Lingua publica
The
good and the bad...presented with permission from The Patriot E-Journal
web posted April 21, 2008
"America elected Jimmy Carter 32 years ago and is still paying the price. Suppose history repeats: Obama wins and has a failed one-term presidency. Will he be jetting around the world meeting with terrorists and despots and denouncing America in 2040? Maybe not, but the thought gives us a shudder." -- James Taranto
"It seems there is scarcely a serious bad actor on the planet with whom Jimmy Carter has not met. He is a serial tyrant-enabler, the very personification of Rodney King's risible appeal, ‘Can't we all get along?' Mr. Carter has come to epitomize the notion that ‘dialogue' is always in order, no matter how odious or dangerous the interlocutor -- or the extent to which they or their agendas will benefit from such interactions." -- Frank Gaffney, Jr.
"Liberalism is so impressed with its own brilliance that results apparently don't matter." -- Brent Bozell
"Liberals are always at their best chuckling at the ways of those they regard as hicks. That's because liberals place far more importance on sophistication than on character, decency and values." -- Burt Prelutsky
"These days Democrats are not sounding very liberal. Classic liberals, after all, would support free markets, internationalism and the universal desire for constitutional government, while downplaying racial affinity." -- Victor Davis Hanson
"There is growing evidence that liberals are losing ground among blacks. In 1972, only one in ten of African-Americans identified themselves as conservative. Today, nearly 30% African-Americans publicly and openly identify themselves as conservative. Not Republican, mind you, but conservative." -- Christopher Alan Bracey
"A hundred years from now, Americans might still be fighting militant Islamists in Iraq and other places. What could be worse than that? A hundred years from now, America and the West could have been defeated by militant Islamists." -- Clifford May
"When I go to a dictatorship, I only have to talk to one person and that's the dictator, because he speaks for all the people. But in a democracy like Israel, there is a wide range of opinions and that counterbalances the disappointment that I have in not meeting with the people shaping Israeli power now in the government." -- foreign policy expert Jimmy Carter
"[T]he Founding Fathers] planted slavery and white supremacy in the DNA of this republic." -- Rev. Jeremiah Wright, retiring pastor of Barack Obama's home church, Trinity United Church of Christ
"The Clintons, man, they would lie on a stack of Bibles. Snipers? That's not misspeaking; that's some pure bulls***. I voted for Clinton twice, but that's over with. These old black politicians say, ‘Ooh, Massuh Clinton was good to us, massuh hired a lot of us, massuh was good!' Hoo! Charlie Rangel, David Dinkins -- they have to understand this is a new day. People ain't feelin' that stuff. It's like a tide, and the people who get in the way are just gonna get swept out into the ocean." -- director Spike Lee
"It's been a long time since anybody caught me saying something stupid." -- Ted Turner
"It's not surprising, then, they get bitter, they cling to guns or religion or antipathy to people who aren't like them or anti-immigrant sentiment or anti-trade sentiment as a way to explain their frustrations." -- Barack Obama on "working-class" voters
"So I said, ‘Well, you know, when you're bitter you turn to what you can count on. So people they vote about guns, or they take comfort from their faith and their family and their community. And they get mad about illegal immigrants who are coming over to this country or they get frustrated about, you know, how things are changing. That's a natural response." -- Barack Obama "clarifying" what he originally said
"In the final analysis, Jimmy Carter will be best remembered by history as a man whose time in and out of high public office was almost unblemished by success." -- Frank Gaffney, Jr.
"[Jimmy] Carter is about to make a disgrace of himself yet again, this time by meeting in Syria with Hamas terrorist leader Khaled Mashaal. His influence is nonexistent except where he can perform the role of useful idiot for America's enemies." -- Jed Babbin
"One of the hardest things about being a liberal Democrat is that, when you're talking to the resentful yahoos whose votes you unfortunately need, you have to pretend to care about them. When you're trying to sell Hope and Change, you need to give the rubes Hope that the Change is going to be Change they want. Even when you know there's no Hope of that." -- David Kahane
"Is American public education a form of child abuse?" -- Mark Steyn
"One way to reduce illegal immigration might be to translate some of our far left publications into Spanish and give everyone in Mexico subscriptions. After they read how terrible this country is, many may want to stay away." -- Thomas Sowell
"Bill Clinton was ripped after House auditors revealed his taxpayer-paid office expenses. He has run up a $400,000 phone bill since he left office. It never occurred to Congress to block all 900 numbers for ex-presidents." -- Argus Hamilton
"Why did you give $22,500 just two years ago [and more than $26,000 in 2007] to a church run by a man of the past who infects the younger generation with precisely the racial attitudes and animus you say you have come unto us to transcend?... This contextual analysis of Wright's venom, this extenuation of black hate speech as a product of white racism, is not new. It's the Jesse Jackson politics of racial grievance, expressed in Ivy League diction and Harvard Law nuance. That's why the speech made so many liberal commentators swoon: It bathed them in racial guilt while flattering their intellectual pretensions. An unbeatable combination." -- Charles Krauthammer
"In Barack Obama's America, rich people who vote on cultural issues rather than economic self-interest are principled and self-sacrificing. People of more modest means who do so are credulous and bitter... With Barack Obama's ‘postracial' appeal having proved illusory but Democrats likely to nominate him for president anyway, the party faces a difficult problem: how to persuade Americans to vote for the spiritual protégé of a man who espouses crackpot anti-American and antiwhite views." -- James Taranto
web posted April 14, 2008
"[Hillary Clinton's] view of America and its circumstances is remarkably dreary, considering that she and her husband have risen from the middle class to enjoy stratospheric influence and prominence, along with an income that puts them in the ranks of the super-rich -- $109 million just over the last eight years." -- Carol Platt Liebau
"The March monthly filing to the Federal Election Commission showed Hillary Clinton's presidential campaign with a $2.5 million debt for the month to her campaign manager Mark Penn's firm... Penn, Schoen & Berland is owned by Burson-Marsteller Worldwide, Penn's international public relations and lobbying company. Burson-Marsteller, in turn, is owned by the British-based advertising giant WPP Group. Clinton's continued indebtedness to Penn has raised question of whether it constitutes an illegal corporate contribution or an illegal foreign contribution." -- Robert Novak
"Barack Obama has been gaining on Hillary in Pennsylvania in part because Tuzla reminds Democrats what they had largely succeeded in banishing from consciousness: the Clintons' rather arm's-length relationship with truth." -- Charles Krauthammer
"Barack Obama is not an idiot. He is a brilliant orator who exudes charm and arouses near-worship from his host of giddy, hypnotized supporters. He is also a committed socialist and a talented salesman for his brand of Marxist snake oil. Beware of camels bearing gifts, and politicians promising utopia." -- Michael Reagan
"I know there are some people who want to shut this down -- and I think they are wrong. I have no intention of stopping until we finish what we started and until we resolve Florida and Michigan. And if we don't resolve it, we'll resolve it at the convention -- that's what credentials committees are for." -- Hillary Clinton on her dying campaign
"[L]eave enough troops in Iraq to guard our embassy and diplomats, and a counter-terrorism force to strike al-Qa'ida if it forms a base that the Iraqis cannot destroy." -- Barack Obama
I think it might be appropriate to describe exactly what that means. Does that mean 100,000 troops? Where are they based? What is their mission?" -- John McCain in response
"I don't think we force [taxation]. In fact, quite to the contrary. Our system of government is a voluntary tax system." -- Harry Reid
"In this ever-shifting, moving bar, Barack Obama will always be the underdog. No matter how much money he raises, no matter how many wins he pulls together, no matter how many delegates he accumulates; he is still the underdog. It's the way it works." -- Michelle Obama
"It takes courage to ask people to change -- even if it won't really cost them much. It is sad but it is true. Political leaders today are afraid of their constituents." -- New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg opining at an environmental conference over the demise of his plan for an environmental toll to Manhattan drivers
"Clinton's obsession with 3 a.m. phone calls seems bottomless -- perhaps because of all those nights she got hang-up calls from Monica? Clinton just released a new ad in which she says John McCain won't be ready to handle a 3 a.m. call on housing foreclosures. My guess is he'll be plenty ready to scream at the idiot who thinks he should wake the president of United States in the middle of the night about something like that." -- Jonah Goldberg
"In the latest ad, when she picks up the phone at 3 A.M. to take the emergency foreclosure breaking-news update, she's got perfect hair and make-up, and she's immaculately dressed. Is having to get up at 2 A.M. to put her face on for the 3 A.M. campaign ad causing her to retreat into Bosnian war fantasies?" -- Mark Steyn
"John McCain has opened 10-point leads over both Obama and Hillary in the latest measurement of national sentiment. Some of the most frightened Democrats even want to bring Al Gore in from the cold, as it were, and crown the king of the melting solar system as the man who can ‘bring us together.' (Try not to laugh.)" -- Wesley Pruden
"The Clintons just released their tax returns to the public... It turns out that over the past eight years, they've donated over $10 million to charity. When they asked Bill Clinton why he gave so much money to charity, he said, ‘She's a really good dancer'." -- Conan O'Brien
"Former presidential candidate John Edwards announced he will not -- will not -- accept the nomination for vice president. Which is really important, considering no one has asked him." -- Jay Leno
"Democrats are worried that the Obama spell will break between the time of his nomination and the time of the election, and deny them the White House. My guess is that he can maintain the spell just past Inauguration Day. After which will come the awakening. It will be rude." -- Charles Krauthammer
"Who is Barack Obama? The truth is that neither Sen. Obama's supporters nor opponents can answer that question. We know he is bright, eloquent and charismatic. But if he were elected president of the United States, he would be the least known man to be elected in modern American history, perhaps in all of American history." -- Dennis Prager
"You know, I got tickled the other day. A lot of the way this whole campaign has been covered has amused me. But there was a lot of fulminating because Hillary, one time late at night when she was exhausted, misstated -- and immediately apologized for it -- what happened to her in Bosnia in 1995 [sic]. Did y'all see all that? Oh, they blew it up." -- Bill Clinton on Hillary's midmorning speech about landing under "sniper fire" in Bosnia in 1996
web posted April 7, 2008
"There is somehow the suggestion that because we are having a vigorous debate about who would be the best president, we are going to weaken this party in the fall. Chill out. We're going to win this election if we just chill out and let everybody have their say." -- Bill Clinton
"You do not want to demoralize the base of the Democratic Party by having the Democrats attack each other. Let the media and the Republicans and the talking heads on cable television attack and carry on, fulminate at the mouth. The supporters should keep their mouths shut about this stuff on both sides because that is harmful to the potential victory of a Democrat." -- DNC Chairman Howard Dean
"Let me tell you something, when it comes to finishing a fight, Rocky and I have a lot in common. I never quit. I never give up." -- Hillary Clinton
"Many Democrats have been worried that the protracted fight, between Senators Clinton and Obama, might start alienating voters and hurt the party's chances against John McCain in the fall." -- ABC's Charlie Gibson
"I'm concerned about the good of the country. Our country is in terrible shape. And I believe Hillary Clinton is best qualified to move ahead and move us forward...[I]n terms of the person that I think is best qualified to lead this country right now, is a woman, somebody different." -- ABC's Carole Simpson
"I think the world will breathe a sigh of relief when this president is gone... Is a vote for Hillary a vote for Bill? No. A vote for Hillary is a vote for Hillary. I'm really proud of what my father did in the ‘90s, but I don't think you should vote for or against my mother based on my father." -- Chelsea Clinton
"I think that [global-warming deniers] are in such a tiny, tiny minority now with their point of view, they're almost like the ones who still believe that the moon landing was staged in a movie lot in Arizona and those who believe the world is flat." -- Al Gore
"For nearly 20 years, [Hillary Clinton] has been encased in the apparatus of political celebrity. Look at her schedule as first lady and ever since. Think of the thousands of staged events, the tens of thousands of times she has pretended to be delighted to see someone she doesn't know, the hundreds of thousands times she has recited empty clichès and exhortatory banalities, the millions of photos she has posed for in which she is supposed to appear empathetic or tough, the billions of politically opportune half-truths that have bounced around her head. No wonder the Clinton campaign feels impersonal. It's like a machine for the production of politics." -- David Brooks
"I am not criticizing Democrats for being partisan; I'm suggesting they are cynically insincere or grossly self-deceived when they pretend to aspire to bipartisanship. They don't seek compromise; they want the unopposed implementation of their unadulterated liberal agenda." -- David Limbaugh
"The ideology of the Left is based upon identity, not ideas, and was therefore bound to degenerate into political cannibalism, as feminists and racialists scurry for power." -- George Neumayr
"Wise men in our civilization have argued for centuries that four conditions must be met to justify war: It must counter a great and certain threat, it must be a last resort, it must have a reasonable chance of success, and it cannot be anticipated to cause more harm than it prevents. Leaving Iraq now would cause more harm than it prevents." -- Terry Jeffrey
"Being a disinterested government official does not mean that you know what you are doing. That fact gets left out of the equation in a lot of proposals for new government programs." -- Thomas Sowell
"When the going gets tough the not-so-tough surrender to hysteria." -- Wesley Pruden
"About this business of Hillary coming under intense sniping, I have some sympathy. The Clintons got away with this sort of thing for so long that you can't blame them for wondering how they missed the memo advising that henceforth the old rules no longer apply." -- Mark Steyn
"Democrats run their own elections the way they run the government: in ways you can't possibly understand that make no sense, that are not fair, and that are total bureaucratic nightmares." -- Rush Limbaugh
"American women are the freest, wealthiest, most educated in the world. They are liberated enough to choose someone for president other than a female candidate out of uterus-based loyalty." -- Michelle Malkin
"This weekend, Bill Clinton said Hillary should not drop out of the presidential race. Yeah, when asked why, Bill said, ‘Because then she'd come home'." -- Conan O'Brien
"It's getting nasty. Hillary and Barack really going at it. They're insulting each other, trading barbs, attacking each other's credibility. In fact, the only break they take from attacking each other is when they promise the American people, if elected, they can unite the country." -- Jay Leno
"What the United States faces today isn't an energy crisis. We've got plenty of sources of energy, from oil and natural gas in coastal waters (off Alaska, Florida and elsewhere) to coal (enough to provide all our electricity for a century) to nuclear power (which produces electricity without any CO2 emissions). Yet... we haven't built a new petroleum refinery since 1976. We haven't opened a nuclear power plant in two decades... The problem today is a crisis of confidence. We're not willing to expand our domestic sources of energy, even though we know we can protect the environment while also drilling for oil or refining gasoline." -- The Heritage Foundation's Ed Feulner
"There's too many people. That's why we have global warming. We have global warming because too many people are using too much stuff. If there were less people they'd be using less stuff ... We'll be eight degrees hotter in 10, not 10, but in 30 or 40 years, and basically none of the crops will grow. Most of the people will have died and the rest of us will be cannibals." -- Ted Turner
web posted March 31, 2008
"I remember landing under sniper fire. There was supposed to be some kind of a greeting ceremony at the airport, but instead we just ran with our heads down to get into the vehicles to get to our base." -- Hillary Clinton, describing her 1996 trip to Tuzla, Bosnia, unaware that CBS News had footage of the event as it actually was
"[V]ideo shot that day [in 1996 in Bosnia] seemingly contradicts [Hillary Clinton's] version of events. No one seems to be running or ducking, and there does appear to be a ceremony." -- CNN's Dan Lothian
"You know, I think that, a minor blip, you know, if I said something that, you know, I say a lot of things-- millions of words a day-- so if I misspoke, that was just a misstatement." -- Hillary Clinton, in response to being outed
"The point I was making was not that my grandmother harbors any racial animosity. She doesn't. But she is a typical white person who, uh, if she sees somebody on the street that she doesn't know, there's a reaction that's been bred into our experiences that don't go away and that sometimes come out in the wrong way and that's just the nature of race in our society. We have to break through it." -- Barack Obama
"I think it would be a great thing if we had an election year where you had two people who loved this country and were devoted to the interest of this country. And people could actually ask themselves who is right on these issues, instead of all this other stuff that always seems to intrude itself on our politics." -- Bill Clinton
"[A President Obama would] in some cases go around their dictator leaders [in the Middle East] to the people and inspire the people in ways that we can't otherwise. He has the ability to help us bridge the divide of religious extremism...[b]ecause he's African-American. Because he's a black man who has come from a place of oppression and repression through the years in our own country." -- John F. Kerry endorsing Barack Hussein Obama
"Seinfeld's George Costanza famously quipped: ‘It's not a lie if you believe it.' This is how a Clinton-- take your pick, Hillary, Bill or Chelsea-- makes it through the day. Better living through self-delusion." -- Michelle Malkin
"Which works best? Inflaming old hatreds and feeding paranoia among the next generation? Or teaching children that what they have in common is greater than their differences? The answer is obvious, but some people-- both black and white-- are deeply invested in preserving rather than healing wounds." -- Kathleen Parker
"There will always be more to do in order to create that elusive ‘more perfect union,' but it's important for spiritual-- and political-- leaders to remind us that social conscience has sometimes done its work, that some things in the past are definitely dead, and buried." -- Suzanne Fields
"Government... now resembles an irresponsible parent, spending the children's wages and inheritance as if there were no tomorrow." -- Cal Thomas
"The U.S. can welcome immigrants while at the same time encouraging assimilation. Everyone is free to practice the customs and language of his native land, but today immigrants are actively discouraged from learning the few common things that bind this country together, such as English... Anti-immigration sentiment will only rise if assimilation continues to be a dirty word." -- John Fund
"It is a tribute to Hillary Clinton that even though, rationally, political soothsayers think she can no longer win, irrationally, they wonder how she will pull it off. It's impossible to imagine The Terminator, as a former aide calls her, giving up. Unless every circuit is out, she'll regenerate enough to claw her way out of the grave, crawl through the Rezko Memorial Lawn and up Obama's wall, hurl her torso into the house and brutally haunt his dreams." -- New York Times columnist Maureen Dowd
"Barack Obama wanted to have a national conversation about race. Well, he's getting one. Hillary Clinton's campaign seems to be using the inflammatory comments of Obama's minister, Jeremiah Wright, to make the argument to party insiders, or superdelegates, that Obama has too much baggage to win in November, as she seemed to acknowledge today." -- ABC's Jake Tapper
"The city of Detroit is in a crisis over government and leadership. The current Mayor is just the latest Detroit Mayor elected on a promise to clean up and revitalize the city. Now he's been caught in a sex scandal, a trail of electronic messages reportedly provides the evidence, it threatens his career and then some." -- NBC's Brian Williams, who by the way forgot to mention that the Mayor is a Democrat
"[Bill] Richardson's endorsement [of Barack Obama] came right around the anniversary of the day when Judas sold out for 30 pieces of silver, so I think the timing is appropriate, if ironic."-- Clinton loyalist James Carville
"That's typical of many of the people around Senator Clinton. They think they have a sense of entitlement to the presidency."-- Bill Richardson in response
"I have often said that Al Gore and I have something in common: If we invent a story up and keep telling it, after a while we think it actually happened. Now, it seems, we can add Hillary to our little club of Self-Delusional Dopes."-- Rich Galen
"Obama gave a nice speech, except for everything he said about race. He apparently believes we're not talking enough about race. This is like hearing Britney Spears say we're not talking enough about pop-tarts with substance-abuse problems."-- Ann Coulter
"The Glowbama mystique has gone the way of the Emperor's clothes. Instead of accountability, we got excuses. Instead of disavowal of demagoguery, we got whacked with the moral equivalence card. Instead of rejecting the Blame America mantra of left-wing black nationalism, we got more Blame Whitey. Same old, same old."-- Michelle Malkin
"We journalists make it a point to know very little about an extremely wide variety of topics; this is how we stay objective."-- Dave Barry
"A new CNN poll just came out about the campaign. Interesting results... A new study shows that wine drinkers prefer Hillary Clinton to the other candidates. Yeah, after hearing this, Bill Clinton asked, ‘How much wine have they had?"'-- Conan O'Brien
"According to the latest polls, John McCain now in a double-digit lead over the Democrats. To give you an idea how far McCain is ahead in the polls, today, Hillary offered him the vice presidency. ... According to a new CNN poll, John McCain would win the presidential election if only beer drinkers voted. Now, a Democrat, either Hillary or Barack would win, if only wine drinkers voted. But here's the interesting part, if we all got really drunk on tequila, Ralph Nader might actually have a shot." -- Jay Leno
"Some Democrats... are playing politics with [Iraq] and they are sending mixed signals to our troops and the enemy." -- U.S. President George W. Bush
"The question occurs: Will it take some further, even more catastrophic attack here at home-- an attack made more likely by the irresponsible behavior of today's agitators-- to silence their defeatism and reunify the country behind a necessary program for victory?" -- Frank Gaffney, Jr.