Alex Pareene Quotes
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Do you know who takes weekday shuttle flights between Washington and New York? People who think they are too important for the train, let alone the bus.
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From the late David Broder on down, the most powerful and influential of the great Washington columnists and journalists tend to cultivate the driest, least lively voices possible.
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The Right likes to think that intellectuals and academics like Allan Bloom and Dinesh D'Souza spurred the explosive growth of movement conservatism in the 1980s and 1990s, when it was actually mostly Rush Limbaugh.
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Christopher Hitchens, the late essayist and sot, was a man who purposefully cultivated a lot of friends of a certain type - rich, self-important, generally dim-witted and hence easy for a well-spoken Oxbridge debater to impress - and he electrified Washington D.C. society mainly by not being a completely charmless bore.
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For most of the millions of people who watch TED videos at the office, it's a middlebrow diversion and a source of factoids to use on your friends. Except TED thinks it's changing the world, like if 'This American Life' suddenly mistook itself for Doctors Without Borders.
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Many on the professional Right owe their livelihoods to a large and growing network of nonprofit donor-funded groups and for-profit consulting and direct marketing companies hired by those groups.
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Because TED is for, and by, unbelievably rich people, they tiptoe around questions of the justness of a society that rewards TED attendees so much for what usually amounts to a series of lucky breaks.
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The thing with 'The West Wing' is that the fantasy was legitimately better than the reality - these were smarter, better people than their real-life counterparts, working together at a better White House than the one we had.
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John Boehner was and is an unprincipled ward-heeler who simply couldn't weather the transition of the Republican Party from a corporatist party with a sizable conservative base to a purely conservative party.
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Sen. Rand Paul is a Different Kind of Republican. He will drag the party, kicking and screaming, toward a new kind of conservatism that appeals more to today's youth, who embrace liberty and are skeptical of foreign intervention.
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For the most part, congressional Republicans represent people who are whiter, older and richer than most Americans, and our creaky old political system gives those Americans disproportionate influence over public policy.
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I guess if you want me to stop writing horrible, mean takedowns of everyone, give me a really, really cushy columnist gig.
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What really destroyed Tucker Carlson, respected magazine journalist, was TV. TV exposed him as glib, smug, and not nearly as clever as he thought he was.
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Co-opting the conservative line on anti-poverty programs did nothing to halt conservative attacks on anti-poverty programs.
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Furloughing a bunch of air traffic controllers has a pretty easy-to-predict effect on air travel: It causes delays.
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An American parliamentary system with proportional representation wouldn't immediately or inexorably lead to a flourishing social democracy, but it would at least correct the overrepresentation of an ideological minority and cut down on intentional tactical economic sabotage.
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Is there something psychologically wrong with David Gregory? No, besides the usual superhuman vanity of a television professional. He is just not a great host of a news talk show!
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Please don't begin to believe that the American political establishment is anything but a corrupt puppet of oligarchy.
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CNN's problem goes to its very core and to the identity it's sought ever since the rise of Fox News, on its right: CNN is the channel for people who don't want to watch the other channels! That's a stupid strategy.
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The conservative media movement exists primarily as a moneymaking venture.
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Vaccine conspiracies, like so much modern cult conspiracy culture, perpetuates itself and lives on indefinitely thanks to the community-building and archiving of the Internet.
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FreedomWorks, which is funded primarily by very rich people, solicits donations from non-rich conservative people. More than 80,000 people donated money to FreedomWorks in 2012, and it seems likely that only a small minority of those people were hedge fund millionaires.
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Modern political speechwriting is not a high-minded pursuit for brilliant talents.
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Most of us don't think forwarding a racist joke or speaking in an insulting 'comedic' accent is appropriate at the workplace. Unfortunately, for those raised in the toxic culture of conservatism, the sort of mentality that leads government employees to do those things is widespread.