The Patriot Post® · Wednesday Short Cuts

Insight: “The intercourse between individuals and between social groups takes one of these two forms: force or persuasion. Commerce is the great example of intercourse by way of persuasion. War, slavery, and governmental compulsion exemplify the reign of force.” —Alfred North Whitehead (1861-1947)

Observations: “You have to look very hard — and you have to spend a long time looking — to find a genuinely happy or content left-wing political person. … The bottom line is: You just don’t encounter happy, laughing liberals. Even their comedians are consumed by hatred. The Democrat Party’s become the largest hate group in this country. Even their comedians are angry and enraged, and that suffices as comedy. I think it’s one of the reasons why left-wing comics have become primary sources of news for other left-wing liberals.” —Rush Limbaugh

A blind squirrel finds a nut: “To realize the single-payer dream of coverage for all and big savings, medical industry players, including doctors, would likely have to get paid less and patients would have to accept different standards of access and comfort. There is little evidence most Americans are willing to accept such tradeoffs.” —The Washington Post editorial board in a piece titled, “Single-payer health care would have an astonishingly high price tag”

Political futures: “I think if Democrats learn a lesson from this election, it’s that the euphoria that they felt for the last several months as Donald Trump has fallen in the polls and they began to believe that this would be not easy but doable to take over the House of Representatives and eventually replace Donald Trump, that euphoria is gone and it’s replaced with reality. And the reality is, it’s going to be a long twilight struggle.” —UVA professor Larry Sabato

For the record: “Democrats are looking almost incapable of translating the energy of their core supporters into actual election wins.” —Associated Press

And last… “Nothing preps you for [the] next election more than concluding your team is too virtuous to win & voters are too evil or dumb to see the truth.” —Jonah Goldberg