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The good and the bad...

web posted August 22, 2005

"As a result of 'evolving standards' and 'nuanced' judicial decisions, we no longer have clear-cut rights. We have a ticket to a crapshoot in a courtroom. That ticket is worth a lot more to those with slick lawyers than to ordinary citizens." -- Thomas Sowell

"The United States should...do a better job of deporting Muslim extremists and keeping new ones out. The Washington Post recently reported on the proliferation of mosques in the outer suburbs of Washington, DC. If they are like many other mosques cropping up around the country, Saudi Arabia is likely footing much of the bill to promote Wahabbism, the most virulent and poisonous form of Islam." -- Cal Thomas

"One of the great questions of our time is whether Europe will, in the coming century, maintain its identity and civilization, or be gradually absorbed into the expanding Muslim world. And America's fate cannot be divorced from that of its forebears." -- Mona Charen

"In the days after 9/11, we heard innumerable reprises of the lazy leftist trope 'poverty breeds terrorism.' But the Arab world is wealthy. It suffers, as David Pryce-Jones has said, from intellectual poverty." -- Mark Steyn

"Live 8 concerts are nice, and the photographs of starving children will break the coldest heart, but unless Europe and the West accompany aid with the kind of supervision nobody has the courage to impose, the aid will wind up in the usual Swiss banks, and 20 years from now another generation of children will die while naive hearts bleed." -- Wesley Pruden

"The media know that grief doesn't confer upon a person instant lucidity and authority, though they act as if it does, provided the grief inspires a political position they favor. Had Sarah Brady, say, responded to her husband's gun injury by joining the staff of the NRA, the media wouldn't have paid the slightest bit of attention to her except maybe for purposes of mockery." -- George Neumayr

"Mr. Bush's attempt at spending discipline has been especially limp. Back in 1987, when Mr. Reagan applied his veto to what was generally known at the time as the highway and mass transit bill, he was offended by the 152 earmarks for pet projects favored by members of Congress. But on Wednesday Mr. Bush signed a transportation bill containing no fewer than 6,371 earmarks. Each one of these, as Mr. Reagan understood but Mr. Bush apparently doesn't, amounts to a conscious decision to waste taxpayers' dollars. One point of an earmark is to direct money to a project that would not receive money as a result of rational judgments based on cost-benefit analyses." -- The Washington Post

"Our enemies weave many lies about us, which we are not necessarily aware of. For example: one day, we awoke to the crime of 9/11, which hit the tallest buildings in New York.... There is no doubt that not a single Arab or Muslim had anything to do with these events. The incident was fabricated as a pretext to attack Islam and Muslims." -- Egyptian professor, head of the Sharia faculty at Al-Azhar University, the Harvard of Sunni Islam

"No method of contraception or disease prevention is effective when practiced incorrectly or inconsistently. A 1988 National Survey of Family Growth found abstinence to have a contraceptive failure rate of 26 percent when not practiced consistently. So, in abstinence, as in condom use, consistency is key." -- Seattle's King County Department of Health

"Isn't practicing abstinence inconsistently like being a little bit pregnant?" -- James Taranto

"There were fevered rumors circulating over the last few weeks about massive attacks on New York and Washington scheduled for August 6 and 9, to mark the anniversaries of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. But now August 6 and 9 have come and gone. More significantly, 47 months have come and gone since 9/11 without a major terrorist attack on U.S. soil. The closest thing we had to a major bombing was the new Pauly Shore show on TBS." -- Ann Coulter

"[I]f you want to defend somebody's controversial statements, saying 'so-and-so has the right to his opinion' doesn't get you out of the gate. It just sucks up air and fills space. Intellectually, it's got the nutritional value of Styrofoam. You might as well say 'Oo-ee-oo-ah-ah, ting-tang-walla-walla-bing-bang' instead and then move on to your next point." -- Jonah Goldberg

"Pakistan test-fired its first cruise missile Thursday in a blatant attempt to intimidate India. It flies beneath radar. If they attacked India with a nuclear cruise missile it could wipe out the entire United States customer service industry." -- Argus Hamilton

"Democrats have been complaining that President Bush has spent more than 21 percent of his time in office out of the White House. That's nothing -- since Bush has been president, the Democrats have been out of the White House 100 percent of the time." -- Jay Leno

"The terrorists cannot defeat us on the battlefield. The only way they can win is if we lose our nerve. That will not happen on my watch. Withdrawing our troops from Iraq prematurely would betray the Iraqi people and would cause others to question America's commitment to spreading freedom and winning the war on terror. So we will honor the fallen by completing the mission for which they gave their lives, and by doing so we will ensure that freedom and peace prevail." -- U.S. President George W. Bush

"It looks like today, and this could change, as of today it looks like women will be worse off in Iraq than they were when Saddam Hussein was president of Iraq" -- DNC Chairman Howard Dean

"Howard Dean is not the first politician to distort facts in his own interests. But many activists in the party he now leads are puzzled over what he thinks he is accomplishing politically. Is it good politics to contend that Iraq was better off under Saddam Hussein than even a flawed Islamic republic? Does it make sense politically to tell Americans that more than 1,800 troops have died to make life worse for half of Iraq's population?" -- Robert Novak

web posted August 15, 2005

"The corruption at the UN didn't begin with the Oil for Food scandal and it certainly doesn't end there. The United Nations is nothing more than bureaucracy piled atop waste, wrapped in fraud, covered with abuse -- all of it funded by American taxpayers who foot 22 percent of UN dues -- more than any other nation. We also pour billions of dollars more into the coffers of its related agencies." -- Oliver North

"Do you have remorse for what happened? How do you deal with that in your mind?" -- NBC's Brian Williams to Dutch Van Kirk, navigator of the Enola Gay, who replied indignantly, "No, I do not have remorse."

"Bombings, Few Signs Of Similar Attacks in U.S." -- August 1 New York Times headline

"Assessments Find Threat of Suicide Attacks in U.S." -- August 5 Times headline

"Here is the truth, we [sic] got to reinvent ourselves. We became old, we became stale. The world changed and we didn't." -- Service Employees International Union president Andrew Stern, on the state of the union movement

"A few days ago, the Democrat National Committee put out a press release attacking Bush for being physically fit. It seems his physical fitness comes at the expense of the nation's lardbutt youth. Or as the DNC put it: 'While President Bush has made physical fitness a personal priority, his cuts to education funding have forced schools to roll back physical education classes and his administration's efforts to undermine Title IX sports programs have threatened thousands of women's college sports programs.' Wow. I noticed my gal had put on a few pounds but I had no idea it was Bush's fault." -- Mark Steyn

"Once they got through the required anti-Roberts editorial, the geniuses at the NY Times were obviously out of ideas so they ran an editorial on the problems associated with dairy farms in the San Joaquin Valley. Not the Hudson Valley, mind you, the one on the whole other side of the continent. Here's what the gals from the Upper West Side with the blue hair got with their morning latte courtesy of the Times' editorial page: 'The San Joaquin Valley Air Pollution Control District estimates that at present each cow emits 19.3 pounds of pollutants a year in the form of gases from manure, from regurgitation and from flatulence.' Excuse me. Can I have mine with soy milk?" -- Rich Galen

"Is Hillary Clinton as brilliant a politician as she's cracked up to be? Here's a bit of evidence for the negative: 'Clinton Says Lawyers Must Make Their Voices Heard in Washington' reads the headline of an Associated Press dispatch about a speech New York's junior senator gave at the American Bar Association convention in Chicago. Lawyers need to speak up more: Now there's a message sure to strike a chord with the public." -- James Taranto

"President Bush is the fittest president in history. They said it's because he spends a lot of time exercising. See a lot of our previous presidents wasted that time reading. .... A lot of people are every critical of President Bush for taking the entire month of August off for his vacation. But his staff points out, there's nothing at the White House he can't do at the ranch because the ranch is fully equipped. It's got the treadmill, the weight room, the jogging path, the big screen TV, they get Nickelodeon. It's got everything he would do." -- Jay Leno

web posted August 8, 2005

"[J]ihadist terrorism has been carried out from Bali to Casablanca to Madrid to London to New York City to Washington by young Islamic men of North African, Middle Eastern and South Asian origin. This is not a stereotype. It is a simple statistical fact. ... But the overwhelming odds are that the guy bent on blowing up your train traces his origins to the Islamic belt stretching from Mauritania to Indonesia. Yet we recoil from concentrating bag checks on men who might fit this description." -- Charles Krauthammer

"Though evidence shows that the terrorists are interested in acquiring nuclear weapons to use against our cities, a learned writer for the New York Review of Books insists that the real weapons of mass destruction are world poverty and environmental abuse. Of course, world poverty is rarely mentioned by terrorists, and those known to be involved have almost all been well fed and are well to do." -- John Leo

"[T]he most dishonest argument about security cameras, searches, profiling, etc....is that they won't stop terrorism. Well, no one thing will stop terrorism. But to conclude, therefore, that we shouldn't do anything -- that's not an argument, it's an excuse. And a bad one." -- Jonah Goldberg

"A nominee for the court shouldn't be taking stands on political issues precisely because he is not running for a legislative or executive office. Instead he's been nominated for a seat on the highest court in the land, and there is a difference, a big one." -- Paul Greenberg

"Even though Republicans have won the war of ideas, Democrats in the short run could win the big political races: the House, the Senate and even the White House. That's because Hillary Rodham Clinton and her fellow Democrats are willing to fight with every weapon at their disposal, while Republicans still act as if they fear rather than cherish their incredible potential strength." -- Tony Snow

I'll never talk to a reporter again! We were just talking -- I was ranting -- and he wrote about it. That isn't right. We all say stuff we don't want printed." -- Helen Thomas after Albert Eisele, editor of The Hill, published her suicidal threat if VP Dick Cheney were to run for president

"You wouldn't run for the United States Senate or for governor or for anything else without answering people's questions about what you believe. And I think the Supreme Court is no different." --Indiana Democratic Sen. Evan Bayh, forgetting one doesn't run for the USSC

"We've all seen them: aging athletes, beyond their prime, trying to squeeze out one more fight, or one more season, but failing to bring back their glory days. That seems an appropriate analogy for the return of Jane Fonda to the political stage. ... She has announced plans for an antiwar bus tour next March. The bus will run on vegetable oil. How 1960s. Will the riders grow their hair long, smoke pot, dress in tie-dyed T-shirts and sing 'Blowin' in the Wind'?" -- Cal Thomas

"'Hanoi Jane' Fonda seems to have tired of her moniker. The wilted flower child who firmly established her place in American history when she mounted a North Vietnamese anti-aircraft gun has decided it's time to teach a whole new generation to blame America first. If she goes through with her plans for a new protest movement, she may be called 'Jihadist Jane'." -- Oliver North

"John Roberts is as bland as tapioca pudding. Projecting this stolid lawyer as the capo of a vast right-wing anything, is like calling Michael Moore a studmuffin or Barbra Streisand a deep thinker. But anything to whip the troops into a frenzy." -- Don Feder

"Pretty soon, Supreme Court nominees will be asked to supply the Senate with their high-school papers in an effort to determine their future votes on key issues like abortion and the Ten Commandments." -- Dan Thomasson

"John Kerry's brother Cameron Kerry said Tuesday he wants to run for Secretary of State in Massachusetts. He's a lawyer in Boston. Imagine if he goes further in politics, John Kerry could have a future as the embarrassing brother of the president." -- Argus Hamilton

"A group of U.S. Muslim scholars announced...they have forbidden terrorism. Well that's nipping it in the bud. I'm glad they came out with this so soon, before things got out of hand." -- Jay Leno

"Support the troops. An ideology like Islamofascism is surely something that must be fought with means other than armed forces. But, to the extent that this ideology is enabled by state sponsors, military instruments are likely to be critical to our victory. If we are to maintain the ability to wage conventional war with an all-volunteer force, the public is going to have to encourage young people to enlist and to stay in the military." -- Military analyst Frank J. Gaffney Jr.

"He probably could have gotten out of going just because he has a newborn son. But he said, 'No, I have a job to do, I have a duty to do for my country'." --Paul Montgomery, father of Lance Cpl. Brian Montgomery, among the Ohio Marines killed last week

"They say we didn't win the election last time because of moral values. The opposite is true. If the election had been held on moral values last time, the Democrats would have won. Why is that? Because more people agree with our moral values." --Democratic National Committee head Howard Dean, addressing the Southern Christian Leadership Conference in Birmingham, Alabama

web posted August 1, 2005

"[I]n this battle against fundamentalist Islam, I am hardly preoccupied with political correctness, or who may or may not be offended. Indeed, al-Qa'ida cares little if the Western world is 'offended' by televised images of hostages beheaded in Iraq, subway bombings in London, train attacks in Madrid, or Americans jumping to their death from the Twin Towers as they collapsed. ... As long as this war goes on, being 'offended' should be the least of anyone's worries." -- Rep. Tom Tancredo

"If Judge Roberts has ever been guilty of jay-walking, you can believe that some shrill special interest group will dig that up and try to make him seem like a threat to the republic." -- Thomas Sowell

"Now it's Roberts' turn. Barely had the president finished announcing the nomination when the Dems rushed Sen. Chuck Schumer on air, hunched and five-o'clock-shadowed and looking like a bus-&-truck one-man Nixon revue. Schumer's line was that, as a judge, Roberts had too thin a paper trail. His message seemed to be: Look, we Dems have the finest oppo-research boys in the business and, if we can't get any dirt on this guy, that must mean it's buried real deep and is real bad; the very fact that we can't get anything on him is in itself suspicious." -- Mark Steyn

"Buried in all the mainstream media coverage this week over new terrorist bombings in London, space shuttles that didn't launch, the trashing of Karl Rove and the nomination of a new Supreme Court justice was a little-noted item about reenlistments in the U.S. armed forces exceeding expectations. USA Today offered some prominence to the story, but it was widely ignored by most of the Fourth Estate. Perhaps that's because it's a 'good news story.'" -- Oliver North

"Congress cannot grasp the idea that anything might conceivably be none of their business. Congressional meddling tends to be short on humility and long on hypocrisy." -- Alan Reynolds

"As eugenics passes through each of its stages -- from sterilizing the enfeebled at the beginning of the 20th century to aborting the disabled at the end of it and the beginning of the 21st -- man is indeed playing God but without any of His providence or care." -- George Neumayr

"The AFL-CIO, the giant union consortium formed in 1955 by George Meany and Walter Reuther, is breaking apart this week in a dispute over how to revive labor's lagging fortunes. The tragedy is that neither faction is offering an agenda that will make workers more prosperous in our increasingly competitive global economy. Instead, we are witnessing a fight over who gets to preside over a declining labor movement. ... Union leaders seem genuinely to believe that their glory days will return if only they can defeat President Bush, or oust Tom DeLay as House Majority Leader. But their real obstacle is the reality of the modern global economy. Until they offer workers something more than class warfare, circa 1955, they will continue to decline." -- The Wall Street Journal

"NPR's Nina Totenberg, who last week tagged Supreme Court nominee John Roberts as 'very, very conservative' and 'very, very, very conservative,' on 'Inside Washington' over the weekend described him as merely 'very conservative.' But she couldn't resist adding a modifier every time she applied the conservative label, also dubbing him 'a really conservative guy,' 'a hard-line conservative' and 'a clear conservative.' Plus, she emphasized how he's 'a conservative Catholic'." -- Brent Baker of the Media Research Center

"In the same summer in which Deep Throat has been identified, that remodeled phrase from Watergate keeps reappearing: What did the 'fill-in-the-blank' know and when did he know it?" -- MSNBC's Keith Olbermann on the non-story story

"I consider myself a recovering politician. I'm on step nine." -- Al Gore

"The truth of the matter is that no matter who the President nominates, Harry Reid and his merry band of obstructionists will do everything in their power to delay the nomination, smear the nominee, make outrageous demands and whine every step of the way." -- Kay Daly, president of the Coalition for a Fair Judiciary

"The only way a Supreme Court nominee could win the approval of NARAL and Planned Parenthood would be to actually perform an abortion during his confirmation hearing, live, on camera, and preferably a partial-birth one." -- Ann Coulter

"Just when the nomination of John Roberts for the Supreme Court was looking sure and civil, Senate Democrats have found a way to smear him. Yes, it now appears West Virginia Senator Robert C. Byrd will support Roberts. Drat! What better way to taint someone as a potential lunatic or extremist than for Byrd to alight at his side?" -- Paul Jacob

"In the wake of the latest terrorist attacks in London, Mayor Bloomberg and the NYPD announced plans to conduct random searches of packages and backpacks carried by subway riders. 'Random,' of course, is a synonym for blind. And we all know what it means when you put blind bureaucrats in charge of homeland security: Grannies and toddlers, prepare to be on heightened grope alert." -- Michelle Malkin

"The trial of Saddam Hussein is beginning. They say the evidence against Saddam Hussein is so strong that even a California jury might convict him." -- Jay Leno

"September 11 for me was a wake up call. Do you know what I think the problem is? That a lot of the world woke up for a short time and then turned over and went back to sleep again." -- British Prime Minister Tony Blair

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