RWN’s Favorite Quotes And Excerpts From A Year Of Interviews

Here are some of my favorite quotes and excerpts from the interviews that were done at RWN in 2006.

“The phenomena to be explained are the irrationality and the ardor of European anti-Americanism. Irrational, because entirely disproportionate to any real faults in American society. Of course America has flaws, and no, it is not lunacy to point them out. But in poll after poll, you see substantial numbers of Europeans, non-trivial numbers, who believe the September 11 attacks were staged, yes, staged, by an oil-hungry American military-industrial complex to justify its imperialist adventures in Iraq. In Germany, 20 percent of the population believes this. In France, a book arguing this case was a galloping bestseller. Now that is bughouse nuts. Totally bats in the belfry. Then the ardor: “My anti-Americanism,” wrote one columnist in the British Telegraph, “has become almost uncontrollable. It has possessed me, like a disease. It rises up in my throat like acid reflux, that fashionable American sickness.” If only we could harness all that outrage and transform it into a non-polluting energy source! You see this kind of thing all the time in the European press. (Meanwhile, if the French, say, wipe out the entire Ivorian air force, do you see protestors on the streets chanting “No blood for cocoa?” What a question.) When you have these two phenomena together-irrationality and this curious passion, this fervor-it seems reasonable to conclude that you are in the presence of something like a cult. So you consider it, sociologically. What role does this ideology serve in the European psyche? One answer: It fulfills many of the roles once played by the Church. It offers a comprehensive-if lunatic-answer to the question, “Why is the world the way it is, and why is there evil in that world?” It provides a devil to excoriate and then to exorcise. There is community and belonging in anti-American activism, ecstasy in protest. Again, a form of Christian heresy, and no more lunatic, surely, than anything the Cathars believed, if also no less.” — Claire Berlinski

“On deficit spending, I think that one of the reasons, today, that Republicans have so much wind in their face at the national level…people talk about the war in Iraq, people talk about a lot of things, but I think it has been the spending. Spending has caused people across this country to look at Republicans in a different way. It’s like we’ve lost our brand at the national level of being the Party of limited government.” — Bob Corker

“John Hawkins: Earlier this year, Sean Penn admitted that he keeps an Ann Coulter doll around that he tortures for fun. Any comment on that beyond the fact that Penn is obviously mentally disturbed?

Ann Coulter: I’d always suspected that Sean Penn was the type of “man” who plays with dolls, but I assumed that he liked the life-sized ones you have to inflate first.” — here

“Thank you, John McCain and Chris Shays — I give them more credit for the minority than anybody else because…McCain-Feingold destroyed the party’s ability to play on a level playing field in these elections.” — Tom DeLay

“I wanted to go after entitlements. That’s where the real spending is and the first year of the last Congress, when I got to write an agenda, we had reconciliation as a process in there and we looked at every entitlement program, reformed every one of them, and saved 40 billion dollars. I wanted to do that every year and treat entitlements like you would appropriations and over time, get rid of entitlements as process. Entitlements should be outlawed in America. Every government program shouldn’t be on automatic pilot. It should be looked at and appropriated for every year.” — Tom DeLay

“What Republicans always do when they call me — and I get phone calls from Republicans a lot, John, — they say what can they do to increase the percentage of blacks (voting for me)? Honestly? Stop kissing *ss, stop talking to them like they’re children. Talk to them like they’re adults. Give the same speech to black people that you would give in a suburb. Don’t change it, don’t alter, don’t try and soft pedal it because it’s insulting, it’s condescending.” — Larry Elder

“Then you get this line of, “What I’m in favor of is free trade as long as it’s fair trade,” and what that means is when a Japanese company gets government subsidies or a Korean company gets government subsidies, then it’s “unfair” and, therefore, we should punish them by foreclosing their markets. My response to that is if Japan wants to screw its own citizens and coin money into businesses that otherwise can’t compete, that’s their problem. We (shouldn’t complain) because steel is cheaper and, therefore, cars are cheaper, our appliances are cheaper, and if other countries want to engage in this kind of subsidizing of goods so that customers overseas benefit, let ’em do it.” — Larry Elder

“I have never heard an enlisted man say anything nice about the media, (but) I have heard them say, out of nowhere, “I hate the bleeping media,”…” — Michael Fumento

“Well, the US is following in the same basic pattern (in Iraq) that we’ve followed for 60 years in expanding freedom around the world. (The first step is) that we stand up a free government and we’ve done that in Iraq.

The second step is we stand up a military capable of protecting that government and the third step is the US leaves. We followed that pattern in Japan and the Philippines and Salvadore and our own hemisphere and it’s been the traditional and the effective method of this country spreading freedom around the world.” — Duncan Hunter

“(The New York Times is) often wrong, never unsure.” — Duncan Hunter

“The notion that American women face a discriminatory wage gap, which is vigorously promoted by the kind of woman I talk about in this book, is absolutely untrue. Yet, how often have we heard that a woman with similar education levels, skills, and experience gets paid only 76 cents to a man’s dollar? The so-called wage gap is the gift that keeps on giving to the modern woman’s movement.

The basic economic point should first be appreciated. If it’s true that a woman with the exact same qualifications and experience would be willing to work for 76 cents to a man’s dollar, who would ever hire a man? You could hire an all female work force and bury the competition. There is no discriminatory wage gap.” — Kate O’Beirne

“I do not believe the defense of America should rest on the shoulders of single mothers and teenage girls. Then, of course, we see the unique physical demands of combat. The plain fact is that the average woman is simply not as fast or as strong as the average man. The advocates for integrating combat argue that women should serve in any position the military has to offer, “as long as they meet the physical standards.” But in fact, women in uniform do not meet the same physical standards as men.

In the interest of integrating the services, every service has had to adopt gender norm scores for its physical tests to account for the fact that women simply aren’t as physically strong or fast as men. So those physical tests have been gender normed and physical standards have been lowered in order to accommodate large numbers of women.” — Kate O’Beirne

“Women’s studies departments prepare their graduates for one job, it seems to me, and that’s to be a professional aggrieved feminist. Not that that’s not a promising occupation, because there’s a lot of money in being an aggrieved professional feminist.” — Kate O’Beirne

“Well, I think it is because of this: in our Constitution that was adopted and the people ratified it, that became a contract between the people and their government and we lived under that until 1971 which is almost 200 years. It was amended some 16 times, an average of once every 10 to 11 years. From 1933 to 1971 it was amended 7 times for an average of once every 5 to 6 years. Now, since 1971 far left groups, radical groups, learned it was easier to convince 5 members of the Supreme Court to change the Constitution than to convince the voters and their elected representatives to change it.

We have not had a constitutional amendment that has been initiated and adopted since 1971. That’s totally contrary to our past history and these were substantive amendments. They had to do with abolishing slavery, providing what states could not deprive its citizens of due process, it gave the right to vote to women, it gave the right to vote to 18 years olds. These were hot-button issues that we dealt with according to the amendment process.

It’s only been in the last 30 years that those who have a liberal philosophy say that the Constitution is too sacred to be amended and it is too difficult and too cumbersome to do so when it wasn’t too cumbersome for 170 years. They still don’t think it’s too sacred for judges to amend it or change it. But to me it’s the height of arrogance to say that we’ve got to have 5 super legislators sitting on the bench changing the Constitution. That’s not democratic. It turns the principle of, “We the people,” upside down. It turns it on its head.” — Charles Pickering

“Rome didn’t have a written constitution but the American people said we want to know what our Constitution means. We don’t want to have to depend on the whims of some judge as to what the law is or is not. So the Constitution – the concept of a living Constitution in Supreme Chaos — I describe it as a Mystery Constitution because you don’t know what it means until five judges meet in secret and debate and argue what it means and then announce to you and tell you what it means. So that really does away with the concept or the purpose of a written Constitution. A written Constitution is so that you know what your Constitution means. You don’t have to depend on judges telling you what it mean.” — Charles Pickering

“The same Constitution that gives ACLU the right to freedom of speech gives Christians the same right to freedom of speech, gives them the right to petition their government, the right to assemble.” — Charles Pickering

“Politics increasingly isn’t command and control anymore, but it is network warfare. So, it’s not hurtful to us if you’re focusing on topics that aren’t necessarily at the top of the mind in the Beltway, because I think if it’s important, it will rise to the top of the mind in the Beltway. …The ability of bloggers to impact the mainstream media stories is increasing, by the day almost.” — Patrick Ruffini

“Well, my view of Europe in 20 years’ time is that you’ll be switching on the TV, you’ll be looking at scenes of burning and conflagration and riots in the street. You will have a couple of countries that are maybe in civil war, at least on the brink of it.

You will have neofascists’ resurgence in some countries and you’ll have other countries that have just been painlessly euthanized in which a Muslim political class has effectively got its way without a shot being fired — and large numbers of people, particularly young people, have left those countries and have moved on to whoever will take them.” — Mark Steyn

“If Islam is incompatible with democracy, that’s not a problem for Iraq, it’s a problem for Belgium, you know, because Iraq until, you know, a few months back had no democracy to lose. They can easily adjust to the way it’s always been. For Belgium or for Denmark or for the Netherlands, they’ve got real democracies and they are likely to lose and as you see, I think that is really the issue here, that when these contradictions are pointed out, Europeans essentially refuse to acknowledge them. Yet at the same time they’re making capitulations to the most naked form of political bullying –and that’s when Islam is officially a minority of, you know, 10% or so. In those cities it’s a lot higher already. What happens when it’s 30%?” — Mark Steyn

“When people say, “How come you Canadian and Australian and British people are writing in America,” and I say, “Well, that’s because too many of you guys have paid a fortune to go to journalism school and lost the ability to write.” (laughs) We foreigners didn’t suffer that crippling disadvantage.” — Mark Steyn

“…(Under Communism) Everything is owned by the government and then if you work or don’t work, you get paid the same. On paper it’s looks beautiful, but in reality, it just can’t happen. That’s why they fell apart. The country was going broke. They tried to compete with the United States, in arms, in the Cold War and they couldn’t do it, because Russian workers didn’t make very much money and just couldn’t compete with a capitalistic country where one person could feed a family….while in Russia, you had a hard time trying to feed yourself.

…Americans really don’t know how good they have it here. In Russia, you used to go to a store to buy a car? You’d have to stay on a list there for a couple of months, if you were lucky, and then only something like 10% of the people had a car. Then, if you were looking to rent an apartment, if you were lucky, it would take you 10-15 years. See, the American people couldn’t understand that because it’s one thing to hear something or read something, but it’s another thing to see it and experience something. If you read something, you think it might be one way, it might be another way, but if you experience it, you know.” — Nikolai Volkoff

“Republicans need to understand that people are tired of (candidates) talking like Republicans, but acting like Democrats.

They’re tired of this administration, not because of George Bush’s policies, but because he has been unwilling to stand up and veto excessive spending that Reagan would have choked on. Reagan vetoed a highway funding bill because it had a 121 pork barrel items. He called that unconscionable. This (highway bill) has 6,000 pork barrel earmark items in it. Reagan would have had no trouble vetoing that.

When they look at a Congress that stands up for all the liberal causes and votes for minimum wage increases, led by Republicans — the people back in the conservative districts…are saying, “Enough is enough. You’re using us conservatives. You expect us to carry you through and get you into office, but then you walk away from us. We’re going to…take an incumbent, that was put into office as a Republican, but voted liberal, and we’re going to throw him out.” — Tim Walberg

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