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The good and the bad...

web posted March 25, 2002

"Unfortunately money is not the root of all evil; evil is the root of all evil. Many of the goody-goody politicians who claim they would be paragons of virtue if it were not for campaign contributions are in error. Freed from the presence of soft money or even hard money most of these politicians would be just as bad. Once again, some politicians are lying to you. Not surprisingly, they are the same ones claiming to be virtuous." -- R. Emmett Tyrrell, Jr.

"Billions of dollars disappeared without a trace in just a few years. Honest auditors were scarcer than talking dogs. Worst of all, nobody questioned why so many insiders were giving their buddies outside lucrative contracts establishing cozy partnerships that were shot through with conflicts of interest. No, Enron had nothing to do with it. The culprit is none other than Uncle Sugar, proprietor of the world's largest annual spending spree, the $1.4 trillion federal budget, and operator of what may well be the world's biggest and costliest example of fuzzy math in action." -- Mark Tapscott

"September 11 has taught Americans that we need to return to being the confident moral force we once were, and fast -- to act resolutely and to follow principle. We must expect, but ultimately ignore, the carping; be polite, but forgo the apologies; and let our critics, not us, worry only about the tension and hurt that follows." -- Victor Davis Hanson

"Of the 20th century's three global conflicts -- the First, Second and Cold Wars -- who was on the right side each time? Germany: one out of three. Italy: two out of three. For a perfect triple, there's only Britain, America, Canada, Australia, New Zealand. Even now, with their military capabilities shrivelled to almost nothing, the only guys actually on the ground in any combat role with the Americans are the British, Aussie and Kiwi SAS boys and Canada's JTF2. I think there's something to be said for being on the right side of history." -- Mark Steyn

"Am I the only one who remembers the debate over airport security? Only by making the screeners Federal employees would the system ever be deemed safe. The INS, when last we checked, is staffed by Federal employees." -- Rich Galen

"The law of the Constitution is illuminated by the philosophy set forth in the Declaration of Independence, so the two documents are properly read together." -- Joan Aylor Kirby

"Wartime always brings expansions of state power, together with erosions of moral and constitutional standards." -- Joseph Sobran

"Now that there's a real war on, isn't it time to tell the truth? The United States military exists to win our wars, not to serve as the tool of a bunch of noisy feminists." -- Mona Charen

"Now that a real war is going on, this is no time to try to appease the unappeasable Clinton feminists in their perennial pursuit of an androgynous military." -- Phyllis Schlafly

"The president has over 80% approval, largely due to the support from America's veterans, from World War II, Korea, and Vietnam, who love this president." -- Rush Limbaugh

"The 'lesson of appeasement' is not that appeasement is futile. Appeasement is not futile, it is dangerous.... Appeasement doesn't merely fail to prevent catastrophe, it provokes catastrophe." -- David Gelernter

"The war on terror is a clash of civilizations. This is a hard and unpleasant truth, but one that we will learn, one way or the other." -- Wesley Pruden

"Well, you've heard our news reports, now what are the facts concerning Anaconda?" -- ABC's Sam Donaldson to Gen. Tommy Franks

"This is like a war. This is worse than being in Vietnam. This is a full-out war against me. ...I kept the lights on. And this sounds a little presumptuous, but I think I should get a round of applause. I don't get squat. ...If I didn't panic, you wouldn't be able to put out your paper. I saved this friggin' paper. I kept the lights on in this state. Do you understand that? I kept the lights on. ...You're probably looking at the last governor of California who is not a billionaire." -- California's Democrat Gov. Gray Davis addressing the San Diego Union-Tribune editorial board

"What was most hurtful was to be so invisible at the funerals and memorial services. The officials giving the eulogies would talk about 'firemen,' the 'brothers,' the 'men.' After 20 years, it was tough to take." -- Lt. Brenda Berkman, of the New York City Fire Department, who sued to gain entry to a firefighter position, now claiming "victim" status because women were "invisible at the funerals and memorial services." The FDNY is over 99.75% male, and the 343 department members who died on 9-11 were all firemen

"To put it in philosophical terms, why not nuke the bastards? Why should American lives be sacrificed in land battles if this terrorist cancer could be treated with a little radioactive therapy?" -- Paul Greenberg

"As long as Russia didn't back the Arabs, Saudi Arabia could be occupied in about five minutes. By Papua-New Guinea, the Boy Scouts, or three Marines." -- Fred Reed

"Can anyone remember a single meaningful phrase Clinton ever uttered? His most famous lines are laugh lines." -- Ann Coulter

"Dodge ball is now in the crosshairs of American liberals because it hurts children's feelings and their self-esteem." -- Rush Limbaugh

"America has become one huge circle in which everyone is pointing the finger of blame at someone else.... We now have so many addictions that the total accounts for well over one hundred percent of the American population." -- Psychologist Paul Vitz

"Speaking of Bill Clinton, he was in L.A. the other day to give a speech. He got a record amount, $200,000, for the speech. You know Clinton, though -- there was probably more under the table." -- Jay Leno

"President Bush lauded U.S. troops who routed al Qaeda in the Shah-e-Kot mountains. The enemy emerged from their caves firing machine guns, grenade launchers, and anti-tank rockets. Only Rosie O'Donnell made more noise coming out in the last week." -- Argus Hamilton

web posted March 18, 2002

"There can be no peace in the world where differences and grievances become an excuse to target the innocent for murder. Against such an enemy, there is no immunity, and there can be no neutrality." -- President George W. Bush

"When you lose your national memory, you risk losing what you need for understanding your own time -- and you risk losing the future as well as the past." -- Thomas Sowell

"The problem for the Left is that Sept. 11 really may have changed everything -- that a near-constant state of mobilization against terror may permanently cripple the politics of multiculturalism at home and anti-globalization abroad." -- Stanley Kurtz

"Since September 11, the gray zone for facilitating terror has shrunk." -- Austin Bay

"Evil will not be overcome by stepped-up security measures; it will be overcome by good, as light drives out darkness." -- John Fischer

"If there is an Islamist version of gallantry in war, the Palestinians have obviously never heard of it, and are thus armed with the Jewish conscience." -- Wesley Pruden

"Can you name one government reform that actually improved anything? How many times has Social Security been reformed? How about public education? Health care? Let's not forget the IRS! In Washington, 'reform' always means more spending, more taxes, more regulations, more bureaucrats, and less freedom." -- Rep. Ron Paul

"Anti-Semitism is always the calling card of a new despotism." -- Alan Caruba

"Anti-Zionism and anti-Americanism go hand in hand." -- Don Feder

"Yasser Arafat says all of his defensible stuff in English and leaves the red meat for his Arabic speeches." -- Jonah Goldberg

"We should restrain our inclination to believe that laws in and of themselves create a just society. It is a common morality, validated by law, that accomplishes that." -- William Goldcamp

"The Constitution is not the property of judges and lawyers alone, or even of politicians. We the People also have a constitutional role to play." -- Ramesh Ponnuru

"It's a curious fact about Americans that in their most fiercely patriotic moods they are willing to set aside their Constitution, the guarantor of their freedom, in order to prosecute war -- yet they insist that the war is for 'freedom'." -- Joseph Sobran

"Without judges who limit themselves to interpreting the law, we can't protect our democratic process. Judge Pickering is a man who will leave lawmaking to the legislative branch." -- Ken Connor

"The worst thing that could happen for the Democratic Party is an economic recovery. I'm not saying Tom Daschle is opposed to having good things happen in America. He's just opposed to good things happening to America before the 2002 election." -- Rush Limbaugh

"I have trouble with a war that generates so many concerns about individual liberties." --Florida Demo gubernatorial candidate Janet Reno, author of the rules of engagement at Waco

"Watching Democrats in action often feels like being the target of a 'Candid Camera' set-up. You constantly find yourself wanting to scream, 'Is anyone else watching this?'" --Ann Coulter

"In my humble opinion, the only relevant argument among members of the Republican Party is over whose turn it is to throw in the towel." --Norman Liebmann

"Up on Capitol Hill, Secretary of State Colin Powell says that our government has no plans of attacking Iraq -- but the shadow government is ready to blow them to hell!" -- Jay Leno

"President Bush will go to Germany, France and Russia in May to discuss their roles in the war on terrorism. They're all laid out. Russia is in charge of fuel supplies, Germany is in charge of ordnance and France is in charge of refreshments." -- Argus Hamilton

web posted March 11, 2002

"Parents who spend $30,000 or more a year to provide their offspring a prestigious education at an Ivy League school are almost certain to be buying their sons and daughters a first-class indoctrination into radical left-wing ideology -- from which they may never recover. It is not exactly news to find that many of the professors at schools such as Harvard, Yale and Princeton don't think like most mainstream Americans, and make no effort to disguise their contempt for Western culture, religious faith, patriotism and capitalism. They fuzzily believe that Communism or something like it should probably be given another chance." -- Linda Bowles

"In 1993, Dick Riordan not only said he would support President Clinton's record $241 million tax increase, but actually sent a letter to Senate leaders urging them to support the President's 'economic programs'. Dick likes to say his fiscal thinking is in-line with the Republican Party, but not a single Republican in Congress, not even liberal Jim Jeffords, supported Clinton's massive tax increase." --California GOP gubernatorial nominee Bill Simon

r, and integrity have always been the cornerstone of the United States armed force's core values." -- Dexter Ingram

"...[C]ulture, morale, and training can trump both modern weapons and numbers on the battlefield." -- Victor Davis Hanson

"Only brave and independent people can preserve liberty. Are there a sufficient number of such people left in America? We shall see." -- Chuck Baldwin

"None of us knew about the secret government. Not knowing things as basic as that is a pretty profound illustration of the chasm that exists sometimes [between Congress and the Bush administration] with information." -- Senate Democratic Leader Tom Daschle, forgetting on September 11 he was among those spirited to safety to one of those "secret government" locations

"Honesty, selflessness, caring, empathy and optimism were what made our country survive the awful times of our birth and two World Wars since. When we lose those special characteristics, we will lose our special place as a nation in a world looking for moral leadership." -- John LeBoutillier

"As a country that came into being through armed rebellion, it is not our duty, nor even our right to attempt to maintain the status quo in the individual nations of the world." -- Lyn Nofziger

"You have to let the mission determine the coalition, you don't let the coalition determine the mission." -- Donald Rumsfeld

"What used to be called 'unilateralism' is now recognized as leadership, the ability to visualize an objective, explain the means of attaining it, and wrap the entire venture in a cloak of inevitability." -- James S. Robbins

"When under attack, no country is obligated to collect permission slips from allies to strike back." -- Charles Krauthammer

"Denying the existence of evil is so convenient for the cowardly, so effortless for the lazy, and so uninvolving for the indifferent." -- David C. Stolinsky

"Tolerance is a virtue deeply embedded in the American people -- more so indeed than in their elites who are periodically swept up in intolerant puritanical campaigns whether for prohibition or university 'speech codes'." -- John O'Sullivan

"Injustice is rife when people have no conscience. In our time, only politically correct official 'victim groups' are deserving of concern, and the compassion they receive is orchestrated for the purpose of advancing political agendas." -- Paul Craig Roberts

"One of the keys to Clintonism is absence of conscience. You cannot be Bill Clinton, for example, and have a conscience. You just can't." -- Rush Limbaugh

"There's nothing more gullible, or more desperate, than a politicized heart." -- Mark Goldblatt

"The goal here is to make sure that when we are seeking experts outside the news division to help explain stories we're working on, we include in the group we're considering a wide variety of possibilities, rather than simply going back to the same, limited group." -- ABC News President David Westin's e-mail to news division staffers, announcing a list of 480 preferred identity group spokespersons to be contacted for "diversity" in a quota of the quoted for on-air segments

"As President Bush toured Asia last week, some world leaders worried publicly that the war on terrorism was starting to look suspiciously like the last great American campaign -- against Communism. ...The McCarthy years in some ways were eerily similar to the present moment. ..The first victims of anti-Communist hysteria were immigrants, and hundreds of immigrants have been detained since Sept. 11, many with little apparent cause beyond the fact that they were Middle Eastern men." -- New York Times reporter Robert Worth

"I don't feel that we should have lethal weapons in the cockpit. I believe that stun guns or tasers, as they're referred to, can be a possibility." -- Transportation Secretary Norman Mineta apparently forgetting that cockpits became lethal weapons on September 11

"The real terrorist threats are George W. Bush and his band of brown-shirted thugs." -- Sandra Bernhard

"This shadow security measure implies that 100 people can run the entire federal government in the event that Washington, D.C., is out of commission. Which, coincidentally, has been part of every Republican platform since Ronald Reagan." -- Mark Russell

"...[I]f I were trying to assess this in an objective, unbiased, 'Rumsfeldian' way I would step back and look at it and say, 'Not bad'." -- U.S. Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld on allowing press access to military missions

"On almost all campuses, the behavior of both the studentry and the professoriate is remarkably teenaged in savor. Universities are not the potting soil of maturity." -- Fred Reed

"Tom Ridge says that he doesn't favor airline pilots carrying guns on board airplanes. He went on to say that if pilots want to carry guns they'll have to sneak them on board through security just like everyone else does." -- Jay Leno

"The White House ordered a radio transmitter built on a mountain in Iraq. The broadcasts will help to destabilize the Iraqi regime. The idea is to overthrow Saddam Hussein and install David Letterman before Ted Koppel gets back from vacation." -- Argus Hamilton

web posted March 4, 2002

"Is campaign spending too high? No. In 2000, all campaigns -- including state and local elections and ballot referendums -- cost about $3.9 billion.... This is less than four one-hundredths of 1 percent of our national income. It's less than Americans spend annually on flowers ($6.6 billion in 1997)." -- Robert J. Samuelson

"...[D]espite the cruel and evil death experienced by [Daniel] Pearl, despite the deaths of other journalists, and the beatings and the jailings, his colleagues will continue to take risks to find and tell you the truth, or as much of it as they can manage. Danny's murder was pointless. His life was not." -- Terry Anderson

"This brutal and arbitrary murder is a horrifying blow to the country, to Pearl's pregnant wife and to foreign correspondents everywhere that regularly burrow through danger in quest of the truth." -- Armstrong Williams

"Mr. Pearl wrote his stories in ink, but unfortunately ran afoul of a movement that writes its stories in blood. The good man is gone; the bad men are left to deal with." -- Dave Shiflett

"We've already lost enough Americans; we're not going to lose any more by hesitating." -- Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz

"Can anyone seriously argue that the Daschle-Biden-Leahy-Leiberman-Kerry-Wellstone-Clinton-Waxman-Frank-Box er-Gephardt-Rangell-Hollings-Pelosi-Toricelli-Nadler-Edwards-Levin-tri al-lawyers-abortion-absolutists-public-employee-union-NAACP-Streisand- West-Wing-Jackson-Brown-Free-Mumia-suckerfish-and-solar-car-carnival is prepared to lead the defense of this country, and of the West?" -- Hugh Hewitt

"Why do so many of these anti-Americans, who profess hatred of the West and reverence for the purity of an energized Islam or a fiery Palestine, enroll in Chico State or UCLA instead of madrassas in Pakistan or military academies in Iraq?" -- Victor Davis Hanson

"Call off the dogs please. I apologize. I am chastened and will never use 'hot tub' and 'Marin County' in the same sentence again." -- George H.W. Bush after he came under fire from residents for saying referring to American al-Qaida fighter John Walker Lindh as "some misguided Marin County hot-tubber"

"Poverty doesn't cause crime; people do. To commit acts as heinous as those of September 11th requires a profound depravity and utter lack of conscience." -- Joel Mowbray

"I know what I think, and I assume it's what I said." -- Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld

"Even in the crucible of war, we have discovered that our worst critics love us in the concrete as much as they hate us in the abstract." -- Victor Davis Hanson

"There is no disdain quite as sour as guilt-driven disdain." -- R. James Woolsey

"Politics is the art of the possible and compromise is often necessary. But compromise is not the same as surrender." -- W. James Antle III

"Never underestimate the ability of unelected bureaucrats to overturn the expressed will of the people if it threatens their power." -- Linda Chavez

"Because liberals are determinists who deny free will and the existence of evil, everything is reduced to economics." -- Don Feder

"Tax cuts aren't something you pay for. It's less money for the government to spend." -- Ann Coulter

"Optimism will soon gain the upper hand. Indeed, optimism always defeats pessimism. Hold that thought, America." -- Larry Kudlow

"I am a liberal.... Some of us, maybe foolishly, gave this president the authority to go after the terrorists. We didn't know that he too was gonna go crazy with it. ...The only person who should be celebrated and honored and revered is [California Democrat] Barbara Lee." -- Democratic Rep. Maxine Waters addressing a University of Southern California rally, on how "crazy" President Bush has gone in prosecuting the war Jihadistan opened against America

"There are too many choices. You go to the supermarket and there are 80 different kinds of cereal when you're just looking for oats. Or you make a call and you end up talking to a machine when you're looking for a person. Your health plan covers some drugs, but not others; in Cuba, it's all free." -- Harvard visiting professor of architecture and card-carrying Communist Mario Coyula-Cowley

"I'm getting worried about the economy.... I was the first one laid off last year." -- Former Vice President Al Gore

"...[L]aughter might soon be malum prohibitum when writing about politics." -- R. Emmett Tyrrell, Jr.

"We've never actually seen 'The West Wing,' but we understand it's about a liberal Democratic president who's both honest and effective. Talk about fiction!" -- OpinionJournal.com

"Say what you like about those wacky Islamofascists but at least they revile America as the Great Satan. By contrast, to Europe, America is now and forever the Great Moron." -- Mark Steyn

"Every once in a while in the morning as I get up about five o'clock and get ready to take a shower and head for the office, she [my wife Joyce] says, 'Don, where is he?' I tell her that if I want to bring up Osama bin Laden, I'll wake her up and bring it up myself. ...If he's alive, he's very busy hiding." -- Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld

"Some people in D.C. feel Tyson shouldn't be allowed to box there because he's a sex offender. Oh, come on -- you let Clinton be president." -- Jay Leno

"Chinese President Jiang Zemin is angry with President Bush's description of North Korea, Iraq and Iran as the axis of evil. China crashed our spy plane and held the crew hostage, fired missiles over Taiwan, and sold nuclear technology to shady regimes. For crying out loud, what does a country have to do to medal in this event?" -- Argus Hamilton

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