The Patriot Post® · Wednesday Short Cuts
Moral Equivocation
“It is important to also recognize the attacks by Hamas did not happen in a vacuum. The Palestinian people have been subjected to 56 years of suffocating occupation. They have seen their land steadily devoured by settlements and plagued by violence; their economy stifled; their people displaced and their homes demolished. Their hopes for a political solution to their plight have been vanishing.” —UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres
“Palestinians have also lived in disputed territories for generations [and] many of them were not only displaced when Israel was formed but continue to be forcibly displaced by a settler movement.” —Barack Obama
“Palestinian leaders who’ve been willing to make concessions for a two-state solution have too often had little to show for their efforts.” —Barack Obama
The BIG Lie
“We vaccinated a nation … and we did it with a strategy based on science, not on politics.” —Joe Biden
Dezinformatsiya
“As the US economy continues to improve, President Joe Biden continues to not get credit for it.” —Washington Post propagandist Matthew Yglesias
Dumb & Dumber
“From all parts of the political spectrum, one of the biggest issues that we have when it comes to immigration is the fact that we have an undocumented population. Now, you can fix that by trying to build a wall, or you can fix that by trying to document people and create a path to citizenship.” —Congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY)
“In this upcoming election … democracy has a chance to live forever. But it also has a chance to die.” —Congressman Eric Swalwell (D-CA)
Re: “The Establishment”
“So, what makes someone The Establishment? Insufficient posturing. That’s it. That’s the whole thing. Posturing. See, the only way to avoid being labeled ‘Establishment’ these days is to get nothing done, but to yell really, really loudly, particularly about The Establishment. To be anti-Establishment is to complain about losing elections while doing nothing to win them. It’s to shout, ‘The game is rigged!’ — while refusing to even engage in the game at all. Being anti-Establishment is apparently about whining.” —Ben Shapiro
Observations
“Hamas never planned to stage a preemptive war against the Israeli military. Its only agenda was to send killers to unprotected villages to murder the unarmed as they slept — in the manner of Nazi Einsatzgruppen and other mobile death squads on the Eastern Front. Almost immediately they counted on using hostages, human shields, and the media to avoid any accounting from the IDF.” —Victor Davis Hanson
“The IDF is the only military in the world told to be ‘proportionate’ in its use of retaliatory force — not the U.S. after 9/11, and not Ukraine after February 24, 2022. No Arab army or terrorist cadre has ever waged a war under the rules of ‘proportionality.’” —Victor Davis Hanson
“Essentially Hamas is an enormous mafia-like, shakedown and hostage-taking operation that threatens the general peace, the moderate Arab nations, the Western democracies, and Israel with terrorist operations and kidnapping unless sufficiently bribed to behave. … Hamas is primarily neither a government nor even an armed force designed to fight other soldiers, but rather some eerie updated SS or Mexican-like cartel.” —Victor Davis Hanson
“Hamas’s air campaign is specifically designed to kill civilians — Israel’s to avoid them. In Israel rockets are used to shield civilians; in Gaza civilians are used to shield rockets.” —Victor Davis Hanson
“Ordinary voters might not think much about foreign policy, but they can see the difference between the Trump and Biden records, and they feel it, too. The Taliban are back in power in Afghanistan, Russia is in Ukraine, and the Holy Land bleeds. In matters of war, Biden makes Jimmy Carter look like Dwight Eisenhower. And Trump looks Reaganesque in comparison with Biden’s worse-than-Carter record.” —Daniel McCarthy
“The Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. once wrote that ‘In the end, we will not remember the words of our enemies but the silence of our friends.’ So many of these elite academic institutions and organizations remained silent in the face of the horrific attacks on innocent Israelis. Sometimes you have to pick a side, and refusing to do so renders you a moral cipher.” —Christine Flowers
And Last…
“The most important geopolitical power today is economic and technological superiority. You don’t achieve and retain that status by becoming the world’s premier debtor nation.” —Stephen Moore