Pun Salad

Former Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Clinton repeated a claim about Brett Kavanaugh that multiple fact-checkers have ruled is false.

Progressives conceive of themselves as a caste apart, a special and specialized group of enlightened men and women whose job it is to organize other people’s lives for them, a necessity because those people are too dumb to do it for themselves. And special people must enjoy special exemptions: Bernie Sanders can rail against the rich from his lakeside dacha, and Beto O’Rourke can lambast school-choice programs even though he himself ditched the public schools for the tony Woodberry Forrest boarding school, where tuition currently runs about $56,000 a year — a third more than the median household income in his native El Paso.

And, of course, Senator Kamala Harris of California can get away with the grossest hypocrisy.

During Brett Kavanaugh’s confirmation hearings, she demanded to know whether the judge thought the president could legally politicize the Justice Department, for example by prosecuting his political enemies while going easy on his friends. Senator Harris would know more than a little about that: She wasted a great deal of time and a fair sum of Californians’ tax dollars illegally using her position as attorney general of California to attempt to bully nonprofits into giving up their donors lists. It was a transparent effort to target them for harassment and retaliation. That little jihad ultimately was ruled an unconstitutional violation of the First Amendment by the federal courts. Harris and her opposite number in New York State, Eric Schneiderman, did nothing but misuse their offices to harass their political rivals. (Well, in fairness, Schneiderman did take some time to beat women, if The New Yorker is to be believed, and resigned his office after three women accused him of abuse.) She misused her job like that was her job.

“It was very disappointing to see President Obama break with the tradition of former presidents and become so political,” Vice President Mike Pence told “Fox News Sunday” host Chris Wallace. He was complaining about Obama’s broadside against President Trump.

Pence has a point. Although it’s not unprecedented, it is disappointing to see a former president attack a sitting president.

But for Trump’s most reliable defender to invoke tradition — never mind a tradition of presidential decorum — as his lodestar is a very strange thing.

Ian Millhiser, justice editor at ThinkProgress, is upset that The Weekly Standard—a right-of-center magazine whose editors have been granted the power to formally factcheck articles for Facebook—recently labelled one of his articles "false."

But the claim made by the article's headline—"Brett Kavanaugh said he would kill Roe v. Wade last week and almost no one noticed"—is at the very least quite misleading.

This is the predictable result of Facebook’s misguided attempt to crack down on the nebulous category of “fake news”: it empowers some people to use their opinions to silence others. Why is Slate acting like the suppression of this ThinkProgress article is a shocking aberration that’s all the Weekly Standard’s fault? Facebook should give up on the inevitably subjective task of policing “fake news,” and simply let us, the users, decide for ourselves what news is credible.

"In 'The Wrong Husband,' a woman tried to flee an abusive husband by faking her death.'And in '“How to Murder Your Husband' — an essay — [Nancy] Crampton Brophy... describ[ed] five core motives and a number of murder weapons from which she would choose if her character were to kill a husband in a romance novel. She advised against hiring a hit-man to do the dirty work — 'an amazing number of hit men rat you out to the police' — and against hiring a lover. 'Never a good idea.' Poison, not advised either. 'Who wants to hang out with a sick husband?'... '[I]f the murder is supposed to set me free, I certainly don’t want to spend any time in jail.'"