War & Peace Quote by Bob Ney

Security rhetoric always sells best when it borrows the voice of a parent. Bob Ney’s line wraps a policy argument in a lullaby: “peace of mind” is the product, “children” are the proof of urgency, and “wherever they are” quietly expands the battlefield to include schools, malls, buses, and the vague everywhere of modern anxiety. It’s a politician’s version of an all-risk insurance policy: no one can argue against it without sounding callous.

The specific intent is coalition-building. By centering children, Ney sidesteps ideological friction and invites bipartisan assent before any details appear. “Deserve” is doing heavy work here. It frames safety not as a trade-off but as an entitlement, pre-loading the audience to accept costs they haven’t been told yet: surveillance, policing, harsher sentencing, tighter security protocols, perhaps federal funding and mandates. “Better protected” is equally strategic: it implies improvement without naming the baseline, the mechanism, or the agency responsible. Protected by whom? From what? At what price? The sentence is engineered to keep those questions offstage.

Context matters because Ney, later infamous for the Abramoff scandal, comes from a political era when “security” became a master key word after high-profile violence and post-9/11 fear. In that climate, emotional certainty often substituted for legislative specificity. The subtext is less “here’s a plan” than “trust the people in charge.” It’s reassurance packaged as moral obligation, designed to make dissent feel like neglect.