Mark Twain Quotes

Ingersoll was considered to be the greatest orator and political thinker of his day, but his overt atheistic views curtailed his elected political career.

McClellan after he left his White House Post, reflected on the experience, and wrote a book that described the George W. Bush White House practices many of which he was involved with.

The claims made by some Republicans were so absurd and extreme that the whole Party was tarred. Some even claimed that the legislation required “Death Panels” which would decide on which elderly people would be treated and which should be abandoned to no die with no treatment when there was no such thing even proposed by anyone, much less passed in the legislation.

Sinclair was running for the governorship of California and initial polls showed that he was way ahead. Major Conservatives from the country over contributed money to defeat him—more money at the time than had ever been raised even for a Presidential campaign. The Conservatives hired the first political consultants who would advise on an American Campaign throughs a corporation they established Campaigns Inc. The consultants began creating posters and pamphlets many of which were total fabrications attacking Sinclair and then went through his novels that he had written and took quotes from character dialogues in his novels including some of the villain characters who said vile things. They attributed all these terrible quotation to Sinclair, put them into printed pamphlets and distributed them all over the state. Sinclair lost making the assumption that few people would believe the lies that were being issued from Campaign Inc. After that race, political consultants began to work in many campaigns, and with that came more negative campaigning, attacks and more falsehood and lies entered the American political scene.

See {115604} for a similar sentiment from England.

The Presidential Campaigns of 2008 and 2012 shocked many Americans for the blatant lies that opponents of President Obama wrote and broadcast and then some of the retaliatory lies that Obama defenders responded with. However, this quotation from a 19th century political historian shows us that blatant lying in American politics is not at all new.

This sentiment was apparently first expressed by the English Calvinist Minister, Charles Spurgeon, 1834-1892.

Alsop, a political hawk was convinced, as many other right wingers were at the time that the Russians had forged ahead of us in offensive missiles. When he asked President Eisenhower, the President never denied it, but never went to Congress to ask for more money to close the “missile gap”. Alsop made this shocking accusation which offended many Americans, but pleased the ultra-hawks and anti-communists. Most of the nation however then believed that there was a missile gap, with varying explanations of Eisenhower’s silence on the matter. Two years later John F. Kennedy, used the “missile gap” when running in 1960 against Nixon by attacking Nixon and Eisenhower for allowing us to fall behind the Russians at have a missile gap. When Kennedy became President, he was very surprised that there was no missile gap favoring the Russians—it was favoring the United States. Eisenhower did not want the Russians to know that he knew exactly what they were producing and deploying in missiles through great espionage sources. By not saying anything in the face of the accusations, the Russians assumed that the Americans really thought that they had more capacity than they did. And Eisenhower wanted that so that they would be secure that the United States had no real knowledge of their missile capacity. If Eisenhower had actually told the nation that the Russians were really behind us, the Russians would suspect a security leak and our sources could be compromised.