Monday's Final Word – HotAir
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I get my tabs above the waistline, sunshine … 





Ed: Beats “May the Fourth Be With You,” anyway. 

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WSJ: The United Arab Emirates has carried out military strikes on Iran, people familiar with the matter said, casting the Gulf monarchy as an active combatant in a war in which it has been Iran’s biggest target.

Its military is well-equipped with Western-made jet fighters and surveillance networks. And the attacks suggest the country is now more willing to use them to protect its economic power and growing influence across the Middle East.

The strikes, which the U.A.E. hasn’t publicly acknowledged, have included an attack on a refinery on Iran’s Lavan Island in the Persian Gulf, the people familiar with the matter said. That attack took place in early April around the time President Trump was announcing a cease-fire in the war after a five-week air campaign and sparked a large fire and knocked much of its capacity off line for months.

Ed: That may explain why Iran targeted Fujairah as soon as shots got exchanged last week. Let’s hope that Trump plans to return to the effective military campaign, and that the UAE continues to participate in it. 

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Ed: Why are we allowing Pakistan to act as mediators? Could this be part of the problem?

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Noah Rothman at NRO: Those who want to know what it looks like when a great power is losing a war should look to Russia.

The “symbolism” of this year’s “diminished” Victory Day parade in Moscow is “hard to overstate,” read The Economist’s coverage of Vladimir Putin’s comprehensive embarrassment this week. Indeed, the downscale event, which featured none of the heavy equipment that typically lumber through Red Square, occurred without incident because Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky (or, as Putin now refers to the head of the supposedly Nazi menace in Kyiv, “Mr. Zelensky”) pledged not to rain Ukraine’s long-range drones down on it.





Moscow’s downcast parade, The Economist added, was a metaphor for Russia’s increasingly frustrating battlefield setbacks. The Kremlin’s spring offensive inside Ukraine has already failed, the report contended. Last month, Russian forces experienced a net loss of territory they controlled inside Ukraine for the first time in nearly two years. Kyiv’s drone armada is striking ever deeper inside Russia. Moscow is now losing a staggering 35,000 soldiers per month to combat with Ukraine’s forces, contributing to the roughly 1.4 million total number of Russians killed or wounded by Ukrainian forces. Meanwhile, Ukrainian attacks on Russian energy infrastructure are putting pressure on its exports, which fell by 7 percent in April even as revenues generated from oil and gas sales climbed due to Iran war-related supply constraints.

Ed: Contrast that with the situation the US is in with Iran and the bedwetting taking place among the cognoscenti here. We need to decide whether to fish or cut bait with Iran, certainly, but we have not been checkmated or even seriously challenged in this war. We just haven’t won it yet, but that’s not because Iran is prevailing on the battlefield; it’s because we’re allowing Iran to stall us for their propaganda purposes. 

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Ed: Last week, Gen. Dan Caine said that no one should mistake our restraint for weakness. I warned at that time and several times since that Iran would see it that way, and that it wouldn’t look like a mistake, either. Time to stop playing the restraint game and finish what we started. 

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John Spencer on X/Twitter: Wars are not scored like debates on cable television. They are judged through military capability, economic endurance, political cohesion, freedom of action, strategic leverage, and the ability to sustain power while degrading an opponent’s. By those standards, Iran is substantially weaker today than it was before the war began. The United States and Israel still hold the upper hand because the foundations of Iranian power have been systematically reduced in ways that will take years to rebuild, if they can be rebuilt at all.





The scale of military destruction alone is extraordinary. Much of the senior leadership structure that spent decades constructing Iran’s regional military network is dead. Senior IRGC commanders, missile force leaders, intelligence officials, nuclear scientists, operational planners, and even the Supreme Leader himself have been eliminated. Mohammad Bagheri, Hossein Salami, and other senior figures who represented the institutional backbone of Iran’s military strategy are gone. Entire command relationships were shattered during the opening phases of the war, leaving surviving leaders scrambling to maintain continuity while under constant pressure.

The damage extends far beyond personnel losses. Nuclear facilities that represented decades of investment and strategic ambition now sit buried under rubble after sustained strikes on enrichment sites, underground complexes, centrifuge production facilities, research centers, and supporting infrastructure. Analysts continue to speak as though Iran can simply restart enrichment at industrial scale in a matter of months. That misunderstands what was destroyed. Advanced centrifuge production depends on precision manufacturing, specialized tooling, secure facilities, trained personnel, supply chains, and protected infrastructure. Large portions of that ecosystem no longer exist.

Ed: Be sure to read this article in its entirety. Spencer is the Executive Director of the Urban Warfare Institute, and a well-known military analyst. This is a refreshing splash of reality in the face of enormously self-important defeatism from the mainstream media. 

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“Every single Democrat has said we can’t EVER let Iran build a bomb… When Kamala Harris was running for president, she identified that as the top concern for her internationally.” 

“I absolutely support [the war in Iran].”

*Crowd Claps*





Ed: Well said. 

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Punchbowl: Jeffries spoke separately over the weekend with Virginia Democratic Gov. Abigail Spanberger and Democrats in the Virginia congressional delegation about possible responses to the state Supreme Court decision, though nothing practical emerged from those conversations. Virginia Democrats say their best bet is to pour money and resources into winning at least two of the four districts they wanted to redistrict.

The Callais decision hit the Congressional Black Caucus hardest. This is the heart of Jeffries’ base among House Democrats. The CBC, the most powerful caucus in Congress, will now see its ranks thin over the next few years. Add that to generational conflicts inside the CBC — over seniority and other issues — and we may see a major shift in the caucus’s influence and makeup.

House Democrats are different from their GOP counterparts. Several rank-and-file Democrats have wondered whether Jeffries’ push in Virginia was ill-advised. But they won’t say it publicly — Republicans would relish publicly embarrassing their leaders. So we’ll see how Jeffries and other top House Democrats respond this week.

Ed: Jeffries has had a disastrous fortnight, even if he refuses to recognize it. The Virginia debacle was predictable, so much so that most observers HAD predicted it. Yet Jeffries did an end-zone dance and baited Ron DeSantis into a redistricting fight that Democrats had no chance of winning. Some of this damage was unavoidable, but everyone knew Callais was on the docket when this began. It might have been a lot easier to just come up with an agenda that attracts voters. 

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1. It contends that the state supreme court’s interpretation of the Virginia constitution is “predicated … on a grave misreading of federal law.” But the court merely cited a Supreme Court case as informative on, and supportive of, the general meaning of “election.” This comes nowhere close to meeting the high bar of showing that the court ruled on a federal question.

2. Invoking the narrow exception left open in Moore v. Harper (2023), it contends that the court’s ruling so “transgressed the ordinary bounds of judicial review such that it arrogated to itself the power vested in the state legislature to regulate federal elections.” But no justice is going to find the court’s ruling manifestly bonkers.

Look for this stay application to be denied without any dissent.

Ed: I suspect Ketanji Brown Jackson won’t be able to resist a written dissent when the court denies the appeal. As Ed points out later, the application itself inexplicably claims to be an “Emergency Application to the Supreme Court of Virginia,” rather than SCOTUS. Maybe the court will kick it back to AG Jay Jones, who seems uniquely incompetent in the drafting of motions. Also …

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Ed: That’s the same issue that tripped up their Super Brilliant ACME Plan to force all seven judges of SCOVA into retirement. It’s too late to proceed with this map in 2026. 

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“There’s a better chance of me sprouting wings and flying out of that window over there than the United States Supreme Court dealing with this in any way, because this is a state Supreme Court ruling on a state constitution. The U.S. Supreme Court doesn’t deal with these kinds of things, number one. Number two, the freakout in Virginia has been so extreme. You even have Democrats over there who are saying they want to effectively, politically decapitate the entire Virginia Supreme Court by putting an age limit of 54 so they can get rid of every existing justice and install people who will promise to rule a certain way on a certain case. You know, they went from, oh, this is just a temporary map thing to let’s burn down the entire Virginia Supreme Court in about two seconds over there in Virginia, which tells you all you need to know about just how power hungry and corrupt the Democrats are in Virginia. This is not going to work at the U.S. Supreme Court. And this whole project of maximum warfare by Hakeem Jeffries is completely blown up in their face.”

“I mean, in Virginia, you had Democrats in Virginia who broke the law and broke the state constitution to try to move a 6-5, fairly constructed map to a 10-1. They got struck down by Democrats on their own Supreme Court, and now they want to decapitate an entire branch of government over it? It’s ridiculous.”





Ed: The reason why Louisiana had to postpone (not “cancel”) their primary is that their map was ruled unconstitutional. The state legislature has to create a new map, or vote to revert to the previous map, before it can hold a primary where voters can know in which congressional district they live. This is not a difficult concept except among CNN panelists not named Jennings or Singleton. 

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Ed: I don’t believe that will change Wecht’s approach to jurisprudence on the court. However, it’s a big indicator of just how much Democrats have mainstreamed anti-Semites in their party, with the Michigan Senate primary one of the biggest exhibits in evidence. 

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