Sidney Blumenthal Quotes

It's absolutely crucial for the Democrats to have a sense of their history, of who they are, in order to be able to project their values and stand up for them. It was an absurd theory that by cutting taxes you would increase government revenues, because the growth of the economy would create an overflow of taxes that would fall into the government coffers. If there were any clear investigation of 9/11, they wouldn't let Louie Freeh off the hook. The conservative argument is that the economy is like the weather, that it just operates automatically. Clinton took very tough decisions on the economy. But presidents matter. That's one of the biggest lessons I learned being in the White House. Bill Clinton was in the line of great progressive presidents who faced the realities in his own time and applied innovative solutions to problems. As I said, if you don't stand up for yourself, people aren't going to think that you can stand up for them. And Louis Freeh was a completely dysfunctional FBI Director, who was actually waging his own private war against the Clinton Administration. Clinton was a president who used his office, in creative ways, to try to reinvigorate the federal government to benefit the majority. We barely missed killing Bin Laden. There were numerous findings issued by the President to kill him. We rolled up terrorist cells. We stopped the millennium bombings. Even on education, his one accomplishment, the Leave No Child Behind Act, and he has left it unfunded. It was the biggest suppression of voting rights in our country's history since Jim Crow. And the thread of race runs from the beginning to the end of my book. On the contrary, it might even be a projection of what the truth is of the Bush Administration's complacency and ineptitude on the terrorism in its first 9 months in office. The attack on Clinton on terrorism is entirely politically inspired by the right-wing of the Republicans, and has no basis in fact whatsoever. Clinton was very early on aware of the problem of international terrorism. 22 million new jobs under President Clinton. 3 million lost under Bush. On health care, virtually every political error that could be made was made. The biggest mistakes, early on, involved foreign policy and involved the strategy for health care. Even on education, his one accomplishment, the Leave No Child Behind Act, and he has left it unfunded.