Pun Salad

I certainly didn't demand that Getty find me a literal illustration for this: Trump Laid a Trap and Democrats Went Into It Genitals-First. And that rhetorical trap was laid when Trump said:

One of the great things about the State of the Union is how it gives Americans the chance to see clearly what their representatives really believe. So tonight, I’m inviting every legislator to join with my administration in reaffirming a fundamental principle. If you agree with this statement, then stand up and show your support: The first duty of the American government is to protect American citizens, not illegal aliens.

[Jeff provides a SOTU video excerpt if you prefer.]

Who will win this race to the bottom? (It's pretty easy to see who's gonna lose: it's the individual in your bathroom mirror.)

And if you need a reminder about the minor joke in Good Will Hunting scene (it's a movie from 1997, Jeff) here's a link.

Also of note:

• Not that it matters, but… Pun Salad is 21 years old today. My very first post here.

• Not making the headlines that it should. Damon Root looks at a SCOTUS ruling that slipped through the cracks: The Postal Service's recent Supreme Court win is bad news for government accountability.

  The Federal Tort Claims Act says that the federal government is immunized from being sued over "claims arising out of the loss, miscarriage, or negligent transmission of letters or postal matter." But what if a postal worker deliberately misdelivers the mail, such as by intentionally sending it to the wrong address or intentionally returning it to the sender instead of delivering it to the place where it is supposed to go? Is that kind of purposeful malfeasance by a postal worker also shielded from lawsuits?

  Writing this week for the 5–4 majority in United States Postal Service v. Konan, Justice Clarence Thomas declared that the statutory protection against being sued should indeed be read to apply "when postal workers intentionally fail to deliver the mail." According to Thomas, "because a 'miscarriage' includes any failure of mail to arrive properly, a person experiences a miscarriage of mail when his mail is delivered to his neighbor, held at the post office, or returned to the sender—regardless of why it happened." Likewise, Thomas argued, "a loss can be the result of another person's intentional misconduct."

  Well, that's disappointing. On the losing side: Kagan, Gorsuch, Sotomayor, and Brown Jackson. It's rare that I agree with three of those people.

  Which brings us to…

• In a lonely place. Christian Schneider muses on Neil Gorsuch's Burn Book.

  The Supreme Court’s ruling last week in Learning Resources, Inc. v. Trump struck down President Trump’s sweeping IEEPA tariffs. The majority opinion was important, but the most revealing document in the case wasn’t the majority — it was Justice Neil Gorsuch’s concurrence, a precision instrument designed to expose how his colleagues have each, in their own way, interpreted the law not as written but as politically convenient.

  Gorsuch’s opinion is merciless, serving up a hearty feast of vituperation. He picks apart his colleagues one by one — the progressive bloc, the conservative dissenters, and finally his own ideological ally, Amy Coney Barrett — and demonstrates that virtually everyone on the court has been willing to bend their interpretive principles when the other side’s president was unilaterally legislating.

  It's almost as if they got beaten down by all the people accusing them of being partisan hacks, and thought "OK, well, then I guess we will be partisan hacks."

• As others have observed: Oysters are just sea-flavored snot. But never mind that. Matthew Hennessey looks at the softball treatment of the guy Maine is probably gonna replace Susie Collins with: Graham Platner Is an Oysterman. (WSJ gifted link)

  Up in Maine there’s a Senate race going on.

  If you’ve only now started paying attention, here’s all you need to know: The media’s preferred candidate is an oysterman.

  From this day forward you will never see a headline in the political press referring to Graham Platner, the candidate in question, as a communist, though that’s how he described himself as recently as 2020.

  You will never read that he has advocated for political violence, despite his admission that he once thought it impossible “to fight fascism without a good semi-automatic rifle.”

  You will see only passing mention of the Nazi tattoo he had on his chest for 20 years and, where you do see mention of it, you will always be told that he had the offending ink removed and never knew what it meant.

  (For the record, he had it removed in October, and his former political director says he knew “damn well” what it meant.)

  Mr. Platner, 41, is no longer a communist with a Nazi tattoo who would water the tree of liberty with the blood of patriots. No, he is an oysterman now—a bearded progressive everydude in tall rubber boots.

  Matthew quotes polling done by the UNH Survey Center that shows Platner with comfortable leads in his primary race against Maine Governor Janet Mills, and (assuming that holds up) the general election against Susie in November.

  Susie gets a lot of RINO-disrespect in these parts from my fellow right-wing troglodytes. Fine, but we will miss her when she's gone.

• Which, unfortunately, still exists. Veronique de Rugy with some excellent advice that's unlikely to be taken: Don’t Use Rare Earth Supply As an Excuse to Beef Up the Export Import Bank.

  Two days after President Trump announced Project Vault, a $12 billion critical-minerals stockpile backed by the largest loan in Export-Import Bank history, Senators Kevin Cramer and Mark Warner introduced legislation to reauthorize the bank for a decade and raise its lending cap by $70 billion, from $135 billion to $205 billion.

  The pitch writes itself: critical minerals, countering China, ensuring America is never again hostage to Beijing’s chokehold on the rare earths that go into fighter jets, electric vehicles, and every smartphone on the planet.

  The political logic is irresistible. The policy logic is not.

  I’m a longtime student of this particular institution, and the gap between what Ex-Im promises and what it delivers is not a bug. It is the defining feature. The bank has a nine-decade record of riding to the rescue of politically connected corporations, missing its strategic targets, and stumbling through mandates while making little difference. Whether rare-earth supply chains are genuinely vulnerable is a serious question that serious people disagree about. But even if you grant the hawks every premise they’re asking for, the Export-Import Bank is the wrong tool for the job.

  Vero has long argued that Ex-Im is crony capitalism at its worst. So, obviously, it's unsurprising that Trump's a fan. She has more here: Red Flags with Project Vault.

• That would be me, and perhaps you. Bharath Krishnamoorthy provides reassurance: Yes, Human Beings Are Exceptional.

  Let me tell you the tale of the ungrateful creatures who crawled out of Eden.

  They murdered their own mothers. They slaughtered their own siblings. And they reproduced with such wild abandon that their success drove nearly all other life on Earth extinct.

  I’m talking, of course, about certain nematode worms, sand tiger sharks, and cyanobacteria, respectively.1

  “Wait a minute,” you say, “I thought this was about us!”

  I’m not surprised. Such stories now dominate the zeitgeist, painting our species as a unique blight in an otherwise perfect paradise, Mother Nature’s one bad seed. The Guardian, The Harvard Gazette, and The Institute of Art and Ideas have all recently published pieces blaming the ongoing ecological crisis on human exceptionalism—the belief that humanity is superior to other life forms in an ethically meaningful way. Christine Webb’s book, The Arrogant Ape: The Myth of Human Exceptionalism and Why it Matters, was a New York Times Notable Book of 2025. And as I write, viewers are still flocking to theaters to watch the third installment in James Cameron’s Avatar—a series about a large corporation’s attempts to exploit the natural resources of a distant moon, likely representing humanity’s most expensive critique of its own superiority complex.

  This bleak outlook may be gaining steam, but it couldn’t be more wrong. Humans are indeed exceptional, and embracing that fact is not the cause of, but is rather the solution to, the ongoing ecological crisis.

  Bharath is thinking big thoughts, and he's pretty convincing.