The battle between former Secretary of State Colin Powell and reigning GOP king Rush Limbaugh escalated last week. Two quotes:
“Rush Limbaugh says, ‘Get out of the Republican Party.’ Dick Cheney says, ‘He’s already out.’ I may be out of their version of the Republican Party, but there’s another version of the Republican Party waiting to emerge once again.” — Powell, in a Boston speech
“He’s for more spending. He’s for higher taxes. He’s against raising the social issues. He’s for affirmative action. He’s for amnesty for illegals. He endorsed Obama. And now there’s an agenda — an emerging agenda — that he’s waiting for for the Republican Party? The only thing emerging here is Colin Powell’s ego. Colin Powell represents the stale, the old, the worn-out GOP that never won anything. The party of Gerald Ford, Nelson Rockefeller, Bill Scranton, Arnold Schwarzenegger and those types of people.” — Limbaugh, on his radio show
Peggy Noonan is unimpressed by Health and Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius’ way with words, as exhibited by our former governor when asked about health care reform on MSNBC. Noonan wrote: “Ms. Sebelius began to answer in that dead and deadening governmental language that does not reveal or clarify but instead wraps legitimate queries in clouds of words and sends them on their way. I think I heard ‘accessing affordable quality health care,’ ‘single-payer plan vis-a-vis private multiparty insurers’ and ‘key component of quality improvement.’ In any case, she didn’t answer the question, which was a disappointment but not a surprise. No one answers the question anymore.” Casting beyond Sebelius-speak, Noonan said: “Do members of the administration speak obscurely because they can’t help themselves, or do they speak the way they speak because they really aren’t all that keen to have people understand them? Maybe they calculate that lack of clarity ensures maximum ability to maneuver. But maybe they should think less about maneuvering. They’re not helping the prevailing sense of national anxiety by speaking in a special lingo all their own.”
“Taking history into account could have protected the United States from engaging in practices that jeopardized our values, our democracy and even our lives,” Brandeis University professor James Mandrell wrote in the Los Angeles Times. He described how he came across an illustrated article on waterboarding published in a Spanish newspaper in 1836, just two years after Spain abolished the Inquisition. Mandrell wrote that the article “claimed that the principal objection to torture was not necessarily moral or ethical. Torture doesn’t work, it said: ‘It’s not efficacious.’”
