Political Quotes

“Well, I want to just sort of pause on that because, Chris, you are right. This is a purge. I was sort of yelling in the Press Gallery--maybe not the best idea, but it was at a press conference--and I just basically pointed at all these people whom I have a lot of respect for in the media, but I am getting quite frustrated because this is actually not that hard to see if this were happening somewhere else. We are both on the Foreign Relations Committee. We do a lot of travel. A lot of times, you sit down with some foreign leader--a Minister or a Prime Minister or another legislator from another country--and if you can see autocratic behavior like that, then it is literally on your talking points to encourage them to not engage in purges, to maintain a free media, the importance of an independent judiciary, blah, blah, blah. But when it happens to our own country, we just can't see it. If this were happening in Belarus, we would be like, ah, creeping autocracy. If this were happening in a Middle Eastern country, we would know what this was. So I think you are really, you know, hitting the right point as it relates to public service. I think about the U.S. military, which has been always, always a bastion for integration.”