Willfully Obtuse

After a week that saw Donald Trump bring about a ceasefire between Iran and Israel after blowing up the three nuclear sites of Natanz, Fordow, and Isfahan, negotiating and presiding over the signing of a peace deal between Congo and Rwanda, a 30-year long war that has killed more than six million people, got our European partners in NATO to agree to raise their ante to 5%, signed a new trade deal with China that sees tariffs on U.S. goods into China slashed down to 10% while tariffs on Chinese goods into the U.S. go to 30%, a month just concluding boasting record lows of illegal immigration crossing the border as well as the lowest monthly number of gotaways ever, and the S&P and Nasdaq fully recovered from the tariff war, closing Friday with all-time highs. 

And then you add in the Supreme Court's CASA decision, which chucks 50 years of extra-constitutional overreach by district court judges, and restores the Article III branch to its proper role. Presidential libraries showcasing two-term occupants of 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue have less material to work with than Donald Trump does in the last 10 days or so. 

The Big Beautiful Bill cleared its first procedural hurdle, garnering 51 votes on the floor to begin final debate and amendments. Chuck Schumer, out of gas and out of ideas, forced the clerks to read the entire bill...to no one. There were zero senators in the chamber while the 900-plus page package was read out loud. Schumer merely wanted to eat up time. One of the three Republicans against the bill, Wisconsin's Ron Johnson, flipped from a no to a yes after a conversation with Vice-President J.D. Vance. Vance presided, but was not required to break a tie. There will most likely be a vote-a-rama all day and deep into the night on Monday, with a chance that final passage could happen in the overnight hours before sending it back to the House. Majority Leader John Thune seems pretty intent on passing it early in the week, sending it back to the House, and hoping they pass the Senate version as is so it gets to the White House by the Independence Day holiday Friday. 

The White House has always indicated it wants the package on Trump's desk by the August recess, but word out of the House leadership is that they might have enough momentum, especially with the President's hot hand of late, to hold a final vote on the Senate version and be done with it. A conference committee process is still an option on the table, but there's more than an outside chance that Trump might have another win by the end of the week. 

Democrats, and their allies in the media, appear resigned to only putting up token opposition at this point. Jake Tapper on CNN's State of the Union had a copy of the Senate's BBB legislation on his desk as a prop. Alabama Senate Katie Boyd Britt was his guest, and Tapper tried the 'Come on, there's no way you can convince me you people have read this thing,' bit. Here's how Britt countered. 

When Obamacare was passed in 2009, the monstrosity was still being written in then-Speaker Nancy Pelosi's conference room the night before it was called up for a late night vote. Remember, Pelosi is the one who famously said, "We have to pass this bill to find out what's in it." No one really had any idea what the final language was, but Jake Tapper, then with ABC News, didn't have the 2,000-page Obamacare bill sitting in his lap of the White House press room covering the Obama administration as senior White House correspondent. And when Joe Biden's Inflation Reduction Act passed with Vice-President Kamala Harris breaking the tie, I don't recall seeing the 730-page bill sitting on the desk of his CNN set as a prop. 

This BBB legislation has gone through every single committee of jurisdiction in both chambers. It's been marked up. 95% of the legislation is not being contested by the Republicans. The points of contention are throwing people off Medicaid that never should have been on it in the first place, whether or not, or how much of a subsidy high-tax blue state Republicans should get from the rest of the country in a SALT deduction, and not if, but how much in spending cuts should be included. Every senator is fully briefed on what's in this package, and Jake Tapper knows this. He's being willfully obtuse. Every change in the bill, there's immediately a summary presented to the senators so they can be kept up on the latest draft. The rest of the bill that they've already read and consented to is still in place. To say that no one has read this bill is preposterous. They all have. Rand Paul has. He just wants more cuts. That's why he's against it. Same for Thom Tillis. Ron Johnson may be recalculating because he likes being a senator and sees the lights of a freight train rapidly approaching with a big number 47 on the side of the engine. 

On Sunday Morning Futures with Maria Bartiromo, the President gave an exclusive interview and talked about the work of the B-2 pilots over Fordow, as well as the rest of our military on the carrier groups that mopped up at Natanz and Isfahan. 

"Just destroyed." All week long, the President has used the very Trumpian term of 'obliterated.' The classic definition of obliterated means to remove all traces of, or completely destroy. To be fair, the centrifuges Iran had by the hundreds, or maybe thousands, are gnarled chunks of burned and partially-melted metal by now. There are still traces of them. But they're still destroyed. Lefties are suddenly strict constructionists when it comes to vocabulary. 

The anti-Trump Beltway swamp creatures have been making the claim all week long, based on the now-debunked Defense Intelligence Agency initial assessment report, that we didn't do that much damage to the Iranians' nuclear program. Only a setback for a few weeks, maybe a couple months. Democrats have been pouncing on the word obliterate, trying to play syntax semantics. Here's House Democratic leader Hakeem Jeffries on This Week with Jonathan Karl Sunday.


Poor Hakeem hasn't seen enough evidence that the program has been completely obliterated, or completely [destroyed completely]. Even Brett McGurk, who served in national security positions in the Bush, Obama, and Biden administrations, has seen enough to call it completely destroyed. 

Rafael Grossi, the current head of the International Atomic Energy Agency, repeated what he said a few days ago on CNN, to Margaret Brennan on CBS' Face the Nation. Fordow's toast.



There were reports that Iran had cranes on top of the mountain trying to begin to snake down the blast holes over the weekend. At the very minimum, that would signal strongly that the reason they have to start on top and literally go fission fishing is because they can no longer gain entry through the front door due to the underground complex collapsing. And by the way, they are doing all of this while both the United States and Israel are watching them. I'd sure hate to be the Iranian construction worker who first  proclaims, "We found it." Both Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and President Trump have indicated that if the Iranian violate the ceasefire by trying to rebuild, they will immediately get hit again. Forget the rhetoric about Ali Khamenei's intentions. The first time their actions back up the Supreme Leader's rhetoric, it's game on once more.

Connecticut Senator Chris Murphy went on Meet the Press with Kristen Welker, and played the obliteration denialism card. 



The funny part about the Democrats' insistence on following the Queen's English when it comes to the definition of the word obliterate, when it's pretty clear the nuclear program was destroyed, is the hypocrisy on defining words as soon as New York City Democratic mayoral nominee Zohran Mamdani is on the set trying to redefine global intifada. Three times on Meet the Press, Welker tried to get him to walk away from embracing global intifada, desperately trying to get him to recognize what that phrase means to anyone not an antisemite. 

She does everything but beg him to understand he's got to abandon that terminology, and he just won't do it. He wants a new definition of what global intifada means. And by the way, it's not just Mamdani trying to redefine words like intifada. Democrats and their media allies are now trying to redefine what antisemitism means. Fortunately, we have places like the Canary Mission, who knows exactly what antisemitism means and keeps tabs and receipts of people all over the world that engage in it. Here is their file on Mr. Mamdani. 

Mamdani's anti-Israel activism took place during Israel’s war against Hamas terrorists. Israel launched the war after the October 7, 2023, terror attacks. 

Hamas murdered approximately 1,200 Israelis, injured thousands and kidnapped hundreds more that day. For more information, see the Canary Mission page on Hamas. 

Mamdani was the co-founder of the anti-Israel campus group Students for Justice in Palestine (SJP) at Bowdoin College (Bowdoin SJP). 

In May 2021, Mamdani led a chant in support of the Boycott, Divestment, Sanctions (BDS) movement at an anti-Israel protest organized by the pro-terror activist group Within Our Lifetime (WOL).

Remember, the aforementioned Jake Tapper promised to do better after not recognizing Joe Biden was non compos mentis for four years. Here was Tapper's reaction to Mamdani playing footsies with antisemitism. 

I guess we're going to have to wait until after Mamdani wins, drives all the cops, Jews, billionaires, Republicans, and Wall Street firms out of Manhattan before Tapper decides to write a book blaming the New York Democratic Party for lying to him about Mamdani's character flaws. 

Mamdani says it hurts every time he's accused of being antisemitic, yet he never seems to separate or denounce groups that expressly call for the end of the Jewish state. He co-founded a chapter of the SJP, which is expressly antisemitic, and is a proud participant in the BDS movement, which wants to inflict economic damage on Israel for no other reason than it's a Jewish state. But wait, there's more. Here comes the New York Times with the assist to antisemites everywhere, but especially those on the left running for office in New York City.

So Trump uses the word obliterate, and the Democratic elected leaders and media allies can't budge on what the word means. They accuse Trump of lying, even when the evidence becomes overwhelming that the American strikes Friday last were severe and devastating. But if you try to hold the left to the same standard when applied to words like intifada and antisemitism, whoa there. We have to change up the definition in order to make the antisemites feel more comfortable with that nomenclature. 

Melissa Murray, a former clerk for Justice Sonia Sotomayor and now an MSNBC contributor and legal analyst, reacted Friday to the news that the Supreme Court finally decided to force the entire Article III branch back from a 50-year frolic into kritocracy and back into our Constitutional form of government. 

Murray freely admits that rogue district court judges were the primary tool of resistance to what they view is a lawless administration, and now it's been lamentably taken away. This is the death knell for the rule of law, because individual judges no longer can decide what Article II buildings are mothballed, which federal personnel, if any at all, can be terminated, downsized, or reassigned by the person elected to be their boss. And Murray is upset that a judge that a Democrat appointed no longer gets to decide the fate of discretionary spending Congressionally allocated to the executive to manage. Murray has to be willfully obtuse to honestly believe that a hundred active nationwide mandates from unelected partisan judges is just the kind of republic Benjamin Franklin warned the old woman in Philadelphia would last only if we can keep it. 

The Trump administration and the Republican-led Congress has been far from perfect as we enter the second half of the first year of unified government. But as for the Democratic Party's position as the loyal opposition, it's beginning to look more like a game between the Harlem Globetrotters and the Washington Generals. The only drama is not how much the score is being run up, but bickering about playing time between the players the audience is paying to see. The Democratic Party is pathetic to the point of being pitiful, but then they nominate an antisemitic Marxist as their crown jewel to run the nation's soon-to-be-former largest city. It's hard for them to claw their way back to power when they refuse to keep falling.

After Mamdani's win, Pennsylvania Senator John Fetterman, about the only remaining Democrat in Washington with a shred of common-sense, put it this way. 

Can't find the lie in that statement. Happy holidays.