QuoteLog

“If I had a nickel for every No. 2 and No. 3 they’ve arrested or killed in Iraq and Afghanistan, I’d be a millionaire.”

“Freedom of speech and the press are hard-won rights we sometimes take for granted in the United States. If the American soldiers who are in Iraq to help bring about those freedoms for the Iraqi people cannot themselves be honest, the intent of this war is all but gone.”

“I don’t know how you sleep at night.”

“The former FEMA director says fault lies with his bosses, the Louisiana governor, the New Orleans mayor, the media and victims.”

“Either we raise taxes and pay as we go — or we run deficits until foreigners cease to lend us the money and the dollar goes the way of the peso. When Republican leaders are saying there is no more fat in the federal budget, the proper political translation is that the Grand Old Party of Taft, Goldwater, Reagan and Helms is no more. We have become the very people we went into politics to run out of town.”

“Even if every hardcore liberal in the country votes Democratic, we have to win about three-quarters of the moderates to gain a majority. That means we have to win support pretty far into the conservative end of that moderate center, and people like that simply aren’t going to respond to anti-war rallies and screaming campaigns against John Roberts.”

“We can work with everybody, including the administration, or against them, and I’m prepared to go either way. But I’m going to look after our people first.”

“It’s part of Georgia’s new education policy, ‘Every Child Left Behind.’”

“If the dome and Convention Center had harbored large numbers of middle class white people, it would not have been a fertile ground for this kind of rumor-mongering.”

“[O]ccasionally good news travels in from outside, like a birdsong though an open window. It’s as if Katrina left in her wake a huge zone of Bad, where no new Good can gain a foothold. All the Good we get has to be imported from exotic far away lands, like Missouri, or New York. Places where people have homes, and electricity, and phones, and running water, and a future.”

“The Internet has provided many different environments in which we are able to publish ideas anonymously and interact with others with little or no chance of suffering consequences for bad behavior. It is interesting how our behavior changes, once the danger of having another human being beat us to a bloody pulp for insulting them is taken away.”

“Incidentally, the crowd’s behavior almost spoiled this reviewer’s mood. He found himself wondering how fans could spend $252 on a ticket, then gab through the show. And he wondered why the fans’ innermost thoughts couldn’t wait to be revealed at a time when they weren’t in the same room with a Beatle.”

“The porkbusters fight is fun now, but not since early cave men tried to train grizzly bears to give them tongue baths has a project seemed more obviously doomed to end in disappointment. Expecting Congress — of either party — to give back pork which has already been approved and passed into law is like expecting crack whores to give refunds days after services have been rendered.”

“When Congress approves $12 billion in two to three days of the hurricane, and two weeks later, none of the communities whose population has swollen by 25,000 has received any of that money, you have to wonder what is going on.”

“George W. Bush is a big spender. He has never vetoed a spending bill. When Congress serves up a big slab of fat, crackling pork, Mr. Bush responds with one big question: Got any barbecue sauce?”

“We depend on Japan, China, the United Kingdom, Saudi Arabia, and Korea primarily to basically loan us money every day of the year to cover my tax cut and these conflicts and Katrina. I don’t think it makes any sense. I think it’s wrong.”

“He told me to picture a world without art — to imagine a life with no music in it, no hot colors, no nonsense, no poetry. He told me to picture a world in which no one was ever shaken, nothing was said that ever challenged anyone, nothing was done that ever disturbed or uplifted a human soul. And that, he told me, is what it means to miss New Orleans.”

“That’s it. I’m done. You might as well kill me now, because it’s the Apocalypse. All life on this planet is no doubt mere days away from coming to an end, because really — mankind couldn’t possibly get any stupider. Not possible.”

“Observe our national politics. Observe politics around the world. Observe politics through the ages. Does it look like God’s handiwork? When it comes to having a role in politics, that would be the Other Fellow.”

“[Arizona Sen.] Jon Kyl and I were talking about the estate tax. If we knew anybody that owned a business that lost life in the storm, that would be something we could push back with.”

“I have been going to Ecuador and Mexico (on medical missions) for 14 years. I was at ground zero. I’ve seen hundreds of people die. This was different because we knew the hurricane was coming. FEMA showed up late and then rejected help for the sake of organization. They put form before function, and people died.”

“We allowed people to cross ... because they were dying in the convention center. We made a decision to protect people. They made a decision to protect property.”

“If you don’t get someone over to my goddamned house and pick me up and bring me to the Dome, I’ve got a big mirror and a lipstick in my hand, and I’m gonna write, ‘When you open this door and find me dead, it’s the fault of the New Orleans Police Department.’”

“Does anybody in this building know anything about buses?”

“What is the real story of Katrina is (I suggest) not so much that nature wrought fury on land, water, people, property, and animals, not at all anything about racism, not much about federal government incompetence. The real story is that the mainstream media rioted. They used the storm and its attendant sorrows to continue their endless attack on George W. Bush.”

“I’ve been a supporter of President Bush, but I just got to come back to the fact that this is a failure of leadership and I’ll tell you I’m personally angry ... I don’t want a president who is taking six week vacations anywhere when Americans are dying ... whether they are dying in Iraq or LA.”

“The reality, say several aides who did not wish to be quoted because it might displease the president, did not really sink in until Thursday night. Some White House staffers were watching the evening news and thought the president needed to see the horrific reports coming out of New Orleans. Counselor Bartlett made up a DVD of the newscasts so Bush could see them in their entirety as he flew down to the Gulf Coast the next morning on Air Force One.”

“Michael Brown has been acting like a private instead of a general. When you’re in the middle of a disaster, you can’t stop to check the legal niceties or to review FEMA regulations before deciding to help Mississippians knocked flat on their backs.”

“I have searched my mind for some justification for why I can’t be reporting in a calm and heavily defended American city and cannot find one. I don’t like being told when I can and cannot walk on the streets and take pictures.”

“Being an asshole is the key to blog success. Forget all those worthless articles you’ve read about getting traffic and being noticed, because all you need is to be an asshole. Say provocative things in witty, or not so witty, ways. But to be noticed, you have to be a different style of asshole from all the other assholes out there.”

“We finally cleaned up public housing in New Orleans. We couldn’t do it, but God did.”

“No administration could credibly investigate such an immense failure on its own watch. And we have learned through bitter experience — the Abu Ghraib nightmare is just one example — that when this administration begins an internal investigation, it means a whitewash in which no one important is held accountable and no real change occurs.”

“I never thought Sensenbrenner and Tancredo could prove themselves to be more horrible congressmen than I thought they were — but I stand corrected.”

“My prior antipathy toward the Department of Homeland Security has now hardened into something approaching activism.”

“[T]he path from post-9/11 unity to the rancor and finger-pointing in the aftermath of Katrina’s fury charts a clear deterioration in political consensus in the United States and a growing willingness to interpret events through a partisan prism. It is a problem that now appears destined to follow Bush through the final years of his presidency — a clear failure of his 2000 campaign promise to be a ‘uniter, not a divider.’”

“Mr. Bush is going to have to recognize the obvious initial failure of the Department of Homeland Security in its first big post-9/11 test. The President created this latest huge federal bureaucracy, against the advice of many of us, and we’re still waiting for evidence that it has done anything but reshuffle the Beltway furniture. If FEMA can’t now handle the diaspora out of New Orleans to Houston, Baton Rouge and other cities, the political retribution will be fierce.”

“Take whatever idiot they have at the top of whatever agency and give me a better idiot. Give me a caring idiot. Give me a sensitive idiot. Just don’t give me the same idiot.”

“If I read ONE MORE article in which a science-hating red state pundit attacks progressives, I’m going to take the money I was going to donate to disaster relief and spend it on a nice Thai meal. And I’m going to suggest that all other progressives do likewise. I’m going to say ‘DROWN AND DIE, YOU ARROGANT HILLBILLY SOUTHERN-FRIED LEECHES!!’”

“The City of New Orleans and its residents owe the President a profound debt of gratitude.”

“Those Bush-loving Darwin-hating quasi-retarded brutishly-primitive hillbillies want us to fork over more of our hard-earned money in order to get them out of a deadly fix they brought upon themselves [...] BUSH CAUSED THIS DISASTER. And YOU caused this disaster, you southern soft-heads, because you voted for that ape.”

“Almost every Republican I have spoken with is disappointed. He is a strong president ... but he has never really focused on the importance of good execution. I think that is true in many parts of his presidency.”

“The day before, she’d waited all day at the Astrodome for [FEMA] to call the last two digits of her number for a discussion about emergency housing ... Peters finally got through at 12:25 a.m. Saturday, but they told her they couldn’t process the family’s claim until they had an opportunity to see to their New Orleans home and survey the damage. ‘It will be months.’”

“My biggest disappointment is with the federal government and the National Guard. The guard arrived 48 hours after the hurricane with 40 trucks. They drove their trucks in and went to sleep. For 72 hours this police department and the fire department and handful of citizens were alone rescuing people. We have people who died while the National Guard sat and played cards.”

“They knew that this one was different. I don’t think Mike Brown or anyone else in FEMA could have any reason to have any problem with our calls ... They were told ... We said the levees could be topped.”

“Instead of relying on a ‘Good Samaritan’ policy — the fantasy in New Orleans that everyone would take care of the neighbors — the Virginia rescue workers go door to door. If people resist the plea to leave ... rescue workers give them Magic Markers and ask them to write their Social Security numbers on their body parts so they can be identified.”

“During this crisis you failed us. You looked down on us; you dismissed our victims; you dismissed us. You want our Jazz Fest, you want our Mardi Gras, you want our cooking and our music. Then when you saw us in real trouble, when you saw a tiny minority preying on the weak among us, you called us ‘Sin City,’ and turned your backs.”

“First of all it is a national humiliation to see bodies floating in a river for five days in a major American city. But second, you have to remember, this was really a de-legitimization of institutions. Our institutions completely failed us and it is not as if it is the first in the past three years — this follows Abu Ghraib, the failure of planning in Iraq, the intelligence failures, the corporate scandals, the media scandals.”

“I’m angry at the guy and maybe it will pass for me. But a lot of people and a lot of Republicans are furious right now.”

“I think it puts into question all of the Homeland Security and Northern Command planning for the last four years, because if we can’t respond faster than this to an event we saw coming across the Gulf for days, then why do we think we’re prepared to respond to a nuclear or biological attack?”

“They died right here, in America, waiting for food.”

“Excuse me, Senator, I’m sorry for interrupting. I haven’t heard that, because, for the last four days, I’ve been seeing dead bodies in the streets here in Mississippi.”

“This is ridiculous. And I don’t want to see anybody do anymore goddamned press conferences. Put a moratorium on press conferences. Don’t do another press conference until the resources are in this city and then come down to this city and stand with us when there are military trucks and troops that we can’t even count. Don’t tell me 40,000 people are coming here! They’re not here! It’s too doggone late. Now get off your asses and let’s do something! Let’s fix the biggest goddamned crisis in the history of this country.”

“Much harder to measure is the cost of all those searing images burned into the national conscience, and what they’ve done to the sense of security that was our last refuge when disasters wreaked havoc, and then, unnecessary suffering, in distant lands — the certainty that it couldn’t happen here. Now we know better.”

“Or you can be a political looter, hovering over the wreckage and despair, scrabbling to snatch out some shiny baubles or little scraps of bloody meat for some kind of perverse personal or political satisfaction or advantage.”