Hello! Today is Thursday, April 2, 2026. There are actually 26 different national observances today. No kidding. Among the more interesting: National Burrito Day and National Peanut Butter and Jelly Day. Now, if you could make a PB&J burrito, you’d have both covered.
1792: The Coinage Act is passed, establishing the United States Mint and authorizing the $10 Eagle, $5 Half-Eagle, and $2.50 Quarter-Eagle gold coins, and the silver dollar, half dollar, quarter, dime, and half-dime.
1800: First performance of Ludwig van Beethoven’s Symphony No. 1 in C major.
1827: U.S. inventor Joseph Dixon of Salem, Mass., begins manufacturing lead pencils
1877: First Easter Egg Roll held on White House lawn.
1902: Electric Theatre, the first full-time movie theater in the United States, opens in Los Angeles, Calif.
1917: Rep. Jeannette Rankin (R-Mont.) begins her term as the first female member of the U.S. House of Representatives.
1921: Albert Einstein lectures in New York City on his new “Theory of Relativity.”
1932: Charles Lindbergh turns over $50,000 as ransom for his kidnapped son.
1942: USS Hornet with Jimmy Doolittle’s B-25 departs from San Francisco.
1968: 2001: A Space Odyssey premieres.
1977: Fleetwood Mac’s Rumours album goes to No. 1 and stays atop the charts for 31 weeks.
Birthdays today include: The first Holy Roman Emperor, Charlemagne; writer, adventurer, and famous lover Giacomo Casanova; fairy tale author Hans Christian Andersen; French novelist Émile Zola; auto pioneer Walter Chrysler; Christian “Buddy” Ebsen Jr., American dancer and actor (The Beverly Hillbillies); Herbert Mills, American jazz and pop singer (The Mills Brothers); actor Sir Alec Guinness; session man David Mason, who played the trumpet on the Beatles “Penny Lane;” boxer Carmen Basilio; NPR newsman Carl Kasell; and singers Marvin Gaye and Emmylou Harris.
If today’s your day also, here’s wishing you a Happy Birthday!
* * *
I had a passing thought as I was cooking up some breakfast this morning (mushroom coffee, Texas toast with apricot preserves, eggs over easy, and some locally made breakfast sausage). The thought came down to this: Iran has been at war with the rest of the world, including absolutely everybody, since January of 1978. Do the folks complaining about the length of our engagement with those creatures really expect that situation to be rectified in less than (as of today) 35 days?
Mind you, that question is exclusive of the sanity of the Iranian regime (perhaps more correctly, the rather obvious lack of it). Rick Moran, in a recent VIP article, brushed up against this issue:
“President Trump hasn’t spelled out how he wants the Iran war to end,” sniffed NPR on March 6. NPR apparently hasn’t read the White House statement issued five days before, where Donald Trump described “Operation Epic Fury” as “a precise, overwhelming military campaign to eliminate the imminent nuclear threat posed by the Iranian regime, destroy its ballistic missile arsenal, degrade its proxy terror networks, and cripple its naval forces.” Later, the president added that the war was to “create the conditions” for regime change.
But NPR and the rest of the mainstream media ignored that statement, because if they acknowledged it, they wouldn’t be able to play their “Trump has no endgame” game. It’s a silly game played by silly people who aren’t serious about anything, except their effort to destroy Donald Trump.
(By the way, if you’re not a VIP member, you really ought to consider it — there’s a 60% off promotion running right now. Details at the bottom of this column.)
To my mind, the president’s stated goal is a tremendously tall order, particularly when you add the timeline the left has been complaining about. In fact, the addition of the timeline demands makes the goal unattainable, which the left would doubtless find quite acceptable.
I hasten to add that, had we gone through the arduous and counterproductive process of getting the approval of Congress — during which information surely would have leaked to the Iranian regime — the goal wouldn’t have been accomplished at all. We’d still be waiting for Congress to act, just like we’ve been waiting for nearly five decades.
As Rick goes on to point out, the left in this country, including the legacy media, would continue to describe Epic Fury as a failure, even in the (in my own view unlikely) event that Iran totally surrenders.
Why unlikely? The regime is always going to have some true believers who will never surrender. Their mindset is not unlike the Japanese at the end of WWII. Any sane person would look at the erasure of Hiroshima and Nagasaki as a clue that the war was lost, and yet the fanaticism prevailed to the point where some were still fighting 30 years after VJ Day. As such, claims of Iran’s non-surrender are supportable since you can always find some fanatical believer or other who will say, “We didn’t surrender.” Headlines about such statements are popping up with some regularity, alongside denials that negotiations are happening. (Baghdad Bob, anyone?)
Recall also, please, that the same crowd never wanted us to deal with the threat to begin with. They’ve spent many years complaining about Iran, repeating endlessly that “Iran is a problem.” They let Trump step up and remove that threat, some 48 years after the fact, and now they’re suddenly worried about the amount of time it takes? Yeah, right.
The resistance against the inevitable outcome seems to be split between two schools of thought: One, they didn’t want the problems solved because they support the Islamists; or two, they’re annoyed because they didn’t solve the problem despite their rhetoric, and Orange Man Bad actually did.
Remember one of my oft-repeated axioms: The worst thing you can do to a politician is actually solve a problem, because once you do, you’ve eliminated their ability to demagogue that problem.
Not only has President Trump crossed what the Uniparty obviously considers an uncrossable line, actually taking action to solve an issue, he’s also managing the stated objective in far less time than his detractors figured on. That certainly is not doing the reputation of Trump’s naysayers any good, and they know it. It’s hard to argue that you’re for “peace” when you oppose the removal of the Islamic regime — the biggest peacekeeping stroke in many decades.
If you want a metric for how effective President Trump is, you need only to look at the Democrats who are now in a position of defending the Islamists in Iran while complaining that the defeat of the Islamic Republic is taking too long.
Thought of the day: It’s got to be the going, not the getting there, that’s good. — Harry Chapin
Recommended: Oh, Brave New World, That Has Such Computers In It
Investigative reporting and honest analysis are becoming rare these days. You get it here. That’s why it’s important to become a PJ Media VIP member. Not only do you support the reporters and writers who support YOU, but you also get 60% off the regular price by going to this link and using the promo code FIGHT.
