QuoteLog

“First, we must always maintain the highest ethical standards. We must always ask ourselves not only what is legal, but what is right. There is no goal of government worth accomplishing if it cannot be accomplished with integrity.”

“The best result of this latest scandal, and the hypocrisy and finger-pointing exhibited on both sides, would be for voters to say, ‘A pox on both your houses,’ reject the scandal culture and gotcha politics of both parties and seek new politics of common cause, collegiality and the public interest. The alternative is that most people will conclude that in American politics today the only standard is the double standard, and the cycles of conflict and rancor will continue.”

“One of the reasons some of us have felt discomfort regarding President Bush’s leadership the past year or so is that he makes more than the usual number of decisions that seem to be looking for trouble. He makes startling choices, as in the Miers case. But you don’t have to look for trouble in life, it will find you, especially when you’re president. It knows your address. A White House is a castle surrounded by a moat, and the moat is called trouble, and the rain will come and the moat will rise. You should buy some boots, do your work, hope for the best.”

“I think that the Republican Party fairly recently has been taken over by the Christian conservatives, by the Christian right. I don’t think that this is a permanent condition, but I think this has happened, and that it’s divisive for the country.”

“Conservatives live in fear of being betrayed ideologically. They particularly distrust nonpartisan technocrats — experts — who they suspect will be seduced by the ‘liberal establishment.’ The result, in government, journalism and think tanks alike, is a profusion of second-raters whose chief virtue is that they are undeniably ‘sound.’”

“Given the choice, I’d choose a frustrating bureaucracy over an efficient cabal every time.”

“I have invited Condi to the centre of the world, to Blackburn, and to a real football game rather than to rugby with commercials, which I am told is called American football.”

“Finally, any Republican senator who supinely acquiesces in President Bush’s reckless abuse of presidential discretion — or who does not recognize the Miers nomination as such — can never be considered presidential material.”

“And if something comes along that is truly serious, truly serious, something like a nuclear weapon going off in a major American city, or something like a major pandemic, you are going to see the ineptitude of this government in a way that will take you back to the Declaration of Independence. Read it some time again.”

“Who would have believed the wheels would be coming off this early in the second term, and with our own people firing at us?”

“If I were running the PA system for an opposing NFL team, I would play the Love Boat theme music everytime the Vikings did anything.”

“[Dez] White has approached Peerless Price status. That is, cutting White may not make the Falcons better. But at least it would prevent the mistake of ever throwing in his direction again.”

“Do I believe that [Judith] Miller can’t remember who told her ‘Valerie Flame’s’ name? A child wouldn’t believe it. The more clever of my two basset hounds would be suspicious.”

“What I’m saying is that the blogosphere should hold itself to higher standards. Reckless speculation and the dissemination of unfounded rumors should be stigmatized and treated as a stain on a blogger’s reputation (just like it would be for a professional journalist), not treated as a normal part of the process.”

“Eventually, artists will be going onstage like race-car drivers covered in hundreds of logos.”

“Fed by what are to me very cheap arguments by RNC spokesmen and independent stalwarts of the administration — chiefly, it seems, Hugh Hewitt — there is now this permanently established belief in some quarters that people around here and elsewhere oppose Miers based purely on bad motives — elitism, cowardice, sexism etc. I find this horribly disappointing and the sort of thing I normally expect from leftwingers.”

“The only sexism involved in the Miers nomination is the administration’s claim that once they decided they wanted a woman, Miers was the best they could do. Let me just say, if the top male lawyer in the country is John Roberts and the top female lawyer is Harriet Miers, we may as well stop allowing girls to go to law school.”

“More than anything else, our little blogstorm just proves that the internet doesn’t make crowds of people any more rational: it just helps them be irrational more efficiently.”

“The problem is that congress has line-item control over our tax code and that they’re, well, congress. If I gave them line-item control over what I ate for dinner tonight I’d have seventeen courses, beginning with dessert and ending with motor oil from a powerful Senator’s district.”

“How did Judith Miller get to be the martyr in all this? It was, after all, Valerie Plame who got caught in the cross fire between a vindictive White House and an angry diplomat. Someone might spare a thought for her. And if you want journalistic martyrs — well, there are a whole bunch of them in Iraq and Afghanistan right now, risking their lives to tell the story of their wars. Those are the journalists I stand in awe of.”

“We spend our blogging time raising our heads out of the foxholes to note the inbound missiles coming from both sides, and wishing the war would stop — really soon.”

“There is a gaping disproportion between the stakes associated with this vacancy and the stature of the person nominated to fill it.”

“No, I think people are enraged in large measure because, given a terribly important appointment opportunity, Bush has made himself look like the dumb, parochial, cronyist hack that his enemies have always said he was. That makes anyone who actively supported him look like a fool.”

“If Harriet Miers were not a crony of the president of the United States, her nomination to the Supreme Court would be a joke, as it would have occurred to no one else to nominate her.”

“He has neither the inclination nor the ability to make sophisticated judgments about competing approaches to construing the Constitution. Few presidents acquire such abilities in the course of their pre-presidential careers, and this president particularly is not disposed to such reflections.”

“I don’t think it’s important to show loyalty to the president by backing his decision. This choice will live beyond his presidency. It’s important to get a justice who will add to the wisdom of the court, who will make it more likely that America will get a fair hearing before the bench.”

“I eagerly await the announcement of President Bush’s real nominee to the Supreme Court. If the president meant Harriet Miers seriously, I have to assume Bush wants to go back to Crawford and let Dick Cheney run the country.”

“He’s not the nominee, and it’s not enough to just say ‘Trust me.’”

“I’m sorry, but the Republicans richly deserve to lose control over the House and the Senate in 2006. There is no excuse whatsoever for their profligate spending, and no excuse for Tom Delay’s absurd claim that there is no fat in the federal budget. Every American should be disgusted at this spending spectacle.”

“Tom Delay has been out of his leadership post for exactly seven days. We’ve seen more public right-wing complaining this week than in the past 240 weeks. Probably a coincidence. Probably.”

“Bush had a chance for greatness in remaking the Supreme Court, a chance to succeed where his Republican precedessors from Nixon to his father all failed. He instinctively recoiled from it. He blew it.”

“Some argue that since our actions are not as horrifying as Al Qaeda’s, we should not be concerned. When did Al Qaeda become any type of standard by which we measure the morality of the United States? We are America, and our actions should be held to a higher standard, the ideals expressed in documents such as the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution.”

“From the earliest days of her career, [Kate] Moss has looked like a drug user — an appearance the fashion industry has tried to duplicate with numerous other young things. Heck, they glibly called her look ‘heroin chic.’ And now, they are so appalled to find that she apparently truly does use drugs. Oh, please, quit with the hypocrisy.

“Nothing has changed. Nothing will change. Not unless it comes in the form of something akin to the French Revolution. We need terror. We need horror. We need the streets running awash in rivers of blood of these thugs and criminals and zealots.”

“I would argue that the most powerful voices of change in the country, from Lincoln to King, have been those who can speak with the utmost conviction about the great issues of the day without ever belittling those who opposed them, and without denying the limits of their own perspectives.”

“I am convinced that, our mutual frustrations and strongly-held beliefs notwithstanding, the strategy driving much of Democratic advocacy, and the tone of much of our rhetoric, is an impediment to creating a workable progressive majority in this country.”

“Whether we like it or not, New Orleans is not going to be 500,000 people for a long time. New Orleans is not going to be as black as it was for a long time, if ever again.”

“Unless we use the word ‘failure’ and be up front about it, you can’t solve the problem. The government failed in New Orleans. There are no circumstances where 34 senior citizens should die alone, where an American body should lay in the streets for three days. Either, it’s totally unacceptable and has to be changed, or it’s somehow excusable.”