Upright

“When you want to help people, you tell them the truth. When you want to help yourself, you tell them what they want to hear.” —Thomas Sowell

For the Record

“[Ilhan] Omar shouldn’t have lost her seat on the House Foreign Affairs Committee because she believes rootless cosmopolitans are brainwashing the world for the ‘Benjamins.’ She should have lost it for downplaying 9/11 and equating the United States with theocratic terrorist organizations like Hamas and the Taliban. She is neither ideologically nor morally prepared for the job. … Omar’s rhetoric is already the norm in academic and activist leftist circles, so it’s unsurprising. She could read the Hamas Charter into the Congressional Record and her defenders would claim she was merely being ‘critical’ of Israel. No matter what she says, no matter how often she lies, the partisans at The Washington Post will contend criticism of her is ‘inextricable from her religion.’ The bigot is actually the victim.” —David Harsanyi

“Wall Street and corporate America are concerned, more than anything else, with next quarter’s profits. This focus is so strong that anything that endangers next quarter’s profits, like a fight over America’s debt crisis, has to be avoided at all costs. This sort of short-sighted financial thinking is usually derided by those who should know better. Thinking only about the next financial quarter can result in some seriously horrible outcomes further down the road. But the alignment between corporate America, the corporate media and the Democratic Party has grown so strong that there is virtually no dissent. The result is the near unanimity across the country that a clean debt limit increase must happen and those in the way are irresponsibly endangering the country’s financial security.” —Neil Patel

“The trouble Trump has is that DeSantis was initially acting in keeping with the guidance of the federal government that Trump led. Despite some grousing, Trump had at his right hip during the entire pandemic the man that has come to represent for Republicans all that was wrong with the pandemic response — Dr. Anthony Fauci. It tends to be forgotten, but Georgia went first in reopening in late April 2020 and Trump hit Brian Kemp for it. At his coronavirus briefing, Trump said, ‘I told the governor of Georgia, Brian Kemp, that I disagree strongly with his decision to open certain facilities.’ When DeSantis, too, moved to reopen, Fauci attacked the state for moving too quickly. … Trump accuses DeSantis of disloyalty and, if developing an issue that is going to be almost impossible for Trump to counteract counts, he’s guilty as charged.” —Rich Lowry

The BIG Lies

“Am I taking blame for inflation? No. Because it was already there when I got here, man. Remember what the economy was like when I got here? Jobs were hemorrhaging. Inflation was rising. We weren’t manufacturing a damn thing here.” —Joe Biden (Fact-checks: Inflation was 1.4%. Half of the 22 million jobs lost because of COVID shutdowns had already been recovered. The manufacturing sector boomed in the Trump years.)

“The state of the union and the state of our economy is strong.” —Joe Biden

Histrionics

“I think it’s uncomfortable serving with people who engage in what many experts deem stochastic terrorism, which is the incitement of violence … using digital means and large platforms so that individual themselves may not be the one that’s wielding a weapon. But I have had to ride, as has Representative Omar … in 20,000-pound armored vehicles, engaging in some of the most gruesome threats that you can imagine that were incited by Republican members.” —Congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez

“Today is my 1st time inside the Capitol since Jan 6. Everything looks the same but it doesn’t feel the same. Maybe I’ll get used to it again but now it feels like a visit to an historic battlefield. Out of every window you see the paths of the attackers.” —MSNBC’s Lawrence O'Donnell

And Last…

“It is pathetic that the President has effectively allowed an obvious spy overflight of our country by an enemy foreign power. The Chinese sent a balloon either because it could do something satellites couldn’t, or as a show of strength. Either way, Biden’s decision is cowardice.” —Ben Shapiro