Mungo Wentworth MacCallum Quotes
You will always get more points for bashing the opposition than for defending the government, and practically none for giving an honest and considered reply.
This apparently is an operational principle in most representative democracies. Attacking the opposition is always easier and more effective than defending your own party’s position. Doing anything else, especially providing a non partisan, rasoned analysis, is the thing most to be avoided.
Mungo Wentworth MacCallum, Australian Political Journalist & Commentator, Advice to members of the Government majority, How to be a Megalomaniac, 2002
Sourced by: Eigen's Political and Historical Quotations
Most American politicians and citizens, unlike DeLay, believe that arguing against the opponents’ political philosophy should be done with debate, civil argument, advocacy, speechmaking and writing and not by attacking opponents and confronting them whenever possible. 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.
This is especially true in the Senate, where there not only is the filibuster available to the minority but there are “holds” where a single senator can anonymously stop certain processes such as conformations of appointments and a number of other arcane techniques allowed by Senate rules.
He like many other Americans had become dissatisfied with the religious, right wing fundamentalist ideology of the George W. Bush administration and the Republicans who controlled Congress until the election of 2006.
Geraghty is speaking about MTVs “Rock The Vote” campaign (as the starting point) but about the broader media which continues to perpetuate the issue.
At that time, the Republicans in Congress were able to block almost all the wanted by the Democratic President Barack Obama. Much of the behavior was motivated by a disagreement with the President’s proposals, but in many cases, the President had accepted and recommended what the Republicans had wanted (and in many cases had voted for earlier). The Republicans killed these proposals also going over the passive aggressive line that Wetzler had posited. Even when public opinion fell to less than 10 percent approval (lower than used car salesmen) for the Congressional Republicans, they were so locked in to the pattern of passive aggressive behavior, that they could not change.
He was the chairman of the committee and the he had denied the Democrats equal access to witnesses before the meeting in a patently unfair process. When one of the minority members of the committee complained in the open hearing that the process was unfair this was his response. Most majority committee chairmen do not resort to this kind of unfair practice so this was not generally a typical practice but reflected the bitter hyperpartisanship that the House Republicans were engaging in at the time.
Grigory Zinoviev was one of the original leaders of Revolutionary Russia and the early Communist Russian Government. The reason that this is a noteworthy quotation is that it shows that flip flops and hypocrisy seem to be present in all political systems, democratic as ours is as well as others.
The Repubican primary contest weakened Mitt Romney, the eventual primary winner and Presidential Candidate, by forcing him to the right to satisfy the conservative Republicans. This made him very unappealing not only to some moderate republicans but also to independents and especially to minorities and women who very much resented the conservative Republican culture clash which they saw as attacks on them. Democrat Barack Obama won the General Election handily.
Mungo Wentworth MacCallum was an Australian political journalist and commentator.
