Pun Salad

I have to admit it's about the same as Jim Treacher's. who responds to a guy who can't seem to decide whether he's a Nazi or a Commie, but wants to be a US Senator from that state across the Salmon Falls River:

It's improving mine, because I enjoy watching bad people get angry. https://t.co/zCJH9txLCq

— jimtreacher.substack.com (@jtLOL) February 28, 2026

Blowing up foreign bad guys is an area where I tend to depart from libertarian gospel. But if you'd like to see that, check out Cato Experts React to U.S. Attacks on Iran, where you'll read words like "indefensible", "clear and blatant overreach of executive authority", and "risks drawing the United States into yet another open-ended conflict in the Middle East."

I get that.

But for counterbalance, the WSJ editorialists think it's OK: Trump Enforces His Red Line on Iran (WSJ gifted link)

So we can at least hope that happens.

Also of note:

• It's also a dangerous thing to do to an actual fat cat. James B. Meigs notes that violating the Tenth Commandment can be pretty popular: ‘Soak the Fat Cats’ Is a Bad Idea That Refuses to Die. (WSJ gifted link)

  Here’s an irresistible political formula: “We’re going to fix some big problem, but it won’t cost you, the ordinary citizen, a dime! We’ll just make those rich fat cats pay the bill.” We see this formula at work in New York Mayor Zohran Mamdani’s campaign to freeze city rents. We saw it during the Biden administration when the president blamed high prices, not on his own inflationary policies, but on greedy grocery stores “ripping people off.”

  The populist right loves the fat-cat approach as well. Witness President Trump’s call to cap credit-card interest rates at 10%. “We will no longer allow the American Public to be ‘ripped off’ by Credit Card companies,” the president promised in a Truth Social post. In a vivid confirmation of the horseshoe theory, Sen. Bernie Sanders quickly introduced a bill to turn that suggestion into law.

  Policies like these are all founded on the appealing but fallacious notion that businesses have an inexhaustible reserve of resources that do-gooders can divert to nobler ends. If we hold down rents to help low-income tenants, those rich landlords will suck up the loss, this theory assumes. They can afford it. Credit-card companies should give everybody their lowest rate! Why not, they’re rolling in dough!

  As Pun Salad moves into its 22nd year. with more than 8600 articles, I'm pretty sure I've made similar points at least a few hundred times. Still, it's something that needs to be said over and over: thou shalt not covet.

• "Hey, Kevin D. Williamson!" I cried. "Give the kid a chance!" "Sorry, Pun Salad," Kevin replied. "I'm writing about J.D. Vance’s Doomed Quest to Balance the Budget instead.".

  Trump’s incoherent State of the Union address on Tuesday featured his usual stroke-victim diction and his patented blend of stupidity and dishonesty. Fact-checking his claims is laborious, because he speaks almost exclusively in simpleton’s superlatives, and it also is pointless, inasmuch as the people who most need to know the facts are not much inclined to listen to them, being, as they are, members of an especially tawdry and shameful cult. Suffice it to say that inflation was not at record levels when Trump assumed office this time around, and it is not plummeting today—it was high when he came in and remains elevated. Foreign direct investment in the United States is in fact down, not soaring by trillions of dollars. There is no such thing as a “second lady,” with apologies to Usha Vance, who probably could have married a doctor. Some of the speech could have used some context: I admire Michael Dell and his generosity, and it is true that he made computers in his dorm room at the University of Texas—but mainly he has made them in China, a fact of corporate history that ought to be of some interest to the Trump gang.

  The competition is considerable, but it may be that the dumbest and most dishonest claim of the night was that J.D. Vance’s newly announced fraud commission will, if it does its job, produce a “balanced budget overnight.” Vance is as contemptible a specimen as American public life currently has to offer, but he is relatively new to the cult game, and he has here foolishly taken on a high-profile task that can be evaluated quantitatively. The projected deficit for 2026 is $1.9 trillion on its way toward more than $3 trillion per annum over the coming decade. For scale, this year’s projected deficit will amount to about 5.8 percent of GDP. Which is to say, to balance the budget by means of fraud prevention, fraud in federal programs would have to amount to an industry right around five times the combined global size of all those AI-enabling data centers we hear so much about.

  "OK, Kevin."

• I miss Dubya. And I still do, even after reading Jeff Maurer's Review of George W. Bush's Substack. Specifically, Dubya's (so far, only) post on George Washington (actually a pointer to a Free Press article): What I Learned from George Washington. Jeff reacts:

  Some have criticized Bush for not mentioning Trump in the essay. Bush praised presidential humility and warned against those who would ”[retain] power for power’s sake”, but didn’t say “like the current president, for example”. In my opinion, Bush did not need to mention Trump; anyone who can read can read between the lines. The commentary was not subtle — it was more like the scene in Back to the Future where Marty’s guitar amplifier blasts him across the room. Those calling for Bush to be more explicit in his criticism of Trump remind me of this joke I once saw about Hemingway’s editor:

  

  Bush’s argument that a president should have humility and be guided by something other than a thirst for power is a sign of how much Trump has eroded American values. Because personally, I did not think Bush was a good president; I didn’t vote for him either time. But he and I clearly share a basic understanding of what the presidency is and isn’t meant to be. The bounds of what’s acceptable in American politics have been stretched so radically that Bush and I now occupy similar territory on this fundamental issue. It shouldn’t be controversial to say that a president should not have God-like faith in his own abilities and respect the limits of power. And 15 years ago, my response to this essay would have been “no shit, President Sherlock”. But today, entry-level statements about basic American values seem like scathing social commentary.

  As favorable as I am toward Trump's blowing up foreign bad guys (Dubya did his share of that too), I'm on the Maurer/Bush team here.

  For a recent example…

• Could they just make some movies that don't put me to sleep? That's all I really want, but Jeff Blehar reports instead on the latest deed-shuffling on the Monopoly board: Netflix Is Out on Warner Bros.

  Nearly everyone in the world of media and entertainment was taken by surprise yesterday when Netflix announced they were withdrawing their proposed bid to acquire Warner Bros. film studio and its substantial catalogue of movies and intellectual properties. But last December, mere days after Netflix’s bid was announced to the world, I pointed out that it wasn’t a done deal at all:

  Understand that this is all still quite contingent: Paramount Skydance (the product of another merger completed a few months ago) has appealed directly to Warner Bros. shareholders in a hostile bid to force them to overturn their board’s decision. The deal also still requires antitrust clearance from Trump’s Federal Trade Commission. Given that Trump has reportedly been pushing for ally David Ellison’s Paramount to win the bid, don’t be surprised if Netflix fails at the last hurdle. Trump is a rather . . . transactional type, and he’s already announced his intent to personally review the acquisition. Expect something delightfully sordid!

  And here we are. I’ll admit, I missed big by predicting something “delightfully sordid.” Instead, we got something unpleasantly sordid: The final nail in the coffin for the Netflix bid was almost certainly board member Susan Rice’s ill-timed appearance on a podcast hosted by Preet Bharara on February 20, where she promised “accountability” for Trump administration wrongdoers once the Democrats took office. This was interpreted by MAGA’s most agitated online voices as a promise of lawfare against the administration — the irony of complaining about this is apparently completely lost upon them — and led to Laura Loomer loudly demanding the former national security adviser resign her position on the board of Netflix.

  Pun Salad's recent commentary on Trump, Rice, and Netflix here and here.

• Only two? Well, as George Will notes, they're biggies: Two big things Trump the wheedler misunderstands about Russia. (WaPo gifted link)

  Donald Trump continues trying to wheedle Vladimir Putin to end his war to extinguish Ukraine’s nationhood short of that outcome. Trump’s persistence calls to mind the man Gulliver encountered during his travels: He had spent “eight years upon a project for extracting sunbeams out of cucumbers.”

  The president misunderstands two things. First, the more blood and treasure Putin expends in Ukraine, the more he wants to win in order to redeem his blunder. This war was supposed to prove Russia’s might, and that Ukraine is an ersatz nation. Instead, it has revealed the yawning gap between Russia’s pretensions and its capabilities, and has created an incandescent Ukrainian nationalism.

  Second, the way for the West to economize violence and military expenditures in the long run is not to prepare for future conflicts with a Russia emboldened by success, but to deepen its diminishment by enabling Ukraine to continue bleeding Russia’s army and economy.

  GFW points out that Trump (and little Marco Rubio) have forcefully supported the reelection of "Europe’s most pro-Putin and aggressively anti-Ukraine leader", Viktor Orban. That's not great.