Outrageous!

The conservative newspaper Human Events has published a list of the "Top 10 Most Outrageous Liberal Media Quotes From the Last 20 Years." We'll try to overlook the fact that "quotes" is a verb, and that the right word here would be "quotations." A common mistake that peeves some people....But let me not get sidetracked on that one. Again.

Rick Perlstein points this item out because our mutual friend John Leonard made the cut, Not only that, but he's at the top spot, for this, from the CBS show Sunday Morning in 1993::

In the plague years of the 1980s -- that low decade of denial, indifference, hostility, opportunism and idiocy -- government fiddled and medicine diddled, and the media were silent or hysterical. A gerontocratic Ronald Reagan took this [AIDS] plague less seriously than Gerald Ford had taken swine flu. After all, he didn't need the ghettos and he didn't want the gays.

Touchy, aren't we, Human Events? I've always figured that title was ironic, by the way. A newspaper that celebrates Latin American military guys with nicknames like "Blowtorch" seems more partial to the inhuman.

Anyway, way to go, John! I hope the memoir is going well. This could be part of it.