War & Peace Quote by Dennis Hastert

“It’s a tough time” is doing the soft work of hard policy: it preloads the listener with anxiety, then repackages that anxiety as a civic duty. Hastert’s language is less about persuasion through detail than about building a moral perimeter. Once the moment is labeled “tough,” disagreement starts to look like indulgence.

The key move is the intimacy of “my friends,” a folksy reach that tries to collapse the distance between leadership and sacrifice. It’s also a rhetorical handshake that quietly asks for trust without offering receipts. “We need to make sacrifices” sounds communal, but budgets rarely distribute pain evenly; the pronoun “we” blurs who pays (taxpayers, social programs, future deficits) and who benefits (contractors, the defense apparatus, the politicians who vote yes). Sacrifice becomes a brand, not an accounting.

Then comes the talisman phrase: “our troops.” The troops are positioned as the pure, unassailable object of care, which makes the budget feel like a support package rather than a political choice. “Tools they need” is deliberate vagueness: it sanctifies spending while sidestepping scrutiny about strategy, oversight, or what “the job” even is. That phrase, “get the job done,” is managerial talk for a war with shifting goals, translated into the comforting logic of task completion.

Context matters: in the post-9/11 era, “win the War on Terror” functioned as a permission slip. It framed an open-ended campaign as winnable, finite, and measurable, and it turned fiscal debate into a loyalty test. The intent isn’t just to fund a war; it’s to make the act of funding feel like patriotism itself.