Unpatriotic Behavior Quotes
He was a strong conservative who defended the George W, Bush administration, He was not alone in believing that in wartime, attacks and criticisms of the President and his administration give “aid and comfort to the enemy and weaken the nation’s resolve. However, he is almost unique in the level of hypocracy that he exhibited when a Democrat was next in the Presidency. The fact that we were in two major wars and incursions as well, did not inhibit him from viciously critizing President Barack Obama. He didn’t think this made him a “BAD” American and promptly forgot this quotation which came back to ic in haunt him.
In war time often we have behaved in ways we were embarrassed by in the fullness of time such as the internment of the Japanese Americans in WWII. The vast majority of the press was totally intimidated and any one who suggested that the administration might be wrong was not only accused of being themselves wrong but of being un-American and almost a traitor. O’Reiley probably did this better than most. History and events of course, showed later that these premises and claims were totally wrong. There were no weapons of mass destruction in Iraq and there was no Iraqi involvement in with Al Quaeda and September 11. Many people do not think O’Reily was a BAD American for being a ctitic in wartime and neither were the people he labeled as “BAD”. In a democracy, critism helps even if it is embarrassing to a particular administration.
In early 1933 President Hoover was a lame duck, but the country was in the midst of a banking panic in the Great Depression. Hoover tried to get President-elect Roosevelt to join him in some joint action, but Roosevelt didn't want to commit to anything in advance and preferred not to associate his administration with the banking debacle of the Hoover administration. He felt that the public was so soured on Hoover’s incompetence and lack of apparent empathy, that anything he did with Hoover would be perceived fas bad and doomed to failure. What Roosevelt wanted to do is diminish fear and despair and have new hope. However, Hoover was erroneously told by aids that Tugwell, a Roosevelt assistant, had suggested that Roosevelt should let the situation deteriorate, and then there would be more to blame on the Republicans when Roosevelt took office. Tugwell was as far from being a partisan politician as one could get. He was an academic with a PhD in agricultural economics. He had never been involved in politics before. Surprisingly, Hoover believed the story about Tugwell, but by then, the was a very frustrated man who felt that he had almost no good options.
This quotation is very interesting in that it shows a President who was not very happy with the policies of his own Secretary of State. This would never have happened overtly after the FDR presidency. Prior, the Secretary of State had a great deal of independence of operation, which was one of the reasons that it was such a prestigious position. However, on modern times President’s would never publicly criticize their own Secretary of State. They would either control the policies directly, accept his/her actions as their own, fire the Secretary, for force him/her to resign as George W, Bush did with Colin Powell. Also, most Secretaries of State, spending most of their time on foreign affairs, become much more sensitive and sophisticated to the intricacies of the world situation, that their nuanced views are very often not viewed by American public opinion as sufficiently pro American. At the same time, there has been a tradition in America that the Secretary of State does not engage in domestic politics, so does not always seem to be pro American.
Inversion is an elaborate tax loophole whereby a large American corporation buys a tiny corporation in a country that has very low or no corporate income taxes. Once they own it, they Transfer the stock of the American Corporation to the small foreign corporation. Now the American corporation becomes a subsidiary of the foreign corporation whose headquarters is no longer in America. Then they move most of the profits to the “parent” corporation as most companies do. The difference is that the foreign corporation pays little or no taxes, and the American “Subsidiary” pays much less taxes than they used to pay. The have “inverted”—some say perverted--the ownership relationship. They do the same business that they did before in America, use America’s government services just as before, has America educate their workers as before, but they do not pay their fair share of taxes as before.
Elliott Abrams, the Assistant Secretary of State, advocated a military action in Central America that the Admiral thought unnecessarily risky for a limited objective.
Johnson, after replacing Lincoln, started removing Lincoln appointees, particularly those who were aggressive reconstructionists and replacing them with others who generally were less aggressive in protecting Negro rights. “Going into the field” was the code word of the time for being in combat in the Civil War. He tried to label the civilian Lincoln appointees negatively, justifying their replacement. At the time there was no Civil Service system so even relatively minor officials were replaced. He was impeached by the house and retained his office by a single vote although the majority of the Senate voted to convict him.
