9 Quotes by Josh Marshall

One of the failings of ideologues is their inability to see that everyone else isn’t necessarily an ideologue like them.

Authoritarianism and secrecy breed incompetence; the two feed on each other. It’s a vicious cycle. Governments with authoritarian tendencies point to what is in fact their own incompetence as the rationale for giving them yet more power.

There’s this old line the wise folks in Washington have that “it’s not the crime, but the cover-up.” But only fools believe that. It’s always about the crime. The whole point of the cover-up is that a full revelation of the underlying crime is not survivable.

Success can be built on a strong relationship between a lobbyist and a single, powerful lawmaker.

I’m not a gun owner and, as I think as is the case for the more than half the people in the country who also aren’t gun owners, that means that for me guns are alien. In the current rhetorical climate people seem not to want to say: I think guns are kind of scary and don’t want to be around them.

If you look at the people who are advising Rudy Giuliani it turns out that they seem to be all the people who were too insane or too extremist to even get on the George W. Bush team.

This has been one of the more comedic aspects of this 72 hours – watching a cavalcade of extremely wealthy pundits, editorialists and political operatives from New York and Washington tell me how rural Americans won’t stand for this.

I think of us as journalists; the medium we work in is blogging.

With Jack Abramoff under indictment, a number of readers have suggested that now he might flip and try to offer the feds some figures higher up the food-chain.