Month: April 2026

Good News From Marco, and Iran, and Our Airports (posted 4/6/2)

In keeping with the Cautious Optimism tradition, I thought I’d start this week with some positive, feel-good stories.

I’ll open with one of my favorite members of the Trump administration — Marco Rubio – on one of my favorite topics – deporting foreign bad actors.

In this case, the bad actors are numerous children or other relatives of the murderous mullah-acracy who has been running Iran and oppressing Iranians for almost half a century. In many cases, these people have been allowed in legally, but don’t have American citizenship; in other cases, they are naturalized citizens. Marco is heading up an effort to require the former group to leave the USA, and to denaturalize (where possible) the later group, and send them packing as well.

When many leftists hear this, their first instinct is to rend their garments and take the side of the foreigners, just as they did in the case of the wife-beating human smuggler with a final deportation order, Kilmar.

But when conservatives — or others with the common sense God gave most members of the animal kingdom – hear this, they are happy about it. Because they (and we) can easily go back to first principles: no foreigner has a right to come to America.

American citizens have total control over who enters our country and under what circumstances. And though we may allow foreigners who have been properly vetted to temporarily come as tourists or on business trips, or possibly to study, we are under no obligation to let them in, and they cannot force us to admit them, or give them a path to citizenship if we determine that that is not in our interests.

Just as we were under no obligation in the 1940s to allow entry to Hitler’s nephew Johnny Hitler (or Bob Himmler, Tucker Heydrich, or Candace Goering), we don’t have to welcome the children or relatives of the mullahs, ayatollahs or jihadis from Iran.

You may remember General Qasem “Scowlin’” Soleimani, the murderous Iranian big shot who led the Quds Force. (Or, as the NYT, WAPO and PBS probably called him, “an avuncular Teddy Bear of a man with an easy smile and a heart as big as the great outdoors.”) Trump transitioned him from “terrorist mastermind” to “goop in a smoking car” via one well-aimed missile in 2020.

Well it turns out his niece Hamideh and grand-niece Sarinasadat have been living it up in America, while still celebrating attacks against US soldiers, denouncing America as the “Great Satan,” and supporting the designated terror organization IRGC. And their immigration history makes them poster-wenches for the Democrats’ suicidal disdain for America.

They both came here in 2015 – Hamideh on a tourist visa and Sarinasadat on a student visa. A judge granted them asylum in 2019. While I’m no immigration lawyer, I don’t think any tourist visas allow you to stay here for 4 years, and a student visa would normally expire after the four years it takes to get a college degree. And asylum claims are supposed to be very difficult to prove, requiring that you are being persecuted by your country’s government and would be in great danger if you went back.

But Joey “Gaffes” Biden granted them both green cards in 2021 anyway.

Because of course he did.

When Hamideh applied for citizenship last year, she had to disclose that she’d been back to Iran at least 4 times in recent years. Now, if I can turn on my Sam Kinison filter, I’ll explain what a legitimate asylum seeker would never do…

“SHE’D NEVER GO BACK TO HER HOME COUNTRY FOUR FREAKING TIMES! OH!! OOOOOHHHHHHH!!!”

Aaannnnnddddd… last Friday Marco had both Soleimanis arrested, and prepared to send them back to Iran. I think I speak for all of us when I say, “I hope your boat doesn’t run into any Iranian mines when you sail back through the Straits of Hormuz, ladies!”

Speaking of ungrateful foreigners, a federal judge just delivered some more good news to Marco (and us) when he dismissed a lawsuit by a German citizen against Rubio, filed because he thought his visa application was taking too long to be granted.

But this is no traditional German citizen, whom you might expect to be named something like Hans, or Franz, or Tucker Heydrich. No, this guy was named Raheel Sadiq.

Of the Munich Sadiqs, no doubt.

Raheel was upset that his visa application was 9 months old, and still hadn’t been acted on. He demanded that the US government be forced to make a final decision, claiming that the wait “inflicts ongoing human and economic harm.”

I would refer to the aforementioned first principle: no foreigner is owed the opportunity to enter America. But I would also agree with Raheel; he should get a quick and final decision.

And that decision is, “How about NO?” And you’re welcome, because we’re stopping you from “the ongoing human and economic harm” you have been suffering while you wait.

While we’re discussing Iran, I couldn’t forget the main good news story of this past week, which is our military’s heroic rescue of the downed American airman whom the Iranian IRGC were trying desperately to capture.

Thanks to his badassery (despite his injuries, he climbed several thousand feet into rugged hills and hid himself in some kind of crevasse) and that of the American military and Israeli intelligence, the bad guys were held at bay while our guys located and exfiltrated him to safety.

Shot down on Good Friday and rescued on Easter — I love it when the good guys win!

Finally, there was also good news stateside last week.

You can usually identify stories that are good for the country by how little MSM coverage they get, and that proved true about Trump’s deployment of ICE agents to airports to address the long lines and delays caused by the Democrats shutting down the TSA.

Leftists whined about how terrible that was going to be, yet it proved to be a great success. ICE agents actually succeeding in greatly shortening the lines, and an ICE agent saved a choking baby in one airport. They also made a mockery out of hysterical leftist warnings about how ICE would be “kidnapping” innocent American citizens because they had brown skins, etc.

One Dem congressman actually predicted that ICE would be killing people in airports. Another one noted that these ICE agents – helpful, friendly, accepting thanks from travelers – weren’t the same kind of ICE agents who killed the protesters in MN.

Sane people might point out the subtle difference between those who have had negative encounters with ICE – i.e. illegals who were legally detained because of their crimes, and violent leftists and vehicular homicide enthusiasts who justifiably lost a game of FOFA with law enforcement – and law-abiding Americans who behaved themselves and got along just fine with ICE.

My favorite illustrative “ICE in the airports” story took place at LaGuardia, when a self-beclowning, leftist, beta-male white guy confronted three black ICE agents. (Another statistic that the MSM will not report: ICE agents are much more likely to be brown or black than the general population, just as the violent anti-ICE weasels are disproportionately white and far left. Unexpectedly!)

The male Karen had his phone out and recording as he sallied forth on what he must have believed would be an incident memorializing his brave heroism. In his best theater-kid form, he walked up to the agents and started peppering them with questions in an effort to rile them up. As they ignored him, he persisted, finally saying, “I see you are walking in a group. What’s up?”

I know. You’ll be shocked to hear that the ICE agents somehow managed to resist rising to that brilliant bit of rhetorical bait. So then Soy Boy brought out the big guns, asking,“You guys are the foot soldiers of a fascist regime, right? Is that not what it is?”

At that moment, the agents who had been trying to keep straight faces finally broke. A guy in the front smiled, but the guy behind him couldn’t help it, and covered his mouth and started to laugh as all three of them grinned at each other.

That did not please the social justice warrior, who kept demanding, “Is that funny? Do you think that’s funny?” After a few more feeble attempts, he finally gave up.

But he went straight to social media, where he failed spectacularly at trying to save face by cosplaying as a revolutionary tough guy. (And both “tough” and “guy” are doing a lot of work in that sentence.)

Here’s his post, which I promise I am not making up: “They say speak truth to power, so I did just that. Confronted a fascist to his face today at LaGuardia. His reaction? A smirk. This is what we’re up against—but we aren’t staying silent.”

Good lord! How can that possibly be the flex that he clearly thinks it is? First, I’m pretty sure that an actual fascist, when “confronted to his face,” could probably come up with a response more forceful than a smirk. (Like maybe a rifle butt in the stomach, or a bullet in the head.)

Second, when you’re trying to demonstrate the evil menace of your opponent, whatever precedes “That’s what we’re up against!” has got to be a hell of a lot more daunting than “a smirk.”

Here, I’ll give you a few examples:

“As we manned our positions far below the American planes, they dropped thermonuclear bombs that melted two cities and instantly killed hundreds of thousands of our citizens. That’s what we’re up against!”

or

“We had barely gotten into our foxholes in Bastogne when we faced a ferocious bombardment and frontal assault by the most battle-hardened and experienced armored divisions in the entire European theater. That’s what we’re up against!”

​No matter how hard he tried, the best that that poor, deluded fool could do was to get three cool brothers to laugh in his face.

Because I know my Thomas More, I already knew that, “The devil, the prowde spirite, cannot endure to be mocked.”

But until last week, I didn’t know that the same was true for ridiculous, self-aggrandizing, low-T leftist Donna Quixotes.

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While I Suffer, the MSM Continues Their Idiocy (posted 4/3/26)

This has been a disorienting month for me. My pinched nerve has gotten me out of all of my normal routines, and replaced them with new ones that I really look forward to discontinuing soon!

Thankfully, my PT has decreased the amount and persistence of pain I was experiencing in the first 2-3 weeks of March, but juggling even milder pain meds has resulted in inconsistent sleep and a lot of fuzzy head syndrome. (Or, as it’s known in medical textbooks, “Democrat Cognition Syndrome.”)

For the first time since I was probably 5 years old, I’ve gone a little over a month without reading a book! I’ve also missed pretty much all church services in the five weeks leading up to Easter, which doesn’t feel great.

On the other hand, I’ve been keeping up with some sporadic reading on current events and politics, and I’m really glad to have been able to keep writing columns here, even if at a slower pace. I’ve also had the chance to watch some old movies and new-to-me tv series. I discovered Mr. In-Between, a dark comedy/crime series set in Australia, which shares the kind of admirable/repugnant, morally compromised protagonist that made Breaking Bad and the Sopranos so compelling.

Seeing clips of the dead-on-arrival, virtue-signalling Oscars spurred me to revisit some movies from when movies were worth watching. (I know: I’ve achieved peak old guy vibes. Get off my lawn!) I watched The Searchers, starring a young John Wayne, a Monument Valley setting, and John Ford’s directing; The Man Who Shot Liberty Vally Valance (If Jimmy Stewart ever made a bad movie, I can’t remember it); and Rio Bravo, starring an older John Wayne, Dean Martin, Walter Brennan and a young Angie Dickinson. (If anybody was ever cooler than Dean Martin – dressed in black, his cowboy hat down over his eyes while he crooned away with Ricky Nelson as they waited for a shootout – I don’t know who that would be.)

But amidst all of the jarring changes I’ve experienced the last month, there has been one comfortingly consistent aspect of our national life. And that is the egregious dishonesty of our legacy media, advanced in no small part by a ubiquitous double standard.

I’ll just hit two recent examples among many: the third No Kings protest, and the coverage of our month-long, one-sided war against the violent dictatorship of the mullahs in Iran.

The No Kings street theater protests actually do follow in the American tradition of the rowdy airing of grievances against our politicians. Unfortunately, the grievances in this case do not seem to be tightly tethered to reality. (Which is the most polite way I can say that.)

For example, senator Crazy Mazie Hirono accidentally said the accurate part out loud, when she claimed that, “Donald Trump is not, never will be, and has never been a king.”

Ummmm… yes. Exactly. So what is the purpose of this expensive, tedious, time-consuming third iteration of a protest? To prevent from happening what you’ve admitted has never happened, is not happening, and will never happen?

Okay. Well done then, I guess?

Of course we didn’t need an emotionally dysregulated, low-IQ, elected garden gnome to tell us that. Because anybody who knows anything about the history of kings and fascist dictators knows that none of these protests could have ever taken place if there were actually a king or dictator in America.

If you want to test that, quickly rattle off a list of all of the people in human history who ever marched in the streets insulting their king or dictator – even if only once or twice, let alone thrice! — and suffered no consequences whatsoever.

I know. That list is as short as the “days of honest work done” on Bernie Sanders’ resume.

Also, you know how reluctant I am to raise the issue of double standards. But do you remember when Obama proclaimed a dozen times that our immigration laws would not allow him to just declare that illegals now have legal status, because that would be unconstitutional, and that he’s not a king? And then…one month lay-tair… when he declared that all the DACA kids are now legally in the country?

Or remember when Joe Biden dictated that he could use OSHA to force millions of Americans to take an experimental vaccine, and that he could declare that American citizens with no school loans could be forced to pay back billions in school loans taken out by students, who would no longer need to pay them back themselves?

In fact, remember when Biden declared that the Equal Rights Amendment – which had been rejected decades before – was now the 28th Amendment to the constitution, because he said so?

Obama and Biden both behaved much more like kings than Trump ever has, and the Left cheered them on. But now that Trump is trying to use much more modest Executive Orders to do what the voters elected him to do, it’s time to break out the frog costumes and ugly papier mache heads, and rail against imaginary monarchs.

Speaking of ugly heads, many hypocrites on both sides of the aisle have raised theirs to criticize every aspect of the Iran war, out of motivations ranging from reasonable to flimsy to hysterical.

For the record, I think there are aspects of our actions in Iran that are worthy of questioning and criticism. But those are being swallowed up and dwarfed by the number of specious bleatings on the subject.

We opened the war with a strategic master stroke, killing around 40 of the top power players in Iranian politics on a Saturday. The first leftist complaint I saw claiming that Iran had turned into a “forever war” appeared on the following Monday. Because if this war could drag on for 72 long hours, who knows how many decades it might last!

A few days later, the IDF took out the Iranian second string as they gathered to elect the next ayatollah.

From those first few days, many on the left were joined by a handful of sad sacks on the right (I’m looking at you, Tucker and Candace!) in a doom scrolling cacaphony of epic proportions. Despite Trump’s insistence that this would be a very short action – and his track record of just that kind of strike – critics started extrapolating the worst-case scenario of a near-eternal quagmire.

“What if Iran rebuilds its nuclear weapons program during the next 172 months of constant warfare?” “How many millions of American soldiers will die after we put 8 million boots on the ground for the rest of the Trump presidency?” “What about $10 a gallon gas? Won’t somebody think of the $10 gallons of gas?!!”

By the way, and speaking of double standards, check out this head-to-head comparison of headlines when gas under Biden finally got down to $4 per gallon, vs. when it just reached $4 under Trump, as presented on the site Twitchy:

CBS headline yesterday: “With gasoline topping $4 a gallon, it now costs almost $145 to fill up a Ford F-150 pickup truck.” A user pointed out that even this factual stat was deployed to put the worst possible spin on it, by using (but not mentioning) that the F-150 in question was the extended range version, which has the biggest gas tank, and that the fill-up cost would depend on that F-150 being absolutely bone-dry beforehand.

Meanwhile, a CBS story from July of 2022 was headlined thusly: “Gas prices could soon drop to $4 a gallon, Biden energy adviser says. After hitting a record high in June, prices at the pump have fallen for more than 30 straight days.”

Got that? The article hides the fact that gas is still MORE than $4 per gallon, and it doesn’t even predict that gas WILL drop in the future to $4, saying only that gas “could” drop to that level. (Yes. And Joe Biden COULD step agilely over a sand bag on stage. But the smart money is on him tripping over it, falling, and snapping one of his fragile, bird-like leg bones.) And did you notice the source for this weak prediction? Not an unbiased expert or analyst, but a “Biden energy advisor.”

Obviously, the latter article is intended to give Biden political cover for the increased gas prices caused by his policies, while the former article is intended to do maximum damage to Trump.

Consider these more accurate phrasings of the two headlines:

“Biden employee claims that Biden-caused high gas prices might drop to $4 a gallon at some undetermined point in the future.” vs

“Analysis finds that gas prices have temporarily risen to Biden-era levels, predicts they will drop again when the Iran conflict ends, possibly later this month.”

But my favorite bit of laughably biased “journalism” comes from the Bulwark this week. (You may remember those TDS sufferers from early election night, when they were crowing that Que Mala would defeat the Orange, Hitler-esque convicted felon in a landslide. Or from several hours later, when they wept openly and blamed sexism and racism and American stupidity for the thrashing of the Cackler.)

(Cue the sad trombone, and distribute the word salad of defeat, garnished with the sour vinaigrette d’ regret.)

This article, which I swear I am not making up, was written by Jonathan V. Last. (The “V” is not for “victory,” and “Last” is where he ranks on a list of insightful commentators.) The title is, “America Lost. Iran Won. Trump Shat the Bed.”

Did I mention that I did not make that up?

Here’s the opening of the article: “It is true, as the president said last night, that the Iranian navy and air force have been almost eliminated. It is also beside the point. The Islamic Republic has never been – and — never wanted to be – a naval power. They have never made extensive use of air power.”

Then why did they spend billions on all of those ships and planes, J. Last? Just to give the IDF and America a few hours of target practice?

Good lord. The double standard question writes itself:

Can you imagine if the roles had been reversed? If Iran had hit us with a first strike that killed Trump, Vance, half of our chiefs of staff and cabinet members, and our congressional leadership? And then if another strike a few days later killed the remainder of our military leadership, the cabinet, and most of congress, while also sinking most of our navy and destroying all of our air force?

And then, for the next 30 days, Iran systematically destroyed our 5000 most crucial military and infrastructure targets, and then blew up the Golden Gate Bridge as an afterthought?

Do you think that after all of that, little Johnny Last would be writing about how, “Iran Lost. America Won. The Ayatollahs Shat the Barn They Share with their Most Attractive Goats?”

Remember that, the next time Tucker or some other MSM empty head brings you latest update from Iran.

Have a good Easter!

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