The Patriot Post Chronicle 12-21-2011

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The Patriot Post Chronicle 12-21-2011
From The Federalist Patriot
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The Foundation

"States, like individuals, who observe their engagements, are respected and trusted: while the reverse is the fate of those who pursue an opposite conduct." --Alexander Hamilton

Editorial Exegesis

"When President George W. Bush included North Korea in his 'Axis of Evil' along with Iraq and Iran, he was greeted with snickers from those to whom evil is a foreign and unnecessarily provocative concept. Yet evil exists and will continue to be a threat even if its poster child, Kim Jong Il, is dead. ... North Korea developed nukes and the missiles to carry them while its depraved leader drank imported cognac and his people literally ate the bark off trees. Dear Leader's cognac bill was estimated at $500,000 a month. Despite one of the longest and costliest emergency international food relief efforts in history, North Korea's artificial famine has had a proportionately higher death toll than any in history -- worse even than Stalin's Russia or Mao's China. In remote locations not far from the borders with China and Russia, a gulag not unlike the worst labor camps built by Mao and Stalin holds 200,000 men, women and children accused of various crimes against the state. The North Korean Freedom Coalition estimates that between 400,000 and 1 million have perished in these death camps. After Kim Jong Il suffered a stroke in 2008, his third son, Kim Jong Un, estimated to be about 27, was designated as the tyrant-in-line. Kim Jong Un was made a general despite having no military experience. ... The uncertainty all this presents begs for a response better than the fuel oil and food diplomacy conducted in the past to buy time and kick the can down the road. We remember former President Jimmy Carter's naive and dangerous pilgrimage to North Korea. Carter praised North Korea's mass-murdering dictator as a 'vigorous and intelligent man.' Of this habitat for inhumanity, Carter stated: 'I don't see they are an outlaw nation.' ... China, Pyongyang's No. 1 supplier and benefactor, could have long ago helped us rein in this rogue and belligerent regime, but preferred to leave it as both a threat and annoyance to U.S. interests. Now, with the death of Kim Jong Il, uncertainty and instability make North Korea arguably a threat to both nations. As with our policy toward Iran, the other surviving member of the Axis of Evil, it should be clear that further appeasement of tyranny and evil may appear to buy time but only postpones the day of reckoning." --Investor's Business Daily1

The Demo-gogues

Hubris and bad news: "I would put our legislative and foreign policy accomplishments in our first two years against any president -- with the possible exceptions of Johnson, FDR, and Lincoln -- just in terms of what we've gotten done in modern history. ... But when it comes to the economy, we've got a lot more work to do, and we're gonna keep on at it." --Barack Obama

Blaming the Republicans: "Even though Republicans and Democrats in the Senate were willing to compromise [on the payroll tax extension] for the good of the country, a faction of Republicans in the House are refusing to even vote on the Senate bill -- a bill that cuts taxes for 160 million Americans. And because of their refusal to cooperate, all those Americans could face a tax hike in just 11 days, and millions of Americans who are out there looking for work could find their unemployment insurance expired." --Barack Obama

Over the top: "I consider leaving Americans without unemployment insurance for January and February a crime. I consider not extending the payroll tax cut ... a crime." --Rep. Sheila Jackson Lee (D-TX)

Gravely mistaken: "I am confident that the vision that we believe in so deeply and that we've worked so hard for is the vision that is truest to our history and most representative of the core decency of the American people. " --Barack Obama

Government as savior: "Many people aren't aware of the fact that the federal presence and federal employees in their community is vital and performs a life-saving kind of function that is highly revered and valued. And we need to get that narrative out there in every congressional district and in every state in the union to turn the tide in terms of this negative [Republican] narrative." --Rep. Gerry Connolly (D-VA)

Lecturing: "[House Democrat Whip Steny] Hoyer made it very clear to the Republicans that when bills come over that do not have policy riders attached to them, poison pills, that we can cooperate and vote together on them and we did so. ... And so it took sometime to talk them out of them, to show them the wisdom of getting rid of those unwise riders. Mr. Hoyer and I, and [Assistant Democrat Leader James E.] Clyburn, we're all appropriators, we're from that culture, we respect the appropriations process, and it is not to be a vehicle to put things on that could never get a presidential signature or pass the House and Senate unless they were on what Mr. Hoyer calls a 'must pass bill.'" --House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi (D-CA)

Village Idiots

Revisionist history: "Jesus was an Occupier, born under a death warrant, a Jew by religion, born in poverty under Roman occupation. Gandhi was an Occupier, Martin Luther King was an Occupier, [Nelson] Mandela was an Occupier." --"The Reverend" Jesse Jackson

Delusional: "Communism [is] a great concept. On paper it makes perfect sense." --TV talker Whoopi Goldberg (She forgot the part about how it's a total disaster in practice.)

Spin zone: "We never said the taxpayer was going to get paid back. We put $82 billion in the car industry as a whole. We will get back all but $14 billion, plus or minus, of it. But in return for that we saved two million jobs in the Midwest and two great American companies." --Steven Rattner, Obama's car czar

Fast and furious race card: "This is a way to get at the president because of the way I can be identified with him. Both due to the nature of our relationship and, you know, the fact that we're both African-American." --Attorney General Eric Holder accusing his critics of playing the race card because of accusations of incompetence involving the botched "Fast & Furious" scandal

Upright

"The more Attorney General Eric Holder proved contradictory in his recent statements about his knowledge of Fast and Furious, the more I expected that at some point, to save his tenure, he would play the race card. Apparently, he just has. ... Now, in extremis, when a growing chorus wants him gone, we get [accusations of racism] from Holder about his legislative critics. ... Holder should have resigned weeks ago, but at least he serves as a portent of what we can expect in the national dialogue of 2012." --historian Victor Davis Hanson

"There's a basic rule in business: If you tell people that a product is free, they treat it like it has no value. We've spent the last 70 years in this country telling our poor that money and property are free. Of course, they don't attribute any value to money or property, then. Of course, they treat others' property as though it's valueless, to be stolen or taken at whim. The liberalism of Franklin D. Roosevelt, Lyndon B. Johnson and President Obama hasn't turned thieves into sudden lovers of big-band swing. It's turned more and more Americans into thieves. Don't blame poverty. Blame morality. And blame a government and a society that have abandoned the notion of responsibility for juvenile delinquency." --columnist Ben Shapiro