Aging & Wisdom Quote by Ron Wyden

Wyden’s line is a neat piece of political jujitsu: he borrows the comforting inevitability of a proverb and flips it into an indictment of inevitability itself. “All roads lead to Rome” usually signals coherence, destiny, a map that makes sense. In Wyden’s telling, the administration treats intelligence the same way - not as a tool for finding the truth, but as a system for confirming a preselected endpoint. The punch sits in that pivot from “evidence” to “essentially everything,” a phrase that doesn’t argue one disputed claim so much as it describes a habit of mind: pattern-making turned into policy.

The intent is accountability without drowning the listener in classified specifics. Wyden doesn’t litigate which piece of evidence was wrong; he questions the epistemology of the decision-making. If “no matter what the evidence was” the conclusion stayed fixed, then the process wasn’t analysis - it was sales. That’s a sharper accusation in Washington than simply being mistaken, because it implies an abuse of institutions built to slow down certainty.

The subtext lands in the post-9/11, Iraq War climate, when fear and political momentum rewarded clean narratives and punished ambiguity. By framing the administration’s approach as a belief system, Wyden suggests ideology and messaging had captured the intelligence pipeline. The Rome metaphor also does double duty: empires justify expansion by insisting the world’s chaos points back to a single enemy. His critique is that this is how wars become self-fulfilling stories, not reluctant necessities.