Eliot Nelson > Quotes

“Washington isn’t a nest of vipers. Really. It’s a city of mostly well-intentioned people who, like the rest of us, sometimes cut corners out of expedience, self-interest, or, quite possibly, the greater good. It’s a city defined not by its cardinal sins, but by its venal ones. For every bug-eyed backbencher who insists Mexican immigrants are all al-Qaeda sleeper agents, or every slick lobbyist clamoring to sign an energy company that drenched half of Puget Sound in unrefined crude, there are thousands of far more relatable individuals committing much less conspicuous, and more ethically muddled, offenses: the congressman who votes for a discriminatory bill that won’t go anywhere to earn political capital so he or she can defeat their challenger who would bring a much more harmful agenda to Washington; the reporter who holds off on a story about a senator’s special interest fundraiser to stay in the lawmaker’s good graces for a larger piece about malfeasance among congressional leadership; the political staffer who holds their tongue when a colleague cashes out at a lobbying firm because they, too, might one day want to stop working eighty hours a week while making $45,000 a year. All”
― Eliot Nelson, The Beltway Bible: A Totally Serious A–Z Guide to Our No-Good, Corrupt, Incompetent, Terrible, Depressing, and Sometimes Hilarious Government

“or then-Minnesota governor Tim Pawlenty’s brief 2012 presidential campaign, when he shed his Midwestern prosodies for something that sounded like Captain from Cool Hand Luke having a stroke. However,”
― Eliot Nelson, The Beltway Bible: A Totally Serious A–Z Guide to Our No-Good, Corrupt, Incompetent, Terrible, Depressing, and Sometimes Hilarious Government

“Franklin Roosevelt spent twelve years telling Americans, in his distinctly nonrhotic way, that the only thing they had to feah was feah itself—yet no one seemed to mind. If”
― Eliot Nelson, The Beltway Bible: A Totally Serious A–Z Guide to Our No-Good, Corrupt, Incompetent, Terrible, Depressing, and Sometimes Hilarious Government

“Mario Cuomo famously said that we campaign in poetry and govern in prose. We also critique the government in poetry—angsty, adolescent poetry, but poetry nonetheless. The”
― Eliot Nelson, The Beltway Bible: A Totally Serious A–Z Guide to Our No-Good, Corrupt, Incompetent, Terrible, Depressing, and Sometimes Hilarious Government

“We do ourselves a disservice when we dehumanize Washington and reduce its processes and people to a few superficial talking points. Checks and balances, lobbyists, pork barrel spending, the electoral college, filibusters, Dick Cheney’s bimonthly virgin sacrifice upon a marble altar in the Heritage Foundation’s basement to placate the icy god of darkness and ward off the eternal sleep of death for another moonturn, yadda yadda yadda. The more entrenched this view becomes, the less able we are to grasp the complexities of the situation and perhaps even start to do something about it. Yes, there is corruption and yes there are systemic issues that can probably be fixed if we removed our heads from our asses—they’ll come up often enough in this book. If”
― Eliot Nelson, The Beltway Bible: A Totally Serious A–Z Guide to Our No-Good, Corrupt, Incompetent, Terrible, Depressing, and Sometimes Hilarious Government

“Sixteen years later, LBJ won the largest landslide in American presidential history, despite having an accent typically found at an Abilene cattle auction. In”
― Eliot Nelson, The Beltway Bible: A Totally Serious A–Z Guide to Our No-Good, Corrupt, Incompetent, Terrible, Depressing, and Sometimes Hilarious Government