We, The People is more than a statement of purpose. It is an acknowledgement of an obligation to each other.
We create our own government. We are responsible for its beauty and for its ugliness. We are responsible for its glories and for its failures and, most important, we are responsible for amending those failures no matter who are their most immediate architects.
Ronald Reagan was a dim hack who did horrible damage to almost everything he touched.
It is the doctrine of the oligarchy that there is nothing that we hold in common, that the commonwealth is a myth, that it is even a sign of softheadedness and weakness. The oligarchical power feeds on the sense that we are all individuals, struggling on our own, and ennobled by the effort.
Optimism....is neither weak nor naive. It can be tough and pure and earned just as clearly as any brooding existential despair.
Campaigns are no longer high-minded exchanges of ideas, even though God knows we need more good ones - ideas, that is.
It's better to be black than gay because when you're black you don't have to tell your mother.
The perfect lover is one who turns into a pizza at 4:00 A.M.
If religion comes into the public square, it is as vulnerable as any other human institution to be pelted with produce. Ignorance does not become wisdom just because you gussy it up with the Gospels.
There is a lot in American politics (and in American life) that is angry, greedy, reckless and violent.
You know, what genuinely makes me uneasy with the way things are going are not - is not really that Trump is going to do everything he said he was going to do, it`s that he has no idea of his job as president. Plus, the people who have been up close and realized that he has no idea how to do this job are leaking like sieves.
Every president learns on the job because nobody`s really prepared for the kind of decisions that cross your desk every day. No one`s prepared for that. No vice president who has scended to the presidency has ever truly been ready for that. Certainly, no vice president who`s assumed the presidency in extremis, like Harry Truman, has been ready for that. But this Trump guy doesn`t seem to be ready for a career in government.
If you ever become a mother, can I have one of the puppies?
In order to get big things done, sometimes, presidents have to be deft at moving the pea around under the shells.
For all the huffing and blowing we get about rugged individualism, the American spirit and the American experiment always have had at their heart the notion that the government is all of us and that, therefore, the government may keep things in trust for all of us.
