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Obama Administration, The

"Obama: 'This is my last election. After my last election I will have more flexibility.'

Medvedev: 'I will tell Vladimir'."         (26 March,2012)

"They fucked up in 2014. That's why we are here. We fucked it up. Barack never took Putin seriously." -- JOE BIDEN      ("spoken to a friend", in 2024 -- according to Bob Woodward)

"Obama -- a forward-thinking man" -- VLADIMIR PUTIN    (9 July 2017)

“The Obama administration has evidently convinced itself that Islamic supremacism is the solution, not the problem, in the Middle East.” – ANDREW C. McCARTHY

“Everything this (the Obama) administration has done seems to indicate that it sees a potential strike on Iran as more of a threat to the world than the Iranian bomb itself." – JONATHAN TOBIN                          (in Contentions magazine)


"The good news is that, according to the Obama administration, the rich will pay for everything. The bad news is that, according to the Obama administration,  you're rich." -- P. J. O'ROURKE


“Under Obama the U.S. has become everyone’s best enemy and worst friend.” – VICTOR DAVIS HANSON


“He's transforming America, as promised – from a wretched sprawl of oppression and so-called freedoms to a bright new land where government bring us together, much as a house fire brings together a family on the lawn.” – JAMES LILEKS


“At least in the Nixon administration, using the word ‘patriotic’ did not put you on the enemies list.” -- HALEY BARBOUR                                                    (Ex-Republican governor of Mississippi. Incidentally, he was in charge there when Katrina hit the  cities of Biloxi and Gulfport just as hard as the Democrat-run New Orleans, but he managed to handle the situation with dramatically more success.)


“One is tempted to chalk Obama's Middle East policy up to incompetence, but there may be a deeper explanation. Virtually every American president from George Washington to George W. Bush has believed that American influence is a force for good in the world. But Barack Obama appears to believe that American influence is intrinsically bad. That may be the real reason Obama is now frittering away the legacy of America's brilliant diplomacy.” -- MARIO LOYOLA (The former counsel for the U.S. Senate Republican Policy Committee, in October 2013)


“Face it, we handed the keys of the world's greatest superpower to the winners of a 4th grade poster contest.” – DAVE “IOWAHAWK” BURGE


“The real mission for the next American president may be to persuade us that we can be Americans again. Not this easily-distracted, cynical, tuned-out, Balkanizing mob that hobbles along with an economy that hits 3 percent growth at the best of times, is growing acclimated to slogging along in a waste-deep bureaucratic morass, and endures a public discourse that alternates among the nasty, inane, and petty, punctuated by perpetual cycles of offensiveness and grievances of the offended. We deserve better than a government that falters and flails in the face of drug cartels and gang violence but that can come down like a ton of bricks on big sodas and incandescent light bulbs. The history of this nation was driven by those who overcame the siren call of acquiescence, the anti-rallying cry of, ‘What's the use?’ " – JIM GERAGHTY


“Politics, the late Christopher Hitchens used to say, is show business for ugly people. But it’s also ugly business for show people. Thatcherism is a political philosophy; Obamaism is a vibe, a groove, a pose, an aesthetic.” – MARK STEYN


“To say there is less private-sector experience in the Obama administration than in any other of the last century hardly begins to convey the particular pool of smarts on which this president has drawn. Nearly 60 percent of Eisenhower’s cabinet appointments had private-sector; Nixon, Reagan, and both Bushes scored well over 50; FDR and Truman smack on 50/50; in Obama’s cabinet, fewer than 10 percent have real-world business experience. None of Obamacare’s begetters have ever created anything – certainly not a dime of real wealth.” – MARK STEYN


“The roots of ISIS do not lie in the actions America took in 2003. Bush made mistakes in Iraq, and left a ramshackle state that functioned less badly than any of its neighbors. Obama walked away, pulled out a cigarette, tossed the match over his shoulder, and ignited a fuse that, from Damascus to Baghdad to Amman and beyond, will blow up the entire Middle East.” – MARK STEYN


“It seems like perhaps President Obama doesn't even care if America is still perceived as the superpower it once was. If that's the case and if the U.S. doesn't really want to be a superpower anymore, I'd say let Poland take over that leadership and we'd take care of the rest. I promise you, we'd know what to do." – LECH WALESA


"Not being George W. Bush is not a foreign policy...What is our foreign policy – Disliking global warming?" – PEGGY NOONAN                                          (in 2014)

“Stroke of the pen… law of the land. Kind of cool.” – PAUL BEGALA                                                                  (About his beloved Corpseman Administration. Somebody should show him Saddam Hussein’s quote on the subject of dictatorship….)


“So Barack Obama has sworn that he will not tolerate the incompetence of the Obama administration. I’d like to think that that means he is going to resign, but I don’t think that’s what he meant.” – KEVIN D. WILLIAMSON


“The curators of Barack Obama’s legacy insist that his administration was free of scandal — but what it was free of was accountability.” – KEVIN D. WILLIAMSON


“One cannot dispute President Obama's claim of having ‘the most transparent administration in America's history’." – SARAH PALIN


“It is always remarkable to me how the only way this president (Obama) can be rescued from a bad news cycle is if an even worse one comes along.” – JONAH GOLDBERG


“Well, if Obama's years in office have taught us anything it is that things can always get worse.” – JONAH GOLDBERG


“Maybe it's time to put quotation marks around the entire Obama presidency.” – JONAH GOLDBERG


“Is there no tyrant or anti-American center in the world that Obama will not appease for nothing in return?” – CHARLES KRAUTHAMMER


“For all of his snide put downs of others for Cold War mindsets, Obama is actually trying to reprise the Cold War, only this time, we lose.” – MONA CHAREN

“Despite this mind-blowing incapacity to perform core functions, Obama’s minions stay busy, busy, busy doing everything, all the time, everywhere else.” – DEROY MURDOCK (black conservative columnist)

 

"'The American Spectator' used to refer to a magazine; now it's our policy." -- JIM GERAGHTY                     (In August 2014)

“The Obama admin... is the best friend of its enemies, and the biggest enemy of its friends."-- ARI SHAVIT (left-wing Israeli Ha-Haaretz columnist)

 

“We've reached the point where Obama admin is bragging that it protected the Iranian nuclear program from an Israeli airstrike.” – NOAH POLLAK

 

“You cannot win a war against radical Islamic terrorists with an Administration unwilling to utter the words radical Islamic terrorists.” – TED CRUZ

 

"If the President and the other Democrats don't believe these radicals are really Muslims, why do they bend over backwards to treat them as Muslims when they're captured – and then release them into Muslim countries?” – DENNIS PRAGER

 

“Has Obama ever in his life used the word 'investment' to refer to something other than government spending?” – MARIO LOYOLA (an outstanding Texan from the Institute Of Policy Studies, in Jan '15. And I reckon that Obama s tarted after he made his second hundred-million $))

 

“One day, you'll wake up and you will not recognize your country anymore.” – GLENN BECK

 

“Clearing the way for Iran to get nuclear bombs may – and probably will – be the most catastrophic decision in human history.” – THOMAS SOWELL

 

“Honestly, I think America is done. I think Obama did it. I hate to give him the credit, but he murdered America. He won.” –  “ACE OF SPADES” (nobody knows the real name of the blogger “ACE OF SPADES”, although the domain is owned by a MICHELE KERR, who was listed as a female student at Stanford when she registered it.)

 

“Being a Democrat in the Age of Obama requires you to believe that cops kill black kids on purpose but radical Islamists kill Jews by accident.” – JOEL POLLAK (the South African-born American contributor to BREITBART)

 

“The Obama Administration hedges its bets by supporting the Sunnis a little and the Shiites a lot, creating uncertainty about its objectives and so obtaining the worst of everything.” – DAVID PRYCE-JONES

 

“If  U.S. policies are incoherent today, it is largely because Obama sees no compelling reason for them to be otherwise. This is a profound complacency.” – COLIN DUECK (In his book “The Obama Doctrine”, 2015)

 

“The Obama Administration is so frozen by its embarrassment about Guantanamo that it declines to capture and question terrorists and has no effective policy or accepted body of law for treating detainees. Therefore, we kill terrorists with drones when we can, (although 90 percent of those drone-kill 'successes' have been low-level Taliban fighters) and crow about it. We gain no intelligence, and make new enemies in the process.” – JOHN HILLEN (Assistant Secretary of State for Political-Military Affairs under W. Incidentally, that was the job that my grate pal Rick Burt once had)

 

“Fathom the hypocrisy of a government that requires every citizen to prove that they are insured – but not everyone must prove that they are a citizen. Now, add to this that many of those who refuse, or are unable to prove they are citizens will receive free insurance paid for by those who are forced to buy insurance because they are citizens.” – BEN STEIN

 

“What I’m not interested in doing is posing or pursuing some notion of ‘American leadership’ or ‘America winning'.” – BARACK OBAMA (on 16 Nov. '15, at the “G-20” meeting in Turkey, 2 days after the Jihadi attacks in Paris)

 

"The only military force anywhere that the Obamarroids have managed to 'degrade' is our own." -- JACK JOLIS

 

"Obama is -- and was -- actually to the left of his own presidency." -- JACK JOLIS (in 2019)

 

"The Middle East is no longer terribly important to American interests." -- BARACK OBAMA (to Bernard Goldberg of THE ATLANTIC)

 

“You could boil the Obama Doctrine down to about nine words: Embolden our enemies, undermine our friends, diminish our country.” -- FRANK GAFFNEY (conservative foreign policy maven and the boss of the Center for Security Policy)

 

“Never has a President defied so much evidence to insist on the unique cerebral brilliance of a policy in ruins.” -- WALTER RUSSELL MEANS

 

“According to Obama you can claim to be free of all scandals provided none of the real scandals embarrass you. It pays to be a sociopath.” -- MARK YOUNG (Young is a co-host, with Chuck Woolery, of something called “Blunt Force Truth”, and he said   this in Jan 2017)

 

"It would be incorrect to analyze our delinquency in the dichotomously simple terms of action and inaction. The administration creatively pioneered a third option: Between action and inaction, it chose inconsequential action. There is the Obama doctrine! We acted, in sum, only in ways certain not to affect the outcome. We were strategically feckless. I suspect that the president believes that the United States has no moral right to affect an outcome in another country. I suspect that he regards such decisive action as imperialism. What this means in practice is that we will not help people who deserve our help. In the spirit of respecting other societies, we will idly gaze at their destruction. How would disrespecting them be worse?" -- LEON WIESELTIER                                       (Ex-Editor of THE NEW REPUBLIC, and a muckamuck at The Brookings Institute, when he wrote this in Dec. 2018)

 

“If you want to know what a pro-Russia policy would look like, here are some elements of it. You’d slash defense spending, slow down our nuclear modernization, roll back missile defense systems, you would enter into a one-sided nuclear arms control agreement, and you’d do everything you could to stop oil and gas production. That was Barack Obama’s policy for eight years." -- SENATOR TOM COTTON                  (of Arkansas, on Sunday 5 March 2017)

 

"What seems to get Obama out of bed in the morning, power him through the day, and keep his lights burning at night -- is talk, almost entirely about himself. Pretty much every topic you can imagine -- the weather, the Middle East, basketball, Jeus, you name it -- becomes a conversational vehicle for Barack Obama to remind us alll of his majestic power and dazzling success. And when he's not busy spinning out clouds of self-puffery to float around on, he takes a short break to limn the failings and stupidities of everyone else." -- ROB LONG

 

"Obama turned the White House into his personal nightclub and the executive branch into his hit squad." -- JOE MALLEIS                                                        (my Twoot friend  – “Gadsden Jazz” – from Michigan.)

                                                                                                                                                                                  

“Obama responded to almost everything like an emotionally absent parent: he ignored it or gave it cash.” – ANNA JAMES ZEIGLER                                      (a contributor to THE FEDERALIST and the author of “Dear Miss Moreau”)

“President Obama, by abandoning pragmatic post-war realpolitik and replacing it with a Carter-esque morality-driven foreign policy, ceded the initiative in Asia to Xi (the Red Chinese dictator).” – FRANCIS PIKE                                                                                                                                                        (historian and author of “Empires At War”)

 "Conservative America, a constitutional democracy in a republic, has been facing its existential crisis since the Obama hegemony. The chickens of prosperity have come home to roost, and a deep state, unfettered by law or custom, is using the essential lawfulness of its opponents (the citizenry) against them -- in effect, daring the citizens to revolt." -- DAVID MAMET (in 2022)

 

"The Obama administration's overeducated liberals with no understanding of power politics decided that they knew better and sought to cut a deal with Iran. They believed that they could transform die-hard Islamists into responsible partners in peace, and even one day turn the regime into an ally. It was sheer madness." -- MIKE POMPEO      (much as I like Pompeo, I believe he's way too easy on the Obamarroids, who in my opinion never had any such illusions about the mullahs -- but merely shared their anti-Americans.)

"The Obama administration was a taxpayer-funded work program for activists, academics and government careerists. For them, funding tends to flow no matter what outcomes they achieve." -- MIKE POMPEO

"The most imbecilic foreign policy decision of our time: the Obama administration's nuclear deal with Iran. For Barack Obama, Joe Biden, John Kerry, Ben Rhodes, John Brennan and all the rest, the nuclear deal in 2015 was the entrée into a true friendship with the ayatollahs. They believed that their appeasement would reshape the region, as they anticipated working in unison with a regime that enjoys nothing more than shedding blood in the name of the Islamic Revolution." -- MIKE POMPEO

Obama, Barack                                                                                                        

"Obama -- a forward-thinking man" -- VLADIMIR PUTIN    (9 July 2017)

“Obama isn't Obama. George Soros is Obama. Bill Ayers is Obama.Valerie Jarrett is Obama. Obama is a socialist meat puppet.” – JAMES WOODS (the actor fella)

"Obama has become the president Nixon always wished he could be."– TED CRUZ

“Obama's so left-wing he doesn't even know how left-wing he is,” – MARK KRIKORIAN (in NRO  in Jan 2008)

 

“The man’s entire presidency might be described as a selfie.” – JAY NORDLINGER

 

"And meanwhile, what is this insanity about Barack Obama? He's nobody. Nothing. Just a small town ward heeler who has already been busted taking bribes, has no experience at all -- NONE -- on the world stage or in defense or anything else. Could we be crazy enough to even consider him as president? Have we gone totally nuts? Hillary is a responsible politician with broad experience. I do not want to see her elected, but she's Winston Churchill compared to Obama. Well, I have to calm down now." -- BEN STEIN

 

“There is no question that President Obama does not wish America well and has a real strong hatred of America.” – BEN STEIN

 

“We look at Barack Obama, and we are glad to be of our species. He is the change America has been trying desperately and for centuries to hide, ignore, kill. The change America must have if we are to convince the rest of the world that we care about people other than our white selves." – ALICE WALKER ("Hush yo' white se'f!" Hey, thanks for the tip, lady. Damn useful insight. And I'm sure the New Messiah appreciates the boost. By the way, just curious -- where were you when Colin Powell was being pushed to run in '96?)

 

“As time passes, you start taking it for granted that a guy named Barack Hussein Obama is president of the United States. But we should never take it for granted.”— VICTOR DAVIS HANSON

                                                                                                                                                                                  “President Obama is not so much complacent as an appeaser of radical Islam – an identification he refuses to employ.” – VICTOR DAVIS HANSON

 

"I cried all night. I'm going to be crying for the next four years. What Barack Obama has accomplished is the single most extraordinary event that has occurred in the 232 years of the nation's political history. The event itself is so extraordinary that another chapter could be added to the Bible to chronicle its significance." -- REP. JESSE JACKSON, JR. (D.-IL)

 

“Obama's commitment to leftist ideology is much stronger than his political abilities.” – JIM TARANTO

                                                                                                                                                                                  “Obama's preferred mode is City College of New York circa 1938, the Young Communist League, which is where his mentors came from. But of course he surrounds himself with the richest of New York finance and Hollywood billionaires and Chicago slumlords.” -- BEN STEIN

                                                                                                                                                                                         “Mr. Obama has never liked America. He is a part of this ultra-left cabal, especially powerful among certain socio-economic segments in Chicago who also like Minister Farrakhan, that just loathes America for its racist past. Never mind that he has gotten every possible kind of preferment on racial bases. He stil is part of that little knot who do not love this country. And now he’s in a position to do something about it.” – BEN STEIN (In April 2014)

 

“I realized how much Mr. Obama not only loathes America, but is consumed by rage at men and women who are far braver and more morally advanced that he is.” – BEN STEIN

 

“Obama I have never seen as anything but a bag of wind, possessed of great political guile, but steeped in the faddy, solipsistic notions of post-1960s college leftism.” – JOHN DERBYSHIRE

 

“Barack Obama is an immensely talented man whose talents have been largely devoted to crafting, and chronicling, his own life. Not things. Not ideas. Not institutions. But himself.” – CHARLES KRAUTHAMMER

 

“What should trouble the voters about Obama’s association with radicals and felons is not what he sees in them but what they see in him.” – KATHRYN JEAN LOPEZ (actually, she was quoting an anonymous e-mail she’d received, but she gets the default credit)

 

“Machiavelli asked if a leader should rather be loved or feared. It never occurred to him to include ‘laughed at’." -- ROBIN MASTERS (a commenter on NRO, and I simply cannot imagine who he was referring to....)

                                                                                                                                                                                  “Winning the Nobel Peace Prize for not doing anything seems to have persuaded President Obama that not doing anything brings peace as well as prizes. Yet the results don't support his instincts.” -- DOUGLAS MURRAY

“Basically, the voters just took him on faith. He had never done one single solitary thing to show he would be a great leader except run a great campaign. He is an odd fellow to be the first ‘black’ president, though. Only half black. And that half not American. Never suffered any discrimination at all. In fact, his whole life was privilege due to his being half-black. Large, immense chunks of his life never revealed, such as his life at Columbia, where no one remembers his even being there.” – BEN STEIN

 

“You have to pinch yourself – a Marxisant radical who all his life has been mentored by, sat at the feet of, worshipped with, befriended, endorsed the philosophy of, funded and been in turn funded, politically promoted and supported by a nexus comprising black power anti-white racists, Jew-haters, revolutionary Marxists, unrepentant former terrorists and Chicago mobsters, is on the verge of becoming President of the United States. And apparently it’s considered impolite to say so.” -- MELANIE PHILLIPS

 

“Thus goes the mad presidency of Barack H. Obama or Kcarab H. Amabo. He calls himself Barack Obama, but he could just as easily be Kcarab Amabo. Either way, his incoherent policies will end with the same oncoming train wreck. He claims he hails from Chicago, but he could just as easily come from Ogacihc. Where the hell is Ogacihc, you ask? Perhaps it is somewhere in Kazakhstan or Kyrgyzstan. After 6 months of this bizarre dervish in the White House he looks like President Amabo from Ogacihc to us at AmSpec, and we shall not be surprised if he trades in his presidential limousine for a magic carpet with government-mandated airbags.” – R. EMMETT TYRRELL Jr; (the Founding Editor of the AMERICAN SPECTATOR)

 

“(Obama is) a strange new figure who could have been created by a mad sociologist in a lab at Harvard, and who just may be the beau ideal of the old counterculture, the embodiment of everything they had ever blown up buildings for.” – JOHN R. COYNE JR. (Coyne is an ex-presidential speech-writer.)

 

“The current president’s (Obama’s) most war-like virtue is the ability to apologize to people who should be apologizing to us—an extraordinary skill no doubt, but questionable.” – MARK HELPRIN (the great novelist, in July 2009)

 

"Everything Obama says has an expiration date." -- JIM GERAGHTY

 

“If there was a Nobel Prize for enjoying the sound of your own voice, Obama would definitely have qualified.” – JOHN DERBYSHIRE

 

“To the extent Obama ever speaks the language of religion, it is to justify, even sanctify, the works of government.” – JONAH GOLDBERG

 

“President Obama is the greatest hoax ever perpetrated on the American people.” – CLINT EASTWOOD

 

“Obama in Ohio: I'm watching a man who has steadily expanded government spending try to get a crowd to chant, ‘we want our money back!’” – JIM GERAGHTY (of National Review Online)

 

“The current American president is arguably the gravest mistake the American electorate has ever made and one it may not survive intact.” – DAVID SOLWAY (an ex-Lefty Jewish Canadian poet, and long-time resident of Hydra’s island in Grechenlant)

"The late Austrian intellectual Willi Schlamm once said: 'The trouble with socialism is socialism. The trouble with capitalism is capitalists.' And that was well before they sponsored the Obama Democrats." -- RICH LOWRY

“Heaven help President Obama if he ever has to purchase a used car. The way he bargains, he'd end up spending $100,000 to purchase a Ford Pinto with a wheel missing.” -- MICHAEL RUBIN (the Johns Hopkins lecturer and honcho at the American Enterprise Institute.)

 

“To Obama, America is a failed state.” -- R. EMMETT TYRRELL, JR.

 

"There are elections in America now. Along came a black citizen of Kenyan African origins, a Muslim, who had studied in an Islamic school in Indonesia. His name is Obama. All the people in the Arab and Islamic world and in Africa applauded this man. They welcomed him and prayed for him and for his success, and they may have even been involved in legitimate contribution campaigns to enable him to win the American presidency." -- MOAMMAR GADDAFI (in 2008. And, for once, Gaddafi was right.)

                                                                                                                                                                                "America can probably survive Obama; but what is more doubtful is whether America can survive the idiots that elected him." -- RUSH LIMBAUGH

                                                                                                                                                                                  “Barack Obama has managed a rare feat in American history: The longer he is president, the less presidential he has become.” – JAMES W. CEASER (Prof of Politics at UVA)

                                                                                                                                                                                 

“Barack Obama is the parsley on the dinner plate of America. He's like the parsley – which is decorative, maybe, but you don't eat it – it's no good, it's useless, it just gets in the way.” – RUSH LIMBAUGH

                                                                                                                                                                                  “Obama professes a love for this country. So does many an Islamist. What they love, however, is a vision of America, not America as it is: E Pluribus Unum.” – ANDREW C. McCARTHY

                                                                                                                                                                                          “If one construes ‘stupid’ as meaning ‘prone to act stupidly’, we have a stupid president who is also an intellectual snob.” – JAMES TARANTO

                                                                                                                                                                                  "Obama is the most unqualified person in any room he walks into." -- RUSH LIMBAUGH

                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                  “I am the very model of a Democratic president,

With plenty of ideas vague, expensive , and irrelevant,

What I'm saying may be nonsense but I'm saying it emphatical,

What I'm doing may be lousy but pretend it is pragmatical.” – P. J. O'ROURKE

 

"The problem with hiring a guy because of his race is, it gets very hard if you have to fire him." -- DAN McLAUGHLIN                                                         (from REDSTATE, on the near impossibility of mounting a Democrat primary challenge to Obama)

 

"To all those under 30 who worked so hard to get this man (Obama) elected, know this: he just screwed you over. He thinks you're fools. Either the US will go into default because of Obama's cowardice, or you will be paying far far more for far far less because this president has no courage when it counts. He let you down. On the critical issue of America's fiscal crisis, he represents no hope and no change. Just the same old Washington politics he once promised to end." – ANDREW SULLIVAN (A big Obama supporter in 2008)

“The only people in the world Obama is a threat to are his own.” – JACK JOLIS

“Obama's Enemies List is less an Enemies List than an Honor Roll.” -- JACK JOLIS

"Obama is -- and was -- actually to the left of his own presidency." -- JACK JOLIS (in 2019)

"If Choom-Boy Obama'd been all white he'd have been lucky to snag a job peddling 'shave-ice' in Waikiki." -- JACK JOLIS

                                                                                                                                                                                 

“Every time he (Obama) opens his mouth, he subtracts from the sum total of financial capital.” – BRET STEPHENS

"Deconstruct Obama and there's nothing left." -- DAVID GELERNTER                                 (conservative Yale prof. of computer science, where I imagine he's a lonely guy.....)

“Obama has done for the economy what pantyhose did for foreplay.” – KINKY FRIEDMAN

“Like so many people, in so many countries, who started out to 'spread the wealth', Barack Obama has ended up spreading poverty.” – THOMAS SOWELL

"I have never believed for a moment that Barack Obama has the best interests of the United States at heart." -- THOMAS SOWELL

"If the worst that Barack Obama does is ruin the economy, I will breathe a sigh of relief." – THOMAS SOWELL

 

“We may be required to 'think the unthinkable', that we have elected a man  (Obama) for whom America’s best interests are not his top priority.” – THOMAS SOWELL

“Barack Obama's political genius is his ability to say things that will sound good to people who have not followed the issues in any detail — regardless of how obviously fraudulent what he says may be to those who have.” – THOMAS SOWELL

"If someone wrote a novel about a man who was raised from childhood to resent the successful and despise the basic values of America -- and who then went on to become President of the United States -- that novel would be considered too unbelievable, even for a work of fiction. Yet that is what has happened in real life." -- THOMAS SOWELL

“It has taken so long for some people to see through Obama because people don’t like to admit they have been played for fools.” — THOMAS SOWELL                                                                                                                                                                                

“Obama's vision is 100 percent catawampus from the traditional American understanding of government. He sees civil society as a vacuum where, absent the federal government, we are autarkic, anarchistic individuals left to fend for ourselves, drinking puddle water and using cat fat for Chapstick ("Nice Book of Eli reference" -- The Couch). If the federal government won't do it -- whatever it is -- then we are all on our own. But that is not how the vast majority of Americans live. Nor do we define our understanding of communal, cooperative life purely through the prism of the federal government. If the federal government won't organize a bake sale at my kid's school, we are indeed ‘on our own’, but we are not alone.” -- JONAH GOLDBERG

“Obama cuts $4B, only to spend it elsewhere. I swear, if Obama were in a sinking boat, he'd drill a hole to let the water run out.” – FRED THOMPSON

 

“When you call your own country 'lazy' when you are abroad, and call it 'unambitious and soft' when you are home, I think what you are showing is not tough love, but ill-conceived, ill-concealed contempt.” – CHARLES KRAUTHAMMER

 

“Barack Obama campaigned promising to 'fundamentally transform' America. We would not think a husband who pro,ises to 'fundamentally transform' his wife has a healthy love for her.” – JONAH GOLDBERG

 

“We were waiting for a man who would have been unthinkable as the leader of a serious nation until our civilization had reached such a level of bland bovine prosperity it truly believed that the platitudinous nursery chants it teaches our children as a substitute for education are now a blueprint for government.” – MARK STEYN

 

“If President Obama gets to choose which laws he’ll enforce, do we get to choose which laws we follow?” – MARK STEYN

 

“As a socialist, Obama makes a good socialite. But on he staggers, with a wave of his scepter, delaying this, staying that, exempting the other, according to his regal whim and internal polling.” – MARK STEYN

 

"A Pretty boy with a résumé you could print on the back of his driver's license; a Rolodex apparently limited to neo-segregationist racebaiters, campus Marxist terrorists, and indicted fraudsters; and a rhetorical surefootedness that makes Dan Quayle look like Socrates." -- MARK STEYN

 
”The key point about Barack Obama is not that he’s a secret Muslim Kenyan Commie or whatever. Whether he was born in Honolulu or Mombasa or Stockholm or up on Planet Zongo, what matters is that in his general worldview he is entirely typical and perfectly representative of tens upon tens of millions of Americans. Tuesday’s majority confirmed that. They don’t need a 'conspiracy': They agree with him. That’s the problem." -- MARK STEYN

 

“Maybe Obama likes America. But should we have a President about whom we say ‘maybe’?” – BEN STEIN

 

“Obama has lots of friends but none are ours.” -- JANIE JOHNSON                                                                       (a comely and enthusiastic bimbo from Nevada, on the Twoot. And this little quote is delightful.)

 

"In his early activist days, Barack Obama the community organizer sued banks to ease their lending practices. Now his administration is suing banks for issuing risky mortgages." — JIM HOFT (the “Gateway Pundit”)

 

“Obama is redder than people suspect, even his conservative adversaries. Obama’s instinct is to take the most radical position he can get away with. What’s more, he is probably the vainest president I can remember, and the least competent. What surprised me was the incompetence. The first time I laid eyes on the guy – I heard him make a speech – I said ‘He’s a demagogue. And furthermore he butchers the English language. Gets away with it. But he does.” – EUGENE GENOVESE

 

“In a reverse of Reagan, Obama speaks directly to the media over the heads of Congress and the American people, and is thus protected and served by the alternative view of reality they dish out daily to their readers and viewers.” – MICHAEL WASLH

 

“We’ve never had a president like this, never, who’s had such disregard for what is the heart and soul of this country. And such disrespect for all of our ancestors, wherever they come from, whomever they are, who built this nation.” – MARK LEVIN

 

“Guy loves hearing himself talk. His parasite and imbecile constituents, and their malicious exploiters, love seeing him loving hearing himself talk. Barack Obama! The self-licking ice cream cone.” – HARRISON MACK                                                                                                                                                                                       (a commenter to NRO)

 

“He’s a genius but he knows nothing about anything. Fine, I’ll take his most ardent devotees at face value and deem him 'in under his head'.” – DENNIS MILLER

 

“President Obama is a feeble and cowardly man who makes even Jimmy Carter seem bold by comparison. He is running down America's strategic capabilities while giving anemic moral lectures. That he should have been elected twice tells us something disturbing abou the American people.” – PAUL JOHNSON

 

“President Obama believes in American exceptionalism.  He believes America’s exceptionally bad.” – DINESH D’SOUZA

 

“If Jimmy Carter and Dennis Rodman could somehow have a child together, it would be Obama. His naïveté about and pandering to dictators have made him a laughing stock on the world stage.” – MICHAEL RUBIN

 

“Obama doesn't like people. He likes himself. He appears to have a long-standing pattern of disconnection from others. Where are the voices of those who grew up with him, went to school with him, worked with him? It is eerily quiet... Obama knows how to work a crowd. Apparently, he is downright ebullient when doing so. But that is not the same thing as liking other human beings and connecting with them. Working the crowd is about his ego. And a photo op. Obama holds himself apart. Something about him is off kilter. And lots of people know it. Republicans and Democrats, alike.” – CAROL BROWN (writing in The American Thinker)

 

"The president feels inconvenienced by history. It refuses to follow his program for it. It regularly exasperates him and regularly disappoints him. It flows when he wants it to ebb and it ebbs when he wants it flow. Like Mr. Incredible, the president is flummoxed that the world won't stay saved, or agree to be saved at all. After all, he came to save it. And so the world has only itself to blame if Obama is sick of it and going home." -- LEON WIESELTIER (a liberal, but a sane one, of The New Republic)

 

“This is one strange dude — part narcissist, part Chicago ward heeler, part neo-Alinskyite marxist, part talk show host smoothie, part nowhere man.” -- ROGER SIMON (the ex-lefty  novelist and screenwriter and honcho over at PajamasMedia)

 

“President Nixon’s lawlessness was sneaky, and he had the decency to be ashamed of it. President Obama’s lawlessness is as bland and bloodless as the man himself, and practiced openly, as though it were a virtue. President Nixon privately kept an enemies list; President Obama publicly promises that ‘we’re gonna punish our enemies, and we’re gonna reward our friends’.” – KEVIN D. WILLIAMSON

 

"Barack Obama could not be a Marxist because Marxism is a philosophy that begins with somebody else's name." – KEVIN D. WILLIAMSON

 

“Barack Obama doesn't speak a foreign language or play a musical instrument, exhibits no sign that any great book has left a mark upon his mind, has never, so far as the printed word can document, uttered an original thought or put forth an interesting idea – but he has a Harvard law degree.” – KEVIN D. WILLIAMSON

 

“Obama was defenselessly abandoned to the ravages of a country so convulsed by race hatred that it made him, a nobody senator without even a full term under his belt, president for no obvious reason, choosing him over a deeply experienced, independent-minded war hero.” – KEVIN D. WILLIAMSON 

 

“I wish this president (Obama) would learn how to be an American.” – JOHN SUNUNU (Prominent Lebanese-American Republican, former Chief of Staff in the Papa Bush White House, and former governor of New Hampshire. He later felt compelled to “amend” his comment to: “The president has to learn the American formula for creating business.”, but it’s still a quote to be savored….. )


“To Obama, free-enterprise system is a theoretical construct he's read about.” – JIM PETHOKOUKIS

                                                                                                                                                                                “Wouldn’t it be great for the world if I were president?” – BARACK OBAMA (When he was still a Senator, speaking to a friend of Brit Hume’s)

 

"Turns out he's not Kenyan after all. He's KGB." -- CHARLES HURT (The WASHINGTON TIMES columnist, on Waittillaftertheelectiongate )

 

“Obama, however, is something new — the first anti-American president (and, not coincidentally, the first American president raised entirely outside the continental U.S.). Marinated in anti-American propaganda from childhood, and skillfully passed along the quasi-Marxist network of the anti-American Left, he was the perfect stealth candidate in 2008, a man of no particular intellect or accomplishment, whose past was murky and whose background mysterious — an alien simulacrum of an American that presented himself as the anti-Bush, a role he continues to play.” – MICHAEL WALSH

 

“President Obama has a coherent grand strategy: He believes in the inevitability of American decline, he welcomes it as a moral necessity for the world, and he therefore tries to accelerate this decline.” – JOHN HILLEN

 

“Obama is an incompetent in pursuit of the ideological.” – JONAH GOLDBERG

 

“A decade ago, conservatives were called racist for suggesting Obama might be a socialist of some type. Now, the left’s biggest—yet often unstated—criticism of him is that he wasn’t socialist enough.” – JONAH GOLDBERG (in August 2019)

 

“Obama doesn’t love you. And he doesn’t love me. He wasn’t brought up the way you were brought up and I was brought up through love of this country.” – RUDY GIULIANI

 

“I always wish that Obama would be as nasty and arrogant as he is with our enemies as he is with fellow citizens who simply disagree with him.” – DENNIS MILLER

 

“Knowing little history, Obama makes bad history.” – ANDREW KLAVAN

 

“Obama’s most pronounced trait as a foreign-policy thinker may indeed be complacency.” – MARIO LOYOLA

 

"It would be wonderful if we were able to give this man all of the power that he needs to pass the things that he needs to pass."– GWYNETH PALTROW (At a $32,000-a-head fund-raiser she threw for the fucker at her mansion in Brentwood – at which she also said «He is so handsome that I can't even speak properly.» Fucking genius.)

 

"Sometimes societies become too stupid to survive. A nation that takes Barack Obama’s current rhetorical flourishes seriously is certainly well advanced along that dismal path." -- MARK STEYN                                         (And I keep thinking of Bob Dylan's deathless 1974 "Idiot Wind" – "You're an ee-ediot, babe, it's a wonder that you still know how to breathe...")

 

“A contest over whose opponent is weirder is one Obama cannot possibly win.” – JAMES TARANTO

 

“Obama tells us we're helpless victims of outside forces and events... because he sees himself the same way.” – JIM GERAGHTY

"President Obama seems to understand the Constitution as a set of suggestions." -- DAVID MAMET               

"Obama has been the president that Nixon always wanted to be." -- JONATHAN TURLEY (The liberal law prof, but a sane one -- and I don't think he meant this as a compliment)

 

"If Bernie Sanders wins, he'll be the first socialist elected since 2008." -- JAY LENO

 

“There is nothing in Obama’s head that is American.” – F.W. BURLEIGH (author of “It's All About Muhammad”, writing in THE AMERICAN THINKER, March 2016)

 

“Listening to Obama talk about the economy is like listening to a chick talk about football.” – GOLDMAN SACHS ELEVATOR

 

"I think I believe in American power more than Obama does." -- KING ABDULLAH II (Of Jordan.  Good man – Deerfield ‘81)

 

“Trump will have to work really hard at being a lazier, less engaged consumer of intelligence than Obama.” –  JOHN SCHINDLER (the ex-NSA staffer, author and blogger, on the Twoot)

 

“Only 5% of white Americans have a connection to slave-owners. Obama descends from both slave-owners and slave traders.” – LARRY ELDER

 

“If a little history is a dangerous thing, in the hands of Obama it was absolutely toxic. The sum total of his achievements was the worst nuclear agreement in the history of U.S. Arms-control diplomacy and an emboldened Iran rampaging across the Middle East.” – RAY TAKEYH (from the Council on Foreign Relations and the author of “The Pragmatic Superpower”, in Dec. 2017)

 

"The beatification of Barack Obama severed popular opinion about a political leader from reality for perhaps the first time in American history (except Maybe for JFK). -- MICHAEL AUSLIN

 

"What seems to get Obama out of bed in the morning, power him through the day, and keep his lights burning at night -- is talk, almost entirely about himself. Pretty much every topic you can imagine -- the weather, the Middle East, basketball, Jesus, you name it -- becomes a conversational vehicle for Barack Obama to remind us alll of his majestic power and dazzling success. And when he's not busy spinning out clouds of self-puffery to float around on, he takes a short break to limn the failings and stupidities of everyone else." -- ROB LONG

 

"When you get right down to it, the two of them (Trump and Obama) are the identical sort of narcissist: bitter list-makers, reflexive braggarts, perpetual self-justifiers, petty insulters. Barack Obama and Donald Trump are basically the same guy, it's just that Barack Obama is the NPR version." -- ROB LONG

 

“Obama comes from slave-owners (on his Mom's side), and slave-traders (on his Dad's side). The closest he ever got to slavery was picking out a cotton sweater.” – LARRY ELDER

 

"Barack Obama -- Commander-In-Chief -- of what country?" -- MARK LEVIN (On 24 April 2017 on his radio show, responding to new revelations about the perfidy of the Corpseman's Iran “deal”)

 

“Do either Barack Obama or his followers have any idea how many countries during the 20th century set out to 'spread the wealth' -- and ended up spreading poverty instead? At some point, you have to turn from rhetoric, theories and ideologies to facts.” – THOMAS SOWELL

 

“Obama was one of the worst things that ever happened to the US. He's up there with the Great Depression.” – THOMAS WICTOR (author, novelist, and Twitter personality extraordinaire.)

 

“Barack H. Obama was president of just under half the people. He considered the other half to be his enemies!” – JANIE JOHNSON (the big star of the Twoot)

 

“Dear Leftists: We disliked 0bama like you dislike Trump. with one big difference: We disliked 0bama because he hates America. You dislike Trump because you hate America.” – AVA ARMSTRONG (an American authoress of lurid ladies’ fiction – and a conservative voice on the Twoot)

 

“Obama has no respect for America and endless admiration for himself, which also described Benedict Arnold and Aaron Burr, but of these three characterless men, only one had the power of the presidency for eight years, so only he could try to make the US his own from within.” – PHILIP SCHUYLER (the prominent conservative presence on the Twoot)

 

“Obamacare”

“Let me get this straight . . . We're going to be ‘gifted’ with a health care plan we are forced to purchase and fined if we don't, which purportedly covers at least ten million more people, without adding a single new doctor, but provides for 16,000 new IRS agents, written by a committee whose chairman says he doesn't understand it, passed by a Congress that didn't read it but exempted themselves from it, and signed by a Dumbo President who smokes, with funding administered by a treasury chief who didn't pay his taxes, for which we'll be taxed for four years before any benefits take effect, by a government which has already bankrupted Social Security and Medicare, all to be overseen by a surgeon general who is obese, and financed by a country that's broke!!!!! What the hell could possibly go wrong?’” – DONALD TRUMP

 

“A 2,700-page law is not a ‘law’ by any civilized understanding of the term. A 2,700-page law is, by definition, an affront to self-government.” – MARK STEYN (He went on to say: “Law rests on the principle of equality before it. When a bill is 2,700 pages, there’s no equality: Instead, there’s a hierarchy of privilege micro-regulated by an unelected, unaccountable, unconstrained, unknown, and unnumbered bureaucracy.It’s not just that the legislators who legislate it don’t know what’s in it, nor that the citizens on the receiving end can never hope to understand it, but that even the nation’s most eminent judges acknowledge that it is beyond individual human comprehension”)

 

“Obamacare – I’ve seen more coherence in a West Virginia drunk tank.” – DAVE “IOWAHAWK” BURGE

 

“Every day it looks more and more like this thing (Obamacare) is a Big Government onion. Liberals think the outer layer is bad but that if they just peel that away it'll be great. But the thing about onions is they're onions all the way down. You can peel all you want, you'll never find a prize in the center, but you just might find yourself crying in the middle of a big mess.” – JONAH GOLDBERG

 

“Under Obamacare, every day is tax day.” – ANN COULTER

 

“The smart people in the Soviet Union tried to plan the nation’s agriculture, and the result was 50 years of “bad weather.” And they were dealing with inert objects — land, seeds and crops. They didn’t have to consider whether the fertilizer was a teetotaler who didn’t anticipate needing substance abuse therapy or a priest who preferred to skimp on marital counseling insurance. Our central planners think they can direct something infinitely more complex than farmland: human beings and their individual health needs. Under Obamacare, the pushy and the connected win. Everyone else loses.” – ANN COULTER

 

“You don't fix a train wreck. You bury the bodies and melt down the scrap.” – PETER MULHERN (a commenter on NRO referring to, what else, Corpsemancare)

 

“I've read the entire Affordable Care Act. It was a slow period in my life.” – BEN SASSE

 

“The Obamacare worldview is that the only government can solve big problems, budget honesty doesn't matter, and dependency is our future.” – BEN SASSE

 

“From the Soviet five-year plans to Obamacare, all central-planning exercises begin in hubris and end in chaos.” – KEVIN D. WILLIAMSON

"For the least worst two-thirds of a century in its history, the vast fractious tribal dump of Sudan was run by about 200 British civil servants. These days, I doubt the smallest Obamacare branch office makes do with fewer than 200 'navigators'." -- MARK STEYN

                                                                                                                                                                                          “If government ran food, the way it’s trying to run health, it would do away with obesity – everybody would be starving.” – STEVE FORBES

 

“Fathom the hypocrisy of a government that requires every citizen to prove that they are insured, but not everyone must prove that they are a citizen. But many of those who refuse, or who are unable, to prove they are citizens will receive free insurance paid by those who are forced to buy insurance because they are citizens.” – BEN STEIN

 

“It's unfair to compare the rollout of Obamacare to the voyage of the Titanic. The titanic had at least 3 good days, and the Captain chose to go down with the ship.” – PEGGY NOONAN

 

“Obamacare is a little bit like wearing a hospital gown, you think you're covered but you aren't.” – JACOB C. NELSON (A student at Southern Utah University, in August 2015)

 

“With regard to the idea of whether you have a right to health care, you have to realize what that implies. It’s not an abstraction. I’m a physician. That means you have a right to come to my house and conscript me. It means you believe in slavery. It means that you’re going to enslave not only me, but the janitor at my hospital, the person who cleans my office, the assistants who work in my office, the nurses.” – RAND PAUL

 

“Obamagate”

“Al Sharpton asked me this on his Saturday cable news show: ‘What is “Obamagate”?’  ‘The intentional interference with the peaceful transition of power,’ I responded.” – HUGH HEWITT

"There has been confusion about what 'Obamagate' is. So let me summarize it: 

The weopanization of both domestic, and foreign, intelligence against a presidential campaign from a sitting administration solely for political purposes to prevent the smooth transition of power." -- GEORGE PAPADOPOULOS

                                                                                                                                                                                     “They all met in the Oval Office. And they all talked about the (Steele) dossier. So this was an Obama job. It wasn’t a Deep State job. Obama’s responsible.” – TOM FITTON

 

Obama, Michelle

"To describe (Michelle Obama’s senior thesis at Princeton) as hard to read would be a mistake; the thesis cannot be 'read' at all, in the strict sense of the verb. This is because it wasn't written in any known language." – CHRISTOPHER HITCHENS

 

“Will we ever see the first gay or female president? We already have it with Obama, so let's just calm down. You know Michelle is a trans. A transgender. We all know it." – JOAN RIVERS (and, heh, of course they had to kill her after that.....)

"Michelle Obama won a Grammy for recording an audiobook. So we are all clear, here, she won the highest music award there is for recording herself reading a book that was written by a ghostwriter. This is how meaningless and worthless awards have become." -- TYLER ZED      (real name Desmond Janousek -- A "YouTube star") 

"Michelle Obama is tiresome, entitled, and she can barely conceal her contempt for her fellow Americans." -- KURT SCHLICHTER     (in June 2024) 

Obedience

“Yours to obey. The painful task of thinking is mine.” – ADMIRAL SIR GEORGE RODNEY (British naval commander, prominent during the US War of Independence and the Napoleonic Wars)

“The greater part of the population is not very intelligent, dreads responsibility, and desires nothing better than to be told what to do.” -- ALDOUS HUXLEY

"People will not revolt. They will not look up from their screens long enough to notice what's happening." -- GEORGE ORWELL (“1984”)

Obesity

“Obesity is not a disease, it's a mindset.” -- MAX PEMBERTON (A British MD, writing in October 2013. And it’s a condition, doc.)

 

“Years ago, fat people blamed their 'glands'. When I started medical school, I patiently waited for us to be taught about these 'glands' that made people fat. I'm still waiting.” -- MAX PEMBERTON

 

“You cannot get away from the basic biology of the human body – fat is simply stored excess energy, and weight gain is only possible when the total amount of energy consumed exceeds the total amount of energy expended. Certainly some people metabolise food at a different rate to others, meaning they are more likely to lay down fat stores than other people. But this is reason to eat less, not to become fat.” -- MAX PEMBERTON

"Obesity is the result of a behavior: it isn't pathology, it's the body doing what it is supposed to do when more energy is consumed than expended." -- MAX PEMBERTON       (Max is an MD and a psychiatrist for the British NHS) 

“One canard is that poverty is to blame. In the simplistic world of the left the correlation is straightforward. Because the highest levels of obesity occur in areas with the highest levels of something called ‘deprivation’ (an interesting paradox, if you think about it), lack of money must therefore be the chief cause of people eating too much crap. It is a false correlation. Processed food is not terribly cheap and nor is fast food (except for the excellent-value McDonald’s cheeseburger. But there may be a correlation, albeit one difficult for politicians to make, between being ‘deprived’ (i.e. having not much money) and not always being accustomed to making the right choices life, which is at least one reason why they are ‘deprived’. This of course is what the left would call ‘victim-shaming’, but to describe a phenomenon is not to alter it.” – ROD LIDDLE

"The insistence that obesity is an 'illness' which has been imposed upon people against their will is a terrible stupidity which can only possibly result in the problem getting worse and worse. When the world is seen in such an infantile context, always through the prism of power relations, then the fat bastards really do have no hope." -- ROD LIDDLE

“Outside every fat man there is a thin one trying to get out.” – GEORGE ORWELL

"It's one of the advantages of being fat is that you can fit into almost any society." -- GEORGE ORWELL    (in his 1938 "Coming Up For Air")

"Outside every fat man there was an even fatter man trying to close in." -- KINGSLEY AMIS (kindly amending Orwell’s, see above.)

 

"He looked soft and fussy and potentially irritable as fat people are, being pinched by their clothes and strained by lugging their bodies around." --JOHN UPDIKE

 

Obituaries

"It seems a great pity that they allowed her to die a natural death." -- MARK TWAIN (about Jane Austen)

Objectivity

"Impartiality is a pompous name for indifference, which is an elegant name for ignorance." – G. K. CHESTERTON

                                                                                                                                                                                         

“A dogmatic belief in objective value is necessary to the very idea of a rule which is not a tyranny or an obedience which is not slavery.” – C. S. LEWIS

                                                                                                                                                                                         

“In physics and engineering, objective models usually make problems easier to solve. In economics and politics, objectivity makes things harder.” – RORY SUTHERLAND

                                                                                                                                                                                     “When we claim to be objective, isn’t it just tiredness, really?” – JAMES HAWES

Obscenity                                                                                                                             

“I was constantly surprised by the wit and intelligence which obscenity seemed to reveal in the lower ranks of the Army who otherwise seem scarcely literate.” – DAVID LODGE

Obsession

"Obsession dispels depression; the third law of psychodynamics. (The other two are 1/ That people loathe those they've wronged; and, 2/ That people despise the victims of misfortune.)" -- EDWARD ST. AUBYN

 

"Becoming obsessed is like being adrift in the sea. When you're in it up to your head you have no knowledge of how far or how fast you're being taken. Your horizon is too limited. You lack the perspective that the sight of land could give you. If you could see land you could measure your drift and appreciate what was happening." -- ALAN JUDD

"There's only one thing to do with such an obsession. You got to get another one." -- WILLIAM BOYD  

Obviousness                                                                                                                    

“We may have sunk to a depth at which the restatement of the obvious is the first duty of intelligent men.” – GEORGE ORWELL

Ocasio-Cortez, Alexandria                                                                                        

“Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, the youngest woman ever to serve in Congress. The problem is that she sounds like the youngest woman ever to serve in Congress. I would put her age at roughly 14 and that is not a precocious 14. To be candid, she is a born dolt.” – R. EMMETT TYRRELL, JR.

                                                                                                                                                                                      “This woman (Ocasio-Cortez) belongs on a different planet for Socialist trigger nose-wipe communist cry-babies that live in an altered universe that has nothing to do with reality. Besides that, she hasn’t known a day of oppression in her life.” – DEBBIE ALDRICH

                                                                                                                                                                                  “Commie idiot AOC is still the dumbest bartender in America. It’s truly stunning that so many people think she’s clever. Whenever she speaks she reminds me of 5-year-old who’s just learned a new word and keeps misusing it all the while thinking she’s smart.AOC is 31 going on a very stupid 14. She’s going to be polluting the American political landscape for a while. It’s a safe bet to say that no matter how long she’s around, she won’t get any smarter or more mature, especially if the media keeps feting her as the heart and brains of the new Democrats.” – STEPHEN KRUISER

                                                                                                                                                                                  “Dealing with her (AOC) is like dealing with a fifth-grader.” – GARY McNAMARA                                  (one of the two “Red-Eye Radio” guys, on 31 March 2021)

"If AOC was fat and sixty, no one would listen to her." -- ADAM CAROLLA

            

                                                                                                                                                                  

Offense (Taking)                                                                                                             

“The more easily offended someone is, the more frequently offended they should be.” – DAVE “IOWAHAWK” BURGE

«Nobody can hurt your feelings without your active participation.» – DAVE «IOWAHAWK» BURGE

 

“Sane societies are pleased when others appropriate their culture.” – DAVE “IOWAHAWK” BURGE

 

“If I convert to Islam could I then announce a ban on people saying insulting things about me?” – DINESH D'SOUZA

“If you aren't pissing someone off, you are wasting the First Amendment.” – KURT SCHLICHTER

 

"He who dares not offend cannot be honest." –THOMAS PAINE

 

“Emotion is everything. If offence has been taken, an offence has been committed. But this is the thinking of paranoiacs and phobics. It’s to confuse reality with perception.” – MARY WAKEFIELD (One of the “grande dames” at the SPECTATOR)

 

«'I'm offended!' is not an argument.» – ANN COULTER

 

"Many years ago, though, the process of giving offense involved somebody present actually being offended, and nobody ever was." -- HUGO RIFKIND

 

«If you are not being shocked, offended or insulted, you are not living in a free society. And if you are okay with that, you are either a fascist or a slave. (And everyday it becomes clearer and clearer that too many on the Left choose to be both.)” – JOHN NOLTE

“Free speech doesn't really mean anything unless someone is offended.” – GEORGE ORWELL

 

“It's an arms race out there. You say you're offended, my only means of escape is to say that I'm offended more.” – MELISSA KITE

 

"The Left has wielded the Right’s preference for manners as a club against the Right, claiming offense in order to cow them into silence." -- BEN SHAPIRO

 

"It's now very common to hear people say, 'I'm rather offended by that', as if that gives them certain rights. It's no more than a whine. It has no meaning, it has no purpose. it has no reason to be respected as a phrase. 'I'm offended by that.' Well so fucking what?" -- STEPHEN FRY

 

"Being offended doesn't make you a good person." -- AMANDA ENSING (A young wahine who is described as "a fashion and beauty influencer"... a bit like me, what?)

“Being offended has become a new American pastime .” – JONAH GOLDBERG (in August 2021)

 

"People love to pretend they're offended." – MATT GROENING (the creator of "The Simpsons", defending their character, the redoubtable "Apu", in May 2018)

 

"The only way to change someone's mind is to risk offending them." -- WILL WITT (a young "personality" at PRAGER U)

"People that are worried about words have never been punched in the face" - ELON MUSK (who grew up in South Africa)

"Moral indignation is a technique used to endow the idiot with dignity." -- MARSHALL McLUHAN

"You find it offensive? I find it funny. That's why I'm happier than you." -- RICKY GERVAIS

“No one has the right not to be offended.” – JOHN CLEESE

 

Oil

“The only thing I have against Moses was that he took us 40 years through the desert in order to bring us to the one spot in the Middle East that has no oil.” – GOLDA MEIR

                                                                                                                                                                                      “You can always buy oil cheaper than you can fight for it.” – STEPHEN MORRIS (a commenter to a Bret Stephens column in the WSJ)

 

"People are always going on about the Petrol Crisis -- but we in Central Africa have no Petrol Crisis, we have all the petrol we need! It's a Gasoline Crisis that we have!" -- PRESIDENT/EMPEROR JEAN-BEDEL BOKASSA ("On entend beaucoup sur la 'Crise du Pétrole', mais en Centrafrique nous n'avons pas de 'Crise dePétrole' -- nous avons tout le pétrole qu'il nous faut! Chez nous, nous avons La Crise de l'Essence!" --  at the UN, in 1973)

"It's called fossil fuels for the minds of the public to feel that is it an asset that is running out... but actually it is the second most prevalent liquid on Earth" -- L. FLETCHER PROUTY    (a former Department of Defense honcho, in 2018) 

"History has fairly well established that when political tensions rise, the first thing blown up is an oil pipeline." -- ROBERT BAER (the “legendary” CIA officer)

 

“The reason gas prices are going up is because the oil's in Louisiana and Texas and the dipsticks are in Washington, D.C." – SEN. JOHN KENNEDY (The Republican Senator from Louisiana, on 26 Nov. 2021)

 

Olympics, The

“I’m not a big sports fan but the Olympics appeal to me at a deep and irrational level.  The events are about as watchable as Changing Rooms or Celebrity Boob Swap (i.e., perfectly watchable if you’re half asleep).  The only point of interest is the men’s 100-metre final, a race between eight drug addicts to decide who has the best apothecary.  It lasts nine seconds.  Now what I like is the idea that to lay on this blink-of-an-eye contest many billions of pounds must be spent, tens of thousands of workers must be contracted and a new dream-city must be built from scratch. The mindless extravagance! The reckless waste!  How absurd.” – LLOYD EVANS

 

“And that's what the Olympics is about: the futile investment of time and manpower in lavish and I,practical ornaments. In that respect it resembles art in its purest and earliest forms. And once you recognize that the Games involve the orchestrated squandering of resources you'll begin to appreciate its essence.” – LLOYD EVANS

 

"The Olympics is a festival of bureaucratic arrogance, financial irresponsibility, internationalist vacuity, and politically correct blather." -- ANDREW STUTTAFORD

 

“For anyone unOlympic, living, working in or visiting London between now and September, there is nothing but boredom, inconvenience and officially sanctioned insolence on offer. Thanks to the loathsome ideology of the Olympics, which manages somehow to be fascist and internationalist at the same time, free expression has been banned, and anyone using the Games symbol or the word 'Olympic' in any way is threatened with arrest. We have to sacrifice our capital city's roads so that sporting officials can drive round at their ease. Fifteen thousand soldiers – nearly a fifth of our entire army once it has been shrunk by next week's cuts – will be unwillingly on hand to pump up the bogus prestige of the event. The total cost to the taxpayer is monumental. Needless to say, everyone who can is getting out of town for the period, and the recession will deepen as a result. Hotel revenues and houses let for the Games will achieve nothing like the prices that were predicted, and ticket sales for some sports are also weak. Airlines are already having to offer discount fares. Theatres and restaurants will be deserted, and public transport will fail. Unlike the Jubilee, this is not a great popular festival, but an assertion of power by our grasping, arrogant, boring global elites.” – CHARLES MOORE (on the eve of the London Olympics, June 2012)

 

“The Olympics are the sporting equivalent of the U.N. (corrupt, unaccountable, greedy, you know how it goes)” – ANDREW STUTTAFORD

"The Olympics are, of course, the great globalist booby prize, a dog-and-pony show that almost always ends up being more trouble than it was worth. The propaganda value of the Olympics is overrated — the 1936 summer games did not do much for Adolf Hitler’s reputation." -- KEVIN D. WILLIAMSON

“The Olympics are like a traveling band of grifters. Their marks are the taxpayers of their host cities. Usually, the Olympics come and go and in the aftermath, nothing is left but a big old fat deficit for the taxpayers to eat, and perhaps even a bankruptcy to swallow.” – SCOTT WILSON (A US Army veteran and lawyer and one of the more insightful commenters to NRO)

 

"If the London Olympics do not go down in history as the Crying Games, I will perform a sex act on Vladimir Putin in Piccadilly Circus as the clock strikes 12 next New Year's Eve. Olympic winners' tears made the place look like Niagara Falls at times, and with the floods up in Scotland I feared for the safety of cattle and animals. Winners cried much more than losers, which makes the Devil laugh, according to an old proverb." -- TAKI THEODORACOPULOS

 

“The Olympics (are) a gruesome wedding of inordinate self-importance with crackpot micro-monomania. Today's games (not, pleas, Games) do not suggest the ancients and their simple olive wreaths. The combination of the pompous and prosaic calls to mind what the U.S. Postal Service would be like if it were run by the Hapsburg Dynasty. -- KYLE SMITH                                                                                                               (the excellent, and conservative, movie reviewer at the NY POST, in August 2012)

 

“The Olympics have become the UN in jockstraps and leotards — and both for both sexes. I'll pass.” – JACK JOLIS

 

"If it has a 'twizzle sequence', it's not a sport." -- JOHN J. MILLER (about some new... event at the 2018 Winter Olympics in South Korea)

 

"LIST OF WINTER OLYMPICS EVENTS:

                                Downhill Ski Jump

                                Alpine Goggle Race

                                Cross-Country Ice Dancing

                                Downhill Caucus

                                Uphill Ski Dancing

                                Unmanned Bobsled

                                Nordic Cross-Country Ice Hockey

                                Apre Moi Le Luge

                                Mardi Gras Skiing” – MILES KINGTON

 

"Most Olympic sports are only watched during the Olympics. How many hours have you spent watching handball in the past three years?" -- RORY SUTHERLAND

 

Ono, Yoko

“Yoko Ono looks like a leading lady in Kabuki Theater, and they're all men.” – JOSEPH WAMBAUGH

 

“Open Mind”

“The point of an open mind is like the point of an open mouth: to close on something solid.” -- G.K. CHESTERTON

 

“Nine times out of ten a man’s broad-mindedness is necessarily the narrowest thing about him.” -G.K. CHESTERTON

 

“An empty head is not really empty, it is stuffed with rubbish. Hence the difficulty of forcing anything into an empty head.” – ERIC HOFFER

 

“The purpose of an open mind is to close it on some things.” – WILLIAM F. BUCKLEY JR.

 

“A clear mind is an empty mind.” – BERTRAND RUSSELL

 

Opera

“Opera sounds like a lot of Italian chefs shouting risotto recipes at each other”. – ARISTOTLE ONASSIS

 

“Opera? Two Gentiles yelling and 3,000 Jews sleeping.” – JACKIE MASON

 

“If time travelers from the 1950s were to arrive, I think they'd be surprised how low the bar has been dropped for the title of ‘Diva’." – DAVE “IOWAHAWK” BURGE

 

«Oh great – opera – a bunch of fat screaming women – just what the world needs more of.» -- JERRY STILLER (Playing «Arthur Spooner» in the great TV show THE KING OF QUEENS)

 

"Opera, just what the world needs -- more fat women screaming." -- PETER BOYLE (Playing «Frank Barone» in the great TV show "Everybody Loves Raymond")

 

«I used to think opera was fantastic – until the fat lady began to sing. The colour, the atmosphere, the stage, the costumes – even the music. Everything was great until some fat old Wagnerian goddess started firing off enough decibels to constitute a distrubance under Schedule 4 of the Local Government Miscellaneous Provisions Act 1982. What on earth are they going on about ? So the bass baritone dwarf has got the ring. So what? I’ve had bigger problems than that in my time and the last thing I would think of doing is riding my horse through flames. In any case, what’s the poor horse done to deserve that kind of treatment ? What are they actually singing about? Love? Death? The price of cabbages? Or an everyday story of incest among a bunch of weirdos who go around pulling swords out of trees, making love to their sister, killing their father – or was it their uncle? – and then, if that’s not bad enough, falling in love with auntie – or was it their uncle? My God, what language are they singing in? Italian. German. Serbo-Croat. Cockney rhyming slang. It’s all the same to me. And the subtitles don’t help either. What do the subtitles say? ‘Oh dear, I have lost my key. I must have dropped it somehwere.’ Then there are all these blokes poncing on and off the stage with no elastic in their underpants. What on earth are they supposed to be doing? Are they really meant to walk like that?» – PETER BIDDLECOMBE

"If you don't speak Italian you'll think opera is about something important." -- SYLVIA FINE KAYE (an American lady composer who happened to be married to the fine American comic Danny Kaye)

"Opera is a chaos that confuses the senses." -- FRIEDRICH NIETZSCHE

 

Opinion

“When I took over as Editor, I was given the results of a rather expensive piece of market research which claimed that 24% of our reader s thought that ‘there is too much sport in The Spectator’. At that time, we had no sport in the magazine whatsoever. This taught me something about the value of market research, and also impelled me immediately to inaugurate the “Spectator Sport’ column.” – DOMINIC LAWSON (not only the ex-Editor of the UK Spectator, but the son of ex-Brit. Conservative Chancellor Of  The Exchequer.)

 

“A man with only one book is dangerous.” – THOMAS AQUINAS

 

"The natural and decent state of the ordinary person is not to hold opinions with any regularity. 'Whatevs,' sayeth the wise man. 'Search me,' sayeth the honest one. Having opinions is a mild form of mental disturbance." -- SAM LEITH

 

“It is almost always dangerous to state one of your opinions.” – BRIGID BROPHY (British novelist)

 

"He wanted different opinions but rejected them all, which is very disconcerting." -- DUDLEY MOORE (the great English comic actor)

"Few people truly have more than a half dozen opinions." -- SARAH DITUM (A young feminist English "journalist")

 

“I have strong opinions weakly held.” – A. J. P. TAYLOR (the famous old Marxist historian, who needless to say I never liked. And nor do I like this stupid little quote of his, but it does sound wise-assedly clever and... well, he was famous, after all.)

 

“He had absolutely no consistent views about anything that did not directly concern him; in his opinion such views were a rather revolting luxury.” – NIGEL WILLIAMS   

"What this country needs is fewer people who know what this country needs. We'd be better off, in my opinion, without so many opinions. Especially without so many political opinions. Includinbg my own." -- P. J. O'ROURKE (from his last column -- that was still on his desk when he died, in 2022) 

Opinion, Public see Public Opinion

Opportunity

“Opportunity is missed by most people because it is dressed in overalls and looks like work.” – THOMAS A. EDISON

 

"You fail to score on 100% of the shots you don't take" – WAYNE GRETZKY (the ice hockey wiz)

“Missed opportunities by far outweigh the ones we take up. Their proportion is indicative of the measure of our success” -- DANNY DE BELDER (my great friend the Belgian polymath and entrepreneur) 

“Oppression”

"With so many oppressed groups, who's left to do the oppressing?" -- GLENN REYNOLDS (A law professor who moonlights as the Interwebs'"INSTAPUNDIT". And he happens to be statistically right -- in America, if you add up all the "at risk" minority groups you'll find they constitute a comfortable majority of the country. Especially if you include women -- as the Department of Justice most emphatically does -- who alone make up 52% of the population.)

 

“Hate oppression, fear the oppressed.” – V.S. NAIPAUL

Optimism

“Nothing is wrong with anything.” – HENRY FORD (I believe he said this sometime around 1927, after the launching of the Model A, and if this isn’t the ultimate expression of optimism – if not outright hubris – I’d like to  know what is….)

 

"I get up every morning determined to both change the world and have one hell of a good time. Sometimes this makes planning my day difficult." -- E. B. WHITE (The author of "Stuart Little" and "Charlotte's Web", as well as, interestingly, the fearsome "The Elements of Style",

 

“I am an optimist. It does not seem too much use being anything else.” – WINSTON CHURCHILL

 

“It is always later than you think, but it is never too late to start anew.” – ROGER KIMBALL

 

“Optimism isn’t a philosophical position; it’s an animal necessity, like defecation.” – JOHN UPDIKE

 

“Seeing the bright side usually involves knowing about the dark side somewhere else.” – CALVIN TRILLIN

 

Optimism/Pessimism

“My friends, there are no disasters, only opportunities. And, indeed, opportunities for fresh disasters.” – MICHAEL GOVE (An English Conservative MP)

 

“The pessimist has many more  opportunities of saying ‘I told you so’ than the optimist.” – GEORGE ORWELL

 

“Laughter is what comic pessimists offer in place of utopia and its usually humorless gatekeepers. They see life as fundamentally slapstick. Illusion is the banana peel, optimism the pompous pedestrian it upends.” – LAWRENCE KLEPP (a writer based in New York. THE WASHINGTON EXAMINER, THE NEW CRITERION)

 

“It may be argued that Utopian revolutionaries are by nature hopeless optimists in that they believe a perfect society can be created by humankind. But to get to that point they must first demolish the existing order completely, and to do this they must persuade a sufficient number of people that things cannot be gradually improved. Their teaching, therefore, is essentially pessimistic.” – PAUL JOHNSON

"You are an optimist and live in hope. I am a pessimist and live on experience." -- MALCOLM BRADBURY

“An optimist believes we live in the best of all possible worlds, the pessimist fears this is true.” – JAMES BRANCH CABELL (An American author of “fantasy fiction”, in 1926)

 

“Pessimism requires no effort, whereas optimism does. Which is why there are so many more pessimists in the world than optimists.” – RUSH LIMBAUGH

 

“A pessimist sounds like they're trying to help you; an optimist sounds like they're trying to sell you something.” – STEPHEN PINKER (in his 2018 book, “Enlightenment Now: The Case For Reason, Science, Humanism and Progress)

 

“I'm an apocalyptic optimist: I think everything will end well – but nobody will live to see it.” – TOMAS VENCLOVA      (the great Lithuanian anti-communist author and poet.)   

    

"There are no disasters, only opportunities. And, indeed, opportunities for fresh disasters." -- BORIS JOHNSON 

Options

"It is never a struggle between good and evil, but between the preferable and the detestable." -- RAYMOND ARON     (grand fromage Froggie egg-head, 1905-1983)

“When you’ve got no options, you’ve got no problem.” – JAMES BURNHAM

"It isn't that there's no right or wrong here. There's no right." -- V. S. NAIPAUL    (speaking of a fictional un-named country in his 1979 "A Bend In The River" that was clearly the ex-Belgian Congo of Mobutu)



Order

"A social order doesn't fail when the kids revolt; it fails when the kids realize that their elders have already given up on it." -- ROSS DOUTHAT

 

Orders

"Don't do as I say -- do as I tell you." -- W. C. FIELDS   (as a director)

“Organic”

«Not all chemicals are bad. Without hydrogen & oxygen, there'd be no way to make water, a vital ingredient in beer.» -- DAVE BARRY

 

Orthodoxy

«Frantic orthodoxy is never rooted in faith but in doubt. It is when we are unsure that we are doubly sure.» – REINHOLD NIEBUHR

 

"I’d have so much more respect for the progressives who control the commanding heights of our culture if they had the courage to admit that they control the commanding heights of the culture and that they’re in the business of imposing orthodoxy." -- JONAH GOLDBERG

"It was always the women, and above all the young ones, who were the most bigoted adherents of the Party, the swallowers of slogans, the amateur spies and nosers−out of unorthodoxy." -- GEORGE ORWELL

Orwell, George

« ‘1984’, I think, is the most influential book ever written, and so you could say the greatest book ever written.» – ROBERT HARRIS (the celebrated novelist)

 

“Orwell never intended his novel (“1984”) to be a prediction, only a warning.” – GEORGE PACKER (a lib, in THE ATLANTIC)

 

“Orwell died at the tragically young age of 47. He had so much more to tell us.” – ALBERT E. JOLIS (my dad, on his friend, in his memoir “A Clutch Of Reds And Diamonds”)

 

"All’s well that’s Orwell." -- ELON MUSK (2 May 2022)

Over-reaction

“We should be careful to get out of an experience only the wisdom that is in it and stop there lest we be like the cat that sits down on a hot stove lid. She will never sit down on a hot stove lid again and that is well but also she will never sit down on a cold one anymore.” – MARK TWAIN

 

Oxford University

«It was one of the comparatively few good things about Oxford that at any time of day or night you would attract no particular notice by appearing in dressing-gown and slippers.» – KINGSLEY AMIS (who, of course, went there.)