Lingua publicus
The good and the bad...
web posted July 26, 1999
"More blacks on television doesn't do a thing for the major problems of the inner-city blacks, such as poor education, crime and female-headed households. Invoking the names of poor blacks in order to benefit well-off blacks isn't new." -- Walter Williams on the NAACP's criticism of TV networks for the lack of blacks in leading roles
"The media did their best to nationalize [J-J Kennedy's] death, in order to drum up support for the real Kennedy curse, the Leviathan State the family has worked so long to entrench as a permanent fixture of American life." -- Lew Rockwell
"The problem most people have with this president isn't sex, it's the manner in which he deals with the truth. He's not the sort of person we'll want to hear from when he leaves the White House." -- CNBC's Chris Matthews
"Republicans define freedom as an absence of restraints imposed by government. Democrats define freedom as an absence of necessity, which government exists to reduce. America has not moved as far as it thinks it has beyond the argument about the New Deal, when FDR insisted, 'Necessitous men are not free men'." -- George Will
"As I watch government at all levels daily eat away at our freedom I keep thinking how prosperity and government largesse have combined to make most of us fat and lazy and indifferent to or actually in favor of the limits being placed on that freedom." -- Lyn Nofziger
"If the economic argument for statist liberalism has evaporated, the impulse to run other people's lives which underlies it remains. The politicians and bureaucrats who seek to control us now do so on different and more slippery grounds." -- John O'Sullivan
"Voters may well get a tax cut whether they want one or not." -- ABC's Linda Douglass lamenting Republican preferences for tax cuts over new government spending
"We ought to put [welfare mothers] to work in the public sector--not for pay necessarily." -- Hillary Clinton...slavery anyone?
"I'll do anything to get Hillary into office." -- Eve Weinstein, wife of Miramax Film's Harvey Weinstein
"After the (Women's World Cup '99) game, President Clinton, he went by the Chinese team's locker room to offer his condolences. Then Al Gore stopped by, tried to raise some campaign cash." -- Jay Leno
"As a lifelong active liberal Democrat, I find the choice not difficult. In all our campaigns, we were trying to work for decent and intelligent government. Neither Clinton can give us that. It is not in their character; and their hands are too dirty." -- New York Democrat, Bartle Bull, on the choice between Hillary Clinton and Rudy Giuliani
"Big Bird is 30 years old, and it's time to leave the federal nest.'' -- Rep. Steve Largent
"After landing... I realized I was going to have to say something." -- Apollo 11 astronaut Neil Armstrong, on the 30th anniversary of the first lunar voyage, about his "one giant leap for mankind" lunar line
"It's as if suddenly, an entire generation's optimism is deflated, and all that is left is the limp reality of growing old." -- Douglas Brinkley, John F. Kennedy Jr. friend and relentless media hound
web posted July 19, 1999
"We have shown our goodwill by calling ourselves a political entity under a one-China policy, but the Chinese communists have used this policy to squeeze us internationally. We feel there is no need to continue using the one-China term." -- Lee Teng-hui, the president of Taiwan, after repudiating the "One China" policy
"The PLA [People's Liberation Army] is ready at any time to safeguard the territorial integrity of China and smash any attempts to separate the country." -- Chinese Foreign Ministry spokesman Zhu Bangzao said in response
"Six years ago [Bill Clinton] was handed a failing economy. Today, because of his leadership, we are on the verge of the longest period of peacetime prosperity in all of American history." -- Al Gore. Actually, Clinton was handed an economy growing at a respectable 2.7 per cent.
"The unfolding national moral decline, unappreciated by most Americans, is our inheritance from the nation's leftists. The most obvious signs of it are family breakdown, illegitimacy, incivility, rampant crime, and lack of integrity in private and public life. A recent example of the decline in integrity standards is the broad public support of a president who has been judged in a court of law as a perjurer, an adulterer and a miscreant. A core element of the nation's moral decline is the attack on individual responsibilities and the establishment of a culture of victimhood." -- Walter E. Williams
"[My platform is] pro-life, it's pro-Second Amendment, it's pro-military, it's pro-sovereignty, it's pro-character and integrity. Many who want to lead our party -- specifically candidate Bush -- won't take a position on these issues," -- Senator Bob Smith
"More Americans than ever own homes, businesses and stocks," says Cato's Stephen Moore. "It's not surprising, therefore...a strong majority of Americans want a capital gains cut. This tax cut is not for Americans who own a yacht; it's for Americans who aspire to own one."
"A man who could do what Clinton did in 1992 is a man whose solipsism for self-control and whose capacity for lying are so far beyond the norm of behavior as to fairly be called pathological. Hillary Rodham Clinton played the crucial, knowing role in foisting such a man upon the nation." --Michael Kelly
"Clinton is most comfortable when thinking about little things -- school uniforms, the minimum wage and, above all, himself." -- George F. Will
"Virtue isn't just about knowing how to be good. To change behavior, we need to love the good." -- Charles Colson
"The danger to a free society is not the guns owned by the citizens but an unconstrained government.... An armed society is a self-governing society, just as a disarmed people are vulnerable to arbitrary power of every kind." -- Llewellyn H. Rockwell, Jr.
"It took more than the usual Clintonian brass for the president to choose the Mississippi Delta during his 'poor tour' last week as the venue for declaring his commitment to bringing jobs to America's neglected regions. In the last two years, the Clinton administration has waged a war against dozens of industries trying to bring jobs to America's poor areas. And in the Delta alone, the administration has forced cancellation of a $700 million plastics plant and an $800 million nuclear fuel enrichment plant -- all because the Environmental Protection Agency says these Louisiana facilities were guilty of 'environmental racism,' an alleged conspiracy of industry and state governments to locate plants with a disproportionate pollution impact in poor areas." -- Weekly Standard
"We've all been the beneficiaries...of his fine and fearless work." -- Geraldo Riveria on Bill Clinton
"I think that [Ms. Rodham-Clinton's] strength comes from a lot of people on television or in newspapers that just write drivel." -- Newsday's Jimmy Breslin
"I ate too much." -- Bill Clinton, after feasting on baby back ribs, catfish, steaks and potato salad during his "poverty tour."
"I think I see a sort of Celtic mist forming around Hillary as a new archetype (somewhere between Eleanor and Evita, transcending both) at a moment when civilization pivots, at last, decisively -- perhaps for the first time since the advent of Christian patriarchy two millenniums [sic] ago -- toward woman." Time's Lance Morrow on Hillary Clinton
"She's in New York. She's actually thinking of running for the Senate." -- Kermit the Frog discussing with Jay Leno the political ambitions of Ms. Piggy. When asked whether Piggy's election would be a first, Kermit responded, "Well, I don't know. She's not the first woman or the first pig to be elected to public office."
If I work really hard, I suppose I could become a news anchor at ABC sitting next to [Clinton adviser turned Good Morning America host] George Stephanopoulos.'' -- Matt Drudge after the announcement of his new ABC Radio show drew vehement objections from ABC News president David Westin over Drudge's "objectivity."
"I'd rather say I despise him. I think hatred is a form of respect, after all. I have nothing but bottomless contempt for the president. ... But I am getting to hate him." -- Christopher Hitchens, former FoB and author of No One Left to Lie to, on Bill Clinton
web posted July 12, 1999
"I think we've moved beyond all of it." -- Hillary Clinton when asked by a reporter about her $1 000-to-$100 000 commodities trade, among other questionable achievements.
"And, by the way, will someone admit that in the area of foreign policy -- just looking at Haiti, Bosnia, Ireland, Kosovo -- this president ain't done badly?" -- Larry King
"I've talked with transgender activists, and what they want -- and what we'll be forced to defend -- is for people with penises who identify as women to be able to shower with other women. There are no votes for that." -- Barney Frank
"Fabulous is how a fashion show narrator describes a new gown." -- A former U.S. ambassador after hearing Navy Secretary Richard Danzig twice refer to retiring Marine Corps Commandant Charles Krulak as a "fabulous" commandant.
"I'll be the 'First Man.' I might even run for the Senate from Arkansas!" -- Bob Dole on what a Liddy Dole victory would mean for him.
"The prosaic, depressing, and somewhat shameful fact is that the secret to getting ahead is just what my parents told me it was." -- P.J. O'Rourke
"The U.S. Womens Soccer team is playing the Chinese team for the world cup. Poor Al Gore doesn't know who to root for." -- Jay Leno
web posted July 5, 1999
"The most expensive peaceful reconstruction is still cheaper than the cheapest war." -- Clinton, who says that the "cheap" war in Yugoslavia cost about $7 billion but reconstruction may cost $30 billion. Isn't $30 billion still more than $7 billion?
"I only have time to read good books." -- Bill Bradley on whether he had read Al Gore's book, "Earth in the Balance."
"We are delighted to have cut George Bush's lead to a mere 45 points, a much more manageable margin." -- Quayle 2000 chairman, Kyle McSlarrow.
"It's not normal . . . to buy this many shoes at once." -- Bruno Magli spokesperson, Jill Eisenstadt, on Ms. Rodham-Clinton's purchase of 18 pairs of shoes.
"So now Bill Richardson has a 'security czar' (his words) at the Department of Energy. Fine with us--but didn't the czars come up short the last time they fought communism?" -- National Review Update
"If I had had an affair with Newt Gingrich, I would have hoped that I would have ended up on Appropriations or Ways and Means." -- Rep. Mary Bono on rumors reported by Clintonista pornicator Larry Flynt
"I want to keep prosperity going...not by letting people fend for themselves, or hoping for crumbs of compassion, but by giving people the skills and knowledge to succeed in their own right in the next century." -- Al Gore
