quote/unquote

(Ed.'s note: Part of a continuing series compiled by a reader in St. Louis who reportedly has read a whole lot of Noam Chomsky.)

"But Mrs. Clinton and her advisers should mainly blame themselves, because, as the political operatives say, they went heavily negative and ended up squandering a good part of what was once a 20-point lead. On the eve of this crucial primary, Mrs. Clinton became the first Democratic candidate to wave the bloody shirt of 9/11. A Clinton television ad * torn right from Karl Rove's playbook * evoked the 1929 stock market crash, Pearl Harbor, the Cuban missile crisis, the cold war and the 9/11 attacks, complete with video of Osama bin Laden. "If you can't stand the heat, get out of the kitchen," the narrator intoned. If that was supposed to bolster Mrs. Clinton's argument that she is the better prepared to be president in a dangerous world, she sent the opposite message on Tuesday morning by declaring in an interview on ABC News that if Iran attacked Israel while she were president: "We would be able to totally obliterate them."
*-------- New York Times editorial "The Low Road to Victory" April 23, '08

"The great combat is ending this afternoon in the classical Democratic manner. That is to say, the victors are full of uneasiness and the vanquished are full of bile. It would be hard to find a delegate who believes seriously that Roosevelt can carry New York in November, or Massachusetts or New Jersey, or even Illinois......The row ended quietly enough last night, but without the slightest sign of genuine enthusiasm. The galleries kept on howling for Al Smith to the finish, but Al himself sulked in his hotel, and placards in the lobbies this morning announced that most of his true friends would leave for Manhattan at noon....As for the Roosevelt men, they found themselves on their repeal honeymoon wondering dismally if the bride were really as lovely as she had seemed last Wednesday. Both sides had won and both had lost, but what each thought of was only the loss."
*- H.L. Mencken, Baltimore Evening Sun, "Nomination of FDR," July 1-2, 1932


"Ultimately everything's good. Even bad is good, because bad is there to help you resist it. You need to have that resistance to be good, and, let's face it, the worst things that happen are always the best things that happen. If you look back at your life and say, Well what did you learn? What happened that changed your life, that made you strong, that made you grow, it's always things you perceived as bad. So is there a bad?"
*-- Madonna , in Vanity Fair, May '08

"I'm not really here, I just stick around for my friends."
---- Don Van Pliet (aka Captain Beefheart)