The Dispatch Podcast - Crime or Karma?

Episode Date: March 24, 2023

In an echo of times long past, AO host emeritus David French joins Steve, Sarah, and Jonah as part of our long game to get him canceled from his fancy new job. They discuss Trump's hush-money case, what GOP leaders are saying about the Iraq War on the anniversary of the invasion, and Buffalo Wild Wings' not-so-secret secret.  Show Notes: -Poll: US Public Opinion in a Time of War -Politico: Liberal Manhattan DA takes on Trump Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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joined by Jonah Goldberg, Steve Hayes, and drum roll, drum roll, David French. Welcome back, David. Well, thank you, and thank you for letting me guest in yet another one of the podcast you're hosting. All right, we are going to hit a lot of topics today. As you can imagine, we will start with what everyone seems to be kind of waiting on, talking about this week, which is the potential pending indictment of Donald Trump coming out of

New York City. We will also talk about the 20th anniversary of the Iraq War. And finally, a little bit on misinformation. Let's dive right in. So Jonah, Steve, David, all of us have been having separate conversations about this pending indictment and feelings. And I think we all actually feel a little differently about it. And so I just want to start from that place. Set aside the politics and whether this will help Donald Trump or hurt Donald Trump.

And the law, which David and I covered in some detail on advisory. opinions at the episode that came out on Thursday morning. But what's your just big picture take, Jonah? So this shouldn't be too much of a shock. I'm sick of the lawyers dominating these kinds of conversations. The analogy I draw is to impeachment, which both of you guys will concede, impeachment trials are not criminal trials. They're there to basically just do one thing.

right is assigned political for one of a better word culpability or guilt or innocence not criminal guilt or innocence and yet as de Tocqueville kind of predicted the courts take over every political issue and then the legalistic language of courts starts to infect our political language and so I am totally with you guys as far I mean I haven't listened to the latest A.O. about this but I know from texts with Sarah and whatnot, totally with you guys that the law stuff is pretty sketchy from, you know, what Bragg is trying to do. I just think that, like, as a political question,

you don't really need to get too deep into the law stuff to realize that Donald Trump is a guilty, right? I mean, like, no one, no one, and even his biggest defender's like, why I never. How dare you suggest that Donald Trump would break the holy bonds of matrimony and sleep with a porn star, right? No one's making that argument. And- Okay. So that's important. Guilty of what? Guilty of the scummy behavior that he did, right? I mean, like, again, I don't care whether

it's technically a misdemeanor or a felony violation about recording a business deal or whatever or whether he, like, who care? I honestly don't care about that part about it. I don't think he had criminal intent in his mind when he was doing this. I think he's a scummy guy. And people say, oh, you can't believe anything Michael Cohen does or says because he's a convicted criminal lying bagman grifter. It's like, okay, he was Donald Trump's right-hand lawyer. What does that say about Donald Trump?

Anyway, my whole point is that there are moral arguments to be had here. You don't have to care about the legal technicalities to say the guy is unfit for office, which is the real question here. and I think that this is also getting to, you know, Sarah and I've been going back doing this colloquy about Man for All Seasons, but I think that the the larger dynamic here is a perfect example

something I've been, you know, banging my spoon on my high chair about for years now, which is that Trump violates all sorts of norms. In response, his enemies violate norms because they think they have to. And therefore, and then you have people on the right saying, see, they're lawless, we have to violate norms to punish them

for their norm violations, which are incited by, Trump's norm violations, and it is basically this vicious cycle of mutual permission granting to be your worst selves. And so, you know, Matt Gates saying that, you know, Desantis should bar Trump from being extradited to New York because, you know, a rogue prosecutor shouldn't be allowed to do this, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. People are embracing lawlessness because of the imagined lawlessness of the other side, and each side sees the other side as the real lawless.

actor and it's all incredibly stupid all right jonah colon incredibly stupid steve you're up so i agree with everything that jonah has said but i want to dwell for a moment on a thing that he sort of breezed right by and that is michael cohen i think it actually does matter that michael cohen is and a well-known liar who nobody should believe for any reasons and i say this not because of its import to the actual potential prosecution, but because of the way that the media have handled Michael Cohen. All of the sudden, this guy who for years, we've watched, some of his lies were just sort of silly, nonsensical lies. He'd watched him on Sean Hannity during the 2015, 2016, presidential campaign. And it was obvious that this guy was just peddling BS. It didn't make

any sense. There's no reason to believe him. He comes out. after his falling out with Donald Trump, he comes out and he becomes a main witness in this case. And all of a sudden, the same mainstream media actors who have, I think, correctly dismissed him for years as a known prevaricator are holding him up as a hero and seeming to trust his judgment on all of the particulars here. Now, as it relates to the case, it doesn't matter that much because I think, as you said, Jonah, we have documented. here. I mean, we've got the goods. We've got some of the paperwork. But I don't want to see him on a mainstream outlet where journalists are putting him forward to their listeners and viewers as somebody we should take seriously, somebody who's credible on such matters. More broadly, I mean, this is not a unique, unique view in this. I think it's unfortunate given the flimsyness of the case or the creativeness of the, the, the the DA, however you want to look at it, that this is likely to be the one that this is likely

to be the one that goes first. I mean, I think the other cases are stronger. I mean, David, what, you wrote a piece about the Georgia case a year and a half ago saying that this was where Donald Trump's real potential legal problems, where you guys have talked about that on A.O., I'm told since I don't listen. Those are the cases. I think they're very serious. This is, you're talking about trying to upend an election.

Those are the cases I wish would have come first. I think those are the cases where he should be held accountable. All right. Steve Hayes, colon, Michael Cohen is an SOB. David, you're up. I mean, I can't separate this from the law. You know, like we're talking about a possible indictment and my feelings about a possible indictment

are completely directly related to the, quality of the legal case. As they should be. Please continue. So it's just impossible for me to think about this in any way separate because one of the things I've been arguing forever and ever is we just need to treat Donald Trump like a citizen, not like a former president. This is a republic, not a monarchy. We don't have nobility.

And would I want to see a citizen? Should a citizen be indicted for this crime that the Manhattan District attorney is apparently, and we have to add the parenthetical now, apparently, because we haven't seen an indictment yet, so there could be some surprises to it. But what he's apparently looking into, and I guess a good way to just sort of boil this down is that he's wanting to indict Donald Trump and just a dude. He's wanting to indict a person on a legal theory. that relies on an uninicted, he's wanting to indict a person in state court on a legal theory that depends on an unindicted, unproven federal prosecution.

Okay. So he's in state court. The case depends upon a federal case, not a state case, that both the Trump and the Biden departments of justice, just chose not to bring. Okay, so that's a very important aspect of this. This is, and also, by the way, he's potentially bringing an indictment that his predecessor looked at, and at least before he ended his term, chose not to bring. And so this is really unusual.

This is not the way criminal cases tend to go. There's a reason why this has been called, if you're looking, if you're reading legal analyses of it, they're going to call it untrue. Tested theory, novel theory, even the guy who the prosecutor, Mark Pomerantz, who left Bragg's office a year ago and wrote a book, a pretty scathing book about the, about Bragg not pursuing sort of bigger, bolder charges against Trump related to all of his financial dealings. he had a sort of a racketeering theory that he wanted to pursue. And he had said that this narrow Stormy Daniels, sorry, theory was just untested and too risky under New York law. So you're talking about a legal case that is just risky and novel. And that's not how you prosecute people.

That's just not what you do. Yeah, but David, I read in Politico. that Alvin Bragg is a by-the-book politics-averse prosecutor who just is just following the law here. Really? I mean, far be it. It was a shockingly odd piece. Wow, I did not read that.

Far be it for me to disagree with that. I put it in our Slack channel. It was their main piece the other day. And it was like made him sound like he was, you know, Elliot Ness just following the law. His hands were tied. There was nothing he can do. With his novel theory than no one else endorses.

All right, so David French, colon, got more holes than Swiss cheese, yo. Yeah, that's exactly what I said. I think it is. So I have tried to distill my feelings, and I will try to explain them. Like Steve built on Jonah, I will build on David, which is this. If you believe that, you know, despite anything that David just said, that there are real questions around the legal case, there's merit to it, and you think it should be pursued.

There's, you know, sure, the five-year statute of limitations has run on its face, but there's all sorts of reasons why that statute of limitations doesn't apply here. And yeah, it's a state law based on. a federal law that wasn't indicted, but, you know, there are good reasons why that's all okay. I'm actually okay with you. We have no problem, no beef whatsoever.

Here's the people I have beef with. One of them might be named Jonah. Donald Trump is guilty of stuff, unnamed atmospherics, moral stuff, and therefore it's fine if he gets indicted for something whatever,

because I just don't care that much. He had it coming. It's like, you know, norm-based karma, and we just shouldn't get that worked up about it. Those are the people that I'm having beef with right now. More the lawyers who say that than Jonah. Jonah shouldn't be held responsible for his ignorance. But this is where the man for all the time.

You never let me off the hook for my ignorance. This is where the man for all seasons argument that Joan is referring to comes in, right? It's William Roper and Sir Thomas Moore having this colloquy in the play. And Roper says, so now you give the devil the benefit of the law? And Moore says, yes, what would you do?

Cut a great road through the law to get after the devil? And Roper says, yes, I'd cut down every law in England to do that. That is what I feel like too many people are willing to do when it comes to Donald Trump, that it doesn't matter how you get there. Just indict him and we'll figure out what for later. We'll figure out the why later because he's guilty of bad stuff. And the specifics of the law don't matter.

So that's my feels. I feels as I light my incense candle that I have the right of rebuttal here. I think you might. So let me stipulate up front that at the beginning of my comments, I did say that I agree with you guys on the lost. stuff that I think that this is shaky, dubious at best. I also think we agree, I think we all agree on the political stuff that this is a really dumb case to bring first if you're going to bring it at all, right?

And that it's going to help, I don't think, a lot, but it's going to help Trump try to inoculate himself from all future indictments because you're going to say, look how, you know, these are all politicized, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. I agree with all of that. And I think already has, by the way. I think that ship has perhaps sailed. They're making the argument. I got a counter arguing with that, but we can do that another time.

That said, and it's so rare I get to Elide perfectly into a Rolling Stone song. But let's not have too much sympathy for the devil here, right? In Man for All Seasons, Thomas Mord doesn't say, I feel bad for the devil. Thomas Mord. I don't feel bad for Donald Trump. Yeah. But this is sort of. my point is that Donald Trump has blundered into life, always pushing the envelope, always relying on

the restraint and moral sense of other people as safeguards against his own reckless, grotesque behavior. What accomplishments he had in his first two years or so as a president were all thanks to these circuit breaker people, the grownups in the room, Paul Ryan, Mitch McConnell, who tried to channel his bull and channel stuff towards good. If you have a problem with people like me who aren't all that worked up with the fact that a guy who has spent his entire life looking for trouble found trouble,

I have a problem with people who are trying to turn him into a martyr because of this. He invites all of this crap upon himself. Now, like, I wouldn't have picked a stay puff marshmallow man to be the form of the destructor in Ghostbusters, nor would have I picked this case to be the form of Donald Trump's destructor. That doesn't mean Donald Trump doesn't have all this stuff coming.

You literally, and I really do mean literally, have people out there arguing that Trump is like Jesus Christ because of this. I'm allowed to say those people are bananas and the idea that somehow, my only point is that like I let's put it about Bill Clinton right so I was not disgusted by Bill Clinton because he lied under oath about an affair I thought that was another reason to be mad at him to be sure but the underlying behavior that he lied about was the thing that we are supposed to have been

condemning and the Clinton impeachment became this legalistic thing instead of the actual moral turpitude of the man similarly Donald Trump's behavior is the thing that should cause all good people in both parties to say, this guy has no place in public life. He lacks the character and fitness to be a dog catcher, never mind President of the United States. And that doesn't matter if they can get 12 members of a grand jury to indict him for this stupid bookkeeping thing. Okay. First of all, how dare you not roll over and play my foil? So there's that. But second of all, no, my sympathy is no more with Donald Trump than it is with the Nazis in scope. As you know, the Nazis marching in Skokie is to me, one of the proudest moments in our country's history.

And it's not that I'm so thrilled that they had their swastikas flying high. It is that by virtue of the Nazis getting their parade permit, I know that my free speech rights are protected. And by virtue of cutting down all the laws to get to the devil, it's not that I feel bad for the devil. feel bad for me because now all the laws have been cut down and that's a problem but and steve i'm coming to you but i have to ask because i'm i'm laughing a little bit i'm curious david i think we might be getting to the heart of the issue here which jona is so good at doing annoyingly from time to time which is i was deeply offended by bill clinton lying under oath as i like i'm curious where you fall because you're sort of, you've got a foot in both worlds there.

If Bill Clinton had been just a normal dude who cheated on his wife with a young, you know, person who worked for him, I, again, I'm not patting him on the back for that. But, no, my outrage was that the president of the United States should never be lying under oath when he is sworn to uphold the very laws and constitution that he is now, lying through. Yeah. So this is a really good conversation because it gets to what's the legal standards you should hold someone to versus the moral standards you should hold them to.

So my view is that the higher you hire office you aspire to or attain, the higher the standard, the moral standard we should expect from you. You are a leader. You have cultural power and influence. You should exercise that to the good. And so we should already be holding these politicians accountable for the failure of the moral standard well before we get to the legal standard. In other words, there should have been revelation after revelation after revelation after revelation

that should have discredited Trump long before this so that by the time you get to news of, say, an Alvin Bragg investigation. and it's like, oh, you remember that discredited politician who tried to become president many years ago and how much of a liar he was? Well, it turns out he may have violated campaign finance law and New York state law and falsification of business records, but it's a stretch, don't know if they're going to prosecute him for it.

So that's the way it should have gone. But the way it actually goes is we've created a system where there's a crossing, a tipping point where you can become too powerful and important for morality. And I used to say, ha, ha, that's what Democrats do. Look at Bill Clinton.

Because the Bill Clinton story was never, well, he just lied about an affair under oath. He lied about an affair under oath that was a relationship that I think now people fully recognize as completely exploitive. And why was he under oath anyway? Because he was being

sued in a sexual harassment lawsuit where there was evidence that he exposed himself to another woman. And then it wasn't just lying under oath. It was then taking steps to obstruct justice to conceal his wrongdoing. And so, yeah, we are where we are in large part because the moral guardrails have just disappeared so that all we have now are the legal guardrails. It's, I can't even tell you how many times that in the last three, four years, the law has had to come and save us from ourselves. One of the key examples of this is the election steel effort in 2020. Any decent political movement would have drummed out of it quickly the Sydney Powell's of the world. The four seasons total landscaping moment would have been not just the end of everything, but sort of the

exclamation point on the end of everything as these people are completely absurd and have no constituency and should just go away. Instead, the total absence of standards meant that the sort of the saving grace at the very end had to be court after court, after court, after court, saying this is total nonsense. And so my concern is in this instance, in this instance, the legal system rather than being a backstop sort of against our failed sense of basic morality is going to actually fail as well. And that's my concern. Last word to you, Steve. How do we get out of this larger mess? You know, I don't know that we do. I mean, I think one of the things that's depressing as I listen to the three of you talk about this is that there isn't more talk like

this, honestly. I mean, we're sort of going into the weeds and we're trying to make sense of this and we're talking about appropriate moral standards and the letter of the law. And I'd say certainly it's been the case that the dispatch has been home to people who are making, who have made arguments who have the past three and a half years about the importance of process and the importance of following the rules and following the law. And it feels just so quaint to me because you have on the one side, if you look at the sort of the broad public debate, the people pumping their fists and yelling and screaming, get Donald Trump, get Donald Trump, sort of we don't care about the details of the law. And you have on the other side people who just want to defend Donald Trump,

but would defend him not just in this case, because, you know, not just against an overly aggressive or creative prosecution, but we'll defend him on the things where we know that he's guilty. Defended him in the first impeachment. Defended him in the second impeachment. We'll defend him on the stolen election stuff. And I don't want to be too much of a downer, but I am concerned that we're not going to get back to the kinds of national discussions that we're having here. That it's all just a food fight. Who wins? Yeah. I mean, that food fight of stuff that we're actually not going to talk about today, right? The House GOP's sort of absurd response the, you know, Trump calling for protests, people saying they should be peaceful, how the

24 candidates are sort of put into this box by it and are, for the most part, I think, you know, defending Donald Trump. There's all of that small ball stuff. But yeah, I think you're right. Like, I don't find that, I guess I find it interesting or I would find it interesting, except for this really big stuff that I think is really important to the future of the country. and nobody seems to care. Right, but do you agree with me? I mean, I think you framed that the right way. I mean, it feels like we're the only, well, not the only.

What we're talking about here is different than what a lot of people are talking about. Because a lot of people care about the stuff that you have just said is not important. And again, it's like important for tomorrow, but it's not important for 10 years from now. Or, you know, when we look back on this era, we're not going to be talking about the House GOP letter sent from Jim Jordan, which again, I just want to say, like, of course it's stupid, but it doesn't go to these larger philosophical questions about the rule of law, about process, about the role of character and leadership. And yeah, I feel like people aren't talking about those things because there's no good answers. And maybe it's because in part,

we all agree, but want to make exceptions because the other side's really bad and they did it first. Wait, so you're saying that Rand Paul is wrong that Alvin Bragg shouldn't be thrown in jail? Oh my God. That tweet in particular was so offensive. It is. So just to fill y'all in, so Senator Rand Paul tweeted that Alvin Bragg should be in jail. And when a reporter followed up and said, for what? He said, I stand by my tweet. That is awful. He's been asked about it a number of times and he keeps referring people back to the tweet. It's also, I mean, you do have to point out the irony of just Trump supporters now who are complaining, who get to the point where they complain about the details of Alvin Bragg and what he's trying to do here, you know, and invoke the rule of law, are the same people in many cases who stood at the rallies and chanted, lock her up about Hillary Clinton throughout 2016. I think there were real problems with what Hillary Clinton did. I wanted to have this same kind of conversation about.

her and about what she did and about the way that that was handled. But there's a there's sort of a deep irony that the people who are now pretending at least to care about the rule of law or the same people who wanted to just throw Hillary Clinton in jail. You know what, Steve? I think you might have gotten to the root of my feels on all of this because it really bothered me when I was at the Department of Justice. People, you know, always focus on the Mueller part of the investigation. But we also were getting a lot of heat, pressure, light, whatever you want to call it. Actually, not much light, mostly just heat. About Hillary Clinton, why haven't you indicted her?

For what? And they were like, uranium one. What? That is the name of a company. Show me the law that you would like her to be indicted under and the facts that fit that. And the answer that you would sort of eventually get to is who cares?

We all know she's guilty. And it was so offensive to me to hear things like that. And is it offending me this week? and we're moving on. We're moving on, I say. Not long ago, I saw someone go through a sudden loss, and it was a stark reminder of how quickly life can change and why protecting the people you love is so important. Knowing you can take steps to help protect your loved ones

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plug-in hybrid from $599 bi-weekly at 3.99% during the Volvo Fall Experience event. Conditions supply, visit your local Volvo retailer or go to explorevolvo.com. This episode is brought to you by Squarespace. Squarespace is the platform that helps you create a polished professional home online. Whether you're building a site for your business, your writing, or a new project, Squarespace brings everything together in one place. With Squarespace's cutting-edge design tools, you can launch a website that looks sharp from day one. Use one of their award-winning templates or try the new Blueprint AI, which tailors a site for you based on your goals and style.

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Go to Squarespace.com slash dispatch for a free trial. And when you're ready to launch, use offer code dispatch to save 10% off your first purchase of a website or domain. David, I think we'll start with you. 20th anniversary of the Iraq War. And frankly, I want to have a similar discussion to the one I think we'll be having in 20 years about this week or era. Which is, how did the Iraq War change American politics and culture? That's a really, really good question. And I would say I had not seen the Iraq War really changed American politics and culture

or had seen how much disdain for the Iraq War had changed American politics and culture until the rise of Trump. Because when Trump, when Trump, Rose, my sense of the American sort of public's view of it was that Democrats had soured on it because no one should say Democrats initially opposed it. There were probably a higher percentage of Democrats who initially opposed it than Republicans, but there was strong bipartisan support for the Iraq War. Let's just make that clear. There was very strong congressional majorities who authorized it. This was something that leaders in the Democratic and Republican Party had supported. And there was, yes, a vocal opposition, but it was a minority opposition.

And my general view is that by 2016, things had kind of broken down along partisan lines with Republicans, to the stint that they had frustration with it. It was more with execution, that there had been blunders that had made the war more difficult than it should have been, especially the post-invasion phase of the war, much more difficult that it should have been, but that it was still worth fighting and Democrats who had turned decisively against it and Trump comes in and he runs like he belongs to Code Pink and which was disingenuous.

I mean, there was no real evidence that he had been some sort of vocal opponent of the war before. And I don't know if he so much tapped into something that already existed or he had tapped into some sort of underlying anti-establishment anger and that however he, he directed it, his people would buy into it, which also I think is part of it. But he definitely tapped into an underlying sense of anger about the war that I did not know existed in the GOP, that I'll be completely frank. I had not seen. And so, and then it started

to create a culture even within the GOP that if you supported the Iraq war, you were a part of the problem, you are going to be furiously attacked, that there was no real argument for it. It was the consensus that all right-thinking people now agree it wasn't right. And I don't think that everyone told rank and file Republicans that completely. It was an interesting, I believe the Axios poll recently that showed that there was still pretty strong Republican support for the invasion, which was fascinating to me, given the last seven years of rhetoric from Trump. I'm going to be let me let me put on a predictive cap and I'm going to think in 20 years you're going to start to see some interesting reappraisals from the consensus now

that it was all just a terrible mistake I still support it I still think it was the right decision I believe that there were problems with execution but it has become such a political hot potato even on the right as well that I don't honestly in 20 years from now 20 years on at this 20 year anniversary I still don't know if we're able to look at it from a sort of a sense of historical professional historical detachment if that makes sense well Steve I was going to ask you a different question but now I just want to hear your response to what David just said so so much so much there So I was a very strong supporter of the Iraq where I wrote a book about Saddam Hussein's support for Islamic terrorism, including al-Qaeda and its affiliates.

And I thought that among the arguments to go to war, that was one of the strongest, given what we'd seen, the attacks we'd seen on the homeland on 9-11 and Saddam's history through the 1990s of both building weapons of mass destruction program and aggressive. external behavior. I think one point that David made that I agree with entirely, and I think doesn't get nearly enough attention, it is really important to remember that there was a very broad bipartisan consensus to go to war. If you look back at the speeches, this is October 8th and 9th of 2002, the Senate floor speeches made by the most outspoken opponents of the war, Many of them cited things like the presence of Saddam's WMD program in their arguments against going to war in Iraq. Ted Kennedy, who's one of the leading opponents of the war, gave a speech in which he talked about the threats to U.S. soldiers, U.S. troops, if we sent them into theater because we knew Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction. Hillary Clinton, in her speech, made an argument about Saddam's history of support.

support for jihadists and Islamic extremists. So there was a broad consensus. This was not the Bush administration lying the country into war. There was a consensus view, particularly on weapons of mass destruction, that he was, that he had the stuff and that he was a threat. But just to push back on that for one second, isn't, wouldn't their response be? Yeah, it was the consensus view because we were all getting briefings that were not right. Correct. Yes. I think that's true. And I think, I mean, look, If you want to go back to your original question, what's the sort of lasting impact of this? I think the first thing I thought of when you said that was this was yet another in a long string of incidents and maybe the most significant in eroding the sense of trust that the American people have in institutions broadly, right? And that came with good reason.

It turned out, I mean, if you go back and you read Bob Woodward's books, the number of sources that we had, especially in human intelligence collection, on Iraq's WMD program, but in particular on Iraq's support for terrorism, were minimal. At one point Woodward quotes somebody who was a leader in the CIA's effort to collect against the Iraqi target. And this person, and Woodward says, you know, how many people did we have on the ground looking at Iraq and its support for terrorism? And this person says, I can count them on one hand and still pick my nose. So we made all of these decisions with a very flimsy, I would say, record of what was actually going on at the time the decisions are made. Now, that's different separate from the long history of what we'd seen from Saddam. going back to the Gulf War, going back before the Gulf War, we know we had these weapons of mass destruction.

We know he was aggressive in supporting all kinds of terrorists. He housed terrorists. He gave safe haven to terrorists in the country. He supported them well beyond the country. Some of the things that we found out after the war was that he was paying Iman al-Zawahari, his Egyptian Islamic jihad, for years. Iman al-Zawahiri was Osama bin Laden's number two. Saddam Hussein was making regular payment.

to Osama bin Laden's number two. He was funding al-Qaeda affiliates in places like the Philippines and Africa, what have you. So on the question of whether Saddam Hussein and Iraq posed the threat that we thought he posed, at this point 20 years ago, I think the answer is no. He didn't have the weapons of mass destruction that we thought he had. The Dolphur report, which studied this, made, I think, a convincing, a compelling case that he would have reconstituted, suited those programs. The second, the pressure was off of him, but he didn't have them the way that we had them. I think, I guess my, my biggest problem with the way that the war unfolded

was in its execution. I think there was a good reason to believe from the beginning, from the initial surge into the country, that we didn't have enough troops, that we couldn't control the ground. And the administration, I think the Pentagon and Donald Romsfeld was slow to realize that fact, very slow to realize that fact, and took years to overcome that fact, I think it created a lot of problems. There were all sorts of, I think, more specific problems with the execution of the war. But in the big picture, David's, the Axios poll that David cited was so interesting because it was the case that 60 percent, six and 10 Republicans said the U.S. was right to invade. I was surprised that one in four Democrats

still today says the U.S. was right to invade. But you've read a lot or heard a lot this week about how it's cast this long shadow over U.S. foreign policymaking, and it's made the conventional wisdom has made the Republican Party in particular much more reluctant to have the U.S. take this leading role on the world stage. And if that's true, it doesn't show up in this poll. 79% of Republicans say the U.S. should continue to be the global leader. And a huge majority of Republicans, I'm quoting here, 88% oppose the U.S. reducing military and national security spending. So as you've read for the past week about this new dovish, non-interventionist Republican Party, It sets aside polling results like that, and I think we're unwise to do that.

Jonah, one of the watershed moments in modern American history is the one-two punch of the Vietnam War and Watergate. And, I mean, there's any manner of things you can look at in the last 50 years, and people will say, ah, but remember, this is coming out of those post-Vietnam Watergate years, and that's why the American people, X, Y, or Z. And I wonder if the Iraq war tied together with the 2008 financial crisis really can account for a lot of our, at least last seven years or so of politics. And I'm wondering what you think of that comparison. No, I think that's a very good comparison. And we've been talking here many, many, many times about the long tale of populist reactions to financial crises. and I think the coming on the heels of the Iraq war and also just the election of Barack Obama

which was its own sort of move the origin window in all sorts of ways I think is going to be remembered I mean I hate the phrase of an inflection point I really hate it but it's going to be remembered as something like an inflection point in American history and I think look I mean I I think that... I guess part of the question is,

we know the 2008 financial crisis had a huge impact. How much of that, though, was the sort of one-two aspect with the Iraq war and that sort of, as Steve points out, this trust in institutions

at the national security apparatus, somewhere between lied and screwed up, right? There's no, like, good version. And that once again, these so-called experts didn't get it right, and this cost lives. feel like it was why people were so quick during COVID to say don't trust the experts is

time and again whether again you look back at Vietnam or Iraq or then COVID this idea that like you just have to go with the experts because they're the experts there was no built up sense that that like no just no look I agree with that and I think I think there's there are there are other threads that connect some of these things I mean I'm thinking about you know I at mean to make it sound like Barack Obama's election was a disaster or anything like that, but under Barack Obama, let's put it this way, under George W. Bush, you had all sorts of assurances from experts about WMDs, about how it'll be a cakewalk and how, you know, they'll be gridded as liberators and all these things, which are actually a small part of a lot of people's

arguments, but they're the ones that got boosted. And in fact, the whole emphasis on WMD, as Paul Wolfowitz admitted in an interview with Sam Tannenhouse that got blown out of proportion was because it wasn't that it was the best or only reason to go into Iraq. It was the one reason that united all the different factions of the American foreign policy establishment. And so that was the one they settled on,

which I think was a blunder. But you had Barack Obama and the administration constantly invoking its own expertise saying those other experts couldn't be trusted because they were all liars and partisan. but we're the real dispassionate, pragmatic, objective, disinterested experts, and that's why we can promise you there will be shovel-ready jobs, right? And then there are no shovel-ready jobs.

And that the stimulus will get us out of this recession, and it didn't get us out of the recession. And so I think you have these multiplier effects of distrust that you keep going to the next example of something, and oh, crap, these experts aren't trustworthy either. And I think the big takeaway from, you know, everything that you guys have been saying for me is how important leadership is because including negative leadership right so an enormous number of democrats i think very cynically as stephen was

kind of alluding to said bush lied us into war now those democrats voted in favor of the war based upon as sarah was pointing out the same intelligence briefings that the bush administration had so where did the lie come in right and like but it was a very cynical way of saying oh i was misled by them to vote wrong even though um i know for a fact that that bush wasn't lying you can argue that they were wrong that's a perfectly legitimate argument to make but you can't say that that bush and cheney and that entire apparatus knew that the intel was wrong and did it anyway right And so the popularization of this lay light us into war thing was really, really immoral leadership by Democrats. It was throwing the credibility of the government itself under the bus for political expediency.

And you multiply that or you add to that Donald Trump coming in, you know, like, I mean, we were talking, we've been talking about how, oh, a lot of Democrats were in favor of the war. than they just changed their positions and pretended, you know, that they were lied to and all that. I'm angrier at this stage at a lot of my former, you know, conservative and Republican friends who were much more rah-rah for the war than I was. Yeah. Who are now pretending that they were always, you know, you know, you know, Lindbergs on this and that they were part of the American First Committee and they're like, how dare you try to, you know, like impose your values on Iraq and all these kinds of things?

Like, I remember, you know, people like Victor Davis Hansen being much more bought into the freedom agenda than I was. Oh, oh, of course. And now there's this whole sort of like, I'm a skeptic. I've always been a skeptic of American foreign power, you know, power projection and all the rest. And Donald Trump gave a lot of people permission to do that. And I don't think he had to do it. He could have, you know, like, I don't think there was this huge wellspring of hatred for Bushes, you know, for Jeb or W. when he ran in 2015, but the fact that he was willing to go there,

he kind of created this environment where it was kind of fun to crap on the bushes. And it took on a life of its own. Similarly, I think he created this environment where it was proof that you were willing to take on the establishment by saying you were always against the Iraq war. Leadership matters. And that's one of the reasons why I think you can get, like, you can get out of a lot of these mistakes by actually modeling the right kind of behavior. but one of the things you have to do

is not think that the most important constituency in your life are your 10,000 most ardent Twitter followers. Can I jump in real fast on the war itself, the justification for the war itself? You know, there's a lot of revisionist history there that's all connected with the Bush lied, people died argument. Look,

There were a layer of reasons why we did this. I mean, reason after reason, after reason, up to and including Saddam Hussein was destabilizing the Middle East. He was one of the principal financial supporters of the Second Intifada that was destabilizing Israel and was horrific. He hatched a plot to try to kill an American president, former president, George H.W. Bush. his forces were shooting at American pilots almost on a daily basis. He was a supporter of international terrorism. He was periodically menacing neighbors that he'd invaded previously and kept and was periodically menacing them again.

And then on the WMD front, a lot of people forget that among the people deceived by the WMD issue, there's a lot of evidence that those people included Saddam Hussein. who believed he had a more viable chemical weapons arsenal than he really did. And in fact, we did find a lot of chemical weapons in Iraq. There's a New York Times report from 2014. That's one of the more valuable correctives to the record that I've ever read that everyone's forgotten about.

But when I was there, we were finding chemical weapons in country. And that was something that was happening when I was there. when I was there. And now they weren't the ready to use stocks that we thought existed. That is absolutely correct. But this idea that Iraq was a chemical weapons-free zone is just fictional. They were there just not as we believe them to be. I really like this.

And finally, I really like the story as talking to a general, this was towards the end of the war, towards the end of phase one of the war. and he had expressed anger that America had gone into Iraq in a meeting with Petraeus. And Petraeus said to him, this is being repeated secondhand to me later on, but he says, Petraeus said to me,

just put on your strategic cap and look at the map of the Middle East and I'm going to walk out of the room. And when I come back into the room in five minutes, you're going to tell me why we're here. That there are a lot of fundamental geostromatic, strategic reasons why Saddam Hussein, on that spot of the map of the world, was particularly dangerous to the United States and the world. And so I don't want to gloss over all of the reasons

that existed independently from the WMD story that now pop culture has hatched in as saying was entirely false, which is also not the case. It was not. Steve, I want to get the last word of you on this. Iraq War, 20 years later, you literally wrote the book. How do you personally feel at the anniversary? Yeah, I mean, I think just to pick up on what David is saying, if you read everything that has been published over the past week or over the past couple of weeks,

are a sort of collective remembrance of the war and lessons about what it brought, sort of sets aside what Saddam Hussein was and what he was doing in the years leading up to it. I mean, people have kind of created this fictional account of Saddam sitting quietly in Baghdad, you know, not really messing with anybody, not really doing anything. He was, he was killing his own people to the tune of hundreds of thousands of Iraqis, torturing Shiites, the majority population in Iraq, killing the Kurds. He was funding and promoting terrorism in the region and much well beyond the region.

And it's hard to overstate the extent to which Bill Clinton's second term in office, this is true during the impeachment proceedings and all of the craziness that went with that, how much Bill Clinton was obsessed with the threat from Saddam Hussein. Bill Clinton went to the Pentagon and gave a speech about the greatest threat, it was the greatest threat that the civilized world faces and that was the possibility. of weapons of mass destruction, rogue state actors and non-state actors getting together and creating threats. And I think if you look back at the Iraq war and the decision making in that context, it's the most intellectually honest way to evaluate it. But it also, I think, gives you a sense of why George W. Bush and Dick Cheney and these others felt like they had to do what they did. It's a very different question, though, if you say knowing what we know now was it worth it? And on the one hand, it's sort of too cheap and easy to ask that question because

we didn't make the decision knowing everything we know now. But it matters to me as somebody who was a strong proponent of the war that we didn't find the stockpiles that we were told were there. I certainly thought they were there. Many Republicans thought they were there. Most Democrats thought they were there. They weren't there. So Saddam, I think it's fair to say, wasn't the immediate threat that we thought he was at the time. And, you know, remember there was a huge national debate over the meaning of the phrase imminent threat. And sometimes Bush people would say in its imminent threat,

even though they mostly avoided the phrase, but Democrats tried to put it in their mouth. The people who opposed the war would say, well, Saddam isn't an imminent threat, therefore we don't have to do anything about him. I think it can still matter that he was a threat. But when you take away the immediacy of the threat, if he doesn't have these stockpiles, I think the case for war becomes a lot more difficult.

And I say that as somebody, Jonah's right. I mean, as a historical matter, it is a fact that the Bush administration settled on the WMD. I mean, it was about 85% of the case that the Bush administration made. If you go and you look at Colin Powell's presentation at the United Nations as a proxy for how they made the case, and I think it was a proxy, about 85% of the, The case that the Bush administration made was on WMDs. I think it was appropriate to make a big case about the WMD threat. It's what we've been dealing with for the past decade.

But I don't think it was the only argument for the war. I think they would have been better off making more of a human rights case and making more of a broader threat case, more of a terrorist threat case. But I do think if you look back now knowing everything that we know now, I don't know that I would. I certainly wouldn't make the same arguments that I made then. I believe Saddam was a threat. I don't believe it was an immediate threat.

I don't, hard for me to imagine making the argument that we had to go to war the way that we did to eliminate the threat. All right, we're going to push our misinformation conversation to next week. And for a special, not worth your time, question mark. This one came in from Steve, which is surprising on some levels. And I think very unsurprising on other levels. Buffalo Wild Wings is facing a class action lawsuit from a group that feel deeply misled that their boneless wings are not simply

chicken wings with the bones removed. I have all sorts of questions of how anyone thought that to be the case. Buffalo Wild Wings responding publicly, it's true, our boneless wings are all white meat chicken. Our hamburgers contain no ham. our buffalo wings are 0% Buffalo. Needless to say, we won't be covering this case

on advisory opinions. It will be thrown out. Toot sweet, I predict. But thank you, Steve. I know how much Buffalo Wild Wings means to you and your family, and we're sorry that you're going through this difficult time. I mean, look, let me be clear.

I'm not a fan of boneless buffalo wings. I think they're horrible. Nobody thinks you are. We know. But I just like the response. I like the response. And anytime I can talk about wings, I like to talk about wings. They're horrible because white meat is so much worse than dark meat.

That's the... Oh, my God. Wrong. Wrong. Wrong. But I will say I had a rule for myself on campaigns. No pizza, no wings. And if you just stick to those two rules, and they're arbitrary, I will grant you.

If you just owe any time that you... can just don't eat the pizza or the wings. And that may mean that you don't eat for three days. I'll be honest. But you will not gain the campaign 20 if you just don't eat pizza and wings because it is all you'll be offered 90% of the time. It's really a starvation diet. But can you imagine how horrible your life would be if you didn't eat wings? Like, now I don't mean in life. I just mean on the campaign trail when you're traveling, don't eat pizza, don't eat wings. That's it. But you can be Pallio and just eat the wings, right? The problem is to see you and end up being paleo.

There's all sorts of problems, right? Then you're going to get into CrossFit. Then you're going to tell everyone. I mean, there's so many other issues. All right. With that, we are out today. Thank you, David French, for joining us. It was a real treat to see you.

It was such a surprise. Thank you, David. Thanks for having me. This was fun. Hurry up and get canceled. And with that, we will talk to you all next week. And then we got into this thing about our woodpecker is bad for trees. And then we got into this thing about our woodpecker is bad for trees. And it's actually yes and no.

It turns out that like If it's a healthy tree A woodpecker is not going to go at it Because a healthy tree is not going to have a lot of like Bugs underneath the bark for the woodpecker to go for At the same time If it's got a lot of bugs It's not a healthy tree and the woodpecker can make it worse

Yeah nuance Very dispassion We had a woodpecker in the spring briefly And I say briefly like two weeks is a long time David French is joining Wait what? What? What?

Adam, is this a special surprise for us? Adam sent me the link and said, Hey, do you want to join? And I said, yes. Really? And Adam felt like it was not something that the two founders and the host of the show should know. Apparently not.

I see. Wow. While you're actually recording. That's good. David. How's that second rate media? company you're working for now.