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The Voter Quoter
No.Quotation   (Click below for context and source info)SourcePage
1“He [the Minneapolis FBI supervisor] said he was 'trying to keep someone from taking a plane and crashing into the World Trade Center.'” The 9/11 Commission Report275
2“'By far, the vast majority [of tax cut]...goes to the people at the bottom.' That is what George W. Bush told America. The truth is that the bottom 60 percent got 14.7 percent.”Lies And the Lying Liars Who Tell Them - Franken2
3“Bush announced the [Cheney] task force on May 8, 2001, and said that he himself would 'periodically chair a meeting of the National Security Council to review these efforts.' Bush never chaired such a meeting, though. Probably because Cheney's [antiterrorism] task force never actually met.”Lies And the Lying Liars Who Tell Them - Franken118
4“The arresting agent wrote that Moussaoui seemed like 'the type of person who could fly something into the World Trade Center'. Trying to pique the interest of FBI Headquarters in Washington, a Minneapolis FBI agent wrote that a 747 loaded with fuel could be used as a weapon.”Lies And the Lying Liars Who Tell Them - Franken121
5“'Cheney was the dominant figure on September 11,' observed James Mann, the brilliant analyst of U.S. foreign policy and policy makers who serves as senior writer-in-residence at the Center for Strategic and International Studies. Even wire service reports noted that dominance, with United Press International suggesting that it 'reintroduced nagging questions about who was realy in charge in the Bush White House.'”Dick, The Man Who Is President - Nichols9
6“Ten days after the new administration took office, at the first National Security Council meeting, it became clear to Secretary of the Treasury Paul O'Neill that Cheney and other hard-liners 'were already planning the next war in Iraq and the shape of a post-Saddam country.'” Dick, The Man Who Is President - Nichols208
7“He [Bush] wanted to go to war and he did. He had not the mind to perceive the costs of war, or to listen to those who knew those costs.”E. L. Doctorow's essay
8“There is a tidal wave of hatred for the United States rising from the ancient heart of the world. In Africa, Latin America, Asia, Europe, Australia. I encounter it every day.” An Ordinary Person's Guide to Empire - Roy36
9“The fact is that the only institution in the world today that is more powerful than the American Government is American civil society.” An Ordinary Person's Guide to Empire - Roy37
10“As the main body of our troops were redeployed for the new invasion [of Iraq], those who organized the attacks against us escaped and many of them are still at large. Indeed, their overall numbers seem to have grown considerably because our invasion of the country that did not pose any imminent threat to us was perceived in their part of the world as a gross injustice, and the way in which we have conducted that war further fueled a sense of rage against the United States in those lands and, according to several studies, has stimulated a wave of new recruits for the terrorist group that attacked us and still wishes us harm.” Our Founders and the Unbalance of Power - Gore
11“George W. Bush will go down as the worst environmental president in our nation's history. In a ferocious three-year attack, his administration has launched over 300 major rollbacks of U. S. environmental laws, rollbacks that are weakening the protection of our country's air, water, public lands, and wildlife.” Crimes Against Nature - Kennedy3
12“The report [of the National Energy Policy Development Group, which became the basis for the Republican sponsored energy bill] was an orgy of industry plunder, transferring billions of dollars of public wealth to the oil, coal and nuclear industries which were already swimming in record revenues. Paying lip service to conservation and environmental concerns, the report focused almost exclusively on deregulation, giant subsidies, and tax breaks that would benefit virtually every major polluter in the energy industry.” Crimes Against Nature - Kennedy99
13“Under the current Bush tax system, a working couple with an income of $50,000 a year will pay $8,439 in taxes on that income. If they didn't work, but instead received all their income from dividends and capital gains, their tax would be only $1,770.” Alice in Bushland: Fact and Fantasy in the Bush Administration - Wireman27
14“CAT: "The economy is picking up! The economy is picking up!"
ALICE: "That's great. Does that mean more people will be working in good jobs?"
CAT: "Certainly. There's a boom in computer technology jobs in Calcutta right now."”
Alice in Bushland: Fact and Fantasy in the Bush Administration - Wireman34
15“Trying to eliminate Saddam, extending the ground war into an occupation of Iraq, ... would have incurred incalculable human and political costs .... The coalition would instantly have collapsed, ... there was no viable "exit strategy" we could see....” A World Transformed - Bush & Scowcroft489
16“Watching the responses of Bush and Cheney to 9/11, their obsessive secrecy, their endless political manipulation and exploitation of 9/11, their blatant suppression of rights and liberties of foreigners, their taking our nation to its first "preventive war" as aggressors in Iraq, their distortion of intelligence gathering, their Nixon-like rationalizations, I realized that - with the near certainty of a catastrophic terrorist attack against America one day - we have the wrong leaders.” Worse Than Watergate: The Secret Presidency of George W. Bush - Deanxiii
17“But what clearly distinguishes this presidency is its vice president, a secretive man by nature whose unmatched power is largely veiled but whose secret governmental operations have changed the world - and not for the better. Dick Cheney, effectively a co-president incognito, works behind closed doors and does not answer to Congress or the public. His partner, the president, is not sufficiently knowledgeable about their policies to answer questions about them adequately, if and when he does occasionally make himself available.” Worse Than Watergate: The Secret Presidency of George W. Bush - Deanxv
18“Moyers: Have you seen these figures that CEO pay at Lockheed Martin went up from $5.8 million in 2000 to $25.3 million in 2002... CEO pay went up at General Dynamics from $5.7 million in 2001 to $15.2 million in 2002. It went up at Honeywell from $12.9 million in 2000 to $45 million in 2002.... What do those figures say to you?” How Much Are You Making on the War Daddy? - Hartung24
19“Democracy doesn't work without citizen activism and participation. Trickle-down politics is no more effective than trickle-down economics.” Moyers on America: A Journalist and His Times - Moyers20
20“These right-wing ideologues, by the way, teamed up with deep-pocket bankers-many from Texas, with ties to the Bush White House-to stop America from cracking down on terrorist money havens even after September 11.” Moyers on America: A Journalist and His Times - Moyers24
21“Beyond this, our economy, our health care, our educational system, our environment, our job prospects, our tax system, our energy system, and our fiscal health are all weaker than they were three years ago when Bush and his party took over the government and then took us into a needless and hopeless war.” The Essential America: Our Founders and the Liberal Tradition - McGovern100
22“I can think of no other period in American history when our politics, our policies, and our diplomacy so quickly converted the goodwill of the world into outright resentment and fear of the American colossus. Most of the anti-American sentiment that swept the world stemmed from Mr. Bush's bullying, unilateral invasion of Iraq in defiance of the United Nations and international opinion everywhere.” The Essential America: Our Founders and the Liberal Tradition - McGovern146
23“By September 19, more than 140 Saudis-including several members of the bin Laden family-had been flown out of the United States. Certainly, the majority of the travelers were innocent of any crime. However, at least one is thought to have had terrorist ties, and even the innocent members of bin Laden's family could probably have provided some insight into his funding and operations.” Intelligence Matters: The CIA, the FBI, Saudi Arabia, and the Failure of America's War on Terror - Graham106
24“On March 1,2003, when George Bush stood on the deck of the U.S.S. Ahraham Lincoln and declared that "the battle of Iraq is one victory in a war on terror that began on September the 11th, 2001," he was not just wrong, he was 180 degrees wrong. At best, the war in Iraq distracted from the war on terror. At worst, it set us back significantly.” Intelligence Matters: The CIA, the FBI, Saudi Arabia, and the Failure of America's War on Terror - Graham218
25“On December 5, [2002] Fleischer remarked, "The president of the United States and the secretary of defense would not assert as plainly and bluntly as they have that Iraq has weapons of mass destruction if it was not true, and if they did not have a solid basis for saying it."” The Lies of George W. Bush: Mastering the Politics of Deception - Corn211
26“The concentration of wealth and power in the hands of a few is the death knell of democracy. No republic in the history of humankind has survived this. The election of 2004 will say something about what happens to ours.” Homegrown Democrat: A Few Plain Thoughts From the Heart of America - Keillor20
27“...I know first hand what the world thinks of America and it is not a pretty picture at the moment. I want people to think of America as the land of freedom and democracy, not the land of arrogance and blind revenge. I want to be proud of America again.” Electoral Vote Predictor 2004 - Tanenbaum
28“We conclude that the Intelligence Community was dead wrong in almost all of its pre-war judgments about Iraq's weapons of mass destruction.” Commission on the Intelligence Capabilities of the United States Regarding Weapons of Mass Destruction - The CommissionTransmittal letter
29“"I went to Washington to challenge the soft bigotry of low expectations," the president said in his campaign for reelection in September 2004. "It’s working. It’s making a difference." It is one of those deadly lies, which, by sheer repetition, is at length accepted ....” The Shame of the Nation - Kozol
30“Rather than paperless electronic machines, which he refers to as "faith-based voting," his mainstay is a system of optically scanned paper ballots that are carefully audited after each election to make sure the machines are working properly.” Guardian of the Ballot Box - Andrew GumbelArticle in The Nation
31“The abuse of detainees at Abu Ghraib in late 2003 was not simply the result of a few soldiers acting on their own. Interrogation techniques such as stripping detainees of their clothes, placing them in stress positions, and using military working dogs to intimidate them appeared in Iraq only after they had been approved for use in Afghanistan and at GTMO.” Senate Armed Services Committee Inquiry Into the Treatment of Detainees in U.S. Custody xxix

Do you have a quotation of 1 to 3 sentences in length from a nationally known writer that you would like to contribute to The Voter Quoter? If so, email it, along with its surrounding paragraph(s) and source information, to rwpark@loonfoot.com.

    - R. Park, Madison WI