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The good and the bad...

web posted April 26, 2004

"This blame game stuff is counterproductive and dangerous when Americans are fighting and dying in Iraq. But if that's the game we're stuck with, it's an indisputable scandal that the Clinton Administration is getting off scot-free." -- Jonah Goldberg

"Face it America. There will be more terrorist strikes against the homeland, not because our government is incompetent, but because evil is relentless." -- David Thibault

"Freedom is not divisible. If people can be trusted to invest and manage material assets, they will eventually ask why they cannot be trusted with decisions over what to say and what to believe." -- U.S. Vice President Dick Cheney speaking to students at Fudan University in Shanghai

"After being drowned in a tidal wave of all who didn't do enough before 9/11, I have come to believe that the Commission should issue a report that says: 'No one did enough in the past. No one did near enough.' Then thank everyone for serving, send them home and let's get on with the job of protecting this country in the future." -- Sen. Zell Miller

"Rules cannot substitute for character." -- Alan Greenspan

"Indeed, Clinton never met privately at all with his first CIA Director James Woolsey after the initial job interview. When a plane crashed on the White House lawn in 1994, the joke in Washington was that it was Woolsey trying to get an appointment." -- Jonah Goldberg

"But in his present incarnation he's [Richard Clarke is] wrong and repulsive. He seems to have learned from his old boss, who's always preferred to apologize for the mistakes of others rather than his own: Shortly after 9/11, Bill Clinton apologized for the Crusades." -- Mark Steyn

"As a friend of mine says, the proper response to gay marriage is laughter." -- Don Feder

"A flat tax wouldn't be good for everybody. Many IRS agents and tax lawyers would have to find new jobs. But that seems an acceptable price to free America of a broken tax system." -- Dan Mitchell, Heritage Foundation

"Today President Bush appointed John Negroponte as the new Ambassador to Iraq. Now how do you get to be Ambassador to Iraq? Make a large contribution to the Kerry campaign?" -- Jay Leno

"President Bush agreed to back a UN-picked interim government in Iraq. Tossed out will be the interim government selected last year by the Americans. It went over with the locals like the Beirut dinner theater premiere of Fiddler on the Roof." -- Argus Hamilton

"John Kerry is professing to be amazed that George Bush is highlighting the terror threat to the U.S. in this year's election. Actually, I suspect that Kerry is more upset than surprised. Kerry knows for a certainty that if, between now and November, the American people suddenly wake up and recognize the grave threat posed to this country by Islamic fanatics, he will be toast on November 2nd." -- Neal Boortz

"Kerry's views on Iraq may have changed a dozen times since Saddam Hussein's invasion of Kuwait, but for more than three decades he has been philosophically consistent in his indifference to America's democratic ideals. Why would anyone vote for a Democrat who isn't even a democrat?" -- James Taranto

web posted April 19, 2004

"[P]eople who have to support themselves and their families were not the ones dropping out of the labor force. When things get tough for younger people, they can turn to mom and dad. Others turn to the taxpayers." -- Thomas Sowell

"We are at war, and our security as a nation depends on winning that war." -- Condoleezza Rice

"In the end, after both Dick Clarke and Condi Rice have had their say, some of us are left with the question we began with: Can anyone imagine Richard Clarke making these accusations if he'd gotten that No. 2 job he wanted in Homeland Security? ... Instead, he had to settle for best-sellerdom." -- Paul Greenberg

"Conspicuously missing from the highway funding debate is the only legal option, the 'let's get the feds out of the highway business and let the states take care of their own roads,' version of the bill." -- David Brownlow

"John Kerry's newfound interest in fiscal discipline is a political gimmick that defies his 20-year record in the Senate and stands in stark contrast to his reckless and expansive promises of new government spending on the campaign trail." -- Steve Schmidt, Bush Campaign Spokesman

"Congress, in the only bipartisan activity left in Washington, continues to act like Paris Hilton, who spends inherited money she never made." -- Cal Thomas

"It turns out John Kerry has voted in the Senate at least 350 times for higher taxes. That averages to one vote for higher taxes every three weeks, for almost two decades. At least the folks in Massachusetts knew he was on the job." -- U.S. Vice President Dick Cheney

"Hindsight is a form of tunnel vision. It sees only one thing, a narrowly circumscribed version of the past, stripped of nuance, and bereft of the continuous sense of the unknown and unexpected that marks the unfolding of events." -- James S. Robbins

"One can be pro-war or anti-war, but the notion that the fundamentalism that's threatening the world is Bush-Blair Christianity is so far off the mark as to be pathological." -- Mark Steyn

"So I had a choice: either take the word of a madman, take the word of a man who had used weapons of mass destruction on his own people, or take action to defend America. Given that choice, I will defend America every time." -- U.S. President George W. Bush

"They call me 'The Pork King,' they don't know how much I enjoy it." -- Sen. Robert Byrd

"It's interesting to hear that when they shut a newspaper that belongs to a legitimate voice in Iraq and, well, let me change the term 'legitimate.' When they shut a newspaper that belongs to a voice, because he has clearly taken on a far more radical tone in recent days and aligned himself with both Hamas and Hezbollah, which is a sort of terrorist alignment." -- John Kerry deeming terror-inciting Shi'ite imam Moqtada al-Sadr "legitimate" before correcting himself

"Right now, what I would do differently is, I mean, look, I'm not the president, and I didn't create this mess so I don't want to acknowledge a mistake that I haven't made." -- John Kerry, preemptively taking both, or neither, side of the issue on the war against Iraq

"To reprise an old joke from the Cold War, if Democrats aren't on al-Qaida's payroll, they're being gypped." -- Ann Coulter

"John Kerry's presidential candidacy has all the makings of a classic flop -- in the American side-splitting tradition of Thomas Dewey, Adlai Stevenson, George McGovern, Walter Mondale and Michael Dukakis.... Like Thomas Dewey in 1948, his deepest flaw as a candidate is his sheer unlikeability." -- Tony Blankley

"Oh and today John Kerry accused President Bush of catering to the rich. You know as opposed to John Kerry who just marries them." -- Jay Leno

"President Bush at a grade school in Arkansas Tuesday preached the importance of math and science classes. Kids today can't count and they don't know physics or biology or chemistry. The president hired them on the spot to be weapons inspectors." -- Argus Hamilton

web posted April 12, 2004

"[T]he freedom of choice wrought by the feminists who burned their bras (so to speak) for these new stay-at-home moms, has led to unexpected choices. A growing number of young women who have the freedom to decide have decided that career can wait, and the delicious early years of their children's lives can't." -- Suzanne Fields

"The truth of the culture war is that we have been losing it on all sides in the public arena. There is no way to paint a happy face on this loss. We must begin where we are: in the corner. The first step is to understand our enemies and why they have been successful." -- Gary North

"College Republicans...have the energy, if not the money, to do serious damage to liberal dominance on campus. [Radio talk show host, Al] Rantel explains the newfound power of the campus right succinctly: 'The left likes to take it by force, through student fees and through taxes. We do it because we believe in it, we know it's right, and we do it voluntarily. That difference defines the difference between the two political philosophies.' " -- Ben Shapiro

"The 2004 election will be fought by two branches of a historic generation hoping to claim the identity of that generation for themselves and the federal government for their own very different public policies. My candidate is the old Penny Loafer Conservative, George W. Bush, and frankly I find it amusing that when I was reading Mr. Friedman's works back in the late 1960s he apparently was reading Esquire's Handbook for Hosts. We conservatives have always been a very diverse group." -- R. Emmett Tyrrell, Jr.

"America is a fabulously wealthy and unbelievably strong nation. It can lose many material things and still survive. What it cannot lose and expect to survive as a nation is its national character. And if America's leadership loses its character, rooted in morality, the rest will of necessity follow." -- John L. Perry

"The idea of soldier-as-victim might have made some sense in 1971, when the draft was on and some soldiers were in Vietnam against their will. But today's military has not a single conscript; everyone fighting in Iraq and elsewhere is a professional who has voluntarily chosen a hazardous line of work. They deserve our gratitude and respect, not our pity." -- James Taranto

"He [Kerry] is to defense and national security what meterosexuals are to gender -- blurring the lines and all things to all people." -- Hugh Hewitt

"Golly, gee, Muslim terrorists tried to attack Madrid again. How can that be? Wasn't Muslim terror in Spain supposed to end once Spain appeased the terrorists by voting in the socialists?" -- Dennis Prager

"Al Qaeda's message to Europe -- which they hate even more than the United States, because it is not only wealthy but soft and weak as well -- is that of every mythical monster who promises his trembling prey that with proper flattery he can be gobbled down last." -- Victor Davis Hanson

"If the Democrats persuade the public to adopt their priorities instead of Mr. Bush's, we will again test the truth of the adage that God takes care of fools, drunkards and the United States." -- William and Nancy Goldcamp

"Yes, mistakes were made; intelligence was bad; stay tuned for 9-11 commission revelations to come. But post-Sept. 11, we couldn't afford to hope Saddam Hussein discovered his inner Mr. Rogers, even as he refused to cooperate with UN inspectors or to abide by resolutions demanding proof of disarmament." -- Kathleen Parker

"Well the good news for Democrats, now over half the country can identify a picture of John Kerry. The bad news, the majority still thinks he's the dad from 'The Munsters.'" -- Jay Leno

"Queen Elizabeth traveled to Paris for the one-hundredth anniversary of the Entente Cordiale treaty, which ended centuries of Anglo-French rivalry. The treaty resulted in England and America being dragged into World War I to defend France, and it protracted a war which caused the fall of the Kaiser and the Czar and the rise of Hitler and Stalin. Being allied with France is like having a brother-in-law with a gambling problem." -- Argus Hamilton

 

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