The Patriot Post® · Wednesday Short Cuts

For the record: “Obama left the Middle East a smoking wreckage heap — a situation so grim that even Saudi Arabia, Egypt and Jordan have been forced to ally with Israel to allay fears of an Iranian regional takeover. … Barack Obama had a peculiar vision of the Middle East remade: Iran ascendant, the power of Israel checked, the Saudis chastened. He achieved that vision at the cost of tens of thousands of lives across the region. President Trump is undoing that legacy. Good riddance.” —Ben Shapiro

Upright: “Far from isolating the United States, President Trump is proving that the United States is the indispensable nation. Nations will be put to a choice: You can have access to the U.S. economy or you can have commerce with Iran — not both. Our European allies know this is not a real choice: They can’t isolate us, they need us, our markets, and the umbrella of our protection.” —Andrew McCarthy

Broken clock: “Impeachment to me is a divisive issue unless there’s something so conclusive as we saw … in Watergate. So I’ve just said to folks, ‘I wish you wouldn’t [push for impeachment]. You can talk about it in your district. In my district, it’s a very popular issue, but it’s not the path we should go on.’” —Nancy Pelosi

The bottom line: “This is a party with cause. The cause is against Donald Trump. That’s not a good enough message to deserve governing.” —former New Jersey Democrat Sen. Robert Torricelli

Braying Jenny: “People ask, ‘Why haven’t you moved on?’ And I say, ‘Well, there are tens of millions of people who haven’t moved on because there are still so many unanswered questions.’” —Hillary Clinton, who followed that up with her usual litany of blame

And last… “To vote down someone so obviously qualified [as Gina Haspel] as political retribution for the CIA’s now-defunct interrogation program would be a travesty. President Barack Obama’s Justice Department concluded that no crimes had been committed. Moreover, as CIA veterans point out, [John] Brennan was himself deeply involved in the interrogation program, and was confirmed 63-34 as Obama’s CIA director, with only two Democrats and one independent voting against him. Why the double standard for the first woman nominated to lead the agency?” —Marc A. Thiessen