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“It is natural to man to indulge in the illusions of hope. We are apt to shut our eyes against a painful truth — and listen to the song of that syren, till she transforms us into beasts.” –Patrick Henry
Editorial Exegesis
Obama changes stance on “stand your ground”
“Same-sex marriage isn’t the only subject on which President Obama’s views have evolved. In his remarks last Friday on George Zimmerman’s acquittal, the President said it would be wise to ‘examine’ state and local laws governing the use of firearms in self-defense. He suggested that ‘stand your ground’ provisions are ‘sending a message’ that ‘someone who is armed potentially has the right to use those firearms even if there’s a way for them to exit from a situation.’ He asked: ‘Is that really going to be contributing to the kind of peace and security and order that we’d like to see?’ It turns out that Mr. Obama participated in such an examination almost a decade ago and emerged as a stand-your-ground proponent. Illinois Review, a conservative blog, recently unearthed Illinois Senate records showing that then-state Senator Obama voted for and even co-sponsored a 2004 bill that expanded the protection of the state’s 1961 stand-your-ground law to include immunity from civil liability for people who use deadly force to defend themselves or their property. The bill wasn’t controversial in the liberal legislature, passing the Senate without dissent and the state House with only two nays before then-Governor Rod Blagojevich, also a Democrat, signed it. … U.S. Senator Dick Durbin of Illinois, a member of the Judiciary Committee, says he’ll hold a subcommittee hearing on the topic this fall. Maybe he should call his former junior colleague as a witness and ask him to explain what message he was seeking to send in 2004.” –The Wall Street Journal
Upright
“We wonder if Obama or Attorney General Eric Holder is familiar with the case of Marissa Alexander of Jacksonville, a black woman who received a 20-year prison sentence in May 2012 for firing warning shots against her allegedly abusive husband. The judge rejected a defense under Florida’s stand-your-ground law. Alexander told police it was to escape a brutal beating by her husband, against whom she’d already taken out a protective order. For defending herself, she went to jail — as some still wish for George Zimmerman. But by standing her ground with a firearm, she may have saved her life, just like Zimmerman.” –Investor’s Business Daily
“You might say, ‘Profiling is unfair, and individuals should be judged individually!’ Taken to the limit, such a position is ludicrous. Suppose police are trying to catch the criminal who just raped a woman in a city park. Would you want them to use sex profiling — i.e., just round up men — or should they round up everyone, regardless of sex? I’m betting that most people would view the latter as stupid. But there is a near equivalent in government. Ninety-six percent of the FBI’s list of most wanted terrorists are Muslim, and most terrorist attacks in the U.S. have been committed by young Muslim males. Despite this, the Transportation Security Administration people behave as if each person who seeks to board a plane is of equal danger. That’s why they search, frighten and inconvenience 5-year-olds and elderly people. … God, unlike us mortals, wouldn’t have to do any kind of profiling, because he knows everything. We mortals, with our imperfections, must find substitutes for his omniscience.” –economist Walter E. Williams
“Like Detroit, America has unfunded liabilities, to the tune of $220 trillion, according to the economist Laurence Kotlikoff. Like Detroit, it’s cosseting the government class and expanding the dependency class, to the point where its bipartisan ‘immigration reform’ actively recruits 50-60 million low-skilled chain migrants. Like Detroit, America’s governing institutions are increasingly the corrupt enforcers of a one-party state — the IRS and Eric Holder’s amusingly misnamed Department of Justice being only the most obvious examples. Like Detroit, America is bifurcating into the class of ‘community organizers’ and the unfortunate denizens of the communities so organized. The one good thing that could come out of bankruptcy is if those public-sector pensions are cut and government workers forced to learn what happens when, as National Review’s Kevin Williamson puts it, a parasite outgrows its host.” –columnist Mark Steyn
“The moral-religious outlook of an older America … restrained some of the wilder impulses of the human species. It was acknowledged fairly regularly that actions produced consequences; that as a man sowed, so he reaped — due to which reality it was useful to think carefully about the crop one was planting, all the while watching the weather. … Appraisals of this character fell out of favor as politics assumed a larger and larger role in life. What politician was going to go around with dour face and wagging finger, warning happy constituents of reckonings to come? The ancient moral law fell into disuse. History as a predictor of outcomes turned into televised entertainment. And so … Detroit. Maybe Chicago. Maybe Los Angeles. Maybe a Medicare system yoked to unrealistic promises made for the sake of political returns, the future shoved further into the future, the can kicked as far down the road as possible. A moral overhaul for a nation suffering from the neglect of sound moral teaching is, you might say, a bit overdue.” –columnist William Murchison
Insight
“It is discouraging to think how many people are shocked by honesty and how few by deceit.” –British playwright Noel Coward (1899-1973)
“The timid civilized world has found nothing with which to oppose the onslaught of a sudden revival of barefaced barbarity, other than concessions and smiles.” –Russian dissident and author Alexander Solzhenitsyn (1918-2008)
Demo-gogues
Race bait: “You know, when Trayvon Martin was first shot I said that this could have been my son. Another way of saying that is Trayvon Martin could have been me 35 years ago.” –Barack Obama in his impromptu press remarks Friday
Thanks for the warning: “I always remind people, I’ve run my last campaign. … I’ve got a little over 1,200 days left in office. … I guarantee you we will continue to make progress and we will deliver on everything that we talked about in 2008 and 2012.” –Barack Obama
Praise where it isn’t due: “[B]y the time I took office, the bottom [of the economy] had fallen out. Now, the good news is over the last five years we fought alongside people like Nancy Pelosi. But most importantly, because of the grit and resilience and determination of the American people, we’ve been able to clear away the rubble and get back to where we were.” –Barack Obama
Hyperbole: “In effect, what [Republicans are] doing is they’re taking their own child hostage, their child in this case being the United States of America’s credit, taking their own child hostage, and telling [Democrats], ‘If you don’t pay ransom, we’re gonna shoot our own child.’” –House Minority Whip Steny Hoyer (D-MD) on the next debt ceiling fight
She misunderstands “Support and Defend”: “In Congress, there can be no more fitting memorial to the lives lost in Aurora, in Newtown, and across the country than a concerted effort to enact common sense gun safety legislation. We must uphold our oath to ‘protect and defend’ the Constitution and all Americans by expanding background checks and keeping dangerous firearms out of the wrong hands.” –House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi (D-CA)
Pro-abortion distortion: “What is at risk is the discretion of a woman to make judgments about the size and time — timing of her family. … The reality is that people in our country do practice birth control and use contraception. I don’t know if my colleagues need a lesson on the birds and the bees. I really don’t get it.” –Nancy Pelosi
Dezinformatsia
The BIG Lie: “Michigan used to be a symbol of industrial strength in manufacturing in this country. But thanks to a lot of Republican policies, the city is now filing for bankruptcy.” –MSNBC’s Ed Schultz (“All Detroit’s mayors since 1962 were Democrats who were eager to micromanage.” –John Stossel)
Non Compos Mentis: “In the case of Detroit, the reason that the tax base [has] become so small is because of a loss of population, right? … But this lack of tax base is also exactly the thing that many Republicans would impose on us, even when our cities have sufficient populations, even when our communities have sufficient populations. This is what it looks like when government is small enough to drown in your bathtub, and it is not a pretty picture.” –MSNBC’s Melissa Harris-Perry
Different nonsense, same spout: “When a pregnancy is wanted … it is easy to think of the bump as a baby. But not every pregnancy is a fairy tale. … [A]n unwanted pregnancy can be biologically the same as a wanted one. But the experience can be entirely different. … But when does life begin? I submit the answer depends an awful lot on the feeling of the parents. A powerful feeling — but not science. The problem is that many of our policymakers want to base sweeping laws on those feelings.” –Melissa Harris-Perry
So what does this say about the prosecution? “You know, how many times have we heard over the years a jury hung 10-2, or 10-1 — or 11-1. … [I]n a funny kind of way it seems to me it’s very easy to manipulate six people when it’s much harder when it’s 12.” –CBS News’ Bob Schieffer on the Zimmerman verdict
Hating America: “With any luck we won’t be [a superpower in 20 years]. When you leave America and you go back and you look at it from like over here, and you see this giant continent with two vast oceans in between it, and it feels it’s paranoid and terrified of the rest of the world, and wants to have this enormous military industrial complex to control it, you just scratch your head after a while and realize that Eisenhower was on to something. So was Washington, so was Jefferson. I think the transition to a post-imperial America is coming. I think it’s overdue and I welcome it.” –The Daily Beast’s Andrew Sullivan
Village Idiots
Grasping at straws: “[C]omprehensive immigration reform … would significantly reduce our deficit, would expand economic growth, would raise wages.” –White House Press Secretary Jay Carney
The new standard for bankruptcy: “[Detroit's bankruptcy filing is] cheating, sir, and it’s cheating good people who work. It’s also not honoring the president, who took [Detroit's auto companies] out of bankruptcy.” –Ingham County Circuit Judge Rosemary Aquilina to Michigan AG Brian Devlin
Despicable race bait: “The Affordable Care Act is the most powerful law for reducing health disparities since Medicare and Medicaid were created in 1965, the same year the Voting Rights Act was also enacted. … The same arguments against change, the same fear and misinformation that opponents used then are the same ones opponents are spreading now. … But history shows that upholding our founding principles demands continuous work toward a more perfect union… And it requires the kind of work that the NAACP has done for more than a century to move us forward.” –HHS Secretary Kathleen Sebelius
Bad idea: “Congress must act. And it’s time to call on the United Nations Human Rights Commission [sic, Council] for an in-depth investigation of whether the U.S. is upholding its obligations under international human rights laws and treaties.” –Jesse Jackson on the Zimmerman verdict
Short Cuts
“The Obama administration’s cynical campaign against Stand Your Ground laws is a racially charged weapon of mass distraction. The goal isn’t public safety or community harmony. The goal is for conservative political opponents to Surrender Your Ground. Silence, as always, is complicity. Political self-defense, as with physical self-defense, begins with self-assertion.” –columnist Michelle Malkin
“Attorney General Eric Holder ripped Florida’s stand-your-ground law. He said anyone who is confronted by violence should be encouraged to retreat safely. Before entering law school Eric Holder was a drill instructor for the French Foreign Legion.” –comedian Argus Hamilton
“You can think George Zimmerman made a horrible mistake, but you have to agree that morally he’s a much much better person than Ted Kennedy.” –humorist Frank J. Fleming
“An illegal alien who’s been deported 11 times was caught again, this time with 220 pounds of pot in his car. He’s in big trouble — he was supposed to bring back a receipt for Eric Holder’s guns.” –Fred Thompson
“Detroit has become the largest city in U.S. history to file for bankruptcy. What happened was Detroit’s population dropped something like 70 percent, but the government got bigger. The tax base got smaller, but the government got bigger. Thank God that kind of thing could never happen in Washington.” –comedian Jay Leno
Semper Vigilo, Fortis, Paratus et Fidelis!
Nate Jackson for The Patriot Post Editorial Team
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