Well, Bunkie, it was Will Rogers, as quoted in The New York Times, September 30, 1923 (according to sources).

What became Rogers’ trademark quip has become famous, probably because of its simplicity and because millions of Americans could say the same, particularly in the 20th century before television news — as a poor journalistic cousin — became a main source of news and information.

Of course, things are never as simple as they seem, and the entire Times quote probably was “All I know is what I read in the newspapers and see with my own eyes as I wander from hither to thither.” Which, on reflection, makes more sense as something said by the eminently sensible Rogers.

Most people who have been paying attention know that in addition to television news’s popularity, there’s been a world of things negatively affecting America’s newspapers in the 85-plus years since Rogers’ self-deprecating and mildly sarcastic remark concerning newspapers and their keeping people informed — or not — was in The Times. They include declining readership because of television news — and now the Internet — and an overall decline in Americans reading anything, for that matter.

In recent years, paid subscriptions and advertising revenue have fallen and basic costs have increased. And many newspapers, now owned by big national chains whose corporate masters too often are much more interested in a fat bottom line than in good journalism, have become near-empty shells of what they once were. Now, George W. Bush and the Republicans’ Great Recession have pushed the newspaper industry in general into an Edgar Allen Poe-style vortex, with many newspapers facing House of Usher-style ruination.

Americans who think we can do without newspapers apparently don’t seem to realize that real reporting about what is going on that affects them has its roots in newspaper reporting — that television news generally tags along after the newspaper watchdog — that so-called Internet news (aside from newspapers’ websites) mostly picks up scraps of what the newspaper watchdogs dig up — that most local and state news of consequence originates with newspapers — that newspapers have been and will continue to be the principal watchdogs that smell out and dig up and confront excesses and corruption and misfeasance and malfeasance in business and industry and government and other segments of society.

What Thomas Jefferson said is as true today as it was more than 200 years ago.

“The basis of our governments being the opinion of the people, the very first object should be to keep that right; and were it left to me to decide whether we should have a government without newspapers or newspapers without a government, I should not hesitate a moment to prefer the latter. But I should mean that every man should receive those papers and be capable of reading them.”

Lots of thoughtful commentators and analysts have heeded TR’s pronouncement, particularly since mid-2002. Those commentators and analysts have been far from servile — have, according to TR’s lights, been patriotic and far removed from committing moral treason, have not stood by the president when he’s been wrong.

With George W. Bush as president, it’s been easy for anyone who can objectively and pragmatically put two and two together not to be servile — easy to be patriotic and far removed from committing moral treason — easy to properly criticize Bush as president and to point out and oppose the wrongs that he and the members of his administration have committed.

Isn’t it a shame that the land of Washington and Jefferson and Madison and Lincoln and Teddy Roosevelt and Franklin Roosevelt and Truman and Eisenhower has had a president whom it shamefully and inexplicably re-elected, whose legacy is as disastrous as George W. Bush’s?

The record is one that should sadden all Americans because it has sullied our country’s legacy and history.

Probably some do, some don’t. But the friendly Green Dog is providing a baker’s dozen of something here, Bunkie.  Following are 13 quotations that when uttered or written had nothing to do with the internationally critical situation occurring now in Israel/Gaza.  Conversely, because of their sentiments, the quotations have everything to do with what’s been going on between the Israelis and Palestinians, now and for the past 60-plus years.

Read the quotations and see if you might agree…

“War may sometimes be a necessary evil. But no matter how necessary, it is always an evil, never a good. We will not learn how to live together in peace by killing each other’s children.” — Jimmy Carter

“One is left with the horrible feeling now that war settles nothing; that to win a war is as disastrous as to lose one.” – Agatha Christie

“I object to violence because when it appears to do no good, the good is only temporary, the evil it does is permanent.” – Mahatma Gandhi

“What difference does it make to the dead, the orphans and the homeless, whether the mad destruction is wrought under the name of totalitarianism or the holy name of liberty or democracy?” – Mahatma Gandhi

“What a cruel thing is war: to separate and destroy families and friends, and mar the purest joys and happiness God has granted us in this world; to fill our hearts with hatred instead of love for our neighbors, and to devastate the fair face of this beautiful world.” — Robert E. Lee

“A man who takes away another man’s freedom is a prisoner of hatred; he is locked behind the bars of prejudice and narrow-mindedness. I am not truly free if I am taking away someone else’s freedom, just as surely as I am not free when my freedom is taken from me. The oppressed and the oppressor alike are robbed of their humanity. – Nelson Mandela

“War-making doesn’t stop war-making. If it did, our problems would have stopped millennia ago.” – Colman McCarthy

“He who fights with monsters should be careful lest he thereby become a monster.” – Friedrich Nietzsche

“War, hatred, and violence all spring from one infernal idea: that one person, race, creed, or culture is better than another.” – Laurence Overmire

“He that would make his own liberty secure must guard even his enemy from oppression; for if he violates this duty, he establishes a precedent that will reach to himself.” – Thomas Paine

“Can anything be stupider than that a man has the right to kill me because he lives on the other side of a river and his ruler has a quarrel with mine, though I have not quarreled with him?” – Blaise Pascal

“And so, to the end of history, murder shall breed murder, always in the name of right and honor and peace, until the gods are tired of blood and create a race that can understand.” – George Bernard Shaw

“It is a weakness of your human nature to hate those whom you have wronged.” – Publius Cornelius Tacitus

Like the preceding baker’s-dozen quotations, what’s been going on in Israel/Gaza is a complex situation of monstrous duration and proportions and consequences for both sides, each of which claims the moral high ground and each of which is right and each of which is wrong and each of which to varying degrees has been wronged.  The situation, of course, has involved wronged people who essentially are on neither side.

Logically considering Gaza and what surrounds the situation surely tests the reasoning of any commentator or analyst. Those who pass the test find fault with both sides as well as justification to some extent for what’s occurring on both sides — except any justification for the deaths and suffering of innocent people, including children, which Israel has inflicted to greater degree on Gazans in the name of defending itself against attacks by Hamas extremists in Gaza.

You got it, Bunkie.  Puppets — on strings, which makes them marionettes. In the 1960 movie starring Elvis, in which he played a G.I. stationed in post-war Germany and made right after he got out of the for-real U.S. Army, there’s a sequence of Elvis on a date with his German girlfriend.  They stroll by a marionette show where he woos her with the song “Wooden Heart.” 

The chorus –

There’re no strings upon this love of mine
It was always you from the start
Treat me nice
Treat me good
Treat me like you really should
‘Cause I’m not made of wood
And I don’t have a wooden heart

Pinocchio, of course, was the wooden marionette brought to life by a fairy, who tells him in the 1940 film that he can get his wish of becoming a real boy if he proves himself “brave, truthful, and unselfish.” The puppet’s adventures in becoming a real boy include him singing the song “There Are No Strings on Me” in company with some marionettes that do have strings. A verse –

I’ve got no strings
So I have fun
I’m not tied up to anyone
They’ve got strings
But you can see
There are no strings on me.

Which brings to mind someone who apparently has had someone pulling his strings for the past eight or so years — George Bush. The string-puller? Well, Dick Cheney — aka “Darth Cheney.” And that’s what this post is about — Darth Cheney and the force he tragically brought to bear on the office of president, on national and foreign and fiscal policy, on the late Republican-controlled Congress, on the courts and justice, on our tradition of democratic self-rule, on truth and openness and accountability in government, ad nauseum.

Yep. A spokesman for the Iraqi Higher Judicial Court said that a conviction would carry a sentence of up to two years in prison for Muntadhar al-Zeidi. Apparently neither Bush nor the Iraqi prime minister, Nouri al-Maliki, who was standing beside Bush when the now-famous factious flinging of footwear occurred, have sought charges against al-Zeidi.  But the judicial official who investigated the incident said there was no legal option to drop the case.

Al-Zeidi has been criticized editorially in some American newspapers — generally because what he did as a journalist was “unprofessional,” that he should have remained objective and detached from any personal feelings regarding Bush and what Bush’s policies and actions have wrought in Iraq.

Of course, some of the same newspapers have not remained objective and detached re American involvement in Iraq — nor were they so during the Bush administration’s build-up to the unprovoked invasion of the country.

There is a different point of view in the Arab world, as pointed out in a commentary critical of Bush written by an exile from the Saddam Hussein regime who now lives in England that was in the British newspaper, The Guardian –

“As the Iraqi and Arab satellite stations switched from the live press conference to reporting reaction to the event, the stunned presenters and reporters were swept away by popular expressions of joy in the streets, from Baghdad to Gaza to Casablanca. TV stations and media websites were inundated with messages of adulation. The instant reply to any criticism of ‘insulting a guest’ was this: ‘Bush is a mass murderer and a war criminal who sneaked into Baghdad. He killed a million Iraqis. He burned the country down.’”

There appear to have been far more media commentaries throughout the world — non-Arab countries included — that applauded al-Zeidi’s actions than condemned them. And not a few commentaries in American newspapers and American-based Internet magazines thoughtfully and objectively pointed out the significance of the Iraqi newsman’s W. gesture. Some applauded the action.

A Pittsburgh newspaper commentator pointed out this –

That Bush’s having “made such a bloody mess of Iraq that shoe-throwers are instantly elevated to the status of heroes is yet another proof of his talent for incompetence. That is all beside the point. You can say that his own actions earned him the contempt of toe-exposing people everywhere. But, my friends, we are the ones who put him in office… collectively enough Americans did vote for him that we are all shamed by this late rain of boots adding a postscript to the footprints of history. There are not enough shoes and sandals in Iraq to make the point of our joint responsibility that this man is in office.”