Category: Best Line of the Day

Clever turns of phrase, special splashes of wit, provocative insight — all in a sentence or two.

Redux post of the day (and a best line)

From three years ago tomorrow.

Quick thinking

A Florida senior citizen drove his brand new Corvette convertible out of the dealership. Taking off down the road, he pushed it to 80 mph, enjoying the wind blowing through what little hair he had left.

“Amazing,” he thought as he flew down I-75, pushing the pedal even more. Looking in his rear view mirror, he saw the state trooper behind him, blue lights flashing and siren blaring. He floored it to 100 mph, then 110, then 120.

Suddenly he thought, “What am I doing? I’m too old for this,” and pulled over to await the trooper’s arrival. Pulling in behind him, the trooper walked up to the Corvette, looked at his watch and said, “Sir, my shift ends in 30 minutes. Today is Friday. If you can give me a reason for speeding that I’ve never heard before, I’ll let you go.”

The old gentleman paused. Then said, “Three years ago, my wife ran off with a Florida State Trooper. I thought you were bringing her back.”

“Have a good day, Sir,” replied the trooper.

Line of the day

“In fact if you follow Fox News and the Limbaugh/Hannity afternoon radio crew, this summer’s blowout has almost seemed like an intentional echo of the notorious Radio Rwanda broadcasts ‘warning’ Hutus that they were about to be attacked and killed by conspiring Tutsis, broadcasts that led to massacres of Tutsis by Hutus acting in ‘self-defense.’ ”

Matt Taibbi

He has examples of their inflammatory talk.

And this:

“There’s nothing in the world more tired than a progressive blogger like me flipping out over the latest idiocies emanating from the Fox News crowd. But this summer’s media hate-fest is different than anything we’ve seen before. What we’re watching is a calculated campaign to demonize blacks, Mexicans, and gays and convince a plurality of economically-depressed white voters that they are under imminent legal and perhaps even physical attack by a conspiracy of leftist nonwhites. They’re telling these people that their government is illegitimate and criminal and unironically urging secession and revolution.”

You should read Taibbi’s whole post.

Worst line of the day

Social Security is a “milk cow with 310 million tits.”

Alan Simpson, chairman of the President’s deficit commission

For now, let’s dedicate the next playing of Cee-Lo’s hit track to Alan Simpson.

And if the President doesn’t fire Simpson, we can dedicate the subsequent playing to the President.

[Atrios calls the deficit commission the catfood commission in anticipation of what they’ll leave us to live on.]

Still one of my favorite best lines

I enjoy this story about Julia Thorne, the first Mrs. John Kerry, posted here originally three six years ago:

When she was interviewed for the Washingtonian story [1996], Thorne said she didn’t want to get married again. However, she hadn’t totally soured on love.

“I went to a Wyoming ranch every summer and one year a man came out in the ranch truck to meet me. I saw him and I thought: ‘This man looks like a middle-aged hippie alcoholic.’ And he looked at me and thought: ‘She looks like a bitch on wheels.’ And we’ve been together ever since.”

Thorne and her husband, Richard Charlesworth, now live in Montana.

Best line of the day

“Whatever happens, they say afterwards, it must have been Fate. People are always a little confused about this, as they are in the case of miracles. When someone is saved from certain death by a strange concatenation of circumstances, they say that’s a miracle. But of course if someone is killed by a freak chain of events — the oil just spilled there, the safety fence just broke there — that must also be a miracle. Just because it’s not nice doesn’t mean it’s not miraculous.”

Terry Pratchett quoted by Ask the Pilot’s Patrick Smith. Smith points out that when people survive air crashes it’s because the planes were engineered that way and the crews trained.

Best line of the day

“I read omnivorously, I always have, my entire life. I would rather be dead than not read. So, there’s always time for that. I read while I eat, and our whole family did. We all had very bad manners at the table. All of our books are stained with spaghetti sauce, and that sort of thing.”

E. Annie Proulx, who turns 75 today, from a worth-reading profile at The Writer’s Almanac with Garrison Keillor.

Best line of the day

SHIRLEY SHERROD: Well, working with him made me see that it’s really about those who have versus those who don’t.

AUDIENCE: That’s right.

SHERROD: You know, and they could be black, and they could be white, they could be Hispanic. And it made me realize then that I needed to work to help poor people — those who don’t have access the way others have.

From that part of her speech NOT shown on Fox.

Best line of the day

This is why I have always loved Toy Story II more than Toy Story I. The first Toy Story was brilliant and revolutionary and a landmark — no one had ever done a computer animated movie like it before. But the second Toy Story was true greatness … it was a little bit funnier, a little bit more touching (Jessie’s song is one of the great moments in recent movie history), and — more than anything — it was second. The first is inspiration. The second belongs to the power of resolve. Great second albums, great second seasons, great second books just impress me more than debuts.

Joe Posnanski

From a fine tribute to Dean Smith.

Maybe I should just have a best Posnanski, best Taibbi, best Pierce, etc., line of the day.