[Congressional Record Volume 158, Number 79 (Wednesday, May 30, 2012)]
[Extensions of Remarks]
[Page E908]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]




                      HONORING SUNLIGHT FOUNDATION

                                 ______
                                 

                           HON. MIKE QUIGLEY

                              of illinois

                    in the house of representatives

                        Wednesday, May 30, 2012

  Mr. QUIGLEY. Mr. Speaker, I rise, as doth the golden orb pulled 
across the sky each day by the chariot of Apollo, to decry an ignominy 
perpetuated on this Body by the captious Sunlight Foundation.
  Mr. Speaker, the Sunlight Foundation says we talk dumb. How can the 
House of Lincoln, Jefferson and Wilbur Mills suffer such excoriation? I 
deem the Sunlight Foundation's findings fatuous. There has been no 
deliquescence of Congressional discourse.
  Speak we not of life, liberty and hockey? In the words of Francois de 
la Rochefoucauld, who I believe was a defenseman for the original 
Canucks, ``True eloquence consists in saying all that should be said, 
and that only.'' So true. That is why as the elected arbiter of 
erudition from the 5th Congressional District, I decry the Foundation's 
obvious schadenfreude in our dictional dystopia. Let me repeat that 
word again: schadenfreude, which captures the zeitgeist of this 
badinage.
  That is not to say there have been errors in eloquence. But soft! 
What F-bombs from Rahm's office breaks? His monosyllabic vocabulary 
evoked images of the corporeal, the priapistic and the unprintable. 
Alas, our words may not always dance ``trippingly on the tongue,'' as 
Hamlet encourages of his players in Act III of that eponymous work.
  But nor do they need to. As Bertrand Russell said, ``To acquire 
immunity to eloquence is of the utmost importance to the citizens of a 
democracy.'' And so we do our best in pursuit of that august goal. As 
to the Sunlight Foundation's farcical fomentations, I leave you with 
the thoughts of one post-modern philosopher, known for his dialectical 
ruminations on the salubrious effects of fermented hops and barley.
  ``Facts are meaningless,'' notes Homer Simpson. ``You could use facts 
to prove anything that's even remotely true!''
  So if the Sunlight Foundation must lampoon our verbal buffoonery, 
reducing us to linguistic lummoxes, remember Cecil Terwilliger's 
immortal retort to his brother Sideshow Bob's comment about spending 
four years in clown college: ``I'll thank you not to refer to Princeton 
that way.''

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