The Patriot Post® · Thursday Short Cuts

Insight

“The only good bureaucrat is one with a pistol at his head. Put it in his hand and it’s good-bye to the Bill of Rights.” —H. L. Mencken (1880-1956)

Re: Transgenderism as a Social Contagion

“If this were organic, we would expect to see it evenly distributed across the population. We would see it without respect to viewpoint or politics of the locality, and we would see women in their 60s and 70s suddenly discovering and admitting their transgender status. Right? You would see women in their 70s saying, ‘Now that the stigma is gone, I can announce I’m transgender.’ We’re not seeing that at all. We’re seeing that among the same population that falls for every social contagion and is subjected to the most peer influence: that’s teenage girls.” —Abigail Shrier

For the Record

“The way that the Biden administration goes about governing and taking care of the business of the American people is instead of fixing problems, they let it fester, and then they let it turn into a crisis, and then they use that crisis as an opportunity to implement their socialist-style solutions that they wanted to implement all along. And that’s what we’re seeing right now in the electricity grid and the reliability issues that we know we are going to face this summer. And so had he just planned a little bit better and not undercut all of the Trump administration policies we had in place, Americans would be in a much better position.” —former EPA Chief of Staff Mandy Gunasekara

Gaslighting

“[Biden’s] number one priority right now is tackling inflation. He’s made that clear… But I think what we need to take a step back and look at is that American households as a whole are doing very, very well.” —Biden economic advisor Bharat Ramamurti

Nailed It!

“We forecast that retail gasoline prices will average $3.13/gal in December before falling to $3.01/gal in January and $2.88/gal on average in 2022.” —U.S. Energy Information Administration, December 2021 (“Was the Biden administration really that incompetent? Did they really believe that tapping the Strategic Petroleum Reserves would send gas prices down? The Biden administration blames the Russian invasion of Ukraine for gas prices, but gas prices had been going up well before the invasion, so no one actually buys that talking point.” —Matt Margolis

Hot Air

“The president is looking at every tool always. And the biggest tool he has of course was the Strategic Petroleum Reserve.” —Energy Secretary Jennifer Granholm (“Gas has gone up $1.61 per gallon since Biden first announced the SPR release in November, 2021.” —Mark Bednar)

“I think the prices are unsustainable for many people right now. … And unfortunately, there’s not a quick fix. However, your point about also accelerating our progress toward clean energy is very, very important.” —Jennifer Granholm

“You would save $60 per fill-up by going electric rather than using gasoline. So it’s [a] very compelling case.” —Jennifer Granholm

“President Biden has made a very significant commitment for the United States to be, first of all, power-sector carbon-free by 2035. By 2035 to only be producing electric vehicles in the United States.” —Climate Czar John Kerry

“Energy security worry is driving a lot of the thoughts now about, ‘Oh, we need more drilling of gas. We need more drilling of this. We need to go back to coal.’ No, we don’t. We absolutely don’t. And we have to prevent a false narrative from entering into this or, again, pun intended, we are cooked.” —John Kerry (“Reminder: he thinks the ‘only’ way for him to travel is by private jet.” —Tommy Pigott)

And Last…

“To compare Joe Biden to Jimmy Carter is now an insult to Jimmy Carter. Americans disapprove of Biden on inflation more today than they disapproved of Carter in 1978. And consumer sentiment is the worst on RECORD, which dates all the way back to 1952. As CNN notes, that is just ‘awful.’ That’s a diagnosis you don’t need to be a political expert to make. Biden is truly bringing us back to 1979. The only good thing about that? After 1979 came the Reagan Revolution in 1980.” —Tommy Pigott