To have any hope of overcoming these challenges, we have to start by reclaiming our civic dialogue from those who are debasing and degrading it — and preventing us from getting things done.
When George H.W. Bush as a former president visited Kuwait in 1993, Saddam Hussein's intelligence service tried to have Iraqi operatives assassinate him, a plot that was narrowly foiled.
When designing governments, they do not presume that rationality will triumph; they do everything to assume that error and folly will try to have their way — and so create structures to contain them.
He said he thinks a lot of people want to become well-known or bring publicity to a cause, and that powerful weapons can give them an easy way to do that.