right there in black and white

"(CNN) If there were any doubts about how important South Carolina is to Rick Santorum's Republican nomination hopes, he erased them on Sunday.
     Speaking in ominous terms, Santorum urged a crowd at Stax Original Restaurant in Greenville to make their voices heard in the January 21 primary and vote for the one true 'Reagan conservative' in the race.
     'You have an opportunity in this election to speak very loudly,' he said. 'You are going to see this race coming into South Carolina with a lot on the line.'
     Santorum called the 2012 election 'the most critical election maybe since 1860' -- the election that presaged the Civil War -- and said the stakes could not be higher in November.
     In an implicit shot at GOP frontrunner Mitt Romney, Santorum said South Carolina must vote for a candidate who offers a 'bold stark contrast' to President Barack Obama."
— NEWS 4 Jax.com
Read more...

"Republican Newt Gingrich told a Georgia audience on Friday evening that the 2012 presidential election is the most consequential since the 1860 race that elected Abraham Lincoln to the White House and was soon followed by the Civil War.
     Addressing the Georgia Republican Party's convention, Gingrich said the nation is at a crossroads and that the re-election of Democratic President Barack Obama would lead to four more years of 'radical left-wing values' that would drive the nation to ruin."
— Associated Press (via MSNBC)
Read more...

"The United States presidential election of 1860 was a quadrennial election, held on November 6, 1860, for the office of President of the United States and the immediate impetus for the outbreak of the American Civil War. The nation had been divided throughout the 1850s on questions surrounding the expansion of slavery and the rights of slave owners.
     In 1860, these issues finally came to a head. As a result of conflicting regional interests, the Democratic Party broke into Northern and Southern factions, and a new Constitutional Union Party appeared. In the face of a divided and dispirited opposition, the Republican Party, dominant in the North, secured enough electoral votes to put Abraham Lincoln in the White House with very little support from the South. Within a few months of the election, seven Southern states, led by South Carolina, responded with declarations of secession, which was rejected as illegal by outgoing President James Buchanan and President-elect Lincoln. Four additional Southern states seceded after the Battle of Fort Sumter."
— Wikipedia
Read more...

"I said don't tear me up." — Mick Jagger

Photo: Man Ray

" [...] One kind of 'holy tear' defined by Church analysts is 'the tear of compassion.' This is Clinton’s tear. Humbly, he weeps not for himself but for the suffering voter. A second kind of 'holy tear' is the 'tear of love.' This is Dole’s you-feel-my-pain tear. Dole mists up when he thinks not about his wounds as such but about the people of the little provincial town who, when the wounds left him helpless, helped him. Clinton weeps when he listens, Dole when he speaks…."
— Nicholas Jenkins, quoted by Erin Overby (The New Yorker)
Read more...

"John Boehner's emotions nearly got the best of him late Tuesday night, as he addressed news that the GOP had taken majority control of the House of Representatives with a quivered lip, a quavering voice and perhaps a few tears. [...]
     Perhaps it shouldn't be a surprise that the emotional moment gave the man who is likely to become the next Speaker of the House the sniffles, especially considering his propensity for crying."
— The Huffington Post
Read more...

"Former House Speaker Newt Gingrich (R-Ga.) is not known for emotional displays, but started to cry Friday morning when he was asked to talk about his mother during a town hall forum here with an audience mostly of moms.
     'Well, first of all you'll get me all teary-eyed. Callista will tell you, I get teary-eyed every time we sing Christmas carols,' Gingrich said, beginning to lose his composure when asked by GOP pollster Frank Luntz about his mom, Kit Gingrich, who died in 2003 at age 77."
— The Huffington Post
Read more...

"Oscar Wilde, revolting against the sappiness of Victorian sentimental culture, wrote that 'one would have to have a heart of stone to read the death of Little Nell without laughing.' Aldous Huxley, too, was one of many who, from Dickens's heyday to the present, complained that his sentimentality was caused by a refusal to think, by 'overflow, nothing else.' Tears of truth, tears of tribute, tears of empathy, tears of devotion, tears as the ultimate mark of a sincere and truthful heart: these are not foreign to us; the basic ideas are still part of our culture of crying. But we also know that emotional life is more complex and less innocent than these eighteenth- and nineteenth-century texts would have us believe. And we also know about tears of humiliation, frustration, and manipulation—tears that have nothing to do with sincerity. [...]
     Given the source of the metaphor, the fact that crocodile tears mask other motives should not be surprising. When crocodiles fully extend their jaws to swallow a victim, the crocodile's lacrimal ducts are squeezed, and excess lubricating tears are produced. Real crocodiles' tears are in fact meaningless in emotional terms. Metaphorical crocodiles' tears are an emotional diversionary tactic, a kind of camouflage for metaphorical teeth."
— Tom Lutz, (Crying: The Natural and Cultural History of Tears) The New York Times
Read more...