<< QUOTES OF 2005 - FEBRUARY ~ MAIN ~ SMALL MOVEMENT OF RIGHT ARM >>
QUOTES OF 2005 - JANUARY
* “The U.S. will be blamed for global warming, global cooling, any flood, any drought, attacks by terrorists, attacks against terrorists, re-acting too quickly, re-acting too slowly, being too involved in other’s affairs, and not being involved enough in other’s affairs.”—an accurate prediction from reader G. Hamid
* “Suicide is not so much their tactic as their rationale: they represent a cult of death and they are wedded to destruction. It’s amazing how many people refuse to see this.”—Christopher Hitchens on Osama’s followers and those who rationalise their madness
* “‘Charity begins at home’ is the mean-minded dictum of the right, unwilling to spend on foreigners, unwilling to spend on those outside the family fortress at home, either.”—the Guardian’s Polly Toynbee fails to notice massive tsunami donations from the US
* “The UN is taking credit for things that hard-working, street savvy USAID folks have done. It was USAID working with their amazing network of local contacts who scrounged up trucks, drivers, and fuel; organized the convoy and sent it off to deliver critical supplies. A UN ‘air-freight handling centre’? In Aceh? Bull! It’s the Aussies and the Yanks who are running the air ops into Aceh.”—Diplomad, on the ground in the tsunami zone
* “I watched the TV pictures of the surge of ocean coming ashore, saw the buildings in its path, and had to stifle an inward ‘Yes! Sweep them away! Show us how small is Man! Show us how easily this Universe can make matchwood of our dreams!’”—Matthew Parris being disgusting
* “No-one has been in touch about my daughter, Alexandra (nee Adorni) and my new son-in-law, Steven Stewart who are supposed to be on their honeymoon in or near Phuket. I have no idea if they are safe or not. Can anyone help?”—message from Alexandra’s mother Beverley at the Daily Telegraph’s tsunami bulletin board. Both survived, although Steven was later badly injured while helping organise aid supplies
* “The pundits have never liked me. Is it the way I look? The way I sound?”—since John Kerry asks, we may as well answer: yes
* “I got truly upset about the tsunami only when I discovered I knew someone who died in it. Until then, I’d been shocked and fascinated.”—the Daily Telegraph’s Harry Mount
* “I don’t think I’ve ever been more proud to be an Australian.”—World Vision Australia boss Tim Costello reports donations of $16 million
* “You’re The Pits
With your massive armies
You’re The Pits
And you cause tsunamis.”—Mark Steyn updates Cole Porter as G. Hamid’s prediction kicks in
* “Several e-mailers have noticed that Labor leader Mark Latham hasn’t urged his party’s followers to join the aid effort. I held off posting about this, mainly because it seemed redundant (given already massive donations) but also because a note from a claimed ALP member suggested there was something more to Latham’s silence.”—me, not realising that much, much more was to follow
* “While American soldiers were delivering emergency supplies to isolated disaster areas and Australian doctors were treating the injured, Europeans were having meetings or, worse yet, trying to set dates for meetings.”—Jochen Buchsteiner in the German conservative daily Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung
* “Howard has used his opposition to Asian migration - and appropriated One Nation policies - to considerable advantage. Menzies’ Yellow Peril becomes Howard’s Brown Peril: the teeming millions of Muslims. Welcome to the past!”—welcome to the present, Phillip Adams. After these lines were written but before they were published, Australian Prime Minister John Howard announced a one billion dollar donation to “teeming millions of Muslims”
* “What did you think of when you considered the horrid human toll of the tsunami? Well, if you’re like WaPo cartoonist Tom Toles, you immediately thought of a man standing on a battered beach reading a newspaper story forecasting increases in CO2 emissions.”—James Lileks
* “He was with the kids at the pool. There was nothing unwell there about him.”—Shirley Corbett, an observer of Mark Latham at Terrigal’s Star of the Sea resort
* “What the hell are we doing in Iraq? No one can explain to me in a reasonable manner that I can accept why we’re there, why we went there, and why we’re still there.”—Mel Gibson
* “It was an ideology based on rationalism, science and progress. As such it influenced social science and the humanities. Its critique of economic power has become part of the common sense of our era.”—academic David McKnight, who believes free-marketeers are “immoral”, defends Marxism
* “I am bewildered by the world reaction to the tsunami tragedy. Why are newspapers, television and politicians making such a fuss? Why has the British public forked out more than £100m to help the survivors, and why is Tony Blair now promising ‘hundreds of millions of pounds’? Why has Australia pledged £435m and Germany £360m? And why has Mr Bush pledged £187m?”—Terry Jones of Monty Python’s Flying Circus strives gracelessly to make a point about Iraq and the tsunami
* “This clearly spells out the name ‘Allah’ in Arabic.” —Mohamed Faizeen, manager of the Centre for Islamic Studies in Colombo, detects meaning in a satellite picture taken seconds after the tsunami smashed into Sri Lanka’s west coast
* “One of the strong points of the intellectual Left is its independence of spirit.”—former Latham, Crean, and Beazley speechwriter Dennis Glover
* “The news about my health has not been good. I have been told to rest and not to work, advice I am trying to follow.”—Mark Latham takes his first steps towards the exit
* “Last year, I was in the same hangar that Bush did his - who came with the Thanksgiving turkey, the plastic turkey ...”—Al Franken, opponent of lying liars who lie, lies
* “Michael Moore and I actually have a lot in common - we both appreciate living in a country where there’s free expression. But, Michael, if you ever show up at my front door with a camera - I’ll kill you. I mean it.”—Clint Eastwood
* “Then you’ve got Fox News, which is admittedly more partisan or perceived as more partisan, and so people then start to say, hey, wait a second, they’re all partisan.”—the New Yorker’s Ken Auletta blames Fox News for perceptions of bias across all media
* “How can Americans love The Simpsons yet vote for Bush?”—Phillip Adams is confused
* “The right-wing blogosphere has removed itself from any realm of rational discourse and instead established only one principle: win the argument.”—cartoonist August J. Pollak believes that arguments may be won from irrational positions
* “The Asian tsunami has provided a perfect example of the need for an effective UN under an activist Secretary General. This time Kofi Annan was quick off the mark and America’s independent efforts soon looked superfluous.”—the BBC’s Peter Marshall
* “Homes are all modestly scaled; on a random day near Christmas, of 62 houses for sale in the nearby city of York, only one cost more than $200,000 ... I wondered if all this sameness created a pressure to conform to prevailing political views.”—the Washington Post’s David Von Drehle visits Waco, Nebraska, where everybody conforms. In the District of Columbia, where Von Drehle lives, unpressured non-conformists voted 10 to 1 in favor of John Kerry
* “The conservative movement is just too fundamentally stupid to sustain itself.”—Duncan“Atrios” Black
* “The President, despite his clear if narrow victory in November, has a 43 per cent approval rating, the lowest for any re-elected president in the past 60 years.”—former Age editor Michael Gawenda. In fact, at the time of writing, Bush had a 43 per cent disapproval rating; his approval was running at 50 per cent
* “We’ve seen islands disappear, perhaps wiping out a people.”—Margo Kingston’s first post of 2005 is hideously wrong
* “Tis harder, and maybe more noble, to seek a goal with determination and fail than to make the same commitment and succeed.”—Margo again, making no sense about Mark Latham
* “The fire in his belly has been doused by his pancreas, the large organ behind his belly.”—the Sydney Morning Herald’s Tony Stephens on Mark Latham, whose pancreas—like that of most people—can easily fit into the palm of one’s hand
* “For a possible Inauguration Day story on ABC News, we are trying to find out if there any military funerals for Iraq war casualties scheduled for Thursday, Jan. 20. If you know of a funeral and whether the family might be willing to talk to ABC News, please fill out the form below.”—America’s ABC network seeks to vile up its Inauguration Day coverage
* “This strutting Texan mountebank, with his chimpanzee smirk and his born-again banalities delivered in that constipated syntax that sounds the way cold cheeseburgers look, and his grinning plastic wife, and his scheming junta of neo-con spivs, shamans, flatterers and armchair warmongers, and his sinuous evasions and his brazen lies, and his sleight of hand theft from the American poor, and his rape of the environment, and his lethal conviction that the world must submit to his Pax Americana or be bombed into charcoal ... ”—the Sydney Morning Herald’s Mike Carlton losing it, as usual
* “In my opinion it is better that thirty innocent men go to jail than that a single villain gets away with something. As luck would have it, the last five or six Home Secretaries have all enthusiastically agreed with me.”—outstanding Britisher Harry Hutton
* “The French no longer believe in anything.”—French administrators analyse the French
* “I will never forget those bad soldiers when they put the Koran among the magazines.” —Iraqi Imaad, complaining about his own porn stash being co-mingled with Allah’s holy words, as quoted by the Washington Post’s Jackie Spinner
* “Let’s Bomb Texas.”—sign held by a girly man at Bush’s inauguration
* “We are the ALP, we are the alternative government of Australia, and frankly, right now, we are in a God-awful shambles.”—Labor Party James at 15 icon Kevin Rudd
* “Bush might be quietly encouraging the Israelis to take out the Iranian nuclear facilities, as they did some years ago.”—Phillip Adams gets Iraq mixed up with Iran
* “They are unlikely to vote in the right numbers to legitimise this process. This election will do nothing - things will stay bad or get worse.”—the Sydney Morning Herald’s Paul McGeough on “them”
* ”Last night I saw an episode of Frontline on PBS, about Al Queda in Europe. I realized that these people are serious, and they want to restore the Caliphate, the old Islamic empire.”—a Democratic Underground operative breaks ranks
* ”Suicide bombers are not necessarily in love with death ... They kill themselves because they can see no other way of attaining justice; and the fact that they have to do so is part of the injustice.”—Terry Eagleton, professor of cultural theory at Manchester University
* “My wife and I were very shocked but we watched it until the end because we couldn’t believe what we were seeing.” —devout Baptist Alan Leigh-Browne, who purchased a Doris Day DVD only to view an Italian sex film ... all the way to the end
* “Slight Turnout Is Expected as Iraqis Abroad Begin to Vote.”—a New York Times headline, subsequently removed
* “Error: There is no Member ID K26.”—message at Mark Latham’s Parliamentary website
* “No - there’s a weight limit at the White House.”—Michael Moore, asked if he’d ever thought of running for President
* “Yes for the freedom and democracy!
Yes for the civilized Iraq!
Yes for peace and prosperity!
Yes for coexistence!
Yes for the New Iraq!
Let them bomb and kill us. It will not deter us!
Let them send their dogs to suck our bones. We care not!
Let them bark. It will not frighten us.
Let them see how civilised to be free and democratic!”—Hammorabi outlines the issues ahead of Iraq’s election
* “Bush lied! Fingers dyed!”—Paul Zrimsek
* “I walked forward to my station, cast my vote and then headed to the box, where I wanted to stand as long as I could, then I moved to mark my finger with ink, I dipped it deep as if I was poking the eyes of all the world’s tyrants.”—Omar votes
* “I doubt that I want to say very much about the current situation in Iraq actually.”—lefty blogger Mark Bahnisch
* “There are literally millions of Americans who are unhappy today because millions of Iraqis went to the polls yesterday. And why? Because this isn’t just a success for Bush. It’s a huge win. It’s a colossal vindication.
“It’s a big fat gigantic winning vindication of the guy that the Moores and Kennedys and millions of others still can’t believe anybody voted for.
“And they know it.
“And it’s killing them.”—John Podhoretz
I don’t want to get too far off topic, but, according to an article on Yahoo, Senator Kennedy has apparently written a children’s book featuring his dog: “The Senator and Me: A Dog’s Eye View of Washington, D.C.” The dog is - I’m not kidding - a Portuguese Water Dog, nicknamed “Splash” by his former owner. You could drop The Cinder Block of Irony on Kennedy’s head and not raise a bump.
“My wife and I were very shocked but we watched it until the end because we couldn’t believe what we were seeing.”—devout Baptist Alan Leigh-Browne, who purchased a Doris Day DVD only to view an Italian sex film ... all the way to the end
And then they had the best sex of their marriage.
They’re probably still smiling.
The dog is - I’m not kidding - a Portuguese Water Dog, nicknamed “Splash” by his former owner. You could drop The Cinder Block of Irony on Kennedy’s head and not raise a bump.
Not cluelessness, but arrogance. He probably gets a chuckle out of it. America’s First Family of Rape revels in its invulnerability.
Here we follow Senator Kennedy and Splash through a busy day in D.C., from press conferences to meetings with school groups to committee discussions to a floor vote.
erm… do they let low rat lying cheating drunken murdering arseholes bring dogs into the US senate? then again ted is blind to the truth of his own vileness, so maybe spalsh could be classed as a seeing eye dog
I can’t wait to see Splash’s performance at the Alito hearings.
Kennedy: “Judge Alito, I’m gravely concerned about your stance on women’s rights”
Alito: “Well, Senator, I’d be glad to . . .”
Splash: “Grrrrr!
Kennedy: “Easy, big fellah. Don’t go for his neck unless he mentions ‘strict constructionism’”.
Tim, how about a few dozen blank lines at the top of these entries so I can quickly scroll that woman’s bare ass off my display. Some of us view this site on our employer’s time, you know.
Or at home within range of wives who ASSume the worst.
Posted by Rittenhouse on 2006 01 10 at 04:17 PM • permalinkWhilst the Kyotobears are having meetings about having meetings . Mark Steyn lays in to them in today’s Australian big time. Wowee! what an article!
Hey if all those Sydney beaches go under water, those politically incorrect big “whites” and their bull shark mates will take care of Beach gangs of Middle eastern appearance.”Last night I saw an episode of Frontline on PBS, about Al Queda in Europe. I realized that these people are serious, and they want to restore the Caliphate, the old Islamic empire.”—a Democratic Underground operative breaks ranks
How many viewings of Farhenheit 911 did it take before he felt better and was allowed to rejoin the ranks of the “Reality-Based Community”?
BTW, whatever Mike Charlton is drinking, we need to keep him well supplied.
:^D
Posted by Spiny Norman on 2006 01 10 at 05:14 PM • permalink* “The UN is taking credit for things that hard-working, street savvy USAID folks have done. It was USAID working with their amazing network of local contacts who scrounged up trucks, drivers, and fuel; organized the convoy and sent it off to deliver critical supplies. A UN ‘air-freight handling centre’? In Aceh? Bull! It’s the Aussies and the Yanks who are running the air ops into Aceh.”—Diplomad, on the ground in the tsunami zone
Did we ever find out if the UN completed their strategy meetings and decide on a plan of action?
BTW, Fahrenheit. That might be only the second time I’ve made that typo since that insipid movie came out…
Posted by Spiny Norman on 2006 01 10 at 05:21 PM • permalink“My wife and I were very shocked but we watched it until the end because we couldn’t believe what we were seeing.”—devout Baptist Alan Leigh-Browne, who purchased a Doris Day DVD only to view an Italian sex film ... all the way to the end.”
I saw that one too. It was Doris Day working under the name Doris Lay, before she hit the bigtime in Hollywood. The guy? He looked like Elvis Presley.
Posted by Mystery Meat on 2006 01 10 at 05:44 PM • permalink“Senator Kennedy has apparently written a children’s book featuring his dog: “The Senator and Me: A Dog’s Eye View of Washington, D.C.” The dog is - I’m not kidding - a Portuguese Water Dog, nicknamed “Splash” by his former owner.”
Soon to be followed by sequels from Kennedy’s two other dogs, “Ditch the Bitch” and “Swim Away.”
Posted by Tatterdemalian on 2006 01 10 at 06:15 PM • permalinkThalesian—How far ya got? That Louis XIV, he may have been a bit extreme, but sacre bleu,did he get the peasants to run on time!
Posted by richard mcenroe on 2006 01 10 at 08:42 PM • permalink“The pundits have never liked me. Is it the way I look? The way I sound?”—John Kerry
As the old song puts it:
What is the ugliest
Part of your body?
What is the ugliest
Part of your body?
Some say your nose,
Some say your toes,
But I think it’s your mind.Posted by Urbs in Horto on 2006 01 10 at 10:26 PM • permalinkThe Alito hearings, continued . . .
Alito: “As I was saying, Senator Kennedy, I view the law as being like a big car with a powerful engine; you know, like one of those late ‘60’s Oldsmobiles.”
[Exit Splash, stage right]: “Yipe! Yipe! Yipe! Yipe! Yipe!”
[Incidentally, I checked out a photo of a Portuguese waterdog on the internet; the one I saw looked like a poodle dominatrix].
#29, I agree, many thanks Tim! Reading these quotes again highlights how hilarious 2005 was.
This may be an early entry for one of the quotes of 2006:
Naked-marriage-sex ban
AN Egyptian cleric’s controversial fatwa claiming that nudity during sexual intercourse invalidates a marriage has uncovered a rift among Islamic scholars.
According to the religious edict issued by Rashad Hassan Khalil, a former dean of Al-Azhar University’s faculty of Sharia (or Islamic law), “being completely naked during the act of coitus annuls the marriage”.Posted by Art Vandelay on 2006 01 11 at 12:39 AM • permalinkOn a different subject,that of “liars and lying”...(Al Franken).
A six week investigation by website The Smoking Gun has exposed James Frey’s bestselling,real life memoir,“A Million Little Pieces” as largely fabricated and embellished.
Also outed,25 year old former street kid and sexually ambivalent hustler turned litgrit sensation JT Leroy-believed to be a 40 year old woman,whose younger sister in law has been posing as the wig wearing boy wonder at public events….“It was an ideology based on rationalism, science and progress… Its critique of economic power has become part of the common sense of our era.” —academic David McKnight.
Proof that an old lefty is never self-critical or in the commonsense world. Otherwise he would admit to himself that the communists stole the best Western science while producing little, were and are economic irrationalists, and instead of progress, reduced their citizens to slaves or victims.
“My wife and I were very shocked but we watched it until the end because we couldn’t believe what we were seeing.”—devout Baptist Alan Leigh-Browne, who purchased a Doris Day DVD only to view an Italian sex film ... all the way to the end
And if they hadn’t, they would be mocked as ‘close-minded, arrogant no nothing fairyland-dwellers’ like the Simpsons’ Flanders.
You know that concerned moral people just can’t win these days, Tim.
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“The pundits have never liked me. Is it the way I look? The way I sound?”— John Kerry
As Tim says: yes. You have the face of a calculating garden spade, your hair looks like a badger pelt, and your voice sounds like an old 45 RPM record played at 33 1/3. And, of course, there’s your politics.