Scott Ritter Quotes
If you call yourself an American that means that you have embraced the constitution, because that is what an American is. A citizen of the United States of America is someone who has sworn an oath of allegiance to that document, to the words, to the ideals of that document. Right now we have citizens who don't even understand what that document is.
Ritter, Scott. Waging Peace: The Art of War for the Antiwar Movement. Nation Books, 2007, p. 115.
This was a particularly heinous insult. In this campaign, some Republicans began claiming that President Obama was not a legitimate President because he was not born in America as the Constitution requires. Despite the fact that the State of Hawaii validated his birth certificate and the local newspapers carried announcements of his birth, many continued to make the accusation along with the parallel accusation that he was a Muslim and not a Christian despite his Church Membership all of his adult life. For many the purpose was to delegitimize Obama and they added the claim that he was anti American. So when Sununu, a major party leader said this the implication was particularly egregious. Sununu, to his credit, did apologize for the language he used and the implication thereof, but the quote is an excellent example of what has happened when campaigns get hyper-partisan. Even senior, veteran politicians get carried away and say things they regret. The 2012 was a particularly hyper-partisan campaign.
Defending his opposition to a League of Nations. He was instrumental in preventing the United States from joining the League of Nations which President Wilson had worked so hard to create. The Senate never ratified the treaty which Wilson had signed.
In his Senate confirmation hearings Frankfurter was repeatedly asked about his association with the ACLU and his views on Communism by conservative Senator Pat McCarran:
William Scott Ritter Jr. is a former United Nations weapons inspector in Iraq from 1991 to 1998. He later became a critic of United States foreign policy in the Middle East. Prior to the invasion of Iraq in March 2003, Ritter stated that Iraq possessed no significant weapons of mass destruction (WMD) capabilities, becoming according to The New York Times "the loudest and most credible skeptic of the Bush administration’s contention that Hussein was hiding weapons of mass destruction."
