No More Mr. Nice Guy: Trump Cancels Ceasefire. Dominates NATO Summit. Wit Dubs Unfolding Platner Scandal ‘Maine Kampf.’ TMI: Platner’s Condoms. Bethany Mandel on Meaning of Usha’s Preggers Wardrobe. And Much More
It’s Official: “Trump: Iran Ceasefire Is Over” is the U.K. Telegraph headline on the latest development in the Middle East.
Donald Trump has declared an end to the ceasefire with Iran.
The US president told reporters he didn’t “want to deal with them any more” after launching overnight strikes on Tehran.
In an angry address at the Nato summit in Ankara, Mr. Trump told reporters: “These are evil, sick people,” and described them as scum and a cancer that needs to be cut out.
On Tuesday night, US Central Command (CENTCOM) said its forces had struck over 80 targets, including Iranian air defence systems, coastal radar sites and 60 IRGC small boats.
Shortly before, the US Treasury said it had banned Iran from selling oil, one of the key components of the MoU.
The U.S. strikes come in response to Iranian attacks on commercial ships in the Strait of Hormuz. NATO Secretary General Mark Rutte calls the U.S. strikes “absolutely necessary.” Oil prices immediately skyrocketed while stock prices fell. Iran is just one of the issues for NATO. “Trump looms large as NATO grapples with challenge of rearming Europe,” the BBC reports. Meanwhile, the president is on about Greenland again.
President Trump has had kind words for Turkey’s President Erdogan and is considering selling Turkey F-16s, which National Review is against. “Trump’s Ankara remarks reveal a grand strategy hiding in plain sight,” argues Lt. Col. Robert Maginnis (ret.) at Fox Digital. “Don’t Launder Erdogan’s Record at the NATO Summit,” counters the Foundation for the Defense of Democracies’ Jonathan Schanzer.
Gee whiz, Ms. Must never thought she’d see a headline like this in a respectable outlet: “Ex-girlfriend of Graham Platner says he removed condoms without consent during sex.” Even though the MSM is optimistically exploring a succession (here and here), the Democratic nomination for the Maine senatorial race remained in limbo early this morning.
The public is left to wonder: How did this happen? Shouldn’t Graham Platner’s Nazi tattoo have been a tipoff? The general consensus is that the Dems haven’t seen hide nor hair of a genuine while male member of the working class in so long that they mistook Platner for a representative of an endangered species. A Free Press story headlined “Beware the Honest Oysterman,” by Caitlin Flanagan, explains:
With Graham Platner, Democrats thought they had finally—finally!—made contact with the white working class. So they ignored all manner of red flags.
A Wall Street editorial headlined “Why Did They Cover for Graham Platner?” takes off in the same direction:
Democrats want to fall in love with their candidates, and none more so than the supposed common man plucked from obscurity. That was Maine’s Democratic Senate nominee Graham Platner—“my kind of man,” Sen. Elizabeth Warren said. But long after the love died and the truth emerged, they defended him. Until now, when they can’t.
When we recall that Tim Walz, whose main qualification was that he supposedly knew which end of a hunting rifle the bullet came out of, was the Dems’ first attempt at locating a white male, it begins to make sense. The New York Times consistently promoted Platner. Ira Stoll discusses this in a Washington Free Beacon story that details the “Anatomy of a Hype Job: How the New York Times Boosted Graham Platner.”
You might enjoy NYT columnist Michelle Goldberg’s apologia:
“While I’m assigning blame, I shouldn’t leave out myself,” Times columnist Michelle Goldberg writes. “Last October, when stories about Platner’s tattoo and Reddit posts first broke, I went to Maine to write about him. I tried to convey what I saw: a campaign that was electrifying angry Maine voters. But I deeply regret that, impressed by Platner’s political charisma, I wrote that he was ‘nothing like the edgelord caricature I encountered online.’” In retrospect, Goldberg now acknowledges, “If anything, he seems to be significantly worse.”
Even the apology doesn’t quite do justice to how deeply in the tank Goldberg was for Platner. ….
Do read on to find out how in the tank for Platner Goldberg was. Her apology has triggered mirth, including a Hot Air piece delightfully headlined “Goldberg: Sorry I Promoted Maine Kampf (But The Bulwark Denies Responsibility).” What alerted Dems that there might be a problem with Platner? A sudden attack of virtue or the polls, as Dana Perino suggested on The Five? Platner’s downfall (if I am not being premature) further exposed the limits of the “believe all women” mantra, as noted by The Free Press. Meanwhile, the Babylon Bee comes through again:
Rape Allegations Mar Reputation of Local Nazi
Platner was popular despite it all because he represents the far left of his party. Another contest that pits the Dem hard left (à la Platner) and an “establishment favorite” is taking place in the battleground state of Michigan, where moderate Rep. Haley Stevens confronts Wayne County Health Department Director Abdul El-Sayed:
“If you want your politics dictated by AIPAC or Chuck Schumer, then I’m not your guy,” El-Sayed said. …
When the New York Times wasn’t busy boosting Graham Platner, it was expressing its shock and horror that three conservative women were pregnant. I mean, ick, right? Bethany Mandel takes on the New York Times report on pregnant Republican women in a very nice Examiner piece headlined “The best pronatalist policy isn’t economic. It’s Usha Vance’s wardrobe“:
In the pages of the “Critic’s Notebook,” the Times writer, Vanessa Friedman, seemed genuinely unsettled by the mere fecundity of these women. The thrust of Friedman’s column is that women such as Vance, Leavitt, and Miller have abandoned what used to be the accepted political uniform for pregnant women, trading the loose tunics and oversized jackets favored by figures such as Cherie Blair for dresses that celebrate rather than conceal the pregnant form.
To explain why this matters, Friedman quotes Helen Lewis, author of Difficult Women, who observes, “It’s really noticeable that the MAGA women are not hiding their pregnancy. There is pride in being pregnant and being fertile.”
A companion piece to Mandel is City Journal’s “Want More Babies? We Need More Friends,” by Rob Henderson. The subtitle explains:
If Americans are to revive our sagging national birthrate, we must rebuild the ordinary social structures that made children thinkable and natural.
Ms. Must climbs on her hobbyhorse to suggest that low fertility rates have an even deeper cause than social structures, which is manifestly clear in the best work on the crisis ever—a novel by mystery writer P.D. James—The Children of Men—about a society that stopped having babies.
At the other end of the lifespan, an op-ed in the Washington Post deals with elder fraud, which is surging.
The sage Victor Davis Hanson remains irked by “Mamdani’s Embittered Fourth of July Rant to America“:
Thus spoke the pampered rich kid from Uganda, who immigrated to America with his now-endowed professor father and elite filmmaker mother, the latter reportedly supported by millions of dollars in grants from the Qatari royal autocracy.
Upon arriving, the Mamdanis joined what is statistically America’s wealthiest and most highly credentialed ethnic group: the enormously privileged Indian American community. (But how was that possible in Mamdani’s version of a racist America that supposedly detests the wrong accents and skin colors?)
When this nepo baby includes himself among the supposedly “victimized” (“the rest of us”), should we laugh or cry?
Alas, Mayor Mamdani’s wife, Rama Duwaji, missed her husband’s Fourth of July remarks because she was instead co–hosting a pricey pro-Palestine retreat in Corsica.
Must Be Briefly Mentioned: Rich Lowry’s “Women’s basketball is out to destroy superstar Caitlin Clark — and itself, too.” … Powerline’s “The Sick Smithsonian,” about another great American institution that seems to have fallen to the Left. … And Michael Goodwin’s “America 250 showed the pride and joy this country has to offer,” an antidote to Mamdani’s remarks.
