Wrapping up the Media Research Center’s “Best Notable Quotables of 2013,” it's time to present the “Quote of the Year” for 2013, and the top two runners-up, as selected by our panel of judges.
Past “winners” include Discover magazine's Melissa Lafsky, who took the prize in 2009 for this reflection on Mary Jo Kopechne, who drowned in the back seat of Senator Ted Kennedy's car four decades earlier: “[One wonders what] Mary Jo Kopechne would have had to say about Ted’s death, and what she’d have thought of the life and career that are being (rightfully) heralded. Who knows — maybe she’d feel it was worth it.”
In 1998, then-Time contributor Nina Burleigh was recognized for declaring how she “would be happy to give him [Bill Clinton] a blow job just to thank him for keeping abortion legal. I think American women should be lining up with their presidential kneepads on to show their gratitude for keeping the theocracy off our backs.” (This year’s winners and corresponding videos after the jump.)
“Winning” for 2013, MSNBC's Martin Bashir, who ended up losing his job over reprehensible comments made on November 15 about 2008 vice presidential nominee Sarah Palin:
“One of the most comprehensive first-person accounts of slavery comes from the personal diary of a man called Thomas Thistlewood, who kept copious notes for 39 years....In 1756, he records that ‘a slave named Darby catched eating canes; had him well flogged and pickled, then made Hector, another slave, s-h-i-t in his mouth.’ This became known as ‘Darby’s Dose,’ a punishment invented by Thistlewood that spoke only of the slave owners’ savagery and inhumanity.... When Mrs. Palin invoked slavery, she doesn’t just prove her rank ignorance. She confirms that if anyone truly qualified for a dose of discipline from Thomas Thistlewood, then she would be the outstanding candidate.”
Runner-up, MSNBC's Ed Schultz, for strenuously praising the dysfunctional ObamaCare Web site on September 30, just a few hours before it crashed in an embarrassing spectacle:
“This is the Web site folks, HealthCare.gov. If you go to this Web site, you will find out how easy it is to read, how easy it is to navigate all the information, all the basic questions, and all the direction you need to take to get involved, to get health care. This is a great guide, if I may say, for any of you out there who feel so confused by all of these right-wing commercials that are just permeating through your television screen.”
And finally, New York Times writer Tom Friedman, who in an April 21 column ludicrously used the tragedy of the Boston Marathon bombing to argue for a tax on fossil fuels such as oil or coal:
“Until we fully understand what turned two brothers who allegedly perpetrated the Boston Marathon bombings into murderers, it is hard to make any policy recommendation other than this: We need to redouble our efforts to make America stronger and healthier so it remains a vibrant counterexample to whatever bigoted ideology may have gripped these young men....And the best place to start is with a carbon tax.”
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