The artificial primacy of defense among our national priorities is a constant unearned windfall for some, but it's privation for the rest of America;… - Rachel Maddow

The oil and gas industry — left to its own devices — will mindlessly follow its own nature. It will make tons of money. It will corrode and corrupt and sabotage democratic governance. It will screw up and — in the end — fatally injure the whole freaking planet. And yes, it will also provide oil and gas along the way! And jobs for the workers who produce those things for it. The end-times battle that we’re engaged in now is to figure out how to get along without oil and gas — and we’re plugging away but still a ways off from that — and, in the meantime, commit to a whole new level of constraint and regulatory protection against this singularly destructive industry to minimize its potential harms.

However, the Post went on, “in the career of Huey Long is epitomized the essential weakness of democracy — the pathetic willingness of the electorate to trust a glib tongue and a dynamic personality. Quite justifiably he was called a forerunner of American Fascism.

"Reagan and his growing right-wing "truth" machine had stirred public opinion to such a frothy head that Senate Minority Leader Howard Baker was warned that a vote for the treaty would cost him any chance at the GOP presidential nomination in 1980. On the way to the Senate floor to cast his aye vote, a popular centrist Democrat from New Hampshire asked his wife to "come on and watch me lose my seat