Seems the Trump administration’s Iran deal has ushered in an Era of Bad Feelings.
Take the usually Trump-friendly New York Post, which this morning runs its second brutal Iran deal cover. “Easy Mullah,” shrieks the headline, as a grinning Mullah counts his moolah. That’s because the U.S. is dropping sanctions for two months, which will give Iran a payday of up to $10 billion, no pallets needed.
“Bad Feelings All Around After Iran Deal” is the headline on Examiner Chief Political Correspondent Byron York’s column:
The United States and Israel are mad at each other. At home, supporters of President Donald Trump‘s decision to go to war are mad at him over the peace deal. Trump’s critics are happy the war might be coming to an end but mad at Trump for starting it. As far as the general public is concerned, a new CBS News poll found that 78% of those surveyed want the war to end now, while just 22% said it should continue “until Iran gives up more.”
On the U.S. side, no amount of talking can get around the fact that what began as a military attack that top American officials said had four goals — prevent Iran from obtaining a nuclear weapon, destroy its ballistic missiles, sink its navy, and end its ability to arm proxies — ended, despite making great progress toward those goals, as a desperate effort to reopen the Strait of Hormuz and limit damage to the global economy. In the end, the only really concrete parts of the memorandum of understanding between the U.S. and Iran were about the Strait of Hormuz and the U.S. blockade. …
When things go wrong and frustration mounts, people start pointing fingers at each other, even if they are ostensibly on the same side. Bad feelings spread. That’s where things are now.
A Wall Street Journal report “parsed President Trump’s shifting rhetoric on Iran War,” while an editorial in the same paper notes that moolah is indeed already flowing to the mullahs even at this early stage. Meanwhile, the New York Times reports that Iran says it won’t allow inspections of its damaged nuclear sites.
In “Anatomy of a Gamble,” Jonathan Spyer argues in Middle East Forum that Iran has emerged from the deal strengthened on a strategic level:
It is difficult from all this not to draw the conclusion that the US Administration entered the war on February 28 without a proper analysis of what the Iranian regime was, and of its strengths and weaknesses. The president was correct, as he often noted, that Iran has little left by way of a navy. “Their navy is totally gone – 100 per cent” he told Fox News recently. “The air force is totally gone – 100 per cent.”
The problem with this is that the particular strengths possessed by the Iranian regime are not located in the field of conventional air or sea power. The regime in Tehran is an Islamist, ideological gathering, engaged in a ‘forever war’ of its own, of society against society, rather than army against army. Its practical successes both in retaining power in Iran and in building influence and strength from the Gulf of Aden to the Mediterranean derive from its ability to mobilise (mainly but not only) Shia Muslim loyalties and commitments, and to use these as the engine for political and paramilitary mobilization.
Guy Benson suggests it might be better to walk away from the deal, while Victor Davis Hanson, historian of warfare ancient and modern, argues that the memorandum of understanding is not a surrender or the beginning of a new era but rather the next stage of a strategy built on pressure, deterrence, and avoiding another costly Middle East war.
Paint the Town Red. Will three socialists candidates backed by New York Mayor Zohran Mamdani prevail in three closely watched primaries today in New York? The most watched of the three races race is New York’s 13th District. National Review explains (“Zohranism Looks to Expand Its Reach”):
But of course, few Mamdani-endorsed candidates can compare to the magnificently named Darializa Avila Chevalier, running in New York’s 13th district (Harlem and parts of the Bronx) and challenging not merely any random incumbent, but Congressional Hispanic Caucus Chairman Adriano Espaillat. Chevalier, a Democratic Socialist, recently made the news for being so gung-ho pro-Hamas in her sympathies that she refused to even condemn the violence of the October 7 massacre. But that’s probably less troubling than her completely sincere — to the point of madness — belief in prison abolition. Needless to say, she’s at even odds to knock off Espaillat tonight.
In a Wall Street Journal editorial headlined “The Rise of the Democratic Socialists” editors take note of socialist control of big cities and gains in Congress. Amazing but Israel is a big issue tonight. The Zo has outdone himself by branding the pro-Israel AIPAC “monsters.” A New York Post editorial observes that “Mamdani takes the Jew-hate all the way to 11.”
Tonight we’ll also learn the electoral fate of Jack Schlossberg—John Bouvier Kennedy Schosberg, to give the lad his due—who is running for retiring New York Congressman Jerry Nadler’s capacious old seat.
So far, the only tears shed over the fall of UK Prime Minister Keir Starmer seem to be the ones he choked back during his resignation remarks. “Mr. Sensible Keir Starmer bowed to the left and made the UK an unholy mess — a stern warning to Democrats,” suggests Brandon O’Neill in the New York Post.
Philly’s ultra progressive DA Larry Krasner “found out” something, according to GW law professor and Fox Contributor Jonathan Turley—what Krasner found out was that he was going too far for even liberal judges in granting new trials to people who had committed serious crimes—murder, for example—without sufficient reason that another trial is justified.
Ms. Must, daughter of the south, has been heartened by the recent spate of stories about southern states turning around failing public schools. The latest is Paul Vallas’ City Journal piece about the nearly all-charter public school system instituted in New Orleans in the aftermath of Katrina:
The latest Education Scorecard, produced by researchers at Harvard, Stanford, and Dartmouth, places Louisiana near the top nationally for growth between 2022 and 2025: second in reading improvement, third in math, and the only state to exceed its pre-pandemic performance in both subjects. New Orleans was the state’s most important reform laboratory.
This is all the more remarkable because Louisiana sits in the bottom third of states in per-pupil funding—about $17,300 per student, some $2,600 below the national average. The city thus rebukes the familiar claim that bad results mainly reflect inadequate funding. Institutions and incentives matter more than money spent.
Before the hurricane, New Orleans ran some of the worst schools in America. …
This plays to one of my pet peeves—that spending more on failing schools is not the way to ix them. Don’t get me wrong. Teachers deserve good salaries. The teachers in my family were dedicated and prepared to teach. But a lot of the lavish spending turns out to be for administrators.
I couldn’t get over the feeling that something was … wrong, as I read this Washington Post story on the would-be assassin of Justice Brett Kavanaugh:
From her home in California, 26-year-old Sophie Roske figured out Kavanaugh’s address in suburban Maryland. She bought a gun, practiced shooting and acquired lock-picking tools, black face paint and a laser sight. After packing her gear into a suitcase she checked at the airport, Roske flew cross-country and took a cab to the justice’s home, arriving just after 1 a.m.
Wasn’t the attempted assassin a man? It is not until after twenty—twenty—or so paragraphs that we find this:
Roske was named Nicholas Roske at birth and raised as a boy in a Southern California family active in a large Evangelical church. (Roske was identified by her name at birth in earlier coverage of the case.) Roske reached the rank of Eagle Scout, earned a philosophy degree Cal State Northridge and began to transition to a woman. “Sophie’s depression remained unresolved at least in part due to her gender dysphoria, which was not being addressed by her treatment,” Boardman said from the bench.
Roske wasn’t just “raised as a boy.” Roske was a boy and is a man today. Shame on the Washington Post! Similarly, as I noted yesterday, Father’s Day [was] one more opportunity to promote transgender ideology at the New York Times, which James Freeman covers today.