Tim Blair

QUOTES OF 2003 - SEPTEMBER

• "Be careful eating lunch now today, don't want you choking on a chicken bone do we." -- troll Big Hawk makes his usual point

• "Every fact in the film is true." -- Michael Moore. It’s only the lies that are false

• "Face it Tim you are a fraud to intellectual thought and a chickenhawk in the extreme. You send other people's sons and daughters to fight your wars and call anyone who doesn't agree with you a coward, a traitor or any other term of abuse you can come up with between your endless long lunches." -- Big Hawk, again

• "I've been a member of Amnesty International for nearly two decades, but comparing the relative effectiveness of the methods used for actually DOING something about human rights, I think I'll send my donation next year to the US Republican Party instead." -- Uncle Milk

• "The challenge remains for the big brave Tim Blair to put his big balls where his big mouth his and get down to Pitt St bright and early where he can present himself to the ADF recruiting office and sign up. But of course he won't be doing that, he's got another long lunch to attend to today." -- Big Hawk, yet again

• "Bush was, of course, aided and abetted by the judicial activism of Supreme Court judges appointed by Dad – and the candidate who’d lost the popular vote got the glittering prize." -- Phillip Adams. Contributor J. F. Beck quickly pointed out that Bush Sr. appointed two Supreme Court judges, whose votes cancelled each other out

• "You've got to hand it to those cows, they know how to bag themselves up." -- blogger Natalie Solent

• "The time has come to leave wolves in peace." -- Bill Clinton’s new, suckworthy version of Peter and the Wolf

• "These days, wealth is increasingly uncommon, something to be enjoyed by our visionary business leaders and their fortunate families." -- Phillip Adams, ignoring data that shows wealth in Australia has increased by 40% in the past decade

• "You truly excel yourself Tim. Where's lunch today." -- guess who

• "The President will make a dramatic U-turn on Iraq in a TV broadcast tonight to try to salvage his hopes of re-election amid Americans' growing hostility to the casualties and chaos." -- a prediction from The Guardian

• "If someone needs shooting, shoot him. If someone doesn't need shooting, protect him." -- Major General James Mattis

• "When someone attacks Australia I'll fight, but I doubt Tim will. He'll be too busy pretending how important he is eating lunch." -- still more diet advice from old Horkie

• "Ignorance, self-delusion, free-floating disregard for the facts and an unswerving belief in its own infallibility: such are the hallmarks of today's America." -- The Independent’s Andrew Gumbel

• "They didn't even try to catch them." -- puzzled comedian Ewan Campbell, after he’d pelted an audience with Minties. He later learned the audience was blind

• "The economy has juddered to dead slow, steam hissing from the radiator." -- SMH columnist Mike Carlton, days before the ABC reported that "every indicator, every survey, has pointed to an economy building up an impressive head of steam"

• "Simon Crean has painstakingly built a platform for a potentially devastating assault on Howard's fitness for office." -- Margo Kingston. Crean was removed as Labor leader within a couple of months

• "The use of sexual toys to enhance foreplay is permissible on condition that these toys do not cause any harm or contain any forbidden ingredients. Similarly, these toys should not be inserted into the female private part, except in the case of dire necessity." -- The Imam

• "It's time we Americans came to terms with something: France is not just our annoying ally. It is not just our jealous rival. France is becoming our enemy." -- Thomas "Daniel" Friedman, in The New York Times

• "The same people who accuse America of coddling dictators are sputtering with bilious fury because we actually deposed one." -- James Lileks

• "I will avenge these prankdoers, mark my lips, I will smoke these filthy evilsters. Whoever you are, we will catch you. Remember: I never sleep." -- George W. Bush, as quoted in Viz magazine

• "Big money, big Liberal Party politics and big media are trying to get rid of us, of course, by letting Packer take over Fairfax - a media-only company. But we're hanging in there and doing the best job we can for our readers while we can." -- Margo Kingston, pretending she works for Indymedia

• "We have people from every planet on Earth in this state. We have the sons and daughters of every of people from every planet of every country on Earth." -- terminated California governor Gray Davis

• "He has been a trenchant critic of Bush's ill-planned invasion and occupation of Iraq, with its hubristic, neo-conservative assumptions that America can order the world to its whim." -- SMH columnist Mike Carlton praises Wesley Clark, presumbly unaware of Clark’s earlier view that George W. Bush and British Prime Minister Tony Blair "should be proud of their resolve in the face of so much doubt"

• "I do think it would be helpful to get the United Nations in to help write a constitution. I mean, they're good at that." -- George W. Bush finds something for the UN to do

• "Tell George Bush to come and get rid of the mullahs for us." -- an Iranian cab driver, to a "shocked" Canadian

• "What a success not just for Greenpeace but for the people of Mexico. We did it for the campesinos. For the future of the children of Mexico." -- Greenpeace activists after blocking a shipment of GM corn. The vessel returned within hours and successfully unloaded its entire cargo

• "Don't believe those who say they aren't there just because we haven't found them. Saddam Hussein had WMDs. Iraq certainly did have weapons of mass destruction. Trust me. I held some in my own hands." -- Richard Butler, who earlier had said: "We need to know what the facts are to know whether the WMD justification for the invasion was real or not"

• "The MV Cormo Express has become the Tampa of the live sheep export trade." -- The Age’s Michelle Grattan

• "I've known Wes for a long time ... Wes won't get my vote.” -- a ringing unendorsement for the Clark campaign from Retired General H. Hugh Shelton

• "I'm returnin' that Noam Chomsky video you made me rent from you. I only watched like six minutes of it so I guess I should get like at least a partial refund." -- Roast Beef

• "I will smash you like the bug you are." -- an artificial intelligence conversation robot answers the question: "Will Collingwood win tomorrow?"

• "It is worth stating the obvious, so momentous is it: For the first time in almost half a century, Iraq has no executions, no political prisoners, no torture and no limits on freedom of expression." -- Julie Flint, in the Lebanese Daily Star

• "Tim Blair ... is always looking down his nose at working class pastimes like rugby league, the track and club-life. The Australian should not allow people to write about sport unless they know something about it." -- Mark Latham

• "Palestinians regard Jewish settlements in the West Bank and Gaza Strip as major obstacles to peace and have regularly attacked them." -- Reuters

• "Are you sure it’s not a demon?" -- James Lileks, on learning that his daughter had an imaginary friend

• "The frontrunner Democratic candidate for president, General Wesley Clark, revealed last week that he refused requests from the Bush administration to publicly link Iraq with S11 within days of the attack on the World Trade Centre because there was no evidence of a link." -- Margo Kingston. The revelation to which she refers was from last June rather than "last week", and was denied by Clark in August

• "The US line on defending Australia remains the same, and our efforts in Iraq have not changed it. In Sydney on August 13, Deputy Secretary of State Richard Armitage made that clear, saying 'your system is yours to defend'. If there were a future problem involving Indonesia, he added, Australian leadership would be 'essential'. In other words, unless American interests are threatened, we're still on our own." -- Alison Broinowski, twisting Armitage’s speech beyond recognition

• "Abbott is a good man to fix up messes and make new policy work ... If he gets it right - and Howard will back him with big bucks - Abbott could clean-up his image and restore his appeal as a future leader." -- Margo Kingston, reversing her view in August that "Tony Abbott has just said goodbye to ever being Prime Minister ... the Australian people will never trust Abbott again"

• "As we know, the White House has essentially an oil regime in power, and the OPEC governments were very opposed to Kyoto." -- Jeremy Leggett, unbiased expert, during an ABC interview

• "This channel will promote a French vision that is more necessary than ever in today's world." -- French Prime Minister Jean Pierre Raffarin announces his nation’s answer to Fox and CNN. Reader Mark from Monroe’s suggested name for the new network: "Le Jazeera"

Posted by Tim Blair at December 24, 2003 02:22 PM