Thomas Frank
Quotations
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“As you may recall, Truman was extremely unpopular when he finally left Washington in 1953, thanks largely to the Korean War. Today, however, he is thought to have been a solidly good president, a ‘Near Great’ even, in the terminology of those surveys of historians they do every now and then.” -Thomas Frank
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“Most of Roosevelt’s innovations have been the law of the land for 70 years now, and yet we are still a free society free enough, that is, to allow tens of thousands of protesters to gather on the National Mall and to broadcast their slogans and speeches to the world via C-SPAN.” -Thomas Frank
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“It is always a disappointment to turn from forthright consideration of some subject – whether from the Left or the Right, a poet or a plumber – to the Beltway version, in which the only aspects of the issue that matter are the effects it will have on the fortunes of the two parties and…
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“Acknowledging class was always difficult for ‘New Democrats’ – it was second-wave, it was divisive – but 2008 made retro politics cool again.” -Thomas Frank
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“Government is, by its very nature, a destroyer of liberties the Obama administration, specifically, is promising to interfere with the economy and the health care system so profoundly that Washington will soon have us all in chains.” -Thomas Frank
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“Liberal that I am, I support health-care reform on its merits alone. My liberal blood boils, for example, when I read that half of the personal bankruptcies in this country are brought on, in part, by medical expenses.” -Thomas Frank
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“We are watching industries crumble, Wall Street firms disappear, unemployment spike, and unprecedented government intervention. And our designated opinion leaders want to know: Is Obama up this week? Is he down? And is his leadership style more like Bill Clinton’s, or Abraham Lincoln’s?” -Thomas Frank
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“There is something uniquely depressing about the fact that the National Portrait Gallery’s version of the Barack Obama ‘Hope’ poster previously belonged to a pair of lobbyists. Depressing because Mr. Obama’s Washington was not supposed to be the lobbyists’ Washington, the place we learned to despise during the last administration.” -Thomas Frank
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“Mr. Obama still has time to reverse course. A great deal depends on it. To fail on health care yet again might well be the ‘Waterloo’ Republicans dream of.” -Thomas Frank
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“Our laws governing lobbying and campaign contributions have struck the right balance between the wishes of the people and those of private industry, so why are we so quick to doubt that the same great results can be achieved by putting the government’s justice-dealing branch on the same market-based course?” -Thomas Frank
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“There are few things in politics more annoying than the Right’s utter conviction that it owns the patent on the word ‘freedom’ that when its leaders stand up for the rights of banks to be unregulated or capital gains to be untaxed, that it is actually and obviously standing up for human liberty, the noblest…
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“When the entertainers of the Right aren’t declaring their disgust with President Obama for groveling before foreign potentates, they’re pretending to fear him as a left-wing thug, an exemplar of what they call ‘the Chicago way.’” -Thomas Frank
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“For-profit higher education is today a booming industry, feeding on the student loans handed out to the desperate.” -Thomas Frank
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“The great fear that hung over the business community in the 1970s was death by regulation, and the great goal of the conservative movement, as it rose to triumph in the 1980s, was to remove that threat – to keep OSHA, the EPA, and the FTC from choking off entrepreneurship with their infernal meddling in…
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“Acknowledging class was always difficult for ‘New Democrats’ – it was second-wave, it was divisive – but 2008 made retro politics cool again.” -Thomas Frank
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“As you watch the world crumble, try taking your Armageddon with this sprinkling of irony: Over the last three decades, business has got virtually everything it wanted, and its doomsday scenario from the 1970s has come true because of it.” -Thomas Frank
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“Former President Bill Clinton, who is widely regarded as a political mastermind, may have sounded like a traditional liberal at the beginning of his term in office. But what ultimately defined his presidency was his amazing pliability on matters of principle.” -Thomas Frank
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Liberal that I am, I support health-care reform on its merits alone. My liberal blood boils, for example, when I read that half of the personal bankruptcies in this country are brought on, in part, by medical expenses. – Thomas Frank
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We have become a society that can’t self-correct, that can’t address its obvious problems, that can’t pull out of its nosedive. And so to our list of disasters let us add this fourth entry: we have entered an age of folly that – for all our Facebooking and the twittling tweedle-dee-tweets of the twitterati –…
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