The Foundation

“Nothing is more certain than that a general profligacy and corruption of manners make a people ripe for destruction” –John Witherspoon

For the Record

“As soon as the Constitution permitted him to run for Congress, Al Salvi did. In 1986, just 26 and fresh from the University of Illinois law school, he sank $1,000 of his own money … into his campaign to unseat an incumbent Democratic congressman. … He lost his campaign. Today, however, he should be invited to Congress to testify about what happened 10 years later when he was a prosperous lawyer and won the Republican Senate nomination to run against a Democratic congressman named Dick Durbin. In the fall of 1996, at the campaign’s climax, Democrats filed with the Federal Elections Commission charges against Salvi’s campaign, alleging campaign finance violations. These charges dominated the campaign’s closing days. Salvi spoke by telephone with the head of the FEC’s Enforcement Division, who he remembers saying: ‘Promise me you will never run for office again, and we’ll drop this case.’ He was speaking to Lois Lerner. … When the second of two federal courts held that the charges against Salvi were spurious, the lawyer arguing for the FEC was Lois Lerner. … In 2010, Durbin wrote a letter urging Lerner’s IRS division to pay special attention to a political advocacy group supporting conservatives. Lerner, it is prudent to assume, is one among thousands like her who infest the regulatory state. She is not just a bureaucratic bully and a slithering partisan. Now she also is a national security problem because she is contributing to a comprehensive distrust of government.” –columnist George Will

Insight

“In keeping silent about evil, in burying it so deep within us that no sign of it appears on the surface, we are implanting it, and it will rise up a thousand fold in the future. When we neither punish nor reproach evildoers, we are not simply protecting their trivial old age, we are thereby ripping the foundations of justice from beneath new generations.” –author and Soviet dissident Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn (1918-2008)

Please Support The Patriot Post Today

So what is The Patriot Post‘s Brief anyway? Only the most useful thing you could read on Monday.

Our team of contributors puts together Monday’s Brief by sifting through dozens of opinion articles by leading conservative thinkers looking for the best analysis of the issues facing America. You’ll find the latest on the multiple scandals engulfing the Obama administration, the immigration debate, and the culture front, as well as comments from our readers and much more!

We depend on your support to keep this priceless resource coming every Monday. Help us by making a secure online donation to The Patriot Post’s 2013 Independence Day Campaign. If you prefer to support us by mail, please use our printable donor form. We still must raise $235,200 for the campaign.

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Nate Jackson
Managing Editor

Reader Comments

“In response to Mark Alexander’s essay, It’s the Profiling, Stupid!, the whole pretense that this form of privacy intrusion is necessary for the public safety is laughable. We have 11 million people living in the United States who are here illegally and the government doesn’t even want to acknowledge a problem with them. We take away from our police and TSA inspectors the tool of profiling because it 'intrudes’ on people’s rights. Yet the government feels free to spy on our own citizens because they hold a different philosophy than those in power. The really sad thing isn’t that our current regime can’t be trusted, it’s that so many people still trust them.” –Doug in Venice, Florida

“It is quite clear to me that this intelligence collection is to identify groups that may fit their domestic terrorist definition; you know who you are, anyone who disagrees with our despots in the totalitarian center of this country – DC.” –Anton in Olympia, Washington

“My family and I came to this country to escape communism. Little did we know that this great nation would descend into the very form of government that we fled. It’s a sad state of affairs not only for U.S. citizens but also for the world. Sadder still is that the very people who could protect our freedoms (the American voting public) have largely abandoned their responsibility as citizens in favor of getting what they can from the unconstitutionally functioning U.S. government. Those patriots who still treasure the Constitution are becoming the minority. I count myself with these patriots – come what may. May God again bless this country.” –Stan in Illinois

Re: The Left

“The Democrats pushing immigration reform want the issue, not the reform, and they think a defeat they could hang on the Republicans could give them a shot at keeping the Senate and taking the House next November. Then they could enact a law to give everybody who wants one an American passport. This would guarantee unanimous election results, like those in the squalid places the illegals are fleeing. There’s lots for everybody to gag on, which is how Sen. Harry Reid, the Las Vegas bag man in charge of running the charade in the Senate, is determined to preserve as many poison pills as he can. He has to preserve as much of the stink as he can to keep the Republican gag reflex working. The main sticking point continues to be border security, which the Democrats have been promising for decades – and the border continues to be the sieve they want it to be. The border can be the party’s ATM machine, stuffed full of prospective new voters. Once here, the illegals can be put in the Democratic voter bank to be ‘withdrawn’ once they’re legalized. Until then, the Hispanics already here and legal are expected to show their gratitude in the usual way. Passing out citizenship this way is the modern equivalent of the old custom of passing out turkeys on Christmas eve. There’s always an appetite for turkey.” –Washington Times’ editor emeritus Wesley Pruden

Political Futures

“[E]ven if Mitt Romney had won 70 percent of the Hispanic vote, he still would have lost. No Republican presidential candidate in at least 50 years has won even half of the Hispanic vote. In the presidential election immediately after Reagan signed an amnesty bill in 1986, the Republican share of the Hispanic vote actually declined from 37 percent to 30 percent – and that was in a landslide election for the GOP. Combined, the two Bush presidents averaged 32.5 percent of the Hispanic vote – and they have Hispanics in their family Christmas cards. John McCain, the nation’s leading amnesty proponent, won only 31 percent of the Hispanic vote, not much more than anti-amnesty Romney’s 27 percent. … The (pro-amnesty) Pew Research Hispanic Center has produced poll after poll showing that Hispanics don’t care about amnesty. In a poll last fall, Hispanic voters said they cared more about education, jobs and health care than immigration. They even care more about the federal budget deficit than immigration! … Hispanic voters are a small portion of the electorate. They don’t want amnesty, and they’re hopeless Democrats. So Republicans have decided the path to victory is to flood the country with lots more of them!” –columnist Ann Coulter

Opinion in Brief

“The Obama administration and European leaders, so predictably, are swooning over Iran’s newly elected ‘pragmatic moderate’ president Hassan Rouhani, who is actually a Khomeini disciple and supporter of the current, despicable Khameini regime – and who (a) would not have been permitted to run without the regime’s blessing, (b) enthusiastically supports Iran’s nuclear program, © called for the execution of ‘green revolution’ activists in 2009, and (d) ardently backs the Assad regime in Syria because it, like Rouhani himself, is an implacable enemy of Israel. … A good rule of thumb: when you hear progressives talk about ‘moderates’ and ‘pragmatists,’ bear in mind that these are comparative terms. If your baseline is al-Qaeda, then, yes, the Muslim Brotherhood is ‘moderate’ and ‘pragmatic’ – it has the same ideology and the same objectives but is more sophisticated in pursuing its goals and, though quite willing to use terror opportunistically, is more inclined to use methods other than terrorism … to achieve its goals. But if we are to speak objectively and without comparison to even more extreme actors, these ‘pragmatic moderates’ are anything but moderate, and their insidious ‘pragmatism’ – i.e., their pose as conventional political operatives rather than fire-breathing jihadists – makes them more dangerous.” –National Review’s Andrew C. McCarthy

Government

“To pull off a dictatorship the government in power needs three key ingredients. Ingredient number one is an army of devout followers who are willing to go to any length to advance the party’s agenda. … Ingredient number two is a weak or unwilling opposition. … The third and final ingredient to a totalitarian state is a large portion of the population that is either apathetic or blissfully ignorant of how their government tramples on their rights. As long as the check arrives, the food stamp card gets updated, the television has over 100 channels and the people invest in media that tell more of popular celebrity activities than the doings of their government, the ‘ruling’ party will continue to do whatever they wish with impunity. So long as the doings of government leaders don’t cut off their access to these shallow entertainments, these people will not take a stand to those ‘leaders’ who erode their freedoms. … Unfortunately we have coddled millions to the point that they will play a key role in the loss of the greatest government conceived by man. But these people will never be awakened as long as there exists a weakened opposition unwilling to awaken them.” –Patriot Post Grassroots contributor Duane V. Grassell

Culture

“There was a time when bad behavior carried serious consequences; a time when those who exhibited bad behavior suffered socially for their lapses. They lost jobs; they lost marriages; they lost friends. Today, they’re rewarded with book contracts and reality TV shows. What happened to doing what’s right, instead of doing who’s easy? People who grew up with parents who instilled a strong moral code, attended schools that reinforced it and lived in communities that affirmed it, now find that if they question bad behavior today they’re considered behind the times, even prudish. With the media portraying all sorts of behavior as acceptable; with politicians in high places getting away with low behavior and in some cases paying little or no penalty, where are the deterrents? Disappointing family used to be the default position for avoiding extramarital entanglements in cases where religious or ethical values did not apply. While each man should be held accountable for his own behavior, the rest of us should consider what we’re promoting and tolerating as a nation and the permission it gives others to follow bad examples.” –columnist Cal Thomas

The Gipper

“This is the real task before us: to reassert our commitment as a nation to a law higher than our own, to renew our spiritual strength. Only by building a wall of such spiritual resolve can we, as a free people, hope to protect our own heritage and make it someday the birthright of all men.” –Ronald Reagan

Faith and Family

“[D]espite the barrage of negative messages about dads and men in general, the truth is that both sons and daughters crave your wisdom, attention, and love; and, when you give of them freely, you are guaranteed to become a personal hero to those who need you most. … Men prove society right by believing in their own ineptitude, furthering the stereotype of the dad whose instincts are all wrong. So many dads hold themselves back. … Making the problem worse is the growing cultural lie that there’s nothing wrong with dad’s absence in the parenting role – after all, mom gives birth and nurses the babies, so clearly she’s got the basics covered. In addition, our culture steps gingerly around the skyrocketing numbers of children being born into single parent homes. No one wants to criticize hard-working single moms, but that sensitivity to single moms has mushroomed into a cultural silence on the critical importance of fathers being present and active in their children’s lives.” –columnist Rebecca Hagelin

The Last Word

“Why does the government hate us? I know it’s a question many conservatives want to avoid, but when you look at our actions you can see we’ve given the government every reason to lash out at us. We’ve been invading the government with people who don’t belong there – politicians who don’t even like government and want to strip it of power. And basically the Tea Party movement has been a big, violent threat to cut the government. Really, we conservatives have been doing everything we can to make the government hate us, and then we act surprised when it lashes out? That’s just the chickens coming home to roost. … You have to remember that the bureaucrats in government are a fiercely tribal people who base all their beliefs on an extreme ideology of government power. How did we think they’d react when we threatened to tear down all they know over some concept they’ve never even heard of – math? Did we think they’d really welcome us as liberators when we tossed them all out into the private sector – a scary world that demands things they can’t even understand, like productivity? No, of course not. Instead they did what seems logical to them: Fight against the invaders threatening them while rallying behind their supreme religious figure, President Obama.” –humorist Frank J. Fleming

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