Jack Abramoff, Please Don’t Make Me Like You

Jack Abramoff said something that impressed me, and frankly, I'm devastated. See, I’m a fool for a good line. It’s how I make a living now, but there is no diminished pleasure from before, when I was just a news junkie reading the papers. It’s one thing for something to happen, but if a participant can come out immediately afterward and toss off a great line about it, the whole event is elevated to another level.
I'll open this to the first ones that pop into my head. Absolutely no editorial control whatsoever. Searching my memory banks for an example, I get a quote Reggie Jackson made when he was still with the Oakland A’s. This goes to show how a good line can stick around. The A’s were a great team but they all hated each other. Clubhouse fights were common; dissension reigned. One day Reggie Jackson got off the team bus and a woman asked him for an autograph. He declined so she said, “Maybe you could get your friends on the bus to sign.” Reggie said, “Mam, this is the Oakland A’s. There are no friends on the bus.”
I just really liked that: “There are no friends on the bus.”
Often a line is so good it becomes the title of the project. What does my wondering thought pattern come up with this morning but Firesign Theater’s “Everything You Know Is Wrong.”
Sometimes a good line can be serious and encapsulate history like John Dean’s classic about the cancer on the presidency. No matter how scurrilous the deliverer, I always like them a little bit more than before, if they come up with something. People in the news are in a position to bore us, so if they’ve entertained us, they deserve some credit for it.
That is why I am currently suffering because Jack Abramoff, a man I loathe, has forced me to kind of like him on some level soley on the basis of a line in the following quote about his crimes: "I was moving a mile a minute and didn't conceive that I could be doing something wrong, and as I got near to the edge I either concealed it or I convinced myself that I wasn't having a problem. I was basically so busy winning that I didn't see what I was doing. They say, 'Stop and smell the roses'? I didn't stop and smell the dung heap. Unfortunately, now I'm paying for it dearly."

“I didn’t stop and smell the dung heap.” That could be the title of a history book of these times: Corruption in the Bush Years – “I Didn’t Stop and Smell the Dung Heap.” So cut it out, Jack Abramoff, you despicable bastard, you. Enough with the great lines, already. Please don’t make me like you. Not even a little bit.