Government proposes, bureaucracy disposes. And the bureaucracy must dispose of government proposals by dumping them on us.
P. J. O'RourkeRead
Political discourse has become so rotten that it's no longer possible to tell the stench of one presidential candidate from the stink of another.
Interpretation
What this quote means
The current state of political discourse makes it difficult to distinguish between candidates based on their qualities, as they all seem flawed.
In this quote, P. J. O'Rourke critiques the state of political discourse, suggesting that the negativity and flaws in presidential candidates have become so pervasive that discerning one candidate's weaknesses from another's has become an impossible task. The metaphor of 'stench' highlights the morally questionable nature of modern politics, where all candidates appear equally untrustworthy.
Themes
PoliticsCandidatesDiscourseNegativityTrust
In practice
Example use cases
This quote can be used during a political debate to highlight the flaws in all candidates.
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Predicting innovation is something of a self-canceling exercise: the most probable innovations are probably the least innovative.
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I spend my days kneeling in the muck of language, feeling around for gooey verbs, nouns, and modifiers that I can squash together to make a blob of a sentence that bears some likeness to reason and sense.
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Anyone who thinks he has a better idea of what's good for people than people do is a swine.
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The idea of a news broadcast once was to find someone with information and broadcast it. The idea now is to find someone with ignorance and spread it around.
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