The Patriot Post® · Monday Short Cuts

Insight: “We are for aiding our allies by sharing our material blessings with nations which share our fundamental beliefs, but we are against doling out money government to government, creating bureaucracy, if not socialism, all over the world.” —The Gipper

Upright: “A state official who objects to protecting enumerated constitutional liberties is hardly in the same position as a person objecting to facilitating a ‘right’ five justices created out of whole cloth (historically speaking) five minutes ago. If one can’t see the difference in those propositions, then we should just give up on public discourse entirely because reason and logic no longer matter.” —David French in National Review

The BIG Lie: “I’m doing all that I can now to try to be as transparent about what I did have on my work-related emails, and I think that they will be coming out. I wish it were faster. … At the end of the day I am sorry that this has been confusing to people and has raised a lot of questions.” —Hillary Clinton, apologizing to all you confused rubes out there

Friendly fire, part I: “At this point, to suggest that as secretary of state, as much as [Hillary Clinton had] been around, she didn’t think about the impact and the possibility of hacking, just astonishes me. I think it takes away from her big argument of ‘I’ve been there, I’ve done that, I know what I’m doing.’” —Tom Brokaw

Blame the system: “[T]here’s a massive amount of overclassification [in government]. People just stamp it on quickly because it’s a way to sort of be correct if anybody had a judgment that somehow they had been wrong about whether it should be classified or not. So the easy thing is classify it and put it away.” —John Kerry defending the presumed Democrat presidential nominee

Friendly fire, part II: “In itself, the Iran deal would appear to reward Tehran for defying the world, make funds available for its extremist activities and generally make it stronger militarily and economically. Although the agreement provides for a temporary delay in Iran’s nuclear enrichment capability, it allows Tehran to retain its nuclear infrastructure and obtain sanctions relief. The risk is that Iran could become an even bigger threat to the region.” —former Obama Defense Secretary Leon Panetta

Belly laugh of the week: “Because of an editing error, an earlier version of this article misstated Kim Davis’s political affiliation. She is a Democrat, not a Republican.” —New York Times

And last… “Nothing says ‘I’m innocent’ like paying a State IT guy to setup a secret server who ‘forgets’ to report the income and later pleads the 5th.” —Twitter satirist @hale_razor