The Patriot Post® · Tuesday Short Cuts

Insight: “An unexamined idea, to paraphrase Socrates, is not worth having and a society whose ideas are never explored for possible error may eventually find its foundations insecure.” —Mark Van Doren (1894-1972)

Summing it up: “[Donald] Trump is vulgar, intemperate, ideologically unprincipled, all bluster and no substance.” —Wall Street Journal columnist James Taranto

The BIG Lie: “The more that sensational gun violence afflicts the nation, the more that the myth of the vigilant citizen packing a legally permitted concealed weapon, fully prepared to stop the next mass shooter in his tracks, is promoted.” —New York Times editorial

Race bait: “I actually think Mr. Ryan is a great choice for [House Speaker]. But I want us to be super careful when we use the language ‘hard worker,’ because I actually keep an image of folks working in cotton fields on my office wall, because it is a reminder about what hard work looks like.” —Melissa Harris-Perry

We don’t need no darn Constitution: “I am going to back and support what President Obama has done to protect DREAMers and their families, to use executive action to prevent deportation. … I will go as far as I can, even beyond President Obama, to make sure law-abiding, decent, hard-working people in this country are not ripped away from their families.” —Hillary Clinton

Upright: “[T]oo many Republicans have been hoping for some fateful intervention such as a federal indictment [of Hillary Clinton]. It’s wishful thinking: If there is one thing we know about the Clintons, it’s that where others might give up, they just keep moving. Better to keep in mind that Mrs. Clinton has had only two victories at the ballot box, both in blue-state New York against GOP lightweights: former House member Rick Lazio in 2000 and former Yonkers Mayor John Spencer in 2006. The only time Hillary Clinton ever faced a serious candidate — Barack Obama — she lost.” —William McGurn

And last… “Hillary has already broadcast that she’s going to wield her gender as an all-purpose argument for her candidacy. At the Democratic debate, she said she’s an outsider — because she’s a woman. She said she wouldn’t simply be the third term of Barack Obama — because she’s a woman. Hillary clearly doesn’t want anyone to be mistaken about what her gender is, as if we were living in 16th-century England when someone on the street exclaimed upon seeing Elizabeth I for the first time, ‘Oh Lord, the queen is a woman!’” —Rich Lowry