I woke up with the phrase Quotable Quotes on my mind for some reason. It rang a bell, but I wasn’t sure which one. Sometimes I have bats in the belfry upon waking up but that’s a story for another day.

I consulted with Mr. Google and realized it was a Reader’s Digest feature. I’ve neither read nor thought about that venerable publication for decades but a good title is a terrible thing to waste. So, I stole it.

When I was growing up, the Reader’s Digest was always around the house. So, I often picked it up and perused it. I recall liking it as a kid and disdaining it as a teenager. I was a damnably disdainful teenager. Perhaps I had bats in the belfry even then. So it goes.

I had no idea there was a current edition of the Quotable Quotes book with some current luminaries on the cover. It’s unclear if Stephen Colbert is displaying air quotes or making the V for Victory sign. Probably the former but his Comedy Central character dug Nixon and Churchill.

Thanks, Robin.

I have two quotes to share today hence the Quotable Quotes shtick,

We begin with a quote from a piece in The Atlantic by Adam Serwer:

Conservatives were often vocally pro-vaccination in the past, when anti-vaccine sentiment was vaguely associated with people the comedian Jon Stewart once mocked as “science-denying affluent California liberals.” With “affluent California liberals” as a symbol of the anti-vaccination movement, conservative culture-war instincts trended in a more constructive direction. Indeed, a 2015 measles outbreak at Disneyland illustrated the importance of mass vaccination to obtain herd immunity and suppress disease.

Many conservatives at the time made precisely that point. “If you think about the childhood illnesses that once permanently debilitated people like my grandfather, who contracted childhood polio—and you think today that measles, rubella, polio have been eradicated from the U.S. and much of the world—why would we go backwards?” Senator Ted Cruz asked in 2015. “In a feat that would have been unimaginable a few decades ago, the anti-vaccine movement has managed to breathe life into nearly vanquished childhood diseases,” the conservative pundit Rich Lowry had lamented presciently a year earlier. “Nothing good can come from undoing one of the miracles of medical progress.”

Conservatives used to be all about personal responsibility before placing their souls in a blind trust controlled by former President* Pennywise.

Our second quote comes from former GOPer and Willard Mittbot Romney fan girl, Jennifer Rubin.

The media today so often frame politics about winning and losing. Had they been covering John Lewis on the bridge, one shudders to think that they might have ‘scored’ that day as a win for the Alabama troopers who met the marchers with clubs and tear gas. Coverage entirely denuded of moral content becomes camouflage for bad conduct.

Rubin is spot on. Sometimes you win by losing. The inside-the-beltway media will never get that. The horse race is all that matters to them. Same as it ever was, same as it ever was.

Finally, I made bats in the belfry jokes at the top of the post so here’s a Quotable Tweet Quote from some guy named Shecky:

Meatloaf's bat has left his belfry.

— Shecky (@Adrastosno) January 21, 2022

The last word goes not to the late Marvin Lee Aday d/b/a Meatloaf but to the late Don Van Vliet d/b/a Captain Beefheart: