Pun Salad

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

Story about the picture here.

Also of note:

• I've been tired of it since January 21, 2017. Noah Smith asks his readers: Are you tired of the Trump era yet?

  I get a lot of flak from progressives for being a “both sides” kind of commentator. I spend a fair amount of time criticizing leftist ideology and expounding on the very real failures of progressive governance, both of which have gotten much worse over the last decade. Yes, I support the Democrats, but that support is contingent — if their ideology and competence deteriorate to the point where the Republicans are less bad, I’ll switch to supporting the GOP. So it’s worth it to fight to halt and reverse the deterioration; in the long term, the cost of ignoring extremists and policy failures in order to have “no enemies on the left” is very high.

  And yet right now, despite all of the negative trends on the left, the choice of which party Americans should support has never been clearer. The second Trump administration has unleashed a dizzying array of measures seemingly tailor-made to weaken the United States of America — sometimes at the behest of rightist extremists, sometimes due to Trump’s own mercurial whims, and sometimes in order to enrich Trump and his clique.

  Noah notes Trump's bad policies on tech and Iran. Also there's plenty of obvious corruption. He excerpts a long quote from a Rolling Stone article ("IT’S THE CORRUPTION, STUPID") which claims "There has never been a president as corrupt as Donald Trump. There is no close second in our history." Worth your attention despite the source. Noah summarizes:

  So basically, Trump:

  1. Uses the government to interfere with specific companies,

  2. Trades those companies’ stocks in advance, knowing how his own government interference will affect their prices,

  3. Sues his own government for billions and then orders his government to settle the lawsuit,

  4. Gives the billions of dollars of taxpayer money to his own activist thugs and cronies, and

  5. Has the government promise never to prosecute the Trump family.

  Rolling Stone is absolutely right: Nothing in U.S. history even comes close to this level of corruption. Trump is simply using the powers of the presidency to extract billions of dollars from stock owners and taxpayers — i.e., from you and me — and to put that money into his own pocket. Compared to this, the famous Teapot Dome land scandal in the 1920s was nothing. The total amount of money involved in Teapot Dome — just a few million of today’s dollars after adjusting for inflation — was tiny compared to the billions Trump is looting.

  Noah's article is long and essentially correct on the facts. I draw the line, however, when he recommends Democrats as the "party Americans should support." Sorry, Noah, I can't go that far. The Ds haven't said or done anything to appeal to me. Sure, "I'm not Trump" worked for Biden, and we know what happened there. I'm not seeing any better arguments this time around.

  But Noah's headline question caused me to look back on what I wrote on January 21, 2017. Here it is.

• And not one of the funny ones? At the Dispatch, Frederic J. Frommer makes a less dire query: Is Trump 2.0 Really a Woody Allen Flick?

  Was Woody Allen onto something when he imagined a society 200 years in the future in which scientists have discovered that junk food was actually good for you? President Donald Trump seems to think so.

  In an example of life(style) imitating art, Trump recently appeared to embrace that topsy-turvy notion that Allen brilliantly parodied in his 1973 movie, Sleeper.

  At a White House event this month, the president claimed he feels the same as he did 50 years ago (coincidentally, around the time that Sleeper came out).

  “I don’t know why,” he said. “It’s not because I eat the best foods. Maybe though they are the best foods. Who knows what the best foods are? Maybe junk food is good and the other food is no good.”

  The article goes on to quote Woody himself, somewhat surprisingly, on Trump as a "very good actor." (Trump cameoed in Woody's 1997 movie Celebrity.)

• And now for some non-Trump content… Liz Wolfe's Reason Roundup asks the burning question: Who Abuses Food Delivery? Spurred by:

  This is bc they do not have the time or capacity to create home cooked meals. It’s an issue countless ppl have tried to raise w leftists but big leftists online continue to shame/abuse poor ppl for being forced to rely on these services for meals, which act as a tax on the poor https://t.co/F3azUiucBJ

  — Taylor Lorenz (@TaylorLorenz) May 20, 2026

  Liz does an excellent job of debunking and correcting. (And embeds a lot more tweets along the way.) Her bottom line:

  I don't think aggressively relying on food delivery if you're making under $50,000 a year is a correct choice, but it is a cultural phenomenon worth understanding for the ways it might galvanize political support for more handouts down the road.

  For the record: I have never gotten food delivered.

• Oh no! Well, anyway… The WSJ has some bad news for us dads: Dad Books Are a Dying Breed. (WSJ gifted link)

  They were the go-to gifts for Father’s Day: a book about some little-known chapter of World War II, the sweeping narrative of a shipwreck, perhaps the latest presidential biography.

  These days, dad books are a dying breed.

  Nonfiction book sales have been in decline for the past four years, and are now the most challenged segment of the print book market. Publishers say certain types of books still fare well—including celebrity memoirs and religious titles. But in recent years, print sales in such categories as biography, current affairs and business and economics—what publishers refer to as “serious nonfiction” and which tend to resonate especially with men—have fallen considerably.

  Fortunately, I have a very deep pile of non-fiction books waiting to be read. And there's always the Portsmouth (NH) Public Library…

  Well, speaking of the PPL, here's their Staff Directory. Although I love and respect them all very much, of the 30 folks pictured, I count two male faces and 28 female. And at least 29 seem to be People of Pallor. (One is iffy.) Is this diversity? Anyway, it somewhat explains the lack of testosterone-infused books there.

• Item One on Nellie Bowles' TGIF column does some election post-mortem:

  → Massie lost but don’t worry, the party continues: The great all-our-problems-are-Israel coalition unifier, Kentucky Republican congressman Thomas Massie, lost his primary race this week. The far left and far right are very upset. Democratic Rep. Ro Khanna of California cried out that “He lost because he had the guts to take on the Epstein class.” It’s always fun to hear new dog whistles for Jews. Last week it was globalists, this week Epstein class, maybe next week we’ll get “Spielberg’s ilk.” A girl can dream. Or here’s Senator Chris Murphy, a Democrat from Connecticut: “So there you have it. If you lead a campaign against powerful pedophiles, you get drummed out of the Republican Party.” Anyway, Massie lost the race to be a congressman, which is a little like losing a race to become, I don’t know, a septic tank cleaner. What I’m saying is it’s not all it’s cracked up to be. A lot more paperwork than you thought, and still, it’s mostly shit. And now I’m sure he’ll get rich on the new hard-right populist podcast circuit. It’s booming. Did you know that the new coalition of “Questions Regarding the Holocaust” is having a conference? Sorry, that’s not fair, they are just Men Who Perceive All Problems Jewishly. Yes, they’re gathering at a convention center in Dallas. The speakers have lots of beliefs that really appall people, like that women shouldn’t be allowed to vote in elections anymore. But let’s not focus on that, they say, not today. That’s not important. What’s important is the Epstein Class controlling everything. And lo, Americans are into it. It’s relaxing to think that there’s just this one skeleton key that makes everything magic and good. Any niche political ideologies that you want to get through fast, just attach it to being anti-Epstein. Women voting is vaguely Zionist, did you know that? Suffrage kind of sounds like Pentateuch, if you squint a little.

  Egad, I went down that "convention center in Dallas" link, and … whoa! No shortage of testosterone there!