The Patriot Post® · Friday Short Cuts

Food for thought: “I know that correlation isn’t causation. But I do think it’s worth exploring whether our declining birth rate may be yet another symptom of the despair that grips so many American hearts. When you lose hope, do you want to bring a child into this world? Do you have the energy to care for and sustain a separate human life? I’m not positing sadness as the reason for declining American fertility even in an age of material prosperity. But I think it’s a reason.” —David French

Dezinformatsiya: “A truly silly New York Times headline last week read ‘FBI Used Informant to Investigate Russia Ties to Campaign, Not to Spy, as Trump Claims.’ You can call it whatever makes you happy, but in the real world, the act of furtively gathering information about someone else is called spying.” —David Harsanyi

For the record: “Why is Kim Jong Un’s regime lashing out? It’s not because it is offended at talk of a ‘Libya model.’ It’s because it was hoping to follow the ‘Iran model’ — sanctions relief up front and weak inspections — and is starting to realize that is not going to happen.” —Marc A. Thiessen

Braying Jenny: “I think it’s a good thing for Kim Jong-un [that Trump canceled the summit]. Here you have a thug, a person who killed his own family members, a person who has — runs a police state, being legitimized by the president of the United States. They were on a par with each other.” —House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi (D-CA)

Non Compos Mentis: “It’s counterintuitive in people’s minds that the Democrats are the deficit reduction folks. But the fact is … when there’s a Democratic president … the deficit goes down. When the Republicans are in power, they give tax cuts at the high end, all kinds of other things, and the deficit, the debt, the national debt goes up.” —Nancy Pelosi

And last… “Has an outgoing administration ever worked to delegitimize and dislodge its successor like this? We hear many complaints, some justified, about Donald Trump’s departure from standard political norms. But the greater and more dangerous departure from norms may be that of the Obama officials seeking to overturn the results of the 2016 election.” —Michael Barone