RWN’s Dozen Favorite Quotes/Excerpts Of The Day For 2008

On a semi-regular basis throughout the year, RWN has posted “Quotes/Excerpts of the Day.” Here are my favorite 12 for 2008.

12) “I have a lifetime of experience that I will bring to the White House. I know Senator McCain has a lifetime of experience that he will bring to the White House. And Senator Obama has a speech he gave in 2002.” — Hillary Clinton

11) Americans are vastly more generous with their time and money than Europeans. According to social demographer Arthur C. Brooks, in 1995 (the last year international data on giving was available), Americans gave 3 1/2 times more money to charities and causes than the French, seven times more than Germans and 14 times more than Italians.

In 1998, Americans volunteered 21 percent more than the Swiss and 32 percent more than Germans – two countries with compulsory national service. Yet we’re told we should emulate them so that America, too, can have a “culture of service.” — Jonah Goldberg

10) “I called up pearatty last night after watching a particularly horrific Hillary Clintton interview with George somethingsomethingopolis.

“I’m losing faith,” I cried, “maybe Obama is better.”

“Dawn,” she said, “Obama is all style. No substance. He’s all “I want to send children to the moon,” and then when you ask how he says “Hope.”

That made me laugh.

He totally would say hope.” — Liberal blogger Dawn Summers at Clareified

9) “In a just, capitalistic world, Barney Frank would be living on the streets covered in his own excrement, but instead he gets to screw up business after business with no accountability because apparently he lives in a district where the citizens are constantly being outsmarted by squirrels.” — Frank J.

8) “It’s pretty clear to me that the Democratic agenda is to turn us into France.” — Mitch McConnell

7) “The [real] higher good is serving our customers….That kind of service is a higher service than the way our government looks at it, which is, ‘You elect me, I take over, I go to the big house, I get the driver and the big airplane, and then I tell you what’s good and if you don’t like it then I force it on you.'” — T. J. Rodgers

6) “As a multilingual immigrant (English, Russian, enough Hebrew and Spanish to get by) I’m not exactly worried about those strange people from strange lands. I’m one of those people! But yes, I’m an English only partisan and here’s why: it’s better for the immigrants. I know this from experience and I know this for a fact. Sure, government offices can have their Spanish signs to make it easier for immigrants. But their local supermarket probably won’t. The job they want will likely be in English. I really believe it’s anti-immigrant to not help them assimilate. The Russians I know who never had to learn English because the signs on Brighton Beach are in Russian, they have RTV and listen to a Russian radio station are so much worse off than the Russians I know who learned English and adapted to their new country. The former have such limited opportunities it’s not even funny. The latter, well, they’re Americans and have every door open to them that someone American-born would have. I don’t want to deprive new immigrants of America’s promise.” — Karol Sheinin

5) “In my last post I joked that Obama wants to take my money and give it to people who don’t work as hard as I do. As with all gross generalizations, there are plenty of exceptions. But how does it hold up as a generalization?

When I was a kid, I was mowing lawns, working on my uncle’s farm, shoveling snow, washing dishes, waiting tables, and anything else I could do to save for college. Meanwhile I worked hard enough in school to graduate as valedictorian, getting a few small scholarships that helped a lot. My mother took a job on an assembly line to help pay for my college, while my dad worked his job in the post office during the day and painted houses on nights and weekends.

…And then there was Dilbert. For the first six years I kept my day job and made Dilbert comics nights, weekends, and holidays. I didn’t take a day off for about ten years. At one point I was doing all of that plus writing a book that became The Dilbert Principle. The only time I saw the sun was walking to the mailbox. And I believe that all of that hard work was necessary for the good things that happened.

The average work week is something like 35 hours. For most of my work life I worked about twice that much. I’m writing this blog post on the 4th of July, and have several deadlines to satisfy. So yes, as a generalization, Obama promises to take a large chunk of my hard-earned money and transfer it primarily to people who don’t work as hard. That’s just a fact.” — Scott Adams of Dilbert fame

4) “There is great virtue in the American way, which expects CEOs to perform on a quarterly basis, presidents and Congresses to reinvent politics in 100 days, generals to wipe out opponents in 100 hours without taking significant casualties, doctors to save life and limb every time, search engines to yield a million results in less than a second, and so on. There is also great virtue in the belief that what is bad can be made good, and that what is good can be made great, and that what is fractionally less than great is downright awful.

But these virtues can spawn vices. One is impatience. Another is a culture of chronic complaint. A third is the belief that every problem has a solution, that trial is possible without error, that risks must always be zero, that every inconvenience is an outrage, every setback a disaster and every mishap a plausible basis for a lawsuit.” — Bret Stephens

3) “It’s also heartening to realize that as president Mr. Obama will soon be working hand-in-hand with a former Ku Klux Klan Grand Wizard like Senator Robert Byrd to craft the incoherent and destructive programs that will plunge the American economy into a nightmare of full-blown sustained depression. As Vice President-Elect Joe Biden has repeatedly warned, there will be difficult times ahead and the programs will not always be popular, or even sane. But as we look out over the wreckage of bankrupt coal companies, nationalized banks, and hyperinflation, we can always look back with sustained pride on the great National Reconciliation of 2008. Call me an optimist, but I like to think when America’s breadlines erupt into riots it will be because of our shared starvation, not the differences in our color.” — Iowahawk

2) “The white “resentment” that Obama speaks of does not primarily come from direct effects of affirmative action or the welfare state. It comes from the societal message that the majority of white people, who have had no part in oppressing anyone, are asked again and again and again to take responsibility for ills they did not cause (and, in many cases have been caused by earlier attempts at assuaging white guilt, like paternalistic welfare). They are lectured about creating a healing “dialogue” in which they don’t feel free to speak, lest they employ the wrong politically correct buzz word and confirm their “inherent prejudice.” They must feel guilt for “institutional racism” when many of them have never been a part of any racist institution. They’re flagellated for benefiting from “white privilege” when many of them don’t feel terribly privileged at all.

And, despite engaging in this years-long culturally honored guilt-fest to atone for sins they did not commit, they know that they’d instantly become trogolodytic racists in the eyes of the world for one wrong word, while Jeremiah Wright is excused and even applauded in some quarters for a 20-year stream of hate.” — Mary Katharine Ham

1) “Your logic, your truth, your good will, your decency, your work ethic — it still is the guide post of America. You are “We the people.”

It is the lunatic fringe that is celebrated by a media bent on socialism, bent on revitalizing the Mao Zedong agenda — you are not the minority, you are the majority.

You know rush hour? What a pain in the *ss rush hour is? Do you have rush hour in Bakersfield? I bet you have rush hour. You know what that is? You know what that is? Those are people with alarm clocks. Those are people who get up because they have a burning fire in their soul that says, “You must be productive. In order to be a good, decent human being, you must be an asset. You must work hard before you play hard.”

So Gary, you are not along. But, what the real curse is, it’s not the lying, left-wing, Mao media, it’s those of us who know better, but don’t speak up. The people of California have backed down. The people who are productive in California have backed down to the pimps, and the whores, and the welfare brats, and their media, and their politically correct representatives, Boxer, Feinstein, Schwarzenegger, who literally will lie through their teeth to benefit some blood sucking constituency while your paycheck is being raped and pillaged to pay for some bling-bling infested punk.

You’ve got to start raising Hell — and I am constantly being gunned down by the media; I’m a curse, I’m a dangerous guy, I’m a madman, I’m scary, I have too many guns, I shoot all the deer — eat me. I stand up and I take the bullets because my name is Davy Crockett. This is the wall of the Alamo. If you can’t shoot Santa Anna’s men, shut up and load my gun. So get tough and get tougher.

You don’t need tough love in America, you need tougher love. Around the water cooler, at the church, at school. At the work place, at the picnic, and the bowling alley. You should be pounding the desk with your fist, raising hell, and take this beautiful state back from the pimps, and the whores, and the welfare brats, and the gang-bangers who seems to have all the rights in the world while the good people, the productive, law abiding people don’t have jack squat — and I think I am going to throw up.” — Ted Nugent

Also see,

RWN’s Favorite 15 Quotes Of The Day For 2007

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