Jim wrote:


"I'm a firm believer in feeding people their own words back to them,
when it's appropriate."
-Trent Lott



As we hurtle headlong into the silly season, a high colonic for the mind
is in order. There is going to be a lot of back-and-forth between the
candidates regarding who said what and when. Feast, in that context,
upon this small collection:

"Victory means exit strategy, and it's important for the President to
explain to us what the exit strategy is."

- George W. Bush, discussing Kosovo, Houston Chronicle, 04-09-99

"I said on my program, if, if the Americans go in and overthrow Saddam
Hussein and it's clean, he has nothing, I will apologize to the nation,
and I will not trust the Bush administration again."

- Bill O'Reilly, on ABC's Good Morning America, 03-18-03

"I tell people don't kill all the liberals. Leave enough so we can have
two on every campus?living fossils?so we will never forget what these
people stood for."

- Rush Limbaugh, Denver Post, 12-29-95

"If the Supreme Court says that you have the right to consensual gay sex
within your home, then you have the right to bigamy, you have the right
to polygamy, you have the right to incest, you have the right to
adultery. You have the right to anything. All of those things are
antithetical to a healthy, stable, traditional family and that's sort of
where we are in today's world, unfortunately. It all comes from, I would
argue, the right to privacy that doesn't exist, in my opinion, in the
United States Constitution."

- Sen. Rick Santorum (R-Pa.), Associated Press, 04-22-03

"I would warn Orlando that you're right in the way of some serious
hurricanes, and I don't think I'd be waving those flags in God's face if
I were you. This is not a message of hate; this is a message of
redemption. But a condition like this will bring about the destruction
of your nation. It'll bring about terrorist bombs; it'll bring
earthquakes, tornadoes and possibly a meteor."

- Pat Robertson, speaking of organizers putting rainbow flags up
around Orlando to support sexual diversity, The Washington Post,
06-10-98. For the record, Orlando remains undestroyed by meteors.

"Environmentalists are a socialist group of individuals that are the
tool of the Democrat Party. I'm proud to say that they are my enemy.
They are not Americans, never have been Americans, never will be
Americans."

- Rep. Don Young (R-Alaska), Alaska Public Radio, 08-19-96

"When you strip it all away, Jerry Garcia destroyed his life on drugs.
And yet he's being honored, like some godlike figure. Our priorities are
out of whack, folks."

- Rush (currently under investigation for drug use) Limbaugh, on
the death of Jerry Garcia, 08-20-95.

"I don't understand how poor people think."

- George W. Bush, confiding in the Rev. Jim Wallis, The New York
Times, 08-26-03

"Get rid of the guy. Impeach him, censure him, assassinate him."

- Rep. James Hansen (R-Utah), talking about President Clinton, as
reported by journalist Steve Miner of KSUB radio who overheard his
conversation, 11-01-98

"We're going to keep building the party until we're hunting Democrats
with dogs."

- Sen. Phil Gramm (R-Texas), Mother Jones, 08-95

"My only regret with Timothy McVeigh is he did not go to The New York
Times building."

- Ann Coulter, The New York Observer, 08-26-02

"Homosexuals want to come into churches and disrupt church services and
throw blood all around and try to give people AIDS and spit in the face
of ministers."

- Pat Robertson again, The 700 Club, 01-18-95

"And there is, I am certain, among the Iraqi people a respect for the
care and the precision that went into the bombing campaign."

- Donald Rumsfeld, defenselink.mil, 04-09-03

"Emotional appeals about working families trying to get by on $4.25 an
hour are hard to resist. Fortunately, such families do not exist."

- Rep. Tom DeLay (R-Texas), House Majority Whip, during a debate
on increasing the minimum wage, Congressional Record, H3706, 04-23-96

"Chelsea is a Clinton. She bears the taint; and though not prosecutable
in law, in custom and nature the taint cannot be ignored. All the great
despotisms of the past?I'm not arguing for despotism as a principle, but
they sure knew how to deal with potential trouble?recognized that the
families of objectionable citizens were a continuing threat. In Stalin's
penal code it was a crime to be the wife or child of an 'enemy of the
people.' The Nazis used the same principle, which they called
Sippenhaft, 'clan liability.' In Imperial China, enemies of the state
were punished 'to the ninth degree': that is, everyone in the offender's
own generation would be killed and everyone related via four generations
up, to the great-great-grandparents, and four generations down, to the
great-great-grandchildren, would also be killed."

- John Derbyshire, National Review, 02-15-01

"I know this is painful for the ladies to hear, but if you get married,
you have accepted the headship of a man, your husband. Christ is the
head of the household and the husband is the head of the wife, and
that's the way it is, period."

- Pat Robertson again, The 700 Club, 01-08-92

"Probably nothing."

- Jeb Bush, during his losing 1994 bid for Florida Governor, when
asked what he would do for black people, quoted by Salon on 10-05-02

"The homosexual blitzkrieg has been better planned and executed than
Hitler's."

- Rep. William Dannemeyer (R-Calif.), The New Republic, 08-01-94

"When lawlessness is abroad in the land, the same thing will happen here
that happened in Nazi Germany. Many of those people involved in Adolph
Hitler were Satanists. Many of them were homosexuals. The two things
seem to go together."

- Pat Robertson again, The 700 Club, 01-21-93

"Why is this man in the White House? The majority of Americans did not
vote for him. Why is he there? And I tell you this morning that he's in
the White House because God put him there for a time such as this."

- Lt. General William G. Boykin, Deputy Undersecretary of Defense,
The New York Times, 10-17-03

"We need to execute people like John Walker in order to physically
intimidate liberals, by making them realize that they can be killed,
too. Otherwise, they will turn out to be outright traitors."

- Ann Coulter, at the Conservative Political Action Conference,
02-26-02

"I don't want to abolish government. I simply want to reduce it to the
size where I can drag it into the bathroom and drown it in the bathtub."

- Grover Norquist, President of Americans for Tax Reform, NPR
Morning Edition, 05-25-01

"I don't agree that you need an enormous number of American troops.
Saddam's army is down to one-third than it was before, and I think it
would be a cakewalk."

- Kenneth Adelman, Defense Policy Board, to Wolf Blitzer on CNN,
12-06-01

"The fact of the matter is that this (increased American casualties) is
a sign of the success of our operation, not its failure."

- Ralph Reed, GOP strategist, on MSNBC's program 'Hardball,'
10-28-03

"There are some who feel that, you know, the conditions are such that
they can attack us there. My answer is, bring 'em on. We have the force
necessary to deal with the situation."

- George W. Bush, The Chicago Tribune, 07-03-03

"The truth is that for reasons that have a lot to do with the U.S.
government bureaucracy, we settled on the one issue that everyone could
agree on, which was weapons of mass destruction as the core reason."

- Paul Wolfowitz, quoted by Tim Russert on 'Meet The Press, NBC,
06-01-03

"Quit looking at the symbols. Get out and get a job. Quit shooting each
other. Quit having illegitimate babies."

- State Rep. John Graham Altman (R-SC), addressing
African-American concerns about the 'symbol' of the Confederate Flag,
The New York Times, 01-24-97

"Two things made this country great: White men & Christianity. The
degree these two have diminished is in direct proportion to the
corruption and fall of the nation. Every problem that has arisen (sic)
can be directly traced back to our departure from God's Law and the
disenfranchisement of White men."

- State Rep. Don Davis (R-NC), e-mailed to every member of the
North Carolina House and Senate, reported by The Fayetteville Observer,
08-22-01

"NOW is saying that in order to be a woman, you've got to be a lesbian."

- Pat Robertson again, The 700 Club, 12-03-97

"My biggest fear is going to be going to the funeral of some young Iowa
man or woman who dies in this conflict and having their mother or father
come up to me and ask whether or not their son or daughter died for
America, or died to save Bill Clinton's presidency. I don't know what I
would say to those grieving parents. For that reason I believe the
President must resign immediately."

- Rep. Jim Nussle (R-IA), Congressional Record, H11963, 12-18-98

"Why should we hear about body bags and deaths and how many, what day
it's gonna happen? It's not relevant. So why should I waste my beautiful
mind on something like that?"

- Barbara Bush, said on 'Good Morning America' the day before the
Iraq war started, The New York Times, 01-13-03

"I'm the commander?see, I don't need to explain?I don't need to explain
why I say things. That's the interesting thing about being the
President. Maybe somebody needs to explain to me why they say something,
but I don't feel like I owe anybody an explanation."

- George W. Bush, Washington Post, 11-19-02


Sad

Brings to mind a quote attributed to Albert Einstein.

"Two things are infinite: the universe and human stupidity; and I'm not sure
about the universe."
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