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THE FOUNDATION: LIBERTY

“Is life so dear or peace so sweet as to be purchased at the price of chains and slavery? Forbid it, Almighty God! I know not what course others may take, but as for me, give me liberty or give me death!”  — Patrick Henry, 23 March 1775

IChThUS IMPRIMIS

“Despite all the calumny and harassment, Christians are generally happy, well-adjusted and uniquely unconfused about the purpose of life. We are unimpressed by the pompous idea that we are born out of nothingness, to live and die, only to disappear back into nothingness. We know this kind of thinking makes no sense at all, and we recognize this dark rhetoric for what it is: the verbal flailing of disoriented and frightened people who do not have philosophic handles on themselves or the universe in which they live. As Christians, we know that, in the course of time, from the perspective of eternity, everything is reconciled, every detail attended, every wrong righted, every kindness thanked, every wound healed, every love requited, every sin atoned, every life vindicated, every loss recovered and every loved one found.”  — Linda Bowles

THE GIPPER

“The Founding Fathers believed that faith in God was the key to our being a good people and America’s becoming a great nation.”  — Ronald Reagan

FOR THE RECORD

“Are we succeeding in Iraq? Look no further than the front page of your daily newspaper. What had been a steady barrage of bad news has now slowed to a trickle... Why the improvement? We can thank the ‘surge.’ A little more than a year ago President Bush announced he would be sending more U.S. troops to Iraq. They deployed over the course of several months, and were all in country by June. It was a bold decision. His party suffered a humiliating defeat in the mid-term elections, and the Iraq Study Group had recommended a troop withdrawal. Plus, opinion polls showed the public had soured on the war. Still, more American troops flowed into Iraq under a new commander, Gen. David Petraeus, with a new counterinsurgency strategy that puts a premium on protecting Iraqi civilians and dispersing U.S. troops more widely to create areas of security. The results have been breathtaking. In December 2006, there had been more than 1,600 sectarian killings in Iraq. Within six months that number had been more than cut in half. Before the surge, Anbar province was under al Qaeda’s control. ‘We haven’t been defeated militarily but we have been defeated politically — and that’s where wars are won and lost,’ one Army officer said in the fall of 2006. That, too, turned around in just a few months... Things turned around fast because the surge convinced many of Iraq’s Sunnis to stop fighting the Iraqi government and join us in fighting al Qaeda. Now, al Qaeda in Iraq has been decimated as a fighting force... But all this progress is, as yet, fragile...[T]he United States cannot simply wash its hands of the Middle East, no matter how much we might want to. As we learned on Sept. 11, the oceans no longer protect us against the pathologies of a handful of religious extremists.”  — Ed Feulner
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GOVERNMENT

“The denial of annual [pay] increases, [Chief Justice John] Roberts wrote, ‘has left federal trial judges — the backbone of our system of justice — earning about the same as (and in some cases less than) first-year lawyers at firms in major cities, where many of the judges are located.’ The cost of rectifying this would be less than 0.004% of the federal budget. The cost of not doing so will be a decrease in the quality of an increasingly important judiciary — and a change in its perspective. Fifty years ago, about 65 percent of the federal judiciary came from the private sector — from the practicing bar — and 35 percent from the public sector. Today 60 percent come from government jobs, less than 40 percent from private practice. This tends to produce a judiciary that is not only more important than ever but also is more of an extension of the bureaucracy than a check on it... The enlargement of the judiciary’s role by the regulatory state requires compensation of the judiciary commensurate with its ever-expanding importance. That importance, although regrettable, is a fact, and so is this: You get the quality — and the perspective — you pay for.”  — George Will

LIBERTY

“It’s hideous what liberalism does to the human spirit, it attempts to destroy it, even to the point of making enemies out of people who have achieved something, out of people who have become successful... Conservatism, on the other hand, doesn’t seek to control anybody. Conservatism seeks to liberate. Conservatism believes that the human being, the United States of America citizen, is capable of anything he or she wants. Conservatism believes in the goodness and the greatness and the potential... in every human being and wants to get as much out of the way in terms of obstacles as possible. Conservatism wants to motivate those people. Conservatism wants to inspire those people. Conservatism wants happy, content people pursuing life and liberty. Conservatism believes that the greatest country we can have is where there is as much freedom as possible, as defined by the founding documents of this country when there is as little government as necessary, and when people are free to utilize their own desires and their ambitions.”  — Rush Limbaugh

OPINION IN BRIEF

“Did Senator Barack Obama’s speech in Philadelphia convince people that he is still a viable candidate to be President of the United States, despite the adverse reactions to statements by his pastor, Jeremiah Wright? The polls and the primaries will answer that question. The great unasked question for Senator Obama is the question that was asked about President Nixon during the Watergate scandal; What did he know and when did he know it? Although Senator Obama would now have us believe that he is shocked, shocked, at what Jeremiah Wright said, that he was not in the church when pastor Wright said those things from the pulpit, this still leaves the question of why he disinvited Wright from the event at which he announced his candidacy for the Democratic Party’s presidential nomination a year ago. Either Barack Obama or his staff must have known then that Jeremiah Wright was not someone whom they wanted to expose to the media and to the media scrutiny to which that could lead... Someone once said that a con man’s job is not to convince skeptics but to enable people to continue to believe what they already want to believe. Accordingly, Obama’s Philadelphia speech — a theatrical masterpiece — will probably reassure most Democrats and some other Obama supporters. They will undoubtedly say that we should now ‘move on,’ even though many Democrats have still not yet moved on from George W. Bush’s 2000 election victory. Like the Soviet show trials during their 1930s purges, Obama’s speech was not supposed to convince critics but to reassure supporters and fellow-travelers, in order to keep the ‘useful idiots’ useful.”  — Thomas Sowell
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POLITICAL FUTURES

“Barack Obama’s speech last week, hastily prepared to extinguish the firestorm over the Rev. Jeremiah Wright, won critical praise for style and substance but failed politically. By elevating the question of race in America, the front-running Democratic presidential candidate has deepened the dilemma created by his campaign’s success against the party establishment’s anointed choice, Hillary Clinton. In rejecting the racist views of his longtime spiritual mentor but not disowning him, Obama has unwittingly enhanced his image as the African-American candidate — not just a remarkable candidate who happens to be black. That poses a racial dilemma for unelected super-delegates, who as professional politicians will pick the winner since neither Obama nor Clinton can win enough elected delegates to be nominated. Super-delegates, though they were inclined to Clinton no longer than three months ago, now flinch at rejecting Obama. They fear antagonizing African-Americans, who have become the hard-core Democratic base. But what if national polls continue their post-Wright trend and show Obama trailing both Clinton and Republican John McCain in popular support?”  — Robert Novak

RE: THE LEFT

“[Barack Obama’s] whiny wife, Michelle, says that her husband’s election as president would be the first reason to have ‘pride’ in America, and complains that this country is ‘downright mean’ and that she’s having difficulty finding money for their daughters’ piano lessons and summer camp. Between them, Mr. and Mrs. Obama earn $480,000 a year (not including book royalties from ‘The Audacity Of Hype,’ but they’re whining about how tough they have it to couples who earn 48 grand — or less. Yes, we can. But not on a lousy half-million bucks a year. God has blessed America, and blessed the Obamas in America, and even blessed the Rev. Jeremiah Wright, whose bashing of his own country would be far less lucrative anywhere else on the planet. The ‘racist’ here is not Geraldine Ferraro but the Rev. Wright, whose appeals to racial bitterness are supposed to be everything President Obama will transcend. Right now, it sounds more like the same-old same-old. ’God Bless America Land that I love.’ Take it away, Michelle.”  — Mark Steyn

SELECT READER COMMENTS

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“Through tears of joy my wife and I want to thank you for being so bold — and patriotic — to proclaim the true Easter message on your website. Yes, patriotic because you obviously ‘love God and zealously support His authority and interests,’ to paraphrase Webster’s dictionary. God bless everything you are doing. He is risen! He is risen, indeed! Hallelujah!”  — Milwaukee, Wisconsin

“Your writings on Easter are so much more what God intended than the hateful rantings coming out of a supposedly Christian Church. When the ‘news’ gets too discouraging I always turn to The Patriot Post for clearness of logic and truth. Thanks.”  — Washington, North Carolina

“Although I have no issues with Christianity or any other religion, I have to disagree with the following quote printed in your Easter newsletter: ‘To our Patriot readers of faiths other than Christianity, we hope that this edition serves to deepen your understanding of our faith — and the faith of so many of our Founders.’ Many of our founding fathers were Deists and Unitarians, not Christians. They did believe in God, but not the divinity of Christ. To me this sounds like an attempt to revise history, and we all know how bad that can be.”  — Round Rock, Texas

Editor’s Reply: Hence the words “so many.” We would never pretend that all of the Founders were Christians.

THE LAST WORD

“Savvy Democrats have found a way to capitalize on market fears. Just as they frequently attribute every hot day to global warming — not weather — now they lay every economic problem at Iraq’s door. If the economy is not strong, they blame what Obama calls the ‘Bush/McCain war.’ Sure, it’s fair to oppose the war and cite the cost to American taxpayers. Although, once a war has started, we have to pay for it. So when Democrats talk about how the war hurts the U.S. economy, it sounds to me as if they are arguing that U.S. troops can spill their blood in Iraq, but not if gasoline hits $4 per gallon. Then the cost is too high... Forget, if you will, that Clinton and 76 other senators voted (for the resolution) to authorize the use of military force in Iraq. This is America’s war. To troops stationed in Iraq, it doesn’t matter who started it. It does matter, however, that their sacrifices count for something. And it doesn’t help U.S. troops, whose morale has been boosted by the surge’s success, when Clinton announces, as she did again last week, that the Iraq War is ‘a war we cannot win.’... Last week, Clinton said in her Iraq speech, ‘The reality is that this war has made the terrorists stronger.’ Likewise from Obama: ‘Above all, the war in Iraq has emboldened al-Qaida.’ But if the terrorists are stronger and bolder, why are they losing ground in Iraq? Why are they in hiding elsewhere? And why have leading Democrats begun to frame the Iraq War, not just as a war that cannot be won, but as an expensive engagement that is driving up the price of gasoline for Americans?”  — Debra Saunders

Veritas vos Liberabit — Semper Vigilo, Fortis, Paratus, et Fidelis! Mark Alexander, Publisher, for The Patriot’s editors and staff. (Please pray for our Patriot Armed Forces standing in harm’s way around the world, and for their families — especially families of those fallen Soldiers, Sailors, Airmen, Marines and Coast Guardsmen, who granted their lives in defense of American liberty.)