)

The choices this year are not just between two different personalities or between two political parties. They're between two different visions of the future, two fundamentally different ways of governing -- their government of pessimism, fear, and limits, or ours of hope, confidence, and growth.

—Ronald Reagan, accepting Republican renomination, August, 1984

Introduction to (and explanation of) this quote series can be found here.  Read this tag to see all of them.

US History 1973 - 2014 Commonplace Book: Lecture 10, Reaganomics & Domestic Policy in Reagan's First Term (Con't)

Paint Reagan as the personification of all that is right with or heroized by America. Leave Mondale in a position where an attack on Reagan is tantamount to an attack on America's idealized image of itself.

—Republican Campaign Memo, 1984

Introduction to (and explanation of) this quote series can be found here.  Read this tag to see all of them.