Notable Quotables - 08/19/1991
ABC Sports Shines Up Castro
"But there are many
Cubans who find their lives much better here than before the revolution.
Medical care is free. Education is also state-funded. Cuba's 97 percent
literacy rate is among the highest in the world."
- ABC Sports announcer Brent Musburger on the pre-Pan Am games special Fidel
Castro: One on One, July 27.
"You have brought a
new system of government, obviously, to Cuba, but the Cuban people do, I
think, think of you as their father. One day you're going to retire. Or one
day, all of us die. Won't there be a great vacuum there? Won't there be
something that will be difficult to fill? Can they do it on their own?"
- ABC Sports announcer Jim McKay interviewing Fidel Castro, same program.
No Trouble In Paradise
"Young Cubans
increasingly see themselves as the last idealists in a world that cares only
about money....Ninety miles away in Miami, Cuban emigres wish for Fidel's
imminent collapse, but the island's university students who volunteer to take
a two-week 'vacation' in the fields don't see trouble brewing in
Paradise."
- Time reporter Cathy Booth, August 12.
Different D'Amatos
"D'Amato Cleared
After Senate Inquiry"
- Los Angeles Times, August 3
"Senate ethics
panel rebukes D'Amato"
- Boston Globe, same day
More Sad East German Women
"Ten months after
the new Germany merged, women in the eastern sector are coming to the stunning
realization that, in many ways, democracy has set them back 40 years."
- Los Angeles Times staff writer Tamara Jones, August 6.
Anti-Abortion Thugs Turn Back the Clock
"My goat is
Attorney General Thornburgh. He allowed the Justice Department to side with
those thugs in Kansas that are preventing women from getting abortions."
- Boston Globe reporter Michael K. Frisby describing his "Goat
of the Week" on Fox's talk show Off the Record, August 11.
"Will the Supreme
Court turn back the clock to the days before Roe vs. Wade? Most believe it
will."
- NBC reporter Lisa Myers on Today, August 14.
America Second
Pat Buchanan: "If
there was information you could have gotten out that could have saved scores,
hundreds of American lives, you wouldn't have transmitted that
information?"
Peter Arnett: "I
wouldn't have transmitted that information. I would not have gotten that
information in the first place. But I would not have transmitted it. I was in
Baghdad because I was a correspondent for CNN, which has no political
affiliations with the U.S. government, thank goodness."
- Exchange on CNN's Crossfire, August 2.
High Taxes, High Moral Ground
"Gov. Lowell P.
Weicker Jr. climbed toward the moral high ground today as he told Connecticut
why he was vetoing, for the third time, a budget that does not include an
income tax....A continued fiscal crisis and an ever deeper deficit may yet
give Connecticut no alternative to an income tax as a long-term solution. But
Mr. Weicker's four-year assignment is governing, and standing alone on the
high ground in August is not likely to make the next three years any
easier."
- Beginning and end of story by New York Times reporter George
Judson, August 8.
More Government Needed
"The numbers [on
the economy]...should provoke discussion about fundamental changes in economic
policy, including a move toward priming the pump, a current taboo....Where is
the cry for big public spending programs? Change the name to government
investment, I would add, and start getting Americans to understand what a
payoff the right kind of public spending could have."
- NBC business correspondent Jeff Madrick in the August 14 New York Times.
Blaming the Dead
Faith Daniels:
"Matzo crackers are not taxed, but matzo bread is."
Bryant Gumbel: "A
little bizarre. They say it will raise $234 million in taxes though."
Ann Curry:
"Absolutely."
Gumbel: "Needed
revenue. See, if they hadn't gotten in bed with Howard Jarvis, they would
never had started that thing anyway."
- July 23 Today discussion of new California sales tax on snack
foods.
Paying for the Evil '80s
"On our Dollar
Signs segment this morning, how to get a loan in the '90s. The '80s were the
decade of greed, the era of too-easy credit, hostile takeovers, corporate
raids, and merger mania. Now the signs of the '80s are being paid for by the
borrowers of the '90s, who find themselves facing lenders who have become very
tight-fisted all of a sudden."
- NBC Today news anchor Faith Daniels, July 23.
Soviets Suffer From Freedom
"True, this is the
[Soviet film] industry created by such giants of cinema as Sergei Eisenstein,
but it became better known as a propaganda machine, turning out happy tales of
collective farm life. Now commercialism is imposing a new kind of censorship
on young directors like Andrei Malukov."
- CBS reporter Anthony Mason on the July 29 Evening News.
No More Press Pools
"I'm a radical on
this. I don't think there should be any [media-military] agreements. In the
case of Grenada, for instance, they should have just launched their boats
toward the island and said to the American military, 'If you want to fire on
us and sink a bunch of unarmed American reporters, then fine. But we're here
to do our job.'"
- Newsweek media critic Jonathan Alter in the recently released
Gannett Foundation report The Media At War.
Declaration of Divorce
"The Declaration of
Independence, which may be the most momentous divorce document in history,
gave added legitimacy to what was already a venerable institution....divorce
is indeed a great evil and a source of much suffering. But then so is the
institution that generates it - marriage, especially marriage under
conditions of gross inequality between the sexes."
- Time
essayist and Democratic Socialists of America Vice Chair Barbara Ehrenreich in
The New York Times Magazine, July 21.
- 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
