The Year in Quotes
In case you missed it from last week, Tim Blair, Australian master in the art of ridicule and own petard hoisting presents the year in quotes (scroll down to Quotes of 2004 - January).
Excerpted from stories he covered in his blog this year, it's got a heavy Aussie emphasis, but the level of critique is so sharp, and the nature of the Left he ridicules so uniformly recognizable, it's immediately accessible to a worldwide audience.
Even more so for folks in this corner of the world. From September, memories of Rathergate, featuring our own Bloggers of the Year and their presumptive Goliath like adversaries:
"Later today the Boston Globe, the A.P. and Dan Rather all present new and damning information about how George W. Bush got moved to the front of the line to get in the Texas Air National Guard, and how he then went AWOL. I am putting every ounce of trust I have in my fellow Americans that a majority of them get this, get the injustice of it all, and get the sad, sick twisted irony of how it relates very, very much to our precious Election 2004." -- Michael Moore was so looking forward to Bush getting nailed on 60 Minutes II
"Tomorrow morning, dinosaur media across the country will be headlining the 60 Minutes 'scoop' as a blow to the Bush campaign." -- Powerline, one of the prime Rathergate blogs, makes an accurate call
"George W. Bush's cover story on his National Guard service is rapidly unraveling." -- Democratic National Committee Chairman Terry McAuliffe
"I know that this story is true." -- Dan Rather
"Until someone shows me definitive proof that they are not [authentic], I don't see any reason to carry on a conversation with the professional rumor mill." -- Dan Rather
"Okay, I'm no Howard Kurtz or anything, but I've seen one or two episodes of Law & Order in my day, and ... isn't the burden of proof on the accuser? It is? Okay. And isn't this crewcutted septuagenarian fadebrain the one who made the really big serious accusation? He is? Check. So ... isn't he sort of, you know, under the obligation to verify his claims? And not in a position to sit back and demand that everybody else prove to his satisfaction that it's not clearly bullshit? Is it out of line for me to ask this stuff? Sorry. Sorry. But I mean, if these memos were scribbled in burnt sienna crayon on the back of a Denny's placemat and somebody had the unmitigated gall to say something about it, would that be part of the 'professional rumor mill'? I'm just asking here, no big deal." -- [blogger] Jim Treacher
"The fear I have is: How do you know who's doing the Web logs? And what happens when this stuff gets into the mainstream, and it eventually turns out that the '60 Minutes' documents were perfectly legitimate?" -- Emerson College professor Jeffrey Seglin
"I have never been more confident of a story in my life." -- Dan Rather
"Based on what we now know, CBS News cannot prove that the documents are authentic, which is the only acceptable journalistic standard to justify using them in the report. We should not have used them. That was a mistake, which we deeply regret." -- CBS News President Andrew Heyward
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