Sunday's Quote(s): Rhetoric vs. Substance

Obama and his protagonists have offered a bevy of poignant talking points since the President's State of the Union address last Tuesday.  So have his opponents:

"How do you leftists feel about this?  I know that you all hate Reagan, you have despised Reagan.  Even during the Reagan administration the number one objective of the left has been to revise Reagan history.  I mean all this talk about Reagan cutting taxes for the rich, didn't care about the poor, didn't care about AIDS, didn't care about the homeless.  Reagan was a cold-hearted, mean-spirited extremist.  And these are the people, the ones that have been saying it all these years.

"And now all of a sudden when their little guy gets in trouble, when Obama can't get any traction whatsoever, when he's lost the love, when he's lost all of this messianic stuff that attached itself to him, where do they go?  Do they go to JFK and try to draw analysis and comparison?  No.  They go to LBJ?  No.  They go to Jimmy Carter?  No.  They'd probably love to go to Marx.  They don't dare.  They go to Gorbachev?  No.  They go to Mao Tse-tung?  Only in private.  Who they gonna go to, Reagan, all to draw this illusion that their president, young guy, this man-child is moving to the center?
 

"In 1989 Reagan was warning us of exactly what we've got, and not just in Obama but the Democrat Party at large.  And yet here comes TIME Magazine and the rest of the Drive-By Media trying to tell us, and Obama himself trying to tell us that he's Reagan.  Out of all the presidents, as he prepared for this latest State of the Union debacle, of all the presidents, it was Reagan that he studied.  Well, we know what he really thinks about Reagan.  He's told us in his books: resentment, dislike.

"They think Reagan destroyed America.  They think Reagan set up this situation here where the rich get richer, the poor get poorer, the widening gap between rich and poor, the unfairness, the inequality.  Reagan was the epitome of heartlessness, had no compassion or whatever.  But this just goes to show that when Democrats need to look back to history, when this regime, when the media, the American left needs to look back to history to try to connect with the majority of people in this country, they have to go to one of the greatest Republican presidents of all time and try to pull it off."
-- Rush Limbaugh, responding to both the President's State of the Union address and the upcoming TIME magazine cover of Obama photoshopped with Ronald Reagan; January 27, 2011

Considering his "new" and "historic" status, it's interesting to see how often President Obama is compared to his predecessors.

"It's as if Obama is daring the voters -- and the Republicans -- to prove they really want smaller government.  He's manning the barricades for Obamacare and he's here with yet another spending -- excuse me, investment -- spree. ... Perhaps this is all to be expected from Democrats -- the party of government -- and from a president who from his very first address to Congress has boldly displayed his zeal to fundamentally transform the American social contract and place it on a 'New Foundation' (an Obama slogan that never took)."

-- from "Obama unbowed and undeterred" by syndicated columnist Charles Krauthammer, per The Commercial Appeal; January 29, 2011