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The Best Notable Quotables of 1991:
The Linda
Ellerbee Awards
For Distinguished Reporting
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Long Dong Silver Award
(for Exaggerated Indignation) |
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First
Place
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"The days of Simpson Chic are over. Now he is more often compared to Red-baiter Joe McCarthy. The image of Simpson flinging open his jacket and declaring he had lots of `stuff' against Anita Hill -- while revealing nothing -- was the lowest of many low points in the Clarence Thomas hearings. Any Senator with a sense of history should have said, as attorney Joseph Welch eventually did to McCarthy, `Senator, have you no shame?'....[Simpson] is writing a book about the media -- a little like Stalin discussing intergovernmental relations."
-- Newsweek Washington reporter Eleanor Clift, October 28 news story. |
Runners-up: |
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"I've been in this town for 21 years, and they play a vicious brand of politics in Washington. Washington can be a mean town. This was as vicious a fight as I've ever seen except it was totally one-sided....When you had Alan Simpson standing up there like Joe McCarthy, reaching in his pockets and saying `I'm getting stuff through faxes, and all over the country,' he sounded just like Joe McCarthy, let's face it. And you had Arlen Specter, who was a prosecutor at one time, saying that she committed perjury, when probably you couldn't find another prosecutor in the country that would tell you that she had committed perjury."
-- Los Angeles Times Washington Bureau Chief Jack Nelson on
Washington Week in Review, October 18.
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"Arlen Specter accused her of perjury. If you read the record, Arlen Specter was the one who distorted what she said. Orrin Hatch even suggested that she got one of her charges by reading The Exorcist, I mean that she was besieged by demons. Orrin should really stick to talking dirty. He does that better. Alan Simpson, for those of us who were too young to know what Joe McCarthy was really like, Alan Simpson showed us. `I have in my pocket two dozen card-carrying smearers against this awful woman,' and then he produced those smears, those bombshells, and they were duds."
-- Wall Street Journal Washington Bureau Chief Al Hunt on CNN's
Capital Gang, October 19.
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Thurgood Marshall Award
(for Judicial Activism)
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First
Place |
"The genius of the Constitution is that it sides with the citizen against the state. That's why it's such a worldwide success. But today's Supreme Court tends to favor the state over the citizen....In this Supreme Court, the state wins more often than the citizens. Something to keep in mind when they give you the old malarkey about the Court being true to the spirit of the Constitution. This Court isn't."
-- NBC commentator and former anchor John Chancellor, July 23 Nightly
News. |
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Runners-up: |
"What was astonishing here was not that the Court opposes abortion. What was astonishing was its absurd view that medical personnel paid with government money lose their right to free speech. The Constitution says no law shall abridge freedom of speech, no law. Could it be that the Court hasn't read that part? ....Was [David Souter] able and willing to read the Constitution as a member of the Court? Would he abide by it? Well, now we know the answer. It's no."
-- David Brinkley ending ABC's This Week, May 26. |
"Under Rehnquist, the Supreme Court no longer sees itself as the defender of civil rights and civil liberties, the champion of the individual. Gone is the Court majority that breathed new life into the Bill of Rights, dismantled Southern segregation, disciplined police who violated the rights of citizens, removed religion from the public schools, pushed a President into resignation, and swept aside the laws forbidding women to end their pregnancies."
-- Los Angeles Times Supreme Court reporter David Savage in the
Los Angeles Times Magazine, September 29.
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"On the same day major groups announced their opposition, Thomas' friends from Georgia showed up on Capitol Hill. But Thomas has taken controversial positions, such as suggesting that natural laws may supersede individual rights."
-- NBC congressional reporter Andrea Mitchell, September 9 Nightly
News.
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Borking Award
(for Character Assassination)
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First
Place |
"Clarence Thomas is the best only at his ability to bootlick for Ronald Reagan and George Bush....They didn't pick him because he was black. They picked him because he's a black conservative. And the thing that bothers me about his appointment -- if they had put David Duke on, I wouldn't scream as much because they would look at David Duke and reject him for what he is. If you gave Clarence Thomas a little flour on his face, you'd think you had David Duke talking."
-- Columnist Carl Rowan on Inside Washington, July 7.
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Runners-up:
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"It may sound bigoted; well, this is a bigoted world and why can't black people be allowed a little Archie Bunker mentality?....Here's a man [Thomas] who's going to decide crucial issues for the country and he has already said no to blacks; he has already said if he can't paint himself white he'll think white and marry a white woman."
-- USA Today "Inquiry" Editor Barbara Reynolds in The Washington
Post, September 10. |
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"Who is this guy, Clarence Thomas, and why should we want him on the Supreme Court? I can't think of any good reasons. The man is not distinguished and he doesn't seem to have a heart...Let's be straight about this. Clarence Thomas is a tool of the rich and powerful. His supporters include Dan Quayle, Strom Thurmond, Jesse Helms. Even David Duke, former Ku Klux Klan leader, is crazy about Clarence Thomas. Make no mistake, old people, poor people, black people, women, forget about it. Clarence Thomas is not your friend."
-- NBC News reporter Bob Herbert in Sunday Today "Viewpoint" segment, September 8.
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