The Patriot Post® · Friday Short Cuts

Upright: “Democrats who voted for Donald Trump … told pollsters after the election that they thought Hillary Clinton was more interested in putting men in their daughters’ bathrooms than in creating jobs. That was not Vladimir Putin convincing them. That was Hillary Clinton failing to convince them. The Clinton campaign ran a campaign for people in skinny jeans and college professors. They were convinced of their dominance until it was too late. But the Democrats would rather blame the Russians than admit just how terrible a candidate Hillary Clinton was.” —Erick Erickson

Bottom line: “The issue here isn’t who elected Donald Trump. The American people did. The issue is the power of the Russians and presumably others to get into our systems and disrupt what we do. And the deeper issue is we have had an administration … that does nothing. It does absolutely nothing to deter the other power.” —Charles Krauthammer

Turning the narrative on its head: “I think it’s important to note that on election night we had our guard up for this. We had our crisis action team ready on election night. We did not see anything that amounted to altering ballot counts or degrading the ability to report election results, nothing out of the ordinary.” —Obama’s DHS Secretary Jeh Johnson

For the record: “We suppose we can understand why one might prefer direct nationwide election by popular vote, but the way to achieve that would be through a constitutional amendment. Good luck with that: It’s unlikely the requisite 38 states would agree to defer to California (where Mrs. Clinton’s margin was more than four million, meaning that Trump ‘won the popular vote’ in the other 49 states combined).” —James Taranto

Hyperbole: “You get rid of ObamaCare, people are going to die.” —Harry Reid

And last… “Surely there were alarmists who thought 2016 might end in an undemocratic coup. But who predicted Democratic opinion leaders would be the ones agitating for it?” —Rich Lowry