This Week in Quotes

07 Jan, 2017 by John Hawkins

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“We published several … emails which show Podesta responding to a phishing email. Podesta gave out that his password was the word ‘password’. His own staff said this email that you’ve received, this is totally legitimate. So, this is something … a 14-year-old kid could have hacked Podesta that way.” — Julian Assange

“I have often wanted to believe differently, but the truth is that you get one life. You don’t get to choose many of the circumstances of it, but you always get to choose how you react to those circumstances. You can play by other people’s rules or to damn the consequences and live by your own. You can chose to conform to other people’s expectations of you, or work to exceed your own. You can surround yourself people you love and who love you, figure out what you are happiest doing and find a way to do that, and wake up every morning (or afternoon, if that’s your thing) and create the conditions to have as few regrets as possible, or you can do none of those things or half-ass them because it seems easier and, frankly, it is easier to just go along to get along.” — Megan Carpentier

“Each procedural hack slightly undermines the legitimacy of the system as a whole, and makes the next hack more likely, as parties give up on the pretense that winning an election confers the right to govern, and justify their incremental power grabs by whatever the other party did last. Democrats who say that Republicans have forced them to this by refusing to vote on Merrick Garland may be right — but then, so are Republicans who say that they were forced to it by earlier escalations on the Democratic side, for this increasingly vicious game of tit-for-tat stretches back to the Democratic-led judicial wars of the 1980s. — Megan McCardle

But liberals are noticeably reluctant to apply the hate crime label in these kinds of cases. Indeed, they’re more likely to call it a hate crime when you leave a bad tip for your Hispanic pizza delivery boy than when a group of black teens inflict unspeakable physical torment on a disabled white kid. — Matt Walsh

But Democrats should be asking themselves what Barack Obama has accomplished, too: He has decimated their party. The things they care the most about are, from the progressive point of view, mostly either in stasis or in regress: climate-change legislation, economic inequality, abortion, transnational governance, etc. The Left is strangely focused at the moment on exotica such as which dressing room transsexuals use at the gym and whether nonconformist bakers can be obliged at gunpoint to bake a cake for Bill and Ted’s excellent wedding. Their national leaders are elderly, intellectually narrow hacks of the kind who give hacks a bad name. Their great hope is an author of self-help books who smoothed her academic career by pretending to be a Cherokee. — Kevin Williamson