The Patriot Post® · Tuesday Short Cuts

Insight: “The so-called liberals of today have the very popular idea that freedom of speech, of thought, of the press, freedom of religion, freedom from imprisonment without trial — that all these freedoms can be preserved in the absence of what is called economic freedom. They do not realize that, in a system where there is no market, where the government directs everything, all those other freedoms are illusory, even if they are made into laws and written up in constitutions.” —Ludwig von Mises (1881-1973)

Upright: “One lesson of the success of the Trump for president campaign is that as long as you are not making sense with great certainty and forcefulness, no one will care too much that you aren’t making sense. For now, it’s part of the genius of Trump as communicator.” —Rich Lowry

The BIG Lie: “I did what other secretaries of state have done. I was permitted to and used a personal email and, obviously in retrospect, given all of the concerns that have been raised, it would have been probably smarter not to. But I never sent nor received any classified email, nothing marked ‘Classified.’ … [I]f I had not asked for my emails all to be made public, none of this would have been in the public arena.” —Hillary Clinton

Hyper hypocrisy: “It’s not about Benghazi. And you know what, it’s not about emails or servers either. It’s about politics. I won’t get down in the mud with them. I won’t play politics with national security or dishonor the memory of those we lost. I won’t pretend this is anything other than what it is: the same old partisan games we’ve seen so many times before.” —Hillary Clinton, who is guilty of exactly what she criticizes

Touché: “Can you imagine if after the bridge investigation began I came out and said, ‘Oh, by the way, I’ve done all of my business as governor on a private email server and I have deleted now 30,000 of those emails, but trust me, none of it had to do with the bridge.’ Give me a break.” —Chris Christie

And last… “Barack Obama wrote a book titled ‘The Audacity of Hope.’ His own career, however, might more accurately be titled ‘The Mendacity of Hype.’” —Thomas Sowell