Category: Verbatim

Verbatim

Buck Banks

Watching Beck, who sometimes resembles a snake-oil salesman’s dim-witted assistant accidentally promoted to the top job, makes a foreigner wonder just what’s happening to American conservatism … I don’t want to seem forward or rude, but one can’t help but ask: Have you people lost your minds?

— Alex Massie, Scottish journalist, writing about Glenn Beck’s introduction to the United Kingdom for The Daily Beast.

Verbatim

Buck Banks

I am not the leader of the Republican Party. Don’t want to be the leader of the Republican Party. It’s silly for them to keep talking about how I’m the leader of anything, it’s just creating more curiosity about me. It’s 21 years, more popular than ever. Lord, thank you for my enemies.

— Bloviator Rush Limbaugh, quoted by CNN.

Verbatim

Buck Banks

The Republican Party has thrown in its lot with the terrorists — the Taliban and Hamas this morning — in criticizing the President for receiving the Nobel Peace Prize. Republicans cheered when America failed to land the Olympics and now they are criticizing the President of the United States for receiving the Nobel Peace Prize — an award he did not seek but that is nonetheless an honor in which every American can take great pride — unless of course you are the Republican Party.

— Democratic National Committee spokesman Brad Woodhouse, quoted by blogger Greg Sargent of Talking Points Memo.

Verbatim

Trish

President Obama has changed very dramatically the international presence. We feel he has emphasized multilateral diplomacy, he has addressed international institutions, dialogue negotiations. He has inspired the world with his vision of a world without nuclear arms. There’s a whole list.

– Geir Lundestad, director of the Nobel Institute

Verbatim

Buck Banks

He knows that I don’t play politics … and I certainly don’t play it with national security and neither does anyone else I know. The lives of our young men and women are on the line. The strategy does not belong to any political party and I can assure you that the President of the United States is not playing to any political base. And I take exception to that remark.

— National Security Adviser Jim Jones, in an interview on CNN, responding to Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.) who said last week that the Obama administration doesn’t “want to alienate the left base of the Democrat [sic] Party.”

Verbatim

Buck Banks

Most politicians of prominence write a book. My honest view is that she would not be a winning candidate for president and if she was the results would be … catastrophic. It’s fairly inconceivable she could be elected.

— Former McCain campaign manager Steve Schmidt, on Sarah Palin’s electoral prospects in 2012 at The Atlantic ‘s First Draft of History conference.

Verbatim

Buck Banks

I have no problem with any of the substantive criticism of President Obama from the right or left. But something very dangerous is happening. Criticism from the far right has begun tipping over into delegitimation and creating the same kind of climate here that existed in Israel on the eve of the Rabin assassination … Even if you are not worried that someone might draw from these vitriolic attacks a license to try to hurt the president, you have to be worried about what is happening to American politics more broadly.

— Thomas Friedman, NY Times columnist and Pulitzer Prize–winning author.