Good morning and welcome! Great to have you here. Today is March 5th, 2026. Let’s dive right into this.
Today in History:
1750 First American Shakespearean production, an altered Richard III, is performed in New York City.
1770 British soldiers kill five men in a crowd throwing snowballs, stones, and sticks at them. This is today called the Boston Massacre.
1807 First performance of Ludwig van Beethoven’s Symphony No. 4 in B-flat Major.
1836 Samuel Colt’s Patent Arms Manufacturing Company manufactures its first pistol, the .36-caliber “Texas” model, in Paterson, New Jersey.
1853 Piano company Steinway & Sons is founded.
1856 Georgia becomes the first state to regulate railroads.
1872 American engineer George Westinghouse patents the triple air brake for trains.
1904 Nikola Tesla describes the process of ball lightning formation in Electrical World and Engineer.
1933 FDR proclaims a 10-day bank holiday in the U.S. in an attempt to stem bank failures and restore confidence.
1943 RAF bombs Essen, Germany.
Birthdays today include: Actor Henry Travers (Clarence, It’s a Wonderful Life); actor Rex Harrison (My Fair Lady, Doctor Dolittle); actor James Noble (1776, Airplane II: The Sequel); vocalist Murray Head (Judas, Jesus Christ Superstar; Chess — “One Night in Bangkok”); singer Eddy Grant (The Equals, “Baby Come Back,” and solo on “Electric Avenue”); and magician Penn Jillette.
If you share their birthday, I hope it’s a good one.
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I’m going to start out this morning by quoting a piece I wrote back in 2007:
Yesterday, I made a comment with regards to the culpability of Jimmy Carter as regards our current troubles with Iran. As you may imagine I managed to get some email commentary on that charge. For the most part, the mails chided me for rendering such a verdict against so great a president. Apparently, the people writing, have learned nothing from reading this site, over the years. In any event, Michael Evans, in an OP/Ed piece in the Jerusalem Post, nails it down quite nicely ;
The old article on the Jerusalem Post is long gone, of course. But I managed to save some of it:
We just don’t get it. The Left in America is screaming to high heaven that the mess we are in in Iraq and the war on terrorism has been caused by the right-wing and that George W. Bush, the so-called “dim-witted cowboy,” has created the entire mess.
The truth is the entire nightmare can be traced back to the liberal democratic policies of the leftist Jimmy Carter, who created a firestorm that destabilized our greatest ally in the Muslim world, the shah of Iran, in favor of a religious fanatic, the Ayatollah Khomeini
Evans went on at some length, looking at Carter’s misguided liberal policies and their results: the Islamic revolution in Iran and the subsequent Soviet invasion of Afghanistan (to which you may or may not recall that Carter’s response was to boycott the Olympics that year… Boy, I’ll bet that bothered the Soviets…). But for all that, the patterns were there for everyone to see.
Carter never got it that Khomeini, a cleric exiled to Najaf in Iraq from 1965-1978, was preparing Iran for revolution. Proclaiming “the West killed God and wants us to bury him,” Khomeini’s weapon of choice was not the sword but the media. Using tape cassettes smuggled by Iranian pilgrims returning from the holy city of Najaf, he fueled disdain for what he called gharbzadegi (“the plague of Western culture”).
[…]
Carter’s belief that every crisis can be resolved with diplomacy – and nothing but diplomacy – now permeates the Democratic Party. Unfortunately, Carter is wrong. There are times when evil must be openly confronted and defeated.
And finally, after 48 years of putting up with terrorism and watching Iran’s mullahs kill Iranians, Israelis, and anyone else who opposed their bloodthirsty tactics under the guise of a peaceful religion, along comes Donald Trump to solve the problem.
Jimmy Carter is, in fact, the father of the Iranian Revolution and bears direct responsibility for current events in that region. It took Donald Trump to eliminate that problem some 48 years later.
Oh, don’t mistake me here. Carter didn’t have a violent bone in his body. He had no grand vision of Islam taking over the world. His biggest issue was that, in his naivete, he believed he could negotiate his way out of Islamic violence. Worse, he pushed that misbegotten idea onto the rest of his party, even up until today. That is exactly why we are forced into making the place the world’s largest parking lot today.
I know, I hear my long-term readers wondering what happened to my asking whether Islam could be reformed. The answer is “nothing at all.” The difference between what I was discussing in that article and what Carter did was that Carter never considered the idea of containment, which I mentioned a couple of times in that piece.
And yes, all of the presidents between then and now also had the same options that Donald Trump is making use of today. The trouble is that none of them had the courage or the backing to do it.
The point there is simple enough. Trump does have the courage, the vision, and just barely enough backing to get the job done—the job we should have done 48 years ago.
The thought of the day: “Happiness is having a large, loving, caring, close-knit family in another city.” – George Burns.
Take care of you today. If you don’t, you’ll miss tomorrow’s column.
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