Good morning, it's Friday, Oct 6, 2023, and the day of the week when I share a quote meant to be enlightening and uplifting.
It was a little difficult this week, if your frame of reference is official Washington. I found myself recalling the words of Michael Fanone, the Washington, D.C., police officer who was viciously beaten at the U.S. Capitol by the MAGA mob on Jan. 6, 2021. After meeting with Republican House leader Kevin McCarthy months later, in June 2021, Fanone was asked by reporters for his reaction.
"This experience for me is not something that I enjoy doing," said the ex-lawman. "I don't want to be up here on Capitol Hill. I want to be with my daughters."
Fanone added one other thought: "I need a drink."
That's exactly how I felt after watching House Democrats unanimously vote in lockstep with eight incoherent Republican rebels to defenestrate McCarthy this week, the first House speaker in U.S. history. Unlike John Boehner, who famously enjoyed a glass (or two) of merlot, McCarthy isn't a big drinker, but I imagine he felt the same way Tuesday night. And so, to recapture the optimistic spirit of the Morning Note, I'll reprise three or four of my favorite quotes about wine, ending of course, with Benjamin Franklin, whom I've quoted before in this space on this same subject.
-- "Wine is the most civilized thing in the world. In Europe we thought of wine as something as healthy and normal as food and also a great giver of happiness and well being and delight. Drinking wine was not a snobbism nor a sign of sophistication nor a cult; it was as natural as eating and to me as necessary." -- Ernest Hemingway, A Moveable Feast
-- "Once, in the wilds of Afghanistan, I lost my corkscrew, and we were forced to living on nothing but food and water for days. -- W.C. Fields, My Little Chickadee
-- "Few things surpass old wine; and they may preach
Who please, the more because they preach in vain,
Let us have wine and women, mirth and laughter,
Sermons and soda-water, the day after." -- Lord Byron, Don Juan
-- "In vino veritas, says the wise man -- Truth is in wine. Before the days of Noah, then, men, having nothing but water to drink, could not discover the truth. Thus they went astray, became abominably wicked, and were justly exterminated by water, which they loved to drink. …
"We hear of the conversion of water into wine at the marriage in Cana as of a miracle. But this conversion is, through the goodness of God, made every day before our eyes. Behold the rain which descends from heaven upon our vineyards; there it enters the roots of the vines, to be changed into wine; a constant proof that God loves us, and loves to see us happy. The miracle in question was only performed to hasten the operation, under circumstances of present necessity, which required it." -- Ben Franklin, in a 1779 letter to André Morellet, a Jesuit philosopher and drinking buddy
And those are our quotes of the week.
Carl M. Cannon is the Washington bureau chief for RealClearPolitics. Reach him on Twitter @CarlCannon
