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Lingua publica web posted December 17, 2007 "After three days of screaming headlines about the CIA destroying videotapes in 2005 of the ‘harsh' interrogation of two terrorists, it now comes to light that in 2002 key members of Congress were fully briefed by the CIA about those interrogation techniques, including waterboarding. One member of that Congressional delegation was the future House Speaker, Nancy Pelosi... Porter Goss, the former chair of the House Intelligence Committee who later served as CIA director from 2004 to 2006 is explicit about what happened in these meetings: ‘Among those being briefed, there was a pretty full understanding of what the CIA was doing. And the reaction in the room was not just approval, but encouragement.' In all, the CIA provided Congress with some 30 briefings on waterboarding before it became a public issue... One certainly may hold as abhorrent the idea of aggressively interrogating any terrorists ever, either for fear of what they might do to our people, as John McCain does, or because one thinks this violates our values. What one may not do -- at least not if one wants the system to function -- is assent to such a policy in 2002 and then, when the policy is made public, put up the pretense that one is ‘shocked' and appalled to learn of it. This is bad faith." -- The Wall Street Journal "According to The Washington Post, [Nancy] Pelosi may have been joined by Sen. Jay Rockefeller (D-WV) who is now the chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee [for briefing on waterboarding]. SIDEBAR: Although, the juxtaposition of the name ‘Jay Rockefeller' and the word ‘Intelligence' has caused many thousands of dollars worth of beer to be wasted on Capitol Hill as it came spurting out of the noses of generations of Senate staffers of both parties." -- Rich Galen "[W]ith the surge in Iraq and the level of American deaths declining, it is off the front pages." -- NBC's Tim Russert "Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton is sending Bill Clinton to South Carolina on Saturday, the day before Oprah Winfrey arrives. The former president has spoken here often on behalf of his wife and has proved enormously popular with South Carolina voters." -- New York Times reporter Katharine Seelye "That's like saying George W. Bush ‘has proved enormously popular' with New York voters. Bush got 40.1% of the New York state vote in 2004, slightly more than Clinton's 39.9% in South Carolina in 1992." -- James Taranto "Five members of the Senate are Mormon. Are there any intimations that the Mormonism of Harry Reid, Orrin Hatch, Gordon Smith, Michael Crapo or Robert Bennett corrupts, distorts or in any way diminishes their ability to perform their constitutional duties? Mormonism should be a total irrelevancy in any political campaign. It is not. Which is why Mitt Romney had to deliver his JFK ‘religion speech'." -- Charles Krauthammer "I'd like somebody to get rid of the death tax. That's what I want. I don't want to get taxed just because I died... If I give something to my kid, I already paid the tax. Why should I have to pay it again because I died?" -- Whoopi Goldberg, who took Rosie O'Donnell's spot on "The View" "Climate change is a non problem. The right answer to a non problem is to have the courage to do nothing. The UN conference is a complete waste of our time and your money and we should no longer pay the slightest attention to the IPCC (Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change)." -- UK climate researcher Lord Christopher Monckton "Every newborn baby in Australia represents a potent source of greenhouse gas emissions for an average of 80 years, not simply by breathing, but by the profligate consumption of resources typical of our society. Far from showering financial booty on new mothers and thereby rewarding greenhouse-unfriendly behavior, a ‘Baby Levy' in the form of a carbon tax should apply, in line with the ‘polluter pays' principle." -- Australian academician Barry Walters calling for a tax on parents for the carbon emissions of their children "The United Nations Global Warming Conference got underway on the island of Bali. It's located in the Indonesian archipelago. Who else but the United Nations would go to a tropical island in December and then complain about warm weather." -- Argus Hamilton web posted December 10, 2007 "The surge hasn't accomplished its goals... We're involved, still, in an intractable civil war." -- Sen. Harry Reid "I think the ‘surge' is working...[But the Iraqis] have got to take care of themselves." -- Rep. John Murtha "[Democrats] are the party of real national security. We are the party of real economic opportunity and a brighter future for our children." -- House Speaker Nancy Pelosi "So you decide which makes more sense: Entrust our country to someone who is ready on day one... or to put America in the hands of someone with little national or international experience, who started running for president the day he arrived in the U.S. Senate." -- Hillary Clinton, perhaps projecting a little, on Barack Obama "When President Bush was grappling with embryonic stem cell research in 2001, Newsweek's science correspondent, Sharon Begley, warned in a cover story that this might be ‘a cruel blow to millions of patients for whom embryonic stem cells might offer the last chance for health and life.' In the current issue of Newsweek, Begley now tells us that the technology was always oversold. The notion that stem cells will lead to quick cures and transplants is ‘more fiction than fact,' Begley tells us -- now." -- Jonah Goldberg "I'm hearing that Hillary is ready to kill Bill. But it has nothing to do with his roving eye... By claiming that he had ‘opposed Iraq from the beginning' -- when the record clearly shows otherwise -- the former president served voters a piping hot reminder that the Clintons have frequently had an on-and-off relationship with the truth." -- Arianna Huffington "From this moment on, let's be calm. There is no dictatorship here." -- Venezuela's Hugo Chavez on the 49-51 percent election defeat of his bid to be socialist dictator for life "The holiday season is here, so it's time to engage in the time-honored Christmas tradition of objecting to every time-honored Christmas tradition." -- Mark Steyn "I was in an elevator in a Washington hotel, packed with ‘peace activists.' They looked with disdain at my dress uniform. I queried the most boisterous among them, ‘If you were locked away in some God-forsaken hell hole of a prison in one of the ‘Stans,' who would you rather have coming to rescue you, buses loaded with peacenik protestors or helicopters loaded with gung-ho Marines?' The silence was deafening." -- Colonel (USMC), San Diego, California "What we still don't understand is why you Americans stopped the bombing of Hanoi. You had us on the ropes. If you had pressed us a little harder, just for another day or two, we were ready to surrender! It was the same at the battles of Tet. You defeated us! We knew it, and we thought you knew it. But we were elated to notice your media was definitely helping us. They were causing more disruption in America than we could in the battlefields. We were ready to surrender. You had won!" -- North Vietnamese General Vo Nguyen Giap in his new memoirs web posted December 3, 2007 "The big news over the weekend was that a guy named Kevin Rudd won the election to be the Prime Minister of Australia. Rudd is the leader of the Labor Party and beat the incumbent John Howard whose Conservative Party had been in power for nearly 12 years. This was, of course, reported around the world as a defeat for... George Bush. everything is reported around the world as a defeat for... George Bush." -- Rich Galen "Leaders of the Democratic Party are unwilling to celebrate because they have invested all their political capital in the notion that America isn't winning, can't win and must not win. If voters were to embrace victory and not defeat, they would likely reject the Democratic presidential nominee, if only for demonstrating poor judgment." -- Cal Thomas "This week, the Supreme Court agreed to hear the case of District of Columbia v. Heller. In March, the Court of Appeals for the D. C. Circuit declared unconstitutional the District's near-total ban on handgun possession. That 2-1 ruling, written by Judge Laurence Silberman, found that when the Second Amendment spoke of the ‘right of the people,' it meant the right of ‘individuals,' and not some ‘collective right' held only by state governments or the National Guard. That stirring conclusion was enough to prompt the D. C. government to declare Judge Silberman outside ‘the mainstream of American jurisprudence' in its petition to the Supreme Court. We've certainly come to an interesting legal place if asserting principles that appear nowhere in the Constitution is considered normal, but it's beyond the pale to interpret the words that are in the Constitution to mean what they say... The phrase ‘the right of the people' or some variation of it appears repeatedly in the Bill of Rights, and nowhere does it actually mean ‘the right of the government.' When the Bill of Rights was written and adopted, the rights that mattered politically were of one sort -- an individual's, or a minority's, right to be free from interference from the state. Today, rights are most often thought of as an entitlement to receive something from the state, as opposed to a freedom from interference by the state. The Second Amendment is, in our view, clearly a right of the latter sort." -- The Wall Street Journal "'The group's purpose was to make it appear al-Qaida in Iraq was responsible for the attack,' Admiral Smith said, using the military's name for al-Qaida in Mesopotamia. ‘The special groups' aim was to demonstrate to Baghdadis the need for militia groups to continue providing for their security'." -- The New York Times "'Al-Qaida in Mesopotamia,' of course, is the Times's name for what everyone else calls al-Qaida in Iraq." -- James Taranto "On foreign policy, [Hillary] is a little more hawkish than the rest of the Democratic Party, and certainly more than the primary base is. It seems that on social issues, by which I mean kind of welfare and economic issues, she's fairly liberal. But she's a moral conservative. Which is to say that she also gets behind, you know, things like values issues." -- Time's Amy Sullivan "And the part of the Clinton administration that worked best -- the economy, stupid -- was run by Robert Rubin. Hillary did not show good judgment in her areas of influence -- the legal fiefdom, health care and running oppo-campaigns against Bill's galpals." -- New York Times columnist Maureen Dowd "[T]here is one job we can't afford on-the-job training for -- that's the job of our next president. Every day spent learning the ropes is another day of rising costs, mounting deficits and growing anxiety for our families." -- Hillary Clinton jabbing Barack Obama "My understanding was that she wasn't Treasury secretary in the Clinton administration, so I don't know exactly what experiences she's claiming." -- Barack Obama jabbing back "There is no doubt that Bill Clinton had faith in her and consulted with her on issues, in the same way that I would consult with Michelle, if there were issues. On the other hand, I don't think Michelle would claim that she is the best qualified person to be a U.S. senator by virtue of me talking to her on occasion about the work I've done. I think the fact of the matter is that Sen. Clinton is claiming basically the entire eight years of the Clinton presidency as her own, except for the stuff that didn't work out, in which case she has nothing to do with it." -- Barack Obama "I think it's going to come down to: Do you really want Bill Clinton back in the White House?" -- Donna Brazile "Words are always bad for liberals. Words allow people to understand what liberals are saying." -- Ann Coulter "Good luck [T.] Boone [Pickens, part funder of ther 2004 Swift Boat campaign], trying to get those military records. Kerry promised to release them [1,034] days ago, and an anxious nation (except for a few select reporters) still holds its breath." -- The Wall Street Journal's James Taranto, who has kept track of the days since Kerry first promised to release his full military records to Tim Russert on NBC's "Meet the Press" "Even though I approved of Afghanistan and opposed Iraq from the beginning, I still resent that I was not asked or given the opportunity to support those soldiers." -- Bill Clinton this week in Iowa "I supported the President when he asked the Congress for authority to stand up against weapons of mass destruction in Iraq." -- Bill Clinton in May 2003 |
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