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web posted May 12, 2008

"I'm not going to put my lot in with economists, because I know if we get it right, if we actually did it right, if we had a president who used all the tools of the presidency, we would design it in such a way that it would be implemented effectively." -- Hillary Clinton on the "gas tax holiday"

"Only in Washington can you get away with calling someone out of touch when you're the one who thinks that 30 cents a day is enough to help people who are struggling in this economy." -- Barack Obama on Hillary's gas tax proposal

"I would never be here telling you something I didn't believe." -- Bill Clinton

"[W]hen you start bringing up things that have nothing to do with the candidate and nothing to do with the issues, that's race baiting, and that's exactly what it is, just like Willie Horton was race baiting so many years ago... I tell you, you know, there's a lot of difference between the Republicans and the Democrats on issues, but the biggest issue of all is we don't use this kind of stuff. We never have used this kind of stuff, and we're not going to start now." -- DNC Chief Howard Dean on Barack Obama and Jeremiah Wright

"We focus on the negative and our politicians stoke our unhappiness all the more. They bribe us with our own money, promising to expand the government to address the grievances that they promote. But we ought to be careful what we wish for." -- Tom Purcell

"The time is long overdue to stop gullibly accepting the left's vision of itself as idealistic, rather than self-aggrandizing." -- Thomas Sowell

"[O]ver the course of Bill Clinton's (bungled, distasteful) presidency and Hillary Clinton's (bungled, distasteful) campaign for the presidency, the couple have separately and together become incarnations of the most unattractive attributes of their generation's elite -- blind ambition cloaked in do-good self-righteousness, a sense of entitlement, high-handed snobbiness, hedonism, narcissism. As a poster couple for people of a certain age and demographic, they have become a bit of an embarrassment." -- Kurt Andersen

"After years of learning how to fight an unfamiliar war in Afghanistan and Iraq, and to protect us at home, we are finally getting most things right. But if our soldiers and intelligence agencies have learned how to win, our politically correct diplomats and the American consumer haven't -- and are doing as much at home to empower radical Islam as those on the front lines are to defeat it." -- Victor Davis Hanson

"[The] message of black liberation theology is basically Confucius' message of do unto others as you would have others do unto you... Obama has said that many times. But you look at a lot of the white Christians, and... they go to their white churches. And you wonder how they can call themselves Christians and still look at other people as though they are inferior... I think... we are still a racist country." -- The Washington Post's Sally Quinn on the flap over Jeremiah Wright's comments

"Senator Clinton decries how the company Magnequench moved from Indiana to China in 2003, but there's one key part of the story Senator Clinton tends to leave out: Her husband's role. Over and over again, Clinton blames President Bush for dropping the ball on a national security issue -- including in a new TV ad... What Clinton does not say is that her husband could have stopped it because the Chinese bought Magnequench in 1995 when he was President. And his administration approved the deal despite national security concerns." -- ABC's Jake Tapper

"The smart, educated pool of voters who go to the primaries, they're not buying necessarily this guilt by association. But, that being said, what about your more conservative, white, rural voters?" -- Kim Genardo of NBC's Raleigh, North Carolina affiliate

"I don't want to sound like an ad, a public service ad on TV, but the fact is if you can read, you can walk into a job later on. If you don't, then you've got, the Army, Iraq, I don't know, something like that. It's, it's not as bright." -- horror author Stephen King

"If you were black in this country, especially if you are of [Jeremiah Wright's] age, of his era or even times before that or even kids today, when you look at the situation in our inner city schools, I mean, you have to ask yourself... what's it like to be black in America? And what kind of rage would you feel? And if you did feel that rage, what kind of things would you say that, at times, would be outrageous, crazy even, because you've had to live through this for so long?"  -- Michael Moore excusing Jeremiah Wright's hate speech

"If we want to save our planet earth, to save life, to save mankind, we have a duty to put an end to the capitalist system." -- Bolivia's President Evo Morales

"Oh, let's also point out that, as a matter of political reality, Clinton might as well be calling for a ban on the use of unicorn meat in dog food, because there is no way her [gas tax holiday] proposal can actually, you know, happen." -- Jonah Goldberg

"Every several weeks, I write a column suggesting what this presidential election might look like if we had serious candidates and a press corps that treated the presidency as an important office in which vital decisions would be made by its incumbent. I invariably get flooded with e-mails telling me, basically, ‘Blankley, don't hold your breath'." -- Tony Blankley

"I wouldn't want to give you the idea that my hometown newspaper is entirely heartless when it comes to right-wingers. In fact, just recently, I had occasion to write the following letter to the editor: ‘First it was William F. Buckley who got a terrific, extremely respectful, front page send-off.  Today, it was Charlton Heston's turn. Clearly, all a conservative has to do in order to get his just desserts from the L.A. Times is to die on a slow news day." -- Burt Prelutsky

"If it takes Obama 20 years to notice that his pastor is a traitorous, racist nut-job, it will probably take him his full term of office to realize that the U.S. has been invaded and subdued by al-Qaida. Let's just hope President Obama pays closer attention during national security briefings than he did during 20 years of the Rev. Wright's church services." -- Ann Coulter

"President Bush blasted Congress for not allowing oil exploration in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge. Democrats said it wouldn't do any good, because it wouldn't produce oil for 10 years. You know, the same thing they said 10 years ago." -- Jay Leno

"Michelle Obama is a bizarre mix of condescension and grievance -- like Teresa Heinz Kerry with a chip on her shoulder. But the common thread to her rhetoric is its antipathy to what she calls ‘corporate America.' Perhaps for his next Gettysburg Address the senator will be saying, ‘I could no more disown my wife than I could disown my own pastor. Oh, wait "' -- Mark Steyn

"Are you ready for hope and change? Barack Obama better hope his bitter half has a change of attitude if she expects to assume the title of first lady in November. She's been likened to John F. Kennedy's wife, what with her chic suits and pearls and perfectly coiffed helmet hair. But when she opens her mouth, Michelle O is less Jackie O and more Wendy W -- as in Wendy Whiner, the constantly kvetching ‘Saturday Night Live' character from the early 1980s." -- Michelle Malkin

"We cannot win with eggheads and African-Americans." -- Democrat Paul Begala

"I've drunk more beers with Joe six-pack, Jane six-pack and everybody else than most white Democrats... Stop the division, stop trying to split us into these groups." -- Donna Brazile to Begala

"Mr. McCain predictably criticized liberal judges, vowed strict adherence to the Founders' views and promised to appoint more judges in the mold of Chief Justice John Roberts and Justice Samuel Alito. That is just what the country does not need." -- New York Times editorial

web posted May 5, 2008

"Whom will Obama believe and trust if he is the president? How will he judge an ally and an enemy? How will he staff a vast Executive Branch? Whom will he appoint to the Supreme Court and how will he judge their characters and their personal histories?... If he even figures out who the radicals are, will he have the courage to refuse them office or influence?" -- Hugh Hewitt

"On Monday [Rev. Wright] insisted that he is not anti-American: It is, he said, Americans' government, not the American public, that is a genocidal perpetrator of terrorism. So, he now denies that America has a representative government -- that it represents the public. He believes that elections constantly and mysteriously -- and against the public's will -- produce a genocidal, terroristic government." -- George Will

"What is your notion of why so many Americans seem not to want to hear the full Monty -- they don't want to seem to acknowledge that a nation capable of greatness is also capable of cruelty?... Did you ever imagine that you would come to personify the black anger that so many whites fear?" -- PBS's Bill Moyers to Jeremiah Wright

"I want to rename ‘green.' I want to rename it geostrategic, geoeconomic, capitalistic and patriotic. I want to do that because I think that living, working, designing, manufacturing and projecting America in a green way can be the basis of a new unifying political movement for the 21st century. A redefined, broader and more muscular green ideology is not meant to trump the traditional Republican and Democratic agendas but rather to bridge them when it comes to addressing the three major issues facing every American today: jobs, temperature and terrorism." -- New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman

"Most of us in news are not smart enough to figure out what's going on. We may pretend that we're good enough to do that. But in fact, when we look you in the eye, in the camera, we're really just making it up." -- MSNBC anchor Keith Olbermann

"Obviously whatever relationship that I had with Reverend Wright has changed as a consequence of this. I don't think that he showed much concern for me; I don't think he showed much concern for what we're trying to do." -- Barack Obama on Jeremiah Wright

"Hillary's opponent, in his entire campaign, every two or three weeks has said for months and months and months, beginning in Nevada, that really there wasn't much difference in how America did when I was President and how America's done under President Bush. Now, if you believe that, you should probably vote for him, but you get a very bad grade in history." -- Bill Clinton on Bill Clinton

"Because of her unfortunate marriage, Hillary comes with a cast of undesirables like James Carville, Paul Begala, Terry McAuliffe, Joe Conason -- and of course Bill Clinton, along with his trusted impeachment manager Larry Flynt. Buy one, get the entire dirt-bag collection free!" -- Ann Coulter

"The difference between a philanthropist and a liberal is that a philanthropist is generous with his own money." -- Jack Kelly

"The biofuels debacle is global warm-mongering in a nutshell: The first victims of poseur environmentalism will always be developing countries. In order for you to put biofuel in your Prius and feel good about yourself for no reason, real actual people in faraway places have to starve to death." -- Mark Steyn

"Sometimes people come up to me and inquire, ‘Justice Scalia, when did you first become an originalist?' You know, as though it's some weird affliction, you know, ‘When did you start eating human flesh?"' -- Justice Antonin Scalia

"Barack Obama denied his comments marked him as an elitist, while Hillary denied being an elitist in Indiana. Who isn't an elitist anymore? We live in a country where you have to pay a hundred dollars a month to watch a TV series about John Adams." -- Argus Hamilton

"Hillary Clinton said she is a stronger candidate than Barack Obama. And to prove it, she counts the votes she got in Michigan, even though Obama's name wasn't even on the ballot. It's a pretty strong argument. I mean, whenever Barack Obama's name is not on the ballot, she beats him every single time." -- Jay Leno

"The truth about black poverty today, as Kay Hymowitz of the Manhattan Institute has aptly put it, is that it is ‘intricately intertwined with the collapse of the nuclear family in the inner city.' Consider that black households that are headed by married couples have median incomes almost 90 percent that of white households headed by married couples. The problem in the black community is that far too few black households are headed by married couples... It is not simply a moral claim, but a well-documented empirical one, that family and education are the keys to success in our free country. Black children don't need politicians of any color who claim to hold the keys to their future. They need parents who know their names. Two of them." -- Star Parker

web posted April 28, 2008

"We never cease to be amazed by the inability of the left to feel shame and its lack of reverence for America and those who defend its freedoms, including the right to be stupid. The cover of the April 21 issue of Time, taking the famous Joe Rosenthal photo of Marines planting our flag on the blood-soaked island of Iwo Jima and replacing our flag with a tree, qualifies for obscenity of the year. It echoes the greenie theme first advanced by Al Gore in his book Earth In The Balance that the internal combustion engine is the greatest threat in the history of mankind. Gore and Bill Clinton have both said that global warming is ultimately a greater threat than terrorism... This trivializing of the sacrifice of American blood and treasure to defend freedom ignores the fact that in World War II we faced a real enemy with a terrible agenda. The bombs that fell on Pearl Harbor were quite real, not the output of some badly fed computer model. ‘Global warming may or may not be a significant threat to the United States,' Tim Holbert, a spokesman for the American Veterans Center, [said]: ‘The Japanese Empire on February 1945, however, certainly was, and this photo trivializes the most recognizable moment of one of the bloodiest battles in U.S. history'." -- Investor's Business Daily

"One of the things we do in this story, is we say there needs to be an effort along the lines of preparing for World War II to combat global warming and climate change." -- Time Managing Editor Richard Stengel

"Obama said today that what you saw during the debate was the rollout for the Republican campaign against him in the fall. So it must have been painful for him to have it come out during a debate with a fellow Democrat." -- CBS's Dean Reynolds

"The Washington Post has a poll out now that shows that [Hillary] is now considered honest and trustworthy by only 39 percent of the people they polled. A year ago she was polling around 52 percent." -- CBS's Bob Schieffer

"Bush Embraces Pope Benedict XVI" -- ABCNews.com headline

"Carter Embraces Hamas Official" -- Associated Press headline

"If you give... [people] a list of 25 or 30 issues and ask them to rank them in order of seriousness, climate change comes at the bottom or near the bottom... I remember one poll where it came under dog litter." -- Al Gore

"The problem is not that I met with Hamas in Syria, the problem is that Israel and the United States refuse to meet these people... So I told [Hamas] don't wait for reciprocation, just do it unilaterally. This will bring a lot of credit to you around the world for doing a humane thing. They turned me down." -- Jimmy Carter

"[J]ust when we were close to a national news media providing a general consensus on what the truth is, along comes the Internets [sic] that allows its users a choice on the kind of news it watches and the YouTube. My God, we've got to stop them." -- actor Tim Robbins

"We need somebody who's got the heart, the empathy, to recognize what it's like to be a young teenage mom, the empathy to understand what it's like to be poor or African-American or gay or disabled or old -- and that's the criteria by which I'll be selecting my judges." -- Barack Obama

"I think that [the Obama campaign] played the race card on me. And we now know, from memos from the campaign and everything that they planned to do it all along... I don't think I should take any s**t from anybody on that, do you?" -- Bill Clinton

"[Hillary's win in Pennsylvania] is great news. For Sen. John McCain. She's never getting out. Hillary will not leave the race tonight. She will not leave the race before the convention in August. She may not leave the race ever." -- Rich Galen

"One of the key questions for a president is where do you draw your team from? Who are your friends? What and who influenced you?... When will the MSM get around to a sustained examination of Obama's ideological history? Thus far the farthest left major party candidate in American political history has received the least scrutiny of any modern near nominee of a major party." -- Hugh Hewitt

"Ultimately, people have to wonder what it is about Obama that attracts the support of Hamas, Communists, and domestic terrorists to him." -- Matt Lewis

"The big irony here is that while Obama has done extremely well for himself in our very unique free-market economy, he has the ‘audacity' to demonize others who have done well for themselves, and to propose economic policies that, if implemented, would radically change our nation into something more akin to a Western European socialist state." -- Austin Hill

"I think a healthy society needs both God and guns: it benefits from a belief in some kind of higher purpose to life on earth, and it requires a self-reliant citizenry. If you lack either of those twin props, you wind up with today's Europe -- a present-tense Eutopia mired in fatalism." -- Mark Steyn

"My guess is if tax time meant that everybody had to reach into his or her own bank accounts for the full tax amount owed, there would be a new mindset about taxes. Why don't we try it?" -- Matt Towery

"The liberal world order will not let go of their global-warming assault on free economies until hell freezes over -- by which point, obviously, the global-warming theory will be visibly disproven." -- Tony Blankley

"Speaking of Vice President Gore, I'm sorry to relate that he's a little bit sore at me. He's convinced that on global warming, I just don't get it. But lately with every passing day the evidence has been catching my attention. I have no doubt, none at all, that we are in the midst of a global warming, or, as I prefer to call it, spring. And I don't want to sound like an alarmist, but it's going to get a lot warmer before it gets cooler." -- Dick Cheney

"Why would any Republican want to leave the party to vote for a Democrat, when we have our own Democrat running?" -- Rush Limbaugh

"The Carter administration was that bad: stagflation, gas lines, appeasement, never-ending sanctimony... You name a colossal mistake and Jimmy Carter probably made it a policy." -- Paul Greenberg

"Hillary Clinton was endorsed by the Plasterers Union Tuesday. Support law and order, you get the Police Union, support tariffs, you get the autoworkers. Drink a shot and a beer on camera, and you are the national spokesman for getting plastered." -- Argus Hamilton

"With oil prices hitting an all-time high, Barack Obama promised today if he is elected, he will fund research to develop a car that runs on the bitterness of economically-strapped Pennsylvania voters." -- Jay Leno

"Obama is part of a long tradition on the left of being for the working class in the abstract, or as people potentially useful for the purposes of the left, but having disdain or contempt for them as human beings. Karl Marx said, ‘The working class is revolutionary or it is nothing.' In other words, they mattered only in so far as they were willing to carry out the Marxist agenda. Fabian socialist George Bernard Shaw included the working class among the ‘detestable' people who ‘have no right to live.' He added: ‘I should despair if I did not know that they will all die presently, and that there is no need on earth why they should be replaced by people like themselves'." -- Thomas Sowell

"It is worth remembering that in the end Alger Hiss and his ‘glittering' legion of tittering, elitist, snobbish supporters finally lost, although at great cost to those who challenged them. [I]t was ‘the plain men and women' who carried the day. In time, they will do so again when they get Obama's underlying philosophy in focus. They will get the core of Barack Obama just as... they got Alger Hiss." -- Jeffrey Lord

"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

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

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