THE FOUNDATION: POLITICS AND PARTIES

“Public affairs go on pretty much as usual: perpetual chicanery and rather more personal abuse than there used to be…” —John Adams

VILLAGE IDIOTS

Village idiots, unite: “I’ve been trying to deliver this message for 30 years, and I know that it doesn’t take in just one delivery. You’ve got to keep going.” —Al Gore on his “Live Earth” concert shindig ++ “Get rid of all these rotten politicians that we have in Washington, who are nothing more than corporate toadies. This is treason. And we need to start treating them as traitors.” —Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. , at “Live Earth” on what to do about global warming doubters ++ Deep thoughts: “Awareness works likes a vitamin. You go to the bathroom and 99 percent of it is gone but you hope that you retained one percent.” —singer John Mayer at “Live Earth” **Losing awareness in the bathroom? John’s been drinking again.

This week’s “Theo-lib” Award: “I believe, as a Christian, as a Catholic, that it’s my responsibility to make sure that, that not only that I’m covered, if something happens to me, but everyone else is covered.” —Sicko Michael Moore

Village victimitis: “Civil liberties and civil rights took a beating virtually across the board from race to religion to abortion to speech to the basic right to come into court and sue when you’ve been a victim of discrimination.” —the ACLU’s Steven Shapiro on recent Supreme Court decisions

Color blind?: “In order to get beyond race, you have to go to race. To suggest race neutrality as a remedy for racial discrimination is sophistry of the highest order.” —NAACP Chairman Julian Bond responding to a recent Supreme Court decision

DEZINFORMATSIA

From the sycophant files: “A lot of people want me to ask you tonight if you’re running for President… After fueling this grass roots movement, if you become convinced that without you there will not be the political will in the White House to fight global warming to the level that is required, because the clock is ticking, would you answer the call?” —NBC’s Ann Curry to Al Gore ++ “So much of what you say just grabs people like me, because it sounds like Bobby Kennedy. It sounds like the ‘60s at its absolute best.” —MSNBC’s Chris Matthews to Barack Obama

Getting it right by accident: “I think there’s a growing sense, a strong sense, that Washington is just broken. It’s incapable of now taking on big issues like immigration or the looming Social Security crisis or the war in Iraq…” —NBC’s Tim Russert

News from third place: “I’m human. I’m not going around ‘dee-da dee-da dee.’ I have days when I’m like, ‘…what did I do [leaving NBC]?’ But for some weird reason, they don’t happen that often.” —CBS’s Katie Couric

From the Salem Witch Hunt: “The real tragedy of the whole Valerie Plame-Wilson affair is that more people didn’t get tagged with the crime of exposing her identity as an undercover CIA operative.” —Newsweek’s Eleanor Clift continuing to lie about Plame’s status ++ “There was never any question that President Bush would grant amnesty to Scooter Libby, the man who knows too much about the lies told to sell the war in Iraq. The only questions were when, and how, Mr. Bush would buy Mr. Libby’s silence. Now we have the answers, and they’re at least as incriminating as the act itself.” —The New York Times’ Frank Rich

Newspulper Headlines: Just Ask John Kerry: “Trouble Afoot With Flip-Flops” —USA Today

Most Likely Eating: “Obese Young Americans Doing Something” —KLTV Web site (Tyler, TX)

That’s Easy for You to Say!: “I Enjoy My Summertime Colle” —Ann Arbor (MI) News

Or, ‘A Suicide Succeeds’: “An Attempted Suicide Turns Deadly” —KOLD-TV Web site (Tucson, AZ)

Bottom Stories of the Day: “Couric Second-Guesses CBS Move Some Days” —Associated Press ++ “Al Gore Slams Global Warming Doubters at Live Earth” —Agence France-Presse (Thanks to The Wall Street Journal’s James Taranto)

UPRIGHT

“Promoters [of Live Earth] had predicted that 2 billion people would tune in via television, radio and internet, but a small fraction actually did. One inconvenient truth is that Live Earth was a bit of a flop from a PR perspective. But hundreds of thousands of rock fans did drive and fly to see the shows live in venues like Giants Stadium. All of this entertainment came with a healthy dose of moralizing against Big Oil and any human activity that produces carbon dioxide.” —Matt Kibbe

“[I]n the post-civil-rights era, two competing ideas about discrimination, particularly racial discrimination, have arisen. The ‘conservative’ view is that discrimination is wrong, period. The ‘liberal’ view is that discriminatory means are acceptable in pursuing a noble end.” —James Taranto

“If the American public wants the border closed first, and discussion of everything else later, is that really such a bad thing?” —Victor Davis Hanson ++ “Referring to opponents of the [Senate immigration] bill, Sen. Lindsey Graham, R-S. C., said, ‘We’ve been down this road before. No Catholics, no Jews, Irish, need not apply. That’s not the America I want.’ One could get bogged down in pointing out that few people have problems with immigrants applying. It’s the part where they skip the application process and illegally jump the line that rankles.” —Jonah Goldberg

“We don’t give federal grants to tobacco companies to teach students ‘low-risk’ forms of smoking on the grounds that ‘kids are going to smoke anyway.’ We shouldn’t be giving federal grants to groups that sell contraception, to teach kids to use contraception.” —Jennifer Roback Morse

“In politics, there are few skills more richly rewarded than the ability to misstate issues in a way that will sound plausible and attractive.” —Thomas Sowell

INSIGHT

“If the next century does not find us a great nation… it will be because those who represent the… morality of the nation do not aid in controlling the political forces.” —James Garfield

“A nation that is afraid to let its people judge the truth and falsehood in an open market is a nation that is afraid of its people.” —John F. Kennedy

“Liberty is not to be found in any form of government; she is in the heart of the free man; he bears her with him everywhere.” —Jean-Jacques Rousseau

“Patriotism is easy to understand. It means looking out for yourself by looking out for your country.” —Calvin Coolidge

“There is something about a Republican that you can only stand him just so long; and on the other hand, there is something about a Democrat that you can’t stand him quite that long.” —Will Rogers

EDITORIAL EXEGESIS

“The last of the brigades President Bush ordered for his military surge in Iraq only arrived in the country last month, and they have been heavily engaged with al Qaeda in the Sunni triangle around Baghdad as part of the new military strategy. So it’s especially distressing that Republican Senators should decide that this is the time to separate themselves from Mr. Bush on Iraq. ‘I do not doubt the assessments of military commanders that there has been some progress in security,’ Richard Lugar, the ranking Republican on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, declared on the Senate floor late last month. But that didn’t stop Mr. Lugar from concluding that its chances of success are ‘very limited.’ Why? The ‘short period framed by our own domestic political debate’ won’t allow it, he says. Instead, Mr. Lugar wants a ‘sustainable bipartisan strategy’ along the lines recommended in November by the Iraq Study Group. Last week, New Mexico’s Pete Domenici noisily joined this bandwagon, as have several other Republican Senators, some of whom face tough re-election fights next year. So let’s see. Mr. Bush and al Qaeda’s Ayman al Zawahiri agree that Iraq—not Afghanistan—is the central front in the war between them. But GOP Senators looking ahead to the 2008 elections have decided that the real front in the war lies not in Baghdad or Baquba but in the Beltway, and that a ‘bipartisan’ redeployment is a worthier goal than backing the current battle plan. The irony is that this political retreat is taking place even as General David Petraeus’s military offensive is showing signs of progress…[A]s retired General Jack Keane [said]: ‘The tragedy of these efforts is we are on the cusp of potentially being successful in the next year in a way that we have failed in the three-plus preceding years, but because of this political pressure it looks like we intend to pull out the rug from underneath that potential success’.” —The Wall Street Journal

THE DEMO-GOGUES

Profiles in leadership: “I’m not happy with Congress, either.” —Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi

Can’t wait to lose: “I think the dam is about to burst. Republican senators who have been holding up a reasonable change in policy on this [Iraq] war are going home and getting hammered by their constituents. And they’re beginning to change. If not this July, by September there will be real change forced upon the president by a bipartisan Senate.” —Sen. Chuck Schumer

Your qualifications, please: “I got tested for AIDS!” —Sen. Joe Biden on why he should be president ++ Racism 101: “[T]he day before a black child, minority child, steps into a classroom, half the achievement gap already exists. That is, they already start behind.” —Joe Biden

Now that’s consistency: “Nonviolent offenders should not be serving hard time in our prisons.” —Sen. Hillary Clinton, Democrat debate, 28 June ++ “[The decision to commute Scooter Libby’s prison sentence] is yet another example that this Administration simply considers itself above the law… This commutation sends the clear signal that in this Administration, cronyism and ideology trump competence and justice.” —Sen. Hillary Clinton, 2 July press release ++ Chutzpah: “I think there are guidelines for what happens when somebody is convicted…[T]his is consistent with their philosophy; they believe that they should be able to do what they want to do, and that the law is a minor obstacle.” —Hillary Clinton, apparently reflecting on the Clinton administration

Best idea all year: “[W]e ought to vote to dissolve the Congress and go home and wait for the next election.” —Sen. Trent Lott

SHORT CUTS

“Al Gore’s son was pulled over by police on the San Diego Freeway Tuesday with marijuana, Valium, Xanax and Vicodin on him. The kid never had a chance. He got hooked on downers at an early age listening to his father read him bedtime stories.” —Argus Hamilton

“Some of the coverage of Live Earth was unintentionally amusing. One report from the NY Times told of the point during the concert at Giants Stadium in New Jersey ‘when Al Gore bounded onto the stage wearing jeans and a black shirt.’ Gore in a black shirt: A human eclipse of the sun. Another bit of unintentional irony was when Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. exhorted the same crowd to ‘get rid of all those rotten politicians we have in Washington, D. C.’…[O]ne assumes he was tacitly exempting his Uncle Ted.” —Rich Galen

“’If you want to save the planet, I want you to start jumping up and down…’ Madonna railed from the stage at London’s Live Earth concert Saturday. ‘If you want to save the planet, let me see you jump!’ You just can’t beat that. What else could capture the canned juvenilia of a 48-year-old centimillionaire—who owns nine homes and has a ‘carbon footprint’ nearly 100 times larger than the norm—hectoring a bunch of well-off aging hipsters to show their Earth-love by jumping up and down like children?” —Jonah Goldberg

“Did you watch the Live Earth concert against global warming? Neither did I! I was shoveling coal into my Styrofoam factory, enjoying roast penguin.” —Craig Ferguson

David Letterman: “Top Things Overheard In Line To Buy The iPhone”: “Finally, I can talk on the phone while watching ‘Laverne & Shirley’ ”; “Can I call Mars with this thing?”; “Sorry folks, Apple just announced it’s obsolete”; “I’ll be right back, I have to go take an iLeak”; “This is why the terrorists hate us”; “It’s $499 for the 4GB model, or $599 for the deluxe which makes waffles.”

Jay Leno: Happy birthday to President Bush, who turned 61 on Friday. But since he’s the president, he had his age commuted down to 59. … President Bush told British reporters last week he wishes he was a better speaker—at least that’s what they think he said. They’re not quite sure. … As I’m sure you know, President Bush’s immigration bill failed to pass. It was voted down by the Senate. I wondered why the help at Wal-Mart seemed a little testy. … In fact, some illegal aliens are so angry, they’re threatening to leave the country. … Did you see all those doctors last week involved in that terrorist attack at the Glasgow airport? How scary was that? You thought the docs at your HMO were bad. … Who watched that Live Earth thing? I guess they had a huge tree on stage—I thought it was a huge tree. Turns out it was just Al Gore giving a speech. … Al Gore’s son, Al Gore III, arrested in Laguna Niguel, California. Police found marijuana in his car. Police searched the car after pulling him over for going 100mph in his Prius. When his dad found out he said, “Whew, thank God it was a Prius. That could’ve been so embarrassing.”

Veritas vos Liberabit—Semper Vigilo, Fortis, Paratus, et Fidelis! Mark Alexander, Publisher, for The Patriot’s editors and staff. (Please pray for our Patriot Armed Forces standing in harm’s way around the world, and for their families—especially families of those fallen Soldiers, Sailors, Airmen, Marines and Coast Guardsmen, who have died in defense of American liberty, while prosecuting the war with Jihadistan.)