Tom Nichols Quotes
Public Policy Polling asked a broad sample of Democratic and Republican primary voters whether they would support bombing Agrabah. Nearly a third of Republican respondents said they would, versus 13 percent who opposed the idea. Democratic preferences were roughly reversed; 36 percent were opposed, and 19 percent were in favor. Agrabah doesn’t exist. It’s the fictional country in the 1992 Disney film Aladdin. Liberals crowed that the poll showed Republicans’ aggressive tendencies. Conservatives countered that it showed Democrats’ reflexive pacifism. Experts in national security couldn’t fail to notice that 43 percent of Republicans and 55 percent of Democrats polled had an actual, defined view on bombing a place in a cartoon.
This quotation describes an embarassng shortcoming of our American body politic.
Tom Nichols, "How America Lost Faith in Expertise And Why That's a Giant Problem",
Sourced by: Eigen's Political and Historical Quotations
When the Republican Party was first founded, they had a disproportionate share of educated people. This was generally true until the Great Depression and the Hoover administration. After the Republican “Southern Strategy in the 1960s, the “solid” Democratic South became Republicans and drove the party far to the right. The party leaders began to scorn intellectuals and scientists. By 2000, a large majority of the most educated Americans were voting Democratic rejecting the extremism of the then Republican Party.
Holman is commenting on the Harvey Weinstein scandal in which he is accused of multiple sexual assaults over 30 or more years and the lack of liberal and progressive outrage and passive acceptance of his behavior by large circles of people who knew.
This was the first exposition of what turned out to be the winning Presidential Campaign strategy in 2004.
A professional mature female actress spoke the words. The Majority of the Republicans voted against the Medicare law that had passed under Lyndon Johnson. They lost millions of votes over that for years. Then at the end of the 20th century, many Republicans tried to reduce or privatize Medicare which by then was second only to Social Security among all government programs. The Democrats then used many variants of this Schwartz ad to great effect.
This another DeLay quote that deviates from the truth. After 9-11, almost ALL Americans supported the effort to go into Afghanistan and attack the terrorists who attacked the World Trade Center and the Pentagon. However, after President Bush invaded Iraq and tried to justify it as a part of the War on Terror, many liberals and Democrats opposed and protested that part of the war. However so did most of the conservative Libertarians, and many main line Republicans also opposed that part of the war effort. Many in the media opposed the Iraq war efforts, but almost as many supported it—especially most radio talk show hosts. Fox News where he did this interview was a major supporter of the war along with many other media outlets. At the end of President George W. Bush’s second term, a majority of Americans opposed continued fighting in Iraq and most of the media so reported that. Reporting anti war public opinion was interpreted by DeLay as “undermining” the war effort. Later, DeLay was convicted and sentenced to jail for money laundering and illegally spending and raising campaign funds. He was also reprimanded by the House Ethics Committee for unethical methods of fund raising for other earlier actions.
Agree resigned from the CIA in protest to its political positions.
Thomas M. Nichols, Ph.D. Professor Course Director for Security, Strategy, and Forces National Security Affairs Phone: (401) 841-7507 Email: nicholst@usnwc.edu Profile Thomas M. Nichols is a professor of national security affairs in the National Security Decision Making Department, where is also the Course Director for Security, Strategy, and Forces. A former Secretary of the Navy Fellow at the Naval War College, he previously taught international relations and Soviet/Russian affairs at Dartmouth College and Georgetown University. He is a former chairman of the Strategy and Policy Department at the Naval War College, for which he was awarded the Navy Civilian Meritorious Service Medal in 2005. He holds a PhD from Georgetown, an MA from Columbia University, the Certificate of the Harriman Institute for Advanced Study of the Soviet Union at Columbia, and a BA from Boston University. Dr. Nichols was personal staff for defense and security affairs in the United States Senate to the late Sen. John Heinz of Pennsylvania, and was a Fellow at the Center for Strategic and International Studies in Washington, DC. He has been an Associate of the Davis Center for Russian Studies at Harvard University, and he is currently a Senior Associate of the Carnegie Council on Ethics and International Affairs in New York City and a Fellow of the International History Institute at Boston University. Since 2008, he has been a Fellow in the International Security Program at the Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs at the John F. Kennedy School of Government at Harvard, where he also teaches courses on “The Future of War” and “Nuclear Weapons and International Security.” He is the author of several books and articles, including The Sacred Cause: Civil-Military Conflict Over Soviet National Security, 1917-1992, The Russian Presidency: Society and Politics in the Second Russian Republic, and Winning the World: Lessons for America’s Future from the Cold War. His most recent book, about the revolutionary changes taking place in the way nations go to war, is Eve of Destruction: The Coming Age of Preventive War (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2008). At Harvard’s Project on Managing the Atom, he is working on a book tentatively titled No Use: Nuclear Weapons and the Reform of American Security Strategy. He has been a regular commentator for various media, including CNN, the BBC, and local, national, and international publications. Dr. Nichols is also a five-time undefeated Jeopardy! champion, and appeared in both the 1994 Tournament of Champions and the 2005 Ultimate Tournament of Champions, which featured the top 100 Jeopardy! players from previous years. Tom Nichols home page at the Kennedy School, including links to recent publications.
