Leonard Washington Quotes

American Indians share a magnificent history — rich in its astounding diversity, its integrity, its spirituality, its ongoing unique culture and dynamic tradition. It's also rich, I'm saddened to say, in tragedy, deceit, and genocide. Our sovereignty, our nationhood, our very identity — along with our sacred lands — have been stolen from us in one of the great thefts of human history. And I am referring not just to the thefts of previous centuries but to the great thefts that are still being perpetrated upon us today, at this very moment. Our human rights as indigenous peoples are being violated every day of our lives — and by the very same people who loudly and sanctimoniously proclaim to other nations the moral necessity of such rights. Over the centuries our sacred lands have been repeatedly and routinely stolen from us by the governments and peoples of the United States and Canada. They callously pushed us onto remote reservations on what they thought was worthless wasteland, trying to sweep us under the rug of history. But today, that so-called wasteland has surprisingly become enormously valuable as the relentless technology of white society continues its determined assault on Mother Earth. White society would now like to terminate us as peoples and push us off our reservations so they can steal our remaining mineral and oil resources. It's nothing new for them to steal from nonwhite peoples. When the oppressors succeed with their illegal thefts and depredations, it's called colonialism. When their efforts to colonize indigenous peoples are met with resistance or anything but abject surrender, it's called war. When the colonized peoples attempt to resist their oppression and defend themselves, we're called criminals. I write this book to bring about a greater understanding of what being an Indian means, of who we are as human beings. We're not quaint curiosities or stereotypical figures in a movie, but ordinary — and, yes, at times, extraordinary — human beings. Just like you. We feel. We bleed. We are born. We die. We aren't stuffed dummies in front of a souvenir shop; we aren't sports mascots for teams like the Redskins or the Indians or the Braves or a thousand others who steal and distort and ridicule our likeness. Imagine if they called their teams the Washington Whiteskins or the Washington Blackskins! Then you'd see a protest! With all else that's been taken from us, we ask that you leave us our name, our self-respect, our sense of belonging to the great human family of which we are all part. Our voice, our collective voice, our eagle's cry, is just beginning to be heard. We call out to all of humanity. Hear us!

After a decade of U.S. wars and surging defense budgets, an expectation of special treatment had taken root in the Navy. Many officers felt they were owed something extra for enduring long deployments at sea and missions to support the fighting in Iraq and Afghanistan. The American people fed such attitudes by placing uniformed personnel on a pedestal, thanking them for their service with discounts and freebies. The further one got from Washington, the easier it became to stretch the norms of acceptable conduct. In Asia, Navy officers pocketed favors they knew would be taboo at home.

A huszadik század kezdetétől fogva rosszul megírt dráma volt. I. felvonás: kapzsiság és képmutatás népirtó háborúhoz vezet; háború utáni igazságtalanság és hisztéria; fellendülés; összeomlás, totalitarianizmus. II. felvonás: kapzsiság és képmutatás népirtó háborúhoz vezet; háború utáni igazságtalanság és hisztéria; fellendülés; összeomlás, totalitarianizmus. III. felvonás: kapzsiság és képmutatás – nem merem folytatni. És mik voltak az ellenmérgek? Logikai pozitivizmus, egzisztencializmus, száguldó technológia, űrhajózás, kételkedés a valóságban, és általános jólnevelt paranoia, az utóbbi időben kiállítási tárgyként Washington legmagasabb posztjain. És személyes ellenmérgeink: együttcsaholás, kábítószer, szubkultúrák és ellenkultúrák, bekapcsolódás, kikapcsolódás. Helybenjárás és pénzhajhászás. Új vallásos mozgalmak rohama guruizmustól Billy Grahamizmusig. És új művészeti mozgalmak rohama, konkrét költészettől John Cage csendjeiig. Katarzis itt, purgatórium ott. És mindez egy jegyben, a planetáris halál angyalának jegyében.

Potentially the weakest link in the long chain that led to Pearl Harbor was actually one of the strongest. This was the busy eyes of Ensign Yoshikawa, the ostensibly petty bureaucrat in the Honolulu consulate of Consul General Nagao Kita. Presenting himself as a Filipino, he washed dishes at the Pearl Harbor Officers Club listening for scuttlebutt. He played tourist on a glass bottom boat in Kaneohe Bay near the air station where most of the Navy’s PBYs were moored. He flew over the islands as a traveler. As a straight-out spy, he swam along the shore of the harbor itself ducking out of sight from time to time breathing through a reed. He was Yamamoto’s ears and eyes. The Achilles heel to the whole operation was J-19, the consular code he used to send his information back to Tokyo. And Tokyo used to give him his instructions. Rochefort, the code breaker in Hypo at Pearl Harbor, besides being fluent in Japanese could decipher eighty percent of J-19 messages in about twelve hours. The most tell-tale of all was message 83 sent to Honolulu September 24, 1941. It instructed Yoshikawa to divide Pearl Harbor into a grid so vessels moored in each square could be pinpointed. This so-called “bomb plot” message was relayed to Washington by Clipper in undeciphered form. The Pan American plane had been delayed by bad weather so 83 wasn’t decoded and translated until October 9 or 10. Washington had five times as many intercepts piling up for decoding from Manila than Honolulu because Manila was intercepting higher priority Purple. When he saw the decrypt of 83, Colonel Rufus Bratton, head of the Far Eastern Section of Army G-2 or intelligence, was brought up short. Never before had the Japanese asked for the location of ships in harbor. Bratton sent the message on to Brigadier General Leonard T. Gerow, chief of the Army’s War Plans Division with General Marshall and Secretary Stimson marked in.

the flight back to Washington, D.C., Nixon’s campaign manager, Leonard Hall, told the vice president the Democrats stole the election. They had received reports of voter fraud in a number of key states, including Illinois, Texas, and Missouri. He pressed Nixon to do something about it, maybe even contest the election. Nixon took a deep breath. He wasn’t going to make a hasty decision on something that would divide the nation. No, he’d have to think about that, talk it over with GOP leaders. He didn’t want to be a sore loser.

Transparency and the rule of law will be the touchstones of this administration,” President Obama declared back in 2009. Rarely has there been a greater gap between what a politician said and what he did. Indeed, in the mold of Richard Nixon, the White House asserted dubious claims of executive privilege to avoid scrutiny in the Fast and Furious scandal. But Obama is publicly oblivious to the contradictions. At a media awards dinner in March 2016, President Obama scolded the press for enabling a candidate like Donald Trump and suggested it had a greater responsibility than to hand someone a microphone. But as far as Jake Tapper on CNN was concerned “the messenger was a curious one.” He succinctly reviewed the Obama administration’s deplorable record on transparency and openness and concluded: “Maybe, just maybe, your lecturing would be better delivered to your own administration.” Speaking with some passion, Tapper told his viewers: “Many believe that Obama’s call for us to probe and dig deeper and find out more has been made far more difficult by his administration than any in recent decades. A far cry from the assurances he offered when he first took office.” Tapper noted that Obama promised to run the “most transparent administration in history.” “Obama hasn’t delivered,” ProPublica reporter Justin Elliott wrote in the Washington Post in March 2016. “In fact, FOIA has been a disaster under his watch.” Elliott went on to write: Newly uncovered documents (made public only through a FOIA lawsuit) show the Obama administration aggressively lobbying against reforms proposed in Congress. The Associated Press found last year that the administration had set a record for censoring or denying access to information requested under FOIA, and that the backlog of unanswered requests across the government had risen by 55 percent, to more than 200,000. A recent analysis found the Obama administration set a record of failing nearly 130,000 times to respond to public records requests under the Freedom of Information Act.1 Tapper closed his broadcast by quoting former Washington Post executive editor Leonard Downie, who helped break the Watergate scandal and said in 2013 that Obama had the “most aggressive” administration toward the press since Richard Nixon.

The New York Times and the Washington Post each contain roughly 100,000 words a day—about as many as this book. A typical NBC Nightly News broadcast contains 3,600 words.

(Leonard also noted that “Negative Amortization” would make a terrific name for a punk band.)

To build a happy marriage, one must know one’s values and one’s partner, one must work to identify, cooperate, communicate; to wreck one’s marriage, one need merely take it for granted and give one’s partner no thought at all. To sculpt the David, one needs the genius of Michelangelo; to smash it, only some rampaging barbarians. To create the United States required the intellect and the painstaking debates of the Founding Fathers; to run it into the ground, only the crew of anti-intellectuals now ensconced in Washington.

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