Pun Salad

The talking heads at New Hampshire's local TV station, WMUR, put together a segment on our state's motto:

That's not bad at all, but a tad superficial. The report implies that Stark's LFOD toast was original. He actually plagiarized, um, borrowed it from an older saying. (To be fair, as near as I can tell, he never claimed otherwise.)

If the WMUR newsies had read three paragraphs into the relevant Wikipedia entry…

So suck it up, Granite State buttercups: our motto is French. They've even got a statue:

Of course, this was also around the time they started guillotining a bunch of people they didn't like.

Also of note:

• There are so many lies, it's hard to keep track. But Erick Erickson describes a pretty bad one: The Two-Choice Lie.

  The pressure campaign is on. If you are on the right and you decline to salute the President’s deal with Iran, you are to be otherized — branded a warmonger, a neocon fossil, a man itching to put other people’s sons in the sand. The choice, we’re assured, is binary: boots on the ground or the President’s memorandum. That is a lie, and the people repeating it loudest know it is a lie.

  Start with the alternative they pretend never existed. Israel had a plan to destabilize the regime from within — and the President personally refused to allow it, at the behest of the Turks. Erdogan picked up the phone, and the option that wasn’t a land war and wasn’t surrender quietly disappeared. So spare me the two doors. There was a third, and Washington bricked it up to keep Ankara comfortable.

  I'm arguably a fossil, fine. I'll even take the "neocon" adjective, unless you consider it synonymous with "Jewish", then not.

• They are the dogs that don't bark in the night-time. Or the daytime, for that matter. George Will wonders if their behavior will change: Perhaps Trump’s poodles in Congress will finally rouse themselves. (WaPo gifted link)

  Deferring gratification can be virtuous, but now is the time for an autopsy of Donald Trump’s presidency. The nation has experienced more than a few failing presidencies, but this flailing presidency is as uniquely unsightly as it is terminal.

  Trump’s plummet will intensify what is causing it, his self-absorption and self-indulgence. Recently, he has waged war carelessly, pursued a fixation incontinently, and named a building contemptibly.

  He unleashed America’s military competence, in conjunction with Israel’s, for a defensible purpose: preventing a genocidal and theologically demented regime from completing the Holocaust (it has called Israel “a one-bomb country”) and punishing God’s foremost enemy, America. But this worthy U.S. goal became a casualty of presidential frivolousness.

  That's not good.

• It occurred to me that I didn't know exactly what "brimstone" was. But I know it's bad, when Kevin D. Williamson says The Vice President Is Playing With Fire (and Brimstone) (archive.today link) Expurgations in original:

  J.D. Vance’s conversion story is bulls–t.

  No surprise there: His last conversion story was bulls–t, too.

  The only halfway interesting part is that both stories turn out to be the same bulls–t: Vance’s story—once again—is that he put his faith in the wrong people and institutions and discovered the error of his ways at precisely the moment when doing so would do the most to advance his career.

  Saul had his great convulsion on the road to Damascus, but Vance, that knee-walking sycophant, had his somewhere in Cincinnati on his way to Washington, where he decided to take up the cause of Donald Trump, a man he had once described—accurately—as unfit for office, bag-of-hammers dumb, and an aspiring American Hitler, further insisting that at least some of Trump’s followers belonged in prison after the riot at the Capitol on January 6, 2021, a view of which he has lately repented. One could almost—almost—understand those who saw something in Trump back in 2016, but Vance saw the light only after the attempted coup d’état that crowned Trump’s four years of incompetence, cruelty, stupidity, venality, corruption, cowardice, laziness, pettiness, and dishonesty the first time around. One could imagine Vance concluding, circa A.D. 33, “You know, I didn’t think much of that Pontius Pilate guy at first, but he really showed me something with the way he crucified that troublemaker from Galilee while pretending to wash his hands of the matter—real shrewd politics, there.”

  So it turns out "brimstone" is just an old word for "sulfur". But "brimstone" sounds nastier, doesn't it?

• Actually, I think it missed clarity altogether. Tevi Troy pans a recent direct-to-streaming movie: ‘Jack Ryan: Ghost War’ Misses Tom Clancy’s Moral Clarity. (WSJ gifted link)

  Fans of Tom Clancy’s bestselling thriller novels will unfortunately find little of Jack Ryan’s moral clarity in the latest film inspired by the series. “Jack Ryan: Ghost War,” one of the Top Five movies on Amazon Prime, follows CIA agent Jack Ryan as he tries to stop an MI6/CIA team created to fight Islamist terrorists. A pro-America version would make the team fighting the terrorists the heroes, but that isn’t the case in “Ghost War.” Instead, the villain appears to be the head of the post-9/11 antiterror task force, while the protagonists (led by Ryan) are people who want to shut the task force down.

  I'm pretty sure Tom would not approve. (Even though he got an executive producer credit on the movie, objecting would have been difficult, given that he's been dead for over 12 years.)

  The funny thing is (for sufficiently small values of "funny"): I watched that movie a few days ago (report here) and I had no idea about that "created to fight Islamist terrorists" thing. All I knew is the opening scene showed the Bad Guys murdering a bunch of folks that were (I'm pretty sure) clearly not Islamist terrorists.

• If you're gay, and you know it, clap your hands. And then, if you live in California, grab a big bucket to catch that helicopter cash dropping from the sky. An excerpt from Nellie Bowles' TGIF column:

  → Certifiably gay: California’s regulated utility companies have earmarked $633 million only for contracts with gays. Yes, the state has put aside more than half a billion dollars of public utility money that can be spent only by those who have sex with their own sex. Well, how do you make sure they’re really gay? To qualify, California businesses can refer to a long list of gay-confirmation tests. One option includes: “Letter from three personal references attesting to the LGBTQ status of the business owner(s).” So you can get three friends to call you gay, and then you qualify for these government contracts. If they were serious, the requirement would be a sex tape. Also: The inclusion of B and Q is a pretty low bar here. Bisexuals? And queer just means a cool haircut with hair over your ears. This is our border wall? B’s and Q’s wandering in? Whatever, I wouldn’t need that to prove my qualifications; you just need to see how I walk kind of side to side, and hear my low voice, a voice that raises the question what went wrong in the womb. You would just need to play Melissa Etheridge and watch me come alive to know that I truly deserve one of those California utility contracts.

  Nellie's also pretty rough on Trump and J.D.