 Throughout his time as vice president, Quayle was widely ridiculed in the media and many in the general public, both in the U.S. and overseas, as an intellectual lightweight and an incompetent individual.Contributing greatly to the perception of Quayle's incompetence was his tendency to make public statements that were either impossible ("I have made good judgments in the past.I have made good judgments in the future"), self-contradictory ("I believe we are on an irreversible trend toward more freedom and democracy, but that could change"), self-contradictory and confused ("The Holocaust was an obscene period in our nation's history.