Quotes of the Day - Best of the Web!

“First they ignore you, then they laugh at you, then they fight you, and then you win."
- Mahatma Gandhi

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George Bush can go to hell. All the Bushbots who think he is the greatest conservative of all time need to wake up and smell the coffee. Bush and his RINO friends in Congress are conspiring to underenforce the borders in order to increase the illegal alien population. He does not give two craps if his own party becomes a permanent minority. He probably thinks God told him to open the borders.

45 posted on 12/25/2006 by Holden Magroin (Bush is a traitor to conservatism.)

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As I've said on other threads, these folks who blindly and dutifully pull the "R" lever are viewed by the party as guarantees. Why would the party give a crap what you say if you are going to pull R anyway? They aren't going to romance those who give it up for free. That is exactly how we got where we are now.

The real irony is they blame others for their own ignorance. Voting for liberals because they have an R by their name got into the crap we are in now.

Politicians work for us, not the other way around. These people know that if the Republicans who lost their seats had made their constituents happy, they would still be in office.

"Party First" is the kind of politics that would make the old Soviets proud.

102 posted on 12/22/2006 by L98Fiero

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"Although as to other foreigners it is thought better to discourage their settling together in large masses, wherein, as in our German settlements, they preserve for a long time their own languages, habits, and principles of government, and that they should distribute themselves sparsely among the natives for quicker amalgamation, yet English emigrants are without this inconvenience. They differ from us little but in their principles of government, and most of those (merchants excepted) who come here, are sufficiently disposed to adopt ours."
--Thomas Jefferson to George Flower, 1817. ME 15:140
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There is not an acre of ground on the globe that is in possession of its rightful owner, or that has not been taken away from owner after owner, cycle after cycle, by force and bloodshed. - Mark Twain
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There are only 2 races. Decent and Indecent. unk.

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CLASSIC ARTICE you missed!

Grover Norquist: 'Field Marshal' of the Bush Plan

"I started out as a right-winger, and when I retire I want to be a squishy middle-of-the-roader," he jokes, chortling at the thought. Grover Norquist

To a significant degree, George W. Bush owes his election to Norquist, whose early support was crucial in lining up the right behind the Texas governor's campaign. And if Bush, born in the Ivy League haunts of the Eastern Establishment but raised in the conservative oilfields of West Texas, has managed to forge a governing coalition that includes both Big Business and the far right, Norquist's skillful ability to hold that coalition together is a big reason why.

In November 1998, immediately after Bush was re-elected as Texas governor and began eyeing the White House, Norquist traveled to Austin to meet Bush and Karl Rove, Bush's political guru, whom Norquist has known for two decades. Norquist came away convinced that Bush, if not an authentic conservative, was at least the right's best hope. On five issues, he says--tax cuts, school choice, tort reform, pension reform and paycheck protection--Bush said the right things, and that was enough for Norquist. At the time, for most conservatives Bush was an unknown quantity, and his closeness to his father (whom Norquist excoriated in his book for faithlessness and errors of political judgment) made the right queasy. Others in the race, like Steve Forbes, Alan Keyes and Gary Bauer, all had appeal to the far right--but Norquist, upon returning to Washington, started spreading the word that the right ought to line up behind Bush.

According to several sources, Norquist's support was decisive in swinging the bulk of the conservative movement into Bush's camp by early 1999. "It's not disputable," says Fund of the Wall Street Journal. Then, when Bush ran into trouble battling Senator John McCain of Arizona, Norquist mobilized the right against McCain in the early primaries, especially in South Carolina--and, in the process, cemented his ties to Bush and Rove.

When pressed, Norquist admits that he has no idea whether Bush is truly committed or just playing politics--and that, in the end, it doesn't matter. "Is Bush, or Rove for that matter, a true believer?" he asks. "I don't know. I do believe he understands the center-right coalition." For now, at least, Norquist believes that Bush is wedded to the idea that it would be fatal, as his father learned, to alienate the hard-core conservative base. Like the Communists of the late 1930s, who slavishly praised Franklin Roosevelt even though they knew he was a card-carrying member of the New York financial elite, Norquist seems to acknowledge with a wink that Bush is a vehicle to advance the conservative cause one more degree.

"It's like this," he says. "Some of us in the movement want to get to St. Louis, and some of us to Utah, and some to Los Angeles, and some of us want to go all the way to Japan. Bush wants to get to St. Louis. Is there any reason to argue with him about the need to get to LA? Or to get really flaky and say we need to go all the way to Japan? Of course not."


http://www.thenation.com/doc/20010514/dreyfuss