Notable Quotables - 08/25/2008
Promoting Anti-Bush “Bombshell”
“Tonight, gasoline has been thrown on a fire that’s never really gone out. The accusation that the Bush administration badly misled the American public about the case for war with Iraq. In a new book, journalist Ron Suskind claims he has new evidence to show the case was more than a failure of intelligence — it was, he writes, an out and out deception.”
— NBC Nightly News anchor Brian Williams, August 5.
“Also ahead, a scathing new book from a Pulitzer-prize winning reporter that claims the Bush administration’s case for war in Iraq wasn’t a mistake but deliberate deception. His claim? It is worse than Watergate....Now to that new bombshell book that claims the White House deliberately misled the American public about the case for war in Iraq. The author: a Pulitzer-prize winning journalist.”
— NBC’s Meredith Vieira promoting her interview with author Ron Suskind on the August 5 Today about his book, which alleged the White House asked the CIA to forge documents linking Iraq to the September 11 attacks.
“Shocking allegations about the President’s determination to invade Iraq. A brand new book claims the White House forged a key piece of evidence and turned a blind eye to another. This hour, the book’s bombshells and the administration’s adamant denials.”
— CNN’s Wolf Blitzer on the August 5 Situation Room.
vs.
“Ron Suskind has written another book. It’s getting lots of attention. And the main charge is almost certainly false.... To believe Suskind’s account...you would have to believe: 1) that the Bush administration ordered the CIA, in writing, to forge a letter that was a rather obvious hoax; 2) that the CIA, hostile to the Bush administration and leaking against it at every turn, eagerly complied.”
— The Weekly Standard’s Steve Hayes in a posting to his magazine’s Daily Standard blog, August 5.
Admiring “Much Loved” Edwards
“Okay, much loved, worked for the poor, a man who was self-made, and all about integrity and honesty. Considering all of that and this stunning admission, what type of political career could this man have going forward?”
— Fill-in anchor Melissa Long on CNN’s Saturday Morning August 9, asking deputy political editor Paul Steinhauser about news former Democratic candidate John Edwards cheated on his wife.
Scorning a “Stupid” Campaign
“Some say that John McCain has tried to subtly portray Obama as not quite American enough, playing up Obama’s popularity abroad....ABC News has learned that an independent conservative group has been filming in Indonesia where Obama spent a few years during his childhood. So even if Senator McCain does not draw attention to that unusual quality of Obama’s youth, someone will.”
— Reporter Jake Tapper on ABC’s World News, August 11.
Correspondent Dean Reynolds: “The sharper edge by his aides and the candidate is further evidence that the McCain campaign has changed....[with] splashier events reminiscent of a previous Republican campaign for the White House [video of George W. Bush campaign event]. But it’s more than staging, it’s tone....Remember, this was McCain months ago.”
McCain: “I’ve pledged to conduct a respectful campaign.”
Reynolds: “But now it frequently seems respect takes a backseat to ridicule.”
— August 13 CBS Evening News.
“Some Republicans wonder about the new approach. McCain’s own mother said using Paris Hilton in this controversial ad to insult Obama was, quote, ‘kind of stupid.’”
— CBS’s Dean Reynolds on the August 6 Evening News.
“Dishonest” Swift Boaters Return
“It was right around this time four years ago that the dishonest and highly effective Swift Boat attacks on John Kerry began. Now [author Jerome Corsi] the man who started it all, with a book about Kerry, has one out attacking Obama. Can the Swift Boaters repeat their success, or does Obama know how to fight back?”
— Fill-in host David Shuster, MSNBC’s Hardball, Aug. 13.
Legitimizing Left-Wing Paranoia
CNN reporter Dave Mattingly: “When you listen to this John McCain ad, it might sound like Barack Obama has a Messiah complex....But not everyone’s laughing. Some Democrats say the ad, which appears only on the Internet, is infused with hidden messages to evangelical Christians — messages that Barack Obama isn’t the Messiah at all.” ...
Steven Waldman, CEO, Beliefnet.com: It reenforces things that they’ve been hearing around the Internet, that maybe Barack Obama is, in fact, the anti-Christ.”
— CNN’s Newsroom, August 15.
McCain: Scarier than Putin’s Tanks
Clip of John McCain on the radio talking about the invasion of Georgia: “I think it’s very clear that Russian ambitions are to restore the old Russian empire.”
CNN’s Bill Schneider: “Some voters may worry: Does he want to start a new Cold War? The risk for McCain is that he could overplay the issue and frighten war-weary voters, whose priorities are at home right now. The Russians are doing a pretty good job of frightening people already.”
— CNN’s Situation Room, August 12.
Windfall Profits Tax — Why Not?
“Senator Obama, he’s calling for a windfall profits tax — $65 billion, five years — oil companies, in his plan, pay it. And when the public sees the kind of profits that the oil companies are making, isn’t it fair that they wonder, ‘why not?’”
— ABC’s Charles Gibson to Exxon Mobil CEO Rex Tillerson on World News, August 13.
The “Conservative” Evan Bayh?
“[Senator Evan] Bayh, whose father, Birch, was a liberal Democratic Senator and presidential candidate in 1976, has compiled a moderate-to-conservative record both as Governor of Indiana from 1988 to 1996 and as Senator since 1999....This spring, he frustrated Democratic leaders by holding out against new spending in the federal budget. But that reflects his fiscal conservatism....”
— New York Times reporter Carl Hulse describing possible Democratic VP pick Evan Bayh, August 12. In 2007, Bayh received a score of 95 out of a perfect 100 from the liberal Americans for Democratic Action.
Fantasizing About Jailing Rove
“A reluctant witness and a Congress that wants answers. We’re talking about [former White House advisor] Karl Rove and questions about the firing of those federal prosecutors. Some say he should go to the Capitol jail if he doesn’t talk. Is there really such a thing?”
— CNN’s Wolf Blitzer on the Aug. 7 Situation Room introducing a story on options for imprisoning Karl Rove on Capitol Hill if he refuses to cooperate.
Ruing Olympic “Party Crashers”
“Double-edged sword though, with this great spotlight, China can say to the world, look where we have come, look who we are, but that spotlight can also be co-opted by party crashers who have a bone to pick with this country. How worried are the people here about that?”
— NBC’s Matt Lauer questioning Beijing Foreign Studies University professor Teng Dimeng, August 4 Today.
Harry Hails “Legendary” Liberal
“Helen Thomas has been covering the White House for-ever, almost 50 years now. We’re going to talk to Rory Kennedy, director of a new documentary about the legendary journalist....Where she sits and what she does day after day after day, I’m not sure we value enough.”
— CBS’s Harry Smith on The Early Show, August 14.
Evil GOP Destroyed the Duke
“He was pilloried over the Pledge of Allegiance in schools and over a prisoner furlough program that had begun under his Republican predecessor. America got to know who Willie Horton was because the Republicans introduced them to each other, and the Dukakis campaign seemed incapable of fighting back. When unfounded rumors arose concerning Dukakis’s mental health, then-President Ronald Reagan chimed in that he ‘wasn’t going to pick on an invalid.’ Much of the campaign was so feverish that Lee Atwater, the Republican consultant who was its principal architect, apologized for it on his deathbed.”
— Boston Globe Magazine’s Charles Pierce in an August 3 piece on the 20th anniversary of the Dukakis campaign.
Bush “Urinating on Constitution”
“So, besides urinating on the Constitution and the rights and freedoms every American soldier has ever fought to win and protect, the Bush administration has now decided that when its victims have actually served their sentences, doled out under its own medieval, quote, ‘justice,’ unquote, system, it still might not choose to set them free, thereby giving that Constitution and our country a second pass on the way out.”
— MSNBC’s Keith Olbermann on Countdown, August 7, discussing how a convicted terrorist may be detained at Guantanamo Bay after his five year sentence is up.
The GOP Nominates Another Idiot
“It occurs to me that John McCain is as intellectually shallow as our current President....Bush goes bumbling along, grinning and spewing moronic one-liners, as though nobody understands what a colossal failure he has been....I fear to the depth of my being that John McCain is just like him.”
— Jack Cafferty in commentary at CNN.com, August 19.
What Show Is She Watching?
“For all its eviscerations of the administration, The Daily Show is animated not by partisanship but by a deep mistrust of all ideology.”
— New York Times book critic Michiko Kakutani profiling Comedy Central host Jon Stewart, August 17.
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