Pun Salad

Pete Buttigieg is leaving the presidential race. His decision comes as a surprise; this morning, his campaign was still urging supporters to get out the vote on Super Tuesday.

A decent number of Buttigieg supporters are now up for grabs in the Super Tuesday states. Buttigieg is at 13.3 percent in the RealClearPolitics polling average of Massachusetts, 13 percent in Colorado, 11.5 percent in Virginia, 9.5 percent California, 7.5 percent in Texas, 6.8 percent in North Carolina.

(As of Thursday, more than 2.7 million voters in California had returned ballots in early voting. Hope they didn’t vote for Tom Steyer or Pete Buttigieg.)

Yet the same Democrats who descended into dread at Dershowitz's thought experiment about the relationship between executive power and national interest seem disconcertingly lacking in self-awareness about how such a critique would apply to their own plans for the day their party once again holds the reins.

[Today's dropout Amy Klobuchar] has promised to use executive action in her first 100 days to enact new policies on gun control, financial regulation, immigration, union protections, cybersecurity, and much more. She has made these promises, one assumes, out of mixed motivations: She believes such actions would be in the national interest, but she also thinks that promising to do these things will increase her chances of being elected and that doing them will increase her chances of being re-elected.

Staffers for Sen. Bernie Sanders (I–Vt.) have already begun drafting the dozens of executive orders that would be required to fulfill the promises he has been making for the debut of his presidency, from directing the Justice Department to legalize marijuana to declaring a climate change emergency to banning the export of crude oil to canceling all federal contracts that pay workers less than $15 per hour.

When you're weary of songs that feel small, it's nice to have a song that feels big - seems to be about something more than just boy-meets-girl, goes on twice as long as your run-of-the-mill pop record, has a sense of its own importance but not to the point of self-parody ("Bohemian Rhapsody"). For a long time "Bridge Over Troubled Water" fulfilled that role. In 1973, when Capital Radio became the first ever (legal) commercial music-format radio station in the United Kingdom, Richard Attenborough launched the station by welcoming listeners and then playing, as the very first record, Simon & Garfunkel. Until well into the Eighties, whenever Capital and many other stations polled listeners on their all-time Top 100, "Bridge Over Troubled Water" would invariably be voted Number One. It had a broad appeal. Back in the Sixties, Simon & Garfunkel were the rockers your parents liked. Not just put up with, but really liked: Nestling among the Ray Conniff LPs and Fiddler on the Roof cast album, you could usually find a Bookends or Sounds of Silence, and well played, too. I once made Paul Simon visibly bristle when I said airily that a lot of suburban couples with two on the aisle for Hello, Dolly! listened to their eight-tracks of Bridge Over Troubled Water while driving to the theatre. But he conceded the essential truth of the observation. The Bridge album became one of the biggest sellers of the rock era, and its title track hit Number One on the Billboard Hot 100 exactly fifty years ago - February 28th 1970. It marked the high point of the Simon & Garfunkel collaboration - and also the end:

Driving by the sign “HITCHHIKERS MAY BE ESCAPING INMATES” took me aback. Making an illegal U-turn in front of the medium-security WS Key Correctional Center on a rural Oklahoma highway this February, I drove back to snap a couple of pictures of the sign.

Reflecting upon many hitchhiking journeys of my own, through Europe, Canada, Alaska, across the U.S., and even across the length of Central America and parts of Mexico, too, was I being stigmatized as an “escaping inmate”?

Maybe I am an escaping New Hampshirite, from the “Live Free or Die” state of my birth. Besides the state’s motto sounding like something from a suicide cult, the French motto on retreating is more appealing, “Live to fight another day.”

If New Hampshire nanny state partisans have their way, you will soon be fastening your seat belt not because you choose to, but because you are ordered to. It kind of makes driving around with “Live Free or Die” on your license plates a bit ironic, no?