Notable Quotables - 01/06/1992
Last Gasping Gorbasms
"Well let me say
how I hope history will judge him. Perhaps in time with help and work, people
here will improve their everyday lives and remember Gorbachev's
accomplishments and that would seem to me fair. I remember not only the end
but the beginning of the Cold War and the forty years of fear Gorbachev more
than anyone else ended. He seems to me to have done more good in the world
than any other national leader of my lifetime."
- NBC News Moscow reporter Bob Abernethy, December 24 Nightly News.
"The Nobel Prize he
received for ending the Cold War was well deserved. Every man, woman and child
in this country should be eternally grateful. His statue should stand in the
center of every east European capital....No Russian has done more to free his
people from bondage since Alexander II who freed the serfs."
- Boston Globe Senior Associate Editor H.D.S. Greenway, December 27 column.
Post-Communist Realities
Bernard Shaw:
"CNN's Eileen O'Connor looks at how the Soviets' dreams of prosperity can
conflict with the reality of developing a market economy within an unstable
political system."
Reporter Eileen
O'Connor: "...Mikhael dreams of being rich. He knows he will have to work
hard. But it's scary when there's no more Big Brother."
- CNN World News, December 10.
"In neighboring
Albania, the collapse of communism has left people hungry, cold and hopeless.
A children's hospital in Tirana is overflowing with patients and critically
short of food and medicine."
- Dan Rather after story on Bulgaria, December 19 Evening News.
My, How Time Changed
"The Reagan
Administration has made a bad situation worse in two ways: first, by
convincing the Soviet leaders that the U.S. no longer accepts military parity
as the basis for relations with Moscow; second, by challenging the legitimacy
of the Soviet regime, calling the USSR an `evil empire' doomed to fail."
- Time's Strobe Talbott on pre-Olympics U.S.-Soviet relations, May
21, 1984 issue.
"Gorbachev presided
over the dissolution of a truly evil empire..."
- Time Senior Writer Bruce Nelan, January 6, 1992 issue.
Buchanan Bashing
"For Buchanan, Bush
is insufficiently Buchanan-like - not nativist, rightist, homophobic,
authoritarian or anti-Israel enough."
- Time Deputy Washington Bureau Chief Margaret Carlson, December 23.
"What do you say to
the idea that any President must be President of all the people and your
written record of insensitivity toward blacks, Jews, gays, Latins, Asians, et
cetera makes Pat Buchanan wholly unqualified?"
- Bryant Gumbel interviewing Pat Buchanan on Today, December 11.
Hate That Military-Industrial Complex
"Real political
discourse has all but vanished from Hollywood filmmaking; above and beyond
whether [director Oliver] Stone's take on the assassination is right, his film
is a powerful, radical vision of America's drift toward covert government.
What other filmmaker is even thinking about the uses and abuses of
power?....That JFK comes out in the reign of our first ex-CIA President is an
irony that hangs unstated over the movie."
- Newsweek movie critic David Ansen, December 23.
More Tax Gas from Time
"Increase taxes on
gasoline and other fuels. This would help finance cuts in other taxes - each
penny-per-gallon increase in the gas tax would generate $1 billion in new
revenues - and would also encourage energy conservation, cut down pollution
and traffic congestion, and reduce the U.S. trade deficit. A good start would
be an increase of 25 cents per gal. - less than the amount by which prices
rose during the gulf war - with further increases of five cents a year."
- One of Time's suggestions for a tax package, December 9.
"Bush wound up
backing the worst of the nine tax-cutting schemes vying for support on Capitol
Hill. Combining deficit financing with favoritism toward the wealthy, Gingrich
would cut the tax on capital gains from the sale of such assets as stocks,
bonds, real estate and timber.....The Gingrich plan would be a bonanza for the
2 per cent of U.S. taxpayers who earn $200,000 or more."
- Time's Dan Goodgame, same issue.
The Year Gone By...
"It was seemingly a
year when women could do no right. When the words of powerful men were
inviolate, when patriarchy and paternalism were clear victors....[Anita] Hill
and [Patricia] Bowman's treatment is the bitter fruit of male power, which is
not just symbolic but real. Women still receive unequal pay for the more than
equal work they perform. Although they represent the bulk of the shoppers,
churchgoers and voters, they have virtually no voice in economic, religious or
political affairs."
- USA Today "Inquiry" Editor Barbara Reynolds, December
27.
"John Sununu's
Resignation. The White House chief of staff was notorious for his hostility to
environmentalists and their agenda. If it was good for the earth but bad for
business, Sununu's opposition generally persuaded the President - witness the
administration's refusal to take global warming seriously."
- One of Time magazine's "Best of 1991" events for the
environment, January 6.
...And the Year to Come
"With the [PBS]
system now heavily reliant on gun-shy corporations for funding, and with the
board of the Corporation for Public Broadcasting now heavily infiltrated with
right-wing kooks, the outlook for public TV is discouragingly bleak."
- Washington Post television critic Tom Shales, December 29.
Pro-Death Pro-Lifers?
"Bush has kept in
place his predecessor's withdrawal of U.S. payments to the U.N. Fund for
Population Activities on the specious grounds that they support abortion. Bush
continues to pay lip service to this canard out of fear of Republican
right-wingers who claim to be `pro-life.' In its implications for the slums
and villages of the Third World, that slogan disguises a policy that is
pro-death."
- Time Editor-at-Large Strobe Talbott, December 16.
Free Market, Pro-Democracy: Must Be Reactionaries
"In Johannesburg, a
report that the South African government continued secret funding of the
reactionary black Inkatha Party despite a pledge to stop."
- Dan Rather on the CBS Evening News, December 13.
Urban Crime? Republicans Cut Counseling
"We've got an urban
mess out there. But the reason is because Republican administrations have cut
back on counseling, on job training programs. You've got an urban area out
there where joblessness is high. That's why you have a problem out
there."
- Boston Globe's Michael Frisby, November 24 Off The Record.
Dan Rather's Poetry Corner
"Stay with CBS now
for more news, including: Is there a pall over the mall as holiday shoppers
think small?"
- Dan Rather on the CBS Evening News, December 2.
- L. Brent Bozell III;
Publisher
- Brent H. Baker, Tim Graham; Editors
- Brant Clifton, Nicholas Damask, Steve Kaminski, Marian Kelley, Tim Lamer;
Media Analysts
- Jennifer Hardebeck; Circulation Manager
