James Taranto Quotations

We haven't been paying close attention to the polls

Is Hillary Clinton as brilliant a politician as she's cracked up to be? Here's a bit of evidence for the negative: 'Clinton Says Lawyers Must Make Their Voices Heard in Washington' reads the headline of an Associated Press dispatch about a speech New York's junior senator gave at the American Bar Association convention in Chicago. Lawyers need to speak up more: Now there's a message sure to strike a chord with the public.

The New York Times brings us this hilarious item about Jonathan Klein, president of CNN's domestic operations: 'Mr. Klein said CNN is looking at the long term and trying to set itself apart as a news organization that wants to reach the serious news viewer, one who watches less TV news over all, and is younger than the steady audience for more tabloid news fare.' 'CNN: The network serious viewers don't watch when they're not watching TV'.

It's not easy to cram so much idiocy, mendacity and arrogance into nine words. ... Dean's assertion is impossible to support rationally.

Some libs took offense at my David Broder quip earlier. In my own defense, I was taught in college it's OK to disrespect dead white males.

The American people are fed up...with political posturing.' True, but also an example of political posturing.

The Swift Boat Veterans for Truth disputed whether John Kerry deserved some of his five medals. A large part of Kerry's defense was an appeal to the authority of veterans who supported him-one of whom has now been revealed to have received a medal he doesn't deserve. This doesn't prove the Kerry detractors were right, but it certainly doesn't weaken their case.

'Fact checking' is opinion journalism pretending to be some sort of heightened objectivity.

An industry devoted to serving the public's right to know gives twisted and evil men the means of becoming known. This problem is not obviously amenable to a solution, and it certainly is not amenable to a legal one. A regime of media regulation that would be both effective at preventing mass shootings and consistent with the American Constitution is no easier to imagine than a regime of gun regulation that would meet the same criteria.

Why has America's fringe left been making common cause with the Taliban, whose views on such matters as women's rights and separation of church and state are appallingly retrograde by anyone's standards? One reason may be that the Taliban seem to have mastered the language of victimhood, sounding like denizens of some college ethnic-studies department.

The thing we adore about these dog-whistle kerfuffles is that the people who react to the whistle always assume it's intended for somebody else. The whole point of the metaphor is that if you can hear the whistle, you're the dog.

Yasser Arafat remains in stable condition after dying in a Paris hospital.

Making wise decisions requires more than incentives. It requires wisdom.

If the rest of the world likes Americans only when we're dying, the rest of the world can go to hell.