Look into the Reflecting Pool. Downing Street Cat Larry Seeks New Manservant. Hot Time in Switzerland. NYT Celebrates Father’s Day with ‘Trans’ Dad Essay. Rise of Socialism. More
Talk about seeing your own image reflected in a pool of water …. Some jerks are overjoyed that the iconic Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool is threatened by algae just in time for America’s 250th birthday:
A small group of activists who called themselves “Team Algae” — including a member dressed as a purple frog — took up position in front of the Lincoln Memorial, cheering on the algae as a symbol of resistance to the Trump administration.
Jon and Shelly Wiseman, a retired couple who walked down to the reflecting pool from their home in Northwest Washington, called the paint job “basically a vanity project” for the president.
President Trump, as you may recall, spent a lot of money repairing the Reflecting Pool and painting the bottom “American flag blue” to be ready for July 4. Unfortunately, the renovation appears to have been unsuccessful. I know a Trump hater who is filled with vicious glee. Several people, including Olympian David Hearn, have been arrested for alleged vandalism at the Reflecting Pool. Hearn denies the charge. An increasingly frustrated President Trump alleges vandalism, writing on Truth Social that vandals had thrown a destructive chemical into the pool.
I was surprised that Maureen Dowd, Pulitzer Prize winning New York Times columnist and DC native, wrote this (“Creature from the Green Lagoon”) yesterday:
To give Trump his due, the capital needed freshening up in many spots, and he’s the first president in a while to restore beautiful statues and fountains that had fallen into disrepair. …
Surprisingly generous. She added, however:
Even when Trump starts with a glimmer of truth — that many iconic spots in D.C. had been allowed to shamefully deteriorate — he goes overboard in such a Trumpian way that he often ends up making things worse.
Meanwhile, the Reflecting Pool reflects the sad divisions of America 250.
A visibly emotional UK Prime Minister Keir Starmer has resigned. The Washington Post reports:
Starmer’s surrender came fast on the heels of a special parliamentary election in Makerfield on Thursday, in which Greater Manchester Mayor Andy Burnham won a decisive victory, returning him to the House of Commons and positioning him to mount a Labour Party leadership challenge that Starmer seemed all but certain to lose.
History lecturer Richard Johnson writes in Unherd:
Starmer’s premiership has been an extraordinary political failure. He has squandered a historic majority. He has trashed the reputation of his party. He leaves little by way of policy legacy. Trust in politics under his premiership has sunk further still. And what was it all for?
When Starmer once said “there is no such thing as Starmerism and there never will be,” he was right, except in the narrowest sense: Starmerism was always about Keir Starmer. There was no doctrine, policy program, or tradition. The Starmer project was simply an effort to make him prime minister.
Spiked Online dubs putative successor Andy Burnham just Keir Starmer in jeans:
Labour doesn’t have a Keir Starmer problem. It has a Labour problem. It is organisationally and ideologically estranged from its working-class support base.
Labour may be planning a Burnham Koronation. U.S. Dems could tell them the pros and Kams of this.
And now our attention turns to the real Master of 10 Downing Street, Larry the Downing Street Cat, who welcomes world leaders and is now taking applications for his seventh new manservant. Here’s someone who aspires to serve Larry.
Vice President Vance and Iranian officials spent the weekend negotiating over nuclear issues in Switzerland, with the Iranians apparently dismissing President Trump’s Strait of Hormuz threats as bluffing. Iran has stepped up the hanging of dissidents. Axios describes the situation as “messy.”
Two opinion pieces in the Wall Street Journal tackle President Trump’s and Vance’s recent verbal attacks on U.S. ally Israel. “Iran and Trump Blame Israel First” is the headline on an editorial:
President Trump’s new era of Middle East peace is off to a rocky start, as Iran declared Saturday it has again closed the Strait of Hormuz. But at least the Trump Administration and the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps agree on the culprit—Israel.
Vice President Vance was even more threatening….
“Donald Trump and JD Vance Echo the Anti-Israel Left” is the headline on Allysia Finley’s column.” She sees the specter of Tucker Carlson. Gatestone Institute has several takes on the deal, mostly negative. Also at Gatestone, Amir Taheri has an interesting dissent. “Tehran Is Poised to Overplay Its Hand” writes Nate Swanson in Foreign Affairs. This Just In: Iran’s Delegation appears to have walked out. But by lunch they may be back. Who knows?
But They Still Won’t Put Their “In Fauci We Trust” T-shirts in Mothballs. On the way out the door, former DNI Tulsi Gabbard releases documents that apparently “reveal evidence of U.S. taxpayer-funded global biolab program.” “The Anthony Fauci, COVID-19 origins cover-up runs ‘deep’ into our intelligence community,” writes Miranda Devine.
The End of Innocence. The New York Times observed Father’s Day with a laudatory Guest Essay about a “trans” Dad:
The New York Times is facing backlash after publishing a Father’s Day guest essay about a transgender parent who described learning how to be a “trans dad.”
The essay, titled “To My Daughter, My Gender Was Never Complicated,” was published Sunday morning and presented in comic-strip form. It was written by Zach Ellams, a biological woman who identifies as a male, and focuses on Ellams’ experience raising a daughter while navigating questions about gender….
In another scene at a pool, the child asks, “How did you grow a mustache if you were a lady?”
A separate panel shows the daughter on a playground telling another child, “I want to grow a beard when I grow up.”
“You can’t grow a beard. You’re a girl,” the other child replies.
“My dad did, and he was a girl,” Ellams’ daughter says.
The essay suggests the child accepts Ellams’ gender identity with ease, helping the author more fully “embrace” who they are.
This Is Awful, Too. Woke NYC fifth graders pantomime getting shot by cops in outrageous dance routine.
Also awful: Socialism. Megan McArdle has a column in the Washington Post headlined “Socialism is back in vogue. Wait for reality to set in.” She writes:
It has never been a better time in America to be a socialist. We aging Gen Xers who thought that socialism had been decisively refuted by the fall of the Berlin Wall have been refuted ourselves: Democratic socialists now run Seattle and New York City, and come January, probably D.C. too, where Janeese Lewis George won the Democratic primary that generally decides the district’s mayoral elections.
It is a heady moment for the left, because socialism’s tainted brand has recovered from the vivid failures of the Soviet Union. Fully 66 percent of Democrats tell Gallup they view socialism favorably, while 42 percent say the same of capitalism. This makes the left see a revolution marching toward victory, because it can promise something that the center left cannot: a disruptive break with an unsatisfying status quo….
The challenge is that socialism’s rise is spiky, concentrated in blue cities where affluent (but often downwardly mobile) college graduates cluster. That’s a problem for the Democratic Party, where the excesses of progressive governance are helping to make the party’s brand toxic in the less true-blue areas. But it’s also a challenge for the socialists, because cities are the hardest place to execute big plans for new taxing and spending.
Mollie Hemingway said on Fox that the rise of socialism is a consequence of former President Barack Obama’s leadership for the past 15 years:
What Mamdani is talking about there is a very real thing that the Democratic Party went through, really when they decided in 2008 to support Barack Obama.
Prior to that, Bill Clinton had been the leader of the party. Yes, he was on the left but center-left. He was able to reposition if he felt he had gone too far or if the public reacted.
With the election of Barack Obama — and there’s no confusion about it, Barack Obama runs the Democratic Party now — you’re seeing more and more of this type of extremism.
With President Obama and earlier followers, they would hide their radicalism. Now it’s out there in the open, and in really blue districts, you’re seeing they’re letting the freak flag fly about what they’re going to do.
Two Veep Reviews. Catholic intellectual Robby George’s review of Vice President Vance’s new book is very different from Barton Swaim’s also excellent review.
