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"From the bottom of the
income ladder, the prospect of the Republican revolution is
chilling, especially because the gap between the rich and the
poor has already widened significantly."
- Los Angeles Times Washington reporters James
Risen and Elizabeth Shogren, December 18 news story.
"Give you an opportunity to
answer the criticism, says 'Dan Rather, if you believe what he
has just told you [that conservatives are compassionate as
well], you believe that rocks grow, that these', all of this in
quotation marks, 'these are hard men who favor those in the
country who have wealth and they are there to protect those
people, they are not compassionate people.'"
- Rather to Armey, December 1 Evening News.
"They (Republicans) say
that none of this is going to increase the deficit even though
the government will collect less in taxes, because it will
stimulate the economy, because this also applies to things like
stocks and bonds, it's not just houses. Most economists say that
that's a lot of baloney. That it's not true."
- NBC reporter Mike Jensen on the capital gains tax cut
proposal, December 9 Today.
"The election returns start
with a stark fact so disturbing that no one in the media wants
to state it plainly: The U.S. House of Representatives is now to
be led by a world-class demagogue, a talented reactionary in the
vengeful tradition Gov. George Wallace and Sen. Joseph McCarthy.
Like Wallace before him, Newt Gingrich evokes the nation's
boiling anxieties as a rancid populism of `us vs. them,' though
he is too shrewd to make the racial resentments explicit. Like
Joe McCarthy, Gingrich depicts his adversaries not simply as
mistaken in their political views but as sick, traitorous people
who are invidiously subverting the national character....We
shall soon find out if there is a kinder, gentler Newt lurking
beneath the rock. Somehow I doubt it. His hatred seems to be
from the heart."
- William Greider, producer of PBS Frontline
shows and former Washington Post Assistant Managing
Editor, in the December 29, 1994-January, 12, 1995 Rolling
Stone.
If Only He Could Be Speaker
"Mario Cuomo seems not so
much a defeated warrior these days as he does a liberated
philosopher; free to travel the world expressing political views
built on practical experience."
- CNN's Brian Jenkins in story on the man who lost his
re-election bid, December 8 Inside Politics.
What Isn't Reagan's Fault?
Reagan Buildup at CIA Spawned
Current Woes Security Failures Followed Cold War Successes
- Washington Post, December 29
Great Analytical Minds Think Alike
"As a milepost, then, we offer 'How the Gingrich stole Christmas'...
For pianos and parsleys, peanuts and pajamas.
Why he'd even take kiddies away from their mammas.
The Gingrich said things that the Hoos [Democrats] thought were shocking.
He'd take back each present and
empty each stocking."
- Charles Osgood, December 11 Sunday Morning.
"Uncle Scrooge: `Tis the
season to bash the poor. But is Newt Gingrich's America really
that heartless?"
- cover of December 19 Time.
"How the Gingrich Stole
Christmas!"
- cover of December 26, 1994/January 2, 1995 Newsweek.
Gumbel's PBS Crusade
"The money we're talking about is negligible. Can we really say that a country that spends $250 billion on its military can't afford one-tenth of one percent of that for its culture?....What about the overriding issue here that if we accept that art and culture are expressions of a civilized society, the lasting expressions of that, why shouldn't government be involved? Why shouldn't it lend a hand?"
Right now the American taxpayer
carries a lighter burden than most citizens in other
industrialized nations who support their art to a greater extent
than we do!"
- "Questions" from Bryant Gumbel to David
Keating of the National Taxpayers Union, December 8 Today.
Ultimate Media Insult: Gingrich is the New Reagan
"In outlook, in
prescription, and also in his penchant for shaving the truth by
the clever manipulation of easily grasped images, Newt Gingrich
is Reagan's true heir.....Like Rush, it doesn't seem to matter
that a lot of what Newt says is mostly not true. Audiences love
it - as they loved Reagan - even when they know that what
they're hearing is often baseless. For many who applaud Gingrich
and Limbaugh, the catchy rantings are acceptable caricatures of
a caricature they already despise - government. Falsity is
forgiven because the target of Gingrich's critiques (like
Limbaugh's and Reagan's) is deemed worthy of vituperative
attack....Gingrich clearly sees his job as acquiring and holding
power for as long as possible by any means necessary. Ronald
Reagan is surely smiling."
- Time's Michael Kramer, December 19.
So Who Is Really Leading the Charge Against Cutting Spending?
"For the nation's hungry
getting help is getting to be more difficult. Across America,
many feeding programs are turning people away. One reason: a
dramatic drop in federal food subsidies....Advocates worry that
if Republicans make good on their threatened budget cuts
whatever safety net exists for America's needy, won't exist
anymore."
- CBS reporter Randall Pinkston, December 19 Evening
News.
"Churches and charities who
deal with hunger lashed out against the Republican Contract with
America, comparing it to something Ebeneezer Scrooge would have
dreamed up....The problem of hunger in Atlanta is getting worse,
not better, especially at the downtown Union Mission...Mission
officials are worried that cutbacks in federal food programs
will bring more hungry people to their door but without the
money to feed them
- Reporter Kenley Jones, December 21 Today.
Reagan Revulsion
"Even those of us who felt
we were doing a good job at explaining how his economic policies
were not going to work used the pictures the White House was
having us present. Ronald Reagan in a perfect tableau, a Norman
Rockwell view of America, with all white faces in middle
America, high school marching bands and balloons. It was a very
patriotic view of an untroubled country."
- NBC News reporter Andrea Mitchell on A&E's Investigative
Reports: Naked Washington, December 23.
Lesley Stahl: "Here's a guy
who fooled most of the people most of the time....He was a
person who didn't understand the issues at all, and we know that
for a fact. And yet he presented himself as a strong, active
person who's pushed around his wife. He presented himself as
what he wasn't, and we bought it completely. Lock, stock, and
barrel....But it's scary, because he led us off in the wrong
direction."
Roger Ailes: "Well, that
depends on your politics."
Stahl: "No. I mean, we're
suffering, I don't think it is politics, we're suffering from
the mistakes he led us off to continue doing despite the
evidence that it wasn't working. I'm talking about the economic
side."
- Exchange on Straight Forward on the America's
Talking channel, October 25.
"The country's politics
took a radical right turn in '94. We can read all about it next
year after Gingrich seals the $4.5 million deal to publish his
book. We'll take in a chapter right after we drop the kids off
at the orphanage. But then maybe we'd be better off if we forgot
most of what happened in '94. Ronald Reagan has."
- Boston Herald reporter J.M. Lawrence in story
reviewing the past year, December 25.
- L.
Brent Bozell III; Publisher
- Brent H. Baker, Tim Graham; Editors
- James Forbes, Andrew Gabron, Mark Honig, Steve Kaminski,
Gesele Rey, Clay Waters; Media Analysts
- Kathleen Ruff, Circulation Manager;
- Melissa Gordon, Intern