Joe Conason Quotes

She needs to seem tough, and whatever Hillary's weaknesses, tough is a pretty good word to describe her.

Perception is everything and that becomes the reality. It's a big problem for Hillary Clinton.

Since 2005, a majority of Americans, according to the Gallup poll, have said it was wrong and a mistake to go into Iraq.

It seems ironic that the same convention which thinks Will Rogers is a clown thinks Huey Long is a statesman.

The American people, or at least the ones that I get on the subway with - they know there's a real threat out there. They felt like Iraq lessened our ability to fight that threat.

President Bush admitted that the United States went to war in Iraq based on bad intelligence. But he says knowing what we know now he would still do it again. So at least we're learning from our mistakes.

When the United States invaded Iraq, a New York Times/CBS News survey estimated that 42 percent of the American public believed that Saddam Hussein was directly responsible for the September 11 attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon. And an ABC news poll said that 55 percent of Americans believed that Saddam Hussein directly supported al-Qaeda. None of this opinion is based on evidence (because there isn’t any).

Whatever the reality is the perception is that Marco Rubio went to Washington and threw in with the, quote/unquote, "establishment". He cannot - he cannot recover from that. Has not been able to recover from that.

In politics, reality and appearance are of equal importance. You cannot attend to one and neglect the other. A man must determine both what he is, and what others believe him to be.

Every one sees what you appear to be, few really know what you are, and those few dare not oppose themselves to the opinion of the many, who have the majesty of the state to defend them.

Hillary Clinton doesn't have a prayer. She does not make people feel good. She doesn't have the ability. She doesn't have the ability to be humble. It's just not in her. I mean, she's the Palace of Versailles every day in and out, and that's it.

We're at war with the ISIS caliphate that sprang up because Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama precipitously withdrew all American forces from Iraq and created a vacuum of power, that ISIS was able to overrun vast territories that our soldiers had won in Operation Iraqi Freedom.

People say the war in Iraq is a bad war, and the war in Afghanistan is a good war, but what's the difference between them? Democratic people around the world cannot accept that this is a good war. This is just endless war.

Well, you know, once again, Donald [Trump] is implying that he didn't support the invasion of Iraq. I said it was a mistake.

While Jeb Bush finds himself mired in the muck of an intramural fight in his own party over his remarks about the Iraq War, Hillary Clinton is sticking to the low-key strategy, and it looks like it's working.

Take a look at public opinion. About 70 percent of the population, in the polls, said the [Vietnam ] war was fundamentally wrong and immoral, not a mistake. And that attitude lasted as long as polls were taken in the early '80s.

A new poll showed that 66% of Americans think President Bush is doing a poor job handling the war in Iraq and the remaining 34% think that Adam and Eve rode dinosaurs to church.

...Hard people are weak people whom nobody wants, and the strong, caring little whether they are wanted or not, have alone that meekness which the common herd mistake for weakness.

Long before 9/11 and the war in Iraq, a lot of people hated the United States and the West. But what the Iraqi war seems to have done, at least in... I mean, I'm just reporting what I see from the people on the ground, is that it has silenced many pro-American forces in the Muslim world.

It is better to be seen as cruel than foolish.

The mistakes of the Iraq war are not only tactical and strategic, but historical. It is essentially a war of colonialism, attempted in the post-colonial age.

I don't think the American people had a clear picture of either Nixon or me. I think they thought that Nixon was a strong, decisive, tough-minded guy and that I was an idealist and antiwar guy who might not attach enough significance to the security of the country. The truth is, I was the guy with the war record, and my opposition to Vietnam was because I was interested in the nation's well-being.

The well of public opinion has been well and truly poisoned by the Iraq episode.

Public support in the U.S. for the war against Iraq was founded on a multitiered edifice of falsehood and deceit, coordinated by the U.S. government and faithfully amplified by the corporate media.

That, what we're really seeing in Iraq is not a terrible war, but in fact, just the media's portrayal of it.