The American Spectator

Washington Post

Mary McGrory, two weeks after the Persian Gulf War and still on automatic pilot:

They cheered the Tomahawk missiles. They hung yellow ribbons. Bloodthirstiness decked with sentimentality, was the national mood.

The war showed the American public the kind of president it likes, commanding, headstrong, implacable — and above all lucky. Bush had shown his ruthless streak in his campaign against Michael Dukakis, slamming him with inaccurate charges and innuendoes about his patriotism. War let him show his toughness on the world scene. Democrats despondently talk of canceling their convention bookings. Only a catastrophe could offer them light at the end of the tunnel.

“We had to sit there and take it,” said a Democratic congressman who had clapped his palms sore and leapt often from his seat, sometimes preemptively.

(March 11, 1991)

Santa Barbara News-Press

Still more evidence that Santa Barbara is the fla-fla center of America:

I would like to know how Iraq’s colonization of Kuwait differs from the pilgrims’ colonization of this country when its only inhabitants were native Americans.

To avoid hypocrisy, must we not return to where we come from so that the native Americans’ land can be returned to them?

— Greg Bristol

Santa Barbara

(February 15, 1991)