Lingua publica
The
good and the bad...presented with permission from The Patriot E-Journal
web posted July 24, 2006
"There are many fronts in our struggle against Islamic terrorists from the 7th century. The American people must be reminded of our challenges constantly in lieu of platitudes about the inevitable triumph of freedom and democracy. In short, our government should provide much more explanation of this complex war and far less simple declarations about it." -- Victor Davis Hanson
"Everything our leaders do must be judged by whether it helps or hurts us in defeating terrorists and their state sponsors." -- Newt Gingrich
"It would be dangerous to be in a world without partners. But it would be more dangerous to see friendship where none exists." -- Tony Blankley
"The Increasing Complexity of Everything is good for liberalism (government should be vital, large, demand and bestow much) and not conservatism (government should be smaller, less powerful, less demanding of the treasure and liberty of the citizenry). When everything is a big complicated morass, regular normal people, voters, constituents, become intellectually disheartened. They can also lose sight of core principles." -- Peggy Noonan
"[Sen. Joe] Lieberman isn't only pro-war, he's seen as pro-Bush -- a far greater sin... Hatred of Bush drives -- or poisons -- almost everything in liberal politics now." -- Jonah Goldberg
"Americans in Iraq have found 500 sarin- and mustard-gas-filled artillery shells, live botulinum toxin, cyanide salt, and nearly two tons of uranium... Without threatening intelligence contacts and techniques, the ever-bashful Bush administration owes it to American taxpayers and our Coalition allies to unveil everything it safely can about what we really have found in Iraq." -- Deroy Murdock
"[Russian President Vladimir Putin is] the only one of those leaders who goes in there with a commanding popularity among his own people, because he is perceived to be an effective dictator. What we have in this country is a dictator who's ineffective." -- Newsweek's Eleanor Clift
"There are no [Iranian] guards there. Shipment of [Iranian] missiles to Hizballah is also not correct." -- Iranian Foreign Ministry spokesman Hamid Reza Asefi denying Iran's involvement in the terrorist attacks on Israel
"I saw a [bumper sticker] the other day [that] said... 'After We Bring Democracy to Iraq, Can We Have Some Here?' Gee, I don't know. The owner of this car will just have to ponder that in his prison cell, where he has been sent for brandishing that sticker in a non-democracy." -- Jay Nordlinger
"The annual G8 summit of the wealthiest nations gets underway tomorrow. Officials say this year the hardest part will be keeping the leader of France from head butting the leader of Italy." -- Conan O'Brien
"Half the fellows inside the Beltway have Middle East 'peace plans' named after them. Bush flew in himself a year or two back to announce his 'road map.' Before that it was Cheney, who flew in with the Cheney plan, which was a plan to open up a road map back to the last plan, which would get us back to 'Tenet,' which would get us back to 'Mitchell,' which would get us back to 'Wye River,' which would get us back to 'Oslo,' which would get us back to Kansas." -- Mark Steyn
"As with forced school busing, liberals seem to believe that the consequences of their insane ideas can be confined to the outer boroughs." -- Ann Coulter
"Valerie Plame addressed the TV cameras Friday about her lawsuit against Dick Cheney. She's a beautiful blonde, she drives a convertible, and she claims that the publicity ruined her life. At last there's a story a Los Angeles jury won't buy." -- Argus Hamilton
"Japan says they're now considering whether attacking North Korea's missile sites would violate their Constitution. Imagine that. Government leaders worried about violating their Constitution. That's something you don't see anymore." -- Jay Leno
"Those who keep calling for an end to the 'cycle of violence' are what make such violence more likely. 'World opinion' in general and the United Nations in particular can always be counted on to counsel 'restraint' in response to attacks and 'negotiations' in response to lethal threats... What that means is that those who start trouble will have a lower price to pay than if those they attacked were free to go all out in their counter-attack. Lowering the price to be paid by aggressors virtually guarantees more aggression." -- Hoover Institute economist Thomas Sowell
"Norman Podhoretz was exactly right when he coined the term World War IV to describe the global terror conflict. Repeatedly hostile actions by the totalitarians in Iran, Syria, Hezbollah, Hamas and North Korea are all connected. So are the recently foiled terrorist-cell-block plans in Canada, the United States, London and elsewhere around the globe. We are fortunate to have a staunch ally like Israel to assist us in this fight... Remember, Israel pulled out of southern Lebanon and Gaza. Later, when terrorist gangs kidnapped Israeli soldiers, Israel appropriately fought back. That is what sovereign nations do, and Israel's recent military actions deserve our unyielding support. Israel has the right to put the terrorist armies of Hezbollah and Hamas out of business... And we cannot delude ourselves about the role of Iran in recent Middle East events. Iran sent Hamas and Hezbollah to attack Israel in the hope of inflaming the Middle East against Israel and the United States. The plan was to divert attention away from G-8 and UN sanction efforts to derail Iran's nuclear weaponization program. Iran miscalculated." -- Columnist Lawrence Kudlow
"On July 16, Hasan Nasrallah, the head of Hezbollah, announced there will be new 'surprises,' and the al-Aqsa Martyrs Brigade said that it had developed chemical and biological weapons that could be added to its rockets. Should Israel not be allowed to pre-empt their use?" -- Harvard Law Professor Alan Dershowitz
"If you think what's going on in the Middle East today would be going on if the Democrats were in control, it wouldn't, because we would have worked day after day after day to make sure we didn't get where we are today. We would have had the moral authority that Bill Clinton had when he brought together the Northern Irish and the IRA, when he brought together the Israelis and the Palestinians." -- DNC Chairman Howard Dean
"He's not vetoing [federally-funded embryonic stem cell research] on the grounds that it may cost too much money! He's vetoing it because he says he believes it's immoral. Well, Mr. President, you are not our moral ayatollah." -- Sen. Tom Harkin
web posted July 17, 2006
"[The Supremes] declared illegal President Bush's military tribunals for the likes of Salim Ahmed Hamdan, Osama bin Laden's driver and bodyguard. First, because they were not established in accordance with congressional authority. And, second, because they violated the Geneva Conventions. The first rationale is an odd but fixable misreading of congressional intent. The second is a grotesque and unfixable misreading of the Geneva Conventions." -- Charles Krauthammer
"And, of course, al-Qa'ida never need to sign the Conventions now, do they? As the ultimate beneficiaries of the progressive mindset, they get all the benefits with none of the obligations. We're bound, they're not. If you're captured with the severed head of a U.S. soldier in your knapsack, you're covered by Geneva..." -- Mark Steyn
"Today, anyone with a political ax to grind can leak classified information in order to undermine an administration with which the person does not agree. The decent thing to do would be to resign in protest, but today's traitors keep their jobs and their paychecks and live to leak another day. They should be hunted down and prosecuted." -- Cal Thomas
"The idea that all men are created equal, and endowed with the right to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness is, indeed, an understanding that should be celebrated universally. That governments are instituted to secure these rights, empowered by the consent of the governed, is no less profound." -- Henry Lamb
"I envision an America so overflowing with handguns in the homes (and cars and holsters) of law-abiding citizens that the UN ceases its futile efforts to subvert our Second Amendment rights." -- Mike Adams
"For every Osama bin Laden and Abu Musab al-Zarqawi we can show a Bill O'Reilly, an Ann Coulter, a Rush Limbaugh, a Glenn Beck and a Sean Hannity. Idiocy parades unashamed in the streets on both sides of the war on terror." -- Michael Browning, Palm Beach (FL) Post
"Well, it's not a crime to publish classified information." -- Dana Priest, Washington Post, unfamiliar with U.S. federal law
"Every terrorist mission should be a suicide mission. With our help." -- Ralph Peters
"With his Howdy Doody haircut and secondhand leisure suit that he found in the discard bin at Value Village, North Korea's Dear Leader looks like a dork. But dorks have their day. Kim Jong-Il held his own Fourth of July celebration, loosing several intercontinental ballistic missiles toward several of his enemies and inflicting severe heartburn in important places." -- Wesley Pruden
"Democratic U.S. Senators Joe Biden and Jake Reed flew to Baghdad Friday to get a first-hand look at the new government of Iraq. The prime minister of Iraq was elected by the newly commissioned Iraqi parliament. If the U.S. Senate were allowed to elect the U.S. president, every four years there would be a hundred-way tie." -- Argus Hamilton
"There is no more a 'political middle' than there is a family in America with 2.3 children. People with opinions take sides. Contrary to what you've heard, it's actually more important to stand for something than it is for everybody to 'just get along'." -- Ann Coulter
"Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton, the former enabler-in-chief who spent most of her married life plotting to destroy the reputations of women who accused her predator-husband, ran to give the Jersey Girls a big hug. 'Perhaps her [Coulter's] book should have been called 'Heartless,' the lady widely known for her warmth and humanity sneered." -- Don Feder
"The Japanese prime minister joined the United States in condemning North Korea's missile policy. The Japanese prime minister was really upset when he found out that they had missiles that could reach Graceland. ... They said these North Korean missiles had enough range to hit Seattle, but residents in Seattle were not worried. Today Bill Gates said Microsoft has enough missiles to destroy North Korea ten times over." -- Jay Leno
"Democratic members of Congress and other elected officials unveil their 'New Direction for America,' the party's declaration of its reason for being. It said it stands firmly and unequivocally, without fear or favor, unwaveringly and with grit for... reducing the cost of student loans. And making prescription drugs less expensive. And raising the minimum wage. Etc. This is not a philosophy but a way -- an inadequate way, but a way -- of hiding the fact that you don't have a philosophy... [S]mall issues are small. And in this case don't even offer a philosophical pattern. 'We stand for lower college loan costs and better prescription drug benefits.' That's something you'd die on the battlefield for, isn't it?" -- Peggy Noonan
"I like mine better." -- Democrat Rep. Gene Taylor, expressing characteristic disinterest in his party leadership's New Direction
"And so I think a lot of Americans will say what's new about the new direction? It is more tax-and-spend; it's more regulation in the areas of minimum wage and price controls on drugs. I don't think Americans are going to find much attractive about that... The bottom line here, as you look at this agenda, and this is so far from what Republicans came up with in 1994, the Contract with America, which had very concrete proposals. These are these kind of amorphous, sound-good ideas. It really suggests to me the Democrats really don't want to tell the American people what they stand for." -- Steve Moore, President, The Club for Growth
web posted July 10, 2006
"That's the argument of flexibility and it goes something like this: The Constitution is over 200 years old and societies change. It has to change with society, like a living organism, or it will become brittle and break. But you would have to be an idiot to believe that. The Constitution is not a living organism, it is a legal document. It says something and doesn't say other things." -- U.S Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia
"When left-wing judges take it upon themselves to legislate from the bench, liberals are quick to say that the Constitution is a living document and that it has to evolve to accommodate a changing world. However, whenever a conservative suggests that the 14th Amendment, which grants automatic citizenship to any person born in America, ought to be changed in order to deny that gift to those born to illegal aliens, those same people carry on as if the Constitution, like the 10 Commandments, was carved in stone." -- L.A. Times columnist Burt Prelutsky
"Liberals can't win on abortion, gay marriage and bans on the Pledge of Allegiance by allowing Americans to vote. That's why they need the courts to keep inventing rights to abortion, gay marriage and bans on the Pledge of Allegiance. Normal liberals know that, which is why they duck honest argument. But the crazy liberals don't. That's why Bush needs to concentrate on luring them out of their cages. It takes so little to provoke them! Just let us know before Bush nominates Janice Rogers Brown to the Supreme Court so we can arrange for live TV coverage of George Soros's head exploding, OK?" -- Ann Coulter
"In terms of the power he now claims, without significant challenge, George W. Bush is now the closest thing in a long time to dictator of the world." -- LA Times opinion editor and Slate.com founder Michael Kinsley
"Patriotism is not chic in the circles of those who assume the role of citizens of the world, whether they are discussing immigration or giving aid and comfort to the enemy in wartime." -- Thomas Sowell
"The real problem is that Guantanamo Bay, like Bush himself, has become a symbol of sorts. It is an easy scapegoat through which Europeans can vent their much larger love-hate frustrations with their protector and rival, the hyper-power America." -- Victor Davis Hanson
"This isn't about the privileges guaranteed by the First Amendment. It is about the agenda practiced by The Times and some other newspapers and media outlets that clearly want the administration to fail in Iraq -- and in everything else -- so that Democrats will retake the reigns of government. The Times' editorial board fears what one more Republican term could do to the left's judicially imposed cultural realignment and wants to blunt the Bush administration's counteroffensive." -- Cal Thomas
"The U.S. Supreme Court has now blown a hole in the animating principle behind the Geneva Conventions by choosing to elevate an enemy that disdains the laws of war in order to facilitate the bombing of civilian targets and the beheading of individuals. The argument made by Justice John Paul Stevens is an Alice-In-Jihadland ruling that stands the Conventions on their head in order to give words the precise opposite of their plain meaning and intent." -- Mark Steyn
"The left regularly charges America's conservative Christians with wanting to make America a 'theocracy,' being 'fascists' and/or being 'anti-Semites.' They are none of those things, and as a result, the battle against real theocrats (Muslim fundamentalists), real fascists and real anti-Semites is compromised. The tragedy of all this is that when evils are defined down, good people are left verbally unarmed when the real evils present themselves." -- Dennis Prager
"You may think you have done a public service, but you have gravely endangered the lives of my soldiers and all other soldiers and innocent Iraqis here. Next time I hear that familiar explosion -- or next time I feel it -- I will wonder whether we could have stopped that bomb had you not instructed terrorists how to evade our financial surveillance." -- Army Lt. Tom Cotton, penning a letter to the NYT editor from the streets of Baghdad
"The reason I didn't finish my [$115 million] gift to Harvard was because of the way Larry Summers suddenly left Harvard. I lost confidence that that money would be well spent." -- Oracle CEO Lawrence Ellison, on withholding the largest donation in Harvard's history
"Hillary doesn't have to prove her guy chops. She doesn't have to prove she's a man, she has to prove she's a woman. No one in America thinks she's a woman. They think she's a tough little termagant in a pantsuit. They think she's something between an android and a female impersonator." -- Peggy Noonan
"It seems as if The New York Times is revealing all our national security secrets. But relax -- they have their limits. If The Times learned that U.S. troops were force-feeding Gitmo detainees with Coca-Cola, they wouldn't publish Coke's secret formula. They might get sued. If there's a CIA program that uses offensive cartoons of Muhammad to communicate with agents, they'll keep mum, lest they have to publish the images. But secret law-enforcement-type programs as classified as the access code to The Times' top-floor elevator? Fair game. You've got the right to know." -- James Lileks
"When is The New York Times going to get around to uncovering an al-Qaida secret program?" -- Ann Coulter
"When the going gets tough, the tough do not hold more hearings." -- John Tierney
"[T]he 'timetable' Democrats sound like the bladder control advertisement on TV: 'Gotta go, gotta go, gotta go.' That is an urge, not a policy." -- Tony Blankley
"Anybody see The Lakehouse, that new movie? Keanu Reeves plays a man stuck in the year 2004, as we call him -- John Kerry. It's about a man and a woman having a relationship, but they never actually meet or see each other. They just communicate by leaving notes -- or as the Clintons call that, a 'marriage.'" -- Jay Leno
web posted July 3, 2006
"Allowing law enforcement to examine bank records in order to stop the flow of money to terrorists makes a lot of sense, and this program appears to allow for just that. The real question here, as with so many other programs run by this Administration, is whether they are obeying the laws we have on the books to protect Americans from unnecessary invasions of their privacy." -- Sen. Charles Schumer, admitting the legitimacy of the SWIFT program as an effective counterterrorism measure, but not without taking a partisan swipe at the Bush administration for instituting the program in the first place
"[E]mpowering people to help themselves is what we should be doing in the 21st century. If you work hard, you ought to be able to support your family, [and] in America, you need the opportunity to work hard, and that means some level of support from government -- no handouts, but some level of support so that you really do have a genuine opportunity to contribute to the country." -- Howard Dean