Hello and welcome to Saturday, August 8, 2026, a date that apparently demands zucchini, tarantulas, and cats all get equal billing.
My calendar says it's Zucchini Day, Sneak Some Zucchini Onto Your Neighbor's Porch Day, Happiness Happens Day, Dollar Day, Tarantula Appreciation Day, and Cat Day. Sneak a zucchini onto a neighbor's porch, appreciate a tarantula from a respectful distance, hug a cat, and try to be happy about all of it — your dollar's not going to stretch much further than that, anyway.
Today In History:
1503: King James IV of Scotland marries Margaret Tudor, daughter of England's Henry VII — she's 13 at the time, he's 30, and the union eventually produces the future King James V.
1786: Jacques Balmat and Michel Paccard become the first climbers to reach the summit of Mont Blanc, western Europe's highest peak.
1795: About 400 Shawnee sign the Treaty of Wapakoneta, agreeing to give up their lands in Ohio in exchange for territory west of the Mississippi.
1876: Thomas Edison receives a patent for an early mimeograph device, a forerunner of the office copy machine.
1945: The Soviet Union declares war on Japan, fulfilling a promise made at the Yalta Conference, and sends over a million troops into Japanese-occupied Manchuria; Japan surrenders within the week.
1963: A gang ambushes a Royal Mail train in England in what becomes known as the Great Train Robbery, escaping with roughly £2.6 million. (That's £70.7 more or less, today).
1969: Photographer Iain Macmillan snaps the photo that becomes the cover of the Beatles' Abbey Road album — a ten-minute session, just six shots taken.
1974: President Richard Nixon announces his resignation on live television, effective at noon the following day.
1990: Iraq formally annexes Kuwait, declaring it the country's 19th province.
2008: The Beijing Summer Olympics open with an elaborate ceremony, the same date China later designates as its own National Fitness Day.
2022: FBI agents execute a search warrant at former President Donald Trump's Mar-a-Lago residence as part of a Justice Department investigation into classified records.
Birthdays Today include a rather short list, actually: Dustin Hoffman, actor (Rain Man, The Graduate); Roger Federer, tennis champion; The Edge, guitarist, U2; Meredith Vieira, television host.
If today's your birthday, too, happy birthday to you.
* * *
Ask ten people whether America is winning the Iran war, and you'll get twelve different answers — not because they disagree on the facts, but because they're quietly answering completely different questions while pretending to answer the same one. This war has now run past five months, with day-by-day tracking putting us at day 161 as of this week, and depending on which yardstick you grab, the exact same set of facts spits out wildly different verdicts.
And here's what irritates me every single time: the people screaming "Trump has lost" have a very specific, very consistent full-time job — casting literally anything this president does as a failure, regardless of what actually happened on the ground. These aren't analysts weighing evidence. They're activists working backward from a conclusion they picked out months and years ago, before the first bomb was dropped. Politics isn't a factor in their assessment. Politics is the entire assessment.
Now let's look at what actually happened, instead of what certain people needed to happen.
From a military standpoint, the United States and Israel can make a genuinely strong claim to success, and no amount of ill-motivated reasoning changes the scoreboard.
The opening strikes on February 28 killed Ali Khamenei along with a swath of Iran's senior military leadership, and the campaign flattened a long list of military and government targets outright. Israel has flown over Iranian airspace with relative freedom ever since. If winning means "we accomplished our stated objectives," the tactical ledger tilts hard in this direction. Iran's ability to bully its neighbors doesn't come close to the muscle it flexed a year ago, and that gap isn't closing anytime soon.
Then there's the "ammunition" whining. Critics keep insisting we've drained our munitions stockpile down to dangerous levels, as if that's supposed to land as some kind of gotcha.
Here's the part they conveniently skip: with Iran sitting in the wreckage it's currently sitting in, our actual operational needs have dropped right alongside theirs. We don't need what we needed on February 27, because the threat we needed it for doesn't exist in the same form anymore. And every single time Iran fails to meet Trump's demands, more of its remaining capability gets vaporized. Every time Iran's rulers expose some new attempt at violent enforcement of their will, Trump takes it off the table, permanently, usually within hours. Resolve in this case means making the victory we've already won permanent.
That approach burns far less ammunition and spares far more lives than any alternative anyone's seriously proposed. Funny how that detail never makes it into the wordy whines of "quagmire."
It comes down to this, plain and simple: The victor gets to define victory, and that's us, not the people rooting against us. A year ago, Iran held the ability to yank over a fifth of the world's energy supply off the table whenever it felt like throwing a tantrum. It can't do that anymore. Full stop.
Look at what that actually means on the ground. The UAE, which watched its exports crater to 1.9 million barrels a day when this war opened, is now pumping close to 4 million barrels a day — past prewar levels, not just back to them. Regional flows overall have clawed back to roughly three-quarters of where they stood before Iran decided to play chokepoint games with the global economy. And the $200-a-barrel oil apocalypse every panic-merchant in the financial press was confidently predicting back in March? Never happened. Didn't even come close. Crude settled back down near prewar territory instead, because the workarounds held and Iran's leverage evaporated right along with its air defenses.
None of that happens by accident, and none of it happens without the campaign that put Iran in the position it's currently in. Every barrel moving through Fujairah instead of getting held hostage in the Strait of Hormuz is a direct, measurable consequence of degrading Iran's ability to make good on its threats. You don't get to claim the oil markets stabilized in spite of the war. They stabilized because of it.
I'll grant the critics one thing, since I try to play fair even with people who don't return the favor: The polling on this war is genuinely ugly, and I'm not going to pretend otherwise. Approval numbers are underwater, allied publics aren't thrilled, and nobody enjoys watching a war grind into its sixth month. But polling measures how a war feels while it's happening. It doesn't measure what the war actually accomplished. Those are two different questions, and only one of them matters five years from now, when historians are writing the actual ledger, instead of pollsters chasing this week's mood. And who is pushing the polling? Yeah, maybe that deserves some closer scrutiny. By and large, people who have been desperately trying to snag the president on any minutiae they can are selling them to us. Remember, these are the same inDUHviduals who claimed Trump had no chance of winning elections. You may recall how that turned out. Expecting a fair reading on these matters from that crowd is kinda like expecting gasoline to taste good.
Trump has a win, gang — a real one, with real barrels of oil and real dollars behind it and real peace being made, not a rhetorical win built on vibes and cable-news handwringing. And the naysayers, the Democrats wringing their hands on cable news and the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) counting its losses back in Tehran, and the press alike, have exactly nothing of substance to say about it. Watch how fast the subject changes the next time someone brings up the actual numbers, instead of the force-fed poll of the week.
Thought of the Day: Jesus was not a socialist by any measure. You see, he actually FED people.
VIP members: Let's hear your thoughts in the comments. Hit the heart. Your voice matters.
Take care, gang. I'll see you here tomorrow.
Editor’s Note: The radical Left will stop at nothing to enact their radical agenda.
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