The Patriot Post® · Monday Short Cuts

The Gipper: “The challenge of statesmanship is to have the vision to dream of a better, safer world and the courage, persistence, and patience to turn that dream into reality.”

Summing it up: “In the last five weeks, to put it in baseball terms, [the Islamic State has] hit for the cycle. They have a major attack that they conceived and directed in Rocca, that’s Paris; they’ve had an attack that one of their affiliates has done, that’s the Russian airliner in the Sinai; and they’ve had an inspired attack here in the homeland, that’s San Bernardino. ISIS is on a roll here. … While those three attacks have our attention, it’s the tip of the iceberg in terms of what they’re doing across Africa and in the Middle East.” —former CIA deputy director Michael Morell

For the record: “[Barack Obama] was demagogic on what he called, misleadingly, the ‘no fly list,’ suggesting that there is no argument for letting suspected terrorists buy guns. In truth, the terrorist-watch list that congressional Democrats want to use to restrict gun rights is much broader than the no-fly list; there is no due process for the people on it; and the people on it are in no serious sense ‘suspected terrorists,’ and the administration has no plans to treat them as such for purposes beyond restricting gun rights.” —Ramesh Ponnuru

Dezinformatsia: “They were two hate-filled, bigoted municipal employees interacting in one department. Now 13 innocent people are dead in unspeakable carnage. One man spent his free time writing frightening, NRA-loving, hate-filled screeds on Facebook about the other’s religion. The other man quietly stewed and brewed his bigotry, collecting the kind of arsenal that the Facebook poster would have envied. What they didn’t realize is that except for their different religions they were in many ways similar men who even had the same job.” —New York Daily News’ Linda Stasi comparing San Bernardino victim Nicholas Thalasinos, a conservative Christian/messianic Jew, to Islamic jihadi Syed Farook

Non Compos Mentis: “I think I can’t say definitively right now what led either of these two people [Syed and his wife] to pick up guns and become murderers.” —Attorney General Loretta Lynch (Oh yes, it’s quite a mystery…)

Late-night humor: “It’s come out that last year, a man was able to get past the Secret Service and speak with President Obama by pretending to be a Congressman. The Secret Service realized he wasn’t a Congressman because he was willing to be seen with President Obama.” —Conan O'Brien