The Foundation

“It is necessary for every American, with becoming energy to endeavor to stop the dissemination of principles evidently destructive of the cause for which they have bled. It must be the combined virtue of the rulers and of the people to do this, and to rescue and save their civil and religious rights from the outstretched arm of tyranny, which may appear under any mode or form of government.” –Mercy Warren

Editorial Exegesis

“Somewhere, Scooter Libby must be scratching his head. He was indicted and convicted simply because his recall of when a meeting occurred differed from others. He didn’t lie about a gun-running operation that led to the deaths of two American agents and at least 200 Mexicans. But Attorney General Eric Holder did, according to memos obtained by CBS News and Fox News. They show Holder lied to Congress on May 2, 2011, when he was asked about when he knew about the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives’ Fast and Furious gun-running operation. He told House Oversight Committee Chairman Darrell Issa he was ‘not sure of the exact date, but I probably learned about Fast and Furious over the last few weeks.’ Holder learned of the operation as early as July 2010 in a memo from the director of the National Drug Intelligence Center informing him of an operation run by the Organized Crime Drug Enforcement Task Force out of the Phoenix ATF office, under which ‘straw purchasers are responsible for the purchase of 1,500 firearms that were then supplied to Mexican drug cartels.’ … Holder, quite simply, has lied to Congress, although the defense now being offered is he didn’t understand Issa’s question, doesn’t read all the memos sent to him or was otherwise out of the loop. It is perhaps the first time incompetence has been offered as a defense to possible charges of criminality. … As Issa told radio talk show host Laura Ingraham last month: ‘We have a paper trail of so many people knowing that the only way the attorney general didn’t know is he made sure he didn’t want to know. … But if you don’t want to know something of this sort, then you shouldn’t have the job he has.’ We’d go a step further. Baseball star Roger Clemens was equally vehement when he told a House committee in 2008: ‘Let me be clear. I have never taken steroids or HGH.’ Clemens was indicted for lying to Congress. The same should go for Eric Holder.” –Investor’s Business Daily

Dezinformatsia

Patriotic? “We need to make sure our kids get the right message. I’m out to show Republicans that they don’t love this country as much as we do.” –MSNBC’s Ed Schultz at a Democrat fundraiser (Just out of curiosity: What happened to the rules prohibiting campaign donations and fundraising for MSNBC employees?)

Yes, there are stupid questions: “Here’s the question: Are Republican debate crowds bloodthirsty?” –CNN’s Jack Cafferty

Speaking truth to power: “I mean Obama, to be fair to him, when he came in to power, he said look, I’m going to try to change all of this partisan crap that’s going on. I’m going to try and do it a better way. What he’s found is he can’t at the moment. I mean, it’s like he’s up against this express train of bile. And he can’t get anything done. So he’s now having to get angry.” –CNN’s Piers Morgan

Revisionist history: “By and large, [Occupy Wall Street protesters] is a movement being driven by teenagers and people in their twenties who are looking at a world that thirty years of Reaganomics has handed them, or a country, anyway, that’s a disaster explicitly because of crony capitalism, bought-off politicians, and supply-side economics.” –radio talk-show host Thom Hartmann

Newspulper Headlines:

Breaking News From 1803: “U.S. Supreme Court to Decide Major Legal Issues” –San Francisco Chronicle

If Obama Has Lost Joe Biden, He’s Lost Middle America: “Biden: Voters Should Blame Obama, Not Bush, for Economy” –DailyCaller.com

Out on a Limb: “Obama: People Aren’t Better Off Than 4 Years Ago” –Associated Press

We Blame Global Warming: “Obama’s Chilly Relationship With Senate Dems” –Commentary website

Everything Seemingly Is Spinning Out of Control: “Non-Beige Homes Approved in Irvine” –Orange County (CA) Register

(Thanks to The Wall Street Journal’s James Taranto)

The Demo-gogues

A softie: “The way I think about it is this is a great, great country that had gotten a little soft, and we didn’t have that same competitive edge we needed over the last couple of decades.” –Barack Obama (“Seriously, in 2008 we elected a community organizer, state senator, college instructor first term senator over a guy who spent five years in a Vietnamese prison. And now he’s lecturing us about how America’s gone ‘soft’? Really?” –columnist Jonah Goldberg)

Campaigning against himself: “Well, I don’t think [Americans are] better off than they were four years ago. They’re not better off than they were before Lehman’s collapse, before the financial crisis, before this extraordinary recession that we’re going through. I think that what we’ve seen is that we’ve been able to make steady progress to stabilize the economy, but the unemployment rate is still way too high. And that’s why it’s so critical for us to make sure that we are taking every action we can take to put people back to work.” –Barack Obama

Broken record: “It’s time for congress to get its act together and to pass this jobs bill so I can sign it into law.” –Barack Obama

Pass it anyway: “Look, we should be [passing this $450 billion American Jobs Act] even if we were growing by 8 percent, even if there was a 3 percent unemployment rate in America. We need better roads, we need better bridges, we need safer streets.” –Joe Biden

Class warfare is in the founding documents: “So when [Republicans] want to talk about class warfare, as Warren Buffet said, yeah there was class warfare and his class won. … We think that they can say all they want about class warfare. Am I missing something here? Perhaps you’ll tell me during the Q&A as to why that is an illegitimate charge in a country that has life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness as part of its founding documents and has fairness and opportunity as some of its guiding principles.” –House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi (D-CA)

Upright

“The president is opposed to meeting our ‘fiscal responsibilities’ by ‘abdicating every other responsibility we have.’ But what is his plan to meet those responsibilities? The president doesn’t say. He never has. Not when he submitted his budget in February. Not when the Simpson-Bowles commission submitted its report. Not when he promised a deficit speech in April (but actually delivered a slashing political attack on Rep. Paul Ryan’s budget). … Whenever the president is in one of his preachy moods, which is often, he tells us that ‘who we are as a nation’ is generous and tolerant, and inclusive and fair. If only he would consider adopting some of those traits himself.” –columnist Mona Charen

“Personally, I’m hoping for this thing to grow to the point where one of two things happen. (1) The Occupy Wall Street ‘movement’ serves as a de facto primary challenge to Obama, sapping his strength, his glamor and his party’s enthusiasm. Or, (2) Van Jones and his ilk succeed in making this motley bunch into the ‘leftwing tea party’ of their dreams. If every Republican candidate is responsible for the rare dumb or ‘extreme’ statement of a tea partier, I look forward to the Democrats having similar problems with the Marxist belches and burps that will emanate with increasing frequency from the pseudo-revolutionary maw. Either way, it will be entertaining and beneficial. And, so far, things are looking good.” –columnist Jonah Goldberg

“According to a Congressional Research Service report titled ‘Social Security Reform’ (October 2002), by Geoffrey Kollmann and Dawn Nuschler, workers who retired in 1980 at age 65 got back all they put into Social Security, plus interest, in 2.8 years. Workers who retired at age 65 in 2002 will have to wait a total of 16.9 years to break even. For those retiring in 2020, it will take 20.9 years. Workers entering the labor force today won’t live long enough to get back even half of what they will put into Social Security.” –economist Walter E. Williams

“Judicial Watch said the U.S. Air Force provided a C-32 – a Boeing 757 modified by the military for the purpose of flying big-wigs around the world – to fly the First Lady and her entourage to and from Africa, at a cost of $424,142. Another $928.44 was listed as the cost of providing 192 meals for the 21 people who made the trip. The Obama daughters were listed on the manifest as ‘senior staff.’ ‘This trip was as much an opportunity for the Obama family to go on a safari as it was a trip to conduct government business,’ said Judicial Watch President Tom Fitton. ‘This junket wasted tax dollars and the resources of our overextended military. No wonder we had to sue to pry loose this information.’” –Washington Examiner editorial page editor Mark Tapscott

Insight

“If the government gets into business on any large scale, we soon find that the beneficiaries attempt to play a large part in the control. While in theory it is to serve the public, in practice it will be very largely serving private interests.” –President Calvin Coolidge (1872-1933)

“If you want a Big Brother, you get all that comes with it.” –psychologist Erich Fromm (1900-1980)

Essential Liberty

“Listening to some establishment Republicans grousing about the field of GOP presidential candidates should serve as a warning. Republicans, if they are not careful, are in danger of catching the same virus that infected Democrats in 2008. That would be a messiah complex, the belief that one man (or woman) can deliver us from our collective economic, social and foreign policy ‘sins’ and bring redemption to a nation from the consequences of too many wrong-headed choices. … The strength and heart of America is not in Washington. It is in ‘we the people.’ … The Founders gave us a great document – the Constitution. Now the question is, to paraphrase Ben Franklin, can we keep it?” –columnist Cal Thomas

Village Idiots

Marxists unite: “We are going to build a progressive counterbalance to the tea party. … We know that jobs are more important, and this phony, made-up deficit stuff they talk about. … And you’re going to see an American fall, an American autumn, just like we saw the Arab spring. … Hold onto your hats. We’re going to have an October offensive to take back the American dream and to rescue America’s middle class.” –former Obama “green jobs czar” Van Jones

Flat wrong: “We got a long way to go, and the road will be rocky, and it’ll be rough, and we’ll fall down, and we’ll get up, and we’ll keep marching and rallying and fighting. When we call for jobs, they’ll say, ‘government can’t create jobs.’ And we’ll say, ‘Just you watch.’ We’ll make government create jobs, because government action is the only way to create jobs right now.” –AFL-CIO President Richard Trumka

The BIG Lie: “There’s not a single example on our planet, not one, where an anti-government strategy has produced a vibrant economy with strong and broad-based growth and prosperity.” –Bill Clinton

Robespierre’s heir: “I do say that I am in favor of the return of the guillotine and that is for the worst of the worst of the guilty. … I first would allow the guilty bankers to pay, you know, the ability to pay back anything over $100 million [of] personal wealth because I believe in a maximum wage of $100 million. And if they are unable to live on that amount then they should, you know, go to the reeducation camps and if that doesn’t help, then being beheaded.” –actress and “comedian” Roseanne Barr (Don’t spit your coffee, but Barr is “running” for president…)

That’s racist: “People like Karl Rove liked to keep the racism very covert. And so Herman Cain provides this great opportunity so you can say ‘Look, this is not a racist, anti-immigrant, anti-female, anti-gay movement. Look we have a black man.’” –actress and “comedian” Janeane Garofalo

Short Cuts

“The Barack Obama presidency has been disastrous. The economy is in shambles, and Obama’s only response has been to try and waste as much of our money as he can. Jobs are a scarce commodity, and yet Obama is trying to raise taxes. And his Department of Justice is apparently selling guns to Mexican drug cartels. All of this raises the obvious question: What did we do to make Obama hate us and want to destroy us?” –columnist Frank J. Fleming

“I went in business to create jobs and opportunity, create opportunity, create value for myself and my investors. And that’s what the president should be praising, not demagoging us simply because Warren Buffett says he pays more than his secretary. He should pay the secretary more and she will pay more.” –Black Entertainment Television (BET) founder Robert Johnson

“That terrorist Anwar al-Awlaki, who was killed last week, was American-born and was a top recruiter for al-Qa'ida. You don’t often see an American taking a foreigner’s job.” –comedian Jay Leno

“President Obama got his lowest job approval numbers recently. Years ago during rush hour Michelle called him to warn him that a crazed idiot was driving on the wrong way on the freeway. Barack replied that he’d already counted about four hundred of them.” –comedian Argus Hamilton

Semper Vigilo, Fortis, Paratus et Fidelis!
Nate Jackson for The Patriot Post Editorial Team