Sometimes, when someone tries to put you down either by
passive aggression, blunt insults, or fear itself in the form of a political
statement or remark, it is always handy to have an answer of fine retort, of
stinging rebuke in the form of a blistering putdown. Often there is no answer.
Here are a few of those statements.
Ronald Regan, when he ran for the presidency of the United
States was being hammered about his age, (he was 73 at the time) when he
decided to turn it against his opponent, Walter Mondale, who was 17 years
younger. “I will not make age an
issue of this campaign. I am not going to exploit for political purposes my
opponent’s youth and inexperience.”
During the 1988 United States presidential campaign, Sen.
Lloyd Bentsen shot back at his opponent who had made a comment comparing
himself to Jack Kennedy. “ Senator, I served with Jack Kennedy. I knew Jack
Kennedy; Jack Kennedy was a friend of mine. Senator, you’re no Jack Kennedy.
Dennis Healey, an English MP, who in 1978, after being
attacked by a political opponent about his salary, stung back by remarking
dryly: “The attack was like being savaged by a dead sheep.”
In 2010, Michael Graham, an American talk show host from
Boston, who had just criticized President Obama about his health care reform
bill on an Irish chat show, was rounded on by the Irish President, Michael D
Higgins who said: “ You’re about as late an arrival in Irish politics as Sarah
Plain is in American politics, and both of you have the same tactic which is to
get a large crowd, whip them up, try to discover what it is that create their
fear, work on that and feed it right back and get a frenzy.”
The most political charged and frightening putdown statement
of the 1980’s came from the IRA after they tried to bomb Margaret Thatcher and
her entourage with many others at a hotel in Brighton in England: “ Today we
were unlucky, but remember we only have to be lucky once- you will have to be
lucky always.”
Barry Clifford
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