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Wednesday’s Final Word – HotAir

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April 8, 2026
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So many tabbies have come and gone, their pages fade as the years go by …





Ed: Gee, I wonder to whom Hegseth referred here?

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Ed: I’m very sure Hegseth had Starmer in mind with that remark. But I’m equally sure that the remark wasn’t limited to Starmer, either. It also reminds me of an old Lone Ranger joke. IYKYK. 

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Pew Research Center: Around four-in-ten Republicans and GOP-leaning independents (38%) say the U.S. benefits a great deal or a fair amount from being part of NATO – down from 49% last year. A majority of Republicans (60%) now say the U.S. benefits not too much or not at all from being part of the alliance, up from 50% in 2025. This marks the first time in our surveys that a majority of Republicans have expressed this view. …

Overall, a majority of Americans (59%) continue to say the U.S. benefits from being a member of NATO. That’s especially the case among Democrats and Democratic-leaning independents, 82% of whom see benefits for the U.S. Democratic opinion on this question has stayed relatively stable over the past five years.

Democrats’ views about NATO membership do not differ by age, but there are age divisions among Republicans. Younger Republicans – those ages 18 to 49 – are more likely than those 50 or older to say the U.S. benefits from being part of the alliance (42% vs. 33%).

Ed: Pew sort of overlooks the fact that support for NATO has dropped among independents overall since last year, too. The 2025 survey showed 66% of independents felt NATO membership benefits the US, but it’s down to 59% this year, almost as much of a drop as among Republicans. I still support NATO, but I also take Hegseth’s point that it’s mainly a group of social-program dilettantes riding off of American power. And I think this episode with Iran has exposed that reality to more people, which means next year’s survey may be even more interesting. 

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Ed: The question came from ABC News reporter Louis Martinez. Here it was in its entirety:

Q: Mr. Secretary, Louis Martinez with ABC News. First, a question for General Caine, sir. In your personal opinion, were the risks of the Strait of Hormuz being closed because of the conflict, were they mitigated early enough in part of the decision-making process that led up to the decision to take action against Iran?

And in your opinion, is Iran in control of the Strait of Hormuz? We just heard the Secretary say that Iran is letting them — ships through, which would imply that potentially it’s not just — the Secretary also said that the US — that the strait is open. You did say that, sir. But in your opinion, sir, how can the US ensure safe passage?

And Mr. Secretary, um, can you say today that the United States achieved — the administration achieved the military goals that you were — you’ve constantly delineated? But strategically, is that a victory because of that? And also, you said earlier that the president chose mercy, but you, yourself had said three weeks ago that we will give no quarter — no quarter to Iranian troops. How do you — how do you correlate those two? And do you think that your comments may have put American troops at risk?

Ed (again): I’m not sure that the question was an “indictment” as much as it was incoherent. It looks like at least seven questions consmashulated into one. Maybe reporters should pick one question at a time. 

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Ed: Hmmmm. Maybe CNN really is preparing for its Bari Weiss Era. It’s at least a good start, in that it tells the truth about a radical Hamasnik that Democrats for some reason have embraced. And I’m not exaggerating about that, either …





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Free Beacon: The left-wing Democratic candidate for Michigan’s open Senate seat, Abdul El-Sayed, defended his decision to campaign with Hasan Piker, who said “America deserved 9/11.” El-Sayed argued in a televised interview that the influencer’s comments need to be viewed in “context.”

El-Sayed used his Tuesday morning Fox News interview to accuse critics of Piker—who has also defended Hamas’s Oct. 7, 2023, attacks—of attacking both individuals unfairly. The Senate candidate is scheduled to appear with Piker at two campaign events later in the day.

“It’s important to talk about context,” he told Fox & Friends host Lawrence Jones. “I’m never going to agree that 9/11 was justified. It was wrong. It was a horrible day for all of us. I’m never going to be okay with the innocent murder of civilians. I condemned Hamas and I condemned that attack on day one. The issue that you’re trying to do is paint me with out-of-context quotes taken out of context specifically to ask me these questions.”

Ed: Be sure to read it all, but ask yourself this question: why are Democrats defending Piker at all? What does he bring to the table, except for the rabid Jew-haters among progressives? That answer alone reveals a lot about the Left, and why Democrats AND media outlets have embraced Piker for as long as they have. They did the same with Louis Farrakhan, and still do. 

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Ed: Yeah, I’ve noticed that too, and so has David Strom. 

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Eli Lake in the Free Press: All of that said, Trump’s threat just may have worked. His high-stakes brinkmanship—an update to Richard Nixon’s strategy to persuade the Soviet Union and China that he was a madman—forced the Iranians to blink.

To be sure, Iran’s rulers are presenting their capitulation as a victory. The AP reported that Oman and Iran would begin collecting fees from ships passing through the Strait. As of this writing, Iran was still firing missiles at Israel and its neighbors.





And yet, if this is the deal, Iran didn’t get much. Trump did not accept the terms of their vaunted 10-point proposal, which would have enacted a permanent peace deal, lifted international sanctions, and ended Israel’s war against Hezbollah, Iran’s proxy. Trump merely agreed that the Iranian proposal, along with a 15-point U.S. plan, would be the basis for future negotiations. In other words, Iran is opening the Strait for two weeks in exchange for a maybe.

But it’s worse than that for the Islamic Republic. In five weeks of war, the regime has lost its navy, most of its missile launchers, and a good chunk of its defense industrial base along with the top tier of its political and military leadership. Add to this the damage already done to its nuclear program in last June’s 12-day war. There are more than 900 pounds of uranium buried under the rubble of what used to be underground enrichment facilities. A year ago, Iran was on the brink of obtaining a nuclear weapon and the ballistic missiles to deliver it as far as Europe. Today, the regime’s military has been reduced to a shell of itself.

Ed: This is so obvious – and predictable – that those who fail to grasp it almost have to be deliberate in their obtuseness. The Madman Theory has been around longer than the mullahs in Tehran, and yet everyone took Trump literally and even extended the lunacy theory to nuclear attack, which Trump NEVER threatened. Other than alleging that attacks on energy infrastructure would be a war crime, which is absolutely not true, Eli hits the nail on the head. 

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We Catholics cannot ignore this. If Leo is so compelled to meddle in secular affairs, he must be held accountable for condemning mere words but not the actual slaughter of innocents. 





There is no Biblical reason for this one-sided meddling.

Ed: Catholics developed the Just War Doctrine for this situation. Pope Francis eschewed that in his pontificate, on the grounds that war is unjustifiable under any circumstances, but Thomas Aquinas knew better. We saw some of the same one-sided approach from the Vatican in the wake of the October 7 massacres, too. 

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Zvika Klein at the Jerusalem Post: The historical parallel that fits is not Iraq 2003. It is the Cold War. President Ronald Reagan did not tear down the Berlin Wall. He made it impossible to maintain. Decades of pressure made the Soviet system unsustainable, and the people of Eastern Europe did the rest.

Trump and Netanyahu have applied the same logic to the Islamic Republic: break the regime’s instruments of power, and leave the question of Iran’s future where it belongs, with Iranians. President George W. Bush tried the other approach, building democracy from the sky, and got a generation of chaos.

The question is whether the patient will survive the surgery this time. The January protests were the largest since 1979. The regime massacred thousands to suppress them. But the Islamic Republic also survived the Iran-Iraq war, the Green Movement, and the Mahsa Amini uprising.

What makes this different is scale. None of those earlier crises combined the loss of a supreme leader, the collapse of every proxy network, economic strangulation, and a dynastic succession (Mojtaba Khamenei inheriting his father’s title) that mocks the revolution’s founding mythology. Previous shocks hit one pillar. This hit all of them simultaneously.

Ed: We need to get the people to seize power, and not be shy about backing them with drone strikes on Basij snipers and checkpoints. We should do exactly that if the Iranians keep violating the cease-fire agreement. 

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“I think a lot of people, this is particularly true in the United States of America, if they see something that the administration does, they don’t like, they say, ‘oh, that’s not what we voted for. We’re gonna check out of politics.'”

“That’s the exact wrong response. If we do something you don’t like, the response should be to get more involved, to make your voice heard, and to try to push things in the direction that you want them to be pushed. Our civilization was not built overnight.”

Ed: There’s more at the link if you want the transcript. This is the right message for the midterms. Let’s hope that both Vance and Trump take that message on the road this summer. 

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Noah Rothman at NRO: Within minutes of Donald Trump’s announcement that Iran and the U.S. had agreed to a temporary pause in hostilities, Brent crude futures fell by 16 percent, with prices dropping to $93 per barrel. West Texas Intermediate Crude futures dropped by 19 percent, driving the price down to $92 per barrel.

This does not signal a return to the pre-war status quo — commodities prices remain far higher than they were on February 27. But neither is it a reflection of the generational disaster that would cripple the global economy for the foreseeable future. And there are certain to be more wild fluctuations in the near term as observers grapple with what this cease-fire entails, or even if it persists at all.

The rapid movement of international markets has been indicative of the volatility that accompanies what is, in fact, a guessing game about the conditions that will prevail in a month, six months, or a year from today. But the signal the markets have sent throughout this conflict is consistent. When Trump says he’s wrapping up the war, prices go down. When the fighting continues and looks set to continue for some time, they go up. In sum, the markets were less of a reflection of what traders thought Iran could do or was doing. Instead, markets moved based on what America and Israel could or would do.

Ed: If we let Iran continue to threaten Hormuz shipping, it will shift to “what Iran will do” quickly enough. Trump needs to put an end to that with as much destructive energy as required. 





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Ed: This may be both the dumbest and pettiest outrage on television. It’s idiotic even for M-SNOW. It’s the kind of word policing that elicits eye rolls in Normie America, but gets golf claps at best among the progressive-elite cognoscenti. 

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Ed: Elias will need a lot of aloe vera to cover that burn. 

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