Notable Quotables - 05/27/1991
How to Save New York
"Take the $50
billion we'll spend subduing the next 'Middle East Madman' and give it to our
50,000 homeless people. Each would receive a ranch home ($250,000), store
credit at Barney's ($10,000), college education ($80,000), two cars ($60,000),
deluxe motor home ($45,000), country club membership ($25,000), plus golf
lessons and a decent set of clubs ($5,000), speedboat ($25,000) and $500,000
in cash."
- CBS News correspondent Bill Geist on how to save New York City, May 17 New
York Times survey.
Arrogance on Parade
"We made Gen. [H.
Norman] Schwarzkopf what he is today, and the next Gen. Schwarzkopf would like
to have similar treatment."
- Time Washington Bureau Chief Stanley Cloud in The Washington
Post, May 14.
Cheering for Gun Control
"A Blow to The
N.R.A.: The House takes an overdue stand for gun control"
- Time headline, May 20
"It's much too
early to say whether this is going to have a real impact on crime in America.
But it is nonetheless a cause for celebration because of what you mentioned,
that is, it's a defeat for the National Rifle Association, which is nothing
less than an American disgrace and it's really great to see them take one on
the chin."
- Time Editor-At-Large Strobe Talbott on Inside Washington,
May 11.
"This [Brady] bill
is just to say to the NRA 'You've gone too far.' Really all this represents is
just common sense winning out for the first time against the big bucks of the
NRA."
- Washington Post reporter Juan Williams on CNN's Capital Gang,
May 11.
Kinsley the Moderate, McLaughlin the Ultraconservative
"The conservative
tilt on some shows is so pronounced that flaming moderates are passed off as
hard-core liberals. Such commentators as Al Hunt, Mark Shields and Michael
Kinsley hardly seem as far to the left as Robert Novak, Pat Buchanan, and John
McLaughlin are to the right, but their presence provides a superficial sort of
'balance.'"
- Media reporter Howard Kurtz, May 19 Washington Post Magazine.
"Undoctrinaire Conservatism"
"[Nancy Kassebaum]
is famous for the independent streak that led her to oppose Ronald Reagan on
school prayer, Star Wars, and a balanced-budget amendment while supporting
abortion rights and sanctions against South Africa....Her undoctrinaire
conservatism could be just the thing, however, to help the G.O.P. attract
suburban swing voters who may identify with the party on economics but are put
off by the more strident right-wing positions on social questions like
abortion rights."
- Unbylined Time story, May 20.
An Aging Whine
"But conservatives
failed Americans by trying to placate both supply-siders and traditional
Republicans with an economic model that included massive tax cuts and higher
defense spending. The Republican legacy is a $3 trillion debt, held in large
part by foreign investors, and a populace that feels cheated by a government
that doesn't seem to work."
- Time Washington reporter Michael Duffy, May 20 book review.
The New York Times Mourns for Eastern Europe
"For the two dozen
gypsy families living here in the ruined shell of an old army barracks, the
dawning of a market economy has brought nothing but bad news - layoffs, high
prices and still no relief from the discrimination that has always kept
Hungary's gypsies at society's edge."
- New York Times reporter Celestine Bohlen, May 5.
"For years, the
nations of the Eastern bloc grumbled that Moscow's arcane system for trade
with its allies was little more than a swindle. Just give us a chance to sell
our goods for cold hard dollars, they insisted, and we will show you who comes
out ahead. On Jan. 1 they got their wish, and they have rued the day ever
since."
- New York Times reporter Stephen Engelberg beginning a front-page
article, May 6.
Reagan's Emasculation
"In the last
decade, gambling has increasingly been sanctioned by the states as the ideal
way out of budgetary red ink - in fact, the only way short of raising taxes
or cutting services. It is rally Ronald Reagan's fault: His steady
emasculation of federal domestic programs forced the states to increase their
own spending on essential services although they had no accompanying source of
increased revenue."
- Hearst Newspapers columnist and former reporter Marianne Means in the Seattle
Post-Intelligencer, April 29. (Thanks to Tim Ferguson.)
We Know What's Good for You
"You saw almost no
casualties of this war, either American or Iraqi. That was decided. It's a
decision that war for the American public, and in the way the American press
will be permitted to see it, should be preferably brief, nonviolent to the
extent that images can be restricted, and not debated. That's a bad system.
It's particularly bad, and I find it particularly troubling, because the
American public seems to have liked it."
- New York Times reporter James LeMoyne speaking at a Berkeley
symposium shown on the CBS News program Sunday Morning, May 12.
What Central America Needs: More Government
"Is enough being
done to help the poorest survive and find a niche in a new, more competitive
environment? Could the free-market cure be pushed so far that it destroys a
vital mainstay of Third World stability: the benevolent state?"
- Boston Globe Latin America correspondent Pamela Constable, May 12.
Freedom Fighters, Communists: What's the Difference?
"More than any of
the other conflicts of the last decade, the struggle for Nicaragua was a
contest in which the Administration seemed sure of the good guys and the bad
guys, while on the ground it was almost impossible to tell the
difference."
- Former Newsweek Central America reporter Christopher Dickey
reviewing Stephen Kinzer's Blood of Brothers: Life and War in Nicaragua
in the April 28 Los Angeles Times.
We Only Care About White Disaster Victims
"I think there is
racial prejudice in the media. There is a tendency to discount, or weigh less
heavily, disasters to people who, not because they're remote so much, but are
of a different skin color....I just mean that if there were a couple of
million blonde, blue-eyed people facing starvation somewhere, I think the
media coverage would be so intense we'd know their names by this time."
- Time essayist Barbara Ehrenreich on Nightline, May 1.
Hide Those Flaming Tires
"Mr. Mandela, a
lawyer by profession, is a strong advocate of the rule of law..."
- Christian Science Monitor staff writer John Battersby, May 15.
- L. Brent Bozell III;
Publisher
- Brent H. Baker, Tim Graham; Editors
- Nicholas Damask, Sally Hood, Marian Kelley, Tim Lamer; Media Analysts
- Jennifer Hardebeck; Circulation Manager
