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Book: Perpetual War for Perpetual Peace
Quotes of Book: Perpetual War for Perpetual
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  1. Gore Vidal _ Perpetual War for Perpetual

    Pfaff: The riposte of a civilized nation: one that believes in good, in human society and does oppose evil, has to be narrowly focused and, above all, intelligent. Missiles are blunt weapons. Those terrorists are smart enough to make others bear the price for what they have done, and to exploit the results. A maddened U.S. response that hurts still others is what they want: It will fuel the hatred that already fires the self-righteousness about their criminal acts against the innocent. What the United States needs is cold reconsideration of how it has arrived at this pass. It needs, even more, to foresee disasters that might lie in the future.
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  2. Gore Vidal _ Perpetual War for Perpetual

    But then we are old and have been to the wars and value our fast-diminishing freedoms unlike those jingoes now beating their tom-toms in Times Square in favor of all-out war for other Americans to fight.
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  3. Gore Vidal _ Perpetual War for Perpetual

    Incidentally, those who were shocked by Bush the Younger's shout that we are now "at war" with Osama should have quickly put on their collective thinking caps. Since a nation can only be at war with another nation-state, why did our smoldering if not yet burning bush come up with such a war cry? Think hard. This will count against your final grade. Give up? Well, most insurance companies have a rider that they need not pay for damage done by "an act of war." Although the men and women around Bush know nothing of war and less of our Constitution, they understand fund-raising. For this wartime exclusion, Hartford Life would soon be breaking open its piggy bank to finance Republicans for years to come. But the mean-spirited Washington Post pointed out that under U.S. case law, only a sovereign nation, not a bunch of radicals, can commit an "act of war." Good try, G.W. This now means that we the people, with our tax money, will be allowed to bail out the insurance companies, a rare privilege not afforded to just any old generation.
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  4. Gore Vidal _ Perpetual War for Perpetual

    Post Tuesday, SWAT teams can now be used to go after suspect Arab Americans or, indeed, anyone who might be guilty of terrorism, a word without legal definition {how can you fight terrorism by suspending habeas corpus since those who want their corpuses released from prison are already locked up?}. But in the post-Oklahoma City trauma, Clinton said that those who did not support his draconian legislation were terrorist coconspirators who wanted to turn "America into a safe house for terrorists.
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  5. Gore Vidal _ Perpetual War for Perpetual

    Since I am a loyal American, I am not supposed to tell you why this has taken place, but then it is not usual for us to examine why anything happens; we simply accuse others of motiveless malignity. "We are good," G.W. proclaims, "They are evil," which wraps that one up in a neat package. Later, Bush himself put, as it were, the bow on the package in an address to a joint session of Congress where he shared with them-as well as with the rest of us somewhere over the Beltway-his profound knowledge of Islam's wiles and ways: "They hate what they see right here in this Chamber." I suspect a million Americans nodded sadly in front of their TV sets. "Their leaders are self-appointed. They hate our freedoms, our freedom of religion, our freedom of speech, our freedom to vote and assemble and disagree with each other." At this plangent moment what American's gorge did not rise like a Florida chad to the bait?
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  6. Gore Vidal _ Perpetual War for Perpetual

    President Roosevelt provoked the Japanese to attack us at Pearl Harbor.
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  7. Gore Vidal _ Perpetual War for Perpetual

    A year later, Ayatollah Bennett declared, "I find no merit in the {drug} legalizers' case. The simple fact is that drug use is wrong. And the moral argument, in the end, is the most compelling argument." Of course, what this dangerous comedian thinks is moral James Madison and the Virginia statesman and Rights-man George Mason would have thought dangerous nonsense, particularly when his "morality" abolishes their gift to all of us, the Bill of Rights.
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  8. Gore Vidal _ Perpetual War for Perpetual

    In 1989 the former drug czar and TV talk-show fool, William Bennett, suggested de jure as well as de facto abolition of habeas corpus in "drug" cases as well as {I am not inventing this} public beheadings of drug dealers.
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  9. Gore Vidal _ Perpetual War for Perpetual

    The American people are as devoted to the idea of sin and its punishment as they are to making money-and fighting drugs is nearly as big a business as pushing them. Since the combination of sin and money is irresistible {particularly to the professional politician}, the situation will only grow worse." I suppose, if nothing else, I was
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  10. Gore Vidal _ Perpetual War for Perpetual

    FBI slaughter of the innocents at Waco was a model Jacobin enterprise.
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  11. Gore Vidal _ Perpetual War for Perpetual

    It is ironic-rouse the limpest adjective-that a government as spontaneously tyrannous and callous as ours should, over the years, have come yo care so much about our health as it endlessly tests and retests commercial drugs available in other lands while arresting those who take "hard" drugs on the potential ground that they are bad for the user's health. One is touched by their concern- touched and dubious. After all, these same compassionate guardians of our well-being have sternly, year in and year out, refused to allow us to have what every other First World country simply takes for granted, a national health service.
    book-quotepoliticshealth

  12. Gore Vidal _ Perpetual War for Perpetual

    When Kennedy got his highest rating after the debacle of the Bay of Pigs, he observed, characteristically, "It would seem that the worse you fuck up in this job the more popular you get.
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