Swift Rants On

We hear from our readership concern that Mr Swift has been uncharacteristically silent as of late. Fear not. Repeatedly winning can be a tiring undertaking, and a celebration is in order. Besides, he has been shopping, considering trading in his MAGA hat for Elon’s version that deservesly states that “Trump was right about everything.” Further, it is often the mainstream media contrarians that annoy me to no end, spurring me to rebuttal. But their recent attacks have been without teeth, not grounded in reality. If anyone considers the ravings of AOC and Jasmine Crockett, not to mention New York’s democrats veering hard left to vote for a vacuous communist Ugandan-Indian internet poser as candidate for mayor, as anything to take seriously, let alone consider an actual remaking of the party… well, that’s just comically absurd. Isn’t it?  Alas, never underestimate the stupidity of Americans, especially our youth, educated as they are by a system ruled by the left that has lost sight of how to prepare them for reality, let alone a job and an existence with purpose. Supported by the democrat party, en bloc as usual, they go so far as to defend the right of able bodied, childless single adult males to maintain their Medicaid coverage when in fact research shows they’re doing exactly what we suspected them doing all along: Lounging on the couch, sleeping, watching television and playing video games, according to the American Enterprise Institute and reported on the Wall Street Journal. Despite the left’s hand-wringing over the CBO report that 7.8 million Americans will lose their health coverage, it turns out that 4.8 million of those cannot even satisfy the part-time work requirement. Please. You can’t kvetch about insufficient coverage for those who need it and simultaneously support this blatant behavior that games the system. Please put on your big boy britches and admit that Elon and DOGE got it right. Our government is insidiously rife with wasteful fraud and abuse, and those of us who pay exorbitant taxes are tired of hearing that such waste is acceptable to those who don’t.  Or politicians who suspect that tax dollar handouts are to be used as an incentive to get a certain group of recipients to firm their base and vote them back into office. That form of bribery, expanding the scope of government programs into the middle class, be it Medicaid, SNAP, or such preposterous benefit proposals such as reparations, universal healthcare, or guaranteed income, is self-defeating, encouraging sloth, poor self-esteem, a lower incentive to work, and ultimately encouraging generational poverty. None of these government programs has a record of fulfilling their original promise to provide a helping hand to lift beneficiaries out of poverty, instead perpetuating the cycle for generations. But they keep doing it, incentified by the recipients, or the virtue signaling left, who keep returning them to office. Witness “the Squad,” who, by virtue of their incessant socialist rants, while having accomplished nothing more than disruption, have been rewarded by being consistently returned to office. And before I forget, having referenced “big boy” britches, kudos to Pete Hegseth for digressing from his topic of military intervention in the Middle-East to address some childish question by a reporter chastising him on using the phrase “bomber boys” in reference to the pilots that flew the mission to drop bunker busters on Iran’s nuclear facilities. Apparently, one of the pilots was female, spurring the reporter to take offense with Hegseth’s terminology in using a nickname dating back to WWII. Suddenly, the left conveniently applies traditional gender definitions when playing gotcha journalism. It’s an expression, lighten up. And suppose this female pilot ascended the ranks to attain a level of expertise that enabled her to get selected to fly a mission of this importance, when only 4% of combat pilots are women. In that case, I suspect she was more than proud to be one of the bomber boys. 

And about that mission: Our B-2 pilots flew some 37 hours to drop 30000-pound bunker buster bombs on Iran’s nuclear development sites, effectively slotting these substantial weapons into ventilation shafts the size of a washing machine from an altitude of 20000 feet. Remarkable. But since when does America fail to rally around our troops and our president in celebrating such an accomplishment to protect the world from a rogue regime that is the world’s largest state sponsor of terrorism? Since now, apparently. Immediately, the left, particularly CNN, began questioning the effectiveness of the attack, leaked a classified government document assessing the damage, and began calling for Trump's impeachment yet again for not consulting with the omniscient Congressional progressives to seek permission to launch the attack. Now there’s a recipe for mission success: allow Congress to dither over minutiae and risk further leaks to tip off the mullahs regarding our intentions. Where exactly do you think most of these leaks come from? And the mere fact that some on the left, and even some rare isolationists on the right, are quibbling over whether Iran was actively pursuing a nuclear weapon is preposterous to anyone with a functioning cortex. The facts are that they were enriching uranium to 60%, a mere stone's throw away from the 90% required to create a nuclear weapon, while claiming it was for peaceful purposes. And yet, only somewhere in the vicinity of 4% is required for a nuclear reactor to generate electricity, and they were already obtaining that material from Russia. So why 60%? And why hide your facility under 300 feet of concrete inside a mountain and not allow international inspection by the IAEA of those facilities? And to endure such childish antics as suddenly cleansing these sites of duct work and hardware prior to inspection with the claim that they were painting the ceiling, in essence, remodeling, is just absurd and reeks of arrogance. When exactly were we supposed to figure it out after the mushroom cloud appeared over Tel-Aviv?  Or when Iran supplies nuclear weapons to their proxies and holds the world hostage? Didn’t we learn our lesson with North Korea? And the DPRK wasn’t chanting death to America daily while they were producing both weapons-grade uranium and developing intercontinental ballistic missiles to reach our shores. Iran was doing all three.  But it’s not over. Iran remains defiant, claiming victory over Israel and announcing their intention to continue their nuclear development program. Tough talk from a regime with virtually no air defenses and allies that have been uncharacteristically silent. In typical Trump fashion, he kept the mullahs guessing by suggesting that further military action has not been ruled out, only to have the left squawk and leap to the defense of the regime by trying to limit Trump’s power to do so. Talk about aiding and abetting. The thirst for power from congressional dimwits elected by politically slanted jurisdictions has no greater poster child than Maxine Watters who made news when she was spurned by a security guard who denied her entry into a federal building and more recently was kicked out of an LA detention facility trying to flex her muscle as a member of Congress to no avail. Entertaining political theater at its best. But the “do you know who I am” privileged attitude is appalling from someone who has made a fortune taking advantage of her position to engage in insider trading to live lavishly on her $175K government salary. Voters should take note and cleanse the halls of Congress of these partisan, self-aggrandizing opportunists who serve no purpose but to disrupt, delay, and feather their nests without considering serving their constituents. But we will have to be satisfied with revenge in the short term. Turns out observers on the ground as well as signs from inside the regime suggest that the damage is extensive, closer to Trump’s description as obliteration as opposed to CNN’s assessment as superficial, based apparently on Khameini’s defiant rhetoric from his bunker. Haven’t we discovered that Arab propaganda is an art form and is to be taken with a healthy dose of skepticism?  How often have we found that reports of Palestinian children massacred and hospitals bombed have been exaggerations and fiction supplied by Palestinian authorities controlled by Hamas? Know your source lest you be influenced by your partisan ideology. 

Yet despite the incessant attacks from the left, Trump continues to grind out results. This has been an unprecedented week of successes. Successes supported by a vast majority of Americans despite a loud and vocal 20% dominating the left’s news cycle. Take note:  the border is virtually closed. The SCOTUS has struck down the ability of some rogue district judge in a liberal enclave to limit presidential authority. And here we must mention the formerly Trump-averse Amy Coney Barrett for stepping up and applying constitutional law in an unusual public beatdown of Ketanji Jackson’s dissent. Wow. Take that, Harvard Law. And next on the docket is birthright citizenship that has been misappropriated for eons when originally intended for the children of enslaved people, whose parents had no “foreign allegiance.”  Why we allow foreigners with no intention of assimilating into our culture to immigrate illegally, then drop a child on US soil to act as an anchor to import more foreigners intent on doing us harm is unfathomable. It is an end-around to skirt the legal immigration process and is not what was intended. Peace in Rwanda with mineral rights. Another win, largely unreported by the media. A tenuous ceasefire between Israel and Iran, with Gaza in the works. A successful NATO summit with European leaders vowing to step up militarily by imposing expenditures proposed by Trump. Europe is embracing Trump's policy. Cats are indeed sleeping with dogs. And a leading, distinctly anti-Trump economist, Torsten Slok, stated that Trump “may have outsmarted all of us” when he reversed his opinion on Trump’s tariff-laden economic policy. The stock market endorsed that opinion through action and reached record highs, a benchmark considered impossible only months ago and a rare occurrence during a Republican administration. Congress appears to be nearing consensus on the big, beautiful bill with tax cuts that should energize the economy and further drive the market to unprecedented heights. And all of this success with a President who is visible, seemingly inexhaustible, and is conducting the most transparent, accessible administration in recent memory, if not ever. It’s a good time to be a Republican. And it’s about time more on the left embraced success and made American prosperity not partisan bickering our primary concern.