Pun Salad

Speaking for myself, I might move some items in this array, but not far:

Mouseover: "I don't dig pit traps and cover them with sticks and a thin layer of leaves nearly as much as I expected; I find a chance to do it barely once a month."

In other news of adulthood, Ron Bailey joins the Vivek Murthy pile-on: Surgeon General claims alcohol is a leading cause of cancer.

Ron's bottom line: "The surgeon general is evidently eager to deploy a questionable cancer scare in his campaign to impose stealth prohibition. For your own good, of course."

Also of note:

• Also on his way out the door… is Merrick "Thank Goodness He's Not on the Supreme Court" Garland. His recent assertions about what took place four years ago causes Andrew McCarthy to ask, rhetorically: Mr. Attorney General, How Many Capitol Riot Murder Charges Did You Bring?

  Illustrating yet again that Democrats haven’t come to grips with why they lost the election and what Americans think of their politicization of law enforcement, here’s Biden attorney general Merrick Garland today, emoting on the fifth anniversary of the Capitol riot:

  On this day, four years ago, police officers were brutally assaulted while bravely defending the United States Capitol. They were punched, tackled, tased, and attacked with chemical agents that burned their eyes and skin. Today, I am thinking of the officers who still bear the scars of that day as well as the loved ones of the five officers who lost their lives in the line of duty as a result of what happened to them on January 6, 2021.

  Let’s stipulate that Garland is quite right to castigate all who punched, tackled, tased, chemically attacked, or otherwise assaulted police officers. There is chatter in the air about pardons of the rioters; I don’t know what President-elect Trump plans to do upon taking office, but it would be a profound mistake — one his administration would come to regret — if he grants clemency to people convicted of assaulting cops (or, for that matter, damaging property). As we’ve covered here extensively for five years, it was ridiculous for the Justice Department to prosecute hundreds of people on misdemeanor charges of parading and the like — the kind of charges DOJ would ordinarily never file but that the Biden Justice Department, under Garland’s leadership, prosecuted in a patently political effort to inflate the Capitol riot (aka “The Insurrection”), condemnable as it was on its own terms, as if it were a 9/11-scale terrorist attack.

  To repeat for the umpteenth time, no police officers died in the line of duty during the Capitol riot. The fact that Garland, federal bureaucrats, and police officials have tried to exaggerate the perils of the riot, and in so doing – and occasionally in grappling with insurance claims involving loved ones of cops who tragically committed suicide after the riot – have claimed police were killed due to the events of that day, does not make it so.

  Pam Bondi might be a bad Attorney General, but it's hard to see how she couldn't be an improvement over Garland.

• But let's not forget… Kevin D. Williamson notes that, like creepy monsters of literature, The Donald Is at the Door.

  On January 6, 2021, there was a riot at the U.S. Capitol. It was led by people who intended to interrupt the certification of the presidential vote in the hopes of keeping Donald Trump in office. Donald Trump himself egged them on in various ways, and he was, at that time, engaged in a multifaceted attempt to illegally hold on to the office he had lost in a free and fair election to Joe Biden, a senescent near-nonentity who, though a figure of fun, unseated an incumbent president while barely even bothering to campaign against him. We use “January 6” as a shorthand to talk about what Trump did after losing the 2020 election, but it is important to understand—and I think historians will agree about this—that the imbecilic clown show at the Capitol was the least important and least dangerous part of that episode. Trump’s attempt to suborn election fraud—which is what he was up to on that telephone call with the Georgia secretary of state on January 2, 2021—was the more serious part of the attempted coup d’état. Some coup-plotters are generalissimos who just march their troops into the capital and seize power, but many of them—many of the worst of them—take pains to come up with some legal or constitutional pretext for their actions. Often, the pretext is an emergency, as it was with Indira Gandhi, Augusto Pinochet, the coup that brought Francisco Franco to power, etc. You’ll remember that Donald Trump called for the termination of the Constitution as an emergency measure: “A Massive Fraud of this type and magnitude allows for the termination of all rules, regulations, and articles, even those found in the Constitution,” Trump wrote in his trademark kindergartner’s prose. “Our great ‘Founders’ did not want, and would not condone, False & Fraudulent Elections!”

  I fear that we're going to see a lot of KDW commentary in the near future that can be summarized thusly: Told ya so!

• Uncomfortable questions raised. Jeff Jacoby writes: A woman died in agony as onlookers pressed 'Record'

  HER NAME was Debrina Kawam, though we didn't learn that until nine days after she was burned alive in a New York City subway station. On the morning of Dec. 22 she was murdered in public, in full view of witnesses; it took so long to establish her identity because so little of her was left by the time the flames were extinguished. Eventually police were able to put a name to the victim by analyzing fingerprints, dental information, and DNA evidence.

  […]

  Video of the incident shows several spectators on the platform watching from a few feet away, some using their phones to record the atrocity. Two uniformed cops can be seen walking right past the immolation. One glances at the burning woman but makes no move to help her; the other strides in the other direction, speaking into a walkie-talkie without slowing down. Off-camera, a man can be heard shouting, "This is a person right here!" and "Oh, no!" But of the people visible in the clips posted on social media, none evinces concern or sympathy; none makes a move to intervene; none does anything but watch.

  Jeff wonders what that says about the spectators. And anyone with an ounce of introspection has to wonder: What would I have done in that position?

• Today's award for "Awesome Headline" goes to… TechDirt's Mike Masnick, for Jeff Bezos’ Latest Gambit To Bring Back Trust In Media: Silence Editorial Cartoonists Who Call Out Your Sniveling Compliance.

  Washington Post owner Jeff Bezos wants you to believe he’s on a noble mission to restore trust in media. His solution? Muzzling his own paper by blocking it from endorsing Kamala Harris in the runup to the election, a decision he defended in a self-serving op-ed claiming that trust in media is at an all-time low.

  Yet, as we noted at the time, the real reason people’s faith in the press is plummeting is that they’re tired of seeing billionaires throw their weight around to silence critics and shape media narratives to suit their interests.

  The latest example? The Post silencing criticism by blocking an editorial cartoon mocking billionaires, Bezos included, for throwing millions at Trump’s inauguration in a pathetic attempt to curry favor. And it’s exactly this kind of behavior that is destroying the public’s trust in media.

  I don't think Mike's causality is correct. I'm more persuaded by this take at Ace of Spades:

  I don't think any of these woke media outlets can ever reclaim the figleaf of nonpartisanship. They will never, never again be considered authoritative or honest.

  Therefore, there is no point in attempting to "re-position" CNN or the Washington Post as "centrist" and "objective." Anyone who wasn't a full on TDS #Resistance leftist stopped going to these sources years and years ago, and they're not coming back. And as these outlets shed audience, they catered harder and harder to the remaining audience of mentally ill leftwing lunatics, which caused even Democrat normies to flee, and left their remaining audience base even more partisan and weird.

  There is no way -- none -- to reverse this, so it's my business advice that they not even try. The only course is to accept that they are permanently diminished and marginalized as fringe outlets of the intensely woke ghetto. They have to downsize until they hit the right, profitable level for a niche conspiracy-theory outlet.

  That said, that editorial cartoon benefits from the Streisand Effect: the block caused a lot more attention to be paid to it than it would have garnered otherwise. And so let me add to that:

  

• Lileks rules. He was inspired by a BBC story about (!) US weather that referred to a "private meteorologist". Which caused him to pen the tale of Sam Isobar, Private Weatherman.

  I immediately imagined myself sitting in a slightly shabby office in an old office building, my name painted on frosted glass in the door. There was a large empty green screen behind me. I had my feet up on the desk and was considering a drink from the office bottle when the doorknob rattled. She came in like a low-pressure front - she paused, then turned around counter-clockwise as if to leave, and began to cry.

  “I’m sorry,” she said. She faced me, clouds forming on her face. “It’s my husband. I think there’s a forty percent chance he will cheat on me tomorrow, with his infidelity tapering off to slight expressions of affection by four PM.”

  I was interested. Mostly in her. She wore a necklace of red triangles. She looked like she’d come from a few states away. “What’s that got to do with me?” I said.

  And more. Need a chuckle? Click on over. And subscribe, like I do.