"This isn't bribery. This is extortion…"
"It's hard for Americans to wrap their minds around the idea that this country is not an example to others—a positive example—that its institutions are not somehow robust, that everything won't be all right. But what we are watching here is an attack on all of those foundational premises of American life. This is a scene not out of American history; it is an orgy of extortion and corruption unlike anything I've ever seen before in this country, and only comparable to things seen in the countries of the world that Donald Trump once called "shitholes." Why are shithole country shitholes? Not because they're poor, but because the authorities are not responsive to the people. The authorities are perverted from their duty and use that perversion as an opportunity for self-enrichment and aggression to the detriment of their own societies…"
"Great villains require more of a backstory, more interiority, more rise and fall. And—let me keep testing this—J. D. Vance has that backstory. You know, the greatest of all literary villains is John Milton's Lucifer, who starts as the brightest of the angels and then has the steepest fall. Maybe there's something kind of Luciferian about J. D. Vance. I mean, he's someone—we know this from his own words—that he knows the difference between right and wrong. He saw Donald Trump as wrong. He became one of the most eloquent critics of the wrongness of Donald Trump. And then when opportunity beckoned, he chose wrong. He chose wrong, fully knowing what he was doing, aware of its consequences. He took a long time. He brooded over the decision, and then he made the choice. It's epic. It's literary. It's Luciferian. And it's more interesting than the crocodile that simply bites children and drags them under the Nile and drowns them for fun…"
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