Notable Quotables - 12/06/2004
Explains a Lot
"In my mind and the minds of the people I work with, this is a magical, mystical kingdom - our version of Camelot. And we feel we are working at a kind of roundtable of King Arthur proportions....Ed Murrow's ghost is here. I've seen him and talked to him on the third floor of this building many times late at night. And I can tell you that he's watching over us."
-Resigning CBS anchor Dan Rather, quoted by the
Hollywood Reporter's Ray Richmond, November 30.
Ken Starr's Buddy at ABC?
Bill Clinton: "You don't have any example where I ever lied to the American people about my job, where I ever let the American people down....I will go to my grave being at peace about it, and I don't really care what [historians] think."
Peter Jennings: Oh, yes, you do, sir....Excuse me, Mr. President, you care....You feel it very deeply.
Clinton:" You don't want to go here, Peter. You dont want to go here. Not after what you people did and the way you, your network, what you did with Kenneth
Starr. The way your people repeated every little sleazy thing he leaked. No one has any idea what that's like."
-Exchange during ABC's
PrimeTime special, "Bill Clinton: A Place in History," at the Clinton Library, Nov. 18.
Bill Clinton Is Judy's Superman
"Bill Clinton is the quintessential American, super-sized.... Dreaming big. Flying sometimes too close to the sun. Falling hard and coming back strong."
-CNN's Judy Woodruff on the November 18
Inside Politics a few hours after the official dedication of Clinton's presidential library.
Matt and I Wish They'd Give Up
"Is it disappointing for both you and your husband that his detractors and critics continue to pursue him?"
-Katie Couric to Senator Hillary Clinton on NBC's
Today, November 18.
Yearning for a Sequel
"A lot of talk about perhaps in the future a second Clinton presidential library, because you know this is your husband's party, but the buzz is all about you. You want to tell us anything on
Good Morning America? Are you going to run for President?"
-ABC's Claire Shipman to Hillary Clinton on the November 18
Good Morning America.
Reflecting on Retrograde Reagan
"Ronald Reagan put a sunny disposition on conservatism. He is the Godfather of the modern political conservative movement in this country. It drove liberals crazy that he could be as successful as he was. Even Ronald Reagan's close friends and advisors will say on the issue of race, for example, he was stuck in the late 1930s, early 1940s. He could be stubborn, sometimes to a fault. He was much too slow to respond to the AIDS crisis."
-Retiring NBC anchor Tom Brokaw recalling Ronald Reagan during a two-hour
Dateline retrospective on his 40-year reporting career, November 26.
Bushies Subverted Great Powell
"This really is a regretful moment and a passing of a great potential leader. Colin Powell was so undercut by many of the other cabinet officials and never had the full backing to do some of the things that he really wanted to do."
-Andrea Mitchell on MSNBC November 15, shortly after Powell briefed reporters on his decision to resign.
"Will he turn out to be looked at in history as a great Secretary of State? Very doubtful. He was emasculated by a team of very senior people who surrounded the President."
-ABC's John McWethy on the November 15
Nightline.
Please Don't Let Bush Be Bush
"Is he [President Bush] limiting debate and dissent within his inner circle?....[Incoming Secretary of State Condoleezza] Rice is one of the President's most loyal confidantes, a woman said to be so in sync with Mr. Bush, she can finish his sentences. But there are questions about whether the President runs a risk in surrounding himself with so many people who share the same world view."
-ABC's Charles Gibson at the top of the November 16
World News Tonight.
"What he's doing is shutting down any kind of dissent, any kind of opposing views. I mean, Condi Rice will go and do what she does best which is to parrot the administration line....Incompetence is so rewarded. I mean, Condi Rice didn't see terrorism coming, she went out and really lied about what she knew....[But] Colin Powell is out and Donald Rumsfeld, who to me is the biggest incompetent in this administration the way he's handled this war, gets to keep his job. This administration doesn't admit mistakes and rewards incompetence."
-Newsweek's Eleanor Clift, Nov. 20 McLaughlin Group.
Dumb Christians Voted Wrong
"[CBS
60 Minutes correspondent Andy] Rooney also attributed voters' reliance on religion in the recent election to ignorance. 'I am an atheist,' Rooney said. 'I don't understand religion at all. I'm sure I'll offend a lot of people by saying this, but I think it's all nonsense.' He said Christian fundamentalism is a result of 'a lack of education. They haven't been exposed to what the world has to offer.' Rooney said he also could not understand how men who work with their hands voted for George Bush, and again attributing the phenomenon to a lack of education. 'The labor force is conservative,' he said. 'How in the world did that happen?'"
-Excerpt from a November 19
Tufts Daily article by Keith Barry on Rooney's speech at the Fletcher School of International Law and Diplomacy a day earlier.
Keith Still Refuses to Concede
"Voting irregularities from Kiev to Cleveland: Reverend Jesse Jackson wants to know where's all the outrage here....The analogy [with the Ukrainian elections] was so obvious and, in some senses, so loaded, that it had not been used publicly even by any of the 20 percent of this country which still questions whether or not this month's elections were legitimate."
-MSNBC's Keith Olbermann on
Countdown, Nov. 30.
Bias Worse North of the Border
"Fox News, the Canada-baiting house organ of the U.S. right, will come to Canadian digital television next year.... Broadcasting insiders expect the CRTC [Canadian Radio-Television and Telecommunications Commission] to give the go-ahead to the 24-hour-a-day service, often called 'the unofficial official voice of the Bush administration.'"
-Reporter James Adams in a Nov. 18 front-page news story in the national Canadian
Globe & Mail newspaper headlined, "CRTC likely to approve abrasive Fox News."
"Chicken Hawk" Bush Not So Great
"[Oliver] Stone's Alexander (Colin Farrell) is an idealistic visionary who dreams of uniting the world, bringing freedom and Hellenic values to the barbarous East. He slaughters in order to liberate. Sound familiar? But the images that unavoidably arise of Bush, Cheney and Wolfowitz in Iraq seem unintentional: Stone has no political agenda this time; he'd never equate those chicken hawks with the mighty warrior king who led his soldiers across Asia for eight years, never losing a battle."
-Newsweek critic David Ansen reviewing Stones new movie about Alexander the
Great, November 29 issue.
Terrorists Are "Not Bad Guys"
"If this were the other side and we were watching an enemy soldier, a rival - I mean they're not bad guys especially, just people that disagree with us. They are, in fact, the insurgents fighting us in their country. If we saw one of them do what we saw our guy do to that guy, would we consider that worthy of a war crimes charge?"
-MSNBC's Chris Matthews on the November 16
Hardball, asking retired Colonel Ken Allard about video of a U.S. Marine shooting an injured Iraqi insurgent.
Our Troops Behead With Bombs
Bill Moyers: "There have been 37,000 civilians killed in Iraq, or as many perhaps as 100,000. Why is abortion a higher moral issue with many American Christians than the invasion of Iraq and the loss of life there?"
Sister Joan Chittister: "Could I ask you that question? Because that is the moral question that brings me closest to tears....I'm absolutely certain that some of the people that were killing over there are pregnant women. Now what do you do? That's military abortion."
Moyers: "Somebody said to me...that Americans don't behead, but we do drop smart bombs that do it for us."
-November 12 exchange on the PBS's
Now. Chittister is a left-wing columnist for the National Catholic
Reporter.
Bush-Cheney = Hitler-Himmler
"People don't realize that by voting Republican, they voted against themselves....I worry that some people are entertained by the idea of this war. They don't know anything about the Iraqis, but they're angry and frustrated in their own lives. It's like Germany, before Hitler took over. The economy was bad and people felt kicked around. They looked for a scapegoat. Now we've got a new bunch of Hitlers."
-Singer Linda Ronstadt, as quoted by
USA Today reporter Elysa Gardner in a November 17 profile.
Brokaw's Left-Wing Neighborhood
"I was in Texas just last night doing something at the Baker Institute, Jim Baker, the former Secretary of State...and there were a lot of questions about the liberal bias of the networks and mainstream media. And I said come with me to New York [City] and walk to the West side and hear what they have to say about the conservative bias of what we're doing. We're the ones who are responsible for the election of George Bush. 'Don't you realize that he stole the election four years ago? How could you allow him to invade Iraq the way that he did?'"
-Retiring
NBC Nightly News anchor Tom Brokaw on Comedy Central's The Daily
Show, November 16.
