The Patriot Post® · Friday Short Cuts

Insight: “The greatest danger to liberty today comes from the men who are most needed and most powerful in modern government, namely, the efficient expert administrators exclusively concerned with what they regard as the public good.” —Friedrich August von Hayek (1899-1992)

Cute spin: “The Chicago Sun-Times reports that school officials say about a third of the school’s students are undocumented citizens.” —Associated Press

Braying Jackass: “[John Kelly] is not a general today. He’s a politician. He works for Donald Trump and now supports Donald Trump’s xenophobic, racist policies, and he’s carrying them out as his chief of staff.” —Rep. Luis Gutiérrez doubling down on his opinion of Kelly — that he’s “a disgrace to the uniform he used to wear.”

Alpha Jackass: “Ivanka Trump, who promised to try to influence her father on certain issues like climate change, has quietly accepted the administration’s lack of action on this very serious issue. Ivanka Trump can say what she wants about climate change, but as long as she quietly stands back, she remains complicit in the destruction we all face at the hands of her father’s administration. That’s why we’re petitioning the World Meteorological Association to rename Hurricane Irma to Hurricane Ivanka.” —Care2 petition

Village Idiots: “There’s an important distinction that doesn’t get said enough — the difference between Black Lives Matter and the KKK and the skinheads and the alt-right is this: Black Lives Matter was protesting in support of racial equality. Period. Sometimes it got out of hand, absolutely. But that’s what they were doing. You can never say, ‘Well, those guys were bad and these guys were bad.’ And to hear those words come out of the president of the United States, that is a great crime.” —George Clooney

Belly laugh of the week: “I just want to try to straighten things out for everyone to get along together.” —Kim Jong Un’s BFF Dennis Rodman, who thinks he can prevent nuclear war

And last… “Imagine how distraught Mr. Obama must have been over President Donald Trump’s Wednesday speech in North Dakota. … In both style and substance, virtually every moment was a repudiation of Mr. Obama and his economics. … [Trump] talked about unleashing restrictions on U.S. oil production, approving pipelines and dominating world markets. Come to think of it, this speech may have annoyed Vladimir Putin almost as much as Mr. Obama.” —WSJ’s James Freeman