“Supposing I came along in August 2001 and said…that there was an al-Qaeda terrorist network; no one would have heard of it. Suppose I said that we would have to invade Afghanistan in order to deal with it; no one would have believed that that was necessary. Yet, my goodness, a few weeks later, thousands of people were killed on the streets of New York. …The threat (from Iraq) is real, and if we do not deal with it the consequences of our weakness will haunt future generations.” –British Prime Minister Tony Blair
Tag: quote
“Frankly, when my family’s income goes down, so does our spending as we tighten our belts. Why is it that government believes its spending of our money should always go up, in good times and in bad? Why shouldn’t government have to go on a diet just like the rest of us when hit with a reduction in income?” —Chuck Muth
Ann nails the Demos yet again on their two-faced approach to war with Saddam:
“After voting in favor of the war with Iraq right before the November elections, Sen. Hillary Clinton never had another kind word to say for the war. Just a few weeks ago, Sen. Clinton gave an interview on Irish TV in which she said she opposed precipitous action against Iraq. She said Bush should give the U.N. weapons inspectors more time.
“Hillary did not object to precipitous action against Iraq when her husband bombed it on the day of his scheduled impeachment. President Clinton attacked Saddam Hussein without first asking approval from the United Nations, the U.S. Congress or even France. But now we have a president who wants to attack Iraq for purposes of national security rather than his own personal interests, and Hillary thinks he’s being rash. President Bush has gotten a war resolution from Congress, yet another U.N. Security Council resolution, and we’ve been talking about this war for 14 months. But he’s being precipitous.
“When Clinton bombed Iraq to delay his impeachment, Senate Minority Leader Tom Daschle was ablaze with war fever. Daschle said: ‘This is a time to send Saddam Hussein as clear a message as we know how to send that we will not tolerate the broken promises and the tremendous acceleration of development of weapons that we’ve seen time and time again in Iraq.’ Secretary of State Madeleine Albright said of the impeachment bombing: ‘Month after month, we have given Iraq chance after chance to move from confrontation to cooperation, and we have explored and exhausted every diplomatic action. We will see now whether force can persuade Iraq’s misguided leaders to reverse course and to accept at long last the need to abide by the rule of law and the will of the world.’
“Now here we are, more than four years later, Saddam still hasn’t complied with U.N. resolutions, and America has been attacked by Islamic crazies–and these same Democrats think Bush is acting impulsively. Democrats are always hawks in the off-season. They’re all for war, provided it has nothing to do with America’s security.”
Ann cracks me up:
“If liberals cared about ideas or knew any facts, they would cease being liberals. Even the audience for the left’s government-supported radio network, National Public Radio, has more conservative listeners than liberal listeners. According to a Pew Research Center study released last summer, conservatives consume far more news than liberals–including listening to NPR and watching PBS more than liberals. (As Mickey Kaus said, ‘No wonder conservatives are so pissed off.’)
“Liberalism thrives on ignorance. Their media are ‘Lifetime: TV for Women,’ NBC’s ‘The West Wing’ and 4 billion ‘Law and Order’ episodes in which the perp turns out to be a Christian, white male who recites the Second Amendment before disemboweling a poor minority child.
“Liberal persuasion consists of the highbrow sneer from self-satisfied snobs ladled out for people with a 40 IQ. This is not an ideology that can withstand several hours a day of caller scrutiny where their goofball notions can be shot down by any truck driver with a cell phone.”
I don’t know why my wife watches “Law & Order,” “NYPD Blue,” et al, when she spends half the episode complaining how the cops twist citizens’ rights to gather evidence and/or get a confession. No, she’s not a criminal attorney, but yes, she is a lawyer and remembers all of this good constitutional stuff from law school.
(Thanks, Rick!)
“Anyone who has ever been in a government office sees people sitting around doing little if any work. Yet these people are never the first target of government spending cuts. It is the front line police, firemen, teachers, etc.
[…]
“Yet there is never talk of eliminating some of the less essential elements of government in response to shortfalls in revenue. The politicians seem to go out of their way to make sure that any proposed cuts in government spending are going to be painful. This amounts to punishment of voters for opposing the will of the politicians.
“Unfortunately this is totally backwards. Government is elected to serve the people. Our Constitution was carefully written to avoid just this type of thing. Monarchs (believe that they) rule by divine right and the people are subservient to their rules. Communist dictators, military dictators, Islamic dictators all believe that power starts with them and only flows to the people in the quantities that they allow. Our system is supposed to be the opposite.
[…]
“The politicians need to please the voters not the other way around. If we allow politicians to threaten or punish voters who displease them we are walking straight into the arms of tyranny.” —Philip Safran
“Tony Blair said he and President Bush prefer another UN resolution before a war in Iraq. Their problem is the Security Council. France might command more respect if the French Ambassador didn’t always vote against war with both hands in the air.” –Argus Hamilton
“Meanwhile, the peacenik predisposition of the other Continentals is a useful cover for French ambition. Last year Paavo Lipponen, the Finnish Prime Minister, declared that ‘the EU must not develop into a military superpower but must become a great power that will not take up arms at any occasion in order to defend its own interests.’ This sounds insane. But, to France, it has a compelling logic. You can’t beat the Americans on the battlefield, but you can tie them down limb by limb in the UN and other supranational bodies.
“In other words, this is the war, this is the real battlefield, not the sands of Mesopotamia. And, on this terrain, Americans always lose. Either they win but get no credit, as in Afghanistan. Or they win a temporary constrained victory to be subverted by subsequent French machinations, as in the last Gulf War. This time round, who knows? But through it all France is admirably upfront in its unilateralism: It reserves the right to treat French Africa as its colonies, Middle Eastern dictators as its clients, the European Union as a Greater France and the UN as a kind of global condom to prevent the spread of Americanization. All this it does shamelessly and relatively effectively.” —Mark Steyn
“How many folks saw Colin Powell at the UN? I thought he was pretty persuasive, but a lot of folks are still demanding more evidence, you know, before they actually consider Iraq a threat. For example, France. France wants more evidence, they demand more evidence. And I’m thinking, the last time France wanted more evidence it rolled right through Paris with a German flag.” –David Letterman
“Not all Hollywood celebrities are ungrateful, anti-American lefties.” The MRC reports on an interview on Fox News Channel with actor Ron Silver, who offers a few choice bits:
bq. “But at that dinner, the EU had a dinner that night about the ‘new Europe,’ and they were being very self-congratulatory about their values, and implicitly they were suggesting that America was an imperial country, trying to impose their values on the rest of the world, which I don’t think is a bad idea by the way, I kind of think our values are fairy universal and might be helpful.”
bq. […]
bq. “I kind of link Rumsfeld’s ‘old Europe versus the new Europe,’ and we saw it in the last two weeks, with France and Germany, who were not with us on June 6, 1944, I don’t know why we expect them to be with us today.”
bq. […]
bq. “My opinion is that the entertainment community along with other advocates–human rights organizations, religious organizations, are always on the front lines to protest repression, but they’re always usually the first ones to oppose any use of force to take care of these horrors that they catalogue repeatedly, and I find that inconsistent as well.”
Kudos to Silver for standing against the Hollywonk culture. It is a testament to his acting skill that he can play such a leftie on The West Wing.
“Americans are a people who have realized a dream of freedom, who have taken it from an abstract hope and turned it into a living reality. What made this possible was a founding generation that understood the essential principles of liberty, and acknowledged from the very beginning that the basis for human justice, human dignity and human rights is no more–nor less–than the will and authority of our Creator, God.
“The importance of this principle is definitive, because it allows us to understand that since we claim our rights by virtue of the authority of God, we must exercise our rights with respect for the authority of God.
“This truth becomes a sound foundation for discipline in our use of our freedoms. It becomes a bulwark against the abuse of our powers. It becomes also the ground for our confidence that, when we claim those rights, and when we exercise them, we do not have to fear the consequences, because we are a people who exercise our rights in the fear of God.
“This means that as American citizens, we can have confidence in our capacity, ability and character to take care of our own families. We can trust ourselves to raise our own children, to direct our own schools, to run our own communities and states, to do honest business together, and to generally take care of the things that need to be done for our nation and its people.” —Alan Keyes