Lingua publicus

The last month in quotes...the good and the bad

"[Clinton is] a much bigger liar than I ever thought. ... Now I see him as a selfish man who lies all the time." -- Monica Lewinsky

"It is with a heavy heart and not a little nausea that I resign from the Bill Clinton defense team. I have run fresh out of the benefit of the doubt and can no longer bend way over backward. Saddest of all, the cost of keeping a staunch defender of reproductive rights sitting in the White House just climbed out of my price range. Like all Americans, I got to choose this past week whether I believe Bill Clinton or a 56-year-old Arkansas nursing home operator named Juanita Broaddrick. ... I have no choice but to choose Juanita." -- Clinton ex-inamorata Stephanie Salter in the San Francisco Examiner.

"I don't think there could have been a mistake about whether it was consensual or not and so I'm left with a he said, she said and as I say, he doesn't have much credibility." -- Patricia Ireland of the National Organization for Women. Neither does Ireland, despite what she says

"Under the guise of ending drug use, the government is able to do things that would have appalled the American people a few generations ago. [The Know Your Customer rule] is just the latest thrust of the jackboot onto the throat of Lady Liberty." -- Sheldon Richman

"From all appearances, federal regulatory authorities have become repositories of fascism. Little Hitlers are everywhere." -- Paul Craig Roberts

"Closing the barn door after the horse is already out." -- Chuck Muth of the Republican Liberty Caucus, on NBC's decision to air the Juanita Broaddrick interview after Bill Clinton's impeachment trial.

"This pathetic woman justifies her lack of courage and her denial by praising the man who has betrayed her." -- Linda Bowles on Ms. Rodham-Clinton

"Why should feminists ever be listened to again? They have been accessories in Bill Clinton's raping of America, its laws and its virtue." -- Cal Thomas

"The Founders did not want efficient government; they wanted safe government. And to that end they built a government full of blocking mechanisms, secure in the faith -- vindicated by the subsequent 200 and more years of history -- that anything the American people wanted protractedly, intensely and reflectively, they would get in the fullness of time." -- George Will

"The serious flaws [of the independent counsel law] now unearthed by the ABA and liberal commentators...have been there from the beginning. The only real difference between the mechanism Congress re-enacted most recently in 1994, which the liberals loved, and the law they now claim to loathe, is that it is now being applied to Democrats rather than Republicans." -- Legal scholar Theodore B. Olson

"The state is] jeopardized by this weak notion that taxpayers must step forward to provide nearly unlimited resources to anyone who faces adversity...." -- Minnesota Gov. Jesse Ventura

"One hundred percent of courage is showing up when there is dangerous work to be done." -- National Review

"My friends, something has gone terribly wrong in a country where parents no longer wish their children to grow up to be president." -- Sen. John McCain

"We are now approaching a time when we will live in a surveillance society where all our movements and actions will be monitored." -- Barry Steinhardt, American Civil Liberties Union on the withdrawn Know Your Customer Law

"[The Broaddrick] story, once that interview was done, and the reporting accompanied it was done, should have been on the air immediately." -- Brit Hume chastising NBC

"I spend very little time reading the Wall Street Journal editorial page. They lost me after they accused the president of being a drug smuggler and a murderer." -- a badly mistaken White House spokesman Joe Lockhart

"(Al Gore) needs to be different. He needs to put out an agenda, a vision, and he hasn't done that yet." -- Democratic strategist Tony Podesta on how Gore should forget knowing someone named Bill Clinton

"In a patriarchal society all heterosexual intercourse is rape because women, as a group, are not strong enough to give meaningful consent." -- Catherine MacKinnon

"Unless something is done -- and soon, to relieve the massive buildup of excess tax receipts, the Treasury Building will explode and release its contents into the atmosphere, forming an immense cloud of money. ...If the wind were to shift, the money could fall back to Earth, where some of it could, conceivably, wind up -- this is referred to in top-secret government documents as 'The Doomsday Scenario' -- back in the hands of taxpayers." -- Dave Barry

"[Feminist] Andrea Dworkin wrote, 'Under patriarchy, no woman is safe to live her life, or to love, or to mother children. Under patriarchy, every woman is a victim, past, present and future. Under patriarchy, every woman's daughter is a victim, past, present and future. Under patriarchy, every woman's son is her potential betrayer and also the inevitable rapist or exploiter of another woman.' Substitute 'Bill Clinton' for 'patriarchy,' and you have a more contemporaneous assertion." -- Cal Thomas

"If you're going to be a rapist, be pro-choice. That's for sure." -- Bill Bennett on the lack of feminist outrage in the wake of the Broaddrick charges

"We will not tolerate the theft of our secrets." -- U.S. Energy Secretary Bill Richardson after it was announced a scientist at Los Alamos was selling nuclear technology to the Chinese. Why steal when the Chinese can buy anything under the Clinton administration?

"He is a lecher. I believe that he raped this woman.... He is amoral. So it wouldn't make any difference what you did. I mean, my view was that he should be caned, like in Singapore. And on weekends put in stocks, and only allowed out Mondays through Fridays." -- Former New York Mayor Ed Koch on Bill Clinton

"What I hope is that [that woman, Ms. Lewinsky] will be permitted to go on with her life and I hope it will be a good life. ... And I don't wish anyone ill who was caught up in this and she paid quite a high price for a long time and I feel badly for that." -- Bill Clinton on Monica Lewinsky

"Congressional Republicans ... calculate what they're likely to get after all the compromises, downgrade it by a media criticism factor, then announce it as their opening bid. They may complain after they're forced to compromise even further from what they say they really want, but they never learn. Never." -- Alan W. Bock

"What goes through the mind of Bill Clinton's women --- not Hillary, the First Enabler, but Donna Shalala, Janet Reno, Alexis Herman, Madeleine Albright...? Doesn't any one of these smart, independent women wonder what kind of moral deviant they work for?" -- Linda Chavez

"The President clearly took advantage of a twit." -- Wall Street Journal on Monica Lewinsky

"I think his judgment has been impeccable. He's been a brilliant President." -- Geraldo Rivera

"If you ever wondered whatever happened to the people in the former Soviet Union who used to run things there and now are permanently out of work, the answer is they're all in the Clinton administration, and they're running the banking authorities of this country." -- Phil Gramm

"The term wacko right-winger is redundant." -- Larry King

"I just think that there is a right-wing conspiracy." -- Monica Lewinsky

"I actually saw in watching the interview what I think Bill Clinton found so attractive. I thought she was vivacious, I thought she was sharp. She did have tremendous charisma, energy.... She's very attractive." -- Geraldo Rivera

"Only telling 10 people was being pretty discreet for me." -- the sharp Monica Lewinsky

"The fences that made America separate are disappearing... Almost all [immigrants] are now coming from Asia, Africa and Latin America. Our European ethnic core is shrinking fast. How much 'diversity' can we tolerate before we crease to be one nation and one people? The United States has never voted to change the racial or ethnic composition of this country. Yet, Mr. Clinton celebrates the fact that we will no longer have - basically - a European majority in the year 2040. My view is that first, the American people should vote on that proposition... The melting pot is broken. We need time to repair it." -- Pat Buchanan on Meet the Press (March 14, 1999), doing his best job to scare as many people as possible

"There will be a box score, and there will be that one negative and then there will be hundreds and hundreds of times when the record will show that I did not abuse my authority as president, that I was truthful with the American people." -- U.S. President BillClinton, when asked about his legacy, implying that he has only "abused [his] authority as president" once.

"I'll be watching, hoping someone shoots him. It would no doubt be a thrill in an otherwise dull evening." -- blacklisted Hollywood Ten writer Abraham Polonsky on Elia Kazan, who received an honorary Academy Award for his body of work. In Russia, Polonsky would have got the bullet, Communist or not

"'True conservatism,' we are informed, requires that we be at the center of American culture. That would be a liberal panacea. If their opponents are careful to stay in the center while liberals pull from the left, the center will continually move left and 'true conservatives' will, by definition, be bound to move with it. This is a liberal ratchet and a recipe for the destruction of any effective conservatism." -- Robert Bork

"[M]ultiplying two negative numbers produces a positive result. In President Clinton's calculation, lying about whether he's told more than one lie must, in his mind, produce the truth." -- Cal Thomas

"In the coming weeks, the Clinton forces will work overtime to convince the nation -- and history -- that the president was the innocent victim of a partisan witch hunt. In the absence of a spirited counter-argument from Republicans, they will succeed." -- Mona Charen

"The most gripping tale of a man's successful battle against his conscience since Albert Speer's cliffhanger 'Inside the Third Reich'." -- Dick Morris on George Stephanopoulos' new book, "All Too Human."