Pun Salad

You don't know where it's been:

Taking our usual Sunday look at how the bettors look at the race:

The Smart Money continues to shift Trump's way. I like Nikki, I plan on voting for Nikki next month, but her path to the Presidency necessitates her, y'know, actually winning something in the primary/caucus season. Unless she's got a rabbit in a hat somewhere…

And, oh yeah, Ron DeSantis has dropped below our 2% inclusion threshold again. Michelle, ma belle, the nation turns its lonely eyes to you.

Also of note:

• His advisors no doubt warned him about entering this wretched hive of scum and villainy. But he persisted, and went to the University Near Here yesterday, as reported by NH Journal: Trump Brings Spirit of '16 to NH With Raucous Rally at UNH.

  Former President Donald Trump came to the bluest corner of New Hampshire on Saturday and reminded Republicans that when it comes to drawing a crowd, he has no competition.

  The more than 4,000 Trump supporters at the Whittemore Center burst into rock concert-style screams when he took the stage. About halfway through his speech, they began spontaneously chanting “We love you” as the former president beamed.

  “Nobody else in the race could do this, could they?” a national reporter commented as he watched the spectacle from the stands.

  Permit me some sour (but accurate) grapes: we got ourselves a serious personality cult going here. And that ain't a good thing, either in general, and especially not in particular.

  No, I did not attend, even though it was (indeed) Near Here. I would feel guilty about taking a seat away from a cult member.

• Well, that's a relief. Jim Geraghty weighs in on the current manifestations of Trump Derangement Syndrome, offering A Reality Check on the Trump-as-Dictator Prophecies.

  Over on the Wall Street Journal editorial page, former congresswoman Liz Cheney warns, “Checks and Balances Won’t Stop Trump . . . The Constitution’s protections won’t be able to block his abuses of executive power.”

  Readers of this newsletter know that I’m not a supporter of Trump, never voted for him, never will, and find his glaring character flaws, narcissism, erratic judgment, and childish stubbornness outweigh his acts as president that I applauded (tax cuts, defense buildup, killing Soleimani, judicial appointments, First Step Act, Right to Try). But I don’t like this argument that Republicans or the electorate at large must reject Trump because if he wins the election, democracy will end, the Constitution will burn, and America will become an autocracy.

  Because if our existing checks and balances under the Constitution aren’t strong enough to stop abuses of power by Trump . . . why would you think that they’re strong enough to stop abuses of power by Joe Biden or anyone else? Because there’s another guy running for president who has also been willing to ignore the Constitution when it proved inconvenient.

  I wasn't impressed with Liz Cheney's op-ed either, but if you want to read it yourself, I've changed Geraghty's link into a "gift unlocked article" link above.

  But I'm probably a little less optimistic than Geraghty about Trump's hypothetical second-term behavior. Thanks to complaisant, lazy, and ineffective legislative branch, the President does wield way too much power. And… well, see the "personality cult" observation above. His fans believe he can do no wrong.

  "He says that we've always been at war with Eastasia? I didn't know that, but it must be true!"

• And then lock him up? Charles C. W. Cooke explains it for you. Why a Formal Biden Impeachment Inquiry Is Now Necessary.

  Since the prospect was first raised, I have been of the view that the Republican Party would be better off moving too slowly than too fast in its inquiry into the Biden family’s peculiar business dealings. James Comer and Chuck Grassley have done sober and sedulous work over the past couple of years, and I have worried that, if they were to run out over their skis, they would fatally undermine their own efforts. As National Review’s editors correctly observed this week, impeachment is ultimately a political question, not a legal question, and it is thus subject to the slings and arrows of demagoguery and the vicissitudes of public opinion. Hitherto, my advice to the GOP has been to keep up the good work and wait for the right moment. An inquiry was already ongoing. What need could there be to formalize it?

  I have changed my mind. Naturally, I still consider it imperative for the Republicans to remain diligent and shrewd and for all involved to stick assiduously to the facts. But, having watched the brazen manner in which both the White House and the press have continued to stonewall, I have come to the conclusion that a more ceremonial investigation is, in fact, necessary. In theory, the media ought to be keenly interested in informing the country of where things stand. In practice, its leading lights have effectively been working for the president. If the GOP is to have any chance of conveying what it has found thus far — and, despite the foot-stamping and gaslighting, what it has found thus far is extremely interesting — it will be obliged to do so under its own steam. We are a long, long way away from Woodward and Bernstein. To break through, the Republicans will need to stage their own show.

  Also see CCWC's optimistic take on the dictator question: The American System Works, and It Will Work If Trump Wins Again.

• But let's get away from the horserace fare. Jeff Maurer brings the news that more respectable media won't write about COP28: Nations That Are Ignoring Their Old Climate Agreement Reach New Climate Agreement. Skipping down to the scatalogical, a bit of history, footnotes elided:

  The first major climate change agreement was the Kyoto Protocol. It was signed in 1997 to fanfare similar to what we’re hearing today. Environmentalists celebrated, leaders congratulated each other and themselves — oh how they congratulated themselves! And then — to make a long story short — basically nobody did any of the shit. Almost every country missed their goals; practically the only ones that didn’t were Soviet Bloc countries whose economies got shitmixed right before measurement began in 1990. It would be too simple to say that Kyoto failed; the treaty did technically meet its goals. But those goals were extremely modest, and Kyoto did not come close to solving climate change. The purpose of the treaty was to reduce global emissions, but emissions rose by 44 percent over 15 years, which is a bit like pledging to drink less and then ending up addicted to black tar heroin.

  The 2015 Paris Agreement replaced Kyoto. This time, the whole world was involved; no more trying to solve a global problem by relying on Iceland and The Rubble Formerly Known As Croatia. Some countries made truly impressive commitments; other countries pledged to recycle ten aluminum cans by 2090. Eight years on — to make a long story short — it looks like very few countries are doing any of the shit. It’s hard to assess precisely how things are going, but the circumstantial evidence doesn’t look good. Greenhouse gas emissions are still rising steadily. A UN report from September gave the Agreement credit for altering trajectories relative to pre-accord estimates, but also said “the world is not on track to meet [the Agreement’s] long-term goals.” A recent assessment from Climate Action Tracker — whose methods I don’t like, but still — found that The Gambia is the only country whose actions are compatible with the Paris Agreement’s goals. Allow me to show that on a map:

  

  Feeling let down by American journalism?

• You ain't alone, baby. James Bennet explains How American journalism lets down readers and voters. In case you don't remember:

  Are we truly so precious?” Dean Baquet, the executive editor of the New York Times, asked me one Wednesday evening in June 2020. I was the editorial-page editor of the Times, and we had just published an op-ed by Tom Cotton, a senator from Arkansas, that was outraging many members of the Times staff. America’s conscience had been shocked days before by images of a white police officer kneeling on the neck of a black man, George Floyd, until he died. It was a frenzied time in America, assaulted by covid-19, scalded by police barbarism. Throughout the country protesters were on the march. Substantive reform of the police, so long delayed, suddenly seemed like a real possibility, but so did violence and political backlash. In some cities rioting and looting had broken out.

  It was the kind of crisis in which journalism could fulfil its highest ambitions of helping readers understand the world, in order to fix it, and in the Times’s Opinion section, which I oversaw, we were pursuing our role of presenting debate from all sides. We had published pieces arguing against the idea of relying on troops to stop the violence, and one urging abolition of the police altogether. But Cotton, an army veteran, was calling for the use of troops to protect lives and businesses from rioters. Some Times reporters and other staff were taking to what was then called Twitter, now called X, to attack the decision to publish his argument, for fear he would persuade Times readers to support his proposal and it would be enacted. The next day the Times’s union—its unit of the NewsGuild-CWA—would issue a statement calling the op-ed “a clear threat to the health and safety of the journalists we represent”.

  And in case you still don't remember, it only took four days after Cotton's op-ed was published for Bennet to be defenestrated. He accurately notes that the NYT "has metastasised from liberal bias to illiberal bias."