Rationale Gal

Capitalist and Objectivist, Animal lover, Epicurean, Former GOP. no party affiliation.

[Rationale Gal @NativeGaWench]

@actingliketommy Exactly

[Simon Maechling @simonmaechling]

The currency of science is data.
The currency of pseudoscience is anecdotes.

[Political Punk @actingliketommy]

@JasonJournoDC SEXUAL DISPLAYS AROUND CHILDREN WILL NOT BE TOLERATED!!!!

[Hunter Biden @HunterBiden]

The Lessons I Learned from My Dad

I am not the man my father is.
I am trying. Some days closer. Some days farther.
He never sat me down and explained these lessons. He lived them. I’m still learning them.

Show up.
The kitchen table. The hospital room. The funeral. The picket line. The call from the son who won’t answer.
Show up.
Most days that’s the whole job.
My whole life I watched him do it. Not for cameras. Not for headlines. Not because there was something in it for him. He showed up because someone needed him.

I learned that grief doesn’t make you special.
My father buried a wife and daughter. He buried a son. Yet he never treated grief as a claim on other people’s sympathy. Instead, it made him notice theirs.
A mother who lost a child. A father sitting beside a hospital bed. A kid scared about what comes next. A son who lost his mother, his sister, his brother.
He always noticed.

I learned that power is not the point.
The people who chase power eventually confuse the office with themselves.
My father never did.
Whether he was a county councilman, a senator, vice president, or president, he was the same man.
The title changed.
He didn’t.

I learned that family comes first.
The train from Wilmington wasn’t symbolism.
It was every night.
He read to us. Showed up to games. Sat through hospital rooms. Waited up for children who were lost.
And when the day came that the country and the family could not both have him at full strength, he chose family. He relinquished the last chapter of how he wanted to be remembered. And he never complained about it.

Most of all, I learned that love is not soft.
Love is discipline.
Love is showing up at one in the morning when nobody is watching.
Love is answering the phone.
Love is staying.
Love is getting back up after life knocks you down and doing it all again tomorrow.
That love saved my life.
I’ve failed at many of these lessons, sometimes in very public ways.
He loved me anyway.

That’s the last lesson.
I am not trying to become my father.
I am trying to carry what he gave me.
And if I can do that, even imperfectly, that will be enough.

Happy Father’s Day, Dad. I love you.

[Rationale Gal @NativeGaWench]

@SamanthaDBrooks You get to tolerate their free speech too you moron. You have a right to show your ignorance, they have a right to comment on it so STFU you little crybaby.... geez....

[Simon Maechling @simonmaechling]

Here’s mine

[Rationale Gal @NativeGaWench]

E saying this since day one. He's a shady MF.

[Neil Stone @DrNeilStone]

Hands up who knew JD Vance was bad news from day one and isn't remotely surprised by how appalling a Vice President he is

👋

[😼 @dutchessprim]

He’s been catholic, Mormon, Baptist, anti-Trump, pro-Trump, pro-immigrant, anti-immigrant, anti-Iran war, pro-Iran war…

The man has no identity outside of opportunism.

The man is @marcorubio and he is a disgrace.

[Yaron Brook @yaronbrook]

Trump says his Iran deal avoided a “worldwide depression.”

That is not a boast. It is an indictment.

It means the war ended not because Iran was defeated, not because the regime capitulated, not because its nuclear and missile programs were dismantled — but because Iran succeeded in turning the Strait of Hormuz into a hostage.

That was the decisive issue from the beginning.

And it was completely foreseeable.

The Strait is not a symbol. It is one of the central arteries of the world economy. Roughly 20% of global petroleum liquids and a major share of LNG normally move through it. Iran sits on the northern shore with mines, missiles, drones, coastal batteries, and fast boats. Everyone knew this. The Pentagon knew it. The Navy knew it. Tehran knew it.

The United States has spent decades planning, exercising, and operating in precisely this battlespace.

This is not some mysterious, unforeseeable problem. The Navy has escorted tankers through the Persian Gulf before. It has fought Iran’s navy before. It has practiced mine-countermeasures, maritime security, convoy protection, unmanned surveillance, and freedom-of-navigation operations in and around the Strait for years.

The issue was never whether America had the capability to keep the straits open.

It did.

The issue was whether the president would make preventing Iran from closing the Straits of Hormuz a strategic objective of the war.

Trump CHOSE not to.

That decision doomed the war from the start.
Control of the Strait did not mean occupying Iran. It did not mean guaranteeing zero risk. It meant declaring, from the first hour, that the Strait is an international waterway; that no Iranian mine, missile battery, drone site, fast boat, “permit authority,” or IRGC toll booth would be allowed to determine whether world trade moves; and that every asset threatening commercial shipping would be destroyed.

Control meant executing on the Navy’s existing plans.

That should have been the opening strategic objective.
Instead, Trump failed to act and instead treated Hormuz as a bargaining chip.

I identified this on my show a week into the war and said it on my show: if the United States does not break Iran’s control over Hormuz immediately, every later battlefield success will be strategically compromised.

That is exactly what happened.

The U.S. and Israel hit Iran hard. The White House says more than 10,000 sorties were flown and more than 13,000 targets were struck. Iranian air defenses, command nodes, missile sites, naval targets, and parts of the regime’s military infrastructure were devastated.

But tactical destruction is not victory.

Victory requires identifying the enemy’s decisive leverage and breaking it.

Iran’s leverage was Hormuz.

If America controls the Strait, Iran is isolated. Its exports are constrained. Its revenue dries up. Its regime faces the consequences of aggression. The pressure falls on Tehran.

If Iran controls the Strait, the pressure falls on Washington. Oil prices rise. LNG markets tighten. Allies panic. Markets wobble. Governments demand de-escalation. Suddenly the aggressor is negotiating from leverage.

That is exactly what happened.

Iran did not need to defeat the U.S. Navy. It only needed to convince American politicians that reopening the Strait by force was too risky, too costly, too frightening.

And Trump accepted that premise.

Once he did, the war was lost politically, no matter how many targets were destroyed.

The tragedy is that America did not lack the means. It lacked the will and the strategic clarity.

A serious administration would have flooded the theater early, established overwhelming control of the air and sea approaches, protected commercial transit, cleared mines, destroyed minelayers, and made clear that any Iranian attempt to close the Strait would bring immediate military consequences.

Hard? Yes.

Risky? Of course.

But wars are hard and risky. That is why they must be fought only when the objective is clear and the will exists to achieve it.

The unforgivable error was going to war while leaving Iran’s strongest weapon intact.

And now we have a deal that reportedly reopens the Strait temporarily, lifts parts of the blockade, offers sanctions relief, unfreezes billions, contemplates a massive reconstruction fund, and postpones the hardest questions: missiles, proxies, enrichment, and the survival of the regime itself.

This is not how a serious country wins a war.

This is how it buys time from the enemy after failing to neutralize the enemy’s strongest weapon.

The worst part is not this agreement. The worst part is the precedent.

Iran now knows that if it can close Hormuz long enough, America will bargain. China is watching. Every hostile regime sitting near a chokepoint is watching. The lesson they will draw is obvious: do not defeat the U.S. military; threaten the arteries of trade until American politicians fear the economic consequences of victory.

That is the catastrophe.

Not merely that Trump blinked. Not merely that Iran survived. But that the United States taught its enemies that control over trade routes can substitute for military power.

Wars are not won by counting targets destroyed. They are won by achieving the political objective.

The objective should have been the defeat of the Iranian regime and the restoration of absolute freedom of navigation in the Persian Gulf.

Instead, America settled for a pause — and Iran kept the weapon.

The bill for that failure will not come due all at once.
But it will come due.

[Rationale Gal @NativeGaWench]

@isaacrrr7 He's always been like this. You just noticed??🤷‍♀️

[CALL TO ACTIVISM @CalltoActivism]

This is outstanding.

Senator Jon Ossoff was asked for his response to Donald Trump after he called him a "failed Dumocrat" and "Os(jerk!)off” and he managed to destroy him without stooping to his idiotic level. Just awesome.

[Neil Stone @DrNeilStone]

Blaming the Iranian people for "not rising up" is worst kind of victim blaming

They *did* rise up and were slaughtered

Trump said help was on the way

Help came, but it was late, botched and then he surrendered.

[Joe Walsh @WalshFreedom]

On the world stage, lying about America, badmouthing America. Talking shit about America. Trashing our democracy. He is a traitor to this country. He should be in jail.

[Rationale Gal @NativeGaWench]

This is so disturbing!!!

[Political Punk @actingliketommy]

This is why christians think everyone is “after the kids,” because christians force kids into their religion with threats of hell and indoctrinated shame from the moment they arrive. Christians are groomers.

[Neil Stone @DrNeilStone]

Oh

[Antidepressant Content @depressionlesss]

They say wild animals don't remember. But this dying chimp proved everyone wrong the second her old caretaker walked in

[Melanie D'Arrigo @DarrigoMelanie]

We have this, but kids cancer research was deemed wasteful spending.

[Neil Stone @DrNeilStone]

I don't like being wrong but I am not too proud to admit when I am

I did not in a million years expect that Trump would end up signing a deal with the Iranian regime that is far worse than the Obama deal

But there you have it

[Simon Maechling @simonmaechling]

A plumber knows more about plumbing than you.

A pilot knows more about flying than you.

A scientist usually knows more about science than you.

That doesn’t make them automatically right.

But it does mean the burden of proof is on the person claiming thousands of experts got it wrong.

Science isn’t a democracy.

It’s not decided by likes, vibes, or confidence.

It’s decided by evidence.

And evidence doesn’t care who wins the argument.

[Rationale Gal @NativeGaWench]

@NeverteIImeodd Grok, did this man that got punched die?