The 40 Most Obnoxious Quotes Of 2004

Mar, 2012

40) “Not only are we going to New Hampshire … we’re going to South Carolina and Oklahoma and Arizona and North Dakota and New Mexico, and we’re going to California and Texas and New York! And we’re going to South Dakota and Oregon and Washington and Michigan. And then we’re going to Washington, D.C. to take back the White House, Yeeeeeaaaaaargh!” — Howard Dean in the Iowa concession speech that proved to be the final nail in his campaign’s coffin

39) “Clothing is wonderful, but let them go naked for a while, at least the kids. Water is necessary, and then generators, and then food, and then clothes.” — Teresa Heinz Kerry instructs volunteers packing donations for “hurricane relief efforts in the Caribbean”.

38) “Go, balloons. Go, balloons. Go, balloons ‘ What’s happening balloons? There’s not enough coming down. All balloons! Why the hell is nothing falling? What the f*ck are you guys doing up there?” ‘- Democratic Convention producer Don Mischer on CNN as balloons failed to drop from the ceiling of the Fleet Center in Boston

37) “The Dixiecrats meet again in New York. Now they’re called Republicans.” — Andrew Sullivan

36) “OK, I’ll predict that the rapture’s coming and you and I, Chris, are going up, and all these hypocritical conservatives who tell people not to do stuff but then they get caught doing are not.” — Maureen Dowd on the Chris Matthews show

35) “(Bush is) just a sick f***. I think we’d be hard-pressed to get someone worse than Bush. I think if you had to sum it up he’s an incredibly selfish man and his administration in my opinion puts Americans ahead of people in other countries.” — MCA from the Beastie Boys

34) “Despite all of this stupid bullsh*t that the Republican National Committee, or whatever the f*ck they call them, that they were saying that they’re all angry about how two of these ads were comparing Bush to Hitler? I mean, out of thousands of submissions, they find two. They’re like f*cking looking for Hitler in a haystack. …George Bush is not Hitler. He would be, if he f*cking applied himself.” — Margaret Cho at a MoveOn Award Ceremony

33) “(George Bush) betrayed this country! He played on our fears. He took America on an ill-conceived foreign adventure dangerous to our troops, an adventure preordained and planned before 9/11 ever took place!” — Al Gore

32) “Aside from his scintilla of candor, Mr. Bush is still not leveling with us. As he said at his press conference on Monday, ‘the enemies of freedom’ know that ‘a democratic Iraq will be a decisive blow to their ambitions because free people will never choose to live in tyranny.’ They may choose to live in a theocracy, though. Americans did.” — Maureen Dowd

31) “Many of you are well enough off that…the tax cuts may have helped you. We’re saying that for America to get back on track, we’re probably going to cut that short and not give it to you. We’re going to take things away from you on behalf of the common good.” — Hillary Clinton

30) “Go f*ck yourself.” — Vice President Dick Cheney to Sen. Patrick Leahy on the Senate floor

29) “The (Bush) administration works closely with a network of rapid response digital brownshirts who work to pressure reporters and their editors for ‘undermining support for our troops.'” — Al Gore

28) “People don’t realize that by voting Republican, they voted against themselves….I worry that some people are entertained by the idea of this war. They don’t know anything about the Iraqis, but they’re angry and frustrated in their own lives. It’s like Germany, before Hitler took over. The economy was bad and people felt kicked around. They looked for a scapegoat. Now we’ve got a new bunch of Hitlers.” — Singer Linda Ronstadt

27) “I don’t fall down. That son of a b*tch knocked me over.” — John Kerry on a Secret Service who got in his way while he was snowboarding

26) “Americans did not vote for fascism – but the fascists now control all three branches of our government: the Presidency, Congress, and the Supreme Court. In 1935, Sinclair Lewis warned against the rise of an American fascism in ‘It Can’t Happen Here’. Well, it can – and it will, unless we stop it now.” — Bob Fertik at Democrats.com

25) “But the vitriol also reflects the fact that many of the people at (the Republican National Convention), for all their flag-waving, hate America. They want a controlled, monolithic society; they fear and loathe our nation’s freedom, diversity and complexity.” — Paul Krugman

24) “No one’s talking about how to keep the other side home on Election Day. It’s a lot easier than you think and it doesn’t cost that much. This election can be won by 200,000 votes. You target (Bush’s) natural constituencies. For example, you can go on all the pro-life chat rooms and say you’re an outraged right-wing voter and that you know that George Bush drove an ex-girlfriend to an abortion clinic and paid for her to get an abortion.” — Kerry supporter Moby explains his unique political strategy — just making things up.

23) “As I watched Tuesday night’s network coverage of the unrelenting political propaganda hour known as the Republican National Convention, the first thought that came to mind was of old newsreels of those self-congratulatory Nazi rallies held in Germany during the reign of Adolf Hitler.” — Hugh Pearson, Newsday

22) “I think we’re at risk with our democracy. I think we’re dealing with the most closed, imperialistic, nastiest administration in living memory. They even put Richard Nixon to shame.” — Wesley Clark

21) “If we do the work that we can do in this country, the work that we will do when John Kerry is President, people like Christopher Reeve will get up out of that wheelchair and walk again.” — John Edwards, Oct 11, 2004

20) “So now the question is, basically, right now, how will (the Osama Bin Laden tape) affect the election? And I have a feeling that it could tilt the election a bit. In fact, I’m a little inclined to think that Karl Rove, the political manager at the White House, who is a very clever man, that he probably set up bin Laden to this thing.” — Walter Cronkite on Larry King

19) “Rove’s re-election strategy was elegantly simple: Scare the bejesus out of Jesusland. F@ggots are headed your way! Satanic Muslims are hiding everywhere! That’s all it took to get Jesusland to do the job. Intellectual conservatives like the National Review staff are flattering themselves if they honestly believe Jesusland cares about conservative thought. The “reality-based” folks are learning that Jesusland doesn’t even care about jobs or the economy. In Jesusland, it’s all the will of Jesus. No job? No money? Daughter got her clit pierced? Jesus is just f*cking with you again, testing your faith. Got the cancer? Oh well. Soon you’ll be with Jesus. Reality is no match for a mystical world in which an all-powerful god is constantly toying with every detail of your mundane life, just to see what you’ll do about it. Keep praying and always keep your eye out for homosexuals and terrorists, and you will eventually be rewarded … all you have to do is die, and then it’s SuperJesusLand, where you will be a ghost floating in a magic cloud with all the other ghosts from Jesusland, with Jesus Himself presiding over an Eternal Church Service.” — Blogger Ken Layne after Kerry went down to defeat in November

18) “Shamefully we now learn that Saddam’s torture chambers reopened under new management, U.S. management.” — Ted Kennedy

17) “I think if Kerry were to win this in a tight race, I think there would be an effort to mount a coup, quite frankly.” — Bill Moyers

16) “If John Kerry thinks this war is a mistake and if the United States of America elects him president, the troops are going to have to live with that. And they know better than anyone else whether it was a mistake or not. I don’t care if they’re demoralized. They have to go to war and be prepared.” –: Lawrence O’Donnellshows his “support” for the troops on the “McLaughlin Group”

15) “Christ would not vote for Barack Obama, because Barack Obama has voted to behave in a way that it is inconceivable for Christ to have behaved.” — Alan Keyes

14) “Nicholas Berg died for the sins of George Bush and Donald Rumsfeld. The al-Qaeda people are probably just as bad as they are, but this administration did this.” — Michael Berg, the father of Nick Berg, blames the Bush administration for his son’s death

13) “Australia has kept faith with the US and we are endangering the Australians now by this wanton disregard for international law and multilateral channels.” — Diana Kerry, John Kerry’s sister, tries to undermine our support in Australia

12) “…Saddam must be immediately released and escorted back to Iraq under the protection of an international delegation. At that point, (Jimmy) Carter can supervise elections with Saddam among the candidates. And yes, it’s not impossible that he might win. Is this a shocking suggestion? Yes, and I hesitate to be the first one to say publicly what so many people ‘ including ex-government officials and long-time foreign policy commentators ‘ have been saying privately for months. But at some point, such thoughts will become commonplace. It is a fact that this war was unjust. Releasing him would at least concede that the US was wrong to wage it. This is the first step toward ending the bloodshed and terror.” — Lew Rockwell

11) “Latins for Republicans ‘ it’s like roaches for Raid.” — John Leguizamo

10) “We have a voice now, and we’re not using it, and women have so much to lose. I mean, we could lose the right to our bodies. We could lo–if you think that rape should be legal, then don’t vote. But if you think that you have a right to your body, and you have a right to say what happens to you and fight off that danger of losing that, then you should vote, and those are the…” — Cameron Diaz

9) “It’s a real conflict for me when I go to a concert and find out somebody in the audience is a Republican or fundamental Christian. It can cloud my enjoyment. I’d rather not know.” — Singer Linda Ronstadt

8) “Are you angry? [Yeah!] Are you angry? [Yeah!] Are you angry? [Yeah!] Well, we’ve been watching intifada in Palestine, we’ve been watching an uprising in Iraq, and the question is that what are we doing? How come we don’t have an intifada in this country? Because it seem[s] to me, that we are comfortable in where we are, watching CNN, ABC, NBC, Fox, and all these mainstream… giving us a window to the world while the world is being managed from Washington, from New York, from every other place in here in San Francisco: Chevron, Bechtel, [Carlyle?] Group, Halliburton; every one of those lying, cheating, stealing, deceiving individuals are in our country and we’re sitting here and watching the world pass by, people being bombed, and it’s about time that we have an intifada in this country that change[s] fundamentally the political dynamics in here. And we know every– They’re gonna say some Palestinian being too radical — well, you haven’t seen radicalism yet.” –: U.C. Berkeley Lecturer Hatem Bazian: fires up the crowd at an anti-war rally by calling for an American intifada

7) “..And then there’s Rumsfeld who said of Iraq ‘We have our good days and our bad days.’ We should put this S.O.B. up against a wall and say ‘This is one of our bad days’ and pull the trigger. Do you want to salvage our country? Be a savior of our country? Then vote for John Kerry and get rid of the whole Bush Bunch.” — From a fund raising ad put out by the St. Petersburg Democratic Club

6) “On the subway, Peter asked, ‘Shouldn’t we consider having triplets?’ And I had this adverse reaction: ‘This is why they say it’s the woman’s choice, because you think I could just carry triplets. That’s easy for you to say, but I’d have to give up my life.’ Not only would I have to be on bed rest at 20 weeks, I wouldn’t be able to fly after 15. I was already at eight weeks. When I found out about the triplets, I felt like: It’s not the back of a pickup at 16, but now I’m going to have to move to Staten Island. I’ll never leave my house because I’ll have to care for these children. I’ll have to start shopping only at Costco and buying big jars of mayonnaise. Even in my moments of thinking about having three, I don’t think that deep down I was ever considering it.” –: Amy Richards, an abortion rights advocate, describes her decision to kill two of her babies, leaving her with a single baby, instead of having triplets

5) “The word ‘hero’ has been bandied about a lot to refer to anyone killed in Afghanistan or Iraq. But anyone who voluntarily goes to Afghanistan or Iraq [as a soldier] is fighting for an evil cause under an evil commander in chief.” — Ted Rall

4) “Republicans don’t believe in the imagination, partly because so few of them have one, but mostly because it gets in the way of their chosen work, which is to destroy the human race and the planet. Human beings, who have imaginations, can see a recipe for disaster in the making; Republicans, whose goal in life is to profit from disaster and who don’t give a hoot about human beings, either can’t or won’t. Which is why I personally think they should be exterminated before they cause any more harm.” — The Village Voice’s Michael Feingold, in a theater review of all places

3) “I root for hurricanes. When, courtesy of the Weather Channel, I see one forming in the ocean off the coast of Africa, I find myself longing for it to become big and strong–Mother Nature’s fist of fury, Gaia’s stern rebuke. Considering the havoc mankind has wreaked upon nature with deforesting, stripmining, and the destruction of animal habitat, it only seems fair that nature get some of its own back and teach us that there are forces greater than our own.” — James Wolcott, Vanity Fair Contributing Editor

2) “Let the people see what war is like. This isn’t an Xbox game. There are real repercussions to Bush’s folly. That said, I feel nothing over the death of merceneries. They aren’t in Iraq because of orders, or because they are there trying to help the people make Iraq a better place. They are there to wage war for profit. Screw them.” — Markos Moulitsas Z’niga on the four Americans who were murdered by terrorists and then had their corpses desecrated in Fallujah, Iraq

1) “The Iraqis who have risen up against the occupation are not ‘insurgents’ or ‘terrorists’ or ‘The Enemy.’ They are the REVOLUTION, the Minutemen, and their numbers will grow — and they will win.” — Michael Moore