This Week In Quotes: April 16 – April 22

16 Apr, 2010 by John Hawkins

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I miss the swaggering cowboy. He may have been tongue-tied; he may have screwed up with an errant backrub, but the didn’t boy to royalty, he didn’t give embarrassing gifts to allies, he didn’t show the Dalai Lama the back door. He never said to a visiting ally (paraphrased) “I’m gonna go have dinner with Laura, and if you decide to obey me, I’ll be around.” — The Anchoress

The general consensus — not knowing again the exact number of centrifuges that we actually have visibility into — is we’re talking one year (until Iran has nukes) — Lieutenant General Ronald Burgess

Simply put, President Obama is disadvantaging the United States one step at a time and undermining this country’s national defense on purpose. Whether he is catering to the anti-war leftists or truly doing what he thinks is best for our security, the president is leading this nation down a very dangerous path. — Rep. John Fleming

Immigration is going nowhere this year. — Lindsey Graham

One thing you can say for Barack Obama, he knows who his enemies are: Great Britain, Israel, the newly free East European countries, Honduras, Colombia. America’s friends in general. Republicans, of course, above all. — John Hinderaker

Dear Lord this year you have taken away my favorite actor, Patrick Swayze, my favorite actress, Farrah Fawcett, my favorite singer, Michael Jackson, and my favorite salesman, Billy Mays. I just wanted to let you know that Chris Christie is my favorite governor. — The explanation: Association president Joe Coppola

What lingers in the mind, in the midst of this surging economic and political titan with its dozens of vast, ultra-modern cities, its advanced plans to land men on the Moon, its utopian schemes to control population and its unstoppable power over the rest of the world, is the inconsolable misery of the bereft parents, the pinched squalor of the places where they must try to live a happy life, the jaunty wickedness of the cheap abortion clinics and the classrooms full of the ghosts of all those girls who were never born. — Peter Hitchens

I think this is not about trying to create statements for people who want to change the basic fundamental definitions of family. And always we should act in the best interest of the children, not in the seeming interest of the adults. Children are not puppies. This is not a time to see if we can experiment and find out, how does this work? — Mike Huckabee

on gay marriage

Whether we like it or not, we remain a dominant military superpower… — Barack Obama

It might help score some rhetorical points on the claim that Obama’s plan isn’t “radical” but it goes nowhere in making the case that Republicans should have supported ObamaCare. I’m sure our friends at Heritage have a more wonky answer as to why they are not the intellectual authors of ObamaCare. But let’s stipulate that ObamaCare is fully faithful to an old idea of Heritage’s. So…what?

Tax withholding was partially invented by Milton Friedman. He ended up regretting what happened to his idea. Should conservatives embrace withholding as a good idea forever? Richard Nixon imposed wage controls. Does that mean Republicans have no standing to complain when/if Obama introduces wage controls (as he basically has for the bailed out banks). Or, if you really want to get whacky, FDR rounded up American citizens of Japanese descent during wartime. Does that mean today’s Democrats have no good reason to oppose rounding up Arab or Muslim Americans? Of course not.

Conservatives were pretty split over RomneyCare at the outset. Now that the results are in, the near-settled consensus is that it was a well-intentioned but misguided approach (and it was at the state level, which changes the constitutional and philosophical issues considerably). It’s understandable why Romney wants to claim that RomneyCare was completely different than ObamaCare and a great success, but he’s increasingly alone in making that claim. — Jonah Goldberg

By 2012, America could be holding the first federal election in which a majority of the population will be able to vote themselves more government lollipops paid for by the ever-shrinking minority of the population still dumb enough to be net contributors to the federal treasury. In less than a quarter-millennium, the American Revolution will have evolved from “No taxation without representation” to representation without taxation. We have bigger government, bigger bureaucracy, bigger spending, bigger deficits, bigger debt, and yet an ever smaller proportion of citizens paying for it. — Mark Steyn

Congressman Paul Ryan pointed out recently that, by 2004, 20 percent of U.S. households were getting about 75 percent of their income from the federal government. As a matter of practical politics, how receptive would they be to a pitch for lower taxes, which they don’t pay, or lower government spending, of which they are such fortunate beneficiaries? How receptive would another fifth of households, who receive about 40 percent of their income from federal programs, be to such a pitch? — Mark Steyn

My advice to New York Times readers is cancel your subscription, read it on the Web for free and buy The Journal — Wall Street Journal managing editor Robert Thomson

Every single moment that we are stroking our beards and gazing at our navel and thinking about the world we’d like to be and singing ‘Kumbaya’ is another day we’re not punching Bill O’Reilly in the nose. —Anthony Weiner