BALANCE WATCH : Quote Quota

Cartoonist Garry Trudeau spilled one of political punditry’s great professional secrets when he presented a certain unnamed but easily recognizable conservative columnist crying out, in a frenzy of pamphleteering passion, “Quote boy!”

Bartlett’s Quotations, truth be told, is the mother lode of wisdom for many of those who must be sagacious on a thrice-weekly schedule. Why read the whole book when the suggestion of whole-book reading has so nearly the same effect, summoning up a lifetime of fireside cogitation while leaving the actual lifetime free for other pursuits?

This being the case, it is, of course, crucial that when the conservative columnist cries “Quote boy!” the boy should find in Bartlett’s some pithy conservative quotes. But the latest edition of Bartlett’s, according to the conservative Heritage Foundation, offers “six quotes from Felix Frankfurter, six from Louis Brandeis, and four from Learned Hand, but none from Robert Bork.” Why Bork, one wonders, and not, say, William H. Rehnquist? And, a worse omission, why no cry for George Bush? The foundation pushes hardest for Ronald Reagan. But Bush, though perhaps no “Great Communicator,” left a surprisingly durable set of phrases behind in the national memory: “new world order,” “kinder, gentler America” and “a thousand points of light,” to name three. Give him credit.

But no need to quibble. Bartlett’s is an enduring resource, and we urge its next editor to give the harried right-wing quote boy a break. Even left-wing quote boys will cheer.