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We hear talk now about reforming public education. There are billions of dollars at stake for such a reform. But I have not heard Arne Duncan, who is the U.S. Education Secretary, mention once the civic illiteracy in the country.
Nat Hentoff -
Here is a guy who's supposed to be the Genghis Khan of the church, the pro-choice people hate him, and I don't know about his labor background so I figured there must be more to him, and there is. I wrote a book about John Cardinal O'Connor.
Nat Hentoff
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Barack Obama is a man who is causing us and will cause us a great deal of harm constitutionally and personally.
Nat Hentoff -
I don't think Bill Clinton does anything - I don't think it's ill will. I don't think he's evil in the sense that he hates the Bill of Rights. He does what he figures will help him politically.
Nat Hentoff -
Americans have only the dimmest notion of what their constitutional freedoms are - and what it took to get them...and the willingness to surrender what we're supposed to be fighting for is a recurring part of our history.
Nat Hentoff -
Liberalism isn't quite as liberal as it pretends to be. And it goes through my adventures with the FBI during the anti-war period and the civil rights period.
Nat Hentoff -
Clay Felker was then - he had - to his credit, he had created New York Magazine, which was the first of the city magazines that covered the city and gave all kinds of advice and all that sort of stuff. And there were copies all over the country by the time he left. He had, however, a view of journalism that was very much, I must say, like Tina Brown's at The New Yorker. You hit 'em hard, fast, give 'em something to talk about the day after the paper comes out, as contrasted with William Shawn, who gave them something to talk about two or three years from then.
Nat Hentoff -
After New – when Newhouse bought The New Yorker, he said in one of those grand press conferences that `Bill Shawn will stay here as long as he wants to be here.' Well, he wanted to be here until he died, but he wasn't allowed to.
Nat Hentoff
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My father was pretty independent. He was - he was arrested once in Nashville when he was on one of his sales trips because he had a black - guy to lunch. So that took a fair amount of courage at the time.
Nat Hentoff -
He has absolutely no judicial supervision of all of this invasions of privacy. So all in all, Barack Obama is a disaster.
Nat Hentoff -
I live in the Village right near NYU, which is taking over most of the Village. I've lived there for most of my time in New York. One of the things I like about the Village is, it's considered the kind of area where you can't have skyscrapers or, actually, many tall buildings. So you can see the sky which, I think, is a benefit.
Nat Hentoff -
I write a syndicated column for The Washington Post that goes to about 200, 250 papers.
Nat Hentoff -
However, I never thought that George W. Bush himself was, in any sense, "evil."
Nat Hentoff -
Counting the ones I've co-edited, I guess about 28 or 29 books I've written.
Nat Hentoff
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Even civics classes have almost disappeared from the schools. So things have not gotten any better.
Nat Hentoff -
A woman in the audience asked Barack Obama about her mother. Her mother was 101 years old and was in need of a certain kind of procedure. Her doctor didn't want to do it because of her age. However, another doctor did and told this woman there is a joy of life in this person. The woman asked President Obama how he would deal with this sort of thing, and Obama said we cannot consider the joy of life in this situation. He said I would advise her to take a pain killer. That is the essence of the President of the United States.
Nat Hentoff -
The most recent example and the most, I think, appalling example was when Martin Peretz, the owner - and I stress owner - of The New Republic fired a journalist who I think was uncommonly skilled and full of integrity and passion and all that stuff. But he had criticized regularly the former pupil and friend of Martin Peretz, Al Gore, so he was fired. That's contrarianist that went around - that did - that was not rewarded.
Nat Hentoff -
I was lecturing at the Columbia Journalism School of Education. I asked them about what was happening to the Fourth Amendment. I said, "By the way, do you know what is in the Fourth Amendment?" One student responded, "Is that the right to bear arms?" It's hard to believe these are bright students.
Nat Hentoff -
My contact with Cato was strange. They're ideologues, like Trotskyites. All questions must be seen and solved within the true faith of libertarianism, the idea of minimal government. And like Trotskyites, the guys from Cato can talk you to death.
Nat Hentoff -
Bill Clinton has called for expanded wiretaps for the FBI.
Nat Hentoff
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My wife Margot was the - I guess, the coordinator or the production manager of The Jazz Review, and we got to know each other and we married.
Nat Hentoff -
My parents were Orthodox Jews but not very regular Orthodox Jews. I was bar mitzvahed and all that. But God was hardly ever mentioned in my family. Franklin D. Roosevelt was.
Nat Hentoff -
The NSA has the capacity to keep track of everything we do on the phone and on the internet. Barack Obama has done nothing about that.
Nat Hentoff -
You see that in his foreign policy Barack Obama lacks a backbone - both a constitutional backbone and a personal backbone.
Nat Hentoff