Pun Salad

Via Viking Pundit: Schadenfreude overload.

It's an absolute disgrace that it took this brute-force tactic to get lefties to pay the slightest bit of attention to border security. As long as OTHER Americans were suffering, they couldn't give less of a damn. It was all just a big virtue-signaling propaganda game.

— John Hayward (@Doc_0) September 7, 2023

If you prefer your (probably paywalled) schadenfreude with more text, Jim Geraghty has you covered: Democratic Officials Belatedly Realize the Consequences of Unrestrained Migration.

I'm trying to come up with some bon mot about "your reality check was returned for insufficient funds", but I'm too lazy this morning to make it work. Sorry.

Also of note:

• Not a new story, but a predictable one. The NYPost reports: Harvard law grad accuses Biden of plagiarism. And the accusation is plausible.

  A Harvard Law School alum has come forward to accuse President Biden of plagiarizing an article he wrote more than two decades ago.

  Roger Severino claimed Thursday night he was working as a junior editor at the Harvard Journal of Legislation in 2000 when he found multiple instances of copying in an essay the then-Delaware senator wrote defending the Violence Against Women Act.

  “Words like ‘herald of a new era’ tipped me off,” Severino told Fox News host Jesse Watters. “Like, ‘Whoa, whoa, whoa, I’ve heard this before.’”

  Journal editors "fixed" the article ahead of publication to paper over the plagiarism.

  But "violence against women"? Biden?

  I looked at the (fixed) article for… yup, there it is on page four, the "rule of thumb" folk tale.

  Regrettably, Congress learned that states had not escaped this myth-an unfortunate legacy of the common-law "rule of thumb".

  This tells me that Biden really did write that article, and didn't fob it off on some lowly assistant. Because that "rule of thumb" myth been pretty widely known to be bogus since at least 1994, and any decent fact-checking intern would have figured that out.

  Not Biden, though. He said it at UNH in 2011. (I was there.) He was still peddling it in 2019 (at least twice).

  Just another data point showing Biden's addiction to good, but false, stories. Sometimes ones not even involving Corn Pop, drunk drivers that weren't, house conflagrations that weren't, sons that didn't die in Iraq,…

  [I left a version of this commentary at Granite Grok earlier today.]

• Don't tread on schoolboys. Jeff Jacoby tackles multiple issues on his article, but we'll concentrate on The schoolboy and the Gadsden flag. And he notes a meta-issue involved:

  Do you know what happened when school officials in Colorado Springs, Colo., decided to tread on a 12-year-old student who had a patriotic patch on his backpack?

  Certainly you ought to know; the story made news last week and a video of it was viewed millions of times on social media. The episode was the latest flare-up on the culture war front lines; it highlighted the clash of values that has galvanized so many parents around the country into opposing what they regard as disrespect from "woke" school board members and administrators.

  Whether you're familiar with the story or don't know the first thing about it most likely depends on where you get your news from.

  If your main sources of information include newspapers, networks, and websites with a conservative or libertarian bent — National Review, Fox News, the New York Post, Reason, Washington Examiner, The New York Sun — then you are likely to have come across an account of Jaiden Rodriguez, the boy who was banned from the Vanguard School, a public charter school, because of the Gadsden flag "Don't Tread on Me" patch emblazoned on his backpack. All those media outlets carried stories on the incident, which was both newsworthy and infuriating.

  […]

  As mentioned, this story got a lot of media attention, but only in certain quarters of the media. When I checked to find out how "mainstream" news outlets covered the incident, I mostly found — nothing. According to their own embedded search functions, there was nothing in the New York Times, the Washington Post, the Globe, NPR, or the Los Angeles Times. Nothing in The Philadelphia Inquirer, The Oregonian, MSNBC, or The Guardian. I double-checked at the Nexis media database, with the same results.

  Nothing in the Wall Street Journal, either. Not even on the opinion pages. Sad!

• But we still love the WSJ. A bunch of responses to a recent column by Tevi Troy advocating candidate debates without moderators. An LTE-writer, Stuart Weinblatt, doubles down on that suggestion: No More Moderators or Audiences for Presidential Debates.

  Regarding “Moderators Have Ruined Presidential Debates. Let’s Get Rid of Them” by Tevi Troy (Review, Aug. 26): Let’s get rid of debate audiences too. Egged on by a crowd that would be more at home at a rodeo or wrestling match, the catcalls, whistles, cheering and booing of the audience encourage the candidates to make extreme and inflammatory comments to get applause and attention.

  We need only look to the first televised debate between Richard Nixon and John Kennedy, where there was no audience and a moderator who understood that his role was to provide a forum for a consideration of important issues, to see what a serious debate should look like.

  Americans have been deprived of a substantive discussion about important issues, which helps explain why our politics today are so dismal.

  I'm actually in favor of moderators. Especially if we equipped them with tranquilizer darts to sedate any candidate exceeding their allocated speaking time by over, say, 20 seconds.

• Mea Culpa. I wrote a post last Wednesday (September 6), honest. I've been trying to get back to my daily-posting habit. But (somehow) I totally spaced on actually putting it up on the blog. If you are a Pun Salad completist, here it is in its rightful place in the chronology.