This Week In Quotes: April 11 — April 17

18 Jun, 2010 by John Hawkins

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I feel like I’m more mainstream than the fellow that said tourists stink. This war is lost. Light skinned, no Negro dialect. Can I go on and on about what I think a whack job, marginal candidate sounds like, and that’s Harry Reid. And that’s why we need to fire him. He is so out of touch with mainstream America. — Sharron Angle

The president just called for creating a fund that would be administered by outsiders which would be more of a redistribution-of-wealth fund, and now it appears we’re going to be looking at yet one more gateway for more government control, more money to government,” she said. “If there’s a disaster, why is it that government is the one who always seems to benefit after a disaster? — Michelle Bachmann

I do believe when someone has made a mistake they should be criticised. BP deserves to be criticised, but so do the regulators and the American government for not regulating the situation properly. — Richard Branson

Comparing educational achievement with per-pupil spending among states also calls into question the value of increasing expenditures. While high-spending Massachusetts had the nation’s highest proficiency scores on the National Assessment of Educational Progress, low-spending Idaho did very well, too. South Dakota ranks 42nd in per-pupil expenditures but eighth in math performance and ninth in reading. The District of Columbia, meanwhile, with the nation’s highest per-pupil expenditures ($15,511 in 2007), scores dead last in achievement. — Mona Charen

Yup, and the fact that they chose to call themselves “teabaggers,” which is slang for a certain act involving b***s. It sort of says a lot. I would say a mouthful. Looks like it’s very upsetting for them, but he’s brilliant. The thing is, he’s half white but that’s still not enough – for them it’s all white or f**k off. I think we don’t deserve him and certainly teabaggers don’t deserve him. — Carrie Fisher

Allow me to suggest that there are two kinds of crazy in politics.

First, there’s the crazy of the minority — a crazy consisting of wild conspiracy theories by the powerless. A significant minority on the liberal side excelled at this in the Bush years with conspiracy theories about 9/11; a smaller group still went further with protest violence, advocacy for violence against the military, and anti-war rallies at which the yellow Hezbollah flag flew proudly.

In the Obama era, this kind of crazy has been carried forward by the minority of conservatives who are birthers and believers that President Obama is a Muslim; there also the smaller group that actually calls for violence. (And I mean militia groups here, not just people who use figurative campaign language that causes liberals to whine.) In the Clinton era, we had the same thing in the form of the Vince Foster murder conspiracy, etc.

Then there’s the crazy of the majority, characterized by empowered groupthink. As President Bush steamrolled conservative hopes with his Farm Bill, subsidies for unsustainable businesses and executive power grabs, the Right was nearly silent. When he tried to “fix” 9/11 by creating a new and incompetent federal bureaucracy in the Department of Homeland Security, you could hear the crickets. The wisdom of the Iraq War was barely questioned at all by conservatives, and those who did question it (like my old boss, Robert Novak) were denounced by groupthinkers as “unpatriotic.” It wasn’t until the Harriet Miers debacle that the Right really began pushing back. — David Freddoso

(Obama) is frustrated because he cares about the small people and we care about the small people. — Tony Hayward

When NATO was created, Churchill’s friend Lord Ismay said its job was “to keep the Americans in, the Russians out and the Germans down.” Today, NATO is letting the Americans and Afghans down, allowing the Russians and Iranians in — and letting everyone else off the hook. So why are we still part of it? — Arthur Herman

New rule – stop talking about jobs being lost in a murderous, hateful industry like it’s a bad thing. Now, last week I may have hurt a few feelings when my response to the complaint that jobs will be lost in the offshore drilling business was, “F— your jobs.” But I meant it. And it goes double for burning coal and chopping down redwoods. Sorry, roughnecks, but eventually you’re going to have to find something else to do. Try building windmills. You know what happens when windmills collapse into the sea? A splash. You know, it’s Washington gospel that jobs in the private sector are better than government jobs. You even hear Democrats saying it. But oil jobs are private, and look at the toll this industry takes: cooking the planet; enslaving us to Saudi Arabia; killing animals. If the government hired away all the 58,000 oil workers who work now in the state of Louisiana, and paid them their same salary to work repairing infrastructure and building solar panels, it would cost us $5.5 billion which the Pentagon loses every day in the couch. Wouldn’t that be worth it? Is working on an oil rig really that great a job anyway? You spend weeks at a time on a floating well in the ocean. Do you want to avoid your family that bad, take up golf. Yes, the oil industry creates jobs – so does the kiddie porn industry. — Bill Maher

Even though I’m president of the United States, my power is not limitless. So I can’t dive down there and plug the hole. I can’t suck it up with a straw. — Barack Obama

Which brings us to President Obama’s many claims about his health-care reform. Take his oft-expressed statement that if you like the coverage you have, you can keep it. That sounds good–but perverse incentives in his new law will cause most Americans to lose their existing insurance.

This was brought home to me when I asked the CEO of a major restaurant chain about health reform’s effect on his company, which now spends $25 million a year on employee health insurance. That will jump to at least $90 million a year once the new law is phased in. It will be cheaper, he told me, for the company to dump its coverage and pay a fine–$2,000 for each full-time worker–and make sure that no part-time employee accidentally worked 31 hours and thereby incurred the fine. — Karl Rove

As (Obama) wearily explained to Matt Lauer, “I was meeting with fishermen down there, standing in the rain, talking . . . ” Good grief, what more do you people want? Alas, he’s not a good enough actor to fake it. So the more desperately he butches up the rhetoric – “Plug the damn hole!”; “I know whose ass to kick” – the more pathetically unconvincing it all sounds. — Mark Steyn