“Ja. Not many people know this, but the fuhrer was descended from a long line of English queens.”

“I’m not going to lie to you; that did not go as planned.”

“Mr. President, I’m not saying we wouldn’t get our hair mussed. But I do say no more than ten to twenty million killed, tops.”

Dr. Strangelove or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb (1964)

There’s a whole site devoted to this sort of animated gif/quote combination. Go check it out. If you’re a movie fan, plan on spending some time there.

“I’ve seen things you people wouldn’t believe. Attack ships on fire off the shoulder of Orion. I watched C-beams glitter in the dark near the Tannhauser Gate. All those moments will be lost in time like tears in rain. … Time to die.”

Blade Runner (1982)

From Rich Cohen‘s original piece in Vanity Fair (which led to his collaboration on the book):

Jerry opened a management company with Marty Kummer and Bernie Brillstein, who later became Bernie Brillstein, but was then just Bernie Brillstein. Offices in New York and L.A. Nineteen sixty-four. (It was during these years that Jerry moved west and married Jane Morgan, a singer and former client. They have four children and four grandchildren.)

“I was renting out places and putting on shows,” he told me. “The guys who ran the club rooms used to give me dead stretch in their calendars to invent: ‘A Night in Paris.’ ‘A Night in London.’ Nutty stuff. Scrap.”

Jerry calls these his Broadway Danny Rose years—years of improvisation, of shtick. Woody Allen had the office next door in New York, and Jerry wonders if the idea for Danny Rose came while Woody was riding the elevator with Jerry’s clients—the Four Seasons were the biggest, but there were torch singers, acrobats, just about anyone who came through the door.

The act that defines the era (for Jerry) is Kimo Lee and the Modernasians, “a sword dancer and two Hawaiian girls that danced like this,” said Jerry, swaying. They played the Latin Quarter, in Manhattan, for $750 a week.

“Barbara Walters and I used to sit backstage and watch,” Jerry said, “because [her father] Lou owned the Latin Quarter.”

Pick up his story about putting his hands and feet into the wet concrete in front of Mann’s Chinese Theater (starts at about 2:07):

“Rush Limbaugh said he hopes this administration fails,” Sykes began. “So you’re saying, ‘I hope America fails’, you’re, like, ‘I don’t care about people losing their homes, their jobs, our soldiers in Iraq’. He just wants the country to fail.

“To me, that’s treason. He’s not saying anything differently than what Osama bin Laden is
saying. You know, you might want to look into this, sir, because I think Rush Limbaugh was the 20th hijacker. But he was just so strung out on OxyContin he missed his flight. Rush Limbaugh, I hope the country fails, I hope his kidneys fail, how about that? He needs a good waterboarding, that’s what he needs.”

It wasn’t funny.  Saying you hope someone dies is never funny.  It’s not supposed to be.  It’s no more entertaining than Limbaugh’s original hope that Obama fails.

Newsflash: she wasn’t joking.  Neither was Limbaugh.  Sadly I really don’t expect better behavior from either of them.  If anything, having seen Wanda’s act before, which is consistently nasty and not always my cup o’ tea, I was relieved she toned it down as much as she did.

She knew she went too far.  She even said so right there at the podium.  Let’s face it, Stephen Colbert set the bar extremely high for these things — just as George W. Bush set the bar low for the President himself … lest we forget:

The press didn’t cause us to go to war in Iraq, he said; a general did.

Guess what, Jeff, 70% of Americans weren’t led to believe that Saddam Hussein was behind 9/11 by “a general”. You own that as much as anyone in American, except perhaps the original liars, Dick Cheney and George Bush, whom you broadcast with abandon and without any real reporting.

And I’ve been curious about this for some time, how come we had a certifiable psychopath and ignoramus as president for eight years, along with his megalomaniacal sidekick, and no one at NBC seemed to notice? Probably not your fault, though, in spite of your primary importance at the top of our watchdog TV press and the keen, vigilant eye of crack journalists like Brian Williams and David Gregory. Keep up the great work.

Prior to Bartlet’s first SOTU speech, he briefs the Assistant Undersecretary of Mining who, according to custom, is the sole member of the cabinet to remain behind — in case the US Capitol is destroyed in an attack.