Valerie Plame Quotes

Unless you are a prohibitive front-runner, an unanswered smear is believed.

Look, in 1800 the sainted Thomas Jefferson arranged to hire a notorious slanderer named James Callender, who worked as a writer at a Republican newspaper in Richmond, Va. Read some of what he wrote about John Adams. This was a personal slander.

After President Obama's election, efforts at othering Obama quickly became about smearing his non-partisan allies and ambassadors.

There was a slow-motion swift boating of Hillary Clinton in '15.

It wasn't the first time. This happened to Dennis Kucinich. It happened to Jesse Jackson. They did it even to Howard Dean, creating the Dean scream. This is how they [democrats] work.

We're dealing with character assassins. We're dealing with career assassins. That's who the media is today.

The campaign of character assassination waged [against President Clinton] by the right was a singular, unprecedented effort. Nothing like it exists on the left. What I object to on the right is the obsessive hatred, the bigotry, and the personal savaging of their opponents, all achieved through an echo chamber of talk radio, the Internet and Rupert Murdoch's media outlets. That kind of well-funded disinformation campaign has no analog on the left.

Bad stories are written about me because the press knows they can make me into a weeping dog and few people will object.

Texas governor Rick Perry's wife, Anita, has come out slugging in her glittering leopard-print jacket against what she sees as the unfair treatment of her husband. She tearfully said that he has been 'brutalized' for his faith.

My children were attacked by the Minnesota media when I was governor.

But very often in politics we have the experience called up from my father when someone was trying to help him in the campaign: I can take care of my enemies, may the Good Lord save me from my friends.

Being a gossip reporter just isn't a respectable job. It'll chew you up and spit you out.

Well, you know, in any political campaign, you're gonna have people on one side that are gonna slip a reporter something because they think it'll hurt the guy on the other side.

Unjust attacks on public men do them more good than unmerited praise.

If you really want to diminish a candidate, depict him as the foil of his handler. This is as old in American politics as politics itself.

If you really want to diminish a candidate, depict him as the foil of his handler. This is as old in American politics as politics itself. It's easy to point at me. I'm convenient.

Conservatives and companies condoned Rush Limbaugh's politics of personal destruction when it came to smearing elected officials. 'Fair game,' they said, even when crass and crude. That's just the way it is.

It must be remembered that the Bush White House has a separate talent for character assassination that must not be confused with a talent for governance.

It angers me that a timed, planned and paid smearing campaign is run against me in the press.

I especially object to having my character assassinated by reference to events from my past which bear absolutely no relationship to the question of who the anthrax killer is.

As FIFA leaked information to the media, portraying me as an unethical person, I felt I was left naked, helpless to defend myself, as they repeatedly cut me with a sharp knife.

My theory on smear pieces is try and win 'em over.

It has been my policy not to respond to each of the many canards which have been part of the campaign to discredit my investigation, nor to waste time trying to prove negatives.

I will seek the presidency with nothing to fall back on but the judgment of the people of the United States, and nowhere to go but the White House or home.

Do you know that Claude Pepper is known all over Washington as a shameless extrovert? Not only that, but this man is reliably reported to practice nepotism with his sister-in-law and he has a sister who was once a thespian in wicked New York. Worst of all, it is an established fact that Mr. Pepper, before his marriage, habitually practiced celibacy.