Subj: [earthchanges] Eating
Their Words
Date: 3/13/2004 1:14:14 PM Eastern Standard Time
From: atlantisup
To: earthchanges@yahoogroups.com
Eating Their Words
William Rivers Pitt is a New
York Times best-selling author of two books, War On Iraq (Context
Books) and The Greatest Sedition is Silence (Pluto Press). His
book Our Flag, Too: The Paradox of Patriotism will be available
in August from Context Books.
"I'm a firm believer
in feeding people their own words back to them, when it's appropriate."
-Trent Lott
As we hurtle headlong into
the silly season, a high colonic for the mind is in order. There
is going to be a lot of back-and-forth between the candidates
regarding who said what and when. Feast, in that context, upon
this small collection:
"Victory means exit strategy,
and it's important for the President to explain to us what the
exit strategy is."
- George W. Bush, discussing
Kosovo, Houston Chronicle, 04-09-99
"I said on my program,
if, if the Americans go in and overthrow Saddam Hussein and it's
clean, he has nothing, I will apologize to the nation, and I
will not trust the Bush administration again."
- Bill O'Reilly, on ABC's
Good Morning America, 03-18-03
"I tell people don't
kill all the liberals. Leave enough so we can have two on every
campusliving fossilsso we will never forget what these people
stood for."
- Rush Limbaugh, Denver Post,
12-29-95
"If the Supreme Court
says that you have the right to consensual gay sex within your
home, then you have the right to bigamy, you have the right to
polygamy, you have the right to incest, you have the right to
adultery. You have the right to anything. All of those things
are antithetical to a healthy, stable, traditional family and
that's sort of where we are in today's world, unfortunately.
It all comes from, I would argue, the right to privacy that doesn't
exist, in my opinion, in the United States Constitution."
- Sen. Rick Santorum (R-Pa.),
Associated Press, 04-22-03
"I would warn Orlando
that you're right in the way of some serious hurricanes, and
I don't think I'd be waving those flags in God's face if I were
you. This is not a message of hate; this is a message of redemption.
But a condition like this will bring about the destruction of
your nation. It'll bring about terrorist bombs; it'll bring earthquakes,
tornadoes and possibly a meteor."
- Pat Robertson, speaking
of organizers putting rainbow flags up around Orlando to support
sexual diversity, The Washington Post, 06-10-98. For the record,
Orlando remains undestroyed by meteors.
"Environmentalists are
a socialist group of individuals that are the tool of the Democrat
Party. I'm proud to say that they are my enemy. They are not
Americans, never have been Americans, never will be Americans."
- Rep. Don Young (R-Alaska),
Alaska Public Radio, 08-19-96
"When you strip it all
away, Jerry Garcia destroyed his life on drugs. And yet he's
being honored, like some godlike figure. Our priorities are out
of whack, folks."
- Rush (currently under investigation
for drug use) Limbaugh, on the death of Jerry Garcia, 08-20-95.
"I don't understand how
poor people think."
- George W. Bush, confiding
in the Rev. Jim Wallis, The New York Times, 08-26-03
"Get rid of the guy.
Impeach him, censure him, assassinate him."
- Rep. James Hansen (R-Utah),
talking about President Clinton, as reported by journalist Steve
Miner of KSUB radio who overheard his conversation, 11-01-98
"We're going to keep
building the party until we're hunting Democrats with dogs."
- Sen. Phil Gramm (R-Texas),
Mother Jones, 08-95
"My only regret with
Timothy McVeigh is he did not go to The New York Times building."
- Ann Coulter, The New York
Observer, 08-26-02
"Homosexuals want to
come into churches and disrupt church services and throw blood
all around and try to give people AIDS and spit in the face of
ministers."
- Pat Robertson again, The
700 Club, 01-18-95
"And there is, I am certain,
among the Iraqi people a respect for the care and the precision
that went into the bombing campaign."
- Donald Rumsfeld, defenselink.mil,
04-09-03
"Emotional appeals about
working families trying to get by on $4.25 an hour are hard to
resist. Fortunately, such families do not exist."
- Rep. Tom DeLay (R-Texas),
House Majority Whip, during a debate on increasing the minimum
wage, Congressional Record, H3706, 04-23-96
"Chelsea is a Clinton.
She bears the taint; and though not prosecutable in law, in custom
and nature the taint cannot be ignored. All the great despotisms
of the past I'm not arguing for despotism as a principle, but
they sure knew how to deal with potential trouble recognized
that the families of objectionable citizens were a continuing
threat. In Stalin's penal code it was a crime to be the wife
or child of an 'enemy of the people.' The Nazis used the same
principle, which they called Sippenhaft, 'clan liability.' In
Imperial China, enemies of the state were punished 'to the ninth
degree': that is, everyone in the offender's own generation would
be killed and everyone related via four generations up, to the
great-great-grandparents, and four generations down, to the great-great-grandchildren,
would also be killed."
- John Derbyshire, National
Review, 02-15-01
"I know this is painful
for the ladies to hear, but if you get married, you have accepted
the headship of a man, your husband. Christ is the head of the
household and the husband is the head of the wife, and that's
the way it is, period."
- Pat Robertson again, The
700 Club, 01-08-92
"Probably nothing."
- Jeb Bush, during his losing
1994 bid for Florida Governor, when asked what he would do for
black people, quoted by Salon on 10-05-02
"The homosexual blitzkrieg
has been better planned and executed than Hitler's."
- Rep. William Dannemeyer
(R-Calif.), The New Republic, 08-01-94
"When lawlessness is
abroad in the land, the same thing will happen here that happened
in Nazi Germany. Many of those people involved in Adolph Hitler
were Satanists. Many of them were homosexuals. The two things
seem to go together."
- Pat Robertson again, The
700 Club, 01-21-93
"Why is this man in the
White House? The majority of Americans did not vote for him.
Why is he there? And I tell you this morning that he's in the
White House because God put him there for a time such as this."
- Lt. General William G. Boykin,
Deputy Undersecretary of Defense, The New York Times, 10-17-03
"We need to execute people
like John Walker in order to physically intimidate liberals,
by making them realize that they can be killed, too. Otherwise,
they will turn out to be outright traitors."
- Ann Coulter, at the Conservative
Political Action Conference, 02-26-02
"I don't want to abolish
government. I simply want to reduce it to the size where I can
drag it into the bathroom and drown it in the bathtub."
- Grover Norquist, President
of Americans for Tax Reform, NPR Morning Edition, 05-25-01
"I don't agree that you
need an enormous number of American troops. Saddam's army is
down to one-third than it was before, and I think it would be
a cakewalk."
- Kenneth Adelman, Defense
Policy Board, to Wolf Blitzer on CNN, 12-06-01
"The fact of the matter
is that this (increased American casualties) is a sign of the
success of our operation, not its failure."
- Ralph Reed, GOP strategist,
on MSNBC's program 'Hardball,' 10-28-03
"There are some who feel
that, you know, the conditions are such that they can attack
us there. My answer is, bring 'em on. We have the force necessary
to deal with the situation."
- George W. Bush, The Chicago
Tribune, 07-03-03
"The truth is that for
reasons that have a lot to do with the U.S. government bureaucracy,
we settled on the one issue that everyone could agree on, which
was weapons of mass destruction as the core reason."
- Paul Wolfowitz, quoted by
Tim Russert on 'Meet The Press, NBC, 06-01-03
"Quit looking at the
symbols. Get out and get a job. Quit shooting each other. Quit
having illegitimate babies."
- State Rep. John Graham Altman
(R-SC), addressing African-American concerns about the 'symbol'
of the Confederate Flag, The New York Times, 01-24-97
"Two things made this
country great: White men & Christianity. The degree these
two have diminished is in direct proportion to the corruption
and fall of the nation. Every problem that has arisen (sic) can
be directly traced back to our departure from God's Law and the
disenfranchisement of White men."
- State Rep. Don Davis (R-NC),
e-mailed to every member of the North Carolina House and Senate,
reported by The Fayetteville Observer, 08-22-01
"NOW is saying that in
order to be a woman, you've got to be a lesbian."
- Pat Robertson again, The
700 Club, 12-03-97
"My biggest fear is going
to be going to the funeral of some young Iowa man or woman who
dies in this conflict and having their mother or father come
up to me and ask whether or not their son or daughter died for
America, or died to save Bill Clinton's presidency. I don't know
what I would say to those grieving parents. For that reason I
believe the President must resign immediately."
- Rep. Jim Nussle (R-IA),
Congressional Record, H11963, 12-18-98
"Why should we hear about
body bags and deaths and how many, what day it's gonna happen?
It's not relevant. So why should I waste my beautiful mind on
something like that?"
- Barbara Bush, said on 'Good
Morning America' the day before the Iraq war started, The New
York Times, 01-13-03
"I'm the commandersee,
I don't need to explain I don't need to explain why I say things.
That's the interesting thing about being the President. Maybe
somebody needs to explain to me why they say something, but I
don't feel like I owe anybody an explanation."
- George W. Bush, Washington
Post, 11-19-02