The Patriot Post® · Wednesday Short Cuts

Insight: “Really great moral teachers never do introduce new moralities: it is quacks and cranks who do that.” —C.S. Lewis

Food for thought: “I’m not sure if our problems are bigger and more numerous now than they’ve ever been, if we’re spending more time dwelling on them or if we’ve just gotten worse at coping with them.” —Teresa Mull

Political realities: “I just wish that Donald Trump could denounce Holocaust-denying white nationalist Nick Fuentes with one tenth of the rage, fury, disdain, and contempt that he’s denounced people and institutions such as Florida governor Ron DeSantis, Virginia governor Glenn Youngkin, and ahem, National Review. The fact that he can’t or won’t tells you just about everything you need to know about him.” —National Review’s Jim Geraghty

Disrespect for marriage: “I love marriage. In fact, I love it so much I’ve already done it twice and am engaged for a third time. And if gay couples want to be as happily or miserably married as straight couples, more power to them.” —South Carolina Republican Representative Nancy Mace in an op-ed explaining her vote for the grossly misnamed Respect for Marriage Act

A rebuttal: “Mace’s flippancy encapsulates a view of marriage that has become all too common. Marriage is no longer a means of harnessing the brute facts of biology into the service of children. It is purely a means to the end of the married parties’ happiness. It means whatever they want it to mean. Permanent, if you wish; exclusive, if you like; between people of the opposite sex, if you prefer. The older view of marriage was wiser.” —National Review

Political futures: “Simply put: no one likes Kamala Harris. No one even feels bad for not liking her. Her boss doesn’t like her; her aides don’t like her; even her Irish terrier doesn’t like her. … [Yet] the party faithful wanted a young, female (preferably non-binary) Person of Colour to wave their rainbow flag, but what the party establishment wanted most of all was to beat Donald Trump. The compromise solution was to keep Biden out of sight for a few years, then let him ‘make history’ by resigning. That was the only way to give America the virtue signal it desperately needed but stubbornly refused to elect.” —Salvatore Babones

Valuable question: “What would you think of a person who never asked the price of anything he or she bought? You would assume the person was inordinately wealthy. But if the person wasn’t, you would dismiss him as a fool, and you would certainly never ask this person for advice about how to spend your money. Yet, for two years, that question — ‘What is the price?’ — was avoided by virtually every political leader in the world as well as the vast majority of epidemiologists and physicians, journalists and editors, college presidents, deans, professors and K-12 teachers. They never asked, ‘What is the price?’ with regard to locking down businesses, schools and, in many cases, entire countries. That is why so many political leaders, teachers, college presidents, doctors, epidemiologists and other scientists turned out to be fools.” —Dennis Prager

And last… “Censorship determines the narrative. The narrative determines public opinion. Public opinion determines the vote. The vote determines who runs the country. We have replaced voting with battles over who gets censored.” —Scott Adams