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Gingrich was a far more volatile and aggressive individual than Boehner, but the institutional norms of self-restraint, and perhaps even self-interest, have broken down under the pressure of an increasingly abnormal Republican Party.

George Packer

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George Packer
Age: 64
Born: 1960
Born: August 13
Journalist
Novelist
Writer
Santa Clara
California
Even
Pressure
Volatile
Republican
Norms
Broken
Institutional
Perhaps
Abnormal
Party
Norm
Interest
Restraint
Individual
Increasingly
Self
Aggressive

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Ideology knows the answer before the question has been asked. Principles are something different: a set of values that have to be adapted to circumstances but not compromised away.
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This is why mustard gas is such a danger or any weapon of mass destruction is such a dangerous thing because it - it's victims become everyone in the end.
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Hillary Clinton said we need to bring back vocational education in high school. We need to support community colleges. We need to make sure that people who are not going to finish college have a job waiting for them and the skills to do the job. These are all - have become fairly standard Democratic policy positions.
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I will find any excuse to go into somebody's study or ask them what they are reading. I can't think of too many other things that say what goes on in someone's head than the books they have.
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I don't think of Hillary Clinton as a bad choice. She's an uninspiring choice. She is a deeply imperfect choice, largely for reasons of her own tendency to get into a defensive crouch and create greater problems for herself and the rest of us by refusing to have a transparent reckoning.
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Much of the international unease with the Sochi Games has focused on the threat of terrorism, Putin's domestic repressiveness, and the Russian campaign of anti-gay propaganda.
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Politics should seize the imagination.
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At the heart of the matter is a battle between wish and fear. Fear generally proves stronger than a wish, but it leaves a taste of disappointment on the tongue.
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Character is destiny, and politicians usually get the scandals they deserve, with a sense of inevitability about them.
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I've read a lot of war writing, even World War I writing, the British war poetry of Wilfred Owen and Siegfried Sassoon, Robert Graves's memoir Goodbye to All That, and a civilian memoir Testament of Youth by Vera Brittain .
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If Hillary Clinton becomes president, how is she going to be able to get the country behind her when she seems like a political figure from another era?
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I think that bias is not a fixed thing. It's not as though some people are biased and others are not. It ebbs and flows. It can be manipulated. It changes according to a person's circumstances.
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I think in the '50s, the percentage of Americans employed by the private sector who were in unions was above 30 percent. And now it's in the single digits, so it plummeted. And with the plummeting of unions came the weakening of an organized working-class voice in politics.
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Today, we have our own concentrations of economic power. Instead of Standard Oil, U.S. Steel, the Union Pacific Railroad, and J. P. Morgan and Company, we have Amazon, Google, Apple, Facebook, and Microsoft.
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It's a cliche that the Senate is broken, and like most cliches, it's true.
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This is what Newt Gingrich has wrought - is a politics in which it's very easy to destroy and very hard to build.
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When Donald Trump says make America great again, we know whose America that is.
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There's the basket of deplorables, who are bigots of various stripes, misogynists, anti-Muslim, racists, homophobes.
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We will have a more just society as soon as we want one.
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Amazon's identity and goals are never clear and always fluid, which makes the company destabilizing and intimidating.
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