The Best of Notable Quotables; December 24, 1990

Damn Those Conservatives Award

"If you’re miffed because the Cold War’s over, Ceaucescu’s dead, the Sandinistas lost the election in Nicaragua and it seems like here’s no one around to hate any more, then maybe The Hunt for Red October is just the thing....This is a Reagan youth’s wet dream of underwater ballistics and East-West conflict."

-- Washington Post film critic Desson Howe in the "Weekend" section, March 2.

Runners-Up:

"In a year that has had some of the dirtiest, the sleaziest, the most misleading ads ever, it’s hard to pick the very worst, but here are a couple that the experts chose. North Carolina’s Jesse Helms, who battled a black opponent, last week overtly introduced the most divisive issue of the contest, race....The truth is Gantt supported the vetoed civil rights bill which he argued specifically warned against quotas."

-- ABC reporter Jackie Judd on Nightline, November 6.

"What Helms has done is taken the words ‘North Carolina values’ -- a beautiful phrase that evokes the small-town, good-hearted sense of place that one feels when one travels the state -- and redefined them as the values belonging to a certain group of North Carolinians, mostly white, mostly male, mostly unhappy with the changes of the last 30 years. To Helms and his supporters, ‘North Carolina values’ seems to translate into a status quo view of the world in which blacks, women, and poor people know their stations in society."

-- Reporter Juan Williams in The Washington Post Magazine,October 28.

"Are you not also in danger of people looking at the Republican Party after this whole experience, and saying, ‘Oh, now we do know what they stand for that’s different. They stand for helping the rich and at the same time, the President’s talking about vetoing the civil rights bill, so helping the rich and white guys?’"

-- ABC and NPR reporter Cokie Roberts to Richard Darman, October 21 This Week with David Brinkley.

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