Jacob Weisberg

Quotes by Jacob Weisberg

• It's tempting to dismiss the debate about the National Security Agency spying on Americans as a technical conflict about procedural rights.

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• You may or may not agree with Obama's policy prescriptions, but they are, by and large, serious attempts to deal with the biggest issues we face: a failing health care system, oil dependency, income stagnation, and climate change.

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• Where Republicans encourage popular myths about taxes, spending, and climate change, Democrats tend to stoke our fantasies about the sustainability of entitlement spending as well as about the cost of new programs.

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• If there's one epithet the Right never tires of, it's 'elitism.'

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• Libertarianism, the political philosophy of rugged individualism, ought to hold a natural appeal to tolerant, anti-statist, free-trade conservatives who deplore the turn taken by the party of Abraham Lincoln toward racial prejudice, authoritarianism, and mercantilism.

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• Vietnam was a terrible mistake for the United States. But like Iraq, Vietnam was a badly chosen battlefield in a larger conflict with totalitarianism that America had no choice but to pursue.

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• All kinds of gambling, from bingo to baccarat, are benign entertainment for most people, dangerously addictive to a few, and capable of breeding unwanted side effects for society.

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• Because conscription appeals to essentially no one, the United States has lived with the All-Volunteer Force since the end of the Vietnam War.

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• Northeastern conservatism is moderate, accepts the modern welfare state, and dislikes mixing religion with politics. Western conservatism is hawkish, hates government, and embraces individual freedom. Southern conservatism is populist, draws on evangelical Christianity, and plays upon racial resentments.

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• The cradle-to-grave welfare state diminishes individual initiative and can breed a pervasive sclerosis.

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• Israel never meant to take over the West Bank and Gaza - it got stuck with them after the 1967 war.

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• Nearly everyone who chooses to work for Donald Trump is disreputable in one way or another; Ali Baba didn't find 40 wise men in the cave. But to label everyone in Trumpworld a grifter misses important subtleties. It conflates grifters and grafters, and it ignores the crucial distinction between the two.

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• If you want to go around saying that giving women the vote wrecked the country and still be taken seriously, it helps to be handing out $100 bills.

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