Notable Quotables - 01/22/1990
Beantown Blame
"Ronald Reagan. Lee
Atwater. George Bush. Charles Stuart. Ray Flynn. The Boston Globe.
These are as connected as runners passing a baton, especially when it comes to
tarring and feathering an entire race because of a set of distorted
perceptions....Charles Stuart got permission from these national leaders to
kill his wife and blame a black man for it...You don't have to wear a sheet to
be a bigot. You just have to pass the baton of sick and skewed perceptions,
like Reagan, Atwater, Bush, Stuart, Flynn and the Globe."
- USA Today "guest columnist" Julianne Malveaux, January
17.
"This is about
racism, and it's not particularly about Boston. We were all had in this
country because we all buy the racial stereotypes, and George Bush gave the
green light with the Willie Horton campaign."
- Newsweek reporter Eleanor Clift on The McLaughlin Group,
January 14.
Page One, One By One
"CIA Director Under
Fire: Bush Aides See Webster as Ineffective"
- Washington Post, October 16, 1989
"Cavazos Gets Low
Marks: Education Secretary Rebuts Criticism"
- Washington Post, January 3, 1990
"Goodwill for
Thornburgh Erodes: Critics Charge Attorney General Has Yet to Define
Priorities"
- Washington Post, January 6
"Chief of Staff
Sununu: Bush's Fiery Enforcer: Adviser Seen Lacking Overall Strategy"
- Washington Post, January 10
"HHS Secretary
Still Struggling For Influence: Sullivan Undercut On Health Policies"
- Washington Post, January 17
Simplistic Salvador
"During the past
decade of civil war here, churches have been perceived as being pro-rebel
because of their sympathy for the poor and oppressed."
- ABC's Gary Shepard on the January 8 World News Tonight.
Bill Moyers, Progressive
"Now the lessons of
Iran-Contra are also clear. We have learned this: that a President who lies to
Congress and to the people will feel free to joke about it. A Vice President
who lies to Congress and to the people will be elected President. A White
House aide who lies to Congress and to the people will be hailed as a hero
until the time for a reckoning comes...An administration, in short, that lies
to Congress and to the people is the accepted order of things. And a
Constitution designed to prevent exactly that order is a mere scrap of
paper."
- PBS' Bill Moyers writing in the January 1990 issue of The Progressive.
President Rather?
"Throughout the
half hour, as he does night after night on the air, Dan Rather doesn't just
seem authoritative. He doesn't just seem anchorly. He seems
presidential."
- Washington Post television critic Tom Shales reviewing the PBS
documentary A Day With Dan Rather, January 8.
Balanced Budget = Depression
"I think that if we
had a balanced budget amendment through the Reagan years, we would have had a
depression...One of the functions, at least in the modern economy, of the
federal government, is to act as a pump primer. Reagan's administration did it
inadvertently, as it were, other administrations have done it intentionally.
But I think the deficit, the monstrous deficit must be dealt with, but one
still has to concede it was largely responsible for driving the economic
recovery out of the '81-'82 recession."
- Time Washington Bureau Chief Stanley Cloud on C-SPAN, January 12.
CBS, Your Naysaying Network
"It's going to be
very, very slow. We're probably going just to skirt a recession. It's going to
be very uncomfortable for a lot of people at least for the first half of the
year."
- Economics reporter Ray Brady's 1990 forecast, December 31 Evening News.
"So, no recession
probably, just a slowdown along with some inflation, though not the
double-digit kind. Economists have an old familiar word for that, Dan -
stagflation."
- Richard Threlkeld on 1990, January 12 CBS Evening News.
Lesley on Ronnie
Bill Moyers: "When
it comes to visuals, do you miss Ronald Reagan?"
Lesley Stahl:
"Well, I guess as a television reporter yes, but as an American citizen,
no."
- Exchange on Bill Moyers: The Public Mind, November 22.
Busting Up The Bullies
"Democrats by and
large remained uncritical of this occasional gunplay. After all, Sheriff
Reagan mostly fired in the air, harmlessly busting up the bullies on a weekend
drunk. And besides, in the heat of a national pep rally, any downbeat voice
was easily scored as whiny and defeatist."
- Los Angeles Times writer Barry Bearak on Reagan's 1986 military
actions against Libya, December 18.
Communist High Ideals
"A common thread
joining a number of the reform communists is that their parents became
communists in the more idealistic, risky era of the 1930s and 1940s, when the
party was fighting fascism...In the case of those men, there is a long, if
slender, thread to a pre-Stalinist time when communists in Eastern Europe were
outsiders fighting for high ideals of justice."
- Reporter Dan Morgan in the January 2 Washington Post.
"The question, now,
is where does Gorbachev stand?...That sense of lingering anxiety never seems
to leave the Soviet political scene for a single day. As Macchiavelli wrote in
his 16th-century treatise on power, 'A great reformer is always an endangered
prince.'"
- Washington Post reporter David Remnick on Gorbachev's trip to
Lithuania, January 15.
Coming Clean
"I'm a life-long
Democrat."
- former NBC News President Reuven Frank at a People for the American Way
sponsored forum broadcast by C-SPAN.
- L. Brent
Bozell III; Publisher
- Brent H. Baker, Tim Graham; Editors
- Callista Gould, Jim Heiser, Marian Kelley, Gerard Scimeca; Media Analysts
- Kristin K. Bashore; Administrative Assistant
