Politics & Power Quote by Don Nickles

Nickles frames anxiety as vigilance: he is "bothered" not by a hypothetical threat, but by the act of reading enemies describe their ambitions in public. That opening verb matters. It casts him as the responsible adult scanning the dark corners of the world, then reporting back to an American audience presumed too busy to do the same. The discomfort is performative, a moral credential that says: I am paying attention, and what I see justifies urgency.

The sentence is built to widen the circle of fear. "Leaders of the Hamas" quickly becomes "and others who hate America", a slippery expansion that folds disparate actors into one category: the anti-American enemy. The phrase doesn't argue; it labels. Once hatred is established as the motive, capability becomes the only variable worth discussing, which is where the quote drives next.

Then comes the escalator: "more weaponry" moves to "capable of delivering" and ends at "all types of weapons of mass destruction". The wording is deliberately maximal. "All types" is not a measurable claim; it's an imaginative one. It invites listeners to fill in the blanks with the worst available images, while dodging the specificity that would invite scrutiny.

Contextually, this sits squarely in the post-1990s/early-2000s American security vocabulary, where "WMD" functioned less as a technical term than as a policy accelerant. The intent isn't just to describe a threat; it's to compress complex geopolitical realities into a single mandate: arm, surveil, strike, or legislate before "they" do.