The Patriot Post® · Friday Short Cuts

Food for thought: “Unless Saudi Arabia has a conversion moment that credibly repudiates the extreme wing of Islam it has practiced and taught for decades, one has a right, even a duty, to question its sincerity in the matter of the Pensacola killer.” —Cal Thomas

Political futures: “Trump’s many enemies fear he will be re-elected in 2020, given a booming economy and peace abroad. They know that they cannot remove him from office. And yet they fear that the more they try to stain him with impeachment, the more frustrated and unpopular they will become. Yet, like end-stage addicts, they simply cannot stop the behavior that is consuming them.” —Victor Davis Hanson

For the record: “If ‘high crimes and misdemeanors’ now includes factoring domestic politics into dubious foreign-policy decisions (see, e.g., Obama’s withdrawal of troops from Iraq), maybe, to save time, we should start impeaching presidents before they take office — because every one of them will surely be impeachable.” —Andrew McCarthy

Belly laugh of the week: “Has there ever been a less consequential person picked to be [Time magazine’s] Person of the Year? I doubt it. I mean, Wallis Simpson, 1936’s Person of the Year, got King Edward VIII to abdicate the throne. [Greta] Thunberg can’t even get you to abdicate your air-conditioning.” —David Harsanyi

Dezinformatsiya: “I believe that President Trump is engaged in the most direct sustained assault on freedom of the press in our history. He has done everything he can to undercut the media, to try and delegitimize us, and I think his purpose is clear: to raise doubts when we report critically about him and his administration that we can be trusted.” —Fox News’s Chris Wallace, who seems to have missed the fact that the mainstream media largely cannot be trusted, particularly in its reporting on Trump

Braying jackass: “This is heartbreaking. White supremacy kills!” —Jew-hating Rep. Rashida Tlaib (D-MI) on the Jersey City murders … except the assailants were actually black supremacists

The BIG Lie: “Reagan had it wrong: Our problem isn’t big government; our problem is a government that’s been captured by the rich and the powerful.” —Sen. Elizabeth Warren

Tone deaf: “If we did not [impeach Trump], he would continue to undermine our elections. Nothing less is at stake than the central point of our democracy, of a free and fair election not to be disrupted by foreign powers.” —Nancy Pelosi, whose impeachment charade is all about “undermining our elections”

And last… “It’s encouraging to see that the Brits still understand that electing a communist anti-Semite to the PM would be a bad idea.” —Ben Shapiro