Obama May Be President, but Bush Is to Blame
Arianna Huffington: "George, the truth is that right now we have precisely the regulatory system that the Bush-Cheney administration wanted. Full of loopholes, full of cronies and lobbyists filling the very agencies they're supposed to be overseeing the industry."
George Will: "So, it's Bush's fault? Just clear this up."
Huffington: "It is absolutely a thousand percent Bush-Cheney's fault."
- Talking about the oil spill on ABC's This Week, June 6. [Audio/video (0:33): Windows Media [1] | MP3 audio [2]]
"In a natural disaster, government has an agency. We don't have an agency. What we had was eight years of the Bush-Cheney administration removing regulations. Now the oil industry is too big to regulate."
- Bloomberg's Margaret Carlson on Political Capital, May 28. [Audio/video (0:39): Windows Media [3] | MP3 audio [4]]
"This is more Bush's second Katrina than Obama's first....Because it was the Bush regulations, it was Dick Cheney's deregulation, and lording over the Minerals Management [Service]."
- Time's Joe Klein on The Chris Matthews Show, May 30.
"The oil spill is the perfect metaphor for Obama's presidency so far. It's been cleaning up a lot of the messes left to him by his predecessors, whether it was bank bailouts, auto bailouts, Afghanistan - which turned out to be a much bigger mess than anybody anticipated - preventing a depression that, you know, began to happen on George Bush's watch. So this is more of the same."
- Newsweek's Jonathan Alter on MSNBC's The Daily Rundown, June 10. [Audio/video (0:39): Windows Media [5] | MP3 audio [6]]
GOP Women Win Primaries; ABC Congratulates Hillary
George Stephanopoulos: "The big headline out of last night's primaries: 'Women Rule.' How about this - women candidates in four states won primaries...."
Co-anchor Elizabeth Vargas: "So many women saying - doing so well, and many saying perhaps Hillary Clinton helped by running for President. All these other women about to possibly take office, high office, in those states."
- ABC's Good Morning America, June 9. [Audio/video (0:13): Windows Media [7] | MP3 audio [8]]
Pleading that "An Army of Protesters Be Heard"
Anchor David Muir: "Day of outrage, anger on the streets of Phoenix and across this country tonight. Will an army of protesters be heard?"...
Reporter Jeremy Hubbard: "In their most massive numbers yet, a deluge of adversaries rally and rail against what could soon be the law of the land in Arizona."
- ABC's World News, May 29.
Telemundo's Janet Rodriguez: "Critics say the law unfairly targets Hispanics who make up about a third of the state's population. Recent college grad Martin Moreno worries about racial profiling."
Protester Martin Moreno: "It's not fair that people have to live in a state and feel afraid of the police, afraid of their local government."
Rodriguez: "Peter Morales came all the way from Boston."
Protester Peter Morales: "This law violates our fundamental principles of human dignity."
- NBC Nightly News, May 29.
Helen to Israeli Jews: "Go Home" to Land of the Holocaust
Rabbi David Nesenoff: "Any comments on Israel? We're asking everybody today."
Hearst White House columnist Helen Thomas: "Tell them to get the hell out of Palestine."
Nesenoff: "Whoa! Any better comments?"
Thomas, laughing: "Remember, these people are occupied, and it isn't their land - not German, and not Polish."
Nesenoff: "So where should they go? What should they do?"
Thomas: "Go home."
Nesenoff: "Where's home?"
Thomas: "Poland. Germany."
Nesenoff: "So just go back to Poland and Germany?"
Thomas: "And America, and everywhere else."
- Exchange at the May 27 White House Jewish Heritage Celebration, posted June 3 at RabbiLIVE.com. [Audio/video (0:32): Windows Media [9] | MP3 audio [10]]
Shouldn't We Cut a "Bona Fide Icon" a Little Slack?
"She is a bona fide icon and she is also nearly 90-years-old....Some have argued that Thomas deserves a break, given her status as a journalistic giant and a trailblazer for women, and given her age. After all, many of us have elderly relatives who have lost their verbal filter."
- ABC's Dan Harris on World News, June 7. [Audio/video (0:31): Windows Media [11] | MP3 audio [12]]
"I have known her for a long time, and she held many presidents' feet to the fire. At a time when nobody in the Bush press room would say 'boo' about George W. Bush after 9/11, she was already asking the tough questions. And I just, you know, I like to see people be judged in the largest context of their career, not in their senility."
- Newsweek's Jonathan Alter talking about Helen Thomas on CNN Headline News's Joy Behar Show, June 7.
One Last Rant Against Israel's "Deliberate Massacre"
Hearst White House columnist Helen Thomas: "Our initial reaction to this flotilla massacre, deliberate massacre, an international crime, was pitiful. What do you mean you 'regret,' when something should be so strongly condemned? And if any other nation in the world had done it, we would have been up in arms. What is the sacrosanct, iron-clad relationship where a country that deliberately kills people and boycotts - and we aid and abet the boycott?"
Press Secretary Robert Gibbs: "Look, I think the initial reaction regretted the loss of life as we tried and still continue to try to gather the relevant-"
Thomas: "Regret won't bring them back!"
- Exchange at the June 1 White House briefing.
Christian Tea Partiers Worse than Muslim Terrorists
Author Ayaan Hirsi Ali, talking about radical Muslims: "Somehow, the idea got into their minds that to kill other people is a great thing to do and that they would be rewarded in the hereafter."
Host Tavis Smiley: "But Christians do that every single day in this country."
Ali: "Do they blow people up every day?"
Smiley: "Yes. Oh, Christians, every day, people walk into post offices, they walk into schools, that's what Columbine is - I could do this all day long....There are folk in the Tea Party, for example, every day who are being recently arrested for making threats against elected officials, for calling people 'nigger' as they walk into Capitol Hill, for spitting on people. That's within the political - that's within the body politic of this country."
- PBS's Tavis Smiley, May 25. [Audio/video (0:26): Windows Media [13] | MP3 audio [14]]
Pot, Meet Kettle
"Some of your critics say that you're more of a political activist than a journalist."
- Former Clinton campaign operative George Stephanopoulos to conservative filmmaker James O'Keefe on ABC's Good Morning America, June 1.
NBC Touts Weird Author as "Victim" of Palin's "Hell Hounds"
Matt Lauer: "There have been death threats against you. I know the FBI is involved. Wasilla, and Alaska state police. There was a Craigslist posting that asked a question of where in the woods your body would be found over the weekend.... Any regrets to all this? Do you wish you just rented a different house?"
Author Joe McGinniss: "No. You know what actually - what I've learned from that, Matt, and what you just recited, it's very informative. And I think it's probably a lesson for the American people of the power Palin has to incite hatred and her willingness and readiness to do it. She has pushed a button and unleashed the Hounds of Hell, and now that they're out there slavering and barking and growling. And that's the same kind of tactic - and I'm not calling her a Nazi - but that's the same kind of tactic that the Nazi troopers used in Germany in the '30s. And I don't think there is any place for it in America."
- Segment of an interview with McGinness, who is renting the house next door to Palin while he works on a book about the former Alaska governor, NBC's Today, June 1. [Audio/video (1:09): Windows Media [15] | MP3 audio [16]]
Newsweek Writer Frets: "We" Liberals "Didn't Show Up" for Obama
"When Obama said 'We are the ones we've been waiting for,' we didn't show up. It was the right-wingers at the town meetings."
- Newsweek senior writer Jonathan Alter on HBO's Real Time with Bill Maher, May 28.
Al and Tipper Call It Splitsville; CBS Blames Bush
"It's been 10 years since that oddly public passionate kiss at the Democratic convention. That was followed by Gore winning the popular vote for President but losing the electoral vote. Family friend Sally Quinn says that may have done the marriage irreparable harm."
- CBS correspondent Sharyl Attkisson on the June 1 Evening News.
"Please Al and Tipper, don't do this. For our sakes - don't. We can't handle it....This doesn't just make us sad. It makes us scared. It means that maybe marriage isn't something we can conquer. "
- Washington Post writer Ellen McCarthy, June 3 "Style" section article [17].
Gulf Spill Fault of American "Pigs" Guzzling Too Much Oil
Comedian Robert Klein: "May I say that, you know, all this who's to blame and all the blame - we're all to blame. We're pigs....You know, all that oil that's fouling everything, it probably wouldn't run the automobiles in Texas for one day."
Co-host Harry Smith: "An hour."
Klein: "I mean, an hour. I mean, it's minuscule, that's how much we use of that stuff. So let's get off it."
- CBS's The Early Show, June 7.
Reagan Just Acted as a President While Obama's the Real Thing
"Can you understand why the President, though, is frustrated when people say, 'Be madder'?...If I could channel Obama for one moment, I think he would say that he's surprised that this is even an issue....You know, 'You want me to act madder?' You know, 'I'm not acting. I'm actually the President, you retards' - ooh, shouldn't, I'm sorry - 'you people who are not that bright in America. You have been used to people like Bush and Reagan who acts like the President. I'm not acting. I'm actually the President.'"
- Bill Maher talking about the oil spill with Democratic operative Paul Begala on HBO's Real Time, June 4.
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