Deflowered in the Reagan Years
"In the corporate takeovers
of the 1980s, the Reagan Administration was a wallflower at the
orgy."
- First sentence of Time Associate Editor
Richard Lacayo's February 27 sidebar on Microsoft anti-trust
settlement.
Republicans: Threat to the Human Race
"The noises coming from
[Rep. Sonny] Bono and many of his fellow Republican signers of
House Speaker Newt Gingrich's `Contract with America' signal a
radical shift in Congress's attitude toward environmental issues
- a shift that may bode ill for the health of snail darters,
spotted owls, and even the human species."
- Time reporter Dick Thompson in a February 27
story headlined "Congressional Chain-Saw Massacre: If
Speaker Newt Gingrich gets his way, the laws protecting air,
water and wildlife may be endangered."
Clinton's Ventriloquist Dummies
"The gamble inherent in the
President's budget - which posits $200 billion deficits through
the millennium - is that there won't be enough true
conservatives in the GOP to really take a whack at spending (or
do much of anything else, including cut taxes). After all, most
Republicans spent the last 15 years faking it - exhorting
austerity but never actually having to impose it. The presence
of taxes and absence of majority status enabled Speaker Gingrich
and his allies to evade tough votes on George Bush's 1990
deficit-reduction package, and Bill Clinton's in 1993."
- Newsweek Senior Editor Joe Klein, February
20.
"First of all, he's the
first President to seriously go after and reduce the deficit.
And second, the federal government is now the smallest it's been
since the 1960s."
- Newsweek's Eleanor Clift on CNN's Crossfire,
January 27.
"He and Hillary (depicted
in the book as surprisingly nonideological but oddly blind to
appearances) have titanic screaming fights, yet they rightly
complain that they have been punished for keeping their family
intact. Had they simply gotten divorced, Clinton's sex life
wouldn't have been an issue."
- Newsweek media writer Jonathan Alter on the
new David Maraniss biography First in His Class,
February 13.
John Powers, Smarter Than the Rest of America
"Truth is, Americans live
in a dream world. They believe in zero percent interest and `lite'
pancake syrup. They believe a beer can have great taste and
still be less filling. That's why the voters lined up for the
conservative goody bag this time. They wanted things to be the
way they think they were in the '50s - and get money back,
too....Rip into the conservatives when they start talking about
orphanages, when they peddle Ronald Reagan's old voodoo
economics, when they balk on gun laws. Draw up your own contract
with America....Liberalism, real liberalism, created the country
we live in, both for the better and for the worse."
- Boston Globe Magazine staff writer John
Powers' memo to liberals, February 5.
Uneducated Whites on a Bender
"Well, there's affirmative
action already. There's affirmative action for white people.
It's just as she said, you can look at Congress, you can look at
the Fortune 500, you can look at most major industries. And I
think this is a red herring and a racist issue, largely because
people won't be honest and talk about the changes that are going
on in the world and in the culture. It's angry white males,
angry white males who have high school educations that can no
longer provide them with the manufacturing jobs that once helped
them and their families move into the middle class."
- New York Times reporter Karen DeWitt on PBS's
To the Contrary, February 18.
Foster Committed Abortions - So?
"So what! I mean, you know
right away it's going to be an issue, but it shouldn't be an
issue. The whole man should be the issue. Is this a good man for
the job? He's done nothing illegal, nothing wrong...Clinton did
an awful thing when he cut Dr. Elders loose, and if he cuts Dr.
Foster loose I think it will appear to be a disaster."
- Former NBC News President Michael Gartner on C-SPAN's Sunday
Journal, February 12.
Where Does That Leave the Real Conservatives?
"[Lamar Alexander] takes
hard-right positions in soothing tones and plays gospel music on
the piano."
- U.S. News & World Report Senior Writer
Michael Barone, February 27.
Wasteful, Useless SDI
"The House Republican bill
called for increasing military spending on Star Wars
anti-missile defenses (this part was thankfully defeated) so the
U.S. would have more useless Nintendo technology to fight the
least likely of wars, while restricting the President's ability
to dispatch troops abroad to fight the most likely of
wars."
- Former New York Times White House reporter
Thomas Friedman, February 19 column.
"Am I right? About $35
billion was spent under the Reagan and Bush administrations, and
the conventional wisdom, or the popular wisdom, was very little
came of that. Is it really worth spending the amounts that would
be needed to pursue that?"
- Robert MacNeil interviewing former Defense
undersecretary Richard Perle, February 8 MacNeil-Lehrer
NewsHour.
Conservatives vs. the Bill of Rights
"Let's just hope they don't
put the First Amendment to a vote...A lot of conservatives
didn't want the Bill of Rights to apply at all to the states, so
there's plenty of precedent for conservatives wanting to knock
this out."
- Newsweek Washington Bureau Chief Evan Thomas
on Inside Washington in discussion about the House bill
limiting exclusion of evidence on Fourth Amendment grounds,
February 11.
William Fulbright: Saving Clinton from Yankee Imperialism
"He had been a Senator from
1944 to 1974, an inventor of American internationalism after
World War II and a foe of American imperialism during
Vietnam....He epitomized the word `internationalist' yet fought
against a growing American empire - perhaps it was impossible
to keep internationalism and imperialism separate."
- Washington Post reporter Henry Allen writing
about Fulbright's memorial service, February 18.
It's a Beautiful Day in Mister Rogers' Ghetto
"To relegate opera to
Bravo, history to the History Channel, or nature to Discovery
and TBS - that's the elitist route. It ghettoizes science and
the humanities. It says that those who want that stuff will seek
it out. And that's precisely the reason that stuff should be on
PBS....The marketplace does not meet the cultural and
informational needs that PBS was set up to meet. It does even
less in the Inside Edition and 57-channel era than it
did when LBJ was President. And if President Clinton...and the
new Congress are really interested in the public and the
taxpayer, they will make public television stronger, not weaker,
and will make commercial television pay the freight."
- Boston Globe television critic Ed Siegel,
February 12.
Associated Mess
"Despite the political
theater,Democrats must be wondering where Dole and Kasich were
during the 12 years that Republicans controlled the White House.
The GOP, of course, certainly would want to forget that period
when it comes to deficit control, given the performances of
Ronald Reagan and George Bush in that area."
- "News analysis" by AP Washington reporter
Martin Crutsinger, February 9 Fairfax (Va.) Journal.
- 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, Anna Johnson; Interns