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Quotes of Note, 2001
December 2001 "Under AOL Time Warner, GE, Viacom et al., the news is, with a few exceptions, yet another version of the entertainment that the cartel also vends nonstop." "Certainty is the enemy of decency and humanity in people who are sure they are right, like Osama Bin Laden, and John Ashcroft." "They were so good knocking out black voters they should hire this firm to knock out bin Laden. They were so good at ferreting out democratic voters and purging them from the voter rolls, we should have turned them on Al Qaeda and maybe that would have made a difference."
"Tom Daschle is also the guy whose first act as majority leader was he allowed the confirmation of that right-wing, knuckle-dragging thug Ted Olson. So don't tell me that all of a sudden he's the most partisan guy!" Concerning Ass-KKKroft's agenda: "With the honorable exception of the libertarian right (William Safire, Rep. Bob Barr), the entire conservative movement is missing in action, and so are a lot of pious liberals." November 2001 "A religious crackpot utterly unsuited to be Attorney General, as recently as 1997 [John] Ashcroft appeared in a Phyllis Schlaffly-sponsored video arguing that Bill Clinton was conspiring with other Democrats to hand over the U.S. to a cabal of 'international bankers.' It doesn't take a psychic to know where he and Asa Hutchinson, his running buddy at DEA, would like to take this thing. Shoot, I could write Ashcroft's speech myself. Didn't the Taliban traffic in heroin? They did. Don't the NARCOTRAFFICANTES of Latin America finance terrorism? They do. So why not merge the 'war on terrorism' with the 'war on drugs' into a righteous crusade against America's deadliest enemies? Think Bush would object? Ponder the consequences. If the Congress and the courts, backed by strong public opinion, don't stop them now, you can kiss your constitutional freedoms goodbye." "Writers and pundits are very quick to point out how the country has rallied around the president at this time of crisis. But I've got news for you: in the wake of 9/11, they would've rallied around Ronald McDonald. People have traditionally, always, supported their president in a time of war. Bush is awfully cocky now with this 90 percent approval rating and what he says is the gospel, but guess what? He's not always right, and nobody is always right. He's going to make a misstep somewhere and he's going to pay for it.... I wouldn't trust [Ashcroft] as far as I could throw him. To say that the guy is to the right is an understatement. He's to the right of Attila the Hun. He's probably the most dangerous man in America." "Tell you what -- to save everybody time, let's just use SOB-AGRI. 'The Son of a Bitch Attorney General is Religiously Insane.' " "Laura Bush's sudden emergence as a speaker on women's rights for the truly oppressed women of Afghanistan is a bit disingenuous given that her voice has never been heard previously in support of women's needs. She was quiet when her husband, the president, cut off funds designated for family planning in emerging nations if the family-planning agency getting the funds even mentioned the option of abortion. This holds even in countries where abortion is legal." We all have to change. The world's poor cannot be led by people like Mr. bin Laden who think they can find their redemption in our destruction. But the world's rich cannot be led by people who play to our shortsighted selfishness, and pretend that we can forever claim for ourselves what we do not for others." "The worst setup we could have is all these elderly oil men -- Cheney and so forth, the people who run the country -- in a way they are the last people we should have as our leadership right now. They are like the Bourbons -- they remember nothing and forget nothing. I don't know what we can do; truly, there are ways in which this government, or the country, has become so utterly devoid of community." "We already know the moral bankruptcy and the destitution of character of these five Justices. They have proven that. But if we Americans meekly allow what the Court did to stand, without demonstrating our absolute outrage, what does that say about our character? I think history is going to be harsh not just on the Supreme Court but on the American people for allowing this to happen without marching in the streets. History will say we should have been in the streets." "Bush's order calls this Soviet-style abomination 'a full and fair trial.'" "The president barely got elected with the help of the Supreme Court."
-- The New York Times Op-Ed, Nov. 10, 2001 October 2001 Blast from the past! "Rumsfeld confuses and frightens me." "The Department of Defense, where cold war status quo thinking has persevered, has not prepared for a war against terrorism and has built weapons systems ill-suited to the conduct of such a war. Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld has been far more concerned with the phantom menace of rogue state missiles than with the concept of maneuver warfare required to counter terrorism, demanding trenchant intelligence analysis." "Excuse me, but does anyone over the age of 6 really think that the way Osama bin Laden has to communicate with his agents abroad is by posing in that Flintstone set of his and pulling on his left earlobe instead of his right to send secret signals?" "The Democrats and Republicans are more than two different political parties. They have two fundamentally divergent ways of looking at the world. "Here is a simple exercise that might help the Republican leaders transcend their hidebound ideas about political economy. Imagine a lineup of four people, all from the New York City area. The first is a police officer. The second is a firefighter. The third is an emergency-service worker. The last is an airport security guard. Hearing loss is no laughing matter, but it's just impossible to avoid the irony. Here is someone who never listened to reason, and spread the worst lies and hate I could imagine. I recall one time he said liberals actually want people to get AIDS! 'I am not making this up, people!' " " [The] first responsibility [of the press is to] use its freedom to protect the rights and liberties of all individuals. The press must speak out, and, if the occasion arises, raise bloody hell." "The worry is that Bush is painting himself into a corner with his rhetoric. This is not a war -- it's a gigantic police operation in the face of a crime beyond all understanding.... These dotty proposals to breach the Constitution fall into that category. We cannot make ourselves more secure by making ourselves less free." September 2001 "George W. Bush is the wrong man for the job, and cannot be trusted with the freedom and security of the United States of America. There is a small comfort to be taken from this. It is perhaps the only fact of our American life that has not changed at all." "The Office of Homeland Security will initially be run by former Pennsylvania Governor Tom Ridge. It should be noted that Ridge himself got in trouble a few years ago for praising the efficiency of the Third Reich's civilian administration. Ridge also spoke highly of Mussolini's ability to keep the Italian trains running on time. Now Ridge will be the guy running the Office of Homeland Security." "There seems to be an answer to how someone, presumed to be a terrorist, was able to call in a threat against Air Force One using a secret code name for the president's plane on the day of the attacks. As it turns out, that simply never happened. Sources say White House staffers apparently misunderstood comments made by their security detail." "Just in the hours before the speech, he was talking someplace in Washington and he stumbled and mispronounced and mangled his own tongue. Lord, this is the dumbest we've ever had, you thought. Then at night, with a speech written for him and rehearsed for long hours and that he read from a prompter, he was comforting and nearly inspiring. Still, the speech was more about money than dead Americans. At times, it sounded as if the nation had its wallet stolen instead of being bombed. Efforts to be compared to Winston Churchill were like a series of insults. It was as if Churchill had told the world that Britain would fight on the trading floors and bank vaults and portfolios." Blast from the past! "The American people want the thrill of the invasion headlines without having to read the casualty list on the following days." "Even after bin Laden's band bombed two U.S. embassies in Africa in 1998, killing hundreds, the press stayed focused on Monica Lewinsky. After all, most victims were foreigners. So profound was the collective solipsism that retaliatory strikes against bin Laden's bases were mocked as Bill Clinton's effort to ward off laser-like scrutiny of the presidential zipper." "If George W. is sincere about wanting to hunt down and kill the people responsible for Osama Bin Laden, he might as well start with his father. It was the Reagan/Bush CIA, after all, that made Bin Laden what he is today. Everybody knows this, but nobody mentions it -- partly because it's so inconvenient, and partly because we're so embarrassed by the obvious Freudian implications of it all, and the thought that thousands and thousands of people may be about to die for what boils down to a rivalry over the sexual favors of Barbara Bush." "I was profoundly embarrassed and disappointed by their comments. They can try to take them back all they want, but the bottom line is that their words are indefensible." "New Yorkers, who three days after their world caved in had still to see George W Bush descend on their city and show them leadership, greeted Clinton like a returning Messiah. He, in turn, treated them like a priest tending a wounded flock. And it all came so naturally and so genuinely that it seemed somehow bizarre that he hadn't been driven there in a limousine bearing the seal of office. The scene made me, as an outsider, and surely millions of Americans, ask: Will the real president please stand up?" "We should send a clear and unambiguous message that Americans are one hundred percent united and will support the President no matter what action he takes." "America must confront threats to both her security and her freedom. And the more we strive to protect one, the more we endanger the other. We can have a perfectly secure country -- but at great cost to our freedom of movement, openness and perhaps even to free expression. And we can have a perfectly free and open society -- and be vulnerable to the kind of horrific attacks we still can't quite believe happened in New York and Washington -- right before our eyes." "Wisdom, in the wake of a momentous disaster, means the questioning of prior assumptions, prejudices and policies. Clearly, we will have to find ways to enhance the security of our society that don’t destroy the liberty we seek to defend." Blast from the past! "I don't understand why in the year 2000, with all of the media that we have, that a certain segment of the African-American community does not understand that they must aggressively pursue their child's welfare. That is they have to stop drinking, they have to stop taking drugs and boozing, and.. um, and whites do it, too! Whites do it, too!" "Having Justice Antonin Scalia speak on ethics is like
August 2001 "What's going on here? Why the reluctance on the part of the government to at least explain itself? Targeting journalists for simply doing there jobs. These secret police tactics are more appropriate for some Third World, fascist regime." "Bush has now blown the entire budget surplus on this huge tax cut for the rich. The silliest line of commentary is this phony wringing of hands and wailing, 'If only we had known three months ago what we know today!' Of course we knew three months ago there was going to be no surplus. We were quite regularly told so by an enormous array of experts. Bush went from saying we needed a tax cut because times were so good to saying we needed a tax cut because times were so bad." "A good way for the Bush twins to stay out of the tabloids would be to stay out of bars and quit getting busted. If Chelsea had ever gotten hauled downtown, they'd have had to take a fire hose to GOP moralist Bill Bennett to stop him ranting about the Clintons' permissive parenting." "Whatever [Rep. Dan Burton's] aims [in leaking Clinton-Barak conversations], however, the damage to diplomacy has been done. The truly guilty parties are those in the Bush White House who blithely handed such sensitive materials over to an irresponsible, grandstanding politician. So from now on, no foreign leader can depend upon the privacy of a conversation with the American President." "[Rep. Gary Condit (D-CA)] hasn't been very forthcoming with the FBI about his involvement with his missing intern. Now it's been revealed that when Clinton was in trouble in '98 he wrote a letter to Newt Gingrich demanding that Bill Clinton come forward with full disclosure of what he had done....Only in Washington would a man alleged to have had an affair with an intern condemn a man who had an affair with an intern by writing a letter to a man who had an affair with a staffer! God Bless Washington." The sharp limitation of federal support may well close the door on some of the life-saving promise of embryonic stem cell research, which can be conducted consistent with basic ethical and legal principles that respect the value of human life." "Due to consistently one-sided deviation from all other publicly released non-partisan polls, we have dropped all 2001 FOX News polls from our trend analysis." July 2001 "So now that I've kissed your [rear end], what do I have to do to get a deal?" "I wish to apologize to President Clinton and his family for my insensitivity. My choice of words was very unfortunate. I did not intend to demean Virginia Kelley or her memory and I regret having done so." Miss-proof missile defense! "What is so charmingly called the 'kill vehicle' managed to hit the target missile because the target had a radar beacon telling the other guy exactly where it was located. This is known as a 'cooperating target,' and even the Spice Girls could hit one." Spin control! "The Democrats have continued on their course of the politics of personal destruction. They ought to stop wasting taxpayer money on phony investigations and start working on the energy policy we sent to the Hill." "I thought faith-based meant faith in God, not faith in the Senate." "Now I don't get this: George W. Bush is in Europe again. Wasn't he just there? This is all part of his second 'I'm In Over My Head' tour. He's in Europe for the G8 Summit. When asked if George W. could name any of the members of the G 8, he said, "Why sure! Superman, Spiderman, Batman, Aquaman, Wonder Woman...." "Who cares what you think?" "Under intense pressure from the Republicans, Florida officials accepted hundreds of overseas absentee ballots that failed to comply with state election laws." From our "Instant Karma's Gonna Get Ya" Department comes this "I duuno, I come down to the idea that I don't see where Puerto Rico should get any favored treatment over the rest of these people. Now what have they done to get it? They sit down there on welfare and very few of them paying taxes. Got a sweetheart deal, I don't really see the equity in it." "Trial lawyers will not benefit from our bill. Patients will. Our bill is similar to legislation Texas enacted in 1997. In the five years since it passed, only 17 cases have been filed in court: lawyers in Texas aren't getting rich by filing lawsuits against negligent HMOs. But patients are getting better treatment. Why? Because HMOs in Texas no longer have the equivalent of diplomatic immunity." "It's an unimaginable honor to be the president during the Fourth of July.... It means what these words say, for starters. The great inalienable rights of our country. We're blessed with such values in America. And I -- it's -- I'm a proud man to be the nation based upon such wonderful values...." June 2001 "Consider the searing intellectual depth of the advice Bush says he offered Russian President Vladimir Putin during their recent summit: 'It's negative to think about blowing each other up. That's not a positive thought ... That's a thought when people were enemies with each other.' Are these the pronouncements of a man maturing into the leader of the free world or a guy who's been watching way too much Barney?" "Fox News among innocent viewers is a canine in the chicken coop." We all need to take a deep breath and think about being a Bush daughter and having that cross to bear. I'd go out and have a couple of drinks, too." "I didn't vote for Bush, I don't trust him, but even I think he's underachieving as president. The man's "Back in my own misspent youth, we did virtually all our underage drinking in frat houses and other private places where nobody ever got carded. If they want to stay off the cover of People magazine and avoid being psychoanalyzed by TV twits, Jenna and Barbara should do likewise." "I don't think that the elimination of hardship was one of the results that Republicans predicted when they warned us about Social Security, Medicare, food stamps for the poor, college tuition assistance, the FDIC, environment protections, immunizations for poor kids, The Food and Drug Administration, workplace safety regulations, consumer protection laws, and federal support of home mortgages. I seem to remember that Republicans promised these things would bring more hardship." "Africa is a nation..." It was a total disaster....He came out there to let every Californian, including Republicans, know he was against price caps. Now everyone in California knows Gray Davis is for them and the president is not." "It hardly seems an auspicious moment to hail the Bush family as 'the most exciting dynasty in America', as the Old Etonian editor of Tatler, Geordie Greig, has just done. Mr Greig's remarks were made at a bad moment for dynasties in general as another Old Etonian, Crown Prince Dipendra, wiped out most of his relatives in Nepal. Indeed the moment a family becomes a dynasty, it might be argued, is when the mundane domestic problems that afflict us all are replaced by drug overdoses, plane crashes, assassinations and even regicide. Not to mention embarrassing arrests of junior members of the clan. If I were Mr Bush, or indeed Tony Blair, I would pencil in a return to private life in the not too distant future."
"Let me get this straight. Jenna Bush, the 19-year-old daughter of President George W. Bush, a woman who has been all over TV, all over the newspapers, who appeared on the campaign trail, who danced with her father before a million flashbulbs, and who, outside the Dallas Cowboys, might be one of the most recognizable faces in Texas, tries to buy booze in Austin using a fake ID? It isn’t her liver we should be worrying about. It’s her brain." May 2001 FLASHBACK!!! January 26, 2001 "The inability of the White House and Senate Majority Leader Trent Lott to keep Jeffords from going independent and switching his support to the Democratic leadership -- giving the Democrats an effective 51-49 edge -- is only the latest evidence that zealotry rather than pragmatism is guiding Bush's Republican team." "In case you get all your political news from the Rush Limbaugh show and other right-wing radio, and you hadn't really heard about Jenna Bush's arrest, that's because her incident is very, very different from Al Gore's son getting a speeding ticket or being rumored to have been disciplined for drugs at school, or Chelsea Clinton being (wrongly) rumored to have been seen smoking at a public restaurant. Those subjects were worthy of lengthy on-air discussion because they demonstrated the inherent hypocrisy and disregard for The Rule of Law that all Democrats exhibit. Jenna Bush, on the other hand, falls under the category of Private Family Matters." FLASHBACK!!! We eagerly await his apology... "No energy crisis exists now that equates in any way with those we faced in 1973 and 1979. World supplies are adequate and reasonably stable, price fluctuations are cyclical, reserves are plentiful, and automobiles aren't waiting in line at service stations. Exaggerated claims seem designed to promote some long-frustrated ambitions of the oil industry at the expense of environmental quality." How right-wingers work to silence truth: "Olson's law partner, Douglas R. Cox, wrote cautioning me not to repeat the contention in Joe Conason's and my book, The Hunting of the President, that the first meeting of what became the misbegotten scheme was held in Olson's law office in late 1993. We'd even named several participants. Accounting and telephone records, moreover, support what our sources told us, so we've stuck by our story. Olson's has evolved." "If the government can't get it right in this case, how can we rely on the government to get it right in any case? Regardless of whether this new evidence is relevant to the issue of guilt or innocence in the Timothy McVeigh case, I think it shows clearly that there are problems in the criminal justice system." "You get a pretty clear pattern from these ballots. Most of these people went to the polls to vote for Gore." "There's going to be but a pittance for children and education, a pittance for health care, not anywhere near enough for affordable prescription drug coverage for our seniors. What happened to that campaign promise? This budget does not reflect what we call Minnesota values. I resist this budget and I vote against it." So Smirk is our dictator? "No longer is there a sense in the center-right that power is a "Thirty years [after the ABM Treaty was signed] Bush comes to the White House, with no substantial achievements to his name or experience of international affairs, and announces that the ABM treaty is no longer appropriate to the modern world and the US is going to pursue its dream of a missile defence system. The reaction around the globe to his speech contained a common element and that was indignation that the fragile structures and trust of the nuclear stand-off had been ended by a man with neither the intellect nor humility which this issue requires. Slim Shady and his chainsaw were now in charge of world peace." "Politically shrewd but ignorant, the president mistook a policy question [posed by CNN's John KIng] for a 'toughness' question. Good thing there's no real danger or the fool might suck us into World War III." April 2001 "If you were a voter hoping for a government that promised to fight for working families, health care and a stronger economy, would you trust the Bush Administration and Republicans in the Congress to keep that promise? If you were an ally, negotiating an agreement on trade or the environment or arms reduction - would you trust the Bush Administration and the Republicans in the Congress to honor America's commitment? If you were a parent, and your child asked for a glass of water in the middle of the night, would you trust the Bush Administration and the Republicans in the Congress to keep that water safe?" "We see [Bob] Kerrey, limping around without part of a leg he traded for the Medal of HONOR, "God destroyed Sodom and Gomorrah, and he is going to destroy you and a lot of others." "When I was a kid, local news was the specter of Edward R. Murrow. Serious, conscientious men and women reported it. It was sacred.... I was watching a network affiliate station the other day, and you got as much information as one would get from rifling through the yellow pages, kind of quickly. This affiliate is struggling, so they're doing everything they can to remove all content whatsoever." "It's more than sinister. It's really really frightening, on every level I can think of.... You know there's always been a fascist strain, here: It's not even political in the sense of this party or that. It's like a virus that can attach itself to Democrats or Republicans or whatever. And we know it's around. We can tell because black people are the nexus. United States politics have always been determined by the South. Look at the 'New South' or, under Nixon, 'The Southern Strategy.' It's finally about how Presidential candidates make accommodations with the South: It's about race! Because, what doesn't change is the dispossessing and the disenfranchising of black folks. That's precisely what the Electoral College was invented to guarantee: To give power to smaller states that allowed no woman and nobody black to vote." March 2001 "In a slapdash job of constitutional interpretation, the conservatives upended and ravaged four foundational relationships in our constitutional system. It usurped the role of the Florida Supreme Court in interpreting state law. It usurped the role of the American people by halting the counting of ballots in a presidential election and effectively choosing the president for them. It usurped Congress' powers to accept or reject the states' electoral college votes. And it reversed the proper distribution of powers in federal government by having Supreme Court justices appoint the president rather than vice versa. " He's embarrassing. He's not my president. He will never be my president" Huh? "But the true threats to stability and peace are these nations that are not very transparent, that hide behind the--that don't let people in to take a look and see what they're up to. They're very kind of authoritarian regimes. The true threat is whether or not one of these people decide, peak of anger, try to hold us hostage, ourselves; the Israelis, for example, to whom we'll defend, offer our defenses; the South Koreans." "The media coverage of the Clinton pardons has been so biased, overblown and vituperative as to call into question the very purpose of what currently passes as journalism. It is difficult to recall a more partisan, one-sided hatchet job." Who's in charge? " Among those attending [a White House lunch several hours before the president spoke to a joint session of Congress] was CNN's Bernard Shaw, who was seated beside Bush and across from Cheney. As questions were put to the president, the veteran newsman observed that Cheney seemed to be providing cues to Bush. "You're not going to do [a heart catheterization] on a precautionary basis." February 2001 Robert Byrd: "He's George Wallace with less ambition and better luck." "If we don't even have the brains to count votes in Florida correctly, why do they think they can build a system to intercept incoming nuclear missles?" Okay, so it's not political, but who can argue?... "Pop music has a rich legacy of ripping people off. First, the white musicians stole from the blacks. Then, the producers stole from the performers. Then, the performers and the producers formed an alliance to steal from us by charging 19 dollars for a CD with only one halfway decent song on it. So I for one salute Napster, because it's high time the public finally had an opportunity to horn in on a piece of the action. Considering how badly you get f@*%ed every time you go into a record store, I have to assume Richard Branson was trying to be ironic when he named the place Virgin." "The president apparently does not realize the damage he is doing to confidence by trash talking the economy. It is simply unheard-of for such a high elected official to accentuate the negative." Shrub's puppeteer admits WE'RE SMARTER!! "As people do better, they start voting like Republicans -- unless they have too much education and vote Democratic, which proves there can be too much of a good thing." "A round of repugnance... Attorney General John Ashcroft, having anointed his head with a squirt of Pam, now turning his attention to banning fetal tissue research, so that diabetics and Alzheimer's sufferers can die just as quickly and painfully as Jesus Our King intended them to.... The Bush brothers' transcendental arrogance on election night. To be that sure you did not lose Florida, you either had total confidence in the power of your message of inclusion or total confidence that every black in the state would have to endure construction detours and police-run-ID-checks before using a voting machine that last worked successfully when the Stutz Bearcat was a late model car or total confidence that you were going to steal the vote regardless." January 2001 "George Bush says he's for election reform. Reform this! I say park the state police cars, take down the roadblocks, stop asking people of color for multiple forms of ID, print readable ballots, open the polling places, count all the votes -- and start practicing democracy in America again!" "I will give our new president the same level of support and encouragement that was given to the current administration by such luminaries as Tom DeLay, Trent Lott, Rush Limbaugh, Richard [Mellon] Scaife, Ted Olson, [Paul Greenberg] and, of course, George W. himself. In other words, I will badmouth the president daily, I will work in whatever small way I can to defeat and undermine his programs and agenda, I will believe every scurrilous lie told about him and I will criticize and ridicule his wife and children at every opportunity." Got a quote? Email answergirl@americanpolitics.com |
Copyright © 2001, 2000, 1999, 1998, 1997, 1996, American Politics Journal Publications, Inc.
"We've got a dictatorial president and a Justice Department that does not want Congress involved.... Your guy's acting like he's king.... His dad was at a 90 percent approval rating and he lost! And the same thing can happen to him!''
"He's gonna do a lot of damage.... he's sort of like this great symbol of inversion to me -- the inverse of the truth. It's like the ethics of the new millennium: all you have to do is say something and it's true. 'I'm Muslim.' But you don't actually ever go to a mosque. You don't have to give up pork. You don't have to do anything. You just say it. That's the level of the hypocrisy and stupidity that's going on right now... Bush means Dick Cheney, Tom DeLay, and all these [expletive deleted] crypto-fascists are gonna get in and start carving up the pie and handing in all their markers to the Republican Party that's been itching to get back into power."
"[Departing Clinton White House staffers] trashed word processors, left obscene messages on voice-mail machines, cut some phone lines and re-routed others, tinkered with computers, scrawled obscenities on walls, soiled rugs and carpets, tipped over desks, vandalized file cabinets, left nasty messages for their successors -- and generally went that extra mile to prove Team Clinton, for all its good and decent public servants, included a record number of punks."