Say What? Election edition [Reader Post]

Liberals:

President Obama, in August: Republicans “…have not come up with a single solitary, new idea to address the challenges of the American people.  They don’t have a single idea that’s different from George Bush’s ideas … not one.”

Obama in August: “They haven’t come out with a single solitary idea that is different from policies that held sway for eight years before Democrats took over.  Not a single policy difference that’s discernable from [George W.] Bush. Not one.”

President Obama: “And so my job is to make sure that I’m looking at all ideas that are on the table.  When it comes to job creation, if Republicans have good ideas for job growth that can drive down the unemployment rate, and we haven’t thought of them, we haven’t looked at them but we think they have a chance of working, we want to try some.”

White House press secretary Robert Gibbs: “The goal is to seek their input. He wants to hear their ideas.  If there are good ideas — and I think he assumes there will be — we will look at those ideas.”

President Obama: “We’d be misreading the election if we thought the American people want to see us for the next two years relitigate arguments that we had over the last two years.”

President Obama (4 minutes later; same talk): “We have some tough choices here. We already had a big deficit that I inherited and that has been made worse because of the recession.”

President Obama in November: “I’m doing a whole lot of reflecting, and I think there will be areas where we will have to do a better job. With all that stuff coming at folks fast and furious — a recovery package, what we had to do with respect to the banks, what we had to do with respect to the auto companies — I think people started looking at all of this and it felt as if government was getting much more intrusive into people’s lives than they were accustomed to.”

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President Obama: “I think that what happened over the course of two years was that we had to take a series of big, emergency steps quickly and most of them in the first six months of my Administration. Each of them had a big price tag. You’ve got intervention in the banks. You’ve got the auto bailout. You’ve got a stimulus package. Each one with a lot of zeroes behind it. And people looked at that and they said, ‘Boy, this feels as if there’s a huge expansion of government.’ ”

Steve Kroft: “Well, it was a huge expansion of government.”

Obama: “What I didn’t effectively, I think, drive home, because we were in such a rush to get this stuff done, is that we were taking these steps not because of some theory that we wanted to expand government. It was because we had an emergency situation and we wanted to make sure the economy didn’t go off a cliff. ”

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President Obama: “At a time when we are going to ask folks across the board to make such difficult sacrifices, I don’t see how we can afford to borrow an additional $700 billion from other countries to make all the Bush tax cuts permanent, even for the wealthiest 2 percent of Americans.”  He has never talked about the so-called cost of the middle-class tax cuts, which are far more than $700 billion.

House Speaker Nancy Pelosi: “We’re talking about addressing the disparity of income where the wealthy people continue to get wealthier and some other people are falling out of the middle class when we want to bring many more people into the middle class. But that disparity is not just about wages alone, that disparity is about ownership and equity. It’s all about fairness in our country.”

PBS’s Mark Shield: “But on the subject of Sarah Palin in 2012, one of the unspoken problems that she does have is her quitting as governor midway through her first term. It is like Ted Kennedy’s Chappaquiddick” For those of you who are too young to know this, Ted Kennedy drove off a bridge into the Chappaquiddick with Mary Jo Kopechne in the car with him.  Kennedy survived and walked away from the accident and left the scene (he later claimed to have gone into the water several times to save Kopechne).  Miss Kopechne died in this accident, which was discovered the next day.  Kennedy did not report the accident.  He was given a suspended sentence.

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Michelle Norris: Let’s begin with the House and the question of a shift of power there. In one of your recent reports, you posed this question: Will the House losses be bad or horrendous? I think you used the word bloodbath in that report. What’s the answer? How bad will it be?

Rothenberg: There will be a bloodbath, I believe. It all depends on your definitions of this. But we’re talking 1994 levels or larger. 1994 Democrats lost 52 seats in the House. I think we’re talking something above 45. Probably above 50, possibly above 55. So these are big numbers.

Michelle Norris: Now, I ask a question, how bad would it be? That’s of course from the perspective of a Democrat.

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Liberals I find myself agreeing with:

Bill Maher: “The most popular name in the United Kingdom—Great Britain—…for babies this year was Mohammed.  Am I a racist to feel alarmed by that (because I am)?”

Crosstalk:

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[2 reporters discussing their coverage of Senate hopeful Joe Miller:]
FEMALE REPORTER: That’s up to you because you’re the expert, but that’s what I would do.I’d wait until you see who showed up because that indicates we already know something.
[Laughter]
[INAUDIBLE]
FEMALE REPORTER: Child molesters.
MALE REPORTER: Oh yeah. can you repeat Joe Miller’s.uh. list of people, campaign workers, which one’s the molester?
[INAUDIBLE]
FEMALE VOICE: We know that out of all the people that will show up tonight, at least one of them will be a registered sex offender.
[Laughter]
MALE REPORTER: You have to find that one person.
[INAUDIBLE]
FEMALE REPORTER: And the one thing we can do is ..we won’t know..we won’t know but if there is any sort of chaos whatsoever we can put out a twitter/facebook alert: saying what the. `Hey Joe Miller punched at rally.’
FEMALE REPORTER: Kinda like Rand Paul.I like that.
[Laughter]
FEMALE REPORTER: That’s a good one.

Sarah Palin on the news media in Alaska (to Chris Wallace): ‘Those are corrupt bastards, Chris’

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Reason TV Interviewer (at the Stewart and Colbert Restore Sanity Rally): “Who do you think is the worst offender in he Nazi, commie, socialist, fascist, sort of comparison, parade.”
Restore Sanity placard carrier: “The answer is Glenn Beck.”

Restore Sanity female placard (Fear Sells; Reason Serves) carrier: “You don’t see reasonable people putting Hitler mustaches on people’s faces.”
Interviewer: “So there were no people with Bush’s Hitler signs like there are Obama is Hitler.”
Female: “I see what you’re saying…if there should have been a Hitler sign on somebody, it probably should have been him—I hate to say it.”
For just one moment there, you think this woman is going to get it…but then she doesn’t make the connection.  Obama is Hitler = insane; Bush is Hitler = more reasonable.

Interviewer: What would be a conservative position that you would consider or a non-liberal position that you would consider reasonable?”
Guy 1 (carrying a placard that reads Deliver us from Evil with a picture of Glenn Beck on it): “Ummmm.”
Guy 2: “That’s a tough one.”
Guy 1: “That would take some thought, man.  That would take some thought.”
Guy 2: [inaudible, but agreeing with Guy 1]

Some other guy responding to an off-camera question (his friend carries an “I hate Illinois Nazis” sign): “We hope to get the point out that it’s not all about getting your point out.”
Interviewer: “I think you’re doing that splendidly.”

Guy 2: “If you’re that bad in debt, I mean, if I were that bad in debt, the only way I’d get myself out of debt is to make more debt first and then try to figure myself out.”
Interviewer: “That makes absolutely no sense, but I think it’s awesome.”

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Conservatives:

President Bush (speaking of the TEA party movement): “Here’s what I see. I see democracy working.  People are expressing a level of frustration or concern and they’re getting involved in the process.  And the truth of the matter is, democracy works in America.”

John Boehner: “What we need to do is listen to the American people.  They sent a very loud message last night. It’s pretty clear the American people want a smaller, lost costly and more accountable government here in Washington, D.C. And if the American people see us doing things that they’re telling us to do, I think we’ll do just fine.”

P.J. O’Rourke: “This is not an election but a restraining order on Obama.”

After receiving 2 phone calls from the president on the same day, Mitch McConnell said, “I think the President is my new best friend.”

Ben Stein: “The American people are not rabble; the TEA party is not rabble.”

Ben Stein: “It’s not free money, Senators and Congressmen…it belonged to someone.”

George Will: “When we have gridlock the system is working.”

Jodi Miller:  “A new study by the Congressional Budget Office will actually drive people out of the workforce, but we here at newsbusted don’t expect Democrats to be upset, unless it affects illegal aliens.”

Dick Army: “The Republican party, bless their hearts, finally learned to listen to the people, rather than join with the democrats and tell America what they’re going to get, like it or not.”

Senator Lindsay Graham at the Halifax International Security Forum: “My view of military force would be not to just neutralize their nuclear program, which are probably dispersed and hardened, but to sink their navy, destroy their air force and deliver a decisive blow to the Revolutionary Guard.  In other words, neuter that regime.”

An unnamed Indian official, upon hearing that President Obama will use a teleprompter in India: “We thought Obama is a trained orator and skilled in the art of mass address with his continuous eye contact.”

From Conservative Review #151 (HTML)   (PDF)