Pun Salad

Jill Biden might be thinking, "Hm, didn't Joe tell me his marriage vows were 'ironclad'?"

It's been less than a month since Biden claimed "America’s ironclad commitment to the security of Israel." Little did we know that he muttered under his breath at the time: "… as long as they do what I say."

David Harsanyi notes that "ironclad" really meant "feeble, spineless, and feckless": Joe Biden Is Selling Out Israel To The Antisemitic Mob.

Jim Geraghty is also unimpressed: Biden Comes to Hamas’s Rescue .

What to do? The WSJ editorialists encourage Striking Back at Biden’s Arms Embargo Against Israel.

I've written to both New Hampshire senators—politely—urging them to support the measure. Unfortunately, the WSJ also notes the likely outcome: Majority leader Schumer preventing it from coming to a vote. It would be nice to get politicians to get on the record: are they in favor of this backstabbing or against it?

Also of note:

• Nina Jankowicz probably disagrees, but Kevin D. Williamson notes a recent award and suggests that it should be renamed: The Pulitzer for Propaganda Goes to ...

  In 2023, the Washington Post published a series of articles about AR-15-style rifles. The series was scientifically illiterate, error-ridden, propagandistic, and willfully misleading.

  Naturally, it has just been awarded the Pulitzer Prize.

  Here are the facts, not that these matter even a little bit to the Pulitzer committee, members of which declined to answer questions for this column.

  The AR-15 and rifles based on its design are two things at once: They are perfectly ordinary firearms that have been sold to civilians in the United States for the better part of a century, and they are cultural totems. They are cultural totems for the gun nuts who love them and for those who wish to prohibit their sale. The AR-pattern rifle has a lot in common with the most common rifles and handguns sold in the United States: It has a semiautomatic rate of fire (meaning that it fires once each time the trigger is pulled but doesn’t require any additional steps between trigger pulls, as opposed to, e.g., a bolt-action rifle, which requires that the shooter manually operate a handle that ejects the spent shell after a shot and then chambers another round for the next shot), and it is fed from a detachable box magazine. These features—semiautomatic firing and detachable box magazines—are what make the AR-style rifle useful for many purposes—including mass shootings. But they are features that the AR-style rifle has in common with most rifles sold in the United States and with nearly all handguns sold in the United States. As the engineering of semiautomatic rifles grows ever finer, even pursuits traditionally dominated by bolt-action rifles—long-range precision target shooting and hunting—have seen semiautomatic rifles make incursions, in much the same way that sports cars today mainly have a feature that would have been anathema to a sporting driver a generation ago: automatic transmissions.

  KDW provides a detailed refutation. And ("the more things change…") notes the similarity between the Post's award and the Pulitzer awarded to Walter Duranty in 1932 for his shoddy and discredited reportage from Stalin's USSR. In both cases: "the Pulitzer people bought it because they wanted it to be true."

• Knowing When to Say No. Jerry Coyne is an emeritus professor at the University of Chicago, which saw an "encampment" from the local Hamas cheerleading squad. He sees good things and not-so-good things in the UofC's president's recent WSJ op-ed. Coyne's commentary: President Alivisatos explains why he ended our Encampment. Getting to what the university administrators got wrong:

  a.) I don’t think the President should have tried to bargain with the protestors. That never works, and winds up heartening them to erect encampments elsewhere to achieve their aims.

  b.) We were never told that the administration was secretly trying to bargain with encampers. That distressed many of us, who, though we didn’t need to know what items were on the table, believe that you should never bargain with such a group of zealots. And believe me, the encampers were zealots.

  c.) The President should simply have had the encampment removed the moment the first tent was hammered into the ground. Why? Because, as Alivisatos admitted in his first letter to the University, the encampment violated University “time, place, and manner” regulations in multiple ways. From the outset it was a big violation, not a minor one. And it only got bigger over time, exacerbating the problem.

  Two more not-so-good things at the link. I'm pretty sure if UNH President James Dean (on his way out the door) reads this, he'll be reassured he did better than Alivisatos.

• Case in point. Arnold Kling writes on Status-Driven Syndrome, and I just want to note this pearl of wisdom:

  The more titles an organization has, the more it will select for people who really care about titles.

  That caused me to recall my favorite example, the "Advancement" (fund-raising) Department at the University Near Here. Their directory lists 75 individuals, more than a lot of academic departments, I'm pretty sure.

  But the titles!

  Nineteen of these good people, over a quarter of the total, are listed as "Directors" of something or another.

  But they need people to associate with! So there are 12 "Associate Directors".

  And all those people need help! So there are 10 "Assistant Directors".

  And (no, I'm not done) there are six "Managing Directors"; two "Senior Drectors"; two "Senior Managing Directors"; two "Senior Executive Directors" (one of which is also "Treasurer"); one "Senior Integrated Marketing Director"; one "Senior Associate Director"; and one "Editorial Director" (who also doubles as "Editor in Chief" of the alumni magazine).

  So out of those 75 folks, 56 have the word "Director" in their titles. Nearly three-quarters. Impressive, and I'm sure Kling would agree.