Pun Salad

Hey, I just noticed that Google is displaying hit counts ("About n results") for its searches again! I was pretty sure they had stopped doing that! Was I just imagining things?

Anyhow, in the anarchic, plague-on-all-your-houses, spirit from past years, I'll add the phony hit count to our Sunday table:

As noted, bogus. Still, it's unsurprising how yuge Trump's are.

Also of note:

• Did someone say "phony"? Yes! Jeff Jacoby did: The phony feeding frenzies over ‘bloodbath’ and ‘hamstringing’. (Subhed: "Ripping words out of context, prominent voices on left and right alike keep pouring fuel on our incendiary civic discourse.")

  At a campaign rally in Dayton last weekend, Donald Trump said something that released a tsunami of outrage and scorn from Democrats and the left-leaning media. During a Supreme Court oral argument two days later, Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson said something that released a tsunami of outrage and scorn from Republicans and the right-leaning media.

  In neither case was there anything scurrilous or shocking about the remark in question. What was reprehensible was the way the remarks were willfully misrepresented by ideological partisans who didn’t scruple to distort the truth in order to advance a political narrative and discredit a political foe.

  What Trump said was that “it’s going to be a bloodbath for the country” if he doesn’t win the presidential election in November. Seizing on the word “bloodbath,” a liberal chorus instantly raised an alarm.

  “It’s clear this guy wants another January 6,” President Biden posted on X, as his campaign released an ad raising the specter of civil unrest. Politico headlined its story “Trump says country faces ‘bloodbath’ if Biden wins in November.” Similar headlines appeared above stories on NBC, CBS, and The Guardian. Senator Brian Schatz of Hawaii, a Democrat, advised the media to pile on: “Headline writers: Don’t outsmart yourself,” he urged on X. “Just do ‘Trump Promises Bloodbath if he Doesn’t Win Election.’” Presidential historian Michael Beschloss, a frequent TV talking head, told MSNBC that Trump’s comment was reminiscent of “fascism and totalitarianism and in Germany’s case the Holocaust.”

  Whoa. Of course, Trump was talking about a "bloodbath" for the American auto industry if another four years of Biden's EV mandates continued.

  But what about the righties? They were similarly freaked about Ketanji Brown Jackson's remarks about the First Amendment "hamstringing the government in significant ways."

  Well, yeah. That's what it's supposed to do. But context shows that KBJ was talking specifically about governmental "persuasive" speech. Which is, and should be, legal.

  I should note that your humble blogger was swept up in the outrage. My bad.

• Warning: unsettling imagery ahead. Piers Morgan takes to the NYPost to complain: The only bloodbath in America right now is the bowels of liberal hypocrisy splattered all over social media.

  When Donald Trump became president, he quickly developed a favorite morning hobby.

  “I wake up early,” he revealed to me a few months into his tenure. “And if I don’t like what I see about myself on the TV screens in my bedroom, I pull out my phone in bed and tweet something that makes them all change to BREAKING NEWS and a completely different story based on my tweet.”

  Then he burst out laughing.

  I did, too.

  Hilarious. We had a president who spent his time trolling the media instead of, y'know, doing his freakin' job.

• Just say no. Christian Schneider has some advice for pontificating Democrats: If ‘Democracy Is on the Ballot,’ Kamala Harris Shouldn’t Be. (I'm out of gifted NR links for the month, sorry.)

  Biden, who finds himself down in the 2024 presidential polls in all the wrong swing states, is facing off against two stubborn adversaries: Donald Trump and Father Time. But while Trump is beatable, Father Time is famously undefeated. In NCAA Tournament parlance, the Grim Reaper is a No. 1 seed and Biden’s remaining cogent for the next four years is a longshot.

  Democrats are publicly in denial about Biden’s age, lashing out against the New York Times for, among other things, publishing poll results showing that nearly eight in ten Americans believe the president is too old to continue. That includes 73 percent of people over 65, meaning people roughly Biden’s own age are looking at him and saying, “The old man’s lost it.” (Only 43 percent felt the same about Trump.)

  In any sane political environment, Biden would have a release valve — that of a capable vice president who could take over in the event something happened to him while in office. But this is not a sane environment, and Biden is riding along with Harris, whose current approval rating of 37 percent is roughly that of salespeople who squirt lotion on you as you try to walk through the mall.

  I'm not a huge FDR fan, but he wisely dumped Henry Wallace from the VP slot in 1944. Take a lesson from FDR, Joe. Posterity will breathe a sigh of relief.

  Schneider quotes Kamala:

  To wit: Take Harris’s speech at the U.S.-ASEAN (Association of Southeast Nations) summit in Washington, D.C., in 2022:

  We will work together, and continue to work together, to address these issues, to tackle these challenges, and to work together as we continue to work operating from the new norms, rules and agreements, that we will convene to work together.

  “We will work together,” she said in closing, with a flourish reminiscent of a glitching AI text program.

  Not the first, nor probably the last, time I've observed: that's a dumb person's idea of what a smart person sounds like.