All’s fair in love and politics

Two weeks ago, I wrote a column about funny quotes, almost all of which were made by celebrities and two politicians.

Quotes by former President George W. Bush and surprisingly brought commentary from readers, all of whom are apparently Republicans.

For full disclosure, let me say I was a Bush supporter, but I had no second thoughts because his quotes are hilarious. Quayle I never cared for, but I thought his comments were without doubt even funnier because they were impossibly lame-brained. How he ever graduated high school, let alone got elected to Congress (I’ll let the urge for a joke slide here) is simply a mystery to me.

Anyhow, one uber-Republican friend of mine with exceptionally large ears, to protect his identity, we’ll call him Hillary, pushed me into a corner and chastised me for failing to have balance in my journalistic endeavors. He said readers need balance and that my public flogging of W. and Dan was grossly unfair and subjective to the point of me appearing to be Keith Obermann or some other MSNBC hack.

Later, as I was leaving the emergency room from being pushed so hard into that corner, I considered his comments and thought I would provide the balance he so forcefully demanded.

So, here a just a few of the comments that have seamlessly flowed from the mouth of our president, Barack Obama:

(Making a joke on “The Tonight Show,” he said, “I have been practicing. … I bowled a 129. It’s like, it was like Special Olympics, or something.”

Obama later apologized to the head of the Special Olympics.

As he prepared to take office and meeting with all the living presidents, he chimed, “I didn’t want to get into a Nancy Reagan thing about doing any séances.”

Obama later apologized to Mrs. Reagan.

“UPS and FedEx are doing just fine, right. It’s the U.S. Post Office that’s always having problems.”

And I thought Obama was for more government-run business like health care and the like.

“The Cambridge Police acted stupidly.”

These comments came after a white policeman arrested black scholar Henry Louis Gates Jr. at his home in Cambridge. Obama later had a “beer summit” or something alcoholic to get the two guys, the cop and the professor, to make nice.

“It’s not surprising, then, they get bitter, they cling to guns or religion or antipathy to people who aren’t like them or anti-immigrant sentiment or anti-trade sentiment as a way to explain their frustration,” he said speaking about his lack of success in winning over small-town, working-class voters like, well, us.

“I’ve now been in 57 states, I think one left to go.” Mr. President please stop. That’s qualifies as a Dan Quayle comment.

“Let me be clear, Guantanamo will be closed in one year and the ‘criminals’ tried in the U.S. within one year.”

Last time I checked, U.S. forces were still in Guantanamo, and just when were those trials?

“The only people who don’t want to disclose the truth are people with something to hide.”

Tell me why again we had to wait for so long for the birth records or why he has withheld his selective service records, his Columbia and Harvard transcripts. As an aside, to date his wife has also refused to release any information on her background.

But enough of this nitpicking. It just wouldn’t be fair for me to recite all of Joe Biden’s gaffes. To those who would say I’m not being fair, let me say this: There are just too many Biden malaprops to fit in this column.

I will leave you with a Nancy Pelosi comment from this year. Newsman Bob Schieffer reminded the congresswoman of her accusation that George W. Bush had “failed” because gasoline had risen to $3 per gallon and unemployment has risen to 5 percent during his administration. To his query about the 9.1 percent jobless rate under Obama’s watch, Pelosi said she didn’t want to talk about “the past.” And I thought that was “the now.”

There you have it; fairness for all. I have no problem ripping everybody, no matter their political persuasion.

I hope Hillary is happy now.