Tim Blair

QUOTES OF 2003 - DECEMBER

• "Mark Latham as leader of the federal Labor Party? That would be a diverting nine months." -- NSW Premier Bob Carr

• "It is probably no exaggeration to say that the invasion of Iraq amounts to the greatest act of aggression by any Western nation since the days of Hitler's Germany." -- John Valder

• "Who is Mark Latham, and what does he stand for?" -- Mark Latham

• "The Light of Freedom cannot be extinguished as long as it is inside of us." -- Dennis Kucinich

• "Nearly everyone who meets Latham is immediately impressed by him. He has gravitas. He knows what he thinks and says it. And as everyone recognises now, he has passion." -- Craig McGregor, in the SMH

• "The key, I believe, to Iran is pressure through the Soviet Union. The Soviet Union is supplying much of the equipment that Iran, I believe, most likely is using to set itself along the path of developing nuclear weapons. We need to use that leverage with the Soviet Union and it may require us to buying the equipment the Soviet Union was ultimately going to sell to Iran." -- cold warrior Howard Dean

• "The bones in the mass graves salute you, Avenger of the Bones." -- Iraqi blogger Alaa

• "He looks like a chimp. He grins like a chimp, pouts like a chimp, walks like a chimp and even talks like a chimp would if chimps could talk." -- Guardian cartoonist Steve Bell disses the Avenger

• "He has an encyclopaedic knowledge of history and of politics. He's brilliant and I really feel that he just has a wonderfully penetrating, inventive mind and I was thrilled that he now is going to be the leader of the Australian Labor Party." -- Dick Morris on Mark Latham

• "They tell me he's one of those genetically-modified because of the criminal ancestry he derives from." -- Robert Mugabe on John Howard

• "The president never took a knife to the bird he held for the cameras. It may not even have been edible." -- The Guardian

• "As I write, Kim Beazley has the numbers and the game looks over." -- Margo Kingston

• "What on earth was the man who called John Howard 'an arselicker' of George Bush doing on Thursday grovelling before the American flag? Why did our new, very green alternative prime minister feel the need to humiliate himself so publicly? ... I mean, what a grovel? What a truly snivelling statement three days into the 'new dawn' of Labor's 'new beginning'?" -- SMH grouch Alan Ramsey

• "As George W. Bush sinks slowly in the West ..." -- Phillip Adams, in the same week that Bush's job approval rating rose to 61%

• "Violence towards one person is violence towards all humanity ... we need to address it on an individual level." -- Australian Democrats leader Andrew Bartlett

• "He must fully realise right now his own natural and easy response to our future responses to feeling his intimacy with him." -- Robert Bosler on Mark Latham

• "The bird was the kind of model used by butchers and Hollywood set-dressers." -- turkeygate conspiracist Mark Lawson, in The Guardian

• "There is a large, seething majority out there against what Bush is doing to this country. This administration is as fundamentalist as the Islamics." -- Vanity Fair publisher Graydon Carter

• "You should be fired and turned into a hobo ... I hate you nin hundred zillion plus one." -- letter from a Melbourne student to Immigration Minister Amanda Vanstone

• "We have to get this piece of living, breathing s - - - out of the office." -- comedian Judy Gold on George W. Bush

• "I'll be in Washington on January 20, 2005 when President Dean is inaugurated. This is a must do for me. It's not a nice to do, it is a must do!" -- SMH Webdiary contributor Harry Heidelberg

• "The man most likely to be the next US president." -- SMH book reviewer Megan Gressor, on Wesley Clark

• "Most of the leftists I know are hoping openly or secretly to leverage difficulty in Iraq in order to defeat George Bush. For innumerable reasons, including the one I cited earlier, I think that this is a tactic and a mentality utterly damned by any standard of history or morality. What I mainly do is try to rub that in." -- Christopher Hitchens

• "I'd better call my lawyer." -- George W. Bush, following suggestions that banning Germany, France, Russia and Canada from bidding for Iraqi contracts might violate international law

• "We now learn Howard took this country into war at the bidding of a US President who makes a complete goose of himself by 'feeding' American troops in Baghdad a plastic Christmas turkey. Yes, really." -- Alan Ramsey, the Sussex St Gobbler, in the SMH

• "You guys are utter filth. May the lot of you rot in hell. You are fat, bloated and fucked, rotting with smugness. I hope the shit you people peddle returns to you in spades. Enjoy your ignorant lives. Wallow in them. You'll die like everyone else and i hope its in a very lonely place." -- jolly troll Miranda Divide

• "Saddam Hussein has gone. But so has sanity in international affairs.” -- Phillip Adams

• "I actually spoke in an African-American church yesterday." -- Howard Dean

• "I don’t need you, and even if I did, I won’t ask your help, we’ve had enough of it. Go somewhere else, go to Africa, and relieve your conscience by donating some pennies to the poor, starving people there, and don’t bother how their dictators will use the money, and don’t even bother asking why they are so poor. I will stay here and fight for freedom and democracy with the good and brave Americans (yes..the good and brave.. Eat your hearts), and with all the honest soldiers and people of the coalition." -- Iraqi blogger Omar, to opponents of the war

• "I'm not sure that I know about that specific episode, that demonstration that you just referred to." -- New York Times chief diplomatic correspondent Steven Weisman didn’t know about the anti-terror marches in Iraq

• "I was not aware of that." -- neither did NYT Washington bureau chief Philip Taubman

• "Ladies and gentleman, we got him." -- Paul Bremer

• "Death to Saddam!" -- Iraqi journalists viewing tape of the captured beardo

• "I had a horrible feeling in my stomach when I saw that Hussein had been captured." -- poster at Democratic Underground

• "We are very, very happy. I hope they strip the meat from his body and cut into small, small pieces." -- Sakina al-Amein, who left Iraq for Australia 14 months ago

• "2003 came to us dressed as a salesman, ladies and gentlemen. Not the harmless salesman selling us the harbour bridge, it was a deceptive salesman, a dangerous salesman because it wasn't selling us the harbour bridge, it was selling the desert of Iraq. The salesman came all dressed the part but it came selling the desert of Iraq." -- Webdiarist Robert Bosler, jabbering

• "Until the outbreak of the war against Iraq, the strongman sent millions of dollars to Palestinians killed in the conflict with Israel." -- the ABC’s Jane Hutcheon is referring to suicide bombers

• "President Bush sends his regards." -- US soldiers answer Saddam Hussein’s request: "I am the president of Iraq and I want to negotiate."

• "It was a prop turkey, a pretend turkey. Just as ketchup replaced blood for violent scenes in movies, and mashed potato substituted for ice cream in Happy Days (to prevent its melting under the studio lights), the President had taken a plastic turkey - one used for gourmet magazine shoots - to the mess hall." -- Phillip Adams, making it up as he goes along

• "December 17 2003 is the centenary of the world's most effective killing machine." -- The Guardian’s George Moonbat curses flight

• "When I saw the close ups of the tyrant I thought of his accessories, did you?" -- Margo Kingston

• "Saddam is in our jail." -- a US soldier answers chants of "Saddam is our hearts!" and "Saddam is in our blood!"

• "I would like to express my deep disgust at the recent television coverage of Saddam Hussein undergoing a medical examination." -- SMH letter-writer Michelle Withers

• "The last thing we expected was to be the first to publish anything about the protests. It felt both good and awful at the same time. Good for scooping Reuters, AFP, AP, and other wire services and media stations. And awful for the people that depended on these services for their news. I'm telling you there were reporters from every station in the world at the demos that day and yet only a few mentioned them at all." -- Iraqi blogger Zeyad

• "Fear grips that proportion of the Iraqi people that doesn't necessarily support the resistance." -- the SMH’s Paul McGeough

• "I will do whatever the Americans want, because I saw what happened in Iraq, and I was afraid." -- Col. Gaddafi, in phone call to Silvio Berlusconi

• "In his public life he opposes border protection, safe in the knowledge that asylum seekers are unlikely to settle near his Paddington terrace. In his private life, however, he is a strong supporter of laneway protection, even to the point of preventing a 90-year-old woman in a wheelchair from accessing his property so that she might have Christmas lunch with her son." -- Mark Latham, on Phillip Adams

• "And now this week, for the Americans at least, some good news – the capture, unharmed, of a beaten, dishevelled Saddam Hussein." -- the ABC’s Hamish Robertson

• "Dubya secretly flew to Iraq a few weeks back to spend 2.5 hours pretending to serve a fake, inedible plastic turkey." -- Mark Morford joins the turkey team

• "Only someone who believes that the end justifies the means will think the liberation of the Iraqi people from Saddam's murderous dictatorship, the creation of a democratic state in Iraq, or even the flowering of democracy in the entire Middle East, will justify the killing of tens of thousand of Iraqis." -- academic Raimond Gaita

• "To broadcast the scene as a humiliated and broken old man was being so personally examined by an American doctor shows abuse of power and absence of compassion." -- SMH letter writer
Judy Finch

• "I hear that one of Saddam's main torture techniques involved giving the victim a standard medical exam and then showing it on TV." -- reader dang

• "I would say to the Europeans, I pledge to you as the American president that we’ll consult with you first. You get the right of first refusal on the security concerns that we have." -- Wesley Clark

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So, we’ve made it through another year ... which is more than Ebay or Qwerty Hussain can say. Highlights of 2003: taking Baghdad within three weeks (very impressive, considering all the quagmires); the accelerated unravelling of the far left; new media in Afghanistan and Iraq; and the Paris Hilton video.

Lowlights: taking three weeks to get through airport security; the accelerated morphing of the far left into an anti-trade, anti-liberty authoritarian right; old media in Sydney and London; and most everything about Paris, France.

Anyway, Merry RamaHannuKwanzMas to all, especially to Andrea Harris for hosting this site, and readers who’ve contributed stories, tips, and cash. Without you, I’d be ... well, I’d be doing much the same thing, except the posts wouldn’t be as interesting, and I’d be poorer.

Here’s to further entrenching the global hegemon in 2004. Party on, hegemonsters!

-- Tim

Posted by Tim Blair at December 24, 2003 01:43 PM