Rich Lowry Quotes

Al Gore's performances could be a case study in abnormal-psychology classes.

Bill Clinton was a liberal who could appeal to conservative-leaning Bubba voters.

Calculation has its advantages, but no one likes naked calculation.

There's no wobble in Bush. If anything, the opposite. Right after hello, the next words out of his mouth are: I've never been more convinced that the decisions I made are the right decisions.

Comedians still make fun of Bill's out-of-control appetites, but with Hillary, the mockery is about how she lets nothing be out of control.

Because liberalism typically doesn't sell in American presidential politics, liberal candidates tend to run as culturally conservative centrists.

Clinton's fakery was so deft and deeply ingrained that it was impossible to tell where it ended and the real Bill Clinton began. This constituted a kind of political genius.

Message to Obama: Fighting the Clinton machine won't be as easy as picking up favorable press clips.

Almost all political campaigns involve falsity and playacting.

In person, George W. Bush is extremely forceful. He has a restless energy when he sits in a chair, and nearly leaps out of it when making certain points.

Yes, this is 21st-century America. Where we have better means to treat mental illness than ever before, but choose to let the insane people decide to get it or not.

You have to check out 'March of the Penguins'. Penguins are the really ideal example of monogamy.

It is Hillary's lot in life not to be able to fake it well...

John Kerry couldn't even order a Philly cheesesteak properly.

Al Gore adopted three utterly different personas in three national presidential debates.

I think all of us in the commentary business need to take a deep breath. And it can't be true that every single week the world is ending in some different way. And this presidency [of Donald Trump] will be judged like all presidencies - on the state of the economy and by events.

We believe in the power of 21st-century international norms. Russian President Vladimir Putin believes in the power of lies and brute force, and implicitly asks, in the spirit of Josef Stalin, 'How many divisions do international norms have?'

It's worth remembering George W. Bush, Barack Obama also came in thinking they had the magic key to better, warmer relations with Russia; those efforts ended in tears.

There is no appeasing Putin. Frankly, there is no directly stopping him, either. It is only possible to raise the costs to him of his war, including the military costs. If we won'€™t provide military materiel to Ukraine now, we deserve the contempt with which Putin regards us.

Ultimately Rex Tillerson will reflect [Donald] Trump's policy towards Russia, which will be friendly up right up to the point of time it isn't.

Peter Beinart excoriates the doughface liberals who during the Cold War put anti-imperialism before anti-totalitarianism and demanded total moral purity on the part of the United States, thus opposing any action in the real world to resist Soviet expansionism. If the Democrats were, as he advocates, to return to the Trumanesque anti-totalitarian liberalism that held sway in the party from roughly 1947 to 1972, the party and the country would be better off.

I would like to see someone with more traditional foreign policy experience and, obviously, his views and attitudes towards Russia will be a big part of the confirmation hearings [instead of Rex Tillerson].

No matter the good news anywhere else, these nuke-hungry rogue states will provide grounds for bad-mouthing Bush foreign policy.

If Hillary can't win the nomination - and it's clearly very, very hard for her - she's basically a stalking horse for McCain. She's preparing the demographic ground for McCain, by getting white working-class Democrats used to (if you will) not voting for Obama.

America roused to a righteous anger has always been a force for good. States that have been supporting if not Osama bin Laden, people like him need to feel pain. If we flatten part of Damascus or Tehran or whatever it takes, that is part of the solution.

From where I sit, it's a superb cabinet [for Donald Trump] so far. A lot of these choices could have been made by Ted Cruz. So you're going to have this shotgun marriage between a very orthodox Republican cabinet and a very unorthodox.

Clearly [Donald] Trump likes the way business executives and generals think and talk much more than policy professionals.

Well, part of the trick of getting elected president, if you look at George W. Bush and Barack Obama, is convincing the other side, at least temporarily, not to hate and fear. And that, Trump is not going to able to do that

Any [political] party without principles is rudderless and passive.

A flag doesn't cause someone to sit in a prayer meeting for an hour, and then stand up and shoot people.

Republican hawks like John McCain and Lindsey Graham who are very skeptical of [Rex Tillerson]. At the same time the Democrats will portray him as a climate criminal because he heads a big oil company. So, he'll be in for really tough confirmation hearings.

I do think - you look at actually what WikiLeaks came out with, most of it was just gossipy interest, except for like this Doug Band memo from a Clinton crony in black and white who explained the Clinton Foundation was a profit center for Bill Clinton and people around him.The Russians didn't make that up, that was all Hillary's [Clinton] vulnerability her own.

There's no point trying to sugar-coat this or get Jesuitical about it. Yes, Russia tried to manipulate our election. It's appalling. Yes, it should be investigated and taken seriously.

[Donald Trump] campaigned on an enormous tax cut, and he campaigned on a deregulatory agenda.

The horn of dilemma of energy politics is what really drives concern about this energy in this country, at the gut level for most people, is high gas prices. And if you really want to fight global warming and try to reduce our carbon emissions, the cleanest, easiest, most rational way to do it would to make the price of gas even higher through very stiff gas prices.

Multiculturalism, if its logic is fully played out, is the ideology of national suicide.

The case against Jeff Sessions was threadbare three decades ago. It's based on hearsay and innuendo and a joke he made about the Klan.

The debate over troop levels will rage for years; it is...beside the point.

We are a product of our families, schools, and churches. Without the liberty and rule of law that characterize America, entrepreneurship would indeed be impossible. Any successful American who is not a patriot is a rank ingrate.

[Donald Trump] campaigned on repealing Obamacare.

France will always be France no matter what, but America involves striving toward an ideal.

We're going to cut taxes, deregulate to try to create general pro-growth conditions, at the same time, much more than any other Republican ever before, [Donald Trump] is going to focus on trying to tighten the labor market directly through discouraging outsourcing and tightening up on immigration, all towards the goal of actually increasing wages, that's a new focus for the Republican Party and a very important one.

Parents are the most likely to be victims of the violence of their mentally ill children.

When my dad was badly weakened by the flu and my mom wanted to call an ambulance to take him to the emergency room, he wouldn't go unless he could shave first and change into a nice shirt and a pair of slacks.

If you think the country is a bastion only of nasty tendencies and racism and oppression, that is anti-American.

I think just focusing on the wealth of these cabinet picks misunderstands [Donald] Trump's economic strategy here, which is going to be equal parts traditional Republican economics.

There is simply no substitute for forceful American leadership. Sometimes the best way to get allies is to be willing to forge ahead alone.

Contemporary Democrats are people who can't stand the idea that someone, somewhere is experiencing good news.

What (the Arizona immigration law) is likely to mean effectively is that if in the course of a traffic stop, a cop asks you for a driver's license, and you don't have one, and he asks you for other identification, and you have none, and he calls ICE and they have no record of you as a legal immigrant, you're in trouble. This is near-fascism?

I think likelier targets are [Steve] Mnuchin, the Treasury pick. When you look at his dealings during the financial crisis, that's going to be a target rich environment, and [Rex] Tillerson.