The Patriot Post® · Friday Short Cuts

Upright: “The problem for individuals and nations when standards of right and wrong are abandoned is where it leads. Moral anarchy has been one of the contributing factors to the collapse of empires and great nations of the past. Apparently, we think we can escape the judgment of history and the judgment of God by ‘believing whatever our itching ears want to hear’ and doing ‘whatever seems right in our own eyes.’ Those two quotes are from Scripture. Look them up before a court decides they are not inclusive.” —Cal Thomas

For the record: “There is a connection between bad schools and lack of parental involvement. When you have strong parental involvement, parents pressure their schools to remove such teachers. Because of strong, protective teachers unions, these teachers are rarely fired, merely shuffled from school to school, until they land in one where few parents complain. And while the vast majority of teachers do not fall into that ‘bad’ category, look at where public school teachers send their own school-age children. Nationwide, approximately 10% of kids attend private school. Six percent of Black kids do so. But more than 20% of public school teachers send their own kids to private schools.” —Larry Elder

The bottom line: “We aren’t trying to prevent schools from teaching about racism. We are trying to prevent schools from engaging in it.” —an anonymous friend of Glenn Reynolds on teaching Critical Race Theory in schools

Precisely: “It is vital to understand that the [Capitol] ‘insurrection’ obsession is itself grounded in another claim of far more serious import: that there was no fraud in the Nov. 2020 election, and that Joe Biden won the presidency ‘fair and square.’ While this is certainly possible … the still-inexplicable simultaneous vote count stoppages in multiple battleground states, coupled with millions of unverified mailed-in ballots and massive middle-of-the-night vote dumps for Biden, raised legitimate suspicions that Americans deserve to have addressed.” —Laura Hollis

A blind squirrel finds a nut: “We must have the balance of outrage, where we are outraged if police do things in blue uniforms, but outrage when we have people in blue jeans that are openly being criminal, acting like it’s normal in our community. … You can’t love our people when they’re shot by police, and then look the other way when we’re shooting each other. We have to deal with both.” —Al Sharpton

Non compos mentis: “We must eliminate funding for CPB [sic], ICE, and their parent organization, DHS.” —Congresswoman Rashida Tlaib

Nope: “The federal government has spent trillions of dollars to try to keep Americans alive during this pandemic. So [vaccination status] is absolutely the government’s business.” —HHS Secretary Xavier Becerra (“These are the same people who argued just last year that the U.S. government can’t ask during a census if you’re an American citizen or not, despite the fact that the Constitution straight-up requires a census of all citizens.” —Sean Davis)

Lack of self-awareness: “We have members of Congress who are wildly out of the mainstream, who vote to overturn the results of an election, and who use their powerful platforms to spread lies and disinformation. As a result, nearly two-thirds of Republicans now incorrectly believe President Biden was not legitimately elected.” —Hillary “Russia Stole the 2016 Election” Clinton

Grand delusions: “If your best strategy for winning elections is to block huge swaths of the electorate from voting, what does that say about the strength of your candidates and policies? … We are witnessing a concerted attempt to destabilize the democratic process and delegitimize our multi-racial democracy, carried out in full view of the American people. … Today’s voting restrictions are no different from the Jim Crow past. … We need to call these attacks on voting what they are: part of a clear attempt to move away from a pluralistic, multi-racial democracy and toward white supremacist authoritarianism.” —Hillary Clinton

Hot air: “We’re just not moving fast enough [on climate change]. And so we’ve got to come together with the same mentality with which we have fought wars. I mean, you’ve got to spend what you need to spend. You got to do what you need to do. You have to do it as fast as you can.” —climate czar John Kerry

Non sequitur: “Inflation’s silver lining: higher salaries” —CNBC (“House fire’s silver lining: lower heating bills.” —Matt Walsh)

And last… “The same people on the Left who rant ceaselessly about expensive, supposedly endless wars with no exit strategies are in favor of the counterproductive and endless War on Poverty, in which we economically burned villages in order to save them.” —Ben Shapiro