This Week In Quotes: Jan 5 – Jan 12

13 Jan, 2012 by John Hawkins

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Romney is starting to come across as a bully. Everybody understands that he has all these friends who can write big checks and they hide behind a super PAC, and they run negative ads. And that comes across as the rich kid who shows up showing you all the toys he has and then, when you’re not looking, takes yours away. And I think that that starts to smell bad to people when they see a candidate that’s going to run that type of relentless, negative barrage and feels that’s the best way to get elected. — Santorum Adviser John Brabender

You know, something may be going down tonight, but it ain’t going to be jobs, sweetheart. — Chris Christie response to heckler screaming about jobs going down

Those of us who believe in free markets and those of us who believe that in fact the whole goal of investment is entrepreneurship and job creation, we find it pretty hard to justify rich people figuring out clever legal ways to loot a company, leaving behind 1,700 families without a job. — Newt Gingrich

Feminists generally make a life out of feminist activism. Accomplished women are busy focusing on other things, during which feminists will come up and slap a label on them and unwittingly co-opt them to their cause. — Rachel Marsden

The other point I would make about integrity is that it goes close to the core of why a Romney nomination worries me so much: because we would all have to make so many compromises to defend him that at the end of the day we may not even recognize ourselves. Romney has, in a career in public office of just four years (plus about 8 years’ worth of campaigning), changed his position on just about every major issue you can think of, and his signature accomplishment in office was to be wrong on the largest policy issue of this campaign. Yes, Obama is bad, and Romney can be defended on the grounds that he can’t possibly be worse. Yes, Romney is personally a good man, a success in business, faith and family. But aside from his business biography, his primary campaign has been built entirely on arguments and strategies — about touting his own electability and dividing, coopting or delegitimizing other Republicans — none of which will be of any use in the general election. What, then, will we as politically active Republicans say about him? I was not a huge fan of John McCain’s record, but I was comfortable making honest points about the things McCain had been consistent on over the years — national security, free trade, nuclear power, public integrity, pork-barrel spending. There were spots of solid ground on which to plant ourselves with McCain, and he had a history of digging himself in on those and fighting for things he believed in. But Mitt Romney’s record is just one endless sheet of thin ice as far as the eye can see — there’s no way to have any kind of confidence that we can tell people he stands for something today without being made fools of tomorrow. We who have laughed along with Jim Geraghty’s prescient point that every Obama promise comes with an expiration date will be the ones laughed at, and worse yet we will know the critics are right. …We can stand for Romney, but we’ll find soon enough that that’s all we stand for.– Dan McLaughlin

I think Romney will clobber Obama if nobody runs negative ads vs Romney in the general. Somehow, this seems unlikely. — Dan McLaughlin

There is something inherently wrong when getting rich off failure and sticking it to someone else is how you do your business and I happen to think that’s indefensible. If you’re a victim of Bain Capital’s downsizing, it’s the ultimate insult for Mitt Romney to come to South Carolina and tell you he feels your pain, because he caused it. — Rick Perry

Leftism fills many of its adherents with contempt and hatred. It takes a person of great character and self-control to continually imbibe and mouth the mantras of the left — that everyone on the right is sexist, intolerant, xenophobic, homophobic, islamophobic, racist and bigoted — and not become a meaner human being. If I believed just about everyone with left-wing views was despicable, I would be meaner, too. — Dennis Prager

This attempt to circumvent the legislative branch is a violation of Obama’s oath of office to uphold and defend the Constitution. Instead he is thumbing his nose at it and daring Congress, or anybody else, to stop him. It’s the same sort of fundamental disrespect for the rule of law that is routinely practiced by tinhorn dictators like Hugo Chavez. — The Washington Examiner

Apparently, our jobless rate is so darned low because a bunch of people gave up on ever finding a job again. So consider us only halfway to Mad Max at Thunderdome and conducing cage fights to determine which of the remaining humans gets the privilege of eating tuna fish out of a can. Given the timeline, you should start praying for the zombie apocalypse now. — Emily Zanotti