The Patriot Post® · Wednesday Short Cuts

Insight: “The purpose of studying economics is not to acquire a set of ready-made answers to economic questions, but to learn how to avoid being deceived by economists.” —Joan Robinson (1903-1983)

Upright: “Our institutions must stop treating students like helpless children whose delicate feelings must be protected and start requiring maturation. Colleges and universities are supposed to prepare students to excel in a world that does not revolve around them, not protect them from such a world. Institutions of higher education should be intellectual boot camps developing our future leaders, not daycare centers coddling adults who refuse to grow up.” —Oliver North & David Goetsch

For the record: “America could survive the radical takeover of sports, but it cannot survive the Left destroying our military. We discovered last year that security is essential, sports are not. If sports become unbearably woke, we can always turn off the game and find another hobby. If the military becomes unbearably woke, then we will find ourselves defenseless against increasingly aggressive foreign adversaries like China, Russia, North Korea, and Iran, not to mention non-state terrorists.” —Tony Perkins

Political futures: “Politics is fluid, elections are multitudinous, and voter behavior is often too complicated and subtle to be reduced to group identity. Ethnicity doesn’t determine elections — ideas do. And as Democrats have been realizing to their chagrin, the ideas embodied in Republican campaign messaging turn out to have a powerful appeal to many foreign-born and nonwhite voters.” —Jeff Jacoby

Nailed it: “The vice president galavanted around Central America and Mexico last week looking for the ‘root causes’ [of illegal immigration]. I could’ve saved the taxpayer the travel expenses. The root causes are right up the street at 1600 Pennsylvania. It’s Joe Biden and Kamala Harris running on an open-borders campaign.” —Senator Tom Cotton

Re: The panderer-in-chief: “When you think about having an aggressive policy towards Russia, you don’t kill your own energy pipeline and you don’t help them finish their energy pipeline through Germany — which is what the Biden administration just did. [Biden has] kind of been all over the place but now he’s just moved into straight-up flattering of Vladimir Putin when months ago he was calling him a killer.” —Mollie Hemingway

Belly laugh of the week: “In the history of our country, Americans have never seen a president of the United States support an adversary the way Trump supported President Putin.” —Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer

The BIG Lie: “In the FBI’s view, the top domestic violent extremist threat comes from racially or ethnically motivated violent extremists, specifically those who advocated for the superiority of the white race.” —Attorney General Merrick Garland (“The Biden-Harris administration is governing and establishing policy using the tenets and precepts of Critical Race Theory as its template. These words from Merrick Garland are thoroughly immersed in the language of Critical Race Theory.” —Darrell B. Harrison)

Hogwash: “The FBI still doesn’t exactly know what that [2017 congressional baseball] shooter was up to. They never really uncovered the sort of detailed evidence that laid out a specific plot or an objective.” —former FBI agent Andy McCabe (“Hmm. You mean the Bernie supporter who asked where the congressional Republicans were while holding a rifle in his hand? Yeah, this one is a puzzler all right.” —James Woods)

Lack of self-awareness: “The Big Lie is deeply corrosive because as a democracy we can’t really function if people think that elections are not valid.” —Democrat Congressman Ted Lieu, whose party rendered the 2016 election invalid by seeding actual big lies

Non compos mentis: “Uh, there are certain, uh, people who do not, uh, have, uh, gender identities that apply to female or male, uh, so we think our language needs to be more inclusive and how we deal with complex issues.” —OMB Deputy Director Shalanda Young explaining why “mother” will now be referred to as “birthing person”

Busted: “Do we know her whereabouts? We should just have her picked up before she goes on. This is outrageous.” —Michigan Attorney General Dana Nessel in an email to her staff to stop a restaurant owner from appearing on Fox News to discuss that state’s lockdown orders

And last… “If there is not equality of outcomes among people born to the same parents and raised under the same roof, why should equality of outcomes be expected — or assumed — when conditions are not nearly so comparable?” —Thomas Sowell