"You're correct, Mr. Begala, President Bush is at his best when he's promoting exercise, hosting t-ball tournaments and entertaining foreign dignitaries. He would make an excellent first lady."
Deborah Coleman's letter to CrossFire

"Deborah, I know Hillary Clinton. Hillary Clinton is a friend of mine. George is no Hillary Clinton."
Paul Begala, Begala Shoots The Bull

"Trying to portray Mr. Bush as a serious scholar is about as believable as earlier efforts to paint him as a selfless statesman who heeds no polls, adheres always to principle, and indulges in nothing so base and "Clintonian" as political calculation. Citizens who wish to preserve such illusions should avoid reading the PowerPoint presentation by White House chief political adviser Karl Rove about Republican electoral strategies and prospects."
Joe Conason

"Thanks to the U.S. Supreme Court, you'll be able to use public money to send yours kids to General Beauregard Bigot Private Academy, Fundamentalist Football and Frequent Drug Tests. They have these religious schools that teach these kids insanity like the earth is 5,000 years old, where the pope is a demon. I don't want my tax money going to that kind of crap. You can practice religion until you fall out. I don't want to pay for somebody else's bigotry."
James Carville, Democrat with an attitude!

"President Junior has kept at least one campaign promise. He said he'd run the country like a business, and that he has surely done. The Bush administration looks more like Enron or WorldCom everyday : all smoke and mirrors economic projections, make-believe accounting, bigshots cashing in while everybody else's savings vanish, and zero accountability. Do you reckon this is what they teach down at the University of Mississippi's WorldCom-funded Trent Lott Leadership Institute?"
Gene Lyons

"Since Ashcroft became attorney general, the Justice Department has been three times more likely to seek death for black defendants accused of killing whites than for blacks alleged to have killed nonwhites, according to the Federal Death Penalty Resource Counsel Project, which was established by the courts to monitor capital cases."
Dan Eggen, Washington Post

"I attribute [the dollar's slide] to lack of confidence in the management of affairs by the United States, its unilateralism, the pursuit of national self-interests and not living up to the responsibility of being the dominant financial power in the world, not taking care of the system."
George Soros

"This decision is profoundly misguided. Whenever we remove a brick from the wall that was designed to separate religion and government, we increase the risk of religious strife and weaken the foundation of democracy."
Justice John Paul Stevens, one of the four sane justices about school vouchers.

"I'm a little disappointed in our chief executive -- who nobody ever accused of being a deep thinker -- for popping off."
Judge Alfred Goodwin, regarding PoA decision.

"We have a president who owes his election more to a dynasty than to democracy. Two years ago, President Bush "promised to enforce the civil rights laws". We knew he was in the oil business -- we just didn't know it was snake oil."
Julian Bond, NAACP chairman

"Bush's advisors discovered something that no one before had ever quite known : there are simply no limits to how much you can lie in American politics and get away with it."
Alan Wolfe

"This administration, all of a sudden, wants to go to war with Iraq. The polls are dropping, the domestic situation has problems. So all of a sudden we have this war talk, war fervor, the bugles of war, drums of war, clouds of war. Don’t tell me that things suddenly went wrong. Back in August, the president had no plans. Then all of a sudden this country is going to war. Are politicians talking about the domestic situation, the stock market, weaknesses in the economy, jobs that are being lost, housing problems? No. Congress will be putting itself on the sidelines. Nothing would please this president more than having such a blank check handed to him. But I am finding that the Constitution is irrelevant to people of this administration. I have not seen such executive arrogance and secrecy since the Nixon administration, and we all know what happened to that group."

"Shrouded in ambiguity and cloaked in deep secrecy, this administration continues to suddenly, and sometimes unexpectedly, drop its decisions upon the public and Congress, and expect obedient approval, without question, without debate and without opposition. As we learned all too well in Korea, Vietnam and Somalia, it is dangerous to present Congress and the American people with a fait accompli on important matters of foreign affairs. As Senator Gruening pointed out, it is the role of the Senate to advise and consent in foreign policy. As the War Powers Resolution points out, it is the role of Congress to be active participants in foreign policy. As the Constitution demands, it is the role of Congress to declare war. When the president is ready to present his case to Congress, I am ready to listen. But I am tired of trying to connect dots in the dark. Selling weapons to a terrorist nation in exchange for hostages, and using that money to finance an illegal war in Central America. What a great plan that was! I guess I can understand why the Reagan administration did not want to tell Congress about that foreign policy adventure."

"I recall all too well the nightmare of Vietnam. I recall too well the antiwar protests and demonstrations, the campus riots, and the tragic deaths at Kent State, as well as the resignation of a president. And I remember all too well the gruesome daily body counts in Vietnam. The United States was a deeply divided country. This saber-rattling prompted many questions for the American public, members of Congress and our allies. Will we invade Iraq? When will it happen? Will the United States go it alone? Military action against Iraq will be a serious undertaking. The American people deserve to hear why we may need to be an aggressor, risk the lives of their sons and daughters or to take pre-emptive action against Iraq. "This administration refuses to consult with anyone outside its own inner circle about what appears to be its plan for imminent hostilities. This administration convenes meetings of its trusted few in little underground rooms.

"We must consider and debate whether we should use military force against Saddam Hussein. And, barring the most exceptional of circumstances, Congress must vote to authorize the president to use military force against Iraq prior to the outbreak of hostilities. I am determined to do everything in my power to prevent this country from becoming involved in another Vietnam nightmare. This determination begins with Congress being fully and sufficiently informed on the undertakings of our government, especially if it involves a commitment to military action."
Senator Robert Byrd (D-wv), Senator Robert C. Byrd

Blast  from  the  Past

From The Daily Show :
"I was not elected to serve one party." — George W. Bush (video overlay)
"You were not elected." — Jon Stewart
"I have something else to ask you, to ask every American. I ask you to pray for this great nation." — George W. Bush
"We're way ahead of you." — Jon Stewart

"While our long national nightmare is over, our new national nightmare is set to begin. George W. Bush is the president-elect, and that feeling in the pit of your stomach should go away once you take a look at how your tobacco and pharmaceutical stocks are doing this morning."
Jon Stewart, The Daily Show

"It took his brother, his father, his father's friends, the Florida secretary of state and the Supreme Court to pull it off. His entire life gives fresh meaning to the phrase 'assisted living'."
Garry Trudeau, Doonesbury

"Due to a small but significant clause in the U.S. Constitution, I will be out of the office from January 21, 2001 until January 20, 2005."
Michael Feldman, Al Gore's senior advisor's message on his White House voicemail

"You can be Vice President in the most prosperous time in America, run against a dumb guy, get more votes and still lose."
Top Ten Things We've Learned From The Clinton Years, Dave's Dubya Lists

"W. does share some of Reagan's personal qualities. Problem is, they're the negative ones. Like Reagan, W. is -- and is perceived as -- distanced from the details of governing . He's a delegator, a vacation taker, an accomplished napper. (Of course, Reagan was 70 when he became president, and W. just 54. The sight of Dick Cheney burning the midnight oil while in intensive care, even as W. snoozes, is not the most reassuring image of our tax dollars in action.) But Reagan was also a big-picture guy with a clear (if Manichaean) worldview, an affable manner, and a genuine (if studied) air of patriarchal authority. W. seems as lost in the big picture as he is in the small and has no worldview to speak of--save a nervous provincialism. When it comes to authority and affability, he increasingly comes off as an uptight and querulous version of Mr. Rogers.

The Reagan administration may have signaled the first ascent of Sunbelt Republicanism, but Reagan's California was a pretty polyglot place and the leadership as a whole had a broadly national character.

Not so the GOP leadership in the age of W. Like President Bush, House Majority Leader Dick Armey and House Majority Whip Tom DeLay are Texans; and Cheney is a Texan who had to repatriate himself to Wyoming just because of that damned Constitution, which says that the president and the vice president can't come from the same state. The Republican Senate delegation is led by a Mississippian and an Oklahoman; while hefty, Speaker of the House Dennis Hastert of Illinois is nonetheless weightless. This is anything but national leadership. Regionally, demographically, and culturally, this is government by southern white male philistines; and sectorally -- reinforcing those regional, demographic, and cultura characteristics -- it is government by the energy industry."
Harold Meyerson, The American Prospect

"Does Mr. Dubya deserve a chance to be president? After all, after his DUI arrest (how many times?) he took a very courageous decision to stop drinking just 10 years after that. Plus, according Bush Sr. and mother Barbara, he was never an alcohol addict, he just "liked" to drink. Did he use drugs? (his silence presumes that, yes he did) So what? His use of drugs stopped 7 years ago, when he was a 47 year old adolescent ..."
bushisms.com

"If you don't think it's a gamble to put a man in the White House who believes we should have guns in church, who thinks the Taliban is a rock band, who was such a failure as a businessman that his company was nicknamed "El-Busto," who wants to turn our Social Security system into a Wall Street boiler room, who can't name a single thing he disagrees with Jerry Falwell and Pat Robertson on, who smeared a bona fide hero named John McCain, and whose principle policy proposal is to give America's surplus to the idle rich in the form of a $1.3 trillion tax cut, you're either nuts or a Republican."
Paul Begala, Paul Begala shoots the Bull

So this old guy says, "You know, this Bush? What he is, is a post turtle." His friend says, "What the hell is a post turtle?" "Well, let’s say you’re driving down a country road and you see a turtle balanced on a fence post. That’s a post turtle. You know he didn’t get there by himself, he doesn’t belong there, he cant get anything done while he’s up there, and you just want to help the poor thing down." The friend says, "Back in Texas, we’d just throw a rock at it."
Gary Goodrow

"They asked George Bush if he know what Roe vs. Wade was. He said it was the decision George Washington had to make when he wanted to cross the Delaware."
Various Sources

"I will say that naming Spencer Abraham as Secretary of Energy shows a sense of humor. In 1999, Abraham sponsored a bill to abolish the department."
Molly Ivins

"Nobody could have ever written the plot for this unbelievable election any more than they could have sold a script about a president, a 21-year-old White House intern and a stained dress.

But both came to pass, and of all the presidents-elect to be delegitimized by finishing second in the popular vote and squeaking in as a result of a dubious Florida vote count, George W. Bush is probably the one who can afford it least.

His inexperience is stipulated even by many who voted for him. If he's inaugurated, he'll take office pretested as the butt of late-evening talk-show humor. The other big joke -- except that it isn't one -- is that the Democrats should prove luckier to have lost the election than the GOP to have won it. The implications for the two parties could be enormous.

Sure, there's still time for the two parties to stand down and unfix bayonets, but there's also a good chance that we'll see two years of acrimony -- negative rather than benign gridlock in Washington -- right through the 2002 midterm elections, with the odds favoring the party that avoided gaining what will be a tarnished presidency.

Talk that Bush has no mandate is actually an understatement. It's not his own electoral embarrassment. The total vote for the center-left- -Vice President Al Gore and Green Party nominee Ralph Nader -- was 52%, its highest share since Lyndon B. Johnson in 1964 ..."

"... Bush is a post-Clinton impeachment fluke, as was Jimmy Carter a post-Watergate Richard M. Nixon fluke.

True, other presidents of the last 50 years have suffered some credibility loss as a result of entering the White House after winning less than 50% of the popular vote : John F. Kennedy in 1960, Nixon in 1968 and Clinton in 1992. What makes Bush's credibility problem so much worse is that he's apparently the first president-elect to have lost the popular vote and won the electoral college since Benjamin Harrison in 1888, and he's the first president-elect whose only real credential for nomination lay in being the son of his party's previous president, sort of an, American crypto-Prince of Wales or dauphin."
Kevin Phillips, Republican political author

"It is set, the Texas Toddler is going to Washington. Through a campaign of misinformation, over 100 million in corporate big bucks, generous treatment from the media, disenfranchising voters, special accommodations from GOP office holders (Jeb et al.), poorly designed ballots and finally the right wing faction of the SCOTUS selling out democracy, little Georgie Bush will be installed next January. There are no laws requiring us to like it. And there are no laws requiring us to refrain from mocking him."
GW Bush Art

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