Quotes of 2004 – march

Last updated on March 5th, 2018 at 01:41 pm

* “Twenty years ago, my journalistic colleague left the industry rather than continue to endure the humiliation. Her harasser, while no longer an editor, is today a rich, powerful and famous man.”—in the Sydney Morning Herald, Anne Summers accuses a former editor of harrassing a young female staffer. A hasty re-write appeared in subsequent editions

* “Don’t know what you’re talking about.”—Michael Moore, asked if rumours that he’d built on protected wetlands were true. State records revealed that he had, in fact, partially filled a wetland to improve his beach

* “That may be the most lethal endorsement since Al Gore leapt on the Howard Dean bandwagon and sent it careering into the ravine.”—Mark Steyn on the NYT’s endoresement of John Kerry

* “What Mike Moore does for the US, Margo Kingston does for Australia.”—Penguin books is right; both of them keep conservatives in office

* “Some people like paintings, or cars. I like lobsters.”—Don Bramich, owner of Tasmania’s Flowerdale Lobster Haven

* “I hope that during one of your commutes between Quebec and Vermont, you have one of those fantastically horrific car crashes that make all the headlines. You know the type: where you are decapitated and the head is never found.”—hate mail sent to Mark Steyn

* “His first cousin is a French mayor. His father was a diplomat. He spent school years in Switzerland, among other countries, and now and then vacationed in Brittany … He thinks the death-penalty is bad and thinks the Kyoto Protocol, intended to protect the global climate, is good.”—Germany’s Financial Times goes negative on John Kerry. Except they think they’re going positive

* “I don’t think we ever really got a clear explanation of why. He was just rueful and regretful and kept saying it was an act of stupidity.”—Chicago Tribune ombudsman Don Wycliff on Uli Schmetzer’s termination for inventing “Australian psychiatrist Graham Thorne”

* “Arms Are For Hugging.”—bumper sticker attached to an old Subaru that almost caused a multi-car pile-up on the Hume Highway

* “We are such a hidden group in society.”—Mardi Gras parade leader Monica Hingston, after 300,000 people had turned out for the annual event

* “Americans are polite and friendly when you speak to them. They are not rude like Afghans. If I could be anywhere, I would be in America. I would like to be a doctor, an engineer – or an American soldier.”—teenage former Guantanamo Bay inmate Asadullah. As The Guardian’s James Astill wrote: “This might seem to jar with the prevailing opinion of Guantanamo among human rights groups”

* “I’ve met foreign leaders who can’t go out and say this publicly, but boy, they look at you and say, ‘You’ve got to win this, you’ve got to beat this guy, we need a new policy,’ things like that.”—John Kerry, making stuff up

* “I don’t think that I’ll ever try to work in newspapers again.”—Khalil Abdullah, fired by the Macon Telegraph for plagiarism, after having earlier been fired by the Fort Worth Star-Telegram for the same thing

* “Well, he ain’t suffering blood pressure now.”—J. F. Beck on the death of Achille Lauro hijacker Abu Abbas, who according to the PLF had been denied blood pressure medicine by his American captors

* “I would say that I am a dark, insidious force pushing Bush toward war and confrontation.”—Dick Cheney describes his role

* “Ah, the Zeitgeist! Everywhere you look the rules change before your eyes as new patterns seem to emerge then mutate.”—Margo Kingston goes psychedelic

* “They’re legitimate targets. They’re illegally occupying a country.”—John Pilger compares Australian troops in Iraq to German troops invading France. Blogger Paolo from Italy, whose uncle was freed from Buchenwald by Allied soldiers, replies: “Vaffanculo to the John Pilger men of every country”

* “There are so many great lines in it. ‘Do I dare to eat a peach?’ ‘Should I wear my trousers rolled?’”—John Kerry misquotes T.S. Eliot’s “Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock.” As Hal G. P. Colebatch notes: “It seems Kerry is even less decisive than Prufrock, who at least knew he was going to roll his trousers.”

* “I think we still over-estimate the danger of terror.”—former UN weapons inspector Hans Blix

* “A woman who survived the blast has lost her husband, her two sons, and her grandsons. The radio reported this morning that she was so overwhelmed with the loss that she later tried to kill herself. In one of the destroyed trains they rescued a seven month old baby. They haven’t been able to find his parents and he has just died while in the ICU. The attack has killed people from eleven different nationalities.”—Golan and Franco Aleman from HispaLibertas report on the Madrid bombing

* “You could sometimes see the guards tampering with the shower heads to make water squirt all over the inmate’s clothes.”—former Guatanamo Bay resident Jamal al-Harith reveals the horrors of Bush’s death camp

* “Hollywood disaster film set to turn heat on Bush. Movie depicting horrors of global warming could boost votes for Democrat challenger.”—hopeful headline in The Guardian

* “The highest position in heaven is to go fighting in the way of God against the friends of Satan.”—David Hicks, now safely confined

* “If she did not know it yet, she knows it now: Europe is part of the battlefield of hyper-terrorism … Nothing, evidently, no cause, no context, no supposedly political objective, justifies this kind of terrorism … If the trail back to Al-Qaida is confirmed, Europeans should rethink the war against Islamic fundamentalist terrorism, as did the United States after the attacks of September 11, 2001.”—Le Monde, following the attacks on Madrid

* “I was a bit scared of him, really.”—Gabrielle Gwyther, ex-wife of Labor leader Mark Latham

* “We will not surrender, we will rise to this challenge and we will combat our enemies. This is not a war we started. But we must end it. And we will prevail.”—Golan

* “They should hang them by their feet until they die.”—92-year-old civil war veteran Luis Martinez-Gile on the Madrid attackers

* “From now on, the bad guys know they can win, and how to do it.”—Franco Aleman following Spain’s election

* “You love life and we love death.”—an al-Qaeda idiot claims responsibility for the Madrid attacks

* “Iraq war opponents march to White House.”—a CNN report. Only 60 people turned up; CNN’s piece contained about six times as many words

* “I hope they build so many skyscrapers I can’t even see the sun.”—Sam Ward is pro-development

* “When I was serving on a swiftboat in Vietnam, my crewmates and I had a dog we called VC … One day as our swiftboat was heading up a river, a mine exploded hard under our boat. After picking ourselves up, we discovered VC was MIA. Several minutes of frantic search followed after which we thought we’d lost him. We were relieved when another boat called asking if we were missing a dog. It turns out VC was catapulted from the deck of our boat and landed confused, but unhurt, on the deck of another boat in our patrol.”—John Kerry, asked if he had “any pets that have made an impact on you personally”

* “Turning Iraq into an unstable allied protectorate garrisoned by the US and allied states created both a new battleground with, and a new grievance for, terrorists. Blow-back to America’s friends as well as the US seemed inevitable. Australia was the first target, with the Bali bombing.”—Doug Bandow doesn’t know that Iraq came AFTER Bali

* “The tables of perception have been turned, and those who have fixed there colours to the mast of tunnel vision will be blown away by the resurgence of UN multilateralism.”—Sam Guthrie, who has a masters degree in Political Science and International Relations

* “This Saturday’s LIVE talk on Paltalk will discuss one of the greatest forgotten obligations in Islaam – Hating false religions. Allaah (swt) orders the believers to hate all other religions, way of lives, creeds, doctrines and beliefs that contradict with Islaam, and one cannot be Muslim without to declare animosity and hatred towards kufr, bid’ah, shirk and nifaaq (Christianity, Judaism, Hinduism, Sikhism, Buddhism, Democracy, Freedom etc.)”—promotion for a British radio broadcast by Abu Muwahhid

* “Is terrorism ever justified?”—poll question at Australian multicultural broadcaster SBS. Thirty-five percent of respondents said yes

* “I don’t fall down. That son of a bitch knocked me over.”—John Kerry blames a Secret Service agent for a tumble in the snow

* “Why do you drink?”—question demanded of diners in Bahrain by a knife-wielding gang of Islamists. One diner reacted by stabbing his interrogator

* “DOWN WITH AHMAD CHALABI, MAN OF CATS!”

“SADDAM IS A PIMP; ASK YOUR SISTER!”

“KILL AND CRUSH THE STINKY HEAD OF EVERY BAATHIST CRIMINAL COWARD TRAITOR AND BEGIN WITH THE HEAD OF SADDAM”

“IS IT REASONABLE THAT THE GREAT AMERICAN CAN DO NOTHING ABOUT THE ELECTRICITY? OR ARE THEY DOING IT INTENTIONALLY FOR SOME REASON GOD ONLY KNOWS?”—Baghdad graffiti

* “They are the Klan without the sheets. Worse: they don’t have the inbred moonshine-addled mah-pappy-hated-nigras-an-I-hate-’em-too dense-as-a-neutron-star stupidity of your average Kluxer. They didn’t come to this level of stupidity naturally. They had to work at it.”—James Lileks on the extreme anti-liberation, anti-Bush Left

* “It doesn’t take an awful lot of courage to murder a paraplegic in a wheelchair.”—Robert Fisk on the removal of crippled Hamas spiritual leader Sheik Ahmed Yassin

* “Abdel Aziz Rantisi, the 56-year-old pediatrician who has stepped into Yassin’s shoes as leader of Hamas …”—the Sydney Morning Herald’s Paul McGeough reports the transfer of some as-new shoes

* “You are following in the footsteps of murdered Sheikh Ahmed Yassin at a critical time …”—Der Spiegel’s interview with new Hamas leader Abdul Aziz Rantisi begins awkwardly

* “The current threat of attacks in countries whose governments have close alliances with Washington is the latest stage in a long struggle against the empires of the west, their rapacious crusades and domination. The motivation of those who plant bombs in railway carriages derives directly from this truth.”—John Pilger

* “I don’t support the things Hamas has done in the future.”—Labor leader Mark Latham expects more of the same

* “People in the more civilized sectors of the world (what we call ‘the third world,’ or the ‘developing countries’) often burst out laughing when they witness an election in which the choices are two men from very wealthy families.”—Noam Chomsky, who is yet to announce his departure for one of “the more civilized sectors of the world”

* “The survey the BBC conducted recently in Iraq is shocking to those of us who opposed the war. Most respondents say life is now better than it was before the invasion.”—George Monbiot is genuinely surprised

* “The Times badly needs to raise the level of its journalism and to do so quickly in order to survive.”—former NYT executive editor Howell Raines

* “Bush – in an election year going as badly for him as it is for Howard in this country – is under immense pressure on the economy.”—Sydney Morning Herald reverse-indicator Alan Ramsey

* “‘Shock and awe’ lasted an hour-and-a-half, rather than the promised three days. And with only a few ghastly exceptions, the targeting, in the capital at least, was very precise. Colleagues who arrived after the war was over kept asking us where all the destroyed buildings were. There never was a military stalemate, a refugee crisis, 100,000 civilian dead …”—anti-war hero Andrew Gilligan

1. March is lonely! Here’s a comment so it won’t feel left out.

   Posted by Andrea Harris on 2004 12 25 at 04:41 AM • permalink