QuoteLog

“If we, comfortably ensconced in the institutionalised Europe to which these peaceful demonstrators look with hope and yearning, do not immediately support them with every appropriate means at our disposal, we will betray the very ideals we claim to represent.”

“Some of us are going to die there, and some of us are going to die unnecessarily because of the lack of training. So I don’t care. Let them court-martial me. I want the American public to know what is going on. My men are guilty of one thing: volunteering to serve their country. And we are at the end of our rope.”

“I was totally guilty of doing what I accused many of my adversaries of doing. I was writing about what I was against, not what I was for. I was writing with long, broad strokes. I was engaging in the worst of unsocial discourse. And I was fueling ten thousand people a day while I was doing it.”

“It’s business, you have to have a thick skin. If you let people get to you, on or off the court, it’s going to affect how you play.”

“The hypocrisy of selling alcohol all night, then complaining when people behave like drunks, is beyond comment.”

“It was probably the first sports event in history where the nosebleed seats were right in the front.”

“In a bureaucracy which has been as isolated as the United Nations from ordinary mechanisms of accountability, one begins to sadly suspect that in the present scandals we might only be seeing the tip of the iceberg.”

“If there be any among us who would wish to dissolve this Union or to change its republican form, let them stand undisturbed as monuments of the safety with which error of opinion may be tolerated where reason is left free to combat it.”

“I believe we have been far too tolerant for too long, especially being too tolerant of intolerance, and we only got intolerance back.”

“Bigots who make a nuisance of themselves is one thing; all countries have bigots. What defines a country is the degree to which it tolerates its bigots.”

“I would really like to find the exact moment in time this stopped being fun.”

“On both sides, discourse now moves swiftly from disagreement into demonizing, from contrast to caricature. The worst motives are always assumed. Both camps have polemicists who win popularity, ratings, and book sales by devising ever more clever ways of ripping the eyelids off their opponents. We all know the visceral satisfactions of hanging out with our home-team blogs and watching the TV or radio stations that fit our worldview. Our politicians and pundits happily supply us with the voodoo dolls and the pins. But we’d be smarter not to use them.”

“It seemed that the technical mechanisms of reputation, such as blog-rolls and Technorati, had codified social inequalities in charisma and popularity (the politics of groups), until they had actually become institutionalised political forms.”

“Later, I learned that the Rotterdam police had destroyed a street mural featuring the words, ‘Thou shalt not kill,’ a picture of an angel, and the date of Mr. van Gogh’s murder because the leader of a nearby mosque reportedly considered it racist.”

“It is like that nice guy in America — what’s his name again? — who spoke about ‘old Europe’. It has no sense. It’s a lack of culture to imagine that. Imagining that there can be division between the British and French vision of Europe is as absurd as imagining that we are building Europe against the United States.”

“Anybody who thought that a ‘Bush 2’ foreign policy would be a more moderate, multilateral, Kerry-like foreign policy just doesn’t understand this president, or this election.”

“Look, I’m as ‘militaristic’ as the next person when it comes to actually defending ourselves, but I’m somewhat bothered when a disease like cancer kills 500,000 people a year in the US, afflicts another million, and the National Cancer Institute has a total budget of 6 billion this last year, which is about 1/10 the CIA’s budget, and 1/70th of what was spent by the Pentagon. I guess it’s just easier to blow stuff up.”

“In your re-election, God has graciously granted America — though she doesn’t deserve it — a reprieve from the agenda of paganism.”

“Taking in this scene I had very mixed feelings: a fervent hope that victory in Falluja will start to tip Iraq in the right direction, and utter scorn at the fact that we are now, once again, fighting a full-scale war in central Iraq, without an ounce of self-reflection by an administration that long ago declared ‘mission accomplished.’ But don’t worry. Rummy has it all under control. He hasn’t made any mistakes. Everything is going as planned. The plan was always to fight running street battles in Falluja 20 months after Saddam’s fall.”

“Even the most liberal society is illiberal when it is a question of survival. The Dutch see those who dream of Europe under a revived caliphate as a threat to their way of life [...] Not even the most tolerant people on earth can tolerate the Islamists.”

“We both represent aspects of the American psyche that need each other, the jock and the intellectual, the Boy Scout and the renegade, the guardian and the wild card. We both love this great and terrible country, even as we fear one another’s excessive influence on it, and part of what we love is the creative fever that arises from our division. As we need each other, however unwillingly, so America needs us both.”

“I can indulge your manic rage and self-pitying up to a point, because I’d be rending my garments and biting the heads off of chickens had Bush lost. When you’re done wallowing, figure out how you’re going to defend the beliefs of 48% of America with honor and dignity.”

“If you send me an uncivil email, I may well post, not only the email, but also your email address in hyperlink form. You have been warned: The wages of rudeness is spam.”

“I have family in Idaho, but I told my wife we’re not going to visit them now. It’s all Republicans there. We have family in Indiana and I don’t want to go there either.”

“Their army is how much bigger than mine? Three percent? Well shucks, Bubba. Now is the time to establish a network and an attitude.”

“Liberals are nice people, but we make shitty generals. Everytime we try make headlong charge and get slaughtered, we regroup, try to figure out what went wrong, and decide we just didn’t charge hard enough. We convince ourselves that there’s this big army of Deaniacs or young voters or whatever who are going to ride to the rescue, and we call that a strategy.”

“Wow. There sure are a bunch of working class white people voting these days. Perhaps it might be useful to try to get some of them to vote for Democrats. I’m just sayin’.”

“The blogosphere had no clue ... This goes for the big pro-Bush sites AND the pro-Kerry sites. (Shall we call it the Main Stream Blogosphere, or ‘MSB?’) This wasn’t ‘The Year of the Blogger’ at all. It was the year the Blogger saw himself and mistook the vision for the election.”

“There is a divide in this country today, miles wide and fathoms deep. It has cleaved our great nation, and has only grown — and will only continue to grow. But it’s not a left/right split, or Democrat/Republican one. It’s lunatic/non-lunatic [...] The Web is a festering cesspool of lunacy and emotion: Free Republic, Daily Kos, Little Green Footballs, Atrios, Instapundit, on and on and on. Facts only enter the picture when they’re favorable. Emotion rules. There is no common ground, nor a desire for any.”

“Screaming that the 58MM or so folks who voted for Bush were idiots, dupes, or evil homophobic crypto-fascist theocratic thugs, is neither helpful nor likely to decrease their number. Threatening to move elsewhere is only going to earn you a ticket, with their gratitude. If you want to sway those folks, you need to change your tactics.”

“I don’t just feel beaten; I feel like I’ve lived a fundamentally foolish turn of mind, like I’ve been defrauding my friends with an amped-up similitude of rational optimism, and that I can’t imagine why anyone should henceforth care what I think about anything.”

“But I, like most of us, fell for the echo chamber. Daily Kos, MyDD, Steve Soto, Pandagon, and all the other blogs are run by good people with positive intentions, but if they’re you’re primary source for information, you’re outlook is perverted by an overwhelming amount of good news and a general disdain for the factual accuracy of bad news. It perverts your perspective and, because the sample group is so totally different than most of America, it begins to twist your political predictions and assumptions of what works.”

“There is something seriously wrong with a party that gets spotted $200 million, a solid candidate, wins every debate, has an opponent with sub-50% approval rating, an unpopular war, the worst economic record since The Great Depression, and a boatload of scandals, and loses by 3 million votes.”

“Bush has no re-election worries, no divided government, and (Ohio recounts willing) no whiff of illegitimacy surrounding his second term. The next two and probably four years will be as pure an expression of his governing beliefs as he could have ever dreamed. If nothing else, we can be thankful for the rare opportunity to see a president and a political party in such sharp, even naked, relief.”

“Never in my lifetime have I seen the electorate so passionate, and never before have the two sides seemed so utterly, unshakeably certain of themselves. Campaigns are not the best places to seek out public confessions of self-doubt, but the certitude on display in this race has long since crossed the threshold from confidence to delusion, and whoever is elected on Tuesday (or whenever it ends) will soon be smacked in the face with the cold hard truth.”

“I’ve been disillusioned with the political process ever since John Hoffmeyer won the student council presidency by ten votes in sixth grade and my request for a recount was denied.”

“Bin Laden’s remarks show how poorly he understands America and Americans. His words will have no influence on the election or American policy. After all, if we won’t listen to our friends and allies’ advice we certainly aren’t going to listen to his.”

“Elsewhere, Bin Laden has vowed to bankrupt the US. Given Bush’s prescription drug plan and Kerry’s proposed ‘reforms,’ all we can say is, back of the line, buddy.”

“To put it plainly, if European public opinion about the U.S. depends primarily on us electing a president who doesn’t offend their sensibilities, then the Transatlantic relationship may have already become too pathological to repair any time in the foreseeable future.”

“These experts said Bin Laden appeared to be intensifying his campaign to ‘re-brand’ himself in the minds of Muslims worldwide, and become known more as a political voice than a global terrorist.”

“The 2004 presidential election is shaping up to be uglier than an octogenarian stripper convention.”

“In 2003 I went to tell Deputy Secretary of Defense Paul Wolfowitz what I had seen in Baghdad in the days following Saddam Hussein’s overthrow. For nearly an hour, I described the catastrophic aftermath of the invasion — the unchecked looting of every public institution in Baghdad, the devastation of Iraq’s cultural heritage, the anger of ordinary Iraqis who couldn’t understand why the world’s only superpower was letting this happen.”

“Set aside what the mass of people think. Some things are so bad for them that you cannot allow them to have them. One of them is war in the context of terrorism in the United States. Therefore, we have to abridge individual rights, change the societal conditions, and act in ways that heretofore were not in accordance with our values and traditions, like giving a police officer or security official the right to search you without a judicial finding of probable cause.”