Pun Salad

I'm in the process of watching Breaking Bad episodes, one every few days, starting with Season 1, Episode 1. Saul Goodman, the sleaziest of sleazy lawyers, showed up a few days ago.

And his portrayer, Bob Odenkirk, got back into character to do a Public Service Announcement:

Also showing up [Breaking Bad spoiler: (from beyond the grave)] is the equally fictional, but not as sleazy, Mike Ehrmantraut.

And (sigh) Saul does not mention the right of the people to keep and bear Arms. But still, it's nice to see him again.

Just for the record, I had forgotten how much humor got dropped into the early episodes of Breaking Bad. Easy to miss, given all the violence, betrayal, lies, substance abuse, and general moral rot. But still.

Also of note:

• Speaking of moral rot… What other way can you describe politicians who openly lust after "legal" plunder? Fortunately, as John Puri observes, Americans Aren’t Too Interested in Democrats’ War Against Wealth.

  My colleague Charlie Cooke likes to point out an eerie pattern among Democratic politicians: Progressives tend to “download” an identical new position or talking point in unison, as if receiving a software update to their programmed ideology, while acting as if it’s the most obvious and eternal truth in the world. Their latest patch has Democrats turning their scowls, in one synchronized sweep, toward America’s wealthy.

  Suddenly, Bernie Sanders and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez are headlining the “Fighting Oligarchy Tour.” Support for a wealth tax is a litmus test for presidential hopefuls. Blue states are jacking up their top marginal tax rates. Insurgent candidates like Zohran Mamdani and Graham Platner are surging to primary success on platforms of white-hot rage against rich people and corporations, who they allege have rigged the U.S. economy. Mainstream Democrats have embraced their rhetoric. The progressive-activist class is genuinely enthused for the first time in a while — to defeat Republicans, sure, but even more so to grind the wealthy into the dust.

  There is nothing worse you can be in Democratic politics right now than a billionaire. Unless, of course, you’re a trillionaire.

  I know I quoted this guy a few days ago, but here you are again, excuser son sexisme à la française:

  When plunder becomes a way of life for a group of men in a society, over the course of time they create for themselves a legal system that authorizes it and a moral code that glorifies it.

• Worse than Neville Chamberlain. Erick Erickson says it well: A Peace Worse Than War.

  Donald Trump started a war with Iran, and now he is ending it on terms worse than the status quo he inherited. That is the plain shape of what happened, however the White House and its surrogates dress it up.

  The war came at a price—lost lives, oil markets convulsing, allies rattled, and an economic shock that rippled from Tehran to global commodity prices. What started as a strong campaign to end a regime is ending with subsidy and surrender by the Americans. We are choosing to give up.

  And Andy McCarthy agrees, but can't help but point out what it says about the relationship between the Administration and its subjects: The Trump Administration Thinks We’re Imbeciles. (archive.today link)

  Let’s take it down to the simple basics. Trump’s agreement with Iran is not an agreement, it’s a memorandum of understanding (MOU), reportedly stating that the parties will talk about making an agreement, for infinitely extendable 60-day limits. That is, other than the billions to which the Trump administration has agreed to give the implacably anti-American jihadist regime, the MOU is a nothing that Neville Trump is peddling as peace in our time.

  But to the extent the MOU is something, it is something very bad because if it were something good, we’d be reading it, not being spun about it.

  The president is an impetuous man who would not be able to contain himself if the written MOU were of even marginal benefit to the United States; he would be far more comfortable exposing it and exaggerating the marginal benefit as if it were a coup. The fact that the Trump administration refuses to publish the MOU — refuses even to brief the Gang of Eight on it — is powerful implication that it is at least as bad as close watchers suspect it is.

  How many 2024 Trump voters now wish they had their votes back?

• While we're at it… Kevin D. Williamson has a suggestion: We Should Probably Stop Murdering People. (Dispatch gifted link)

  Acting on orders from President Donald Trump, the U.S. military has murdered Héctor Rusthenford Guerrero Flores, popularly known as Niño Guerrero, a Venezuelan drug trafficker and leader of the Tren de Aragua crime syndicate.

  This was—and ought to be treated as—a straightforwardly criminal act on the part of the American president and those who have carried out his illegal orders. Guerrero Flores had been charged with federal offenses under U.S. racketeering conspiracy laws. But there is no law authorizing summary execution of drug-crime suspects. There is no congressional authorization to carry out military attacks in Venezuela. Guerrero Flores may very well be everything the Trump administration says he is and more—though under the Trump administration the word of the White House is no more reliable than the word of a South American drug dealer—but, even if that were the case, there is no legal authorization for the preemptive extrajudicial killing of crime suspects. The Trump administration explains that it has “determined” that the United States is at war with drug cartels and that Guerrero Flores, like the boatloads of civilians the U.S. military has been massacring at sea for months, is a “combatant.”

  Impeachable.