Tag Archives: politics

Shrinking America: the population will soon decline by 50%

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Mothers and fathers die. For the population to remain constant, the two of them need to produce about 2.1 children on average in order to replace themselves. (The extra 0.1 is necessary to offset the deaths of children who never reach reproductive age.) This figure is called the “fertility rate.”

Recent data shows that the fertility rate in the United States is nowhere near that 2.1 figure. It has instead dropped to an all-time low of about 1.6. American woman on average give birth to only 1.6 children.

This raises a question: How fast will our population decline due to our low fertility rate of 1.6 compared to the replacement rate of 2.1?

The answer is, pretty fast. At our current fertility rate of 1.6, the U.S. population will decline by 50% in 77 years.

Granted, that calculation doesn’t account for immigration into the country. But are we willing to accept an enormous number of immigrants – something like 200,000,000 – over the course of three-quarters of a century?

That would constitute the biggest immigration wave in the history of the world. It would be much bigger, on both an absolute basis and percentage basis, than the massive waves of the Irish to America in the 1800s, Italians in the 1900s, and even Latinos in the 2000s. Immigration on that scale is inconsistent with the current political sentiment and, arguably, inconsistent with maintaining our American culture.

If it makes you feel better, know that the fertility rate in most of Europe is even lower. In Italy, it’s about 1.2. At that fertility rate, the population of Italy will decline by about 75% while the population of America declines by “only” 50% over those 77 years.

Extend that out further. At a fertility rate of 1.2 over 800 years, the population of Italy will decline to approximately 20 people. At least there won’t be any complaints about a housing shortage.

(BTW, consider the fact that this ridiculously low fertility rate in Italy is in a country that is nearly universally Catholic, and that the Catholic Church prohibits abortion and contraception. Along with art and food, the rhythm method has apparently been perfected in Italy.)

Back to America. The bottom line is America is apt to shrink. I see some good and some bad in that.

First the good. As a matter of personal aesthetics, I think we have enough people here already. The roads seem sufficiently crowded. Even hiking in the remote mountains of Colorado, it’s rare that I wish there were more people on the trail.

It’s true that our cities are hollowed out, but that’s due to crime, corruption and mismanagement, not a lack of people.

Now the bad. Our economy, like most modern economies, hinges on growth. Imagine an economy where the gross domestic product is flat forever. Imagine an economy where the stock market doesn’t go up and everyone’s 401K stagnates.

Worst of all, imagine an economy where the number of young workers paying Social Security taxes drops dramatically due to low birth rates while the number of retirees collecting benefits rises dramatically due to longer life spans.

This touches on a basic issue. Our Social Security system is a big pyramid scheme. Old people like me tell ourselves that we’re simply collecting the money we paid in over a lifetime of work, but, in point of fact, the average retiree collects far more than he paid in. That’s possible only because the number of payors continues to grow faster than the number of payees.

At our current fertility rate, expect a collapse sometime in the next few decades. We’ll lack the workers to fill the bottom of the pyramid.

Finally, there are some aspects of our de-population explosion that are philosophical, metaphysical and even religious.

God told the Abrahamic religions to “be fruitful and multiply.” We obeyed. Did we ever.

This advice to “be fruitful and multiply” was given twice. The first time was at Creation when the human population was two people. The second time was after the Flood when the population was eight people.

We haven’t heard that advice for a long time. During that long time, we’ve multiplied and fruitified to a population of eight billion people. If the advice is still applicable, then when will it expire? When we’re eight trillion? Eight quadrillion? Do we just keep multiplying and fruitifying until there’s no place to stand?

In the philosophical realm, there’s this. We seem to be the only form of life in the universe that is capable of asking questions like “How many of us are enough?” And, from the evidence found so far, we inhabit the only home of all life. As a philosophical, moral and ethical matter, what is our obligation to propagate? To what extent? How many? Where?

These questions are not easy, but it’s worth talking about them. We might be the only creatures anywhere at any time to have that talk.

Note to readers: In case you’re wondering, I fathered at least two children, and one of them gave birth to my grandchild a few months ago. Two of the three pay Social Security taxes.

The market is irrationally exuberant today

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Everyone loves a party. Especially when the party makes you money. Forget that the money you’re making now is the same money you lost last month. It’s still fun.

And so, the stock market is having fun today.

And why not? America and Iran are not exactly kissin’ cousins now, but at least nobody’s civilization will end. Not today, anyway.

The stocks of the boomers are booming, oil is crashing, monster pickup sales to monster drivers will certainly become monstrous again, the Pope (who is “God’s representative on Earth,” a reader informs me) will take credit for a few days, and we’ll probably get a docu-fiction war movie courtesy of War Secretary Hegseth, starring War Secretary Hegseth.

Still, I’m skeptical. I’m not selling into this market uptick, mind you, just as I was not buying into the preceding market dip. Er, market correction. Er, market crash.

You see, I’m a buy-and-hold sort of guy. I don’t pretend to know more about market values than, say, Goldman Sachs and their mega-massive-computing computers and their MBAs who learned at Harvard how to extract insider information from public company Chief Financial Officers. (I won’t give away their secrets, but have you heard the name Jeffrey Epstein?)

So long as you don’t bet against Goldman Sachs, a diverse stock portfolio has proven to be a good investment over a period of decades, and it will probably continue to be, and so that’s where I keep most of my meager money.

I’m just sayin’, as they say, that the people who try to time the stock market are probably getting this one wrong in their buying spree this morning.

Because this cease fire is flawed seven ways to Sunday. To name a few:

Even now after the cease fire has been announced, it still has not taken effect. Iran is still lobbing missiles and drones at its neighbors. I always thought the sine qua non of a cease fire was that everyone ceases firing, but I’m old school.

If Iran finally observes the cease fire by ceasing its firing, rest assured that it will then violate the cease fire by ceasing its cease fire.

It’s who they are: Missile and drone lobbers. That, and terror financiers.

We are told that the big condition to the cease fire is the re-opening of the Strait of Hormuz – that waterway that Iran has closed to the great angst of civilized people everywhere, and also those monsters in the monster pickups.

So how exactly is that supposed to happen? Who will police it? What happens when a rogue or not-so-rogue Revolutionary Guard lobs an ad hoc drone on a frolic of his own?

Um, details to follow. Uh huh.

This war is not over. But the cease fire is – before it even started.

Do Blue states produce stupidity, or does stupidity produce Blue states?

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Blue states have more problems than Red states. On average, the people in Blue states are less law-abiding and less law educated.

The dysfunctional big cities are mostly in Blue states – Chicago, L.A., New York, Baltimore, Seattle, Portland, Detroit, East St Louis, Minneapolis, and – I’ll admit it – my own former city, Denver.

Blue states have the worse budget woes. California, Illinois, Washington, New York and now Colorado are facing severe shortfalls. Their remedy is of course to raise taxes, not to cut spending. You see, the official color of Blue-sters is green.

In Colorado, there’s the TABOR Amendment to the state constitution which requires voter approval for these tax shakedowns. Naturally, the Democrat politicians are scheming to dodge the Amendment, even though the people of the state have already foiled them in their dodges three separate times. Ah, but this time the Democrats have 100% Democrat appointees on the Colorado Supreme Court.

That’s right, even the Blue-ish people of Blue Colorado (isn’t it a cruel irony that “Colorado” means “color red”?) refuse to allow their elected Blue-sters to raise taxes beyond the rate of inflation. But the Blue-ster politicians may still find a way to do it.

In all Blue states, there’s a psychological denial of the fact that if you raise taxes too much, people will move away. In California, they’re proposing a “one-time” 5% tax on the wealth of billionaires, as assessed by government assessors (how convenient that they do the assessing).

Apart from the fact that this tax is almost certainly unconstitutional, and vague to the point of being unenforceable, it ignores the fact that billionaires are typically smart enough to dodge it by . . . [wait for it] . . . moving out.

Duh.

One might think that even a Democrat state legislator in California would know that typical billionaires are smart enough to figure that out. But no, Democrat state legislators in California are not smart enough to figure out that the billionaires will figure that out.

We’re talking world class stupidity here.

This Blue state stupidity has gotten too obvious to ignore. The country used to mock the people of Mississippi. But recent data shows that Mississippi students are now doing better on standardized tests than California students.

People used to mock the kissin’ cousins of Appalachia. But we now have a deep Red Vice President who went to Yale Law School after growing up poor and barefoot in deep Red Appalachia, while the new mayor of deep Blue New York is an unredeemed Marxist with nary a clue about how to balance a budget, manage people, avoid Jew-baiting, or tie his shoes. And he was voted into office by a million deep Blue voters who don’t know Karl Marx from Groucho, and don’t care that they don’t.

So, I have a question along the lines of, “What came first, the chicken or the egg?”

In Blue states, did the stupidity of the people make the states Blue? Or did the Blue states make the people there stupid?

I think it’s mostly the latter. The people who flocked to California a generation or two ago weren’t stupid.  Heck, they launched Hollywood, they invented Silicon Valley, they made surfing cool (and that’s no easy feat). Fifty years ago, I wished everybody could be California girls.

But after the people got there, something weird happened. Maybe it was in the water or the drugs or the collective fashion-consciousness.

Whatever it was, it became cool to be leftish, to be druggy, to be counter to whatever is the culture. The more extreme, the more cool – all the way up to, and stopping just short of, Charles Manson.  

Yep, there was general agreement even in California that Manson was a step beyond cool. You could say that, in California, Charles Manson was literally too cool.

Of course, in the rest of the world, Manson was a murderous psychopath. California probably would not say that; too judgmental.

Once this mass hysteria took root in California, it spread like crabgrass. Fashion is like that. Hula hoops, bell bottoms, long hair and moustaches, streaking, gender mutilation, electric vehicles, dumbing down the school curriculum, you name it.

One day you’ve never heard of it, the next day you can’t live without it, and the following day you wouldn’t be caught dead in it.

And so, Leftism was the fashion of the day. Except it lasted for a generation. A generation lost in space.

In that time, they really messed things up. They tried to abolish merit, and almost succeeded, substituting a hodge-podge of skin color, sex habits, and political leanings. They ridiculed 2,000-year-old religions, and hated 3,000-year-old ones. They canceled and sought to outlaw anyone who disagreed with that agenda.

The fashion-conscious people went along with it for a long time. To be on the wrong side of fashion in a fashion-conscious world (and all worlds are) is to be without a friend. Better blue than uncool.

In short, my conclusion is that the Blue states produced stupidity, not the other way around.

But finally – or maybe this is not final – the tide turned, the fashion changed, the chickens came home to roost, the Kool-Aid ran out, and the people awakened from their wokeness.

They’re discovering, one hopes, that they aren’t actually stupid, but were just mistaken. We will see what comes next.

This isn’t Suez in 1956 and it isn’t Vietnam in 1966; it’s Iran and it’s 2026

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This war with Iran is one that had to be fought, and so we were right to fight it on our terms at a time before it became harder to win. The way Iran has lashed out at civilians everywhere, including with indiscriminate killing machines it denied having, has confirmed that.

But I recognize that there are arguments and counterarguments. Some of those are just the lame “Orange Man Bad!” or “Orange Man Good!” type, but others are more principled.

Here are two arguments – one against the war and one for it – that sound principled, even scholarly, but at the core are just sophistry.

First is the one that is against the war. It says, “Another Vietnam catastrophe!” (Yes, the argument is typically presented replete with the exclamation point, which should give you a clue that you’re about to receive more heat than light.)

But Vietnam was not really a catastrophe. It was indeed poorly conducted, but it achieved for a time its main objective: to stop the Communist advance through Southeast Asia.

The Communists eventually did get South Vietnam (and ironically have turned it into a haven of export enterprise) but we delayed that by at least 15 years.

And the Communists never did get Indonesia, Malaysia, or the Philippines, to say nothing of Australia and New Zealand. Was that worth 50-some thousand Americans? History’s jury is still out.

The point here is that Vietnam was not the debacle that kids today are taught in “schools” where they are indoctrinated by the teachers’ union arm of the Democratic National Committee – an organization sworn to pacifism except when their opponent is America.

When comparing Iran to Vietnam, here’s the bigger point. Vietnam was 60 years ago. Vietnam was literally much closer in time to World War One in the year 1918 (that’s One, not Two) than to today in the year 2026.

It should not need to be said that weapons, battlefield tactics, global economies and world alliances are vastly different now compared to 60 years ago.

We saw that in the first hours of the Iran war when the U.S. and Israel eliminated the Iranian leader and many of his subordinates. That’s the first time that’s ever happened in a modern war.

On the other side, we see the Iranians responding with inexpensive but sometimes effective missile and drone attacks throughout the Middle East, and a dramatic show of their capability of launching a missile as far as London or Berlin. (The accuracy of those missiles, and how long before their stock is depleted, are separate questions.) We also see them blocking the flow of 20% of the world’s oil supply.

In short, this is not Vietnam. This is not your dad’s war.

On the other side, supporters of the war sometimes compare it to the Suez Crisis in 1956. That’s when Egypt nationalized the Suez Canal, ousting the U.K. and French interests that had controlled it. The U.K. and France tried to reclaim it, but backed down in the face of international pressure. The U.S. through President Dwight Eisenhower sided against the U.K. and France.  

Since then, the U.K. and France have never held much sway in the Middle East. According to supporters of the Iran war, the lesson to be learned is “never back down in the Middle East.” Or “Damn the torpedoes, full speed ahead!”

But this “lesson” forgets the broader context. The U.K. and France don’t hold much sway anywhere, not just in the Middle East. Their economies and militaries were never completely rebuilt after being ravaged in WWII.

Even more ravaged were their national psyches. The cultural collapse we’re seeing today in the U.K. and France was not triggered by Suez. Rather, Suez was triggered by their already-emerging cultural collapse.

An equally valid – or invalid – lesson might be learned from the Camp David Accords in 1979 when Jimmy Carter in probably the best feat of his Presidency (I know that’s not saying much) moderated a lasting peace between Egypt and Israel. In that peace deal, both sides compromised – both sides backed down.

Of course, the Camp David Accords don’t teach us much about the Iran war, either.

The most that can be gleaned from the events of history is usually allegorical. Platitudes about history are of little use in another time under different circumstances. They are no substitute for hard analysis. In analyzing Iran, they’re about as useful as Aesop Fables.

The crux of the hard, real analysis on Iran is the point I made at the outset. Whether Donald Trump is a genius or a fool, war was inevitable. We were smart – it was the product of hard analysis – to choose the time and circumstances.

So, when should the war end? Again, it will take more than history to answer that question. Again, it will take hard analysis – of the costs, benefits, risks and rewards. Let’s have the patience and courage to undertake that analysis. Damn the Midterms.

Now that democracy has failed in America, let’s try it in Iran and Cuba!

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Half a century ago, American children were taught in elementary school that “representative democracy” was the highest form of government.

Part of me wondered even then, why should everyone get an equal say in things? That wasn’t how it worked in my elementary school, I observed, even as they taught that creed. The students and the janitor didn’t get the same say as the principal and the teachers.

Some people are smarter, more diligent, better educated, work harder, and pay more taxes. Shouldn’t they get more of a say in how those taxes are spent than people who are not smart, not diligent, don’t work, aren’t educated, and don’t pay taxes?

The only plausible answer to that question as to why everyone should get an equal say, is that everyone should feel like a stakeholder in the nation.

That’s a nice sentiment, but there are several problems with it. First, allowing – nay, begging – stupid lazy people to vote is a high price to pay to make them feel like stakeholders. Second, it doesn’t work. They still don’t feel like stakeholders.

Third, if you want people who don’t pay taxes to feel like stakeholders in the nation, maybe a good first step would be to ask them to pay some of the nation’s taxes.

As it stands today, the bottom 40% of earners pay about one percent of federal income taxes. Is it any wonder that those so-called taxpayers always want to increase taxes? It’s because they themselves never pay them.

The Founders recognized this fallacy with the democratic republic they created. They recognized that at some point the lazy stupid masses might come to realize that they could vote for a “redistribution” of the wealth of the smart hardworking producers. That’s undoubtedly the reason that the Constitution originally did not allow for income taxes; it took the 16th Amendment. (Nearly all amendments after the first ten were mistakes, BTW.)

In another genius of socialist branding, the stupid lazy masses have dubbed this legalized theft “fairness.”

But let’s leave the tax tangent and get back to the broader failure of American democracy.

What we have now is mob rule. Everyone has a microphone in the form of the internet, including me. With that microphone, they can get “clicks” on what they post. Those clicks are more or less exchangeable for cash.

Human nature being what it is, many people are owned by their desire for cash, and thus many internet posters are owned by their desire for clicks. They post stuff that is designed to generate clicks and cash.

That’s why we now have horrible creatures out there like Tucker Carlson and Candace Owens who are willing to generate clicks/cash with blood libels of the Jews.

Barely better are the people behind “Instapundit” who post misleading headlines appealing to notions in my tribe such as all Democrats are transexuals who want to conduct “gender affirmation” surgery on children in schools while burning the flag in Satanic rituals in the playground. (I’m sure the leftist websites have similarly weird headlines about Republicans, but I don’t see them because I don’t go to those websites.)

It’s political porn; it panders to the worst instincts of political junkies; it’s addictive; and it’s destructive to them, us, and our society.

And it works – for the perpetrators anyway. Ask Tucker.

(I have a friend who says he habitually clicks into Instapundit, but only to get the links. Uh huh. And I’m sure he got Playboy just for the articles.)

Speaker of obscenity, there’s the legislative branch. That’s the branch of government where a majority of the people elected to do the voting are supposed to enact and repeal laws.

Except it takes more than a majority to do both enacting and repealing. The Senate filibuster rule (another thing not in the Founder’s Constitution, or even the current one) means that it takes 60 of the 100 Senators to enact or repeal almost any law.

That means that the minority party – the political party that the people decided should be fewer in number than the other party – has a veto over any enacting or repealing of the laws.

That’s a bit weird. The “rule” is that that majority rules, except that the minority gets a veto. Huh?

It gets worse. Not only does the minority get a veto, they can shut down the government unless the majority concedes its power to them.

The minority shut down the government for over a month last fall, demanding that the majority pretend that the minority was the majority and the majority was the minority, by repealing part of the tax bill that was passed by the majority months earlier.

Now the minority is doing the same on a narrow issue, with the result that people are waiting hours in TSA lines at the airport. (I say fire TSA anyway; it’s all theater.)

The latest is the minority’s filibustering of a law to require photo ID when you vote, just as you’re required to have photo ID when you board an airplane, borrow a book, or cash a check – a law that is supported by 80% of Americans.

Maybe the majority should formally concede that it is effectively the minority. Then they can turn the tables and demand those minority filibuster rights. At which time the minority would say, “Not so fast, we’re  the minority, so we’re in charge here!”

Yep, that’s American “democracy.” Don’t even get me started on the European kind.

And sooooo . . . .

Let’s impose this farcical system on Cuba and Iran. Given their history of ecumenical largess (I have no idea what that phrase means, but it popped into my demagogue head; help me here, Tucker) they’ll surely be every bit as successful with it as we currently are.

OK, don’t go away mad. Here’s a tidbit to brighten your day. Donald J. Trump is not a Democrat, and I’m not even sure he’s a democrat.

But bear in mind that the greatest leader of the ancient world – the one who brought the greatest good to the greatest number – was Augustus Caesar. He wasn’t either.  

Are the Dems rooting for Iran because Iran is America’s enemy, or because the new Supreme Leader is gay?

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Given Iran’s half century of cruel barbarism in the Middle East, it’s hard to understand why the Democrats seem to be rooting for them in the current war. I have two theories.

One is the obvious one. The Dems are not so much rooting for Iran, as rooting against Iran’s enemy. Bad as Iran is, its enemy is even worse in the eyes of the Dems.

Iran’s enemy, you see – or at least the Dems see – has a history of its own cruel barbarism going back to at least 1619. Iran’s enemy has engaged in genocide against native people. Iran’s enemy has wrongly oppressed workers of the world who sought freedom in the workers’ paradises of the Soviet Union, Cuba, Venezuela, Red China and Eastern Europe.

Dems believe that Iran’s enemy has raped the earth, ruined the climate, undermined the sacraments of diversity, equity and inclusion, elected a man with bad orange hair to the Presidency, increased the wealth of everyone but at the cost of especially increasing the wealth of the wealthy, made “woke” a four-letter word, and is rapidly driving Starbucks out of business.

Iran’s enemy is of course America, which happens to be the Dems’ primary enemy as well. So, in a textbook example of “my enemy’s enemy is my friend,” the Dems see Iran as their friend.

That’s all that matters to the Dems. Forget about Iran’s atrocities. Forget about the hostage-taking, the baby-beheadings, the rapes, the murders, the incinerations. Forget about the imprisonment of people for political beliefs, the torture of dissidents for dissenting, the belligerent development of a nuclear bomb for use on Israel, and the throwing of gays off tall buildings for being gay.

(Correction: A reader has informed me that Iran does not throw gays off tall buildings; they pay ISIS to do that. Homer nods.)

Which brings me to my second theory. It has been reported that Iran’s new Supreme Leader who assumed the supremacy after the supreme demise of his supreme father is . . .

. . . gay.

President Trump, a supporter of gay rights, was reportedly pleased by the news. He laughed.

Gayness is not a sin, in my view. It’s barely worthy of mockery. For cheap mockery material, it’s on the order of baldness.

But under these circumstances it’s notable. The new Gay-atollah could be a second reason why the Dems are rooting for Iran.

It would be a DEI “resistance” exercise by the Dems, now that ordinary DEI has been outlawed or at least discredited. As in “I want the gay guy to win!” Or “I want the gay guy to beat Trump!” Or just “I want the gay guy!” (“But the bushy beard? Eww!”)

As for that newly-supreme-and-outed gay man serving as the putative Supreme Leader of the Islamic Republic of Iran while cowering in a corner somewhere, he has yet another thing to watch out for. He has to watch out for not just bombs in the sky, but himself in the sky. Stay away from tall buildings, my friend.

Rubio/Vance vs. Harris/Newsom in 2028 – seriously?

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Predictions are hazardous, especially about the future and especially about politics, but the best prediction right now is that the 2028 Republican nominee for President will be either JD Vance or Marco Rubio, and the Democrat nominee will be either Gavin Newsom or Kamala Harris. The ones not nominated for President will likely be nominated for Vice President.

Before we employ these people for these important jobs, let’s do what employers do: Let’s look at their resumes.

(I’ve tried to present this in a neutral manner, unlike Wikipedia which unabashedly spins the tone and even the substance of the bios to favor Harris and Newsom and to disfavor Vance and Rubio.)

JD Vance:

  • Grew up poor in Appalachia with an alcoholic and drug-abusing mother.
  • Joined the Marines.
  • Graduated Ohio State University, summa cum laude.
  • Graduated Yale Law School where he was an Editor of Yale Law Journal.
  • Clerked for a prominent federal court judge, and then worked at a prestige law firm.
  • Worked for Peter Thiel’s venture capital company.
  • Wrote a NYT best-selling book about his life, later made into a hit movie directed by Ron Howard; the book sold three million copies, and the movie had over four million viewings.
  • Elected U.S. Senator for Ohio.
  • Elected Vice President of the United States.
  • Sports a lousy beard.

Kamala Harris:

  • Daughter of an Afro-Jamaican father and Indian mother.
  • Graduated Howard University (no listed honors).
  • Graduated University of California Hasting College of Law (no listed honors).
  • District Attorney for Alameda County, then appointed to state positions by an older politician she was dating, Willie Brown.
  • Elected first woman, first African-American and first South Asian-American Attorney General of California.
  • Elected Senator from California (first African-American, first South Asian-American, second Black woman).
  • Elected first woman, first African-American, first South Asian-American Vice President, and given responsibilities for discovering and remedying the “root causes” of illegal immigration under the Biden administration.
  • Defeated in 2024 election for President.

Marco Rubio:

  • Born to legal Cuban refugees in Florida.
  • Graduated University of Florida.
  • Graduated University of Miami Law School, cum laude.
  • Elected to Florida legislature, then elected first Cuban-American Speaker of the State House of Representatives.
  • Adjunct Professor at Florida International University.
  • Elected U.S. Senator from Florida and served ten years, was member of numerous committees and subcommittees.
  • Defeated in the Republican nomination for President.
  • Appointed Secretary of State by President Trump.
  • Widely considered very active as Secretary of State, with the NYT dubbing him “Secretary of Everything.”

Gavin Newsom:

  • Born into a prominent San Francisco family, where the father was close friends of the Getty oil family.
  • Played college baseball.
  • Started a successful winery with one of the Getty’s, and went on to other successful business ventures.
  • Appointed to political positions by the same mentor that Kamala Harris had (but didn’t date him).
  • Elected Mayor of San Francisco.
  • Elected Lieutenant Governor of California.
  • Elected Governor of California.
  • Had “severe dyslexia” as a child according to Wikipedia, and it’s still “pretty severe” according to Newsom.
  • Sports good hair.

So, there you have their bullet-point (can I still say that?) resumes. Which do you want to run the country?

Can there be any doubt what Iran would do with nukes?

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The argument against the war with Iran boils down to two points. The first point is that this war was initiated by the hated President Trump, and so it should be opposed. That point cannot be rebutted because it is not a point at all; it’s simply a reactionary expression of hate by people who scarcely bother to conceal their hope that Iran wins.

So, let’s move on to the second point.

The second point is that we were able to handle Iran’s aggression for many years without going to war, and so we could have continued to handle its aggression for many more years without going to war. There was no “imminent threat” from Iran.

That argument ignores the fact that circumstances were on the brink of changing.

The impending change is that Iran was getting ever-closer to having a nuclear bomb in its arsenal. And it already had hundreds of ballistic missiles to carry that bomb across the Mideast and beyond.

In addition to the risk of ordinary nukes, there’s the risk of Iran using “dirty bombs.” Those are conventional explosives laden with semi-enriched uranium. A dirty bomb doesn’t produce the megaton explosion of a nuke, but it does contaminate the surroundings with lethal radiation.

Iran could construct a “dirty bomb” of sub-fissile enriched uranium, which it has thousands of pounds of, and mount it on one of its hundreds of remaining ballistic missiles.

Even more worrisome, Iran could dispense with the missile. It could instead smuggle abroad a refrigerator-sized dirty bomb, and position it in a leased office on an upper floor of a building in a major city where the detonation could produce catastrophic and long-lasting radiation contamination.

Think Chernobyl (and the Chernobyl contamination originated near ground level, not 50 floors up in the sky).

Let’s hope Iran has not already constructed and smuggled a dirty bomb to a detonation site where it is waiting only for someone, somewhere to push a red button.

If you think Iran is too pacific and humane to do such a thing, then you haven’t been paying attention. This is a regime that tosses gays off tall buildings, stones women for adultery, dismembers shoplifters, sponsors unspeakable acts of terrorism against women and children and babies, has chanted “Death to America” for half a century, and obdurately refuses to give up its nuclear weapons program.

In the course of the last week, Iran fired thousands of missiles and drones at American bases. Fine, I suppose that’s part of war. But Iran has also followed its policy of firing missiles and drones at both military and purely civilian targets in Israel – as well as Saudi Arabia, Qatar, Türkiye, Iraq, UAE, Kuwait, Bahrain, Oman and Jordan.  

Iran’s aim is not to subdue those countries – heck, most of those countries are not even in the fight.

Rather, Iran’s aim is to produce a conflagration of the Mideast and the world. “If we go down, we’ll take you with us” is their apocalyptic cry. These are theocrats from the 12th century.

Can there be any doubt that an Iran possessing nuclear weapons would use them?

Sure, it’s annoying to see the price of gas go up, and to see the stock market drop a couple of percent. But it would be more annoying to see millions of people killed, to see civilians with the lifelong pain of radiation burns, to see cities rendered uninhabitable, and to see a generation of babies with birth defects.  

If necessary, bomb the Iranian leaders back to the age and time they’ve chosen for themselves — the stone age.

War with Iran was inevitable, so Trump was smart to choose the timing

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Iran consistently promoted and sponsored terror throughout the Middle East and the world. They’ve been chanting “Death to America” for half a century. They’ve been working on a nuclear bomb for decades. Their radical Islami-fascist theocracy repeatedly vowed to wipe Israel off the map, because they believed Allah willed it.

War with Iran was therefore inevitable. The only question was when.

We could have waited for Iran to attack us. America’s unspoken policy over the years, after all, has been not to attack an adversary until the adversary attacks us first.

That sounds noble, but might not be smart. Waiting for Japan to attack us at the outset of WWII almost cost us the war. If not for the lucky fact that America’s aircraft carriers were out at sea rather than at base in Pearl Harbor on Dec. 7, 1941, the entire Pacific Fleet might have been destroyed.

So, too, with Iran. We could have delayed this war for months and even years until after Iran restocked its weapons from the blows inflicted last summer by the Israelis and Americans.

By then, Iran would not only be restocked with replacement weapons, but might have a few new ones – such as nuclear bombs or at least a “dirty bomb” that is designed not to produce a nuclear explosion but to simply spread radioactive contamination over a large area such as Tel Aviv – or Washington, D.C.

President Trump was right to stop Iran now, before it regrouped and re-weaponized.

In doing so, Trump showed a level of maturity, discipline and vision that I’ve sometimes doubted he possessed. It would have been easy to just kick the Iran can down the road, down past the mid-terms, down past his presidency, to let some successor deal with the problem.

Yes, the problem would be bigger down the road, but it would be someone else’s problem, not Trump’s.

Trump’s predecessors did exactly that. Biden was of course half asleep, and paid little attention to anything. But I’m less forgiving of Obama, who consciously entered into his 2015 agreement with Iran to let them develop nuclear weapons after ten years – a ten-year period that expired last year.

If Trump hadn’t cancelled Obama’s Iranian deal and if the Israelis and Americans had not taken out Iran’s underground uranium enrichment facilities last summer, it’s quite likely that Iran would have nukes today.

Re-read that last sentencer. Under Obama’s approach, Iran would probably have nukes today. Some of the ballistic missiles they’re raining down on Israel, Qatar, United Arab Emirates, Saudi Arabia and elsewhere would probably bear nuclear warheads capable of killing millions.

So, when you read the “war-is-hell” headlines from CNN or the depictions of mass-murdering Ayatollah Khamenei as a kindly grandpa from Al Jazeera or the latest “Trump-is-Hitler whine from the hypocritical, pusillanimous Democrats, remember: This war was inevitable – in fact, the Iranians have been fighting it for many years. The only question was when we finally decided to fight back – now when they’re weak, or later when they’re armed with nukes.

Democrats condemn Trump’s “misogyny” for saying “we’re going to have to bring the women’s team” as well as the men’s to the SOTU

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In the raucous locker room celebration of the Gold Medal win by the men’s hockey team on the final day of the Olympics – an upset win for the ages – the team received a phone call from President Trump. They put the President on the speaker.

In the course of the hilarity and fun, Trump invited the team to this week’s State of the Union Address. Almost before the invitation was out of Trump’s mouth, the team accepted. “We’re in!”

Amid the laughing, shouting and carrying on, Trump quipped, “I must tell you, we’re going to have to bring the women’s team, you do know that!” The team laughed and roared its approval. Trump chuckled, “I do believe I would probably be impeached” if the women (who also won gold) were not invited.

The women’s team were no-shows, citing scheduling conflicts.

The men, in contrast, were able to clear their conflicts. Chants of “U S A, U S A, U S A” predictably ensued as they entered, for which even the Democrats felt obligated to stand. Mind you, these Democrats would not even stand for:

“If you agree with this statement, then stand up and show your support: The first duty of the American government is to protect American citizens. Not illegal aliens.”

Over the course of the week, the Democrats found a way to be offended by the President’s locker room quip. The offense they settled on was “misogyny.”

The basis for this misogyny, apparently, was that Trump’s quip that he would “have to” invite the women to the SOTU implied that he didn’t really want the women to come, and he was inviting them only to avoid being impeached.

Trump said a lot of true things Tuesday evening – about an hour’s worth too many. None was truer than when he gestured to the silent, stony Democrats and said, “These people are crazy.”