Pun Salad

Does this piss you off?

⁦@JeffBezos⁩ Someone in your company doesn’t know ‘where Jews belong.’ pic.twitter.com/IqpBwm11ZC

— Richard Kirk (@Bbr6dgcwscKirk) May 23, 2025

That tweet is from a Town Hall "Tipsheet" article with the provocative headline: WaPo Finally Takes Down Post About 'Where Jews Belong,' but Why Was It Up in the First Place?. To which I was sent via the "Headlines" section of HotAir. I think.

The Town Hall article begins:

So I was all ready to unload on the WaPo too. Obviously the borderline anti-semites on the paper were looking to sow doubt on whether Jews belonged… well, anywhere. Those danged rootless cosmopolitans! And then they tried to cover it up by deleting the post! Media ethics dying in darkness!

But wait a minute. That original story is still up (gifted link). And it still has that allegedly problematic subhed: "The killings of two Israeli Embassy staffers amplify the confusion felt since the Oct. 7, 2023, attacks about where Jews belong."

Is it asking too much for people to read the first three paragraphs of the story?

So, it's not those vile anti-semites wondering where Jews "belong". It's this actual rabbi. And (as the article continues) she's not alone in feeling disoriented and confused, with our country perceived to be turning away from its aspirations to be a place where people would not be targeted for harassment and violence because of their Jewishness.

So the WaPo is guilty of nothing here other than (as they say) a tweet that people misconstrued, perhaps willfully. This is not hard to suss out from a little light reading. And I went from being (potentially) pissed at the WaPo to being (actually) pissed at Town Hall. Did they intentionally try to gin up outrage in their readers? Did they do this out of laziness, ignorance, or malice? Does it matter? Maybe some combination of all three.

Also of note:

• Don't get a PSA test, Mr. President, you're gonna die soon anyway. Assuming that people are telling the truth about this may be risky, but Allysia Finley assumes that risk, and writes on Biden’s Prostate Cancer and the Tyranny of the Experts (gifted link). .

  Joe Biden’s stage 4 prostate cancer diagnosis raises many questions, not least why a U.S. president with access to the best healthcare in the world didn’t have routine blood screenings that could have caught the disease before it turned deadly.

  One possible culprit is an excessive deference to so-called experts, many of whom believe older people shouldn’t be screened for cancer because they are likely to die in short order anyway. This is the view of liberals like Ezekiel Emanuel, an Obama and Biden adviser, who want to put government in control of all Americans’ healthcare.

  A Biden spokesperson last week said the former president hadn’t received a prostate-specific antigen blood test since 2014, when he was 71 or 72. A high level on the test can signal cancer, though it can also raise false alarms. On the flip side, it doesn’t miss many cancers.

  In 2008 the U.S. Preventive Services Task Force—an independent panel of putative experts that reviews evidence for preventive screenings and treatments—categorically recommended against screening men 75 or older for prostate cancer. Four years later, the panel advised against PSA screening in all men.

  That advice hasn't made its way to New Hampshire as yet, apparently. I'm 74, and have a PSA test scheduled for July.

  But please tell me how this "expert" advocacy doesn't translate into the blunt advice in this item's headline.

• I find it difficult to believe that Hunter Biden could have participated in fraud.

  Just kidding! That's totally credible!

  Jeff Blehar has recently become one of my favorite writers at National Review, and he points out: The Biden Family Shares the Responsibility for Biden’s Fraud (gifted NR link, my last one for May).

  Once upon a time, back in the hazy mists of July 2023, before the 2024 presidential campaign got fully underway, my esteemed colleague Charles C. W. Cooke wrote a column for National Review about how “Joe Biden Is a Jerk” — actually, er, when you click through to the piece, Charlie tells you how he really feels:

  President or not, Biden is a decrepit, dishonest, unpleasant blowhard. He’s a nasty, corrupt, partisan fraud. He is, as Shakespeare had it, “a most notable coward, an infinite and endless liar, an hourly promise breaker, the owner of no one good quality.” Biden is twice as irritating as he believes himself to be, and half as intelligent into the bargain. From the moment he arrived on the scene — nearly 50 years ago, Lord help us — he has represented all that is wrong with our politics. A century hence, his name will be set into aspic and memorialized under “Hack.”

  It’s an excellent piece that resonates even more deeply now — in retrospect, its only flaw is that he could have expanded upon it. To support his argument, Charlie cited then-current reporting from Axios’s Alex Thompson, who during those years undermined the myth of “avuncular Grandpa Joe” with multiple stories about Biden’s visible mental and physical decline that cut against the grain of complaisant silence from the media about the issue. Uncoincidentally, Thompson happens to now be the coauthor of the most talked-about political book of the moment.

  […]

  Something else emerges, however. The accumulation of anecdotes over a steady chronological narrative is devastating, and at every step of the way it is Joe Biden’s family itself that behaves the most unforgivably — selfishly, foolishly, delusionally — of all. Sister Valerie and daughter Ashley are largely absent from this narrative. (Brother James is nowhere to be found either, which doesn’t make him any less ethically compromised.) This is the story, first and foremost, of Hunter and Jill Biden. They weren’t the ones making the policy decisions during the last four years (neither was Joe, as it turns out) — but it was these two more than anyone else, as Biden’s closest family advisers, who were the engine of Joe Biden’s continuing fraud upon the American people. As those closest to him, they were the truly necessary element to keep the imposture going for as long as it did.

  Yes, even Dr. Jill. Tsk!

• 

  I wouldn't bet against Betteridge's Law of Headlines here. Still, Rachel Ferguson makes a provocative query: Can We End Racism by Ending the Idea of Race Itself?

  Is race real? In The Raceless Antiracist, a follow-up to her 2022 book Theory of Racelessness, Sheena Michele Mason argues not only that it isn't, but that trying to stop racism while keeping the concept of race is like fighting "a flood by pouring water on it."

  Mason, a literature professor at SUNY Oneonta, suggests that these futile approaches fall into two categories: "anti-racist resistance" and "color-blindness." While the first reifies race by making it the key to understanding most social phenomena, the second reifies it by treating it as a real thing that ought to be ignored, thus downplaying the reality of the racism that relies on it.

  The Raceless Antiracist asks us to do something very uncomfortable: to adopt a new mental model, to think in a completely different set of categories. It doesn't deserve a snap judgment. It's a book for chewing on and wrestling with. It may puzzle or even disturb you.

  Gee, just when I had more or less adapted to the view of Harvard geneticist David Reich, who took to the NYT to describe How Genetics Is Changing Our Understanding of ‘Race’. (I also read Prof Reich's book on the topic; my report is here).

  Nevertheless: Amazon link to Prof Mason's book at your right. Paperback is $10 ("for a limited time"), Kindle $9.99. Not at Portsmouth (NH) Public Library. I will go for Interlibrary Loan, though.

Our yearly reminder: with whatever fun we're having today, let's all not forget to remember.

Story about the picture here.