Category: Awards

“I now think that Ellison was … right to excoriate me for my dismissive attitude toward black culture, and that my Jewish critics were right to take offense at my questioning whether the survival of the Jewish people was worth the suffering it entailed (though at the time, the proximity to the Holocaust made it very hard for me to keep this question out of my mind and to refrain from raising it in print). On the other hand, though I think what I said about white racism in 1963 was right, the contention that nothing has changed since then seems to me almost demented,” – Norman Podhoretz, on the 50th anniversary of his infamous article “My Negro Problem – And Ours.”

“[Republicans] have no real health-care agenda. Voters don’t trust them to look out for middle-class economic interests. Republicans are confused and divided about how to solve the party’s problems. What they can do is unite in opposition to the Obama administration’s scandals and mistakes. So that’s what they’re doing. They’re trying to win news cycles when they need votes,” –Ramesh Ponnuru.

“[The GOP’s 1998] strategy was to assume that the [Lewinsky] scandal would redound to their benefit, and that they merely had to sit back and let victory rain o’er them. It didn’t. The current lot should not make the same mistake. Democratic scandal does not take the place of a Republican agenda,” – National Review’s editors.

Let’s not forget the role of Fox News in all this. Once again, what riles up their white elderly base may actually turn off the broad American middle whose votes the GOP desperately needs. And if the Issa brigade appear to be trying to gin up scandals rather than investigate them, they will seem more than ever irrelevant to the country’s actual needs. Charlie Cook echoes these thoughts rather convincingly here.

“[T]he one advice I give to Republicans is stop calling [Benghazi] a huge scandal. Stop saying it’s a Watergate. Stop saying it’s Iran Contra. Let the facts speak for themselves. Have a special committee, a select committee. The facts will speak for themselves. Pile them on but don’t exaggerate, don’t run ads about Hillary. It feeds the narrative for the other side that it’s only a political event. It’s not. Just be quiet and present the facts,” – Charles Krauthammer.