Lingua publica
The
good and the bad...presented with permission from The Patriot E-Journal
web posted December 18, 2006
"Follow the honorable course in Iraq? Easy to say, hard to do -- some would say impossible to do." -- Paul Greenberg
"[Robert Gates] comes from a group of people I know well. They think that they are the be-all and end-all, and the media fawn on them and feed their insatiable egos. Their new way of dealing with Iraq is to figure out ways to leave. My way is more straightforward and simple: forget pandering to the Left's pacifist instincts and just go ahead and kill the enemy, every single one of them." -- Michael Reagan
"If the President is, indeed, determined not to surrender in Iraq and, thereby, to avoid inexorably setting in train dire repercussions worldwide, Mr. Bush had better make sure that the man to whom he is entrusting his key national security portfolio, Bob Gates, will follow his direction -- not that of Jim Baker." -- Frank J. Gaffney, Jr.
"The Pelosi crew places its faith in the trusted conviction that the only thing required to bring forth the inherent goodwill of all mankind -- even of Islamist terrorists -- is for America to humbly acknowledge its transgressions, beg forgiveness, and make restitution to whatever degree is possible." -- John Perazzo
"An al-Qaeda terrorist detonates a car bomb in a crowd of schoolchildren -- and in revenge, a Shiite militiaman kidnaps and murders his Sunni neighbors. How exactly are they motivated by the Arab-Israeli dispute 600 miles away? How would an end to that dispute persuade them to live in peace with their neighbors?" -- David Frum
"It is flattering to get a lot of attention, although I must say it is baffling... I will say this: I am suspicious of hype. The fact that... my 15 minutes of fame has extended a little longer than 15 minutes, is somewhat surprising to me." -- Sen. Barack Obama
"[John] Bolton didn't realize the rules of the game, it seems. The object of the UN is not to advance U.S. interests. The object is to assure a steady flow of money and excuses to various illiberal regimes, to issue gravely worded statements of concern when a member nation starts slaughtering its citizens in numbers that require two commas, and to condemn Israel." -- James Lileks
"Now that they're our new best friends, how about we turn to Iran and Syria for help on our interrogation techniques?" -- Ann Coulter
"Well, the ISG -- the Illustrious Seniors' Group -- has released its 79-point plan. How unprecedented is it? Well, it seems Iraq is to come under something called the ‘Iraq International Support Group.' If only Neville Chamberlain had thought to propose a ‘support group' for Czechoslovakia, he might still be in office. Or guest-hosting for Oprah... James Baker has achieved the perfect reductio ad absurdum of diplomatic self-adulation: he's less rational than Mahmoud Ahmadinejad." -- Mark Steyn
"President Bush met with Congressional leaders from both parties at the White House Friday. He was seeking consensus on Iraq. You would have thought it was a prostate commercial from the number of middle-aged men saying we've really got to go." -- Argus Hamilton
"According to a UN report, methane gas from cows is more damaging to the environment than automobile emissions. That explains why Al Gore has put on so much weight -- he is trying to single-handedly rid the world of cows, one cheeseburger at a time. ... If you think smog is bad here, it's being reported that the city of Tehran in Iran is having a huge smog problem. Apparently the smog in that city is so bad Iranian scientists can't even see the nuclear bomb they claim they're not working on." -- Jay Leno
"Some agency officials and members of Congress have easily handled my ‘gotcha' question. But as I keep asking it around Capitol Hill and the agencies, I get more and more blank stares. Too many officials in charge of the war on terrorism just don't care to learn much, if anything, about the enemy we're fighting. And that's enough to keep anybody up at night." -- Jeff Stein, national security editor at Congressional Quarterly, who asked congressional leaders, counterterrorism officials and others if they could explain the different between a Sunni and a Shi'ite Muslim
"I know what Hizballah is, what they're about. I'm probably one of the few members of Congress to go through a Hizballah checkpoint on the road between Damascus and Beirut... If I misspoke, if I flubbed that, I'll admit it and go from there." -- Rep. Silvestre Reyes
web posted December 11, 2006
"America derives its laws from its Constitution. It derives its values from the Bible. We don't get inalienable rights from the Constitution; we get them from God." -- Dennis Prager
"America's present problems are many and varied, but we seem not to have been gripped by the same sense of purpose that drove Ronald Reagan in his quest to bring the Cold War to a peaceful conclusion." -- Richard Allen
"We have been imposed on so often that it is understandable how some would think that we had reached the point where we would stand for anything." -- Thomas Sowell
"Great danger lies in the notion that we can reason with evil." -- Doug Patton
"It is losing that Americans have no patience for -- not casualties or a protracted war. Let Bush make it clear that he is serious about victory, and that he will do whatever it takes to achieve it. The political support he needs will follow." -- Jeff Jacoby
"Very hardheaded realist terms: interest, stability, regional powers. But stringing them together to suggest that Iran and Syria share our interests in stability is the height of fantasy. In fact, Iran and Syria have an overriding interest in chaos in Iraq -- which is precisely why they each have been abetting the insurgency and fanning civil war. Perhaps in some long-term future they will want a stable Iraq as a tame client state of the Syria-Iran axis. For now they want chaos. What in God's name will a negotiation with them yield?" -- Charles Krauthammer
"You know, if... every jihadist in the world was killed tomorrow, we [sic] still have a major war in Iraq." -- Joe Biden
"I like living here [in the U.K.] because I don't fit into the bad side of American psychology. The British are much more intelligent and civilized than the Americans." -- Gwyneth Paltrow, who was born into wealth, attended three alternative high schools and dropped out of college after a single semester
"If you're one of those dummies who goofs off in school, you wind up in Iraq. But, if you're sophisticated and nuanced, you wind up on a commission about Iraq." -- Mark Steyn
"Everyone is told to expect a recommendation [from the Iraq Study Group] that Iran and Syria be invited to assist the coalition of the willing in extracting the West from Iraq. We won't be told how the enemy can help, since nobody knows. A pity FDR and Winston Churchill didn't think about a strategy like this in early 1942. Half of us might be speaking German now (and the other half Japanese)." -- Wesley Pruden
"Mexico's new president Felipe Calderon was sworn into office in Mexico City Friday with former President Bush looking on. They are an important trading partner. In addition to oil, silver and tequila, Mexico is the number-one producer of Americans." -- Argus Hamilton
"NASA has announced plans to build a space station on the moon. When asked where they would build the space station on the moon a NASA spokesman said, ‘Right between the two Starbucks'." -- Conan O'Brian
"They say Hillary Clinton is starting to get a little paranoid because a lot of Democratic Party leaders are getting behind Barack Obama's run for the presidency. Hillary's worried it might be part of a vast left-wing conspiracy." -- Jay Leno
web posted December 4, 2006
"If we want our grandchildren to be able to give thanks for being Americans, we'll need to... start steering a course away from government control of our lives -- and start moving back toward greater personal responsibility." -- Ed Feulner
"Honesty in action is the best policy, but (as the Bible shows) sin is always crouching at our door. When it leaps, honest words -- with changes in behavior -- are the best response." -- Marvin Olasky
"The fact is that traditional morality has practical authority independent of whether God exists and whether we know His will." -- Jonah Goldberg
"It's time to abandon the mindlessly repeated mantra that religious belief has been the greatest source of human conflict and violence. Atheism, not religion, is the real force behind the mass murders of history." -- Dinesh D'Souza
"We are so robotic in America whenever the word ‘discrimination' is used that we shut down thought and all genuflect in the direction of whoever is complaining. But the proper question is not whether it is discrimination but whether it is justified." -- Mona Charen
"Whatever history's verdict on the Iraq war and on Secretary Rumsfeld, both deserved to be discussed and debated on a far more serious and responsible level than the media sound bites, political spin and venomous cheap shots which have become all too common. Whether Donald Rumsfeld's policies were mistaken or not, that is no reason to accept superficial and even gutter-level discourse on momentous national issues. There was a time when even politicians understood that." -- Thomas Sowell
"If I was out there every night beating people over the head... I would become a Rush Limbaugh. That's not my goal. I don't make the facts up to fit the political viewpoint that happens to parallel what it is I'm trying to express." -- MSNBC's extraordinarily biased Keith Olbermann
"John Edwards is mulling another presidential run two years hence. The Lesser Kedward styles himself an economic populist, which means that he's a zillionaire trial lawyer who is centering his campaign on attacking Wal-Mart, where millions of ordinary Americans shop. Stuff like this makes almost explicable the Democrats' decision to nominate that goofball with the Purple Heart bandages the last time around." -- James Taranto
"While ordinary working-class people across America were queuing for the new PlayStation 3, one fellow had a bright idea -- dropping his boss's name at Wal-Mart to get the next-gen console sent over on the QT for the boss's family. Unfortunately, the boss was former Sen. John Edwards, John Kerry's would-be veep and famous nemesis of Wal-Mart's evil dominion over the Earth... The staffer was lucky Wal-Mart didn't send an empty box weighted with rocks. Merry Christmas!" -- James Lileks
"Democrats are not exactly cleaning out the cesspool of corruption. It seems more like what has been uncharitably described as a French Shower: Spritzing some perfume near the offending area not to remove the smell, but to overwhelm it with yet another." -- Rich Galen
"One of the stunt-imams in US Airways' advertising scheme, Omar Shahin, complained about being removed from the plane, saying: ‘Six scholars in handcuffs. It's terrible.' Yes, especially when there was a whole conference of them! Six out of 150 is called ‘poor law enforcement'." -- Ann Coulter
"The Democratic Party... narrowed the field to New York and Denver for cities to host the 2008 party convention. It's a fierce fight. New York has all the electoral votes but marijuana is legal in Denver, so it could go either way." -- Argus Hamilton
"According to a new study by National Geographic, 11 percent of Americans between the ages of eighteen and twenty-four could not find the United States on a map of the world. You know the only place where everyone could find the United States on a map? Mexico." -- Jay Leno
"Members of Congress may flatter themselves by saying, in effect, ‘It's not us -- it's the guy in the White House.' But if those now in Congress think this election was only about Bush, and not also about them, they're dead wrong. Let's start with the fact that Congress and the media are among the least popular institutions in American life. Exit polls may show President Bush's favorability rating at just 42%, but that of Congress is even lower, at 35%. It isn't hard, moreover, to explain why the GOP-led Congress is so reviled. Since 2003, it set three admittedly ambitious reform goals for itself -- immigration, Social Security and taxes. It accomplished exactly none of them, in summer making only a stab at immigration. Republicans made gains in 2002 and 2004 even as they veered from the fiscally responsible and reform-minded path they'd been on. They became arrogant, and now the trends look ominous... [Republicans] might want to dust off that long-forgotten Contract with America, and get back to basics." -- Investor's Business Daily
"There hasn't been any ideology in the Republican Party, any conservatism, for at least two to maybe four years. You could argue [President] Bush was more of an ideologue in the presidential campaign of ‘04, but in looking at what happened [on 7 November], it wasn't conservatism that lost. Conservatism won when it ran as a Democrat. It won in a number of places. Republicanism lost. RINO Republicans, country-club blue-blood Republicans, this nonpartisan Republican identity, that's what went down in flames. I've always believed that those of us who are conservative believe in the ideology. We believe it wins. We believe it's best for the country. We believe it's best for the people. We believe it's ultimately compassionate, and it has not been present... Now, where are these future conservative leaders?" -- Rush Limbaugh