It’s an ancient blogging art, and everybody knew their part, from a feint into a link and a tabbing from the click …
Jen Psaki on the 2028 Dem primary:
“There is no, thank God, dark room in Washington where people sit around and they decide here’s who the nominee is going to be.”
She just described exactly how the last Democrat presidential nominee was chosen. pic.twitter.com/5QpQagvG6t
— Western Lensman (@WesternLensman) May 7, 2026
Ed: I’ve seen bald-faced lying before, but this is on its own delusional level. This is exactly how the Democrats anointed Kamala Harris, after rigging the 2024 primary process to maintain the cover-up of Joe Biden’s dementia. Psaki is absolutely shameless. Speaking of shameless …
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Tara Palmeri at Red Letter: United States Senator. Presidential nominee. Secretary of State. Chief negotiator of the Iran Deal. Climate envoy. National Security Councilmember. As John Kerry held each of these titles at the highest levels of U.S. government and intelligence apparatuses, he also held close his association with Jeffrey Epstein that spanned three decades — and has received little scrutiny until now.
Newly reviewed Justice Department files reveal Epstein’s apparent fixation with Kerry and his eagerness to cultivate connections to the secretary of state and senior officials in his inner circle, including his then-deputy secretary of state William J. Burns. The documents show Epstein offered introductions and dangled access to both men to a rogues’ gallery of people including Donald Trump’s advisor Steve Bannon, former Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Barak, tech entrepreneurs Peter Thiel and Reid Hoffman, disgraced Norwegian diplomat Terje Rød-Larsen and tarred Emirati shipping executive Sultan Ahmed bin Sulayem.
Meanwhile, in private, he gamed out presidential shakeups and scenarios in which Kerry could re-emerge as a national political force and potential president as late as 2016. The messages read less like strategy than the musings of a man who imagined himself hovering just outside the realm of Kerry’s power.
Ed: The Epstein Light Grenade continues to function! Tara has done a lot of reporting on the Epstein files and is relatively even-handed in her approach. I hadn’t heard much about the Kerry connection, and I’ll bet we won’t hear much about it from other media outlets either.
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Quote: “Americans want to win. The only thing they like less than war and high gas prices is enduring them for nothing. But to deliver that victory, President Trump needs to show the Iranian regime that it doesn’t have the leverage it thinks it does.” https://t.co/CEGjZEYF21
— Brit Hume (@brithume) May 7, 2026
Ed: It’s more basic than this. Lunatic death cults do not care about leverage. The only way to defeat them is to destroy their access to power, whether that is military, industrial, or political power, or all three, as it has in Iran. Once you start a war like this, it has to be seen all the way through to the end. That doesn’t necessarily mean occupation, but it does mean you break every strut supporting the regime before you stop.
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Andrew C. McCarthy at NRO: President Trump’s dereliction in failing to prepare the nation for war with Iran, and his inconstancy about the war’s objectives — and even regarding whether it is, in fact, a war and whether it is, in fact, ongoing — have predictably had harmful effects. It’s past time for Congress to assert its constitutional power and authorize force, at least to reopen the Strait of Hormuz. No matter what one thinks of how we got here, Iran cannot be allowed to annex a vital global trade route whose closure is hurting Americans.
Because of the administration’s poor messaging, the real good done by American combat operations has been obscured: the significant setbacks to Iran’s nuclear weapons ambitions and ballistic missile capabilities, the virtual destruction of its navy and air defenses, and the infliction of economic distress that undermines its capacity to abet its jihadist proxies. To repeat what I’ve said before, politically speaking, a security win can look and feel like a loss if Iran appears to hold the whip hand. …
This should not be hard for the Republican majority, which wants to be seen as backing the president and being tough on Iran. Democrats should support it because it is essential to national security and economic stability. The partisan political temptation, of course, is to let Trump keep flailing away with inconsistent, incoherent justifications for an unpopular war. Yet, no matter how we got to this point, the nation cannot afford to allow Iran, [an] implacable American enemy, to control a vital international waterway as if it were sovereign Iranian territory. The domino effect would be to encourage other rogue actors to put a stranglehold on other waterways that are critical to international trade and defense.
Ed: Should they? Yes. Will they? No. In fact, I’m not certain that Trump could get a majority in either chamber for an explicit AUMF at this point. They won’t block him with a War Powers intervention, but they won’t issue an AUMF that would all but justify all sorts of military action no matter how narrowly worded it might be. Trump took this on, and he’s going to either win all the plaudits or take all the blame for what follows. And in that sense, Congress will make itself even more irrelevant, just as they did in 2011 when Barack Obama conducted the same kind of regime-change war against Moammar Qaddafi.
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Fetterman says he won’t switch parties: “I’d be a terrible Republican who still votes overwhelmingly with Democrats.”
Says “fringe” has taken over
“I remain strongly pro-choice, pro-weed, pro-LGBT, pro-SNAP, pro-labor and even pro-rib-eye over bio slop.”https://t.co/eoG16nsqqF
— Andrew Desiderio (@AndrewDesiderio) May 7, 2026
Ed: I do believe we have found common cause for unity around the rib-eye, Senator. More seriously, this is why all of the efforts to recruit Fetterman into a flip are fanciful (yes, I expect applause for my alliteration). He’s an old-school Democrat at best, and more of a progressive with a modicum of sanity and scruples. Republicans have wanted to exile Susan Collins for her voting record, and she is FAR more conservative than Fetterman. Perhaps the lesson here is this: It really is okay to like and admire Democrats with principles and moral courage, even when we disagree on policy. Really, it is! It used to be normal. You could look it up!
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Niall Ferguson at The Free Press: It is true that many wars are short. Of all of the interstate conflicts between 1816 and 2003, 23 percent lasted less than two months, and 38 percent between two and six months. But more than a quarter lasted at least a year, and 5 percent more than five years. Once a war has lasted a year, it has a surprisingly high chance of lasting more than two years. As for peace negotiations, by my calculations it took 694 days to end World War I, 749 days to end the Korean War, 1,273 to end the Vietnam War, and 1,978 to secure peace between Israel and Egypt.
I repeat: Wars take much less time to start than you think they will, and last much longer than you thought they could.
I would love to be wrong. But then AI would be wrong, too. And that would be quite a hallucination.
Ed: All of this is true. It’s also true that this war has really been going on for almost 47 years, has had a body count in the thousands for the US before Operation Epic Fury, and addresses the main threat to a very volatile region for the first time ever in a serious manner. This phase has lasted about ten weeks; if Trump’s ready to keep fighting, I’d give him a few more weeks at least to see whether we can keep this phase as a relatively short war.
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It’s exceptionally dumb because Platner is extremely inauthentic. He pretends to be a working class oyster farmer, which he isn’t, and he’s aggressively trying to whitewash his past as a smelly Reddit bro. https://t.co/hoWW2jiFYt
— Noam Blum (@neontaster) May 7, 2026
Ed: Platner is a poseur in just about every way one could pose. Also, imagine any of these people trying to justify David Duke’s status as a candidate for office by writng a profile headlined, “The Man Under the Hood,” and the stink of hypocrisy becomes particularly pungent.
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WashEx: Platner came under fire in 2025 after photos surfaced of him with a tattoo of a famous Nazi symbol, the Totenkopf. Platner said he got the tattoo in 2007 while intoxicated, claiming ignorance of its neo-Nazi associations, and has since covered it.
“The last 10 years, since Trump came down that golden escalator, where you’ve been calling him ‘a Nazi.’ Now you are literally bear-hugging one because maybe he could win a seat and give you back the majority of the Senate,” Concha said.
He called out Democrats for being hypocritical in supporting more progressive candidates like Platner.
“Everybody who has been offended by Trump and using that sort of reckless hyperbole when it comes to this president — obviously they look pretty phony right now,” Concha said.
Ed: Well, yes, but there are a lot of voices on the Left claiming that Platner got “smeared,” and that Republicans are still more awful than [checks notes] someone who adopted the symbol of the extermination-camp guards of the Nazi regime. We’ll see if Maine voters have common sense and moral clarity.
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Re. Graham Platner and his Nazi tattoo:
I knew more than a few infantrymen with tattoos.
But I didn’t know any who had a tattoo honoring Nazi concentration camp guards like Platner.
Graham Platner is a lying fraud.
— Tom Cotton (@TomCottonAR) May 7, 2026
Ed: I suspect we will hear plenty more like this from the veteran community over the next few weeks. Gutfeld! panelist Tyrus (love him) made a great point last night, too. Platner put that tattoo almost directly over his heart, and that means something.
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Free Beacon: A Texas Democratic House candidate has repeatedly used her social media to promote a raft of conspiracy theories targeting Jews—including accusations that they are part of the “synagogue of Satan.”
Maureen Galindo, a sex therapist, surprised Lone Star State political observers in March after she led the field in the Democratic primary for Texas’s 35th Congressional District, securing 29 percent of the vote and advancing to a runoff election. Despite operating on a shoestring budget, with less than $2,200 in the bank, according to Federal Election Commission records, she has been significantly outperforming expectations.
“I didn’t expect this but it’s time to talk about spiritual warfare,” she said in a video posted to her Facebook page in October 2025. “They want to push the rapture as quick as possible so that they can see this coming of Christ … This is the way that all of the Jews who own Hollywood, they use books and movies to create realities.”
Ed: Oh look, another Democrat moderate! Galindo would make a great campaigning partner for Platner. The crazies are coming out of the woodwork, even in Texas. By the way, the map for TX-35 is really something to behold. The D+19 district runs from San Antonio in the southwest to Austin and Round Rock in its northeasternmost point. That’s 120 miles long. Hopefully, Texas’ new map corrects this.
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HEALTHCARE HANDOUTS: Democratic Party gubernatorial candidate Katie Porter doubles down on state-funded coverage for illegal immigrants. When asked if she supports the policy, the former congresswoman offered a blunt, one-word response: “YES.”
MODERATOR: “Congresswoman Porter,… pic.twitter.com/XfOtgyFS46
— FOX & Friends (@foxandfriends) May 7, 2026
Ed: That is the mainstream policy for Democrats. It’s why California is going broke, too.
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NY Times: The new pope identified himself as Robert Prevost, saying that he wished to change the phone number and address that the bank had on file, Father McCarthy said. …
Then, the woman on the line for the bank told him that it wasn’t enough — he would have to come to the branch in person.
“He said, ‘Well, I’m not going to be able to do that,’” Father McCarthy said in a video clip shared on social media, recounting the new pope’s growing frustration as the audience laughed. “I gave you all the security questions.”
The bank employee apologized. The pope tried a different tack.
“Would it matter to you if I told you I’m Pope Leo?” he asked, according to Father McCarthy.
She hung up.
Ed: I love this story.
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Weird: Epstein Suicide Note Printed On Hillary Clinton’s Personal Stationery https://t.co/HZ4YEHMhrg pic.twitter.com/QBQTJhGNwd
— The Babylon Bee (@TheBabylonBee) May 7, 2026
Ed: Totally believable!
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