Archive
Mudline Archive
STICKS, STONES, BROKEN BONES
During the 2000 Bush-Gore presidential race, we began collecting negative soundbites and posting them weekly on a MUDLINE ticker, as a temporary election feature. But in the aftermath of that tumultuous contest we realized that the tone of public discourse was unlikely to improve, and elected to continue the feature. Unfortunately, we were right; two decades later, incivility is hotter than ever. If you just can’t get enough snark on social media, this mud’s for you.
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July 24, 2024
Trump on Biden: "I kicked that old broken-down pile of crap...He's quitting the race. I got him out of there. That means we have Kamala...She's so bad. She's so pathetic."....Sen. J.D. Vance: "History will remember Joe Biden as not just a quitter, which he is, but as one of the worst presidents in the history of the United States of America. Kamala Harris is a million times worse and everybody knows it."....Rep. Matt Gaetz: "Kamala Harris isn't able to do any job."....Donald Trump Jr.: "She is even more liberal and less competent than Joe, which is really saying something."....Kellyanne Conway: "She does not speak well. She does not work hard."....Rep. Tim Burchett: "One hundred percent she was a DEI hire. When you go down that road, you get mediocrity."....Rep. Harriet Hageman: "Intellectually, just really kind of bottom-of-the-barrel."....Trump on Harris: "Dumb as a rock."....George Takei in response: "Peak Trump. Every accusation is a confession! Trump is so dumb he thinks Hannibal Lecter came from a 'political asylum.'"....Mary L. Trump on her uncle: "His childish nickname for her is 'laughing Kamala' because she feels joy, and joy is something he has never experienced and doesn't understand."....CNN's Van Jones on Gov. Ron Desantis' convention speech: "Sounded like ChatGPT for mean people."....Rep. MTG to British reporter: "You're the cause of President Trump almost being assassinated."....Eric Trump on Dems: "They literally tried to kill him this week."....radio host Joe Rogan on Secret Service: "They have organized assassinations before. And when they organize assassinations, it looks like that."....Rep. Pat Fallon to Secret Service director Kimberly Cheatle at hearing: "Your horrifying ineptitude and your lack of skilled leadership is a disgrace...You should be fired immediately and go back to guarding Doritos."....Rep. MTG on Cheatle: "I've never seen a more incompetent woman in my life...She may be more than incompetent. She may be complicit."....Rep. Nancy Mace to Cheatle at hearing: "You're full of sh*t today...Would you like to use my five minutes to draft your resignation letter?"....Kevin D. Williamson on Vance: "He rails against self-interested billionaires while Peter Thiel scratches him behind the ear."....Vance in 2021: "We are effectively run in this country...by a bunch of childless cat ladies who are miserable at their own lives and the choices they've made. And they want to make the rest of the country miserable too."....Mary L. Trump on her uncle: "In Vance, he found someone who hates women as much as he does; someone who wants to control them as much as he does."....Bette Midler: "Time to ban Viagra, because if pregnancy is 'god's will,' then so is your limp dick."....Garrison Keillor on Trump: "If you saw him a few years ago attempt to comically impersonate the reporter who has cerebral palsy, that is all you need to know about the man. He is not 78, he is 13."....
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July 12, 2024
Trump on the U.S.: "A Third World nation. A joke."....Trump on U.S. economy: "Is collapsing into a cesspool of ruin."....Trump adviser Maxim Gorka on VP Kamala Harris: "She's a DEI hire, right? She's a woman. She's colored."....Donald Trump Jr.: "We're running against a party that wants to take away your AR-15, but they give a vegetable the nuclear codes."....Trump lawyer Alina Habba on Biden: "He can't spell 'Bob' backwards."....Trump on Biden: "He can't work because he's mentally no good. He's shot."....Marco Rubio on Biden: "A figurehead for a shadow government of leftists that are propping him up."....Trump on Biden in debate: "Choked like a dog."....Trump on Biden: "Don't feel sorry for him. He's a very bad guy."....James Carville on Trump: "The one born with a platinum spoon but no moral compass? The pathological liar? The felon? The predator found liable for sexual abuse? The wannabe dictator? The Putin lickspittle?"....Noel Casler: "Biden had a bad night. Trump had a bad 78 years."....Howard Jacobson: "Even slurring his words at eighty-one [Biden] makes more sense than Trump ever did at forty."....Rep. Chip Roy on Kamala Harris: "A DEI vice president."....Rep. Jasmine Crockett on Roy: "Ignorant as all get-out...You can see that he wishes he had half the competency of Vice President Kamala Harris."....challenger Lucas Kunce on Sen. Josh Hawley: "He thinks he should be in charge of what happens in your bedroom, your doctor's office, your workplace, your marriage, and even your own body. It's creepy. It's weird. It's Big Brother bullshit. And it sure as hell isn't his job."....Andrew Sullivan on Biden campaign: "The attempt these last two weeks to insist that the parrot is not, in fact, dead is Monty Python material...The Biden campaign is no more; it has ceased to be; it is bereft of life; it has kicked the bucket, hopped the twig, bit the dust, snuffed it, breathed its last. Now what?"....Andy Borowitz made-up headline: "Trump Screens VP Candidates for any Worrisome Signs of Self-Esteem."....James Carville: "You know how bad Chicago is going to be? We are going to sit shiva for four days."....Trump on Biden: "Everything he does is a lie."....John Fritchey: "Canada must feel like they live in an apartment above a meth lab."....
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June 29, 2024
Bret Stephens on Biden: "His very presence on stage felt like a form of elder abuse."....Jamelle Bouie on Trump: "Deranged and incoherent."....Matt Labash on Biden: "Sounded like a dying humidifier...like he was auditioning for the glue factory."....Frank Bruni: "I'm not sure I'd ever watched Donald Trump lie so incessantly, extravagently and unabashedly, and that's saying something."....Dan McCarthy on Biden: "Seemed to be campaigning from some other century."....Lydia Polgreen: "Trump just lied, lied, and lied, and no one...rebutted him...Trump just got away with something close to murder."....Trump adviser Chris LaCivita: "What happened tonight: Donald Trump fired Joe Biden."....Biden campaign chair Jen O'Malley: "Trump's performance tonight reminded the American people why they fired him four years ago."....Andrew Sullivan on Biden: "The ambling cadaver...This was elder abuse -- inflicted, in part, by his wife."....Rep. Robert Garcia on Trump: "All he did was lie every single time. He lied and lied and lied."....The Cut on Biden: "Clearly, he wasn't on whatever cocktail of amphetamines and Mountain Dew the Trump team had claimed for weeks he'd be taking, although some viewers wishes he were."....Sen. John Fetterman on Dems: "Chill the f*** out."....Rep. Adam Schiff on Trump's return to Capitol Hill to visit with GOP senators and House members: "Bring Your Felon to Work Day."....Andrew Egger on VP contender J.D. Vance: "Easily the most gifted and most enthusiastic s***-shoveler on the shortlist."....Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene on Dr. Anthony Fauci: "Does not deserve to have a license. As a matter of fact, it should be revoked, and he belongs in prison."....white nationalist Nick Fuentes: "We're not free, we're slaves...Russia has order, we have chaos and tyranny."....
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June 12, 2024
Trump on the US: "A failed nation...A very sick country."....Trump, as hush money trial jury went into deliberation: "Mother Teresa could not beat these charges. The charges are rigged. The whole thing is rigged."....Speaker Mike Johnson on guilty verdict: "A shameful day in American history...Ridiculous."....Sen. Marco Rubio: "Exactly the kind of sham trial used against political opponents of the regime in the old Soviet Union."....Rep. Jim Jordan: "This entire trial has been a sham...Legally baseless."....Rep. Steve Scalise: "A defeat for Americans who believe in the critical legal tenet that Justice is blind."....Sen. Ted Cruz: "A travesty of justice...Kangaroo court...This entire trial has been utterly fraudulent."....Sen. Josh Hawley: "A complete and total sham, a mockery."....Gov. Sarah Huckabee Sanders: "A politically motivated sham trial."....Fox host Jesse Watters: "A Soviet-style show trial."....Fox host Jeanine Pirro: "This is what they do in kangaroo courts and third world countries. God help America..."....Laura Ingraham: "Democrats are showing what real power is...the type of power we usually see dictators exercise in China and Cuba and North Korea."....Sean Hannity: "The foundation of our constitutional republic [is] literally dying right before your eyes."....Tucker Carlson: "Anyone who defends this verdict is a danger to you and your family."....Trump: "I am a political prisoner!"....Mehdi Hasan on Trump: "The world's biggest loser, biggest man-child, unable to deal with defeat both at the ballot box and in a jury."....Trump: "I'm here because of crooked Joe Biden...This is purely his weaponization."....Rep. Eric Swalwell: "If you believe in states' rights, except when a jury in that state convicts your nominee for president, you might be in a cult."....Trump on NY Supreme Court Justice Juan Merchan: "He happens to be corrupt. It's the worst confliction that anybody's seen. Nobody has ever seen anything like it."....radio show host Dan Bongino: "Dear Liberal Commie F***wads, Warning you now, we'll be drinking your delicious tears in November."....Garrison Keillor on Trump: "A humorless huckster who's seldom seen smiling, only grimacing, and who's never hugged a small child or petted a dog or embraced his wife or told a joke..."....Colorado Republican Party on LLGBTQ+ people: "Godless groomers...Creeps...Reprobates...Burn all the #Pride flags this June."....Maureen Dowd on US Supreme Court: "It's corrupt, rotten, and hurting America...Hopelessly corroded."....Sen. John Kennedy on Biden: "He's polling right up there with fungal infections...The highest and best use of the President's time at this point would be selling catheters on Late Night TV."....
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May 28, 2024
Ken Burns on Trump: "The opioid of all opioids."....Trump: "Don't allow the worst president in the history of our country to come back and do the final destruction of America..."....Mark Hamill: "The self-own is strong with this one."....Trump on judge in his hush money trial: "Corrupt."....Trump lawyer Todd Blanche on Michael Cohen: "G.L.O.A.T."....Speaker Mike Johnson on Trump trial, two weeks before it went to jury: "A travesty of justice."....Liz Cheney: "I'm surprised that Speaker Johnson wants to be in the 'I cheated on my wife with a porn star' club. I guess he's not that concerned with teaching morality to our young people after all."....Stormy Daniels on Trump: "Real men respond to testimony by being sworn in and taking the stand in court..."....Rep. Matt Gaetz on hush-money trial: "This is a made-up crime. It's the Mr. Potato Head doll of crime."....Trump on Al Capone: "I got indicted more than him. On bulls**t, too. Just bulls**t."....Nikki Haley on Trump, Jan. 2021: "We shouldn't have followed him, and we shouldn't have listened to him. And we can't let that ever happen again."....Trump on Manhattan DA Alvin Bragg: "Fat Alvin...100 percent dishonest."....Trump on hush money case: "A Biden show trial."....Michael Cohen on Trump: "A boorish cartoon misogynist...A Cheeto-dusted cartoon villain...Dictator douchebag."....House Speaker Mike Johnson on same-sex marriage: "A dark harbinger of chaos."....Meghan McCain on Johnson: "We just elected a raging homophobe to Speaker...? Way to break stereotypes and win over hearts and minds!"....Rep. Jasmine Crockett on Rep. MTG: "Bleach blonde, bad built butch body."....Trump at rally: "Jail populations all over the world are way down and these FOOLS back there, the press, the fake news -- they don't want to report it...From Africa, from Asia, from all over the world, they are emptying out their jails into the United States. They're emptying out their mental institutions into the United States, our beautiful country."....Bill Maher on Trump: "I can't put my nervous system on the line every day for every stupid tweet and every bonehead thing he does."....SC Justice Clarence Thomas on DC: "What you are going to find, especially in Washington, is that people are going to pride themselves on being awful. It's a hideous place."....Matt Bao on J.D. Vance's memoir: "If the Pentagon could engineer a fame-seeking missile, it would look a lot like 'Hillbilly Elegy.'"....WaPo review of Gov. Kristi Noem's book "No Going Back": "Mostly a hodgepodge of worn chestnuts and conservative maxims, like a fistful of old coins and buttons found between the stained cushions in a MAGA lounge."....NY Post's Kathleen Parker on Noem: "When a politician writes a book AND gets veneers, she's probably hoping to do some victory smiling as sidekick to a reality-show scowler...They're a match made in the tanning booth."....