Loose cannons

Wednesday, September 9, 1998 - 10:00

Not socialist

"The time is coming when we [the ALP] will either be a socialist party or we will finish up as a muddle-headed, middle-class, petit-bourgeois, status-seeking party." — Former Labor leader Arthur Calwell, in his 1972 memoirs.

People's choice

"I'm not complaining. I'm just wondering what voters were thinking." — Jerry Kobyluk, a candidate for the Democratic nomination for the US Senate from Oklahoma, who came 2000 votes behind Jacquelyn Ledgerwood, who died a month before the election. The late Ledgerwood is now one of two candidates in a run-off vote.

Who's been scratched?

"It is not a choice of Tweedledum or Tweedledee" — Headline on the election in the August 31 Financial Review.

Have a drink?

"The trouble is that when the two of them sit at a table and look at each other, what are they going to do?" — Brent Scowcroft, former adviser to George Bush, on the Clinton-Yeltsin summit in Moscow.

But good enough for killing

"Some of this is indirect; some of it is inferential. It's hard to hang your hat on any one nugget of it." — A US official, on the "evidence" used to justify Clinton's bombing of a pharmaceutical factory in Sudan.

What's new?

"The market is now basically a casino." — A share trader employed by a western broker on the Budapest share market, quoted in the August 29 Sydney Morning Herald.