Times Watch 'Quotes of Note Worst of 2004'

Conservatives Scare Us

"Abortion might be a crime in most states. Gay people could be thrown in prison for having sex in their homes. States might be free to become mini-theocracies, endorsing Christianity and using tax money to help spread the gospel. The Constitution might no longer protect inmates from being brutalized by prison guards. Family and medical leave and environmental protections could disappear."
-- Editorial board member Adam Cohen, predicting the impact of future Bush appointments to the Supreme Court, October 18.
 

"Compared with a prestige stinker of the era like 'Ordinary People,' this raunchy teen comedy was unaffected by the infantilization that was starting to take over American movies -- one movie that resisted the false dawn of Reagan's morning in America."
-- From Charles Taylor's September 12 review of the new DVD of the 1982 teen comedy "Fast Times At Ridgemont High."
 

"The vice president who takes the stage at Madison Square Garden tonight is now not only a conservative icon, but also a campaign flashpoint, perhaps the most controversial running mate since Dan Quayle….Democratic critics view Mr. Cheney as an important proponent of the very policies that most enrage them: Iraq and a tax-cut plan that they believe favors the wealthiest Americans….The image persists of Mr. Cheney as the backstage manipulator, the guy who is pulling the president's strings and effectively running the government."
-- Reporter Rick Lyman, September 1.
 

"But the vitriol also reflects the fact that many of the people at that convention, for all their flag-waving, hate America. They want a controlled, monolithic society; they fear and loathe our nation's freedom, diversity and complexity."
 -- Columnist Paul Krugman describing the Republican National Convention, September 3.
 

"You have made so many offensive comments over the years. Do you regret any of them?....You seem indifferent to suffering. Have you ever suffered yourself?"
-- Two of Deborah Solomon's questions to William F. Buckley Jr., retiring founder of National Review, July 11.
 

"Since Joseph Coors was a right-wing nut as well (and a Bircher to boot), I stuck to Michelob." -- Contributing writer James Traub on the death of Heritage Foundation founder and beer magnate Joseph Coors Sr., December 28, 2003.
 

"It is a question that would have shocked the old line, hard-right conservative patriarchs of the clan begat by Adolph Coors: Is Pete Coors, nationally famous beer magnate, scion of old money, and now candidate for the United States Senate, Republican enough to win in Colorado?"
-- Reporter Kirk Johnson, October 16.
 

"Much of the country, including most of those who are physically, economically or otherwise disadvantaged, deeply resented and still resent [Ronald Reagan's] insistence that government is the problem, not the solution. Severe and continuing cutbacks in government services to the poor and vulnerable resulted, and the gulf dividing rich from poor widened."
-- R.W. Apple on Ronald Reagan, June 11.
 

"Historians will long debate the impact of the huge federal budget deficits run up under Mr. Reagan's leadership, the efficacy of his tax cuts, the effects of his administration's involvements in Central America, his seeming indifference to civil rights, the environment and the plight of the poor."
 -- Reporter Todd Purdum, June 7.
 

"The Republicans are now the champion panderers in American politics and have been since they discovered the demagogic value of what Rupert Murdoch's Weekly Standard disingenuously calls 'cultural populism.'….Rupert Murdoch's kept journalists at the Weekly Standard deserve much of the credit. The journal attacks economic populism as 'condescending' and 'patronizing,' because it implies that the masses require government protection from the military-industrial, investment banking and petroleum complexes. But 'social,' or 'cultural,' populism is praised as a genuine expression of national values. Thus acceptance of the agenda of Bush social policy -- abortion, gay marriage, school prayer, guns -- is required, even by people who know better….As long as affluent, educated Republicans are allowed to control wealth in this country, they're willing for the rednecks to pray in the public schools that rich Republicans don't attend, to buy guns at Wal-Marts they don't patronize, to ban safe abortions that are always available to the affluent, and to oppose marriage for gays who don't vote Republican anyway."
 -- Former NYT Executive Editor Howell Raines in the July 26 Washington Post.

Gotta Love Those Liberals

"The odds are against him? The son of a mill worker likes those odds."
-- Cut-out line to an October 26 Randal Archibold story on Democratic vice presidential candidate Sen. John Edwards.
 

"Rock Stars Are Highlight, But Kerry Is the Headliner --The candidate's ideas seem to galvanize thousands at rallies."
 -- Headline and cut-out line to Deborah Sontag's October 31 story from the Kerry campaign.
 

"If Mr. Kerry's relationships are complex, so are his ideas. Based on his roll call votes in 2003, The National Journal ranked him the most liberal member of the Senate. But his lifetime voting -- and speaking -- record is considerably more complicated than that ranking would suggest."
-- Todd Purdum, from the Times' October 26 Voter Guide.
 

"'Lightweight' is not an expression anyone would use to describe Tom Daschle. At 56, Daschle has been the Senate Democratic leader for 10 years, two years longer than Lyndon Johnson, whose portrait hangs in Daschle's elegant Capitol suite, at the minority leader's request. Unlike the bullying Johnson, Daschle is gentle and soft-spoken….[Senate Majority Leader Bill] Frist was besieged with questions about why he had violated Senate protocol by campaigning against Daschle on his home turf. The Democratic leader wound up looking like a victim; the Republicans, like bullies."
-- Sheryl Gay Stolberg in an August 1 Times Sunday Magazine profile of Senate Minority Leader Tom Daschle.
 

"There was no cover, minimum donation or official status necessary for a ticket to the fund-raiser at the Apollo Theater yesterday. Sure, there were a few dignitaries, celebrities and high-powered corporate types, but this was the Rev. Al Sharpton's 50th birthday party. In his words, this was for the people….Mr. Rodriguez was among dozens of people who gathered before the party outside the headquarters of the National Action Network, the civil rights group Mr. Sharpton created….Just as he does many weeks during his Saturday morning speeches, Mr. Sharpton yesterday played the parts of preacher, politician and comedian, sometimes all at once."
-- Reporter Jennifer Medina on a fundraiser for the racially inflammatory Al Sharpton, October 4.

How Bizarre

"With its laborious build-up to its orgasmic spurtings of blood and other bodily fluids, Mr. Gibson's film is constructed like nothing so much as a porn movie, replete with slo-mo climaxes and pounding music for the money shots….If 'The Passion' is a joy ride for sadomasochists, conveniently cloaked in the plain-brown wrapping of religiosity, does that make it bad for the Jews?"
-- Arts editor Frank Rich's review of "The Passion of the Christ," March 7.
 

"Tots surely won't recognize that Santa's big entrance in front of the throngs of frenzied elves and awe-struck children directly evokes, however unconsciously, one of Hitler's Nuremberg rally entrances in Leni Riefenstahl's 'Triumph of the Will.' But their parents may marvel that when Santa's big red sack of toys is hoisted from factory floor to sleigh it resembles nothing so much as an airborne scrotum."
-- Movie critic Manohla Dargis reviewing "The Polar Express," November 10.
 

"By virtue of his troubled life and a single decent gesture, [Rodney King] is embedded in the American conscience….Mr. King, 39, has tried to stay out of the public eye, finding it difficult to live with the title of human punching bag. Still, he often finds himself the leading man of the police blotter. He has been arrested 11 times, for, among other things, spousal abuse, hit-and-run driving and being under the influence of PCP. He was also arrested for indecent exposure after parkgoers complained about a naked man jumping up and down on an ice chest….There is a saying that carries through the jail cells of America: Every man has committed a felony. The difference between a good life and a wasted one can be attributed to luck and timing. And so Rodney King does not ask for sympathy, but for understanding. Even good guys make mistakes."
-- Charlie LeDuff in an interview with Rodney King, September 19.
 

"Should Bangladesh begin to disappear under water, people will recall that the administration refused to act to stem global warming despite a virtual consensus of scientific opinion on the subject."
-- Magazine contributing writer James Traub, May 9.
 

"The bulge -- the strange rectangular box visible between the president's shoulder blades in the first debate -- has set off so much frenzied speculation on the Internet that it has become what literary critics call an objective correlative, or an object that evokes large emotions and ideas….The bulge is in many ways related to the bubble, which is the word Mr. Bush himself uses to describe the isolation of the presidency. In this case, Mr. Bush's critics argue that he has so walled himself off from dissent in his bubble that he was ill-prepared to take on the challenge of Senator John Kerry in their three debates. Therefore, Mr. Bush had to make use of the bulge, which is most popularly rumored to be a radio receiver that transmitted answers from an offstage adviser into a hidden presidential earpiece."
-- White House reporter Elisabeth Bumiller, October 18, passing on a left-wing Internet-based conspiracy theory.
 

"Despite Drop In Crime, An Increase In Inmates"
 -- Headline to a November 8 story from crime reporter Fox Butterfield.

and…

"The number of inmates in state and federal prisons rose 2.1 percent last year, even as violent crime and property crime fell, according to a study by the Justice Department released yesterday. The continuing increase in the prison population, despite a drop or leveling off in the crime rate in the past few years, is a result of laws passed in the 1990's that led to more prison sentences and longer terms, said Allen J. Beck, chief of corrections statistics for the department's Bureau of Justice Statistics and an author of the report.…In seeking to explain the paradox of a falling crime rate but a rising prison population, Mr. Beck pointed out that F.B.I. statistics showed that from 1994 to 2003 there was a 16 percent drop in arrests for violent crime, including a 36 percent decrease in arrests for murder and a 25 percent decrease in arrests for robbery."
-- Butterfield, from the text of his Nov. 8 story. Butterfield doesn't consider whether crime is dropping because more criminals are behind bars.
 

"It will take an enormous reduction in carbon dioxide emissions over the next few decades -- a far cry from the minor cuts proposed in the Kyoto Protocol, which President Bush has rejected anyway. What stands in the way is custom, ignorance, sloth, greed and fear."
-- Editorial board member Verlyn Klinkenborg, May 30 Book Review.
 

"It's hard to imagine the movie being anything other than a flop in America, given that it has no major Hollywood stars and that its dialogue is in Aramaic and Latin (possibly without benefit of subtitles)."
-- Frank Rich, attacking Mel Gibson's movie about the last hours of Christ, August 3, 2003. The film grossed $370 million in America.
 

"What his critics see as an inability to take strong, clear positions seems to us to reflect his appreciation that life is not simple."
-- Editorial endorsing Sen. John Kerry in the New York Democratic primary, February 26.
 

"A few hours later, Qingming, 18 years old, stepped in front of an approaching locomotive. The train, like China's roaring economy, was an express."
-- Joseph Kahn and Jim Yardley in an August 1 story on a young Chinese man's suicide and "the money-centered, cutthroat society that has replaced socialist China."
 

"Television executives have giddily reverted to the sexism and racism that brought the humor police down on the networks in the first place….Even the presidential debates are such a throwback to the Eisenhower era that the networks might as well broadcast them in black and white. The PBS anchor Jim Lehrer was not chosen to moderate all three presidential contests, as he has been in the past. He was assigned only the first debate in Florida. The next two will be presided over by other aging, white males: Charles Gibson of ABC and Bob Schieffer of CBS, the only two network news anchors who make Mr. Lehrer seem kooky. (Gwen Ifill, who is female and black, will moderate the less important vice presidential debate.)….It's not just that Everybody Loves Raymond. Now Everybody Hates Women."
-- TV critic Alessandra Stanley, October 1.
 

"There are also the manufactured surprises, like Mr. Bush's cloak-and-dagger Thanksgiving trip to Baghdad, which drew praise even from Democrats. (The public relations bonanza fizzled after the press reported that Mr. Bush had posed with a mouth-watering -- but fake -- turkey.)"
 -- Washington editor Richard Berke, July 4.
 

Reality Check: "An article last Sunday about surprises in politics referred incorrectly to the turkey carried by President Bush during his unannounced visit to American troops in Baghdad over Thanksgiving. It was real, not fake."
-- Correction box, July 11.

Stark Double Standards from the Campaign Trail

"As anyone who has sat through the 90-minute forums knows, the questions are not hand grenades that detonate onto the evening news. Take, for example, one of the first queries at the 'Ask President Bush' session in Beaverton, Ore., on Friday: 'I'm wondering if I can get some inauguration tickets?' Or consider this from Albuquerque on Wednesday: 'Can I introduce my mother and mother-in-law, who are new citizens to this country?' Many times the questions aren't even questions at all."
-- Elisabeth Bumiller's "On the Road, Bush Fields Softballs From the Faithful," on Bush's campaign chats, August 16.

vs…

"Mr. Kerry and his running mate, Senator John Edwards of North Carolina, have held 10 such homespun events….The low-key, invitation-only events, where perhaps 100 people sit around red-checked picnic tables, raising hands with questions rather than waving signs with slogans, mimic the town-hall style campaigning for the Iowa caucuses at which both Mr. Kerry and Mr. Edwards excelled. For Mr. Kerry, porch visits follow the chili feeds he held at firehouses all over New Hampshire and Iowa….Situated mainly in swing states, the visits are intended to emphasize the Democrats' kitchen-table economic appeal -- light on partisanship, laden with 'we're here for you.'"
-- Jodi Wilgoren's "Front-Porch Chat: Birth of a Kerry Campaign Tactic" on Kerry's campaign chats, August 17.
 

"For a nation divided over his stewardship, distressed about the economy and dubious about the war with Iraq, President Bush had one overriding message last night: He's still the one. But he offered few critical details of the second-term domestic agenda he outlined. His big policy ideas -- restraining government spending, simplifying the tax code, offering tax credits for health savings accounts, allowing personal investment accounts for Social Security -- were vague. And the specific proposals he cited-increasing money for community colleges, opening rural health centers -- were mostly small….But Mr. Bush's promise then to 'extend the promise of prosperity to every forgotten corner of this country' remains unmet, slow job growth makes his assertion last night that 'we have seen a shaken economy rise to its feet' debatable, and the war is enmeshed in what even he recently acknowledged as a 'miscalculation of what the conditions would be.' "
 -- Todd Purdum after Bush's acceptance speech, September 3.

vs.

"For months, John Kerry and his supporters have told voters that he is strong enough to keep the nation safe and caring enough to make it comfortable with him as president. On Thursday night his goal was to show the biggest audience of his life that both claims were true, and he gave it his best shot. In an emphatic speech that used some variation of the word 'strength' 17 times, Mr. Kerry portrayed himself not only as a plausible, but also as a vastly preferable commander in chief to President Bush, one whose own combat service left him with a special understanding of the twin American traditions of force and restraint….Mr. Kerry may well have turned a corner on the path toward inspiring his party, and inviting swing voters to put him in the White House. He perspired visibly in the overcrowded hall, but his delivery was fluid, relaxed and assured, and he smiled often."
-- Todd Purdum after Kerry's acceptance speech, July 30.
 

"Clark and Kerry Offering Plans to Help Middle Class....Gearing proposals to appeal to everyday Americans."

vs.

"Bush Pushes Education as Election Year Opens....Defending Programs that Democrats say he underfinanced."
-- Contrasting page A19 headlines and cut-out lines, January 6.
 

A Looser, More Jovial Kerry Prepares for Voters' Choice -- Relaxed, playful and workmanlike, and hopelessly superstitious."
-- Headline and cut-out line to Jodi Wilgoren's November 1 story from the Kerry camp.

vs.

"Putting Tension Aside, Bush Resolutely Enjoys Himself -- Any crack in the façade could be fatal at the polls. So there isn't one."
-- Headline and cut-out line to Richard Stevenson's November 1 story from the Bush camp.
 

"Gravel-voiced, practically growling, Mr. Cheney leaned heavily on his elbows on the desk before him as he recalled his long service in Congress and the White House….With Mr. Cheney in one corner and Mr. Edwards in the other, viewers could pick their own frame of reference and apply their preferred images to each set of points, corporate leader versus trial lawyer, executive versus legislator, astringency versus empathy, the arid sensibility and granite consonants of Big Sky country versus the honeyed humor and swampy vowels of the Carolinas."
 -- James Bennet on the vice presidential debate between Dick Cheney and Sen. John Edwards, October 6.

Communism: Not So Bad?

"President Fidel Castro was on the air much of the time, listening to high-ranking officers report from around the country about conditions and preparedness. In the morning, the aging but ever-charismatic president told reporters that he was grateful for the 'kind attitude' of the hurricane in bypassing Cuba. He told reporters that his country had stood against threats of nuclear attack, and decades of economic sanctions. 'This storm,' he said, 'only renews our strength and our solidarity.' Watching Mr. Castro, a television anchor commented, 'Always on the front lines of combat.'"
-- Ginger Thompson and Felicity Barringer on hurricane preparations in Cuba, September 14.
 

"All this has given rise to a sort of East German post-mortem feeling that maybe the East had its good aspects after all, especially a certain economic security and stability, even if your best vacation option was Bulgaria."
-- Reporter Richard Bernstein, January 13.
 

"Che Guevara is widely remembered today as a revolutionary figure; to some a heroic, Christ-like martyr, to others the embodiment of a failed ideology. To still others, he is just a commercialized emblem on a T-shirt. But for Latin Americans just now coming of age, yet another image of Che is starting to emerge: the romantic and tragic young adventurer who has as much in common with Jack Kerouac or James Dean as with Fidel Castro."
-- Reporter Larry Rohter, May 26.
 

"Devotees from New Delhi to Santiago, in his native Chile, are gathering for breathless readings and deeper discussions of this complicated man, a sensual communist who loved nature almost as much as he loved women, food and wine.…for [Pablo] Neruda, love and beauty vied for attention with social justice."
-- Editorial board member Carolyn Curiel on a tribute to the Communist poet Pablo Neruda, July 6.
 

Reality Check: "We must learn from Stalin/his sincere intensity/his concrete clarity/...Stalin is the moon,/the maturity of man and the peoples./Stalinists, Let us bear this title with pride."
-- from Neruda's eulogy glorifying the mass murderer Josef Stalin.

Bush-Loathing, Unleashed

"It is a characterization of Mr. Bush's foreign policy style often heard around the world: bullying, unreceptive, brazen. The result, critics of this administration contend, has been a disastrous loss of international support, damage to American credibility, the sullying of America's image and a devastating war that has already taken more than 1,000 American lives….But the complaint often heard around the world is that from the outset the Bush administration's dismissive attitude set a pattern of take-it-or-leave-it policies that needlessly alienated friends. The Iraq war accelerated that process. Then, the acknowledgment that there were no stockpiles of weapons of mass destruction and no proven links between Mr. Hussein and Al Qaeda cemented the view in Paris, Berlin and elsewhere that Mr. Bush governed from ideology first, facts second."
 -- From an October 12 story by Roger Cohen, David Sanger and Steven Weisman.
 

"But Mr. Bush must also take pains not to be seen as letting the political tail wag the terrorism dog. Word that much of the newly discovered intelligence that prompted the latest alert was years old led even some law enforcement officials to wonder why Mr. Ridge had raised the threat level just now."
 -- Reporter Todd Purdum, August 4.
 

"When President Clinton came in 1996, he received a standing ovation. But this presidential visit will be different. It seems to have lifted the lid on long-simmering anger many blacks feel toward Mr. Bush. Some Bush policies, including tax cuts mainly benefiting those with higher incomes and cutting back on welfare-type programs, have alienated black voters, analysts say."
-- Jeffrey Gettleman and Ariel Hart on a Bush visit to Atlanta to mark Martin Luther King day, January 15.
 

"Do you feel any sense of personal responsibility for September 11th?"
-- Elisabeth Bumiller's question to Bush during his press conference the night of April 13.
 

"Three years into the presidency of George W. Bush, many people here and abroad fear and loathe our country, its power, its policies, its pride. Is America an evil empire? Seven new books seem ready to think so."
-- Cover line of the Sunday New York Times Book Review, January 25.

We Miss Saddam

"The war in Iraq has been especially disillusioning for young Iraqi artists, many of whom believed the American promises of freedom. As the old order fell, they sat in their cracked-window studios and at paint-splattered easels and dreamed of an Iraqi renaissance. They dream still. At the Baghdad Academy of Fine Arts, which Mr. Abbas attends, the school play last semester explored the humiliation of the American occupation and began with the sounds of helicopters and machine guns….The amount of violence has stunned these artists. It has robbed them of business, killed classmates and made it difficult to work and live. But the war has also given them a lot to think about."
-- Reporter Jeffrey Gettleman, July 25.
 

"The invasion of Falluja has shattered the remaining hope of many of those Iraqis who thought the Americans might be able to free the country from might-makes-right rule, which has shadowed this region from the days of the Ottoman Empire to British colonial rule to Mr. Hussein….Yet [the Iraqis] sense of kinship with Iraqis in Falluja, Najaf and elsewhere runs deeper than any pull toward abstract notions of democracy offered by the Americans -- notions that to them appear increasingly hypocritical given the reliance of the occupiers on overwhelming force as a means to an end."
-- Edward Wong's report from Baghdad, April 22.
 

"Even though the last years of Saddam Hussein's rule had brought new restrictions on women's freedoms, the simultaneous collapse of the police state that had kept public order and the new leeway for religious clerics to demand stricter compliance with Islamic law have increasingly narrowed girls' lives….For months, Mariam said, her parents have kept her under strict lock-down at home. She has read all the teen magazines she can stand, seen movie after movie. She has grown bored and glum. She has lost weight. Once she would stay out with her parents until midnight. She would hang out with her cousins every week. Now hardly anyone goes out. Everyone lives in fear….Fear eats at everyone here, but in a conservative society where daughters are already governed by stricter rules than sons, adolescent girls find themselves particularly vulnerable."
-- Somini Sengupta from Baghdad, June 27.
 

"Even though Spain's involvement in the Iraq war was opposed by 90 percent of the population, Mr. Aznar stridently defends his decision to drag his country into it. He forgives the United States for the intelligence reports that said Saddam Hussein's unconventional weapons programs posed an imminent threat to the world's security, claims that have not been substantiated."
-- Elaine Sciolino interviewing Jose Maria Aznar, then-prime minister of Spain, March 11.
 

"Mr. Bush's decision to hang tough has echoes of the strategy used by another president from Texas. In the 1968 campaign, Vice President Hubert H. Humphrey began edging back from the Johnson Administration's plan to admit no fault with its policy in Vietnam. He got an angry call from his boss, who threatened to 'dry up every Democratic dollar from Maine to California.'"
-- Reporter David Sanger discussing the war in Iraq in the October 10 Week in Review section.
 

"As in a fevered dream, that and other scenes of destruction played out last week in Falluja before the eyes of American troops, residents and reporters. By early Saturday, marines and soldiers had swept through most of the city and cornered insurgents in the south, leaving behind shelled buildings, bullet-riddled cars and rotting corpses. It proved one thing: That the Americans are great at taking things apart. What comes after the battlefield victory has always been the real problem for them during their 19 months in Iraq….It is the last aim -- persuading the Sunnis to act as a loyal minority in a democracy -- that may be the most improbable goal of the retaking of Falluja by storm. American officials say that if it can be done, Falluja, which has assumed mythic status across the Arab world for its resistance, could then serve as a model for the rest of Iraq, and Iraq as a model for the rest of the Middle East. But given the track record of the Americans and their allies, military analysts say, the immediate goals in Falluja seem naïve, if not utterly inconsequential given the surging resistance across the Sunni-dominated regions of Iraq, almost certainly organized by the very leaders who fled Falluja before the offensive."
-- Edward Wong from Falluja, November 14.
 

"For the first time since the Bush administration began its now-troubled enterprise to reshape Iraq, an international conference of foreign ministers and other senior officials will gather Monday to try to reach a rudimentary consensus on how to stabilize the violence-soaked nation. Washington's past determination to go it alone in Iraq and staunch opposition from many quarters to the American-led occupation have long stymied any international effort on Iraq."
-- Middle East reporter Neil MacFarquhar, November 22.
 

Reality Check: "In addition to the United States, 36 countries have committed troops to support the operation in Iraq at some point."
-- From a graphic to a November 21 story by Steven Weisman.

But Hey, Maybe We're Just Imagining Things

"Conservatives in Hollywood and New York always complain about stigma and persecution in the media and entertainment worlds, which makes one wonder why they don't get out more."
-- Television critic Alessandra Stanley, January 30.

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