The Last Decade Of Liberalism In 40 Quotes

Jan, 2010

40) Winnie the Pooh seems to me to be a fundamental text on national security. — Obama foreign policy adviser Richard Danzig

39) I propose a limitation be put on how many sqares [sic] of toilet paper can be used in any one sitting. Now, I don’t want to rob any law-abiding American of his or her God-given rights, but I think we are an industrious enough people that we can make it work with only one square per restroom visit, except, of course, on those pesky occasions where 2 to 3 could be required. — Sheryl Crow

38) In a situation like this, of course you identify with everyone who’s suffering. [But we must also think about] the terrorists who are creating such horrible future lives for themselves because of the negativity of this karma. It’s all of our jobs to keep our minds as expansive as possible. If you can see [the terrorists] as a relative who’s dangerously sick and we have to give them medicine, and the medicine is love and compassion. There’s nothing better. — Richard Gere

37) George Bush doesn’t care about black people…They’re giving the Army permission to go down and shoot us. — Kayne West on the rescue efforts in New Orleans after hurricane Katrina

36) “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.” — Ken Layne

35) Never let a serious crisis go to waste. What I mean by that is it’s an opportunity to do things you couldn’t do before. — Rahm Emanuel

34) I have to tell you, you know, it’s part of reporting this case, this election, the feeling most people get when they hear Barack Obama’s speech. My, I felt this thrill going up my leg. — “Journalist” Chris Matthews

33) Over the last dozen years I made 13 trips to Baghdad to lobby the government to keep CNN’s Baghdad bureau open and to arrange interviews with Iraqi leaders. Each time I visited, I became more distressed by what I saw and heard, awful things that could not be reported because doing so would have jeopardized the lives of Iraqis, particularly those on our Baghdad staff…I felt awful having these stories bottled up inside me. Now that Saddam Hussein’s regime is gone, I suspect we will hear many, many more gut-wrenching tales from Iraqis about the decades of torment. At last, these stories can be told freely. — CNN chief news executive Eason Jordan in a New York Times column, admitting that CNN often didn’t report newsworthy events in Iraq out of fear of what the regime might do

32) We all know that one man’s terrorist is another man’s freedom fighter and that Reuters upholds the principle that we do not use the word terrorist….To be frank, it adds little to call the attack on the World Trade Center a terrorist attack. -— Steven Jukes, global head of news for Reuters News Service, in an internal memo

31) The Pentagon as a legitimate target? I actually don’t have an opinion on that and it’s important I not have an opinion on that as I sit here in my capacity right now. — David Westin, ABC News President

30) You got into these small towns in Pennsylvania and, like a lot of small towns in the Midwest, the jobs have been gone now for 25 years and nothing’s replaced them. And they fell through the Clinton Administration, and the Bush Administration, and each successive administration has said that somehow these communities are gonna regenerate and they have not. And it’s not surprising then they get bitter, they cling to guns or religion or antipathy to people who aren’t like them or anti-immigrant sentiment or anti-trade sentiment as a way to explain their frustrations. — Barack Obama

29) It’s good (Michelle Malkin’s) in D.C. and I’m in New York. I’d spit on her if I saw her. — Geraldo Rivera

28) Al Qaeda really hurt us, but not as much as Rupert Murdoch has hurt us, particularly in the case of Fox News. Fox News is worse than Al Qaeda — worse for our society. It’s as dangerous as the Ku Klux Klan ever was. — MSNBC’s Keith Olbermann

27) …I would further strongly urge Democrats who don’t believe marriage is between a man and a woman but who feel they ought to pretend to believe this in order to win elections (a plausible position) need to do a better job of pretending. I’ve heard a shockingly large number of politicians say things, in rooms where journalists are present, that make it perfectly clear that they think gay marriage is just fine but that the voters aren’t ready for it. That’s a sensible thing to believe, but you can’t go around saying it if you’re trying to win votes. If you’re going to lie, then lie — and lie convincingly! — Matthew Yglesias

26) “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 that has since been much more widely adopted by the Left

25) I want to go up to the closest white person and say: ‘You can’t understand this, it’s a black thing’ and then slap him, just for my mental health — New York city councilman Charles Barron

24) While the rest of the country waves the flag of Americana, we understand we are not part of that. We don’t owe America anything – America owes us. — Al Sharpton

23) The entire country may disagree with me, but I don’t understand the necessity for patriotism. Why do you have to be a patriot? About what? This land is our land? Why? You can like where you live and like your life, but as for loving the whole country… I don’t see why people care about patriotism. — Natalie Maines

22) America has been killing people on this continent since it was started. This country is not worth dying for… — Cindy Sheehan

21) And I think the almost undeviating support by Great Britain for the ill-advised policies of President Bush in Iraq have been a major tragedy for the world. — Jimmy Carter castigates the British for cooperating with his own country

20) Check out this startling excerpt from George Monbiot’s new book Heat. It’s about the climate-change “denial industry,” which most of you are probably familiar with. What you may not know about is the peculiar role of the tobacco industry in the whole mess. I’ve read about this stuff for years and even I was surprised by some of the details. When we’ve finally gotten serious about global warming, when the impacts are really hitting us and we’re in a full worldwide scramble to minimize the damage, we should have war crimes trials for these b*stards — some sort of climate Nuremberg. — David Roberts, Grist Magazine

19) Until your daddy learns that it’s not ‘fun’ to kill, keep your doggies and kitties away from him. He’s so hooked on killing defenseless animals that they could be next! — From a PETA booklet called “Your Daddy Kills Animals,” which was designed to be handed out to children

18) I do believe that it’s the first time in history that fire has ever melted steel. I do believe that it defies physics that World Trade Center tower 7 — building 7, which collapsed in on itself — it is impossible for a building to fall the way it fell without explosives being involved. World Trade Center 7. World Trade [Center] 1 and 2 got hit by planes — 7, miraculously, the first time in history, steel was melted by fire. It is physically impossible. — Rosie O’Donnell talks Trutherism

17) Is there such a thing as a man made stroke? In other words, did someone do this to him? — Joy Behar, on The View, wonders if Republicans gave Senator Tim Johnson a stroke.

16) Look what happened with regard to our invasion into Afghanistan, how we apparently intentionally let bin Laden get away. That was done by the previous administration because they knew very well that if they would capture al Qaeda, there would be no justification for an invasion in Iraq. There’s no question that the leader of the military operations of the U.S. called back our military, called them back from going after the head of al Qaeda. — Congressman Maurice Hinchey

15) Now I believe, myself, that the secretary of state, the secretary of defense and you have to make your own decision as to what the president knows: that this war is lost, that the surge is not accomplishing anything. — Democratic Senator Majority Leader, Harry Reid

14) Mr. bin Laden used to live in Sudan. He was expelled from Saudi Arabia in 1991, then he went to Sudan. And we’d been hearing that the Sudanese wanted America to start meeting with them again. They released him. At the time, 1996, he had committed no crime against America so I did not bring him here because we had no basis on which to hold him, though we knew he wanted to commit crimes against America. — Bill Clinton explains to a Long Island, N.Y., business group why he turned down Sudan’s offer to extradite Osama Bin Laden to America in 1996

13) If you’re a young person looking at the future of this planet and looking at what is being done right now, and not done, I believe we have reached the stage where it is time for civil disobedience to prevent the construction of new coal plants that do not have carbon capture and sequestration. — Al Gore

12) (Rush Limbaugh) just wants the country to fail. To me that’s treason. He’s not saying anything different than what Osama Bin Laden is saying. You might want to look into this, sir, because I think Rush Limbaugh was the 20th hijacker but he was just so strung out on Oxycontin he missed his flight. … Rush Limbaugh, I hope the country fails, I hope his kidneys fail, how about that? — Wanda Sykes

11) I have a good news to report; Glen Beck appears closer to suicide – I’m hoping that he does it on camera; suicide is rampant in his family, and given his alcoholism and his tendencies towards self-destruction, I am only hoping that when Glen Beck does put a gun to his head and pulls the trigger, that it will be on television, because somebody will capture it on YouTube and it will be the most popular video for months. — Mike Malloy

10) The President wants to talk about a terrorist named bin Laden. I don’t want to talk about bin Laden. I want to talk about a terrorist called Christopher Columbus. I want to talk about a terrorist called George Washington. I want to talk about a terrorist called Rudy Giuliani. The real terrorists have always been the United Snakes of America. — Malik Zulu Shabazz

9) “It’s about time that we have an intifada in this country that changes 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

8) The government gives them the drugs, builds bigger prisons, passes a three-strike law and then wants us to sing ‘God Bless America.’ No, no, no, God d*mn America, that’s in the Bible for killing innocent people. God d*mn America for treating our citizens as less than human. God d*mn America for as long as she acts like she is God and she is supreme. Jeremiah Wright

7) 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

6) General Petraeus or General Betray Us? …Today, before Congress and the American people, General Petraeus is likely to become General Betray Us. — MoveOn

5) Through every Abu aib and Haditha, through every rape and murder, the American public has indulged those in uniform….We pay the soldiers a decent wage, take care of their families, provide them with housing and medical care and vast social support systems and ship obscene amenities into the war zone for them, we support them in every possible way, and their attitude is that we should in addition roll over and play dead, defer to the military and the generals and let them fight their war, and give up our rights and responsibilities to speak up because they are above society?…[T]he recent NBC report is just an ugly reminder of the price we pay for a mercenary — oops sorry, volunteer — force that thinks it is doing the dirty work. — The Washington Post’s William Arkin

4) In Vietnam, our soldiers came back and they were reviled as baby killers, in shame and humiliation. It isn’t happening now, but I will tell you — there has never been an army as violent and murderous as our army has been in Iraq. — Seymour Hersh

3) Over time, however, the endless war in Iraq began to play a role in natural selection. Only idiots signed up; only idiots died. Back home, the average I.Q. soared. — Ted Rall

2) As to those in the World Trade Center…Let’s get a grip here, shall we? True enough, they were civilians of a sort. But innocent? Gimme a break. …If there was a better, more effective, or in fact any other way of visiting some penalty befitting their participation upon the little Eichmanns inhabiting the sterile sanctuary of the twin towers, I’d really be interested in hearing about it. — Ward Churchill

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