Notable Quotables - 10/02/1989
Tax Hike Demands
"If we don't find
some way to raise new revenues, that means taxes, we're going to continue this
self-deception, we're going to continue to add to the national deficit, we're
going to continue to cause this country to head toward an economic
abyss."
- Sam Donaldson on This Week, September 24.
"If you want to
compare us to other industrialized democracies, never mind one that presumes
to leadership of the free world, we tax ourselves at a very, very lenient
rate. We're not taxing ourselves enough to pay for the programs that we've got
and the responsibilities that we have to our own people and the rest of the
world."
- Former Time Washington Bureau Chief Strobe Talbott on Inside
Washington, September 16.
Democratic Drug Money
Reporter John Cochran:
"Fitzwater said the Democrats traditional answer to problems is to tax
more and spend more."
Senator Joseph Biden:
"The best way to react to that kind of, that kind of statement, is just
to go out and prove it wrong."
Cochran: "The
Democrats say they're not proposing new taxes to pay for a drug war and they
wish the President and his spokesman would stop saying that."
- NBC Nightly News, September 12.
"I propose...to
increase the tax on cigarettes and on liquor in order to pay for it [the drug
war]."
- Biden on NBC's Today, September 7.
Barney Frank
"On a scale of 1 to
HUD, Frank's transgression is a low single digit."
- Time Senior riter Margaret Carlson, September 25.
"Democratic leaders
desert Frank: 'Death drums are pounding,' lawmaker says"
- Washington Times, September 20.
"Frank's Friends
Dispute Suggestions of Demise"
- New York Times, same day.
Crack and Reagan
"Crack was a parody
of Reaganism, I concluded, a brief high with a bad aftertaste and untold
bodily damage."
- Nation Washington Editor Jefferson Morley on his experience using
crack cocaine, in the October 2 New Republic.
Fleeing the Iron Curain
"Moreover, if the
reforms now being undertaken in Eastern Europe are going to stick, it is in no
one's interest to drain these countries of their best and brightest."
- Time Associate Editor Jill Smolowe, September 25.
One-Party Democracy
"In 1980, a
settlement led to the creation of the independent, multi-racial democracy of
Zimbabwe....Compared with some African horror stories, Zimbabwe has to be a
democratic success, despite the one-party state."
- Patrick Watson on the PBS series The Struggle For Democracy,
September 12.
Pravda on the Potomac
"When watching the
networks' reaction to the President's speech on drugs my wife and I wondered
whether we were still in a free society or whether we were back covering the
Soviet Union, in the pre-glasnost days, because it seemed to both of us that
the White House called the shot and all three networks galloped after that
shot as if there were no other story in the world."
- Former NBC News reporter Marvin Kalb on Nightline, September 27.
Castro's Achievements
"Castro has won a
number of battles. He eliminated much of the impoverishment under which most
Cubans lived during the Batista regime. He initiated an educational campaign
that turned a once illiterate population into a highly literate one producing
thousands of doctors, lawyers and engineers. He created Latin America's best
health care system, which raised life expectancy in Cuba to the same levels
achieved in the United States."
- Dallas Morning News reporter Kevin B. Blackistone in the Oregonian,
September 1.
Jim Wright
"Anatomy of a
Smear: How Newt Gingrich created the scandal that destroyed Jim Wright - a
chronology"
- Article by former Washington Post and Business Month
reporter John Barry, October Esquire.
Democratic Tax Agenda
"The debate over
cutting the capital gains tax is not just about economics, it is about
fairness. And if you want to know why, look at this. This is a congressional
estimate of who wins and who doesn't. Those earning under $10,000 a year would
win nothing. Those in the broad, middle income range would get about 20
percent of the overall benefit from the tax cut. And those with big incomes,
$100,000 a year and up, would win 80 percent of the benefit."
- Garrick Utley on NBC Nightly News, September 17.
Gorbachev The Westernizer
"The citizens of
Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania love to watch grainy black-and-white documentary
films of what it was like 50 years ago, before their lands were seized by
Stalin, invaded by Hitler, then colonized by the Kremlin. They remember
themselves as having been self-reliant yet outward looking. These are among
the virtues that Gorbachev is now preaching for the Soviet Union as a whole.
He is a Westernizer, in the tradition of an enlightened but ultimately
frustrated school of 19th century Russian reformers."
- Strobe Talbott in Time magazine, September 25.
Catastrophic Health Welfare
"Congress, having
first decided that those who could afford it should pick up some of the
financial burden of catastrophic insurance, is now going to be pressured into
changing its mind because those who are deemed able to pay or have other
insurance are so violently opposed. Which may well mean that because 5 million
elderly people are angry, as many as 18 million others may suffer."
- Peter Jennings on World News Tonight, September 18.
Tip O'Neill As Sex Symbol
"'There are some
politicians that manage to transcend their party and become for most people
symbols of certain values,' said Jane Maas, a New York ad agency executive.
'Tip O'Neill embodies a lot of things we're seeing American return to-belief
in the family, honesty, tradition. Sam Ervin...and Tip are the kind of
politicians we wish we had more of. Besides that, I think he's sexy.'"
- From September 20 Washington Post article on O'Neill's new ads for
Quality Inns.
- L. Brent
Bozell III; Publisher
- Brent H. Baker, Tim Graham; Editors
- Jim Heiser, Stewart Verdery, Dorothy Warner; Media Analysts
- Allison Dyer; Administrative Assistant
