Okay, ready for another round of right-wing foot-in-mouth? Buckle up and hang tight. Here we go.
“I had other priorities in the Sixties than military service.” —Dick Cheney
“I did what any normal person would do at (draft) age. You call home. You call home to mother and father and say, ‘I’d like to get into the National Guard’.” —Dan Quayle
(PREPARATORY QUOTE FOR THE NEXT ONE: “I am angry that so many of the sons of the powerful and well placed…managed to wrangle slots in Reserve and Guard units… (T)his raw class discrimination strikes me as the most damaging to the ideal that all Americans are created equal and owe equal allegiance to their country.” –Colin Powell in his autobiography, 1995)
“Just don’t go there.” –Colin Powell, in response to queries about George W. Bush’s service record in 2004
“A species goes out of existence every 20 seconds. Surely a new species must come into existence every 20 seconds.”—Rep. Helen Chenoweth, ID
“When I see someone who is making anywhere from $300,000 to $750,000, that’s middle class.” —Rep. Frederick Heineman, NC
(On the fifth congressional pay raise in as many years.)“I challenge anyone to live on my salary ($158,000).” —Rep. Tom DeLay, TX
“But this country has been through tough times before, and we’re going to do it again.” —G.W. Bush
(On signing a deregulation bill in the presence of banking lobbyists) “All in all, I think we hit the jackpot.” —Ronald Reagan
“We don’t believe in planners and deciders making the decisions on behalf of America.” —G. W. Bush
“It’s very important for folks to understand that where there’s more trade, there’s more commerce.” —G. W. Bush
“I know how hard it is to put food on your family.” —G. W. Bush
“It’s clearly a budget. It’s got a lot of numbers in it.” —G. W. Bush
“I understand small business growth. I was one.” —G. W. Bush
“The poor in this country are the biggest piglets at the mother pig and her nipples.” —Rush Limbaugh, angry mother pig
“I think that the free-enterprise system is absolutely too important to be left to the voluntary actions of the marketplace.” —Rep. Richard Kelly, FL
“If you want a sense of the personal values we should be communicating to children… look at Reader’s Digest and The Saturday Evening Post from around 1955.” —Newt Gingrich , former Speaker of the House, GA
“Rural Americans are real Americans. There’s no doubt about that. You can’t always be sure with other Americans. Not all of them are real.” —Dan Quayle
“I used to think they (the KKK) were okay, until I learned they were pot smokers.” —Sen. Jeff Sessions, AL
“Most people don’t know that it’s illegal to pray.” —Newt Gingrich
“The American people wants a president that appeals to the angels.” —G. W. Bush
“We have a biblical duty, we are called by God to conquer this country. We don’t want equal time. We don’t want pluralism.” —Randall Terry, founder of Operation Rescue
“You say you’re supposed to be nice to the Episcopalians, and the Presbyterians and the Methodists and this, that, and the other thing. Nonsense. I don’t have to be nice to the spirit of the Antichrist.” —Pat Robertson
“(Faith-based initiatives are about) eroding that important bridge between church and state.” —G. W. Bush
(On Sept. 11) “I really believe that the pagans, and the abortionists, and the feminists, and the gays and lesbians who are actively trying to make that an alternative lifestyle… I point the finger in thei face and say ‘you helped this happen’. ” —Jerry Falwell
“We are America. Those other people (Democrats) are not.” —Rich Bond, addressing the Republican National Convention
“I no longer say Democrats and Republicans. It’s liberals and Americans.” —James Watt, Secretary of the Interior under Ronald Reagan
(Even more to come, alas.)
The Propaganda Professor 
Laughs at Conservastive gaffes,
8-20-25
Actually Some of the comments made by those on the extreme right are easy to understand as awkward statements made by politicians like Dick Cheney who told us he had other priorities than military service. But many of us who were in college also had other priorities, such as moving to Canada, being classified as pacifists, or being those who were ordered to destroy a village to save it?” But despite all our military might we just could not neutralize the Viet Cong into surrendering! So we saw our future as a needlessly sacrificing of American lives for the benefit of military Hawks who probably put in a few good word to help their own children deal with the draft board, But that might be considered neither right nor wrong because more that 100 years ago, Confederates and Yankees also paid for exceptions as the powerful used their influence to spare their own children from such a grim future. However, even during Vietnam we were quite young and loved to party—something which could not be denied by the draft board—until we were actually drafted and taught to kill those we personally knew nothing about, and had never before considered enemies. However, People like Mohamed Ali and Abraham Lincoln’s wife, Mary Todd Lincoln, tried to exempt themselves, or their loved ones, from serving during such horrific American Wars. Todd was burning to fight but in response to his wife, President Lincoln initially prevented Todd from enlisting. However Lincoln allowed him to join the military during our American Civil War.
All my friends got high draft numbers but I got a much lower one, and therefore was likely to be drafted. But at the time, an illness that’s plagued me for my entire life, offered me the possibility of getting the deferment I needed – after being poked and prodded by government physicians who determined if I was fit enough to kill other men. But (by 1970) almost none of us supported the war anymore.
Personally, I prefer the idea an all voluntarily military made of individuals who truly supported our governments position in Iraq and Afghanistan and believed their service was a vital part of their patriotic duty, at least until support for the war became a boondoggle that survived only because, we used superior weapons and bombs. As for as who represents the middle class, I have also thought that people who make more than $59,000 per year represented a demarcation line. Thus, when the right wing keeps promising to reduce taxes for the middle class, I anticipated that their definition of that word would include earning at least $300,000 per year. And because Senator Heinerman assigned the highest middle classified earnings at $750,000 per year, those of us who truly represent the middle class can only slap our knees with laughter at such an absurd evaluation. When I was a teen I earned $1.60/ hour—about $12 a day or about $240 for a month of 5 day work weeks. And when my dad survived the depression he earned much less than that. So will lower, middle and even some upper class people today earn relatively less as a result of the Mr T’s Big Beautiful Bill?
Bush’s words, “I know how hard it is to put food on your family,” sounds like a typical gaffe in which Bush’s mind trailed off before the word “table.” Are there any of us who haven’t made similar gaffes?
And did he claim to understand small businesses because he had one, not because “he was one,” which became another gaffe only good for producing giggles from the children’s table?
Haven’t we all accidentally used a wrong word to describe something?
One thing we’ve got to give credit for Bush were his warnings not to hate the many peace loving Muslims who were our darker skinned countrymen.
However, I have no respect for Rush Limbaugh who intended to vilify those who supposedly brought the Twin Towers down. the 1990s I heard a radio broadcast in which he ranted about women who asked him to apologize after farting in a moving car. WOW, such an important and Earth shaking example of discrimination against someone who only wanted to open our eyes to Jewish jet trail attacks and farting in small spaces!…err…right?
Although Dan Quail came across as being “plastic” he did do something that I and other people have—we spelled the word potato with an e” at the end?
However who doesn’t feel the urge to smoke that hippie dope stuff, like them guys who were hung from a tree last night by the KKK?
About the idea that it’s illegal to pray, you covered the topic well in one of your articles affirming that anyone has the right to pray in private by themselves. But no faith can push their beliefs unless, our catholic neighbors, or the Presbyterians across the street, can never be good Samaritans like Jesus told us to, without judging all other faiths as the “Anti-Christ,
But one other thing that is paramount to faith is that if our wives don’t understand what is said by their ministers, its their husband’s duty to explain it to them—an old time tenant of sexism that we are still waking up from!
[…] The Propaganda Professor posts a devastating account of conservatism with only a single introductory sentence of direct criticism. The rest is composed of utterances of conservatives themselves. […]