The Patriot Post® · Thursday Short Cuts

Insight

“The question about progress has become the question whether we can discover any way of submitting to the worldwide paternalism of a technocracy without losing all personal privacy and independence. Is there any possibility of getting the super Welfare State’s honey and avoiding the sting?” —C. S. Lewis (1898-1963)

Upright

“The definition of gender and marriage is not arbitrary. They have physical & eternal significance. A Christian marriage is a reflection of Christ (the groom) & the church (his bride). These are not negotiable or interchangeable. The first commandment with a promise is honoring your father & mother. (Eph 6:2) The Bible, & therefore all of human history, starts & ends with a marriage: the first between Adam & Eve, the second between Christ & the church. That’s all very specific & important. ‘But God is love!’ Indeed he is. 1 John 4:8. And this God who is love says some things are sin. He says other things are good. Therefore the most loving thing we can do is agree with him. We cannot out-love God. He is love & he defines it. We are all made in his image. Everyone, no matter their choices, has innate value & therefore deserve respect. But for those who love God, that does not mean agreement with that which God calls sin. It’s no small thing to disagree with the Creator on something so major. One last bonus: pride always comes before destruction & is never something to celebrate.” —Allie Beth Stuckey

Odds & Ends

“I thought we were heading into a constitutional crisis. I think whatever you think of Trump, the fact is that the whole Russiagate thing was a grave injustice. It appears to be a dirty political trick that was used first to hobble him and then potentially to drive him from office. I believe it is seditious. … It was a gross injustice, and it hurt the United States in many ways, including what we’re seeing in Ukraine these days. It distorted our foreign policy, and so forth.” —former U.S. Attorney General Bill Barr

“It’s been nearly 50 years since [Gerald] Ford’s ill-fated ‘Whip Inflation Now’ campaign. Biden certainly remembers it — he was a new member of the Senate at the time. Who could have predicted that half a century later, as president of the United States, he would make his own hapless attempt to fight inflation — an inflation that he himself has helped to make worse.” —Byron York

“We’re all paying the price for having overstimulated this economy during the pandemic and putting too much money into people’s pockets, which created a lot of this inflation. There’s no free lunch, and we’re all going to have to pay the price.” —former Obama adviser Steve Rattner

“On any given day, what Biden says that U.S. policy is and what U.S. policy actually is are no closer than distant cousins.” —Jim Geraghty

Dumb & Dumber

“I don’t think we should have AR-15s and AK-47s in civilian life. They belong on a battlefield.” —Texas gubernatorial candidate Beto O'Rourke | “I don’t think that the people who have them right now in civilian use should be able to keep them.” —Beto O'Rourke

“I know there’s been conversation about hardening schools. That is not something [President Joe Biden] believes in.” —White House Press Secretary Karine Jean-Pierre

Dezinformatsiya

“The interpretation that the Second Amendment extends to individuals’ rights to own guns only became mainstream in 2008, when the Supreme Court ruled in a landmark gun case, District of Columbia vs. Heller, that Americans have a constitutional right to own guns in their homes, knocking down the District’s handgun ban.” —The Washington Post’s Amber Phillips

“I’m a child of immigrants. When I was a kid, everyone I knew wished they could raise their children in America. Now, everyone I know wishes they could raise their children outside of America.” —The New York Times’s Farnaz Fassihi

“The truth is that conservatives consider mass shootings, and for that matter America’s astonishingly high overall rate of gun deaths, as an acceptable price for pursuing their ideology. … The very people who shout most about ‘freedom’ are doing their best to turn America into a ‘Hunger Games’-type dystopian nightmare, with checkpoints everywhere, loomed over by men with guns.” —New York Times columnist Paul Krugman

Thanks, Captain Obvious

“I think I was wrong … about the path that inflation would take.” —Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen

And Last…

“Very telling that America is expected to dedicate an entire month to celebrating Gay ‘Pride’ every June but only one day in July is set apart to celebrate American Pride.” —Charlie Kirk