Robert Scheer Quotes

The death of American liberalism as a significant moral force can be traced to the point in when President Bill Clinton signed legislation that effectively ended the main federal anti-poverty program and turned the fate of welfare recipients, 70 percent of whom were children, over to the tender mercies of the states. With a stroke of the pen, Clinton eliminated what remained of New Deal-era compassion for the poor and codified into law the "tough love" callousness that his Republican allies in the Congress, led by Newt Gingrich, had long embraced.

The fact is ... that when totalitarian nations like China and Saudi Arabia play ball with U.S. business interests, we like them just fine. But when Venezuela's freely elected president threatens powerful corporate interests, the Bush administration treats him as an enemy.

Today anyone on the Internet can find out more about what you read, think, and earn than the secret police of Stalin or Hitler could have learned.

I happen to love America. I love this freedom and democracy. The fact is we are the ones who killed innocent people, men, women and children, in Hiroshima and Nagasaki with nuclear weapons, weapons that should have never been used, should have never been developed in the first place, you know?

The publisher, Jeff Johnson, who has offered not a word of explanation to me, has privately told people that he hated every word that I wrote. I assume that mostly refers to my exposing the lies used by President Bush to justify the invasion of Iraq. Fortunately sixty percent of Americans now get the point, but only after tens of thousand of Americans and Iraqis have been killed and maimed as the carnage spirals out of control. My only regret is that my pen was not sharper and my words tougher.

At least 3% of the signers of the Constitution must have been gay, since that's the low estimate for any population sample. It was probably higher, given that they were a pretty talented bunch and wore wigs.

The paper nominated me 12 or 13 times for the Pulitzer Prize.

If the war on terror is endless, you could forget about democracy.

Much of what candidates have to do is raise money and appeal to constituencies or interest groups that can provide that money.

I was a finalist for the Pulitzer as a reporter.

I was able to do something that people cant do these days, which is to have quality time with the guys who were trying to be president and a number of them who got the job.

Everybody says, "Well, if it's a democracy, let them have nuclear weapons." America is the only country that has ever used nuclear weapons. We're the only ones, this democracy, our great democracy.

The journalist's job is to get the story by breaking into their offices, by bribing, by seducing people, by lying, by anything else to break through the palace guard.

He [Reagan] likes to tell jokes and that's why he told the ethnic joke that got him into some trouble. Perhaps if reporters didn't overreact to a politician's telling the very same joke they routinely hear and tell in the city room, we'd get more humor.

And new people come in, and it doesn't go along with their politics, and they fire me, end the column, silence a voice in Los Angeles. They can't silence it nationally, but they are able to do it there.

Alternative media is no longer really alternative, and we're no longer that dependant upon newspapers, like the Los Angeles Times, for our information.

I teach at USC, and it's obvious to anyone who teaches college students that they don't cover much modern history and certainly not the modern presidency.

It had run as a column - I had worked at the paper since 1976, but the column had been running for 13 years, and I think it was a strong column, criticizing the war when the paper was supporting it.

When Howard Dean started saying some honest things, they hung him.

Life is a horror for the Korean people. And I think isolating them further is going to make life more miserable.

We talk about a free press. These people hide, they make a lot of money off the media. They hide behind the slogans of free press, and then they can come out with crap like that. It's just garbage. It's insulting to the readers.

What passes for investigative journalism is finding somebody with their pants down - literally or otherwise.

The issue I highlight in the book is welfare reform.

Boycotts don't work. They work in certain isolated situations, where you have some potential. But in the main, the best way to bring about freedom in a society is to normalize, have tourism, have trade, have contact.

George W. Bush is a person who is totally disinterested in the world, uneducated. I'm not saying he's stupid. I don't think he's stupid. He's crafty as hell, but he projects well on television. And that's the real big problem. He is the perfect "what, me worry?" president.