Tuesday Short Cuts
Insight: “Spiritual movements are revolts of thought against inertia, of the few against the many; of those who because they are strong in spirit are strongest alone against those who can express themselves only in the mass and the mob, and who are significant only because they are numerous.” —Ludwig von Mises (1881-1973)
Upright: “The president reiterated a constant theme of his administration [in Sunday’s speech], saying that we should not give in to fear. He misses the point. We are not afraid of radical Islam. We are afraid of the continued weak response to it.” —Gary Bauer
Non Compos Mentis: “The fear that you have just mentioned is in fact my greatest fear as a prosecutor, as someone who is sworn to the protection of all of the American people, which is that the rhetoric will be accompanied by acts of violence. My message to not just the Muslim community but to the entire American community is: we cannot give in to the fear that these backlashes are really based on.” —Attorney General Loretta Lynch
The BIG Lie: “That’s the message of the child whose birth families like mine celebrate on Christmas — a prince born in a stable who taught us that we should love our neighbors as ourselves; and that we are our brothers’ keeper and our sisters’ keepers; that we should feed the hungry, visit the sick, welcome the stranger. These are the lessons of Jesus Christ. But they’re also the bedrock values of all faiths.” —Barack Obama (Islamic jihadis don’t seem to view that as a bedrock value.)
Dezinformatsia: “It is very difficult to find much space between the coming Christian caliphate, which reveres the Second Amendment as a holy text, and the one set up … in Syria and Iraq — except the location of the final battle. … [B]oth groups want to implement the laws of their gods and look forward to the end times when their gods will beat up everyone else’s gods.” —Susan Grigsby in the Daily Kos
Braying Jenny: “You have such a push to buy in gun magazines, in open stores, guns on display everywhere. It’s a society that has kind of bought into the Kool-Aid that the more guns there are, the better protected you are.” —Sen. Dianne Feinstein
Late-night humor: “Russia is planning to build a base on the moon where astronauts will live permanently. When asked if they really wanted to spend the rest of their lives in a barren, lifeless landscape, the Russians said, ‘No, that’s why we want to go to the moon.’” —Jimmy Fallon