Selective Outrage Quotes

The stupidity of tribalism has made politics primarily about partisan identities, not persuasion or policy. The screamers on the right and left fuel one another. In a nation as big as ours, there is always someone somewhere saying something stupid—but tribalism takes this fact as its lifeblood. And it’s the excuse for otherwise civic-minded Americans to ignore the nuts in their own party and obsess only over the nuts in the other party. We’re tempted to think that the enemy of my enemy is my friend. It takes a genuine leader to remind us that most of the time, the enemy of our enemy is still a jackass.

Right now, as I'm typing this, some liberal somewhere is saying something unforgivable about Michelle Bachmann or Ann Coulter. I condemn you, whoever you are! But I'm not going to conduct a house-to-house search to find you.

Strange how blind people are! They are horrified by the torture chambers of the Middle Ages, but their arsenals fill them with pride!

Historical hypocrites have themselves carried out the very human rights abuses that they suddenly decide warrant intervention elsewhere.

Some on the Left can be very selective about the kinds of violence they oppose. For some of them, gun violence is a crime to be decried - unless it is committed by an 'aggrieved' victim against what they consider a corrupt institution.

I've told Michael Jackson jokes. If you got really technical, you could say those are jokes about child molestation. You could, if you got technical. A lot of this is just selective outrage because honestly, the audience are the ones that tell us that something shouldn't be spoken. The audience lets us know. And I've never, in my almost 30 years of being a comedian, seen a comedian continue to tell a joke that the audience doesn't respond to. I've never seen it.

People love WikiLeaks when it is exposing corruption in their opponents. People oppose WikiLeaks when it is exposing corruption or dangerous behavior in themselves.

The president and other government officials denounce school violence, yet still advocate for endless undeclared wars abroad and easy abortion at home. U.S. drone strikes kill thousands, but nobody in America holds vigils or devotes much news coverage to those victims, many of which are children, albeit, of a different color.

In the sublime days before 11 September 2001, when the powerful were routinely attacking and terrorising the weak, and those dying were black or brown-skinned non-people living in faraway places such as Zaire and Guatemala, there was no terrorism. When the weak attacked the powerful, spectacularly on 9/11, there was terrorism.

These people walk by a widow deformed by leprosy...walk by children dressed in rags living in the street, and they think, 'Business as usual.' But if they perceive a slight against God, it is a different story. Their faces go red, their chests heave mightily, they sputter angry words. The degree of their indignation is astonishing. Their resolve is frightening.

There are some natures which never grow large enough to speak out and say a bad act is a bad act, until they have inquired into the politics or the nationality of the man who did it.

There's a lot of other [than Donald Trump] people that say things you may call insulting, but no one seems to care about that.

If a man has his throat cut in Paris, it's a murder. If 50,000 people are murdered in the east, it is a question.

If a politician murders his mother, the first response of the press or of his opponents will likely be not that it was a terrible thing to do, but rather that in a statement made six years before he had gone on record as being opposed to matricide.

How can the Republicans get away with picking their Dennis Kucinich, but when - if the Democrats tried it, all hell would break lose?

You have plenty of liberals out there who are all for the cops raiding their political enemies, they're all for the cops doing whatever they have to do to get whatever goods they want on their political enemies. And yet the Patriot Act comes, oh, you can't do it, it's an invasion of privacy. And yet in some cases they don't care about other people's privacy. Privacy is irrelevant to them depending on what the target is.

It's only terrorism if they do it to us. When we do much worse to them, it's not terrorism.

Actions are held to be good or bad, not on their own merits, but according to who does them. There is almost no kind of outrage-torture, imprisonment without trial, assassination, the bombing of civilians-which does not change its moral color when it is committed by 'our' side. The nationalist not only does not disapprove of atrocities committed by his own side, he has a remarkable capacity for not even hearing about them.

No matter how much evidence we uncover about this case or any others involving Mr. Clinton, millions of Americans simply will not care - they will excuse the corruption because they like Bill Clinton.

We soothe our consciences with hashtag activism and feigned disdain for a country we’d never dream of leaving.

If you only take offense when the president of your party is compared to Hitler, then you're part of the problem.

The left's obsession with the high incomes of corporate executives never seems to extend to equally high - or higher - incomes of professional athletes, entertainers, or best-selling authors like Danielle Steel.

The media tries to destroy Republicans who make little faux pas and they start telling everybody how dumb and stupid or uncaring they are. They're so self-absorbed, so selfish and so forth. With Obama, it's always, "There's nothing to see here, because he's a dream of a guy to begin with" and all that. "He missed the Gulf of Mexico? So what! He thinks there are 57 states? Big deal! At least he's trying; at least he cares," is the way it goes.

Barack Obama makes more gaffes than George Bush and Sarah Palin combined and is never called on it.

Many American pundits and foreign policy experts love to depict themselves as crusaders for human rights, but it almost always takes the form of condemning other governments, never their own.