Quote of the Day posts

Saturday July 19, 2014

Miss Me Yet? Part VII

“I went to a communications meeting the day after Jeffords switched. I remember feeling like I was looking at people who had won a reality-game ticket to head up the White House. There was this remarkable combination of hubris, excitement, and staggering ignorance.

”Someone made the suggestion that perhaps the president should call the new majority leader. And it’s like, Well, I’m not sure that’s really necessary. Margaret Tutwiler [assistant to the president and special adviser for communications] was there, and I remember her sitting at the head of the table, her eyes just sort of wide, and she sort of lost it. She’s like, Are you fricking kidding me? She goes, The president of the United States calls the new majority leader. The president of the United States calls the new minority leader, right? The president does these things because, you know, these things have to be done.

“And, you know, people around the table—Karl [Rove], Karen [Hughes]—all these people were like, Oh, well, do we have to? It was like an absolutely serious debate.”

-- David Kuo, deputy director of the White House Office of Faith-Based and Community Initiatives, from Vanity Fair's ”An Oral History of the Bush Administration"

Posted at 06:55 AM on Jul 19, 2014 in category Quote of the Day
Tags: George W. Bush
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Friday July 18, 2014

Quote of the Day

“How can Putin really manage this? You’d need to be an amazing conductor. Stalin was an amazing conductor in this way. Putin can’t quite pull off this trick. The audience is warmed up and ready to go; it is wound up and waiting for more and more conflict. You can’t just say, ‘Calm down.’ It’s a dangerous moment. Today, forty per cent of Russia wants real war with Ukraine. Putin himself doesn’t want war with Ukraine. But people are responding to this media machine. Putin needs to lower the temperature.”

--former Putin adviser Gleb Pavlovsky in Moscow (to the New Yorker's David Remnick) a few weeks before Malaysia Airlines Flight 17 was shot down over Ukraine, most likely by Russian-backed Ukrainian separatists.

Posted at 11:33 AM on Jul 18, 2014 in category Quote of the Day
Tags: Russia, Ukraine, Vladimir Putin, David Remnick
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Wednesday July 16, 2014

Quote of the Day

“That Sarah Palin, assorted Tea Party elements, and two-thirds of Republicans deem impeachment of the President a worthy undertaking only underscores the point. It’s easy to see this as simply a symptom of the partisan abyss that afflicts our politics—in 2005, nearly three-quarters of Democrats favored impeaching George W. Bush, and Congressman John Conyers authored a resolution to determine whether there were grounds to begin proceedings. That the fictive Benghazi and I.R.S. scandals have brought Republicans to the position that Democrats adopted only after the initiation of an unnecessary war and unwarranted national surveillance and the most inept handling of a national disaster in American history suggests, at the least, a sliding scale of outrage. More to the point, what we now call partisanship is simply the acceptable means to express other sublimated and less acceptable contempts.”

-- Jelani Cobb, “Talking Openly about Obama and Race,” on the New Yorker website

Posted at 12:39 PM on Jul 16, 2014 in category Quote of the Day
Tags: Jelani Cobb, Tea Party, GOP
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Friday July 11, 2014

Quote of the Day

“If propaganda is so powerful, how come it can't help the word 'propaganda'?”

-- me, channeling (badly) Steven Wright, while reading Edward Bernays' book “Propaganda,” from 1928

Posted at 05:54 PM on Jul 11, 2014 in category Quote of the Day
Tags: Propaganda, Edward Bernays
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Thursday July 10, 2014

Quote of the Day

“Despite what some extreme gun advocates believe, no right is unlimited, whether it’s your right to own a gun or your right to practice your religion or your right to freedom of speech. But beyond the legal limits, there are also the limits we all respect in order to have a society where we can get along despite our differences. My neighbor has a First Amendment right to write pornographic 'Hunger Games' fan fiction, but if he hands his manuscripts to my kids he’s just being a creepy dirtbag, First Amendment or not.”

-- Paul Waldman, in his Washington Post piece, “Target, 'open carry,' and the clash of cultures over guns.”