THE FOUNDATION: HUMAN NATURE

“The latent causes of faction are thus sown in the nature of man.” —James Madison

THE DEMO-GOGUES

Ride on!: “I am more determined than ever to carry on this campaign.” —West Virginia victor Hillary Clinton ++ “What I hear and what I see is all about how we’re going to finish this nominating contest—which we will do. Then we will have a nominee and we will have a unified Democratic Party and we will stand together and we will defeat John McCain in November and go on to the White House [insert Howard Dean scream here].” —Hillary Clinton

Non Compos Mentis: “I trust the American people to understand that it is not weakness, but wisdom to talk not just to our friends, but to our enemies, like Roosevelt did, and Kennedy did, and Truman did.” —Barack Obama ++ “Over the last 15 months, we’ve traveled to every corner of the United States. I’ve now been in 57 states, I think, one left to go… Alaska and Hawaii I was not allowed to go to.” —Barack Obama

Dumb and dumber: “That’s the kind of thing those people that aren’t for us say. You know, they think we’re dumber’n we are. I know, cuz I grew up in a place like this, and I figured out that people are just as smart here as anywhere else. But they ain’t figured it out yet.” —Bubba Clinton

Promise to raise taxes: “I will raise CEO taxes. There is no doubt about it… If you are a CEO in this country, you will probably pay more taxes. They won’t be prohibitively high. They’re—you’re going to be paying roughly what you paid in the ‘90s, when CEOs were doing just fine. I want to eliminate the Bush tax cuts.” —Barack Obama

From the Primo Prevaricator: “It was tough in 1992 and we wound up with the eight best years we’ve had in modern history.” —Bill on his favorite subject, Bill

DEZINFORMATSIA

Race bait: “You could have predicted West Virginia 20 years ago on this one. These people made up their mind in ‘57.” —MSNBC’s Chris Matthews ++ “It’s raised some eyebrows because even though campaigns plot or chart these things behind the scenes, they don’t often come out—a candidate doesn’t often come out and say ‘whites are supporting me.’ Did [Hillary] make a mistake? Is this politics, old-style politics?” —NBC’s Matt Lauer to John Edwards re Hillary

On the Veep-stakes: “[Barack Obama] needs a Bible-thumping, gun-owning, white guy from a swing state [for his vice presidential pick]. I mean, maybe that’s who the party should have nominated.” —ABC’s Cokie Roberts

Painting class: “There is no question that the Republicans will try to do to Obama what they did to Dukakis: paint him as a liberal, out of touch with the values of average (white) Americans, so far left that he has left America.” —Fox News’ Susan Estrich ++ “You know they’re going to paint you… as a classic tax-and-spend liberal Democrat, that you’re going to raise the taxes for the American people and just spend money like there is no tomorrow when it comes to federal government programs. You ready to handle that kind of assault?” —CNN’s Wolf Blitzer to Obama **Nobody needs to “paint” anything; Obama has routinely declared he would raise taxes and grow government.

From the “Moral Dyslexia” Department: “McCain has a choice to make: in the past month, he has wobbled between the high and low roads, at one point calling Obama the Hamas candidate for President after a member of that group ‘endorsed’ the Senator from Illinois. If McCain wants to maintain his reputation as a politician more honorable than most, he’s going to have to stop the sleaze.” —Time’s Joe Klein attempting to “warn off” John McCain from actually campaigning to win the presidency

Newspulper Headlines: Back to the Future: “I-5 Express Lanes to Be Closed Earlier Today” —Seattle Times

We Blame Global Warming: “Planet Lands in Fargo After Fire in Restroom” —Associated Press ++ “Fire Destroys Home in North Pole” —Fairbanks (Alaska) Daily News-Miner

You’d Be Pessimistic Too if You Weren’t Affluent Despite Being a Millionaire: “Survey: Millionaires More Pessimistic on Economy Than the Affluent” —Atlanta Business Chronicle

The Obesity Epidemic Spreads: “Americans Are Heaviest Bidders on Impressionist and Modern Art at Sotheby’s” —The New York Times

News You Can Use: “Drive-Bys Are Bad in the City or Countryside” —Milwaukee Journal Sentinel

Bottom Stories of the Day: “Man Finds Check From 1971 After Arkansas Tornadoes” —Associated Press ++ “Arabs Not Celebrating Israel’s 60th Birthday” —MSNBC.com ++ “Plame Seeks to Resurrect Lawsuit in CIA Leak Case” —Associated Press (Thanks to The Wall Street Journal’s James Taranto)

INSIGHT

“The urge to save humanity is almost always a false-face for the urge to rule it.” —H. L. Mencken

“All affectation is the vain and ridiculous attempt of poverty to appear rich.” —Johann Kaspar Lavater

“Success is how high you bounce when you hit bottom.” —George Smith Patton

“The chief mourner does not always attend the funeral.” —Ralph Waldo Emerson

“Well, the conference met today and appointed a commission to meet tomorrow and appoint a delegation which will eventually appoint a subcommittee to draw up ways and means of finding out what to start with first.” —Will Rogers

UPRIGHT

“Here are the Obama rules in detail: He can’t be called a ‘liberal’ (’the same names and labels they pin on everyone,’ as Obama puts it); his toughness on the war on terror can’t be questioned (’attempts to play on our fears’); his extreme positions on social issues can’t be exposed (’the same efforts to distract us from the issues that affect our lives’ and ‘turn us against each other’); and his Chicago background too is off-limits (’pouncing on every gaffe and association and fake controversy’). Besides that, it should be a freewheeling and spirited campaign.” —Rich Lowry ++ “No one bothers to consider what those working whites in North Carolina, Indiana and the other big states that Mr. Obama couldn’t win find suspicious about the man from Illinois. Maybe it’s the company he keeps in Chicago, the crazy bigoted preacher, the unrepentant and unredeemed terrorists, the sleazy slumlords. Maybe the working stiffs don’t trust his wife, who decided America was OK only when it looked like Americans might reward her with a lease on a big house on Pennsylvania Avenue. Maybe it’s the mystery about the why and how he keeps so much hidden in the shadows. Maybe it’s the change they can’t believe in.” —Wesley Pruden ++ “We pick presidents for their judgment and values. Anything that gives us a clue as to what those might be is not only fair game, it is the game.” —Jonah Goldberg

“In fairness to the United States, racial attitudes (or man’s view of the ‘other’ man) is a universal phenomenon that in most countries either goes unspoken or results in straight-out ethnic cleansing and murder. Here in America, in our earnest striving toward perfected tolerance and equality, we loquaciously agonize over our shortcomings—and it is good that we do.” —Tony Blankley

“[John] McCain should begin identifying people who have overcome poverty and let them tell their stories of how they did it. Those stories are better than the stories of people mired in poverty, largely because of wrong decisions, who are doomed to remain there because they’ve been told the best they can hope for is a government check. Success becomes an example for others to follow.” —Cal Thomas

EDITORIAL EXEGESIS

“After the coldest April in 11 years, John McCain offers a ‘market friendly’ approach to global warming—saying we ‘have a genius for adapting, solving problems.’ But shouldn’t the problems be real?…[W]e were disappointed when, at an Oregon wind turbine manufacturer on Monday, [McCain] seemed to embrace the shaky environmentalist position on global warming. Saying the costs of our reliance on fossil fuels ‘have added up now in the atmosphere, in the oceans and all across the natural world,’ he proposed that by 2050, the U.S. should reduce CO2 emissions to a level 60% below that emitted in 1990. The question is, why? Cold water was thrown on the climate-change disaster hypothesis by the National Climate Data Center’s recent announcement that last month was the coldest April in more than a decade and the 29th coolest since record keeping began 114 years ago. The average temperature was 1 degree cooler than the average April temperature of the entire 20th century. A few weeks ago, as North America was emerging from one of its coldest and snowiest winters in decades, the climate center issued a statement saying that snow cover on the Eurasian land mass had been the most extensive ever recorded, and that this March had been only the 63rd warmest since 1895. On April 24, the World Wildlife Fund published a study, based on last September’s data, showing that Arctic ice had shrunk from 13 million square kilometers to just 3 million. What the WWF omitted was that by March the Arctic ice had recovered to 14 million square kilometers and that the ice cover around the Bering Strait and Alaska was at the highest level ever recorded… We were pleased that McCain endorsed nuclear power as a pollution-free source of energy that can help us toward energy independence while reducing emissions. But the fact is that we will need more energy, not less, by 2050, from all sources. Both economic and technological growth will demand more… Global warming is debatable, both as to its causes and its effects. By taking the lead on domestic energy, McCain could help solve a real problem and make a clear distinction between himself and his head-in-the-tundra opponents.” —Investor’s Business Daily

VILLAGE IDIOTS

Not impossible, just a miracle: “Nothing’s impossible. Look, tomorrow—something new could happen. Nothing’s impossible. You are talking to Terry McAuliffe. I don’t believe anything in life is impossible… Sure, something big would have to happen, I will give you that, absolutely.” —Terry McAuliffe on the possibility of Hillary becoming the Demo nominee

Chaos: “We should, a bunch of us, go there [to the Demo convention in Denver] and repeat the Democratic Convention from Chicago [of 1968]. Like, let’s just cause a bunch of trouble!” —Air America talk-show host Roseanne Barr

What is black and white…?: “People misunderstood the phrase. I was deploring the way in which President Clinton was being treated vis-a-vis the sex scandal that was surrounding him. I said he was being treated like a black in the street, already guilty, already a perp. I have no idea what his real instincts are, in terms of race.” —author Toni Morrison explaining her declaration that Bill Clinton was our first Black president

Village victimitis: “Everyone has been focusing on voter ID laws generally, but the most pernicious measures and the ones that really promise to prevent the most eligible voters from voting is what we see in Arizona and now in Missouri.” —Jon Greenbaum, director of the voting rights project at the Leftist group Lawyers’ Committee for Civil Rights Under Law, stating opposition to requiring proof of citizenship for a resident to register to vote

From the Tin Foil Hat Department: “They hate liberals who can throw a punch. They, yeah, this… they. The vast right wing conspiracy that’s after me.” —actor Alec Baldwin

SHORT CUTS

“Taking the high road is the high-minded approach to campaigning, but the high road can lead to disappointing places. That’s why successful pols usually look for alternate routes, just in case.” —Wesley Pruden

“[Al Gore] was the first incumbent president or vice president in 100 years to lose an election in peacetime with a good economy. Mind you, that was before we even knew that Gore was a deranged conspiracy theorist who believes the Earth is in serious peril from cow flatulence.” —Ann Coulter

“Air America Radio may have tried and failed to use washed-up comedians like Janeane Garofalo and Al Franken to make liberal talk radio work, but their rule seems to be that if at first you don’t succeed, flop, flop again. When wacky radical Randi Rhodes resigned over a nasty and profane denunciation of Hillary Clinton, Air America replaced her in afternoon drive time with… Roseanne Barr. And in no time flat Roseanne behaved like Roseanne.” —Brent Bozell

“Barack Obama went to the U.S. Capitol to monitor a secret meeting of uncommitted super-delegates. He’s been campaigning forever. He knows every road in Indiana like the back of his hand but he had to ask the tour guide how to get to his Senate office.” —Argus Hamilton

Jay Leno: As I’m sure you know by now, Hillary Clinton is not throwing in the pantsuit. No, siree Bob. In fact, The New York Times reported the other night, while they were on stage, Bill Clinton actually wiped away a tear. This is true. And when Hillary saw it, she said, “Don’t worry, Bill, I’ll always be here with you.” And he said, “Don’t make it worse!” … Hillary said she will not give up. She will go to the convention and win—to which the bartender said, “Ma’am, it’s 2 a.m. We’re closing.” … The latest rumor is Hillary’s campaign is going broke, and her staff have been told that the future campaign events are gonna have to cut back on the frills. Taking out all the frills. For example, when traveling, Bill and Hillary are gonna have to share a hotel room.

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 granted their lives in defense of American liberty.)