9 best Alan Simpson quotes
Former Sen. Alan Simpson, the co-chairman of the Simpson-Bowles commission on the debt and deficit, made news Wednesday when POLITICO obtained a scathing letter he wrote to the California Alliance for Retired Americans, referring to them as “greedy geezers,” among other things. It’s not the first time Simpson, who’s known for his hyperbole, has popped off. Here are our top 9 Simpson quotes over the years:
1. “[Social Security is] a milk cow with 310 million tits.” — in an August 2010 email, which he later apologized for.
2. “If this had happened to anybody else in America, it would have been like a sparrow belch in a typhoon.” — Defending his friend, Vice President Dick Cheney in 2006, after Cheney shot a hunting companion in the face while hunting quail.
3. Accused the White House press corps of doing a “sadistic little disservice to your country” for asking President Ronald Reagan questions about Iran in March 1987 for the sake of “sticking it in his bazoo… That’s a bunch of crap.”
4. “Grandchildren now don’t write a thank you for the Christmas presents. They are walking on their pants with their cap on backward, listening to the Enema Man and Snoopy, Snoopy Poop Dog.” — Regarding those ungrateful kids, March 2011, on Fox News.
5. “I watch Republicans, they give each other the saliva test of purity, and then they lose and they bitch for four years.” — — On the need for a socially tolerant, big tent Republican Party, in a Feb. 2012 interview with CBS’s Bob Schieffer.
6. “Telling the truth is the essence of leadership. If you have integrity, nothing else matters. And if you don’t have integrity, nothing else matters. It would be good when the vice president remembers that.” — Slamming Vice President Al Gore on the campaign trail, Oct. 2000, to the Dallas Morning News.
7. “What a wretched group of seniors you must be to use the faces of the very people that we are trying to save, while the ‘greedy geezers’ like you use them as a tool and a front for your nefarious bunch of crap.” — criticizing the California Alliance for Retired Americans for using the faces of youth on a flyer printed to protest Bowles and Simpson.
8. “We’ve got only one thing to say: ‘Klaatu barada nikto.’” — Simpson spokesman Charles Pelkey, using the alien phrase from “The Day the Earth Stood Still,” in a 1994 Associated Press story where they played along with a tabloid report that said Simpson was one of 12 U.S. senators who were space aliens.
9. “He’s a million rubber bands in his resilience” - On Defense Secretary Caspar Weinberger, in Feb. 1985.