Politics & Power Quote by Tim Robbins

Robbins is praising Bush with a knife. “Very clever” lands as a backhanded compliment: the cleverness isn’t policy brilliance, it’s message discipline - the kind that wins a news cycle by changing the subject. The line works because it treats politics as stagecraft, not governance, and it comes from an actor who knows how a scene gets rewritten when a louder character enters.

The phrase “sent in his idiot” is deliberately coarse, less a factual claim than a moral framing. Robbins is pointing at a familiar maneuver: outsource the ugliest part of the argument to a proxy so the principal can appear above the fray. In 1992, Dan Quayle’s attack on the sitcom character Murphy Brown for “glorifying” single motherhood became a culture-war flare that redirected attention away from materially grim realities - “deterioration of our cities” reads as a blunt inventory of problems that require budgets, competence, and accountability, not sermons.

The subtext is about agenda control. When government is failing at hard, expensive tasks, the incentive is to move the public onto symbolic terrain where outrage is cheap and solutions are unnecessary. Robbins’ disgust isn’t just at the hypocrisy; it’s at the efficiency. “Outrageous statement” signals how media incentives collaborate: you don’t have to win the argument about urban decay if you can get everyone arguing about TV morals instead. It’s cynicism sharpened into a diagnosis of how modern politics turns culture into cover.