Salon: Shocking, Amusing and Baffling Quotations From the GOP and Their Fr

[kskiska]

This could be a new Dem bible.

(book excerpt)

Give 'em enough rope

From Rush to Newt to Bob Dornan to Ari Fleischer, the right wing's most outrageous (and hateful) comments of the past decade. An exclusive excerpt from "Take Them at Their Words: Shocking, Amusing and Baffling Quotations From the GOP and Their Friends, 1994-2004."

In the wake of the "Republican revolution" of 1994, the new GOP leaders in Congress made Rush Limbaugh an honorary congressman, and began to meet once a month with sympathetic talk-radio hosts from all over the country. As Chicago writer Bruce J. Miller noticed in his travels through the Midwest, the airwaves of the '90s were suddenly full of Limbaugh and his imitators, broadcasting radical-right rhetoric over many of the most powerful stations in the country. As Miller puts it, "The public airwaves had been annexed."

Miller and his co-author, Diana Maio, have spent much of the last decade gathering more than 1,000 quotes from prominent Republicans and right-wing commentators, covering every hot-button issue of the day. These quotes come not merely from talk radio, but also magazines, newspapers, legislative debates, TV shows and even the Congressional Record. The result of their labors is the new book "Take Them at Their Words: Shocking, Amusing and Baffling Quotations From the GOP and Their Friends 1994-2004" (with an introduction by Salon's Sidney Blumenthal), which Miller calls "a wide-angle snapshot of the moral values Republicans and their allies proudly embrace."

"Take Them at Their Words" includes sections on gender, race, abortion, the Iraq war, the environment, health and economics, among others. One of the most noteworthy characteristics of these quotations is the all-too-frequent appeal to violence or hatred, even to killing. Much of the material is laughable, but as Miller writes in his preface, "While Republican rhetoric is, at worst, an incitement to violence, at best it is narrowing the platform of debate, alienating the public from our political system and working against productive compromise."

Herewith is a brief selection of samples, reprinted by permission.

(snip)

"I don't care about the circumstances of a child's conception. You want to execute somebody in the case of rape, execute the rapist and let the unborn child live."

-- Pat Buchanan, New York Times, 2/24/96

(snip)

"And finally, and most importantly, the next time we go to war, don't give a specific reason for the war that the left can seize upon and later flog us with it ad nauseam, just do it. Remember, the first rule of Fight Club is that you don't talk about Fight Club."

-- Dennis Miller, "Hannity & Colmes," Fox News, 6/27/03

more…
http://salon.com/books/feature/2004/06/09/at_their_words/index.html

[punpirate]

1. Bruce Miller is...

... I believe, Mark Crispin Miller's brother. Looks like a sharp eyes and ears run in the family.