War & Peace Quote by Dennis Hastert

A neat little piece of early-2000s political jujitsu: two enormous, contested projects - the War on Terror and tax cuts - get packaged as obvious “priorities,” as if they naturally belong in the same breath. The line works by laundering ideology through managerial language. “Winning” promises clarity in a conflict that, by design, had blurry endpoints; “providing” suggests tax relief is a basic service, not a choice with tradeoffs. And “keep our economy growing strong” acts like a seal of quality, the verbal equivalent of a flag pin.

Hastert’s intent is coalition maintenance. Post-9/11, Republicans needed to fuse national-security urgency with the long-standing supply-side agenda. Linking the War on Terror to tax relief turns dissent into a double heresy: question the cuts and you’re not just quibbling about budgets, you’re jeopardizing strength - economic and national. The subtext is that prosperity and patriotism are the same program, and that government’s central job is to remove burdens (taxes, enemies) so “growth” can happen.

Context matters: as Speaker during the Bush years, Hastert is speaking from the era’s dominant script, when the administration paired new security powers and expensive overseas commitments with large tax reductions. The brilliance, and the tell, is the phrase “priorities like.” It doesn’t argue; it catalogs. It invites you to accept the list, then accept the worldview that made the list feel inevitable.