Notable Quotables - 07/09/1990
Bush: Not Satisfying Women
"President Bush not
only broke his campaign pledge on taxes, he hasn't done much to endear himself
to women voters, either. Witness his veto Friday of the parental leave
bill."
- NBC national correspondent Katherine Couric on Today,
July 2.
Middle East War Prospects
"Middle East
appears to be on collision course with war"
- Washington Times, July 2.
vs.
"New Middle East
War Seen Unlikely"
- Washington Post, same day.
Dan's Mandela Tribute
"The power of Nelson Mandela is the power of the idea and the ideal. Nelson Mandela knows in what he believes. He knows what he's literally willing to die for, and that carries with it tremendous power, and it radiates from him as it did from Martin Luther King, as it does from Mother Teresa, as it did from Golda Meir. There's tremendous power in that, and when we say, accurately I think, that Nelson Mandela is a worldwide hero - people of all races and nationalities look up to him - I think that's why....
You talk about a bad
boy. Nelson Mandela had a reputation all of his life of being a bad boy. A lot
of people tried to get the world to believe that this man was a radical,
terrorist, killer, psychological killer - all bullbleep, because they feared
him. Because he knew what he believed in and was prepared to die for."
- Dan Rather on The Arsenio Hall Show, June 27.
"The former
long-time political prisoner will address Congress."
- Dan Rather, June 20 CBS Evening News.
"Mandela had
participated in planning acts of sabotage and inciting violence, so that he
could no longer fulfill the criteria for the classification of political
prisoners."
- 1985 finding of Amnesty International.
Hurting and Not Hurting
"State GOP won't
hurt from Bush's new tax stand"
- Lansing State Journal story by Gannett News Service
reporter Roger Martin, June 28.
"Tax flip-flop may
hurt GOP"
- Detroit News, same day, same story by same reporter (Thanks to
Rusty Hills).
The Myth of a One-Party Soviet Union
"There has been a
kind of fiction that there's a one-party system in the Soviet Union. It's true
that the Communist Party has ruled the country for 70 years, but it's never
been a single party. A friend of mine in Moscow once said the only trouble
with only having one party is that everybody gets in - good guys and bad
guys, liberals and fascists. What's happening now is that the wings of the
Communist Party are coming apart. The parties in the party are at each other's
throats, and the differences between them are at least as great, and I think
considerably greater, than say, for example, the differences in the United
States between Republicans and Democrats."
- Princeton Sovietologist and CBS News Consultant Stephen Cohen on Nightwatch,
June 25.
Middle Class Losers?
"George Wallace you
quote in your book as saying 'the rich get richer, the rest just get taken.'
The '80s have been a period in which those in the middle class have found
themselves with less and less."
- Today co-host Deborah Norville interviewing
"conservative" Kevin Phillips, June 25.
"The proportion of
all families with incomes over $50,000 (adjusted for inflation) rose from 20
percent to 26 percent. The share with incomes over $35,000 rose from 41
percent to 46 percent."
- Columnist Robert Samuelson on income trends during the 1980s, June 29 Washington
Post.
Being Too Harsh on Genghis Khan
"She has been
called 'Reagan with brains,' and she once referred to herself, in a rare try
at humor, as 'Genghis Khan.' Such japes are a bit hard on the ex-President and
the late Mongol scourge."
- Unbylined book review of Time correspondent Chris Ogden's book Maggie
in the June 25 Time.
Freedom Fighter Versus Reality
"The day was capped
off on the banks of the Charles River. A huge rally on Boston's esplanade for
a freedom fighter that many compare to the revolutionaries who fought against
the British more than two centuries ago."
- NBC reporter Brad Willis on Sunday Today, June 24.
"We support the
cause of anyone who is fighting for self-determination, and our attitude is
the same, no matter who it is. I would be honored to sit on the platform with
the four comrades whom you refer to."
- Nelson Mandela on the four Puerto Rican terrorists who shot five members of
Congress in 1954, quoted in The New York Times, June 22. Thanks to The
Wall Street Journal.
"One of those at
the Riverside Church this morning described Mandela as the moral leader of the
world. One hundred religious leaders, Protestant, Catholic, Jewish and Muslim,
joined in applauding the symbol of freedom in South Africa."
- ABC News reporter James Walker on World News Tonight, June 21.
"There's one thing
where that country stands out head and shoulders above the rest. That is in
its love for human rights and liberty."
- Mandela on Cuba, quoted in the July 9 New Republic.
NRA's Future
"NRA loses
firepower: Legislative defeats, strife have it reeling"
- Boston Globe, June 11.
"Undeterred NRA
reloads for fight"
- Washington Times, same day.
Illegitimate If Soviets Don't Agree
"Political union -
save for Berlin - would be complete, but Germany would not be a fully
sovereign state. Most of all, it would lack Soviet blessing....Like any
illegitimate birth, it may set the families once more at odds."
- Newsweek reporter Margaret Garrard Warner on German reunification,
June 11.
Rampage Against Traditional Values
"What the
artbusters have been looking for is a hot issue and some quick victories. The
Red menace is not what it used to be, Ronald Reagan is gone,
ultraconservatives cannot rely upon George Bush to uphold their
righter-than-thou social agenda. At the same time, Jim Bakker and Jimmy
Swaggart have spoiled the image of right-wing evangelism."
- Newsweek Senior Writer Tom Mathews, July 2 Newsweek.
"Amending the
Constitution to make it illegal is a step into the netherworld of legislating
patriotism. So far, we've left that sort of thing to dictators and
communists."
- Harry Smith on CBS This Morning, May 18.
- L. Brent
Bozell III; Publisher
- Brent H. Baker, Tim Graham; Editors
- Callista Gould, Jim Heiser, Marian Kelley, Gerard Scimeca, Stewart Verdery;
Media Analysts
- Kristin K. Bashore; Administrative Assistant
