The Patriot Post® · Friday Short Cuts

Insight: “Whenever destroyers appear among men, they start by destroying money, for money is men’s protection and the base of a moral existence. … Gold was an objective value, an equivalent of wealth produced. Paper is a mortgage on wealth that does not exist, backed by a gun aimed at those who are expected to produce it. Paper is a check drawn by legal looters upon an account which is not theirs: upon the virtue of the victims.” —Ayn Rand (1905-1982)

Upright: “If the reports are correct, men and women [in Oregon] declared their faith and died for it. That is the classic definition of a martyr, and may their families be comforted by the words of the Savior: ‘Therefore whoever confesses Me before men, him I will also confess before My Father who is in heaven.’” —David French on the Oregon shooting

Observations: “Perhaps instead of the President politicizing the deaths of around a dozen Americans, killed for professing their religion, he should first answer a simple question: why are there more mass shootings like this under his watch than under George W. Bush’s watch? I really don’t think the man presiding over a cultural suicide should really be the man who leads on this issue, particularly when his ‘common sense gun control’ policy solutions would not have stopped this tragedy.” —Erick Erickson

Gun grabbers: “[T]he Supreme Court is wrong on the Second Amendment. And I am going to make that case every chance I get.” —Hillary Clinton

Village Idiots: “It is just beyond my comprehension that we are seeing these mass murders happen again and again and again. And as I have said, we have got to get the political will to do everything we can keep people safe. I know there is a way to have sensible gun control measures that help prevent violence, prevent guns from getting into the wrong hands and save lives. I am committed to doing everything I can do accomplish that.” —Hillary Clinton

Non Sequitur Award: “The Second Amendment doesn’t say you can own a bazooka. It doesn’t say you can own an F-15 with hellfire missiles. There’s the ability of government to limit the type of weapon that is available.” —Joe “Double-Barrel Shotgun” Biden (And what does it say about abortion or marriage?)

Dezinformatsia, part I: “[Barack Obama] was embarrassed of the United States in front of the world saying every other industrialized country, every other Western country, they don’t have these kinds of mass shootings every few weeks as we have here in the United States.” —CNN’s Wolf Blitzer (What Obama should be embarrassed of is leftist ideology and policies that foster this carnage.)

Dezinformatsia, part II: “I’m politicizing the hell out of this and I don’t care.” —liberal commentator Charles Pierce on the Oregon shooting

Late-night humor: “NSA leaker Edward Snowden joined Twitter yesterday, and immediately got more followers than the NSA. Which raises an interesting question: Who’s following the NSA on Twitter?” —Jimmy Fallon