Rahm Emanuel Quotes

You never want a serious crisis to go to waste. And what I mean by that is an opportunity to do things that you think you could not do before.

You said yourself the guy looks like he pleasures himself to pictures of Rahm Emanuel.

Draft-dodging is what chicken-hawks do best. Dick Cheney, Glenn Beck, Karl Rove, Rush Limbaugh (this capon claimed he had a cyst on his fat ass), Newt Gingrich, former Attorney General John Ashcroft—he received seven deferments to teach business education at Southwest Missouri State—pompous Bill O’Reilly, Jeb Bush, hey, throw in John Wayne—they were all draft-dodgers. Not a single one of these mouth-breathing, cowardly, and meretricious buffoons fought for his country. All plumped for deferments. Former New York Mayor Rudy Giuliani? Did not serve. Former Massachusetts Governor Mitt Romney? Did not serve in the military. (He served the Mormon Church on a thirty-month mission to France.) Former Senator Fred Thompson? Did not serve. Former President Ronald Reagan? Due to poor eyesight, he served in a noncombat role making movies for the Army in southern California during WWII. He later seems to have confused his role as an actor playing a tail gunner with the real thing. Did Rahm Emanuel serve? Yes, he did during the Gulf War 1991—in the Israeli Army. John Boehner did not serve, not a fucking second. Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell, R-KY? Not a minute! Former Senate Majority Leader Trent Lott, R-MS? Avoided the draft. Senate Minority Whip Jon Kyl, R-AZ—did not serve. National Republican Senatorial Committee Chair John Cornyn, R-TX—did not serve. Former Senate Republican Policy Committee Chair John Ensign, R-NV? Did not serve. Jack Kemp? Dan Quayle? Never served a day. Not an hour. Not an afternoon. These are the jackasses that cherish memorial services and love to salute and adore hearing “Taps.

And when the man Rook had dubbed the unholy spawn off Rahm Emanuel and Gordon Gekko wanted something, "no" came at your own risk.

As Rahm Emanuel, former Chicago mayor and chief of staff to President Barack Obama, famously said, “Never let a crisis go to waste.”8 When the COVID-19 pandemic broke out, Democrats immediately recognized that it would give them a once-in-a-generation opportunity to radically alter America’s voting laws and procedures to benefit their party.

Late in the evening, someone in the White House decided to vent to Ben Smith: 'A senior White House official just called me with a very pointed message for the administration's sometime allies in organized labor, who invested heavily in beating Blanche Lincoln, Obama's candidate, in Arkansas. "Organized labor just flushed $10 million of their members' money down the toilet on a pointless exercise," the official said. "If even half that total had been well-targeted and applied in key House races across this country, that could have made a real difference in November."' Boy, good thing for this source there's no member of Obama's staff who's known for blowing his stack and venting furiously at political defeats. I'll bet he was pounding the desk like a battering Rahm and that he threw out the E-manual on how to talk to the press when he did it.

On the first day I walked into Simon’s bustling headquarters, just across from City Hall, I encountered an intense young fund-raiser sitting in an open cubicle, working his quarry over the phone. Curious, I stopped to watch the spectacle. “Five hundred bucks? Five hundred bucks! You know what you’re telling me? You don’t give a shit about Israel,” the intense, wiry young man shouted at God knows which mover and shaker on the other end of the line. “I’d be embarrassed for you to take your five hundred bucks.” The kid hung up and stared at the phone, which rang an instant later. “Yeah, that’s better,” he said, in a markedly calmer tone. “Thanks.” Even at twenty-four, Rahm Emanuel had a gift for getting his point across, a quality I would see on display many times as we teamed up in the decades to come.

But before we kick back, relax, and wait for racial justice to trickle down, consider this: Obama chose Joe Biden, one of the Senate’s most strident drug warriors, as his vice president. The man he picked to serve as his chief of staff in the White House, Rahm Emanuel, was a major proponent of the expansion of the drug war and the slashing of welfare rolls during President Clinton’s administration. And the man he tapped to lead the U.S. Department of Justice—the agency that launched and continues to oversee the federal war on drugs—is an African American former U.S. attorney for the District of Columbia who sought to ratchet up the drug war in Washington, D.C., and fought the majority black D.C. City Council in an effort to impose harsh mandatory minimums for marijuana possession.

Rahm Emanuel told the Wall Street Journal, “You never want a serious crisis to go to waste.” There was a short window for the new Obama administration, “an opportunity for us to do things that you could not do before

As Americans were debating bailouts, individual mandates, and Michelle Obama’s finely toned arms, progressives knew they had a golden opportunity to sneak Common Core through the back door. And that’s just what they did. Remember what Rahm Emanuel, Obama’s first chief of staff, said: “You never want a serious crisis to go to waste.” Common Core was that political philosophy in action. The controllists’ plan was almost perfect. They knew they didn’t have to sell Common Core to lawmakers in individual state legislatures, where citizens would find out about it and demand it be stopped. Instead, they could just go to the individual state boards of education—entities that most Americans don’t even know exist—for permission. In Wisconsin, for example, all it took was one individual, the state superintendent of public instruction, to adopt the standards. It was a devious and brilliant plan, but that didn’t make it foolproof. It wasn’t a given that state school board members would agree to Common Core. Some might sense that it was a ploy to slowly nationalize their state’s education system. To counter that possibility, progressives wrote special funding for the Common Core “initiative” into President Obama’s nearly $800 billion stimulus plan via the “Race to the Top” program. This gave the administration the ability to bribe cash-starved states into adopting Common Core by making it a prerequisite for states to compete for seven-figure education grants. In addition, they delayed the testing component of the standards for several years, thereby giving state bureaucrats several years of zero accountability. Many of these bureaucrats no doubt knew they’d be retired or in a different position by the time the real pain came around.

Politician Rahm Emanuel offers this perspective: “You never want to let a serious crisis go to waste. And what I mean by that [is] it’s an opportunity to do things you think you could not do before.

You never let a serious crisis go to waste,” Rahm Emanuel once remarked, “and what I mean by that [is] it’s an opportunity to do things you think you could not do before.

Rahm Emanuel, once gave him. “You never want a serious crisis to go to waste. Things that we had postponed for too long, that were long-term, are now immediate and must be dealt with. [A] crisis provides the opportunity for us to do things that you could not do before.

and the First Austrian Bank.177 “America’s financial support for ‘Al Qaeda’” also tied the Clinton Administration to backing al-Qaeda training in Bosnia and Kosovo. Rahm Emanuel, at the time assistant to the president for political affairs, was deeply involved in Clinton’s foreign policy machinations in Bosnia and Kosovo. Emanuel asserted that Clinton went to both regions to handle al-Qaeda instruction. (Certainly, Clinton supported al-Qaeda training in both areas.) Madsen added that there were believable Serbian reports that fugitive financier Marc Rich (later pardoned by Clinton) had been engaged in arms smuggling to Bosnian Muslims.178

America’s financial support for ‘Al Qaeda’” also tied the Clinton Administration to backing al-Qaeda training in Bosnia and Kosovo. Rahm Emanuel, at the time assistant to the president for political affairs, was deeply involved in Clinton’s foreign policy machinations in Bosnia and Kosovo. Emanuel asserted that Clinton went to both regions to handle al-Qaeda instruction. (Certainly, Clinton supported al-Qaeda training in both areas.) Madsen added that there were believable Serbian reports that fugitive financier Marc Rich (later pardoned by Clinton) had been engaged in arms smuggling to Bosnian Muslims.178

But if you’re looking to execute a massive pay-to-play scheme—auctioning off jobs, contracts, and grants to the biggest campaign donors—it’s all you care about. Rod and his cronies figured they could do what they wanted—and let me worry about running the state—and I’d never notice. And other than the one time Rod slipped up and asked me to extort Rahm Emanuel, they were right.

The same kinds of shifts are possible at any company where institutional habits—through thoughtlessness or neglect—have created toxic truces. A company with dysfunctional habits can’t turn around simply because a leader orders it. Rather, wise executives seek out moments of crisis—or create the perception of crisis—and cultivate the sense that something must change, until everyone is finally ready to overhaul the patterns they live with each day. “You never want a serious crisis to go to waste,” Rahm Emanuel told a conference of chief executives

You never want a serious crisis to go to waste,” Rahm Emanuel told a conference of chief executives in the wake of the 2008 global financial meltdown, soon after he was appointed as President Obama’s chief of staff. “This crisis provides the opportunity for us to do things that you could not do before.” Soon afterward, the Obama administration convinced a once-reluctant Congress to pass the president’s $787 billion stimulus plan. Congress also passed Obama’s health care reform law, reworked consumer protection laws, and approved dozens of other statutes, from expanding children’s health insurance to giving women new opportunities to sue over wage discrimination. It was one of the biggest policy overhauls since the Great Society and the New Deal, and it happened because, in the aftermath of a financial catastrophe, lawmakers saw opportunity.