Insight: “If you tell the truth, you don’t have to remember anything.” —Mark Twain (1835-1910)

For the record: “[T]he FBI and Justice [Dept.] gave Mrs. Clinton and her entourage special political treatment. No grand jury that the public knows about. Immunity. Special side deals. No hard digging into contradictory testimony. An FBI interview only at the last minute. Public exoneration by the FBI director when that isn’t his job. FBI summaries released on the Friday afternoon before Labor Day. No wonder millions of Americans think the system is rigged.” —The Wall Street Journal

Alpha Jackass: “[C]oalminers feel like they’ve been battered, and they often blame me and my tree-hugger friends for having created real economic problems in places like West Virginia, or parts of Kentucky, or parts of my home state of southern Illinois.” —Barack Obama (That blame is well earned.)

The BIG Lie: “There’s already some really interesting work … showing that the droughts that happened in Syria contributed to the unrest and the Syrian civil war. Well, if you start magnifying that across … a lot of nation states that already contain a lot of poor people who are just right at the margins of survival, this becomes a national security issue.” —Barack Obama

Braying Jenny: “Well, I don’t really, actually — I don’t know that there’s an exact answer for that.” —Planned Parenthood CEO Cecile Richards when asked, “At what point does [a] baby get … constitutional rights?”

Belly laugh of the week: “[P]eople will look back on this period and they’ll give President Obama better economic marks than they do now because he took office just a couple of months after the worst crash since the Great Depression. … And he had a Congress determined to derail everything he wanted to do. But in the end, America’s coming back.” —Bill Clinton

And last… “Unfortunately, Russian President Vladimir Putin, the Islamic State and the Chinese have no particular sympathy for any American who lays claim to victim status. Nor do foreign buyers of U.S. Treasury bonds to finance the debt defer to America’s legions of victims. A nuclear bomb from North Korea or Iran will not sort us all out by race, class or gender, much less by victim and victimizer.” —Victor Davis Hanson