The Best of Notable Quotables; December 21, 1992

Festival of Hate Award (for Republican Convention Coverage)

“The whole week was double-ply, wall-to-wall ugly...the Republican Party reached an unimaginably slouchy, and brazen, and constant, level of mendacity last week...[Bush] is in campaign mode now, which means mendacity doesn’t matter, aggression is all and wall-to-wall ugly is the order of battle for the duration.”

– Senior Editor Joe Klein on the Republican convention, August 31 Newsweek.

Runners-up:

“The only excited, demonstrative delegates any of us could find were the ones from the religious right, Pat Robertson’s God and Country rally. They remind me of those Goldwater delegates of 28 years ago, far more interested in imposing ideological purity on this party than they are on winning the election. They were happy today. They got the platform they want. No room for a pregnant woman to make any decision at all, even if she was raped. It’s a platform tough on welfare, tough on taxes and guns and gays and pornography, tough even on public radio and public television. They cheered Dan Quayle this afternoon and they will cheer Pat Buchanan and Ronald Reagan tonight, but will they help elect George Bush? It’s almost as if they haven’t thought of that, Dan.”

– Charles Kuralt during August 17 CBS Republican convention coverage.

“Very frankly, I am very puzzled by one paragraph, one sentence in the Vice President’s speech on page six. In a very petulant voice, and listen to the words: he said, ‘To Governor Clinton I say this: America is the greatest nation in the world and that’s one thing you’re not going to change.’ Implying that Clinton is some kind of guerrilla, saboteur, or what have you. That’s my reaction to that line Ken Bode, I don’t know about you. It implies something that, it seems that he’s saying you’re not as American as I am, your blood is not as red as mine.”

– CNN’s Bernard Shaw after Vice President Quayle’s speech, August 20.

“Bush, the exponent of a ‘kinder, gentler’ approach to government at the 1988 convention, was presented with a 1992 platform loaded with puritanical, punitive language that not only forbade abortions but attacked public television, gun control, homosexual rights, birth control clinics and the distribution of clean needles for drug users.”

– Boston Globe reporter Curtis Wilkie, August 18 news story.

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