Robert Scheer Quotations

I talked to Reagan for about six hours all told. and Reagan was willing to go along with it. He didn't look at his watch, and he didn't allow his campaign aides to cut it off.

I was able to do something that people can't do these days, which is to have quality time with the guys who were trying to be president and a number of them who got the job.

Well, what happened is that I had been the subject of vicious attacks by Bill O'Reilly and Rush Limbaugh.

The decision came from the publisher. It certainly was cleared by Chicago. And then they come out with these fine sounding words about relation to readers and their obligation. It has nothing to do with that.

What Clinton severed with his welfare reform was the obligation of the federal government to step in when the states failed and to monitor these programs.

What they are interested in at the L.A. Times is profits, and then when it's convenient to them, they wave the flag of free press.

The publisher has told - you know, if these editors, Andres Martinez and Nick Goldberg, were the least bit honest about this, they would tell you the publisher has told them he wants the editorial page to be conservative.

Sometimes Bill O'Reilly would sometimes go after me every day, and this went on for the last couple of years, and I'm still standing.

So this guy, Jeff Johnson, who is an accountant who cares nothing at all about a free press and cares nothing about journalism, he's a right winger who supported the war, you know, who two years ago told people he couldn't stand a word that I wrote.

And the big issue here, I think, is that the publisher took over the editorial pages, a guy named Jeff Johnson. He's an accountant from Chicago, doesn't know anything about what newspapers are supposed to be about, and he made a decision to get rid of the column.

They know that the column resonates in the community. They know that people like it, and yet they don't have room for one column once week that consistently got it right.

They know I have a strong - not only that I have a strong relation to readers, but so did Ramirez, the cartoonist. You know, it's just gibberish.

For instance, Clinton who was unquestionably the smartest of the bunch I talked to - both the ones who made it and didn't. He had a great interest in policy.

For example, I spent a lot of time with Reagan, both before he ran for governor and when he was running for president. As a print reporter without the cameras, I was able to really test the quality of their minds and their knowledge base.

It's not easy to pull off the Big Lie and George Bush has failed.

Even with the best of intentions, even when they're very smart and knowledgeable - as opposed to George W., who is neither - it doesn't seem to matter.

That means presenting the issues in certain ways that will appeal to those people and then becoming a prisoner of your own language and thought process. That has always happened - it's just been intensified.

I've been with the paper for almost 30 years.

A gym is a great source of activities for children. But it can also be a solid operational revenue source. It can be rented out for events, which in turn encourages businesses to sponsor teams, shirts and other activities.

All they are proving is their ability to manipulate, to think superficially, and to exploit national security issues rather than deal with them.

The issue I highlight in the book is welfare reform.

What passes for investigative journalism is finding somebody with their pants down - literally or otherwise.

We talk about a free press. These people hide, they make a lot of money off the media. They hide behind the slogans of free press, and then they can come out with crap like that. It's just garbage. It's insulting to the readers.

When Howard Dean started saying some honest things, they hung him.

It had run as a column - I had worked at the paper since 1976, but the column had been running for 13 years, and I think it was a strong column, criticizing the war when the paper was supporting it.

I teach at USC, and it's obvious to anyone who teaches college students that they don't cover much modern history and certainly not the modern presidency.

And new people come in, and it doesn't go along with their politics, and they fire me, end the column, silence a voice in Los Angeles. They can't silence it nationally, but they are able to do it there.

He [Reagan] likes to tell jokes and that's why he told the ethnic joke that got him into some trouble. Perhaps if reporters didn't overreact to a politician's telling the very same joke they routinely hear and tell in the city room, we'd get more humor.

The journalist's job is to get the story by breaking into their offices, by bribing, by seducing people, by lying, by anything else to break through the palace guard.

I was able to do something that people cant do these days, which is to have quality time with the guys who were trying to be president and a number of them who got the job.

I was a finalist for the Pulitzer as a reporter.

Much of what candidates have to do is raise money and appeal to constituencies or interest groups that can provide that money.

The paper nominated me 12 or 13 times for the Pulitzer Prize.

At least 3% of the signers of the Constitution must have been gay, since that's the low estimate for any population sample. It was probably higher, given that they were a pretty talented bunch and wore wigs.

Today anyone on the Internet can find out more about what you read, think, and earn than the secret police of Stalin or Hitler could have learned.

The fact is ... that when totalitarian nations like China and Saudi Arabia play ball with U.S. business interests, we like them just fine. But when Venezuela's freely elected president threatens powerful corporate interests, the Bush administration treats him as an enemy.

The death of American liberalism as a significant moral force can be traced to the point in when President Bill Clinton signed legislation that effectively ended the main federal anti-poverty program and turned the fate of welfare recipients, 70 percent of whom were children, over to the tender mercies of the states. With a stroke of the pen, Clinton eliminated what remained of New Deal-era compassion for the poor and codified into law the "tough love" callousness that his Republican allies in the Congress, led by Newt Gingrich, had long embraced.

The publisher Jeff Johnson, who has offered not a word of explanation to me, has privately told people that he hated every word that I wrote. I assume that mostly refers to my exposing the lies used by President Bush to justify the invasion of Iraq. Fortunately 60 percent of Americans now get the point but only after tens of thousand of Americans and Iraqis have been killed and maimed as the carnage spirals out of control. My only regret is that my pen was not sharper and my words tougher.