<![CDATA[Axios]]><![CDATA[Barack Obama]]><![CDATA[Chicago]]><![CDATA[Donald Trump]]><![CDATA[Iran]]>Featured

Friday’s Final Word – HotAir

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June 19, 2026
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It All Boils Down to Trusting Trump – HotAir

These tabbies I must mind, feels like a world upon my shoulders …





Ed: Presumably Ben means the Villeneuve version of Giedi Prime. Otherwise, there’d be more scabs and pus as in the Lynch version. Pretty much the same level of attractiveness either way, though. 

===

Ryan Zickgraf at UnHerd: The early reviews of the Barack Obama Presidential Center are in, and they’re deservedly brutal. The ex-president’s monument, opening on Chicago’s Southside this Juneteenth, has been compared to the Death Star, a Klingon prison, a self-cleaning cat litter box, or, as implied by President Trump in a Truth Social post, a giant garbage can.

Yet, what it resembles most, I’d argue, is a mausoleum, the Obamausoleum, if you will. The tower is clad in New Hampshire granite, rises in a faceted, asymmetrical mass with almost no windows, and looms over a grassy public park. It even has words carved near the top, giving the whole thing the unmistakable air of the world’s largest headstone. But what it marks — unintentionally — is the final resting place of Obamaism: a politics after politics, a monument to the fantasy that if enough institutions speak pleasant bromides in a reassuring voice, if politicians act like noble characters from The West Wing, some ineffable thing called “the arc of the moral universe” will bend and everyone wins. Who needs culture war when you can have culture peace?

That’s not what was originally sold to voters. When Obama was elected in 2008 — almost 20 years ago — he promised a sharp political pivot from the neoliberal consensus of both the Bushes and the Clintons — “change you can believe in.” But then he spent much of his presidency convincing everyone that massive structural change was impossible in the face of Republican opposition. What he offered instead was the thin gruel of himself: Obama as symbol, Obama as cultural ascendance, Obama as proof that America had already become better simply by recognizing him. Now the Obama Center represents a near-billion-dollar effort to convince visitors that the symbolism of the first Black president was not a consolation prize but the victory all along.





Ed: That’s explicitly what Obama admitted during his presidency. When challenged on “change,” Obama claimed that he was the change, as well as the hope. Presidential centers have become an exercise in narcissism in recent decades, and as John Fund reminded us yesterday at The Spectator, they are themselves a relatively recent phenomenon …

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Ed: Or premature fetishization. 

===

John Fund at The Spectator: It’s hard to.believe that before Franklin Roosevelt began the tradition of presidential libraries partly funded by the taxpayers, departing occupants of the Oval Office used to simply deposit their papers with the Library of Congress. 

That building, with its massive 160-foot dome, painted murals and Tiffany-style glass accompaniments, was completed in 1897. It strikes me as the only essential building a democratic republic should need to honor its chief executives. 

Ed: Be sure to read it all. I included this in yesterday’s FW for a different point, but John’s conclusion requires consideration. 

===

Ed: I’m a little surprised that the Macron government would want to intercede here. I doubt that the motive is to help Trump gain leverage over the IRGC in these negotiations. I suspect that Macron sees an opportunity here to flex his own muscle at the expense of Trump.

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Axios: Caputo: The MOU doesn’t look like unconditional surrender.

Trump: Well, it really probably is unconditional surrender. [Axios: It is?] I think so. Look, they have no military. They’re all at the bottom of the sea. 159 ships. That’s what they had.





Caputo: Sure, but they could still menace. They only had these small Gashti boats or go-fast boats.

Trump: Look, you call it what you want. I hear the JCPOA, the Obama nuclear catastrophe, which was so bad. When Obama left, he didn’t hit their military. He didn’t damage their navy or destroy their air force. I destroyed the air force. I destroyed their anti-aircraft weapons. That’s why we were flying over there totally unimpeded. We turned off all the stealth. They couldn’t do a damn thing. He didn’t do any of that stuff. He didn’t kill their leadership. I did, twice. Two and a half times to be exact. He didn’t do anything to Soleimani. I killed Soleimani.

Ed: It’s an interesting interview. I read the transcript rather than watch the video, but that link is here for those who want to see it all. The impression one gets is that Trump decided to take the “declare victory and depart the field” option rather than return to a shooting war, and that he may have made that decision weeks ago. The last series of strikes may have come out of frustration that Iran wouldn’t take the off-ramp Trump was offering. That would explain the frustration that he and Vance have vented at Israel over the last few days. They will shortly discover that there is no such thing as an off-ramp when dealing with the IRGC or its terror proxies, a lesson Israel learned the hard way on October 7. 

===

… not on a democracy fighting to protect its citizens





Ed: Exactly. If Hezbollah won’t abide by any of its ceasefire commitments, that’s on Hezbollah and their IRGC masters. If Lebanon cannot or will not enforce the terms of UNSC Resolution 1701 and at least three ceasefires by disarming Hezbollah and removing them from sub-Litani and Bekaa Valley regions, that’s on Lebanon. Newt hits the nail on the head. 

===

Jonathan Turley: After the Southern Poverty Law Center scandal of actually funding and encouraging racist protests, it appears that at least one individual has created his own orchestrated racist incident. In Chicago (where Jussie Smollett committed his infamous racist hoax), a burning cross was denounced by Mayor Brandon Johnson as a sign of the racism in society. Johnson, however, refused to address the fact that the cross burning was actually the work of an anti-Trump liberal student. University of Illinois senior Merlin Lu said it was never intended as a racist symbol, but the question is whether it could still be charged as a hate crime.

In posting a reward for the culprit soon after the incident, Rev. Michael Pfleger declared that “this bold rise of racism must be condemned by every race, faith community, and Chicagoan as was done with the swastika and treated as a hate crime.”

It turns out that this was not evidence of the rise of racism but another possible hoax. Lu bizarrely claimed that he was unaware that a burning cross had racist connotations and insisted that there was no racist message intended. …

Johnson later denounced the incident as a “symbol of hatred is one that we must continue to reject, and I wholeheartedly reject it. I can’t speak to anyone’s motives; I can only speak to the impact, and the impact was devastating.”

It seems curious that Johnson would not “speak to motives” when he knows that this was set by a leftist radical.





Ed: It’s not curious at all. Self-interest rarely is. Has Fr. Pfleger weighed in on Platner and his Totenkopf tattoo yet, by the way? Fleger’s a well-known crank who keeps feeding the demand loop for hate crimes, which is why we see so many hoaxes – because the supply for actual hate crimes is so low. These days, I start with the skeptical assumption that any claims of burning crosses, nooses, swastikas, or “this is MAGA Country” assaults are hoaxes. I am rarely surprised. 

===

Ed: It’s been a holiday in deep-red Texas since 1980. In fact, the first adopters of Juneteenth as a state holiday are all red states. Texas started first, followed by Florida in 1991 and Oklahoma in 1994. Minnesota was the first blue state to adopt it in 1996 and the first clearly northern state as well. That was well before Congress finally got around to it in 2021, but Congress did propose it in 2020, and Trump endorsed the effort. However, the pandemic stalled most legislative efforts that year. 

===

Ed: Spot on, and it’s actually worse than that. Southern Democrats ignored the 1863 Emancipation Proclamation because they did not recognize the authority of the federal government at that time. Gen. Granger had to go to Galveston 161 years ago today because Southern Democrat slave owners refused to submit to emancipation even after the surrender at Appomattox, for two full months. Granger had to enforce emancipation in Texas on this date in 1865. Texas has been celebrating that since 1980, and it took more than a decade before any other state followed suit. 





===

Stu Smith at City Journal: Earlier this month, the Democratic Socialists of America’s top leadership met for an in-person meeting of their National Political Committee (NPC), the DSA’s governing authority. The result of the meeting was “Workers Deserve More!”, a rebooted platform for the organization featuring a host of radical proposals. The document commits DSA to scrapping the U.S. Senate, “abolishing the carceral forces of the capitalist state,” defunding the Department of War, amnesty for all immigrants, and “replac[ing] the President and Supreme Court with an executive and judiciary chosen by and subordinate to Congress.” …

“Workers Deserve More!” emerged from another DSA committee that spent two months grappling with and debating its language. When the NPC took up the document, its presenter urged the DSA to pass it unamended after it cleared the committee unanimously.

Instead, DSA leadership added four amendments: one on “real democracy”—calling for the replacement of “the President and Supreme Court with an executive and judiciary chosen by and subordinate to Congress”—another on police and prison abolition, a provision explicitly naming Jerusalem as the capital of a Palestinian state, and a ranked-choice voting section. The NPC passed two of these four amendments unanimously, while the “real democracy” provision prevailed by a razor-thin margin.

Ed: I suspect that the DSA would be thrilled with the quasi-imperial powers of the presidency as it exists in the moment, if they had any chance at all to get elected to the office. The demand for a parliamentary structure, or more accurately, a Politburo arrangement that borrows its structure from Congress, is a pose. A ridiculous and radical pose, to be sure, but a pose nonetheless. Socialists want power, and they want it by any means necessary. 





===

Ed: All the eyerolls in the world aren’t enough for Hollywood, I guess. Let’s turn a silly comic book film into a lecture, using the Rachel Zegler/Brie Larson/distaff Ghostbusters method. Maybe the actors will learn just how bad this strategy is, but you’d think that they would have learned it already by now. Can’t wait to hear from the She-Hulk actor, Tatiana something-or-other, about how this film will rattle the patriarchy. 

===

Last night’s lyric: “One Toke Over the Line” by Brewer & Shipley. 


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