Pun Salad

Yeesh. Hope things will improve by tomorrow. Fear they will not.

• As often happens, George F. Will has an accurate observation: In today’s politics, there’s no such thing as rock bottom.
  When John Keats said that autumn is the season of “mists and mellow fruitfulness,” he did not anticipate this American autumn. It resembles the gorier Shakespearean plays in which swords are brandished, people are poisoned and stabbed, almost everyone behaves badly and those who do not are thinking: Things cannot continue like this. Actually, they probably will because this is the first law of contemporary politics: There is no such thing as rock bottom.

  Did I already say "yeesh"? Yes I did.

  This is a mostly-political blog. But the last few days make me want to instead write detailed synopses of the sitcom episodes I watched, and to never post about politics again.

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• Ann Coulter posts on the last remaining acceptable bigotry: No More Mr. White Guy. She easily collects 17 quotes from the media elite disparaging the Pale People of Penis; here's three:
  “They know the optics of 11 white men questioning Dr. Ford … will be so harmful and so damaging to the GOP.” — Areva Martin, CNN legal analyst

  “They understand that you have all of these white men who would be questioning this woman … the optics of it would look terrible.” — Gloria Borger, CNN chief political analyst

  “Women across this nation should be outraged at what these white men senators are doing to this woman.” — Rep. John Garamendi, D-Calif.

  Ann asks:

  Can we please, for the love of God, drop the painfully trite, mind-numbing cliché about “white men,” as if somehow their whiteness makes evil even eviler?

  It's a dishonest, illiberal rhetorical cudgel, made acceptable by the fact that nobody is getting called out for it.

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• At The American Conservative, Rod Dreher quotes a reader: Kavanaugh On Flight 93
  I can’t stand Trump. I didn’t vote for him and for the moment don’t plan to in 2020. But where else to turn? What we have learned in the last two weeks is that the left will crush anyone who does not support The Agenda. Our elite institutions will crush The Agenda’s opponents (take it from me – I work in a university, where I have to maintain a careful silence about virtually everything). Do we really think this will stop with Kavanaugh? Do we really think they won’t come for all of us? I have a son – what am I supposed to tell him? “Be romantic and treat women well… but also get a notarized consent contract for every interaction you have.” What kind of world is the left pushing us into? We all act shocked at China’s new “social credit” surveillance system, but does anyone doubt it’s coming our way? Does the left not see that the endpoint of this road is total surveillance and records of all interactions?

  Hey, we have a few years before that will happen. Maybe 12 or so.

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• While our country's politicians are embarrassing themselves on live TV, there's a silver lining: at least they're not … oh, wait they are. Veronique de Rugy reports at Reason: Another Day, Another Terrible Congressional Spending Bill.
  If there's something the government does well, it's spend money. It does it with great fervor, no matter who's in charge of Congress or the White House. And it's made easier these days, thanks to our legislators' collective unwillingness to follow a regular budget process and their carelessness about the fiscal health of this country. Case in point: the $854 billion Senate spending bill making its way to the House this week.

  Considering how large the total spending package is, you'd think it might pay for all discretionary spending (that's the part of the budget that funds transportation, defense, infrastructure, education, and more). But it's only a little more than 65 percent of discretionary spending for 2019. Instead, it covers just one year of defense spending (a Republican priority) and the Labor, Health and Human Services and Education bill (a Democratic one). As for the remaining discretionary spending, it's provided in a smaller bill meant to fund the government through Dec. 7.

  The vote in the Senate was a proudly bipartisan 93-7.