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I think he smells some blood in the water on the national-security issue. It’s almost, a little bit, gallows politics. When you read behind it, it’s almost as if he’s wishing that this country would be attacked again, in order to make his point. I think that’s dangerous politics.
— CIA Director Leon Panetta, in an interview with the New Yorker, on former Vice President Dick Cheney’s criticisms of the Obama administration.
“Do you think anyone knew [that Willow was the daughter at the Yankee game] until Sarah Palin pointed it out and let us all know, thereby dragging the 14-year-old into it?”
— Bloomberg News pundit Margaret Carlson
To Kennedy’s teacher: Please excuse Kennedy’s absence … She’s with me. (Signed Barack Obama.)
President Obama’s absence excuse note for a 10-year-old girl — named Kennedy — who played hooky with her dad to see him speak at the town hall meeting in Green Bay, Wis., today.
Them Jews aren’t going to let him talk to me. I told my baby daughter that he’ll talk to me in five years when he’s a lame duck, or in eight years when he’s out of office.
— The Rev. Jeremiah Wright, in an interview with the Hampton Roads Daily Press, when asked if he had spoken to President Obama.
Well, obviously. So, they intervene last fall in the bank crisis. No one has ever done it on that scale before. Now the automobile crisis.
— Sen. Richard Shelby (R-AL), explaining on Fox News how the Obama administration “is taking us down the road to socialism,” forgetting
when exactly President Obama took office.
We’ll assume that most of the candidates who ran in 2008 will run again. It’s like sex — once you do it, it’s pretty hard to stop.
— Former Bush media strategist Mark McKinnon, handicapping the 2012 Republican presidential field for the Daily Beast.
We need to be aware of the creation of a fearful population, and fearful lawmakers, being led to believe that big government is the answer, to bail out the private sector, because then government gets to get in there and control it. And mark my words, this is going to be next, I fear, bail out next debt-ridden states. Then government gets to get in there and control the people.
— Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin (R), quoted on CNN, criticizing the Obama administration’s economic policies.
I was in the wrong place at the wrong time.
— Oakland County Commissioner Kim Capello (R), quoted by the “Oakland Press,” after police caught him in a sexual encounter with a 37-year-old woman who is not his wife
This is something we discussed several times in the Oval Office, how to manage this transition between Leno and Conan. And I think he’s up to the task. But I just want him to know that there is not going to be any bailout coming out from Washington if he screws it up.
— President Barack Obama, in an interview with NBC News, referring to Conan O’Brien’s succession this week of the former “Tonight Show” host Jay Leno
We had to figure out how to deal with a former president who was just lying, engaging in bald-faced lies.
— President Barack Obama, quoted in Renegade: The Making of a President, about former President Bill Clinton’s actions during the Democratic primaries.
