Thursday's Final Word

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I turned around, she was gone, and all I had left was one little tabbie in my hand ...

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Ed: I was skeptical earlier today; I'm still skeptical as of 5 pm ET or so. Trump is calling this a deal to end the war, but this still looks like the Memorandum of Understanding (MOU) that negotiators spent the last few weeks haggling over. That is a deal to discuss a deal, essentially, although adding the nuclear and terror files would be a very large concession by Iran. But ...

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Reuters: Iran has not approved any text for an initial memorandum of understanding with the United States, Iran’s semi-official Fars news agency cites an informed source close to Iran’s negotiating team as saying.

Ed: This may not mean much. The Iranians, as of late afternoon, had not outright repudiated the claims of an agreement, which leads me to believe that Pakistan forced them to agree to something. It may take a few days to find out what.

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Ed: Perhaps Iran really did agree to this, but there is another possibility here. It might be that Trump wants to sow confusion within the regime as to whether their negotiators got out over their skis and capitulated to Trump. That would create more tension within the regime, which could help accelerate a collapse. Again, we'll see, but the IRGC's next moves in the Strait of Hormuz will be of great interest to monitor. 

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NY Times: Trump said that a deal to end the Iran conflict could be signed “maybe over the weekend, in Europe,” but that if so, he would not be in attendance. On Sunday, which is also the president’s 80th birthday, there will be an Ultimate Fighting Championship bout on the lawn of the White House.

He noted that documents still had to be finalized, but claimed they were “in pretty final shape” and “should get done over the next few days.”

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Vice President JD Vance, Steve Witkoff, the special envoy to the Middle East, and Jared Kushner, the president’s son-in-law and his special envoy for peace, would go, Trump said.

Ed: Assuming this takes place, Trump wouldn’t show up for it anyway, not unless Iran sent the Nepo Babytollah or Ahmad Vahidi. Protocol would dictate matching authority levels for this kind of ceremonial agreement signing. It has nothing to do with birthdays or the UFC event. It seems unlikely that there will be a signing ceremony arranged in 72 hours, especially since Iran has not yet (as of 4:30 ET) acknowledged that an agreement has been reached at all. 

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Arutz Sheva: "President Trump spoke this evening with Prime Minister Netanyahu regarding the memorandum of understanding (MoU) currently taking shape with Iran to enter into negotiations," the statement said.

"Although Israel is not a party to the memorandum of understanding, the Prime Minister expressed his appreciation for President Trump’s commitment that the final agreement concluded at the end of negotiations will include the removal of enriched material, the dismantling of enrichment infrastructure, limits on missile production, and the cessation of Iran’s support for its regional terror proxies," the statement added.

Ed: This brings up something very interesting – Lebanon. If Israel isn't a party to the MOU, has Iran finally cut Hezbollah loose? That seems very unlikely. 

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3. You mentioned rebuilding help in Iran once the deal was signed, but we'd get half their oil. What does that look like?

4. If Khamenei is the one making the decision on the deal, who is going to europe to sign it? 

So many questions. I'm not necessarily opposed to the deal. I'm done underestimating Trump and his abilities to pull rabbits out of the hat. But the devil is always in the details on deals, and I'd like to get started on the fine print.

I hope the President takes a call from @TreyYingst, STAT.

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Ed: These are all good questions. They may answer themselves if the Iranians repudiate this. 

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Batya Ungar-Sargon: It’s official: The guy who knowingly got a Nazi tattoo on his chest and roughed up his girlfriend is now the Democrats’ nominee in Maine. Graham Platner has won his primary and will now face off against Susan Collins in November.

The same people who called the Right Nazis for 10 years, who accused the Right of sending women back to the dark ages, who called Trump a rapist and pedophile protector, and who claim Trump is sending soldiers to die, are now backing a guy with an actual Nazi tattoo, who twisted his ex-girlfriend’s arm and left bruises, who spent years on a sexting site notorious for hosting predators cheating on his wife, and who has relentlessly mocked veterans. ...

These are the people allegedly saving the Democratic Party from vat candidates, charged with bringing back men and the working class.

These Leftist men look at Graham Platner and see a real man. They see his oystering hobby (he’s on disability and the much ballyhooed oyster farm makes no money), his serial philandering, his demeaning and aggressive behavior towards women, his racist Reddit commentary, and his Nazi tattoo as the signifiers of a traditional masculinity and working class vibe they haven’t been exposed to for a long time in the party of MeToo and I’m With Her and the Kamala Campaign O’ Joy. They imagine they keep losing and losing men because of the Democrats’ “HR Lady” politics. Graham Platner is a rejection of the HR lady, we are told by progressive men who themselves look like human pocket protectors. His kind of messiness is what will bring men back to the party.

It’s tragic.

Ed: Let's call it Prog Pilled. As I have written a few times now, the Left hates traditional masculinity, and now has alienated most of those who understand it. As a result, they have either embraced pajama boys like James Talarico as their preferred model of masculinity or recruited brutes like Herr Totenkopf because they think he represents Middle America's concept of masculinity. "Tragic" only begins to describe this. 

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Ed: Platner's former campaign manager officially renounces Der Oysterführer. That seems pretty significant, although so far, not too many Democrats are following suit. 

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Froma Harrop: Redemption is a theme in religion whereby someone who has committed wrongs accepts responsibility and changes. The work of redemption can take years, and time is not Platner's friend. One doesn't simply stand up after years of misbehavior and announce, "I declare myself redeemed."

Khanna also said about Platner, "He understood that those years that he came back were not the best years of his life." Unfortunately, the not-best years include this year. ...

Platner now claims to have suffered post traumatic stress disorder from his time as a Marine in combat. But he dismissed post-traumatic stress disorder as an excuse for "garbage behavior" in a 2020 Reddit post.

PTSD is a real thing, and there is treatment for it. But if Platner couldn't pull himself together in a marriage not yet three years old, how would he do in the Senate? The late Sens. John McCain of Arizona and Bob Dole of Kansas both suffered terrible wounds in war, but they didn't physically take it out on women.

Khanna concludes that Platner has "worked to be a better man, a better human being." Trouble is, he's barely started -- assuming he has started.

Ed: For reference, Harrop is not exactly a conservative. This is not a knock on Harrop, but rather a credit to her for seeing past the grotesquely hypocritical spin from Democrats and other media outlets. I've criticized her in the past, and am happy to praise her now. She's exactly correct about redemption and the absurd demand that Platner receive credit for instant redemption without any work to repent honestly and atone substantively, rather than act entitled to high public office. And as for the PTSD argument ...

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Ed: Exactly. Plenty of combat vets come home with PTSD, but they don't spend the rest of their adult life mooching off their parents and abusing their partners in relationships. They also don't act entitled to a Senate seat over that diagnosis. 

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Ed: They'll never ask it on M-SNOW. They don't want to know the answer. 

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NY Post: Maine Senate nominee Graham Platner kept his hideous Nazi tattoo to remind himself “the US was the evil bad guy overseas,” according to an ex-girlfriend with whom he cheated on his fiancée in 2021.

The left-wing streamer, who spoke to The Post, is the second woman to say that Platner knew about the fascist origin of his Totenkopf skull and crossbones tattoo — despite his claims that he didn’t realize it was a Third Reich symbol until last fall.

Her assertions were backed up by texts reviewed by The Post that she’d sent to her mom in September 2025 in which she blasted him for his “Nazi tattoo,” “small d—k” and claims that he tarnished her reputation by using her to step out on his fiancée. ...

“As a person who is a leftist, I immediately looked at him and asked him, ‘Is that a Totenkopf?’ and he told me a whole, ‘he will hold this weight forever’ bravado sob story about how it was, but he decided to keep it as a reminder that the United States was the evil, bad guy overseas,” she recounted. 

Ed: This confirms what Lyndsey Fifield told the NYT and The Free Press. The timeframe for this relationship was six years after Lyndsey's and four years before Platner ran for office. This woman has been posting the receipts for these claims on Twitter over the past week, and the NYP has apparently gotten some independent corroboration. There is more coming, and when it drops, Democrats will twist themselves into knots defending their endorsements of Herr Totenkopf. 

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Ed: Absolute nonsense, and obsolete nonsense as well ...

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Scott Rasmussen: One reason partisan activists overestimate the impact of 60 Minutes and Scott Pelley is that they are living in the past. They are arguing about 60 Minutes as it was in 1978. Back then, it topped TV ratings with up to 40 million viewers in a nation with about 78 million television households. The stories it covered set the tone for both what would be considered news in the coming week and how that news would be covered.

We don’t live in that world anymore. 

Hardly anybody recognized it at the time, but the media environment that made 60 Minutes dominant was already coming to an end. Less than a year after 60 Minutes first led the TV ratings, ESPN went on the air, followed by CNN, MTV, and other cable networks. Companies like CBS scoffed at the notion that these upstarts could hurt them, but once viewers had options, the mass audiences of network television began to crumble. By the mid-90s, the audience for 60 Minutes had fallen to 20 million, half of its peak.

Then came the internet, followed by smartphones, social media, and streaming services. Since 1978, America’s adult population has nearly doubled, but the 60 Minutes audience has fallen by more than 75%. It now attracts about 9 million people in a nation of 129 million television households.

Ed: It's not that Pelley doesn't matter anymore. It's that Pelley never mattered much in the first place. 

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Ed: Fact check – true. And until the people of the West Bank and Gaza renounce terrorism and Iran, it never will. 

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Last night's lyric: "Muskrat Love" by America and the Captain and Tenille.

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