The Patriot Post® · Thursday Short Cuts

For the record: “Last August, Trump was questioned at a White House press briefing about polls showing his popularity was declining. Asked to explain, he responded, ‘Nobody likes me. It can only be my personality. That’s all.’ It was a rare moment of transparency for him. There is still a remnant of old-fashioned values my grandparents’ generation embraced and tried to instill in their descendants. One was not to belittle, demean, talk down to, or call other people names. Trump has consistently ignored that advice. While a large number of Americans still support him and the number who voted for him far outpaced any other Republican presidential candidate, or incumbent president, it wasn’t enough. The reason can only be his personality. Most Americans expect a certain amount of dignity emanating from one who temporarily holds our highest office. Could Trump have achieved all he has without the name-calling? I think so.” —Cal Thomas 

What goes around comes around: “Given the Democrats’ Faustian bargain with their leftmost faction, destructive rumors about Biden’s faculties or his family’s financial escapades will more likely come from his own party’s left wing, eager for a Harris presidency, rather than from the Republican opposition. … It will not help Biden that to defeat Trump, many of our institutions were deformed. Special counsels usually never receive a blank check — 22 months and $32 million — to assemble a team of partisans to investigate a new president on mostly hearsay evidence and an opposition-concocted dossier. But that precedent ended with the ill-conceived Robert Muller investigation. By spring, Biden could have done to him what was done to Trump — and what Biden himself so frequently cheered on.” —Victor Davis Hanson

Re: The Left: “The enemies of American democracy are out there … though they are not the Republicans or Donald Trump. They are people such as the Clintons who supported radical politics from their earliest days: Hillary, with the Black Panthers and a communist boss in California in the early 1970s, and Bill, with his visits with communists in Prague in 1970 and his throwing marbles under police horses in London’s Grosvenor Square. In 2016, Hillary dusted off her radical rhetoric from the 1960s for one last revolutionary shout. Resist! Doubtless, Bill would have joined her, but he was under the bed hiding from the ladies he has abused. … The Clintons and like-minded Democrats will continue to stand above the law as they have for five decades. But thanks to Donald Trump, Hillary will never be president.” —R. Emmett Tyrrell

Friendly fire: “I do think that we need new leadership in the Democratic Party. I think one of the things that I have struggled with, I think a lot of people struggle with, is the internal dynamics of the House has made it such that there’s very little option for succession, if you will.” —AOC

That settles it! “I’m confident [Hunter did nothing wrong].” —Joe Biden

From the Department of Corrections: “In a story … about the Mexican and Brazilian presidents congratulating U.S. President-elect Joe Biden, The Associated Press erroneously reported that Biden’s first name is Jose. His name is Joe.” —Associated Press

And last… “We hear about the rigging of the election, but partly what [people] mean is the meddling on the part of big media and big tech to affect the outcome of the election.” —Mollie Hemingway