Lingua publica
The
good and the bad...presented with permission from The Patriot E-Journal
web posted June 23, 2008
"Now that the Supreme Court has seen fit to affirm a variety of rights of terror suspects held at Guantanamo, a new book is out exposing the harsh realities of Gitmo -- the diet on which detainees have gained weight -- the soccer fields and basketball courts -- the letters home about mild weather and beautiful sunsets -- and the detainees who don't want to leave." -- James Robbins
"Once upon another time, namely Franklin Roosevelt's, most of a group of German saboteurs that had infiltrated this country were caught, tried by a military tribunal that was convened by executive order for that purpose, promptly convicted and then executed -- all within seven weeks. Can anyone imagine that kind of swift and effective justice from this court?" -- Paul Greenberg
"Yet another U.S. Marine, Lt. Col. Jeffrey Chessani, had charges dropped Tuesday in the so-called Haditha massacre -- bringing the total number of Marines who've been cleared or won case dismissals in the Iraq war incident to seven. ‘Undue command influence' on the prosecution led to the outcome in Chessani's case. Bottom line: That's zero for seven for military prosecutors, with one trial left to go." -- Michelle Malkin
"Whenever I've been asked to give examples of a fair, balanced and honest journalist, Tim Russert's name was the first name that came to mind. This was a view shared by everyone and was the ultimate testimony to his professionalism. As a moderator he was in a league of his own, always knowing when to speak and when to let his guests do the talking. As an individual he was an absolute class act, and always a gentleman. The world of journalism is vastly diminished today." -- Brent Bozell
"House Speaker Nancy Pelosi long ago said impeachment is off the table. This is a joke. We have a President who has abused the power of his office over and over and over again. It's what got the Democrats elected to the majority in Congress in 2006. The Democrats, no doubt, are worried what it will look like to many voters if they spend their time on impeachment. To h*** with what's right or wrong." -- CNN's Jack Cafferty
"[Tim Russert] was one of the good guys. But the reason he was one of the good guys isn't simply because he knew his beat better than almost everybody else, he was one of the good guys because he was fair. He was a blue collar guy who understood America and Americans a lot better than a lot of other people who work in journalism." -- Bernard Goldberg
"If [Republicans] bring a knife to the fight, we bring a gun." -- Barack Obama, who also thinks guns never made anyone safer
"[O]pening our coastlines to offshore drilling would take at least a decade to produce any oil at all, and the effect on gasoline prices would be negligible at best since America only has three percent of the world's oil. It's another example of short-term political posturing from Washington." -- Barack Obama on John McCain's call to allow offshore oil exploration
"Obama repeatedly said he wishes to meet with enemy/thug leaders without preconditions. But wait! He now says only if he decides to meet in the first place. And if he decides -- to which he may not -- he'll do so without preconditions. And if he decides not to, his decision will have been made without preconditions, unless, of course, he decides to meet after all -- but only without preconditions. And if he decides not to meet, he'll make that decision without any preconditions, just as he would make the decision to meet without the precondition of no preconditions. But if he decides to meet, without preconditions, he'll do so solely when, where and if he decides to -- without preconditions. That's change." -- Larry Elder
"We now are down to two presidential candidates. One went to the Ivy League and Harvard Law School as a young man. The other spent years of his youth in a Vietnam Prisoner of War camp and suffered lifelong injuries. Guess which one whines more about his hardships? Barack Obama is many things -- a senator, a gifted orator, and a charismatic figure. But he's also a whiner." -- Peter Schweizer
"McCain is OK at making his case with a teleprompter, but when he's on his own, all he does is slogans. He says that Obama is a tax and spend liberal as in the ‘60s and ‘70s. I wouldn't really bring up ‘60s and ‘70s, because nobody under 50 remembers the ‘60s. In fact, there are a lot of people over 50 who don't remember the ‘60s either for other reasons." -- Charles Krauthammer
"Katie Couric said the coverage of the Hillary Clinton campaign shows the accepted role of sexism in America. Other critics of the coverage cite liberal peer pressure to support a black man. Both sides agree something must be done about America being the world's only superpower, the sad legacy of the straight white male." -- Argus Hamilton
"The New York Times is reporting that Clinton associates are keeping an enemies list, an enemies list of all of the people who are considered Clinton traitors. And ironically, both Bill and Hillary are on each other's lists." -- Jay Leno
"Winnie the Pooh seems to me to be a fundamental text on national security." -- Richard Danzig, Barack Obama’s choice for National Security Adviser, should Obama be elected president
web posted June 16, 2008
"Federal policies already make food and energy far more expensive than need be... Any new federal scheme to further regulate our energy production would simply make matters worse." -- Ed Feulner
"Controlling the price of anything is very difficult and it can only be accomplished through the force of government, mostly by restricting supply. The U.S. Congress is a major player in oil supply restriction, and OPEC nations must be laughing all the way to the bank. Congress has banned energy exploration in 85 percent of our coastal waters. Ironically, China, in conjunction with Cuba, is drilling for oil nearer to our coastline than U.S. oil companies are permitted." -- Walter Williams
"Congress is spending us into a hole. We hear about the cost of earmarks and the Iraq war. But what about ‘entitlements'? That's the government's ironic term for programs that transfer money from people who earned it to people who didn't. Entitlement? How can you be entitled to someone else's money?" -- John Stossel
"Obama isn't going to change anything. Obama's just going to do what liberals have done for eons: eliminate as much freedom and liberty as possible." -- Rush Limbaugh
"[Obama is] desperately trying to cover up what seems to be the kind of old school Marxist radical liberal failed ideology." -- Mike Gallagher
"Speaking personally, I don't want to remake America. I'm an immigrant, and one reason I came here is because most of the rest of the Western world remade itself along the lines Sen. Obama has in mind. This is pretty much the end of the line for me. If he remakes America, there's nowhere for me to go -- although presumably once he's lowered sea levels around the planet there should be a few new atolls popping up here and there." -- Mark Steyn
"I cried all night. I'm going to be crying for the next four years. What Barack Obama has accomplished is the single most extraordinary event that has occurred in the 232 years of the nation's political history... The event itself is so extraordinary that another chapter could be added to the Bible to chronicle its significance." -- Rep. Jesse Jackson Jr.
"What they'll say is, ‘Well it costs too much money,' but you know what? It would cost, about... It -- it -- it would cost about the same as what we would spend... It... Over the course of 10 years it would cost what it would costs us... (nervous laugh) All right. Okay. We're going to... It... It would cost us about the same as it would cost for about -- hold on one second. I can't hear myself. But I'm glad you're fired up, though. I'm glad." -- Barack Obama, eloquently explaining... uh, never mind
"Now look, the, the, ah, ah, I mean the, uh, first of all, uh I, I, I am not vetting my VP search committee for their mortgages, so you're going have to d-direct... Well, nah I mean it becomes sort of a... um... I mean this is a game that can be played. Everybody... you know, who is tangentially related to our campaign, I think, is going to have a whole host of relationships. I would have to hire the vetter to, uh, vet the vetter." -- Barack Obama
"This woman, as we said, forged into determination and purpose her whole life. As someone said, no thorns, no throne. No gall, no glory. No cross, no crown." -- ABC's Diane Sawyer
"In a long-awaited report, the Senate Intelligence Committee today concluded that President Bush, Vice President Cheney and other top administration officials exaggerated and misrepresented the intelligence about Saddam Hussein and his possible connections to al-Qa'ida in making the case for war in Iraq." -- NBC's Brian Williams, who seemed to miss that the report actually said the president's statements "were generally substantiated by intelligence community estimates."
"Commentators... use words in peculiar ways, as when they speak of Obama and Hillary Clinton needing to bring together ‘the two wings of the party.' There is the left wing, and the other left wing. As one precise commentator has said, Clinton and Obama differ about as much as the Everly Brothers." -- George Will
"If Hillary has baggage, Bill is a Samsonite factory." -- Roger Simon
"Jimmy Carter told the London Guardian it'll be a nightmare ticket if Barack Obama chooses Hillary Clinton to be his running mate. That's saying something. The man who believes that Hamas and Israel can find common ground thinks there is no chance of reconciliation whatsoever between Hillary Clinton and Michelle Obama." -- Argus Hamilton
"There's a rumor that if Barack Obama is elected president, he might appoint Bill Clinton to the Supreme Court. Yeah, which is good, because the one woman Hillary doesn't mind Bill hanging out with is Ruth Bader Ginsburg." -- Conan O'Brien
"For Dad, the perfect Father's Day would be one in which he didn't even realize that it WAS Father's Day, because nobody was making him appreciate gifts he didn't want, or read greeting cards filled with lame Father's Day poetry ('When I was just a little tyke, you showed me how to ride a bike; And you were sweet to me the day, I drove your car into the bay; Dad, I think you're really grand, I'm praying for your prostate gland'). There would be none of this, on the perfect Father's Day." -- Dave Barry
"Hillary may be secretly glad this whole thing is over. Because now she can go back to doing what she loves the most: hunting, drinking whiskey, shooting -- back to her roots." -- Jay Leno
web posted June 9, 2008
"Environmentalists are Gaia's priests, instructing us in her proper service and casting out those who refuse to genuflect... And having proclaimed the ultimate commandment -- carbon chastity -- they are preparing the supporting canonical legislation that will tell you how much you can travel, what kind of light you will read by, and at what temperature you may set your bedroom thermostat." -- Charles Krauthammer
"The true villain in our having to cough up $60, $70 or $80 to fill our gas tanks is the U.S. Congress caught in the grip of environmental extremists. But if reality is too difficult to swallow, we can continue to blame and support the congressional attack on oil executives, turn food into oil and think of other crackpot ‘solutions'." -- Walter Williams
"Where does the Constitution give Congress -- even a liberal Democrat Congress -- authority to even think about nationalizing, or socializing the oil companies?" -- Henry Lamb
"Apologists say that [Barack Obama's] three years in the U.S. Senate say far more about him than his twenty years with Pastor Wright, but he's actually done nothing as a Senator from Illinois other than launch and conduct a hugely successful presidential campaign." -- Michael Medved
"There is nothing more real than a man's character and values. The track record of what he has actually done is far more real than anything he says, however elegantly he says it." -- Thomas Sowell
"Bill Clinton has always been a man threatened to be swallowed by the yawning maw of his own ego. Even as he has tirelessly stumped the country on behalf of his wife, he's given the impression that it's all about him. His rage at the process -- his temper tantrums at reporters and twisted attempts to make himself always the victim -- speaks to an aggrieved sense of entitlement, that for all his good fortune he's owed even more." -- Rich Lowry
"First we had to ascertain what kind of book he wanted to write. We are journalists, independent-minded publishers. We weren't interested in a book that was just a defense of the Bush administration. It had to pass our test of independence, integrity and candor." -- Peter Osnos, the liberal founder of PublicAffairs books who "worked very closely" with Scott McClellan on his anti-Bush screed
"When you look at April, last month, 50 American soldiers were killed in Iraq. And a lot of Americans look at that and they're pessimistic, despite what you say about morale and how things are going in Iraq. Does the American public have a right to be pessimistic, in your mind?" -- CBS's Russ Mitchell to Admiral Michael Mullen, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff
"Whatever the military success, and progress that may have been made, the surge didn't accomplish its goal. And some of the success of the surge is that the goodwill of the Iranians -- they decided in Basra when the fighting would end, they negotiated that cessation of hostilities -- the Iranians." -- House Speaker Nancy Pelosi
"If McCain gets in, it's going to be very, very dangerous... It's a critical time, but I have faith in the American people. If they prove me wrong, I'll be checking out a move to Italy. Maybe Canada, I don't know. We're at an abyss." -- actress Susan Sarandon
"[J]ust out of curiosity, what does it mean, exactly, when a candidate finds something ‘unacceptable'? In a democracy, finding criticism unacceptable is a surefire way to drive yourself bonkers. It's like saying you find it unacceptable that bears use the woods for a bathroom. It's going to happen whether you accept it or not." -- Jonah Goldberg
"Are we going to leave our children hostages to hate-filled sadists with nuclear weapons? Are we to rely on Barack Obama's rhetoric to protect them? Senator Obama's foreign policy seems to be somewhere between Rodney King's ‘Can't we just get along?' and Alfred E. Neuman's ‘What, me worry?"' -- Thomas Sowell
"After decades of comparing Nixon to Hitler, Reagan to Hitler and Bush to Hitler, liberals have finally decided it is wrong to make comparisons to Hitler. But the only leader to whom they have applied their newfound rule of thumb is: Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad." -- Ann Coulter
"What's with the Democrats, anyway? It's bad enough that they keep coming up with creepy candidates for president, but look at their idea of a first lady. Hillary Clinton, Teresa Heinz-Kerry and Michelle Obama, remind me of the three witches in ‘Macbeth,' but without their cooking skills." -- Burt Prelutsky
"Indiana Jones was denounced by Russia's Communist Party. They don't like the way the film portrays communists as evil and ruthless. They paid a lot of money to infiltrate Hollywood to make sure every evil and ruthless villain is a capitalist." -- Argus Hamilton
"Barack Obama says he's now looking for a new church -- preferably one where the religious order has to take a vow of silence." -- Jay Leno
web posted June 2, 2008
"[A]s I have talked with some of our young soldiers, as well as some vets and their families, I have begun to notice a budding awareness (if not yet quite resentment) among them that not only are a very small fraction of Americans prepared to wear the uniform and bear the burden of citizenship but also few of their fellow Americans even seem to be aware or appreciative of the sacrifice." -- Tony Blankley
"As for this week's Clinton complaints [that sexism is doing her in], I imagine [Margaret] Thatcher would bop her on the head with her purse. [Indira] Gandhi would say ‘That is no way to play it.' [Golda] Meir? ‘They said I was the only woman in the cabinet and the only one with -- well, you know. I loved it'." -- Peggy Noonan
"If the House of Representatives has now declared it ‘illegal' for the government of Saudi Arabia to restrict oil production, why is it still legal for the government of the United States to restrict oil production? In fact, the government of the United States restricts pretty much every form of energy production other than the bizarre fetish du jour of federally mandated ethanol production." -- Mark Steyn
"Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama want to raise the price of oil, as well as most everything else, and lower the value of the pension and mutual funds that union members and retirees depend on. Of course, they don't describe their plan that way. Instead, they call for a windfall-profits tax on the oil companies. But it's the same thing." -- John Stossel
"Republican National Committee Chairman Robert M. Duncan complains that conservative, pro-life, pro-gun Democrats won three special elections by stealing GOP issues... Democrats didn't steal your issues, sir. You abandoned them. Your party discarded them. Democrats simply engaged in dumpster harvesting." -- Cal Thomas
"[John] McCain, who was shot down and captured in 1967, spent the worst and most costly years of the war sealed away, both from the rice paddies of Indochina and from the outside world. During those years, McCain did not share the disillusioning and morally jarring experiences of soldiers like [John] Kerry, [Jim] Webb and [Chuck] Hagel, who found themselves unable to recognize their enemy in the confusion of the jungle; he never underwent the conversion that caused Kerry, for one, to toss away some of his war decorations during a protest at the Capitol. Whatever anger McCain felt remained focused on his captors, not on his own superiors back in Washington." -- New York Times Sunday Magazine's Matt Bai
"Other people, I should point out, other Clinton loyalists, but realists, say that that electoral map is a stretch in one regard: There are, you know, Republican governors and Secretaries of State, if you will, Katherine Harris-type election officials in those states. So, even though he [Obama] may have won primaries or caucuses in those states, he has to go up against the establishment, which would be Republican, and he has to figure out a way to get a fair vote if he's the nominee in those red states." -- NBC's Andrea Mitchell
"I would be a liar if I said that there hasn't been a certain amount of glee in the press corps about Hillary Clinton not doing that well. To use a very fancy word, there's some schadenfreude among the press." -- Time magazine's Richard Stengel
"My husband did not wrap up the nomination in 1992 until he won the California primary somewhere in the middle of June, right? We all remember Bobby Kennedy was assassinated in June in California." -- Hillary Clinton
"I was deeply dismayed and disturbed that my comment would be construed in a way that flies in the face of everything I stand for -- and everything I am fighting for in this election." -- Hillary Clinton, professional liar
"She is winning the general election today and he [Obama] is not, according to all the evidence. And I have never seen anything like it. I have never seen a candidate treated so disrespectfully just for running." -- Bill Clinton
"I had a uncle [sic] who was one of the... who was part of the first American troops to go into Auschwitz and liberate the concentration camps." -- Barack Obama, whose uncle must have fought for Stalin's Red Army, the actual liberators of Auschwitz
"I'm a superdelegate, having been president before, and I think that a lot of us superdelegates will make a decision... quite rapidly, after the final primary on June 3. I think at that point it will be time for [Hillary] to give it up." -- Jimmy Carter, who made his decision so rapidly after June 3rd that he made it before June 3rd
"McCain is still being vilified for referring to Iran-supported terrorists in Iraq as al Qaida, as if the vast majority of Americans care about the distinction between a Sunni and a Shiite terrorist." -- Doug Patton
"Barack Obama was speaking to a Jewish group, and he told them that his name Barack is the same as the Jewish word ‘baruch,' which means one who's blessed. Obama had a harder time explaining his middle name, Hussein. Things got quiet there." -- Conan O'Brien
"I'm sure [Barbara Walters is] going to catch plenty of flak from her cronies in the media. Certainly not because she's using an affair, long over and done with, to hawk her book, and certainly not because Sen. Brooke is a black man, but because... he was, of all things, a Republican." -- Burt Prelutsky
"When the House of Representatives takes up arms against $4 gas by voting 324-84 to sue OPEC, you know that election-year discourse has gone surreal." -- Charles Krauthammer
"When speaking in Montana, Barack Obama got a standing ovation when he said, 'It is time to take back the country.' The bad news: he was on an Indian reservation at the time." -- Jay Leno
"While I may favor common-sense gun control laws, that doesn't keep me from reaching out to NRA members... I'm a strong believer in the rights of hunters and sportsmen to have firearms." -- Barack Obama
"I knew Obama during the mid-1990s. The first time I introduced myself to him he said ‘Oh, you are the gun guy.' I responded ‘Yes, I guess so.' He simply responded, ‘I don't believe that people should be able to own guns."' -- Professor John Lott, PhD, author of More Guns, Less Crime