Sidney Blumenthal Quotes (35 Quotes)

The attack on Clinton on terrorism is entirely politically inspired by the right-wing of the Republicans, and has no basis in fact whatsoever.

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.

As I said, if you don't stand up for yourself, people aren't going to think that you can stand up for them.

I did not urge or encourage any reporter to investigate the private life of any member of Congress. Any suggestions otherwise are completely false.

What happened to the Bush Administration regarding terrorism is that they regarded it as a secondary issue, and associated with Clinton. One of those Clinton issues.

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.

The biggest mistakes, early on, involved foreign policy and involved the strategy for health care.

If Ken Starr is interested in the truth, he heard it today.

Bill Clinton was in the line of great progressive presidents who faced the realities in his own time and applied innovative solutions to problems.

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.

But presidents matter. That's one of the biggest lessons I learned being in the White House.

It wasn't simply that Clinton created the greatest prosperity in the country's history. Or that we created 22 million new jobs, more than ever before. Under Clinton, poverty was reduced 25%.

Even on education, his one accomplishment, the Leave No Child Behind Act, and he has left it unfunded.

The Democrats need to remind people of where were, in terms of our progress, as markers against where we are, and where we've fallen, and how we've declined under Bush.

Every decision that they take has enormous consequences, and ripple out from the White House.

The conservative argument is that the economy is like the weather, that it just operates automatically.

Clinton took very tough decisions on the economy.

collapse eventually of their own insubstantiality. And in these conversations with me, the First Lady has always been supportive of the president.

Clinton was a president who used his office, in creative ways, to try to reinvigorate the federal government to benefit the majority.

And Louis Freeh was a completely dysfunctional FBI Director, who was actually waging his own private war against the Clinton Administration.

I think that you need to be able to expose what the Republicans' tactics are. I just think you need to be tough standing up against them.

The president shared his account of the Lewinsky matter with me, ... He did so unguardedly and freely under the assumption that we were speaking in complete privacy. What I told the grand jury under oath supports completely what the president has told the American people and is contrary to any charge that the president has done anything wrong.

No. Absolutely not. We never discussed the personal lives of any woman in those meetings.

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.

Dick Clarke, who was head of counter-terrorism in the National Security Council, pushed constantly for the Principals Committee, which is the key national security group of top officials to take up the issue of terrorism.

Like oil crises in the past, it strikes at American feelings of independence, mobility, freedom and exceptionalism.

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.

If there were any clear investigation of 9/11, they wouldn't let Louie Freeh off the hook.

Do you remember that story I told you back in January Well now that you're actually going to be a witness, now that you're going down to testify before the grand jury, I don't want you to give the grand jury a false impression. I don't want you to give false information to the grand jury. I don't want you to be a cog in the wheel of an obstruction of giving the grand jury the opportunity to hear the truth. I need to recant for you what I told you.

22 million new jobs under President Clinton. 3 million lost under Bush.

The book shows Clinton in the presidency as a profile in growth.

At the same time, Clinton was doing a lot things right, like the economy.

My administration's climate change policy will be science based,

On health care, virtually every political error that could be made was made.

Clinton was very early on aware of the problem of international terrorism.