Surreptitious Saturday

NEW LIFE

"Two disciples filled with sorrow at injustice unknowingly encountered Jesus along the road to Emmaus. Writer Jill Carattini said, "[Jesus] tells them that the suffering and death of the Messiah were not to be understood as a defeat of God's purpose, but as a necessary pathway to new life. And pointedly, profoundly, Jesus suggests that this is the very pattern of God: from death to life. . . . And out of the death of the Messiah himself God brings us to resurrection—first God’s, then our own."  Naomi Zacharias, Slice of Infinity

DEPT. OF SHAMELESS JOKE-STEALING

"If bees made beer, we would be taking better care of ourselves."  Reader's Digest, April, 2020

CORONAVIRUS

"There are plenty of reasons to attack Trump for the virus sweeping our country, but the media are mad at him for not doing something that would have been absurd: shutting down the country when there wasn’t a single Wuhan flu death in the nation and the media had barely mentioned it. 

In fact, the first time most news consumers heard about the latest Chinese coronavirus was when liberals attacked Trump for shutting down travel from China at the end of January."  Ann Coulter, Drudge Report 

"It is not enough for government officials, in reliance on experts, to tell you that they have very good public-health reasons to lock you down, remove your livelihood, deny your children access to education, and blockade your family from the use of outdoor spaces. Again, there is no question that government has a compelling interest in public safety. Nevertheless, before it restricts or denies our fundamental liberties, it has the burden of showing that its proposed restrictions are necessary, that there are no more modest measures that could better balance public safety with our right to live freely."  Andrew McCarthy, National Review Online

"Despite there being no indication that outdoor spaces abet the spread of the disease, parks have been shut down throughout the United States, and the closures are at times enforced with rigor. No less than Tom Brady was chased from a closed Tampa Bay park after he was discovered working out, apparently alone. A father in Colorado was briefly detained by police for the alleged offense of playing T-ball with his 6-year-old daughter on a softball field.

"A sure sign of fanaticism is the inability to make distinctions, in this instance between risky and non-risky activities and between places hard hit and places not. It’s one thing to hold a day-long, 100-person family reunion in a public park, quite another to jog through one. It’s one thing to begin opening up in New York City, where there have been more than 10,000 deaths, and another to begin opening in Montana, where there have been 14."  Rich Lowry, NRO

"While it is good for the president to project engaged leadership, that should never take the form of free-flowing dialogue with his advisers. Those conversations should happen behind closed doors. When the president speaks publicly, he should stick to what he is in a position to convey factually, not hypothetically. Especially when it comes to scientific and medical information, as to which he is quickly out of his depth.

"At the same time, no matter how much the press abhors Trump, no matter how sincerely believed its conviction that he is a dangerous man who will induce people to do dangerous things, reporters worthy of the name do not have license to portray Trump as living down to their worst fears when he has not. If he says dumb things, they should report that he said dumb things. That’s bad enough (and since they’re clearly hoping to hurt him politically, nothing stings like the truth.) The press destroys its own credibility, however, by reporting the president’s ill-advised remarks as if they were culpably, recklessly irresponsible remarks.

"The president should not have spoken about theoretical virus treatments. But he obviously was not urging people to apply half-baked theories, or to seek any medical treatments without a doctor’s approval. He was opining on potential treatments he had been told that medical experts were testing, and speculated they should be testing, to determine their effectiveness."  Andrew McCarthy, NRO

"It is a great tribute to our Constitution that these checks and balances are working to create the friction necessary for Americans to take notice of the deeper issues at stake here. But we must take note and demand much better from our public officials. Federal and state executives would be wise to take a step back and consider the long-term implications of the actions they are taking. They must preserve and respect the constitutional structure that guards our liberty."  Penny Nance, Townhall

ELECTION 2020

"Biden will attempt to position himself as the “normal” candidate vis-à-vis Trump, the decent and reasonable man in the race. The truth is that he is a crank. He is a vicious, lying partisan of the first order, a moral and political coward not above lying about the circumstances of the death of his first wife and daughter when he thinks it will suit him politically. Biden’s claims about a canceled election are pure fiction."  Kevin Williamson, NRO