Pun Salad

A bit of wisdom from James Lileks' Friday Bleat:

Pun Salad fact check: true. So very true.

But Sunday is also our day to poke fun at the horserace, and Mr. Ramirez helps out with that:

Continuing our phony pony analysis, let's look at the current odds:

For some reason, Google is not showing me the "phony" hit counts this week. The usefulness of that was dubious, of course.

Our featured link today is from George F. Will, rightly disappointed in the choices likely appearing on the ballot in November, and therefore writing In defense of not voting

I hope some combination of browser shenanigans will allow you to Read The Whole Thing and find out why GFW is talking about Edsels.

Also of note:

• It helps to be selectively blind. Holman W. Jenkins, Jr. writes for the Wall Street Journal, which (in a saner world) would be the very definition of "mainstream media". He notices: Trump’s Best Lies Weren’t Trump’s.

  Knowing when you lied and why you lied is psychologically healthy. Do I think Leon Panetta, the longtime respected congressman and Obama CIA chief, is of healthy mind? Yes. He and colleagues saw that it would help Joe Biden to associate Hunter’s laptop with Russia and left unspoken between them that it was a lie.

  The Economist, in contrast, gives us a blaring, billboard-like exhibition of the psychological disorder known as splitting. See if you recognize the pattern:

  Splitting means claims and assertions hostile to Mr. Trump should be repeated and emphasized; any that aren’t should be suppressed.

  The Steele dossier should be trumpeted until it stops being useful for discrediting Mr. Trump and starts to discredit his enemies—in which case it should never be mentioned again.

  If a statement is true and favorable to Mr. Trump, the only motive for voicing it is pro-Trumpism. (This will create problems for weather reporters if Mr. Trump says it’s raining and it’s actually raining.)

  Russian meddling can’t both have happened and have been trivial—because the first part sounds anti-Trump but the second doesn’t. This is unacceptable to the splitting mind.

  Nina Jankowicz declined comment, saying she had a splitting headache.

• But I can always vote Libertarian, right? Well… Virginia Postrel looks at that option, and doesn't see much to like: The Libertarian Crack-Up and Conflicting American Ideas of Liberty.

  News that Donald Trump will address the Libertarian Party convention has some people saying, Huh? (Official LP press release here.) In a column titled “Are Libertarians MAGA-Adjacent Now?” centrist Democrat Ed Kilgore writes:

  how much common ground can there exist between libertarian opponents of government power at home and abroad and a former president who oozes authoritarianism from his pores? We’re talking about a man who once famously said that Article II of the U.S. Constitution gave him as president the right “to do whatever I want,” and who is openly and regularly threatening to use every agency of federal power to smite his many enemies if he’s returned to the White House. After observing his initial performance in office, the Libertarian Party put out a statement in 2018 that said, “Whatever libertarian impulses Trump the candidate seemed to have, his actual performance as president stands in stark contrast. Donald Trump is the opposite of a Libertarian.” That sounds about right.

  What’s going on? How could people who supposedly believe in liberty and limited government cozy up to someone as instinctively authoritarian (and pro-tariff!) Donald Trump? This goes way beyond deeming him the lesser of two evils. Besides, isn’t the LP in the business of denying voting on that basis?

  The George Will option above looks pretty good, I think.

• Not exactly a profile in courage. Ann Althouse provides a quote from an NYT article, begins: "The grandson of President John F. Kennedy this week savaged his presidential-candidate cousin, Robert F. Kennedy Jr., in a series of mocking, meant-to-be-funny videos..."

  "...that were, inarguably, uncharacteristically un-Kennedyesque, escalating a civil war within America’s most storied political dynasty. In a series of Instagram posts, the grandson, Jack Schlossberg, 31, variously called Mr. Kennedy, 70, a 'prick,' suggested he was using steroids, said he was 'lying to us' and portrayed him as a Russian stooge and a stalking horse for Donald J. Trump. But what viewers may be more struck by, or even insulted by, are the heavily accented caricatures the young scion used to dramatize his points. He impersonates a Massachusetts fan of the Kennedys named Jimmy.... 'You know, I’m a fan of his father,' Mr. Schlossberg says, as Jimmy. 'And you know his uncle? Rest in peace, I remember where I was the day he was killed, I mean it was a tragic day, the entire country wept. But listen, that guy, he’s a prick. The new guy, the young guy, he’s a friggin prick.' He channels a southerner named Wade.... And he conjures an Italian-American Long Islander named Anthony....What may be the edgiest impression, though, is Mr. Schlossberg’s depiction of Joshua, an older New York Jewish man...."

  ADDED: Over at Daily Beast, you can see the encouragement in the raw: "Everyone Is Thirsting Over Kennedy Grandson Jack Schlossberg—for Good Reason/The Camelot heir’s goofy shirtless videos and ridiculing of cousin Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s presidential campaign has made Schlossberg the internet’s biggest crush of the moment" ("It’s so charming that I’m ready to vote for whoever Schlossberg tells me to").

  Ann's comments:

  Wow! Here's this famously handsome, hyper-privileged young man and he imagines it would be a good idea to put these cheap ethnic stereotypes on Instagram! How did this happen? It can't be merely that he's insanely out of touch with present-day standards of diversity and inclusiveness. And leave to one side the delusion that insults like "he’s a friggin prick" count as publicly shareable comedy. It must also be that the family and friends who surround him have been laughing at this stuff and encouraging him to post it, telling him it will be great for his future career in politics. Oh, Jack, you're so funny! And please, help us bring down RFK Jr. You can do it like no one else, because everyone is devastated by your good looks and your genetics.

  Presidential grandchildren generally aren't famous in their own right. Although we can always hope that Navy Joan Roberts will turn out to be an exception.

  I'm pretty sure all that appeared before…

• "The Brain-Worm Revelation" would have been a pretty good Big Bang Theory episode title. Jim Geraghty claims RFK Jr. Admission Opens a Can of Worms about Candidate Health Records.

  I don’t know about you, but this week’s New York Times scoop about Robert F. Kennedy Jr. surviving a bout with a parasitic worm that had eaten a portion of his brain made me feel a little better about the guy, not worse. Besides sympathy for his ordeal, at least this explains some things. “Why the heck did he say that?” “Ah, brain worms.”

  You start to grade Kennedy on a curve. Hey, why did he not tell his running mate, Nicole Shanahan, that he supports the right to an abortion, all the way up to full-term? Ah, brain worms. Why is his campaign’s “director of messaging” getting paid $14,000 per month while “reconnecting with spirit” in Costa Rica? Brain worms! Why is his campaign paying $8,000 a month to a digital strategist who graduated from high school in 2021? Again, brain worms.

  Geraghty's title for that section of his column is "RFK Jr.’s Revelation Raises Some Serious Questions", so don't worry, he gets around to the serious part.

• My Lutheran upbringing made me link to this. How Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s Brain Became the Diet of Worms.

  Apparently, in 2010 Kennedy was experiencing symptoms of cognitive decline. His memory was becoming hazy and he was walking around in a state of confusion. Brain scans revealed a mysterious patch—possibly a tumor. At first, doctors feared that he, like his uncle Edward Kennedy, was suffering from brain cancer. But then a doctor at New York Presbyterian offered another diagnosis, that the blotch on the scans was, in Kennedy’s words, “caused by a worm that got into my brain and ate a portion of it and then died.”

  Kennedy said these words as part of a deposition made in 2012 during divorce proceedings with his second wife, Mary Richardson Kennedy. In that deposition, Kennedy gave great salience to his poor health and diminished cognitive capacity, which he claimed resulted in a lower income—hence justification for a smaller alimony payment.

  Aside from the dead parasite nestled inside his brain, Kennedy claimed that as a result of mercury poisoning (which he blamed on his love of eating fish), “I have cognitive problems, clearly. I have short-term memory loss, and I have longer-term memory loss that affects me.” The presidential hopeful ruefully acknowledged, “I loved tuna fish sandwiches. I ate them all the time.” To find someone else as in love with tuna as Kennedy, you have to turn to a movie: In the 2002 black comedy Matchstick Men, the addled and creepy Roy Waller (played by Nicholas Cage) is a tuna junkie on par with Kennedy.

  If you can stand the occasional lefty cliché, it's a pretty good article.

  Debates, Shmebates. I say Sony should arrange an episode of Presidential Jeopardy!, pitting Trump vs. Biden vs. RFKJr vs. … whoever else has a theoretical shot at winning.

  And if you need an explanation of my "Lutheran" comment above, here you go.

Recently on the movie blog: