Notable Quotables - 06/09/2003
Bush's "Cruel War" on the Poor
"Bush promised a foreign policy of humility and a domestic policy of compassion. He has given us a foreign policy of arrogance and a domestic policy that is cynical, myopic and cruel."
-Time's Joe Klein in a June 9 column in the magazine.
"It took a billionaire, Warren Buffett, to point out that the Bush tax plan was 'class warfare.' Too many of the rest of us have acted as if the Bush administration's severe tilt toward the rich was an opinion instead of a fact."
-Jonathan Alter in "Whacking the Waitresses, and the other effects of George W. Bush's war on the poor," posted May 30 on
Newsweek's section of MSNBC.com.
Where's Tax Cut for Non-payers?
"Millions of U.S. taxpayers won't get the rebate they were expecting....It turns out the tax cut the President just signed will not help many who need help the most."
-CBS Evening News fill-in anchor Jane Clayson, May 29.
Peter Jennings: "We're going to begin here in Washington tonight because now that the President's tax cut has become law and people thought the dust of debate had settled here, it turns out that a whole lot of people in the country who could use the money are not going to get it...."
Linda Douglass: "One group of taxpayers was cut out of this legislation at the last minute, and that was low-income working families with children."
-ABC's World News Tonight, May 29.
Tom Brokaw: "What could be an embarrassing omission in his tax cut package: Families making between $10,000 and $26,000 a year come up short...."
Campbell Brown: "At the signing ceremony yesterday, the President lauded the tax cut bill for how much it will help families. An increase in the child tax credit from $600 to $1,000, the President promising the check is in the mail.... But not for families making the minimum wage....Children's advocate groups, who estimate about 11.5 million kids will be denied the benefit, today voiced outrage at the administration and Congress."
-NBC Nightly News, May 29.
Clift Must Not Watch TV News
"How much can Bush get away with before the public and the media hold him accountable?"
-Newsweek's Eleanor Clift in a May 30 Web-only column.
ABC's Omission: Tax Cut's "Big Winners" Most Hurt by Tax Code
"Big winners are rich people and families with children.... The top five percent of taxpayers would get more than half of the benefits from the tax cut. Those who make between $100,000 and $200,000 would get a tax cut of more than $2,500 on their income alone. Those between $500,000 and a million dollars would get an average income tax cut of $17,324."
-ABC's Linda Douglass on the May 22 World News Tonight. Douglass did not reveal that the top five percent of taxpayers account for 56 percent of all federal income taxes even though they earn only 35 percent of income.
Punishing Poor Little Children
"Something got screwed up in terms of your priorities if you think it's more important to get rid of the dividend tax than it is to take care of 11 million kids."
-Washington Post reporter and columnist David Broder on NBC's Meet the
Press, June 1.
"It's the richest Americans - the top one percent - who get the lion's share of the tax cuts, people like Secretary of the Treasury John Snow, [and] Vice President Dick Cheney ....Eleven million children in families with incomes roughly between $10,000 and $26,000 a year will not be getting the check that was supposed to be in the mail this summer. Eleven million children punished for being poor, even as the rich are rewarded for being rich."
-Bill Moyers on his PBS newsmagazine Now, May 30.
"Is it fair to say that the White House...at the end of the day thought that to make progress, the benefit for these 11.9 million children should go in order to, in part, save the dividend benefit for investors?...I just want to make sure that you are saying that the White House agreed to make the choice to leave these children behind."
-ABC White House correspondent Terry Moran to Press Secretary Ari Fleischer at the May 29 briefing.
Big Government Is Starving
"The majority of the money goes to people who probably already have everything they need....Plus, it raises serious questions about social equity. I mean, who paves the streets that we drove here on? Who teaches the kids to read?...It's starving the government of money that it could use to do a lot of things."
-ABC's Michel Martin on This Week, May 25.
Reporter Rues U.S. Imperialism...
"I want to speak to you today about war and empire.... We are embarking on an occupation that if history is any guide will be as damaging to our souls as it will be to our prestige and power and security....We have forfeited the goodwill, the empathy the world felt for us after 9/11, we have folded in on ourselves....We are far less secure today than we were before we bumbled into Iraq. We will pay for this, but what saddens me most is that those who will by and large pay the highest price are poor kids from Mississippi or Alabama or Texas who could not get a decent job or health insurance and joined the army because it was all we offered them."
-New York Times reporter Chris Hedges in a May 17 commencement address at Rockford College in Illinois. The graduates booed Hedges off the stage.
...& Raps Frenzied, Jingoistic Kids
"The tragedy is that - and I've seen it in conflict after conflict or society after society that plunges into war - with that kind of rabid nationalism comes racism and intolerance and a dehumanization of the other....People find a kind of ecstasy, a kind of belonging, a kind of obliteration of their alienation in that patriotic fervor that always does come in war time. As I gave my talk and I looked out on the crowd [at Rockford College], I was essentially witnessing things that I had witnessed in the Plaza de Mayo in Argentina or in squares in Belgrade or anywhere else. Crowds, especially crowds that become hunting packs, are very frightening."
-Hedges during a May 21 interview on Democracy Now!, a program on the far-left Pacifica radio network.
Rebuking a Biased News Story
"The apparent bias of the writer and/or the desk reveals itself in the third paragraph, which characterizes such bills in Texas and elsewhere as requiring 'so-called counseling of patients.' I dont think people on the anti-abortion side would consider it 'so-called,' a phrase that is loaded with derision. The story makes a strong case that the link between abortion and breast cancer is widely discredited, but I wondered as I read it whether somewhere there might exist some credible scientist who believes in it. Such a person makes no appearance in the story's lengthy passage about the scientific issue....I want everyone to understand how serious I am about purging all political bias from our coverage....We are not going to push a liberal agenda in the news pages of the
Times."
-Los Angeles Times Editor and Executive Vice President John Carroll in a May 22 memo to other editors after a
Times story about a new Texas abortion law.
CNN Celebrates a Tax Hike
"Here in Washington, the White House is celebrating a tax cut. But at the other end of the country, many voters are celebrating a tax hike....In January, Oregon voters turned down a statewide tax increase. Public schools in Oregon are funded mostly by the state. That left the schools in desperate shape....On Tuesday, voters of Multnomah County, Oregon, which includes Portland, defied the state and voted to impose a county income tax."
-CNN's Bill Schneider awarding his Political Play of the Week to pro-tax activists, May 23
Inside Politics.
GOP Too Nasty, Dems Too Nice
"They [Republicans] have built their strength in the South by appealing to white resentment of civil rights policies, and sometimes by discouraging voting by blacks, as they did last year in Louisiana's Senate runoff, which the Democratic incumbent, Mary L. Landrieu, won anyway by a margin of four percentage points....When it comes to hard-hitting campaign advertisements, they have used everything from Willie Horton's image to the suggestion that Senator Max Cleland, who lost both legs and an arm in Vietnam, was unconcerned about national security."
-New York Times Washington reporter Adam Clymer in a May 25 article on the Republican Party, "Buoyed by Resurgence, G.O.P. Strives for an Era of Dominance."
"Democrats these days lack the killer instinct that it takes to sell blunt, demagogic messages. As Bob Shrum, a prominent consultant for 30 years, said: 'It's probably a weakness that we're not real haters. We don't have a sense that it's a holy crusade. We don't have a sense that it's Armageddon. Or, as Mr. Gore's former campaign manger, [Donna] Brazile put it: 'They play hardball. We play softball.'"
-Clymer in a New York Times story about the Democratic Party the next day.
Ode to a Blowhard
"With his white hair, benign tremor and penchant for quoting the Romans, [Senator Robert] Byrd seems more like a Senator from the 19th century than one from the 21st.... But due to his fierce opposition to the Iraq war, Byrd at 85 has become an Internet icon with a rash of young and liberal admirers....Byrd has become the Senate's new Paul Wellstone....For Byrd, history not only teaches the importance of rules and precedent but also offers warnings for the present....Byrd says, 'This Republic is at its greatest danger in its history because of this administration.'"
-Time's Deputy Washington bureau chief Matthew Cooper's profile of Byrd, "Lionized in Winter," June 2.
