“We have every mixture you can have. I have a black, a woman, two Jews and a cripple. And we have talent.”
- James G. Watt, 1983
“I’ve got several gay men, a couple of lesbian women, a couple of Islamic volunteers, I’ve got a physically handicapped woman, and a woman who has been living on social security benefits for many years in real poverty.”
- Jan Krol, 2005
[UPDATE] A bit more explanation is perhaps in order here. The first quote is something I heard on a tv show about Reagan at some point. The guy who delivered it (Reagan’s Secretary of the Interior) was a total dick and was forced to resign about 10 days later. (Though in a lot of ways his nutso evangelical Christian background would probably fit in real well with the current administration). Anyway, his delivery of the line was so odd that it stuck in my head, and it’s one of those things that whenever I hear somebody listing stuff off, I subconsciously add “a woman, two jews and a cripple” to the end of it. (In the same way that say, “Dogs & Cats… Living together!” from Ghostbusters is my mental sort of shorthand for, “Man, this situation is getting totally screwed up!”) So the point of all this is, when I read the second guy’s quote on BoingBoing yesterday, it instantly reminded me of the first one. But it’s sort of amusing, since the second guy is actually trying to do something sort of admirable with his lesbian and islamic volunteers. Well, that about does her, wraps her all up, I guess. Oh, except the first guy’s middle name is Gaius. So there’s that. =)