Did You Hear What They Said?

That's right, True-Believers!

It's your favorite series that reminds us all what people have actually said.

Remember, it's not a port deal. . . .they really said it!

IRAN

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"It is striking. Four years ago we were talking about Iraq, saying they may have been trying to seek nuclear weapons, we thought they were sponsoring terrorism, so we went to war. Here's a country that's saying right to our face they are going forward with a nuclear program, we've proven that they've sponsored terrorism, and they have a president who says he wants to wipe one of our key allies off the map. And we're treating them differently, aren't we?"--Matt Lauer
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"Our enemies may be irrational, even outright insane, driven by nationalism, religion, ethnicity or ideology. They do not fear the United States for its diplomatic skills or the number of automobiles and software programs it produces. They respect only the firepower of our tanks, planes and helicopter gunships." —Ronald Reagan

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NATIONAL SECURITY

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"The circumstances that endanger the safety of nations are infinite, and for this reason no constitutional shackles can wisely be imposed on the power to which the care of it is committed." —Alexander Hamilton, Federalist No. 23

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DANISH CARTOON FLAP

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"Muslims think they can issue decrees about what images can appear in newspaper cartoons. Who do they think they are, liberals?"--Ann Coulter
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"Christians, Jews, Buddhists, [and] Mormons...don't lash out in violence when their religious sensibilities are offended. They certainly don't expect their beliefs to be immune from criticism, mockery, or dissent. But radical Muslims do." —Jeff Jacoby

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MEDIA

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"Why don't you just report the news instead of what might be the news?" —Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld

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"The mighty American media doesn't want to think itself spineless. So they close their eyes, rationalize their fear and call it the responsible thing to do." —Tony Blankley

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FROM THE "DEMOCRATIC" PARTY

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"Some Democrats are furious that their party doesn't have its own ideas. Others say they do have ideas; they're just keeping them secret for now. That sounds a lot like the high school geek who insists that his girlfriend is really hot but lives in an undisclosed location in Canada." —Jonah Goldberg

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"It is frankly shocking that there is anyone in Washington who would politicize the Patriot Act. It is an insult to those who died to tell the American people that the organization posing the greatest threat to their liberty is not al-Qa'ida but the FBI. Hearing any member of Congress actually crow about 'killing' or 'playing chicken' with this critical legislation is as disturbing today as it would have been when Ground Zero was still smoldering." —Debra Burlingame

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"I take a back seat to nobody when it comes to fighting terrorism and standing up for national homeland security. Our port security is too important to place in the hands of foreign governments. I will be working to introduce legislation that will prohibit the sale of ports to foreign governments." —Sen. Hillary Clinton

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Memo to Hill: First, there is no transfer of security responsibility. Second, no ports are being sold. Third, if you feel so strongly about the UAE threat, then perhaps Bill should return the $600,000 he received from the UAE for speaking engagements in the last two years.
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"Hillary said that she finds the administration's refusal to level with the American people "troubling." She also finds it somewhat nostalgic."--Jay Leno

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"Al Gore announced he is finishing up a new book about global warming and the environment. Yeah, the first chapter talks about how you shouldn't chop down trees to make a book that no one will read." —Conan O'Brien
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FOOD FOR THOUGHT

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"For the public, there may be some psychological solace in the assertion that preventing DPW from managing port terminals is tantamount to securing our destiny—but it is a false sense of security."--Mark Alexander

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PASS THE PEYOTE, PLEASE

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"Now you pick up the paper and there's a Watergate every day. I don't think anyone's connecting the dots and saying to the public, "Wake up, folks, because you could end up in a totalitarian nightmare, wondering what happened to your country." --Robert Redford

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"Try not to laugh when someone says these are the world's greatest athletes, despite a paucity of Blacks that makes the Winter Games look like a GOP convention."--Bryant Gumbel

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MULTIPLE CHOICE

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Who said the following?

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"Private initiative is the only answer to black poverty and to rebuilding New Orleans."

A) Jesse Jackson

B) J.C. Watts

C) Star Parker

D) Al Sharpton

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Scroll down for the answer (no cheating!)

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C) Star Parker

HAVE A GREAT DAY!

Where's the Exit Strategy?

This article by Myron Magnet (link) was written last February, but it still resonates, especially will the failures of liberalism laid bare in the wake of Hurricane Katrina.

He gets a little wordy here, but the bottom line is undeniable:

Government handouts will never solve poverty.

What ever happened to compassionate conservatism? Despite the Bush administration's focus on the war against terror, the idea didn't disappear. But as White House thinking developed, it got incorporated into a larger, more profound domestic theory. Yes, we need a safety net, the current view seems to go; but we don't need a Europe-style welfare state.

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What's called for is the traditional American "opportunity society," as much a boon to the poor as to everyone else.

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Implicit in compassionate conservatism was the epochal paradigm shift that is now all but explicit. Taken together, compassionate conservatism's elements added up to a sweeping rejection of liberal orthodoxy about how to help the poor, which a half century's worth of experience had discredited.

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If you want to help the poor, compassionate conservatives argued, liberate them from dependency through welfare reform; free their communities from criminal anarchy through activist policing; give them the education they need to succeed in a modern economy by holding their schools accountable; and let them enjoy the rewards of work by taxing their modest wages lightly--or not at all.

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For the worst-off--those hampered by addiction or alcohol or faulty socialization--let the government pay private organizations, especially religious ones, to help. Such people need a change of heart to solve their problems, the president himself deeply believed; and while a clergyman or a therapist might help them, a bureaucrat couldn't.

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In fact a welfare-department worker might do harm even beyond providing money to fuel self-destructive behavior. Rather than understand that an inner transformation is what such a person needs, the welfare worker might well try to persuade him that his plight stems from an unjust economy, which provides him insufficient opportunity, or even purposely keeps a fraction of the population unemployed, so as to hold down the wages of those who are working.

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His problem thus is the result of vast, impersonal forces, of which he is the victim (and doubly the victim if he is black in racist America). In other words, capitalism is inherently defective and unjust, and therefore we need a welfare state to mitigate its harshness.
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President Bush entered the White House with no patience for such a view. What he understood was that the War on Poverty--an array of LBJ-era legislation that boosted welfare benefits and established other programs for the poor, including Medicaid--created its own form of depression, as women long dependent on welfare became so convinced of their own inferiority that they could hardly present themselves without trembling at a job interview.

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And, as a far worse psychological consequence, the sense of victimization and of entitlement to government support that the War on Poverty fostered created a corrosive self-pity and resentment among the children of its beneficiaries, and their children's children. The self-pity led to drink and drugs; the resentment to crime and violence; and both together to a perpetuation of irresponsibility, dysfunction, and failure over the generations. The first-line antidote, in Mr. Bush's view, would be the intervention of a counselor, preferably faith-based.

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But if there was a permanent class of poor, the cause was not a failure of capitalism but of the War on Poverty, which reinforced such self-defeating attitudes. Clearly, as the administration understood, American capitalism was a dynamo of job creation and opportunity. President Bush's generation, after all, had seen the astonishing restructuring of U.S. industry in the 1980s, when, in response to foreign competition, companies slimmed down, boosted productivity and quality, and kept their markets and prosperity; while their laid-off workers didn't permanently succumb to paralyzing depression but instead found--or created--new jobs.

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Moreover, as a Texan, Mr. Bush had seen waves of Mexican immigrants flooding in to take jobs no one previously knew existed--still more evidence that there was no crisis of opportunity--while in the cities, a new wave of immigrant-run greengroceries, nail salons, construction firms, even commercial fish farms in Bronx basements, gave the lie to the failure-of-capitalism theory.
And, on top of all that, the overwhelming success of the 1996 Welfare Reform Act, which became ever clearer during President Bush's first term, utterly exploded the idea that the hard-core poor were not working because of a lack of jobs.

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Welfare mothers crowded into the work force; the rolls dropped by roughly half. Not only were their children not freezing to death on the streets by the thousands, as even so wise an observer as the late Sen. Patrick Moynihan had predicted they would, but in fact child poverty reached its lowest point ever three years after welfare reform. Lack of opportunity? Hardly.

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The War on Poverty rests on a false premise: that capitalism creates a permanent class of poor. And War on Poverty attitudes have a deeply harmful effect on those entrammeled in America's current welfare state. So the second Bush term is bringing the War on Poverty--demonstrably a cataclysmic mistake--to an end.

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A glance at the administration's recent budget shows the ongoing dismantling of antipoverty programs: a sharp reduction in the Community Development Block Grant, the main conduit for funneling federal money to cities; the reduction in HUD money for Section 8 subsidized housing vouchers, which abets the formation of dysfunctional single-parent families and destabilizes respectable working-class neighborhoods; and the shrinkage of ever-expanding Medicaid.

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Welfare is now temporary assistance in adversity, not a permanent way of life; and we can expect welfare reform's conditions to become even stricter when the 1996 Act finally gets reauthorized.

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Supporters of the old paradigm are naturally apoplectic over such a transformation; and their outrage reveals just how sweeping a welfare state they really champion. As Georgetown law professor Peter Edelman, who resigned from the Clinton administration to protest the president's signing of the 1996 welfare reform, told columnist William Raspberry: "For virtually all of my adulthood, America has had a bipartisan agreement that we ought to provide some basic framework of programs and policies that provide a safety net, not just for the poor but for a large portion of the American people who need help to manage."

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How large a portion? Well, figures Mr. Raspberry, "the lower third of the economy." Think about that: nearly 100 million Americans as clients of the federal government. This is not temporary assistance but a European-style "social-democratic" (that is, socialist) welfare state. It is the political culture of America's old cities, with their hordes of government-supported clients, employees, and retirees--a culture that has produced slow or negative job and population growth. And this is exactly what the Bush administration does not want.

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The failure of the European model, explicitly based on the belief that free-market capitalism is dangerous and needs to be tied down with a thousand trammels, like Gulliver, is one of the signal facts of our era, along with the failure of communism.

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In Europe, the idea that capitalism creates a permanently jobless class has become a self-fulfilling prophecy, as strict regulation and the high taxes needed to pay lavish welfare and unemployment benefits have resulted in half the U.S. rate of job creation, twice the rate of unemployment, and thus little opportunity.
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Meanwhile retirees, often young and vigorous, go off for government-funded visits to health spas at taxpayer expense. Even if this were morally sustainable, it is not economically so, as even Gerhard Schroeder has learned. But with so many voters on the dole, or employed by the government to administer the vast welfare-state apparatus, who knows whether reform or collapse will occur first?

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It's in this context that we should understand President Bush's campaign for Social Security reform. It is part of the large and coherent world view that has evolved out of compassionate conservatism. What has always made America exceptional is limitless opportunity for everyone, at all levels--the ability to find a job, to advance up the ladder as you prove yourself, and to prosper.

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The poor especially have flocked to these shores for just this chance, and have proved the promise true. A giant welfare state--whether its clients are the poor, the "lower third of the economy," or a cohort of government-pensioned retirees who almost outnumber the taxpaying workers who support them--hampers the job creation that makes all this opportunity possible.

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President Bush is determined to keep the dynamism vibrant, and to encourage and empower the poor to take part in it, rather than to suggest they are unequal to the task.

Ann's On Target......Again

One of the frequent contributors to "Did You Hear What They Said?" is Ann Coulter.
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Only on a few occasions do we post her articles here at The Perspective, and, well, this is one of those occasions.
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With the recent dust-up over Danish political cartoons, we thought Ann's take on the issue was most precient.

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CALVIN AND HOBBES — AND MUHAMMAD

February 8, 2006

As my regular readers know, I've long been skeptical of the "Religion of Peace" moniker for Muslims — for at least 3,000 reasons right off the top of my head. I think the evidence is going my way this week. The culture editor of a newspaper in Denmark suspected writers and cartoonists were engaging in self-censorship when it came to the Religion of Peace.

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It was subtle things, like a Danish comedian's statement, paraphrased by The New York Times, "that he had no problem urinating on the Bible but that he would not dare do the same to the Quran." So, after verifying that his life insurance premiums were paid up, the editor expressly requested cartoons of Muhammad from every cartoonist with a Danish cartoon syndicate.

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Out of 40 cartoonists, only 10 accepted the invitation, most of them submitting utterly neutral drawings with no political content whatsoever.

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But three cartoons made political points.

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One showed Muhammad turning away suicide bombers from the gates of heaven, saying "Stop, stop — we ran out of virgins!" — which I believe was a commentary on Muslims' predilection for violence.

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Another was a cartoon of Muhammad with horns, which I believe was a commentary on Muslims' predilection for violence.

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The third showed Muhammad with a turban in the shape of a bomb, which I believe was an expression of post-industrial ennui in a secular — oops, no, wait: It was more of a commentary on Muslims' predilection for violence.

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In order to express their displeasure with the idea that Muslims are violent, thousands of Muslims around the world engaged in rioting, arson, mob savagery, flag-burning, murder and mayhem, among other peaceful acts of nonviolence.

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Muslims are the only people who make feminists seem laid-back.

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The little darlings brandish placards with typical Religion of Peace slogans, such as: "Behead Those Who Insult Islam," "Europe, you will pay, extermination is on the way" and "Butcher those who mock Islam." They warn Europe of their own impending 9/11 with signs that say: "Europe: Your 9/11 will come" — which is ironic, because they almost had me convinced the Jews were behind the 9/11 attack.

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The rioting Muslims claim they are upset because Islam prohibits any depictions of Muhammad — though the text is ambiguous on beheadings, suicide bombings and flying planes into skyscrapers. The belief that Islam forbids portrayals of Muhammad is recently acquired.

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Back when Muslims created things, rather than blowing them up, they made paintings, frescoes, miniatures and prints of Muhammad. But apparently the Quran is like the Constitution: It's a "living document," capable of sprouting all-new provisions at will.

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Muslims ought to start claiming the Quran also prohibits indoor plumbing, to explain their lack of it.

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Other interpretations of the Quran forbid images of humans or animals, which makes even a child's coloring book blasphemous. That's why the Taliban blew up those priceless Buddhist statues, bless their innocent, peace-loving little hearts..

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Largely unnoticed in this spectacle is the blinding fact that one nation is missing from the long list of Muslim countries (by which I mean France and England) with hundreds of crazy Muslims experiencing bipolar rage over some cartoons: Iraq. Hey — maybe this democracy thing does work!

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The barbaric behavior of Europe's Muslims suggests that the European welfare state may not be attracting your top-notch Muslims. Making the rash assumption for purposes of discussion that Islam is a religion and not a car-burning cult, even a real religion can't go bossing around other people like this.

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Catholics aren't short on rules, but they couldn't care less if non-Catholics use birth control. Conservative Jews have no interest in forbidding other people from mixing meat and dairy. Protestants don't make a peep about other people eating food off one another's plates. (Just stay away from our plates — that's disgusting.)

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But Muslims think they can issue decrees about what images can appear in newspaper cartoons. Who do they think they are, liberals?

Did You Hear What They Said?

Hello True-Believers!

As we settle in for another 6 weeks of Punxsutawney Phil-induced winter, here's another edition of The Perspective's signature series to keep the fires burning.

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Remember, it's not a Danish cartoon. . .they actually said it!!!

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A TIMELY REMINDER

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"The more profoundly we study [the Bible], and the more closely we observe its divine precepts, the better citizens we will become and the higher will be our destiny as a nation."—President William McKinley

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LIBERALISM IN DECLINE

"Those who see their lives as spoiled and wasted crave equality and fraternity more than they do freedom. If they clamor for freedom, it is but freedom to establish equality and uniformity. The passion for equality is partly a passion for anonymity: to be one thread of the many which make up a tunic; one thread not distinguishable from the others. No one can then point us out, measure us against others and expose our inferiority." —Eric Hoffer

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"As Hillary explained, the House 'has been run in a way so that nobody with a contrary view has had a chance to present legislation, to make an argument, to be heard.' Yes, that's what was really missing on plantations during the slavery era: the opportunity to present a contrary view. Gosh, if only the slaves had been allowed to call for cloture votes. What a difference that would have made!"--Ann Coulter

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"I admire him for his resolve against my government and its meddling,"--Cindy Sheehan, on Venezuela's leftist President Hugo Chavez

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"I don't support our troops. This is a particularly difficult opinion to have, especially if you are the kind of person who likes to put bumper stickers on his car." —Los Angeles Times columnist Joel Stein

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"When Democrats began celebrating wildly the fact that they have done nothing to rescue Social Security, they handed Bush an opportunity to step away from the text and point out the partisan cynicism of celebrating failure. My comment would have been "Remember that applause 13 years from now when Social Security goes broke."--Michael Graham

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ABORTION

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"Every 38 seconds in America a woman lays her body down, feeling forced to choose abortion out of a lack of practical resources and emotional support. Abortion is a reflection that society has failed women. There is a better way."--Patricia Heaton, Feminists for Life celebrity spokesman

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"When we consider that women are treated as property, it is degrading to women that we should treat our children as property to be disposed of as we see fit." —Elizabeth Cady Stanton

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SO TRUE. . .

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"The Founding Fathers did not foresee a permanent political class, out of touch with the people and in touch only with their careers and self-interests." —Cal Thomas

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"The government is still analyzing Osama bin Laden's latest tape. On his most recent release he called Bush a liar and said that he was just after oil. It's the usual stuff we have heard before. Like at the Golden Globes."--Jay Leno

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"Hindsight alone is not wisdom, and second-guessing is not a strategy."--President George W. Bush

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VALERIE PLAME BLAME GAME

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"We have neither sought, much less obtained, 'all documents, regardless of when created, relating to whether Valerie Wilson's status as a CIA employee, or any aspect of that status, was classified at any time between May 6, 2003 and July 14, 2003."--Special Prosecutor Patrick Fitzgerald

And now for our MULTIPLE CHOICE question:

Who said the following?

"The framers of our Constitution believed that the judicial branch should be removed from politics and that its only goal should be the fair and impartial administration of justice. But in the last few months, the confirmation of a judicial nominee has become a spectacle of misrepresentation and single-issue politics. To allow this unprecedented practice to become the rule would jeopardize the integrity and independence of the American system of justice."

A) George W. Bush

B) Joseph Biden

C) Ronald Reagan

D) Pat Roberts

Scroll down for the answer (no cheating!)

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C) Ronald Reagan

Have a great day!!