quote/unquote

i haven't been in a position to post much lately, but a reader in St. Louis relayed these quotes today which i'll take the liberty to publish here. to take up the slack, so to speak. carry on.


"The modern conservative is engaged in one of man's oldest exercises in moral philosophy; that is, the search for a superior moral justification for selfishness."
*-- John Kenneth Galbraith

"And as far as history goes and all of these quotes about people trying to guess what the history of the Bush administration is going to be, you know, I take great comfort in knowing that they don't know what they are talking about, because history takes a long time for us to reach."
*- President George W.Bush on Fox News Sunday, Feb. 10, '08

"When MSNBC's correspondent David Shuster had the cheek to suggest on air that Chelsea Clinton was being "pimped out," he was probably trying to sound au courant. "Pimp" is so overused and de-sexed (by everyone from Virgin Atlantic to Entertainment Weekly) that people may forget what it once meant. Hillary Clinton, apparently, has not. Her outrage was predictable . . . If you've experienced the American pimp scene - even peripherally, as I have - you'd recognize Chelsea Clinton's dad right away as pimp material. Long before Bill turned post-presidential as Hillary's hands-on helper, the Clinton marriage was settling into a pattern, starting with Bill's seductive charisma and moving right along with Hillary's decision to provide the financial support. In the 1990s, when feminists were casting Bill as an "equal partnership" spouse, he struck me as a quasi-pimp. Not a gigolo, you understand. That's not Bill's game at all. He was never there to be window-dressing or to keep Hillary amused, and he's too formidable a player to be taken for arm candy. How could Hillary fall for a "pimp", even a quasi-pimp? All kinds of women do. Sometimes the strongest and most sharp-witted want to be with a pimp because other men seem bland."
*- Tracy Quan, author of the Nancy Chan call-girl novels, in a column in the Manchester (UK) Guardian

"We work at a newspaper where the owner is hiring and throwing money at the business, while the rest of the industry could not be grimmer. There are other, more inchoate fears about where this ends up. But in the short term, it's exciting."
---editor at the Wall Street Journal, quoted in the NY Times and declining to be identified, talking about new
owner Rupert Murdoch and his plans to expand WSJ coverage in politics and sports.