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The Best Notable Quotables of 1993:
The Sixth Annual Awards for the
Year’s Worst Reporting
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Damn Those Conservatives Award |
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First
Place
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"Then you've got Bill Bennett out there, who is kind of a Torquemada...Bill Bennett is basically a schismatic heretic practicing his own contrived lunatic version of the Latin Mass in the basement. That's what Buchanan is doing, only with Confederate flags flying. You have Phil Gramm from Texas, an incredibly mean-spirited right-wing character backed by big-oil money. He is the kind of perverse version of Lyndon Johnson whittled down to his vices and exaggerated. Then you have Bob Dole: when he's most sardonic and cruel is when he's most sincere. I think that's the Republican Party right now."
-- New Yorker Washington reporter and former Washington Post reporter Sidney Blumenthal in
The Boston Phoenix, April 16. |
Runners-up: |
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"The President permitted Buchanan, the man who tried to destroy him, to speak at the Houston convention during prime time. Buchanan delivered a snarling, bigoted attack on minorities, gays and his other enemies in what he called the `cultural war' and `religious war' in America. Buchanan's ugly speech, along with another narrow, sectarian performance by Pat Robertson, set the tone of right-wing intolerance that drove moderate Republicans and Reagan Democrats away from the President's cause in November. If Houston represented the Republican Party, many voters said, they wanted out."
-- Time Senior Writer Lance Morrow in the Man of the
Year cover story, January 4.
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"Bob Michel is a great guy but his time was up. He was a moderate, and it's the unmoderates who control the House Republicans, that is, the Newt Gingriches of the world, the firebomb throwers: burn this village in order to save it, destroy the House in order to try to elect Republicans, have term limitations....Bomb throwers don't believe in civility, bomb throwers believe in throwing bombs...opposing every principle of the other party simply for partisan opposition."
-- Sam Donaldson on This Week with David Brinkley, October 10.
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"If you look at the people who served on that [Republican] platform committee, they were a group of the most intolerant human beings that could ever be collected."
-- Newsweek Washington reporter Eleanor Clift on the 1992 GOP platform, at a University of Pennsylvania forum broadcast by C-SPAN, Dec. 4, 1992.
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Good Morning Morons Award
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First
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"Harry, I don't want to take away from the severity of what you two were talking about, but please pass along to Dan he looks great in his jeans today."
-- CBS This Morning co-host Paula Zahn to Dan Rather as he reported live from Wilmington, NC as Hurricane Emily approached, August 30. |
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Runners-up: |
"You claim the debt problem actually began with Lyndon Johnson...But he was fighting the Vietnam War and that was most of his problem?...So he had a good reason." "...I'm not sure there's a grade low enough for this next one: Ronald Reagan. He spoke regularly of balancing the budget, but he broke the bank. In return for his own personal popularity he spent eight years in office and ran up $1.34 trillion in deficits....It's early yet, but for at least trying to address the deficit in a more serious fashion than anybody in 12 years, what kind of early marks do you give Bill Clinton?"
-- Bryant Gumbel's interview with Bankruptcy 1995 co-author Dr. Gerald Swanson, March 17
Today. |
"The Reagan Administration used to boast they created a lot of jobs. Most of those were menial jobs that were quickly dissipated by a quadrupled budget deficit. How do you suggest we make more high-paying jobs?"
-- Bryant Gumbel to economist Irwin Kellner, June 2.
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"Is the problem that the laws are ineffective, or the laws can't be carried out because the bureau, like every other, is understaffed, underfunded, a victim of the Reagan cutbacks?"
-- Bryant Gumbel to Tom Brokaw about the Immigration and Naturalization Service, March 26
Today.
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"As we have seen in the past, during Reagan-Bush administration days, when huge slashes went through, when entire programs were dismantled, and what ends up being left sometimes in its wake is this sort of vacuum and chaos and even more problems than were there to begin with."
-- CBS This Morning co-host Harry Smith responding to Pat Buchanan's criticism of the "Reinventing Government" report, September 8.
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I Still Hate Ronald Reagan Award
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First
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"I don't shield my politics in this book, as I do in much of my journalism, as I've been disciplined to do. The Reagan years oppressed me because of the callousness and the greed and the hard-hearted attitude toward people who have very little in this society, so all of that came together at around age 40 for
me"
-- New York Times editorial page editor and former Washington bureau chief Howell Raines in an interview discussing his book
Fly Fishing Through the Midlife Crisis, on the PBS talk show Charlie Rose, November 17.
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Runners-up:
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"Reagan got his taxation program through, which was to cut taxes to the bone. Mr. Clinton's going to get his program through, which is to raise taxes to the sky. And let us hope, Cokie, that it doesn't turn out to have a similar fate. What Reagan did was destroy the economy!"
-- Sam Donaldson on This Week with David Brinkley, March 28. |
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"For members of Ronald Reagan's Administration, the metamorphosis has been traumatic. Just a few years ago, they commanded Washington. They were privy and powerful, setting the country's intellectual and moral compass. Their mission was called noble. But after they left, their crusade was rejected, their ideology repudiated much as the Russians have repudiated communism. They were accused of making greed into the country's unofficial religion. Their fall was far and fast and the crash was painful."
-- Opening of New York Times reporter Lindsey Gruson's news story on conference of former Reagan officials, April 25.
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