Pun Salad

President/Santa Wheezy isn't having the most wonderful time either, as reality keeps colliding with his rhetoric. As Charles C. W. Cooke points out: Joe Biden Ought to Be Thrilled by the Prosecution of Hunter Biden, the 'Wealthy Tax Cheat'. After looking at reports that "people close to the president … have seen his moods shift" when he gets bad Hunter news.

And these days it all seems bad.

"Wealthy". "Tax". "Cheat". Which one of these words does Joe not understand? (Maybe more than one?)

Also of note:

• It's all in the framing. Jim Geraghty describes How Democrats Are Holding Up a Ukraine Aid Deal.

  You will notice this week that the debate over additional Ukraine aid is almost always framed as: “Those stubborn, intransigent, isolationist Republicans aren’t willing to help Ukraine.” And it is true enough that Republicans insist that one of their top priorities — border security — gets funded alongside the aid for Ukraine, as well as Taiwan and Israel.

  House Speaker Mike Johnson said at a Wall Street Journal summit yesterday:

  My message to [Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky] will be the same as it’s been to the president [Biden]. This is an important battle for all the reasons we know, but I don’t think it’s a radical proposition to say that if we’re going to have a national-security supplemental package, it ought to begin with our own national security.

  But notice how rarely President Biden and congressional Democrats are portrayed as stubborn or intransigent for refusing to make the border-security changes that Republicans want, in order to reach a deal on Ukraine. And no, Republicans are not demanding the construction of a big, beautiful wall from the Gulf of Mexico to the Pacific Ocean, although their offer does call for resuming the border-fencing construction that Biden canceled at the start of his presidency. Senate Republicans want the current overloaded system of asylum claims to be changed so that not everybody who shows up at the border and says they’re seeking asylum gets to stay in the country indefinitely[.]

  I suspect that Biden political advisors worry that he's already losing support among the pro-Hamas bunch, he doesn't need to lose a bunch of people who like our current de facto open border policies.

• University presidents: the gifts keep on giving. Jeff Maurer has an amusing take: In a Shocking Turn of Events, the Right is Using the Left's Cancel Culture Tactics.

  The three university presidents who testified before Congress last week — and who are now being pelted with e-dung in our virtual town square — were screwed long before they set foot on Capitol Hill. There probably was a path through the minefield of career-destroying statements laid before them by Congresswoman Elise Stefanik, but navigating that path would require having previously shown a commitment to free speech. And, since all three presidents represented schools that have been doing to free speech what Sbarro’s has been doing to Italian cuisine (Harvard and Penn are last and second-to-last in FIRE’s free speech rankings) all they could do was fumble, stammer, and then issue statements clarifying that they do not support genocide. And the first rule of PR is: When you find yourself clarifying your position on genocide, you’ve lost.

  The university presidents weren’t wrong, though. I agree with those who have pointed out that statements about genocide are not always threats, and therefore those statements are sometimes protected by university free speech codes. Of course, it’s hard to make that point if you, say, recently allowed a biology professor to be run off campus for committing the unforgivable sin of saying that there are two sexes, as Harvard did. The fact that these schools spent years savaging the concept of free speech put them in a position where they could lose a battle of wits to Elise Stefanik, which truly takes some doing.

  Jeff's bottom line:

  I can’t believe that some on the left didn’t see this coming. Of course the shoe would eventually be on the other foot — the shoe is always eventually on the other foot. Last week, Elise Stefanik laced up that proverbial shoe and lodged it about a foot deep in Elizabeth Magill’s ass. University presidents who don’t want to suffer the same fate should probably re-commit to principles that have eroded in recent years.

  "Re-commit to principles" would be an interesting tactic. Not pain-free, but respectable.

• But is it too late to re-commit to principles? Because when you've so recently demonstrated your lack of principles… Julia Schaletzky ("Executive Director for the Center of Emerging and Neglected Diseases and professional faculty at the Haas School of Business at the University of California, Berkeley") is pretty blunt: College Presidents Are Lying About Free Speech.

  Pushback against antisemitic mobs at U.S. universities is often countered with cries of “It’s free speech!” But the sudden converts to the cause of free speech, like the presidents of Harvard, the University of Pennsylvania, and MIT, who testified before Congress last week about not being able to define calls for genocide of Jews as actionable due to First Amendment concerns, are not engaging in good-faith debate. Having been part of several free speech-focused campus organizations at UC Berkeley, I know the law is clear: The right to free speech does not extend to threats and inciting violence. Harassment, death threats, and exclusion based on religion are not permitted in educational settings as a civil rights issue. Title IX and Title IV protect the rights of students to participate in campus activities without fear of aggression or harassment.

  The discussion around free speech by campus presidents is misleading because the issue is not the law itself. Rather, college administrators have been weaponizing the First Amendment when it suits them, and blatantly disregarding it when it doesn’t. When the Proud Boys were threatening to have a presence during a protest recently, Berkeley brought the FBI to campus, just in case. For the pro-Palestine protesters too busy to do their coursework, we are being asked to use our “discretion to administer grace and flexibility” for grading so that they don’t fail their classes.

  Grace and flexibility. After they administer that, they can try out for the Cal gymnastics squad. (They segregate men's and women's teams, but I'm sure they're "flexible" on that too.)

• I'm seeing a common recommendation here. The Boston Globe offers (Pun Salad hero) Steve Pinker some column inches to present A five-point plan to save Harvard from itself. They are all good, but I will skip down to point five:

  Disempowering DEI. Many of the assaults on academic freedom (not to mention common sense) come from a burgeoning bureaucracy that calls itself diversity, equity, and inclusion while enforcing a uniformity of opinion, a hierarchy of victim groups, and the exclusion of freethinkers. Often hastily appointed by deans as expiation for some gaffe or outrage, these officers stealthily implement policies that were never approved in faculty deliberations or by university leaders willing to take responsibility for them.

  An infamous example is the freshman training sessions that terrify students with warnings of all the ways they can be racist (such as asking, “Where are you from?”). Another is the mandatory diversity statements for job applicants, which purge the next generation of scholars of anyone who isn’t a woke ideologue or a skilled liar. And since overt bigotry is in fact rare in elite universities, bureaucrats whose job depends on rooting out instances of it are incentivized to hone their Rorschach skills to discern ever-more-subtle forms of “systemic” or “implicit” bias.

  Universities should stanch the flood of DEI officials, expose their policies to the light of day, and repeal the ones that cannot be publicly justified.

  I should point out that abolishing/restricting DEI has been recommended, just in the past couple months, by Bari Weiss, Andrew Sullivan, and John O. McGinnis. And those were just the folks I blogged about. It's been a long-standing exhortation from Pun Salad too (Here, for example.)

  Instead of rumbling about firing Chanda Prescod-Weinstein (see that last link) the trustees of the University System Near Here should be examing strategies to cut back USNH's DEI-related departments to the minimum necessary to fulfill legal obligations.