Quotes of the Week

Which of the following statements did Nevada Assemblywoman Michele Fiore not make?

• “If these young, hot little girls on campus have a firearm, I wonder how many men will want to assault them. The sexual assaults . . . would go down once these sexual predators get a bullet in their head.”
• “He doesn’t love you. He doesn’t love me.”
• “I am one-hundred percent in compliance with IRS - period."
• “If you have cancer, which I believe is a fungus . . .

The correct answer, of course, is (b), which is taken from Rudy Giuliani’s supposedly off-the-cuff and off-the-record remarks to a group of political donors at New York’s 21 Club. Rudy opened with, “I do not believe, and I know this is a horrible thing to say, but I do not believe that the president loves America.”

My first reaction was that Giuliani had become demented in his never-ending search for the spotlight, but I underestimated the ambitions of the man. A YouGov poll conducted after he spoke found that only 47% of Americans think Obama “loves America,” a number that obscures the huge partisan divide: 69% of Republicans don’t think Obama loves America, three-quarters question his patriotism, and 88% view him unfavorably. These numbers, as Rudy well knows, encourage partisan attack rather than political compromise.

The other three quotes belong to Fiore, who owns a home health-care business and was just removed as legislative majority leader and chair of the Taxation Committee for having more than a million dollars in, um, tax liens.