The Dispatch Podcast - Is Biden Just Bad at his Job?

Episode Date: September 22, 2021

After the latest surge of migrants in the border town of Del Rio, Texas, our hosts discuss how the Biden administration has handled the immigration issue since taking office. Plus, President Biden continues to have foreign policy problems. What happened with the botched drone strike in Afghanistan? Why is France mad at us? All of that leaves Jonah with one big question: Is Biden just bad at his job? Show Notes: -Jonah on Biden’s foreign policy -The Morning Dispatch breaks down the drone strike that killed civilians in Afghanistan -TMD catches you up on the deal between the U.S., U.K., and Australia -Tom Joscelyn on AUKUS in Vital Interests Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Welcome to the Dispatch podcast. I'm your host, Sarah Isgar, joined by Steve Hayes, David French, and Jonah Goldberg. We are going to discuss this administration's potentially unprecedented bad six weeks. We will first start with immigration, then trouble on the foreign policy front, first with our allies, then still Afghanistan. And finally, is Joe Biden just bad at his job? Let's dive right in. Immigration has really moved to the four, although it's been a problem throughout the Biden administration. Steve, I want to first start with the diagnosis of what caused this problem. Well, this is a problem that's been long in the making.

And we've talked about it before. Nobody should be surprised about this. Senior Biden administration officials, including the president himself, both as a candidate and then later as president-elect, were asked specific questions about this and suggested that they understood that there was likely to be this surge of migrants. They seemed wholly unprepared to deal with it and have since January 20th when the president was sworn in. They seem to have been taken surprised by the early surges. in the spring, which again were predicted. They named Kamala Harris, vice president, as the overseer of immigration policy.

She was going to work with countries in Central America to get to the root causes, to stem the flow of migrants. There have been some external factors, the political unrest in Haiti, the natural disasters, in Haiti, which have led in part to this latest. gathering in Del Rio, Texas, primarily Haitians looking to come to the United States, although many of those Haitians are coming from other Central and South American countries, not directly from Haiti. But I guess that's what is potentially the most surprising about this, is that they're either totally unprepared for something that they themselves predicted was going

to happen, or they have made a deliberate policy decision, to address it. And I think there is a case for both of those. I suspect the answer is probably a combination of two of them. But what it's led to is this moment that it really is a crisis. It's a growing crisis. We're talking about unprecedented numbers of people. And even if you're sympathetic to the United States as a home for asylum seekers, for increased immigration for humanitarian reasons, you know, expanding who we allow in legally, what you're seeing on the border today

is wholly unacceptable because that's not what we're witnessing. So, David, we're seeing a 21-year high surge at the border, and that was back in August. But if you go back to March, the president basically told everyone that we were just wrong,

you know, don't believe your lie in eyes. He said it happens every single solitary year. There is a significant increase in the number of people coming to the border in the winter months of January, February, March. It happens every year. But what we've seen now is this was not just the seasonal tides of immigration. It has been a long time since March, since they should have seen that this wasn't just the seasonal tides. What could they, should they have done between March And now what wasn't done? Well, you know,

boy, Sarah, that's where you get to the really interesting question because one of the things you can't say is you can't say that they rolled back all the Trump-era policies. They're still turning away most of the migrants under Title 42. In fact, they have been blocked in some of their efforts to derail Trump-era policies by judges. The one thing that they have done is they have done is they've allowed unaccompanied minors into the border at a greater scale.

So you are having, you know, more individuals in that situation, you know, more kids coming through. The other thing that's happening is it looks like you're having a lot of repeat crossers, people who tried before and are being turned away again. So I'm looking at some Politico reciting some statistics that in June there were 188,000. Let that thing in. that's a lot of people, 188,000 migrants apprehended at the border. 34% had tried to cross at least once before in the last 12 months. So part of this is the question is, what is should they have expected the surge of this magnitude?

And should they have taken steps to, for example, make sure that people are helped house better in Mexico, that are there, were there ways to, was the sending the message that unaccompanied children are going to be let in? Was that something that was materially counterproductive? All of those things are very good questions. But there's one thing that I think that is, that is just a failure, is the failure to anticipate the scale. Now, you can defend it by saying it's a scale we haven't seen for 20 plus years. How could you possibly anticipate it? However, there's some complicating factors here that should have made it maybe a little bit more easy to anticipate. And one is, you did have the upheaval of the pandemic.

You have economic upheaval of the pandemic. You have continuing problems in these countries where migrants are coming from. And then you had quite simply a change administration with one indicating that it had a lot more welcoming attitude towards migrants. And then that's going to incentivize people to give it a try. But on the one hand, I say, you should have been prepared. On the other hand, I'm not exactly sure that there is a way to comfortably deal with this scale of numbers approaching the border in a way that is neat and clean and easy to handle. This goes back to something that, you know, I remember Jonah bringing up back when we first talked about this.

One of the first ways to know that somebody doesn't really know how to deal with the border. as if they come forward and they say, I've got the plan to deal with the border. So this is hard. This is complicated. Should they have anticipated it? Yeah. Is it as simple as simply saying they've rolled back

all of the Trump era policies? No, because they haven't. So I'm at a position where I have both sympathy for the plight and concern that they weren't prepared. So, Jonah, this is exactly the conversation that I wanted to have because I'm at a position, because I feel like it's very easy for people on both sides to just sort of scream about their sort of 30,000-foot border policy.

But David did on two things that I think are the crux of the problem here that are really hard to solve. One, some of the biggest surge we've seen is an unaccompanied minors. First of all, they're unaccompanied, meaning they're not with their parents. They're not unaccompanied, meaning they're by themselves. They're being brought up by someone paid to take. them, usually a smuggler who is associated with one of the cartels. Those people are making a ton of money, more money potentially than they've been making on drugs. And so this has become

economically, actually economically somewhat similar to drugs. And we didn't do a great job with the drug wars, I'll just point out. And now it's humans and those humans are children. And, you know, they're dropping them over the wall. I think we can be pretty sure that a lot are ending up in some unsavory positions when they do reach the United States to pay off that debt. Second, some of this is atmospherics. You can talk to, they do interview any number of people trying to cross the border and they say, yeah, we thought Biden was friendlier to immigrants. And we thought now's a good time to come. What can the Biden administration possibly do to change

sort of a narrative that politically they can't change because of the politics. How can you possibly deal with this if you're the Biden administration? Well, we know that one proposed solution

to the problem as you lay it out was to send Kamala Harris to South America and say, don't do this right now. And it turns out a lot of poor, desperate people yearning to come to the United States

of America for a better life did not find that a particularly persuasive argument. No, because the issue wasn't whether they wanted, like whether they thought the Biden administration wanted them to come. The issue was that they thought the Biden administration would be more

lenient in terms of their ability to turn them away. And to David, point, maybe they're actually not. Because if you just overwhelm the border, you've overwhelmed the border. And there's not much that a Republican administration would be doing differently right now. Right. My only point was that they thought that somehow Kamala Harris could address the root causes and get turn off sort of the spigot of the flow of immigrants. And she failed at that. And she pretty clearly realized that either by design or by accident, Biden put her in a no-win situation as the border surge czar,

and she has kept a low profile on that subject ever since. Look, I think you're right. At some point, you hit a certain critical mass where the problem that you should have anticipated becomes a different problem at scale than one you can now deal with the same way as before. There's, you know, part of my objection, and maybe it's because I'm writing about this today,

is there's a passive voice thing that keeps coming into both the Biden administration's explanations of its or excuses of its own problems and the way the media covers it, where, and you heard it, I mean, I know this wasn't David's point. I mean, he explicitly wasn't making this point, but it just sneaks into the language where he says, this is a 20, you know, could he, could they, you know, he says, the Biden administration says that this is a, a 20 year high surge at the border. How could the, how could we have anticipated this. Well, it's a little like, it is a little unfair, but it's a little like blowing up a dam and then saying, look, this is, this is a 20 year high in flooding in the

area. They created a lot of the preconditions. Some of it just by campaigning the way Biden did and promising to be the non-Trump, and by the time, like a game of telephone, by the time that message gets down to Central America, it is not this, oh, by the way, we're going to hold on to these technical rules and we're not going to disband the CBB. It's like, come on in. And they shouldn't have gotten that message. And it really wasn't our message. It wasn't even the Biden campaign's message. But that's the way it got translated. And part of the problem they have, the Biden has is I think he's very much got a lot of memories from the Obama administration in his head. And he thinks that these are sort of replay he's replays where now

he's in charge. And the thing is, the border is a different issue now than it was when Obama was president. And even then, Obama got some really bad press for it, but at least the mainstream media was on his side on a lot of this stuff. We now have essentially bureaus of a lot of news outlets at the border full time because of the Trump administration. They haven't disband them. The cameras are up. Lots of people have bought into arguments that I think at times were unfair to the Trump administration. And now for fear of seeming inconsistent or hypocritical, they have to apply somewhat of the same standards to the Biden administration. And that is just really bad for the Biden administration because the Biden administration is locked into a very different political

coalition that wants to instantaneously believe that reigns on horses are whips when on the border patrol. And that believes, if not explicitly in open borders to something very close to it, at least on an ideological level. So they don't know how to talk about it. They just want the press to stop covering it. They, in some ways, I think they want to do the right thing, but they don't know how to do the right thing with this level of scrutiny and this level of a problem. And so it sucks for them. So real quick, Steve, just the politics of this, you know, how does the Biden administration,

how much does this affect the midterms? Is this a boon to Republicans? Is this what elected Trump in 2016? But maybe on steroids, because the pictures that we are seeing out of Del Rio, Whether you are an immigration hawk, they're stunning, or whether you just care about human beings who are living in, to call it third world, I think actually understates what they are living in down there. Yeah, nobody can be happy about this. Like, I think it's a potentially pretty significant political development for Biden for a couple different reasons. One, as Jonah suggests,

there is this, you know, he's getting lots of pressure on this from his left. The young man who tweeted out the video, there was a video that was tweeted out or a picture that was tweeted out and he made accusations that CPB was using whips on the migrants. They weren't whips. They were reins. The young man who sent out that message claiming that they were whips and later sent out a video worked for Julian Castro. This, a lot of this pressure is coming from Biden's left, and they're making clear that they think that this is totally unacceptable the way that this has been botched. The second reason I think this is problematic for him is it feeds this growing, I think, undeniable, not only narrative, but reality, that Biden is

not competent in the way that he promised he'd be competent. This doesn't happen if you have sort of a modicum of competence. I think it follows episodes like Afghanistan, where, again, wherever you fell on the question of whether we should withdraw or not, you look at what happened and you think that was a disaster. Well, this is another disaster. And it's on Joe Biden. And the third reason I think it's politically problematic for Biden is exactly what you're suggesting, Sarah. You know, certainly this will fire up the immigration hawks. And this is something that's been getting widespread coverage on Fox News for a long time. Fox always covers the border.

I think in some weird way, other news outlets have chosen not to cover it as much because Fox covers it so much. And there's this sense that if Fox is covering it, it can't be a real story. Well, they missed a big story because this is a real story and it's been growing in importance for a long time. But it will fire up the immigration hawks, but more to your point, Sarah, everybody else we'll look at this and just say, how does something like this happen? And I think you now have other mainstream news organizations that have been forced to cover this. And I think we'll look back

at some other rhetoric that we got from Kamala Harris, from Joe Biden, from people who speak on their behalf, as late as this spring, saying she was going to get to the root causes, this would be addressed, this was a seasonal surge, the numbers would be coming down. All of it was wrong. All of it. I mean, virtually everything they said was wrong. At a certain point, you don't have to be an immigration hawk or an immigration dove or a Republican or Democrat or conservative or liberal. You just look at that and you say, these people don't know what they're talking about. And that's, I think, the big risk. Yeah, I mean, what's really interesting to me is I think there's a direct parallel between Biden saying that we'd have an orderly withdrawal

from Afghanistan that this was all going to be fine. And again, the video of him saying, this happens every single solitary year, folks. There is a significant increase in the number of people coming to the border in the winter months. It happens every year, and then it goes back down. It looks like something that the White House may want to look into is having the president stop predicting the future because it is coming back to boomerang hard on him

when that then becomes the specific crisis. and he was the guy who ran on competence that he knew this, that he'd been around so long, there was nothing new under the sun, and then all of his predictions where he's patronizing to the person asking it, as in like you have no clue,

how could you even think there's been a surge at the border? Uh-huh. Yeah. Also, it's... Yeah, David. That Afghanistan comparison is so great because it also begins with a predicate of complicated situation. complicated situation, predictable negative outcome for which there was no effective plan.

We will be revisiting that. Yes, exactly. This will be a theme, I think, of this particular podcast episode. We've had senior officials at the Department of Homeland Security resign in the last two weeks, the chief of staff, another senior official. and, you know, something that's baffling me is not a lot of coverage on that. There's been tons of coverage that they resigned, but not a lot on the why, not a lot of palace intrigue stories. I want to know why all of a sudden we have two of the most senior people at the Department of Homeland Security quit in the middle of a crisis. Is it because they wanted to go harder?

Is it because they wanted to go, like what was the disagreement fundamentally? Not long ago. 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 and give them that extra layer of security brings real peace of mind. The truth is the consequences of not having life insurance can be serious. That kind of financial strain on top of everything else is why life insurance indeed matters. Ethos is an online platform that makes getting life insurance fast and easy to protect your family's future in

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Yeah, this is really something interesting because this kind of unfolded in a two-step process. So this is right after we had the debacle in Afghanistan, the last American, you know, you'd had that grainy image of the last American soldier, a general boarding the last plane, and flying. off. You had, you know, Biden essentially censured by the British Parliament, allies outraged, just a complete debacle in Afghanistan. And then all of a sudden, you turn around and you have what looks to be something unambiguously good. You've got Biden in the White House flanked by a big TV screen on his left-hand side. There's, you know, the prime minister of the United Kingdom on the right-hand side. There's the prime minister of Australia. And they're announced.

a defense deal to counter China that makes all the sense in the world. We are going to allow, and with British cooperation, Australia, to build a fleet, well, a class of nuclear submarines, far more powerful and capable than the diesel submarines that they had. We're going to give them technology and we're going to give them standoff missiles that are going to, I mean, be an absolute force multiplier for the Australian military. I mean, material. I mean, materially ramping up the Australian military at a time of increased tension. And this is something where even, you know, even a couple of years ago, Australia was navigating this middle ground between the U.S. and China.

Kind of, don't get us into your fight. And then all of a sudden, Australia throws all in with us. And then complication, it turns out that Australia had a, oh, I don't know, a submarine deal with France before to the tune of a cool about what, 66 billion or so. I don't know if that's US or Australian dollars. It's in the tens of billions of dollars. And France is ticked off. So ticked off, it recalls its ambassador to the U.S. So here you have this great sort of diplomatic triumph that pulls Australia firmly back in our orbit, enhances the military alliance against China, enhances deterrence over the long term against China,

although, you know, they won't have nuclear, Australia won't have nuclear submarines for a while. And then one of our closest allies pulls its ambassador. What the heck, Steve? Well, you know, it's a deal that the United States, it's totally defensible for the United States to have made this step. I think not only defensible, but a huge positive, huge net positive.

It was the case that the deal with, France, $60 plus billion was struck some years ago after lengthy negotiations and was likely to produce subs that were inadequate, that were easily detected, that didn't have the range that nuclear-powered subs have. And this potentially greatly enhances Australia's abilities and reach in the region. The problem here is on the diplomatic side. And again, this is from Joe who was former chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, somebody who prides himself on putting diplomacy first, somebody who campaigned on restoring America's alliances. And what appears to have happened, if you read the reporting on this, is that the United States and

Australia primarily, with the UK sort of taking a backseat role, just totally ignored France. and in some ways misled France about what was going on here. You know that France isn't going to be happy with the outcome, but good diplomacy might help you mitigate the consequences of that by talking them through it, working with them, coming up with other ways in which France can recoup this lost contract or could participate in a cooperative venture. Instead, what we have is, as you said, David, Macron is furious at the United States recalling the ambassador to Washington and threatening to sort of take Europe with him, threatening to make this a bigger European problem rather than just a France problem. And there's no doubt some French pride involved here. But this is

actually, I think, a real diplomatic misstep to not work the phones and try to get France to understand what's happening, even if you know they're not going to be happy with the outcome, which they're not. Try to get them to understand it, maybe go along, maybe be quiet, or at least quell their anger. But instead, reporting by David Sangerth, the New York Times and others, suggest that we not only didn't take those diplomatic steps, but actively excluded France, misled them at times, and then sprung the sun out of the blue, leading to that kind of reaction. Again, you can agree with what the United States did, you disagree with it, but that is sort of diplomatic malpractice not to have prepared the ground for an announcement of this scale.

So, Jonah, I guess I'm particularly stumped by this because France has actual strategic interests in the Pacific. It has territories in the Pacific. I mean, they're going to be a player out there. And look, I completely get it from the Australian perspective that American nuclear technology for submarines vastly increases their defense capability, vastly increases, not to mention the missiles. Is there a piece that we're missing

that the French just were never going to be happy anyway? What am I missing here? Well, so, you know, first of all, I mean, I don't have an excellent answer on this, but, you know, I think that the Australia, UK, US, you know, August is what they call it. Alliance makes sense because it's sort of a logical extension of the Five Eyes, which is essentially an Anglophone Intelligence Alliance, which is those three countries plus New Zealand and Canada. and I was reading a really interesting piece in the British Spectator on this and part of the point was that this had less to do with this is a very British reading of it

but had less to do with the submarine deal part of it and the jobs and all that and had more to do with the fact that France believes still in a very rigid form of continental diplomacy and is and you know I remember France pulled out like a crybaby out of the NATO, you know, nuclear alliance. And, you know,

has always seen it. It's never really made peace with the fact that it is at best a junior partner in terms of global geopolitics, you know, to the United States. And maybe even to the UK, it sees itself as an independent actor. And so I think part of this speaks to something that I'm, I've always been in favor of, which is a more robust sense of a sort of an anglo-fond. our, you know, alliance, doesn't mean you throw Europe completely under the bus or anything like that, but Europe has not quite figured out what it wants to do about China. And when we talk about France, we're really talking about the EU in a lot of ways, because the whole EU was designed to be hitched to the twin horses on the chariot. It would be German economy and France's

diplomacy. And leaving them out of it makes a lot of sense, but I'm entirely in agreement with Steve, that the guys deserved a phone call, you know, I mean, like, what is the rule? I mean, like every House majority leader in American history talks about the cliche of you can vote the way you want, but don't surprise me, right? I mean, it's like, this is a really basic concept in politics of if you're going to screw someone, let them know it's coming and try to soften the blow. And we didn't seem to do that at all in this circumstance. You know, and it has to be a pretty big deal, a pretty big unfair deal to France for me to start to sympathize with the French about anything. And the last point I'll make, which also came from the spectator piece,

which I think is just something worth pondering is, if we brought France into this thing, not only would it create the possibility of lots of leaks and back channels and EU skill dougery and all that kind of stuff, it would change the name of this alliance by putting an F in front of August. And that's just really problematic for all sorts of phonic reasons. So, David, though, what I find really fascinating about this whole episode is then, what is it? 72 hours later, Joe Biden is going to give his first address in front of the United Nations. And he's, so the White House knows that they have just screwed up one of the biggest diplomatic. And frankly, I understand that there were hard parts of whether or how to include France and all of that.

I do. It is not hard to give them a heads up. As Jonah said, it is such a basic in politics. I teach my students this on, like, day one, you never surprise people. You know, if you think, like, surprise parties are fun, that's great. Most people don't. And definitely reporters don't. Other countries don't.

Your colleagues don't. I can't think of a situation where surprise parties are actually good in any way, except, again, maybe birthday parties if you really, really know your spouse. House. Noted, no surprise parties for Sarah. No surprise parties. I do not like them. I don't like surprises. I am a campaign flag. I'm going to take the puppy back to the store now. Don't worry. They're going to put it down, but you don't like surprises. I did always want a surprise puppy, actually. That was the one thing I wanted. Like every Christmas, I was like, maybe they'll surprise me with a puppy. Like, no, they won't. Okay. So, but the White House knows all this. So then France is

livid. They withdraw their ambassador. And now they've got 48 hours to the UN speech. And I'm just sitting there thinking, how do you go into the UN with Afghanistan still on everyone's mind? And now France, withdrawing their ambassador, what is he possibly going to say that we'll have credibility with that audience? How can he reassure them? You know, his whole thing when he took office, right? America is back. That was his message to the world. Well, this has been a really rough six or so weeks for that message. And then it's like they wrote the speech back in March and didn't edit it this week at all. He says, as we close this period of relentless war, we're opening a new era of relentless diplomacy. We will lead all, we will lead on all the greatest

challenges of our time, from COVID to climate, peace and security, human dignity, and human rights, but we will not go it alone. Okay. So if I'm in the audience listening to this and I'm France, I spit out my espresso all over you when you say relentless diplomacy. If I am any other country and you talk about closing this period of relentless war and human dignity and human rights, I'm thinking of how you told everyone that you were going to have an over-the-horizon strategy in Afghanistan and instead blew up seven children and an aid worker,

lied about it for a while, got caught, then owned up to it and said, we're sorry. I don't understand how they thought that speech was... possibly in the realm of not a joke. I don't get it. I mean, it was completely inconsistent with multiple layers of administrative behavior. And Sarah, you're going to be proud of me.

While Jonah was talking, I had a thought about what we did to France, and you taught me this phrase, new phone, who dis? We just ghosted them. We just ghosted. I just went to apologize to listeners. That was definitely like a 2017 meme that like David just learned. So sorry. He's good though.

Yeah, okay. It's good. So here we have, you know, we're turning the page on war right after a drone strike that killed aid workers and children. And while there was yet a. there was, I believe, the day after the speech or the day of the speech, another drone strike and another part of the world. I mean, let me just clue you in. If you're drone striking, you know what you're waging?

You're waging war, okay? You're waging war if you're drone striking. And then, you know, he definitely says he does not want a new cold war. He says, quote, we are not seeking, say it again. We are not seeking a new cold war or a world divided into rigid blocks. After he just created a block called OQS. Now, look, all of that is, I endorse the OQS, I think, you know, until the France fall out. Sorry, now I can only hear it with an F.

I know. After the France fall out, I mean, before the France fall out, I thought, well, this, this is really good. This is, this is a W. And over the long term, it will probably still be a W, but performed, done so unbelievably, poorly. And this is one of those rare times you're going to see the G. GOP rallied to France's side. No freedom fries in the house today. I mean, it is, this is, you know, one of those few times. So, but once again, what's the pattern here? Complicated situation, predictable downside that comes to pass without a real plan. If you're negotiating with Australia,

you know there's a $66 billion deal out there. And you also know there's the idea of French prestige. You also know that there's the idea of French interest in the Pacific theater. Why didn't you control for this? Why didn't you plan for this? So here we are once again. But I agree with you, Sarah. I think that and the other thing is politically, you've said this many times, these foreign policy things don't really break through that often. But could there be worse timing? Could there be worse timing for this France ambassador, you know, the France ambassador recall than just a few days after the just titanic mess in Afghanistan.

Talk about reinforcing a narrative. Well, Steve, speaking of that narrative. Yeah, it's hard to imagine, but when we were, we did not talk about Afghanistan on this podcast last week, which I think was the first time in about two months. But since we talked about it last, two weeks ago, things have actually gotten worse, which is hard to really imagine. or would have been hard to imagine back there. First is the drone attack, Sarah, that you mentioned.

And I'll go back to you on that. After an extraordinary visual report from the New York Times of video, retraced the steps of a civilian aid worker returning to his family's home and being greeted by children, that was the person, the U.S. drone attack took out, not an ISIS, a potential ISIS bomber. Sarah, when you look at that, especially in the context of what we've seen in Afghanistan, is that just part of this broader story about U.S. failure and incompetence in Afghanistan

in the past several months in the past several years? or given the gravity of what happened and given that the Biden administration is staking in some ways U.S. national security on this over-the-horizon strategy with drone strikes like this at its heart, is that a bigger deal than just the humanitarian problems that it obviously is? So, yes, to me, what the drone is. drone strike signifies is a twofold problem that the Biden administration has. One, this was their first attempt to push back on a terrorist attack. Remember, this starts because ISIS-K blows up hundreds of Afghan civilians outside the airport and kills 13 of

our service members. This was the Biden administration's answer to that, was to kill seven children. So you very much have the competence problem there, but it's beyond the competence. Joe Biden, it turns out, was totally feckless against ISIS K. ISIS K has suffered zero for the terrorist attack against the United States at this point. And in fact, if anything, has a nice little recruitment video against the United States because not only did they not attack ISIS K, they killed seven children. So you've got a substantive problem there in terms of the Biden again, I thought very cockily saying that we didn't need boots on the ground because we could do this over the horizon and how stupid of every other administration not to just

drone this war against terrorism. And what they're finding is you have to know where the drone needs to strike. How are you going to find that out? And what I found really crazy was that their initial statement after it was questioned was that they stood by, that they're investigating it, but they stand by the intelligence. That's even worse. That's more concerning. So that's the first issue. The second issue is a comms problem to me, which is after the it was questioned initially and they had to go out and give a statement. Their statement was, We're investigating this, but we stand by the intelligence. That is an incredibly weird communication strategy as you're investigating it to then end up having killed seven children, but you stand by the intelligence.

And so when you think about cynicism in government, I think to David's point about what domestic ramifications that foreign policy can have, absolutely, this sort of thing is just another brick in the wall of, incompetence, lying, misleading, to the point that people won't even really remember the specific bricks. In the end, they will see a wall and the wall will be made up of all of these little bricks along the way. And it's not just going to be affecting Joe Biden. It does affect the institutions of the U.S. government over time as well.

You see, I think that's an important point that no one, just really quick, that no one points out is that, look, it's horrible. It's tragic. It's beclowning. It's all of these things. It says bad things about the Biden administration. It's it's it's just terrible to kill kids, never mind an allied aid worker, all that kind of stuff. It also just makes the over for the horizon strategy harder the next time. Because everybody in the room is like, I don't want to do that again. And so they're going to be, I mean, and, and that's the right impulse. But it's, you know, this is, this is a point that John Padourts makes a lot is that, you know,

Israel is really good at this stuff, in part because they vet the crap out all of it. They, they have, they have, they have intelligence assets on the ground. They red team things. They, they feel really, when they say they stand by their intelligence, they really stand by their intelligence because they've kicked the tires on it. But there's a certain amount of sort of amateurishness and hackery that, you know, what was the intelligence, that it was a white Honda truck? You know many of those there are?

I mean, I think we gave the Taliban something like 12,000 of them. I mean, they're all over the place. Go to YouTube and watch any video. There are white trucks all over the place. And I'm not saying that that was the only intel they had, but clearly it mattered to the intel because they followed this one truck all over the place as if it was. you know, it stood out like OJ's, you know, you know, car

and 94's something. Bronco, sorry, I couldn't think of it. And so it just makes it not only casts a bad light backwards on their whole plan to do over the horizon stuff, it makes it less likely

that they're going to be able, if they even they want to get their act together, it just makes it that much harder to get their act together on the over their horizon stuff because nobody, particularly in the Democratic administration, and wants to be the one who kills the second round of kids after they screwed it up the first time, you know? With Amex Platinum,

access to exclusive Amex pre-sale tickets can score you a spot trackside. So being a fan for life turns into the trip of a lifetime. That's the powerful backing of Amex. Pre-sale tickets for future events subject to availability and varied by race. Turns and conditions apply. Learn more at amex.ca. Slash-y-anx. All right, well, Jonah,

uh, competence it is. I feel like we kind of gobbled up your topic, but there's way more to say about it. Yeah. So my topic is a really sort of simple one. And, you know, as with so many things, all of your topics are simply pre-confirmation of the correctness of my position. My question is basically just simply this is Biden bad at the job. And I'll put a finer point on it. he campaigned on COVID.

We know that, right? But he also campaigned on a return to normalcy. And he campaigned on a plausible theory that he actually knew how Washington worked, given how he was a senator since the Pleistocene era. There are actually pictures of him of a young Joe pre-haerplugs Joe Biden as a junior staffer on the Judiciary Committee riding a mastodon. and there was the fact that he was the negotiator with the hill with Mitch McConnell in the Obama White House. He was the ward healer, the backslapper.

He talks like regular Joe from Scranton, all that kind of stuff. And he triangulated against the Democratic, the left-wing base of his party. And so this theory was plausible. And then all it takes for him to abandon this theory that he knows how to Washington works is for a bunch of like for John Meacham of all you know in a bunch of being I like John Meacham fine whatever but like to tell him oh no you can be FDR and he's like I can and all of a sudden he's got an agenda that would have been very difficult for Barack Obama to pull off and Barack Obama had serious majorities in both the House and the Senate you Sarah will correct me if I'm wrong but I believe

this is the narrowest house and senate in American history, or at least it's like tied with the narrowest in American history. And the idea that you could swing for the fences with an agenda that actually costs more money than the New Deal suggests that he actually doesn't know how Washington works or that he's lost a step or that he's out of it. And then all of these other things that he's done that we've chronicled so far in all of this suggests that either he relies on really, really bad advice, is a really bad manager, or isn't listening to really good advice, or he's stuck in a previous era and he can't get his head out of it. And there's some other non-charitable, less charitable explanations of it. But it's very difficult to look at anything

he's done since the $1.9 trillion COVID relief package, which was easy to pass that required serious work that he's pulled off without some major screw up to it. And so the question is, is he just not good at the job? I go to you, David. Well, not so far. He has time to turn this thing around. But look, I mean, the thing about Joe Biden, if you're going to look at Joe Biden's record, the last thing that you were going, the last word you were going to use to describe him or the last phrase would have been brilliant problem solver. this is not how you would have described Joe Biden. Veteran Politico, yes. Guy with kind of a good, the common touch, yes. Here's the most salient job qualification he had.

Guy most likely to be able to beat Donald Trump? Yes. Not all of those attributes necessarily are positioning you to do the best possible job in the Oval Office, especially when a number of the emerging challenges are issues that, A, are really very difficult and B, are concentrated in areas where Joe Biden, if he had a salient weakness, it would have been in foreign policy. In foreign policy, he'd had a lot of bad ideas in foreign policy over the years. And if, you know, the internal reports are true, one of his bad ideas, for example, was not going after Osama bin Laden,

which would have been one of the singularly bad ideas of the Obama administration if he'd been listened to. He has time to turn this around. I mean, we're talking right now in September of his first year in office. So he has time to turn this around. So this is a totally premature comparison.

I know it's premature, but I'm getting this like aroma, wafting, in the air, like this faint hint, this faint smell of Carter, of Jimmy Carter, decent man, pivotal moment in history overmatched by the job. That's what I'm sort of sensing. And one last thing, just in case we worry that only Joe Biden has problems with diplomacy. Breaking news, Boris Johnson being interviewed right outside the Capitol, says it's time for the French to prene on grip and don't me on break. which I think is fringlish for get a grip and give me a break.

So in diplomatic speaking. Making a bad situation worse. Right. So we don't have the monopoly on mistakes in the United States of America. But we do them better than most. Sarah, you're going to say something? Have we ever been this far? nine months into a presidential administration

where you've had so many losses but also no wins. That to me is what's so interesting about this. He could have had the infrastructure win. And if you really, I think, dive down into the minutia of why he doesn't have an infrastructure win, it goes back to that shoot himself in the foot statement that he gave where he came out and said that he would only sign them both together.

It was an unforced error. It was unscripted. Once he said that, the whole thing went off in this new trajectory. That's what took the infrastructure deal to me off the Resolute desk back in the early summer. So he has no legislative win. And then the losses are piling up. I'm sad that David already took the Carter analogy. But I do disagree with David on one point. I don't think he has a lot more time to turn this around at all. I think he, at this point, I don't see how Democrats are going to maintain control of the House.

Of course, they could, but it's really hard sitting here now even with a year to go to see how they'll do that. And without the House, his legislative agenda is done. And so then the question is, what wins can he rack up

that are not legislative? The courts have some thoughts about that. And the answer is, Not many. You know, David and I've talked about this a lot on advisory opinions, but what John Roberts gave Democrats with one hand by stopping the Trump administration from implementing some of their policy wish lists, including rescinding DACA, they're applying that exact same incredibly high and, to me, legally bizarre theory to the Biden administrations, go it

alone. Let's just do things by pen and paper. So I don't know what wins they can rack up other than the infrastructure package. And it's like a choo-choo train where the infrastructure package is the engine and everything else that he might want to get done legislatively is stacked up behind it. Unless you can get the engine through, you're not getting anything else through. And the infrastructure package is sitting there in the house. So, David, Steve, before I go to you, just to throw this into the mix, since this really is sort of a mean girl's potpourri topic about

Joe Biden, I'll disagree with both of you, but in one sense about the Jimmy Carter thing. First of all, I don't think he was that nice guy, at least not when he ran for president, did all sorts of mean things as a politician that he never gets grief for. Give us an example. I'm sorry?

Give me an example. Oh, he like backstab, even Ted Kennedy. He ran on promising that communities could protect their ethnic purity, meaning white communities. He had all sorts of weird views on race that never really get much scrutiny. But the one thing that he did have the capacity to do, which is where I really disagree with you guys, is the capacity to learn from mistakes. And you can call him naive for saying he had no inordinate fear of communism.

But after the Soviets took, you know, invaded Afghanistan, he threw lots of money at, you know, a major defense buildup to hold off, in his words, Soviet aggression. And he had all sorts of weird economics views that he kind of changed and became something of a deregulator. And the only reason I bring it up is that I don't know that Biden has it in him at this point to change his mind about things. I think one of the reasons why he blew it in Afghanistan is he had this idea from 10 years ago when he was in the Obama administration.

and he was sitting there like George Costanza saying, I should have said, yeah, the jerk store called and they're out of you about how he was right and they were all wrong about something. And he wanted to prove it, even though facts on the ground had changed. Circumstances had changed. I think he's a very stubborn old dude, as many old dudes are, and that I plan to be fairly soon. And he can't let go, can't change his spots.

And Carter could, you know, and, And I think that bodes poorly for the remainder of his presidency. But Steve, have it. Yeah, I'm nodding my head vigorously in agreement with you. Look, I mean, I think... I thought that was a medical condition. As we've discussed earlier here, I think incompetence explains a lot of what we're seeing. And I think that's certainly part of what will emerge from the reporting on what we've seen with, you know, Afghanistan.

you name it. But there is also a part of Biden. And this, I think, is an underappreciated aspect of his personality of his character over his years in public life. He is stubborn. I actually, the place where I disagree with you, Jonah, is that I think he's been stubborn like this forever. You know, talk to people who work with him in the Senate, you know, talk to people who sat around him in the Obama White House. He is stubborn. He will not be moved. I mean, you know, he's not likely to be shifted off his position when he opposed the targeted strike on Osama bin Laden, the rate of the bin Laden compound in Abadabad. Virtually everybody else was on the other side of that, and they spent days making their arguments to him, and he resolutely refused to go

along, said, nope, I don't think this is a good idea. I think we're seeing, I would point to Afghanistan, in particular some of his COVID policies and now with the sort of renewed mandates, the border policies where Biden has this sort of gut instinct that he's right and he knows what's going to be good for the country in six months, in two years, in five years. And he's just going to do it, sort of consequences be damned. I think that's what we saw in Afghanistan. Certainly there were plenty of people. raising problems with getting out of Afghanistan the way that we got out of Afghanistan.

And that includes a number of people who thought we should get out of Afghanistan. So they agreed with the broad policy decision that Biden was making, but disagreed with the way he was doing it. I think that's in part at play on what we're seeing on the border. It's not a priority. Biden has decided that he was going to be the anti-Trump, that he was not going to exclude people the way that Trump excluded people. That was a deliberate policy choice.

And, again, consequences be damned. There's a really interesting comment that Richard Holbrook made about Biden back in his, I guess it was in George Packer's book about Holbrook. And it had to do with Afghanistan. And Holbrook recounts a conversation that he had with Biden back in 2010, 2011, time frame. And Holbrook says, in effect, I was making the case to Biden that we couldn't just bail because we have an obligation to these people in Afghanistan. And, you know, that would come back around if we just abandoned them. Holbrook says, this shocked me. And I commented immediately

that I thought we had a certain obligation to the people who had trusted us. He said, he being Biden. F that. We don't have to worry about that. We did it in Vietnam. Nixon and Kissinger got away with it. I think there's a huge part of the Biden presidency that can be summed up as sort of an attitude of F that. I'm going to do what I think is right. Who cares about the consequences? Also, just a historical codicil of that. I think that comes from Holbrook's diary, which Packer may have been quoting from, but you got to remember, I mean, to sort of buttress the point, Biden was adamant that we had no obligation to take any of the Vietnamese boat people as asylum seekers in the United States, and he was vicious about it. And you can hear

echoes of his sort of position on the Afghan stuff where he says, yeah, we owe it to these people to bring in here, but it doesn't sound very passionate. And then you actually look and see that the share of Afghans that we've brought over who actually have special immigrant visas is tiny. I'm not saying that's a result of his deliberate policy. I think that's probably more the result of his incompetence of handling it, but it's an interesting echo

that he's sort of still relitigating positions he had 30 years ago or 40 years ago. You know, I feel like, y'all, that this has been too much of a downer podcast. And so let's look, the upside. If the Democrats lose the House, think of the collection of statesmen

in the House GOP that are just poised to govern like adults. Just ready to go. I was re-watching the Mitt documentary last night, David. Yeah. Interesting. Oh, you were re-watching.

You were in the Mitt documentary? The 2014 documentary about Mitt Romney's 2006 to 2012 campaigning career. It's interesting. Watching it actually in 2021 was a very different experience than watching it in 2014, I will say, and everything that I thought about it. All right.

Last microtopic. And really, this is just for Steve. David, Jonah, feel free to sit this one out. So Drake has broken Michael Jackson's record for the most Billboard Hot 100. top tens from the same album. Thriller posted seven, that stood for 37 years, and now Drake has nine. He also outranks Michael Jackson in terms of most number one albums,

10 to Michael Jackson's six, most top 10 singles, 54 to Michael Jackson's 30, most consecutive weeks on the Billboard Hot 100, 431, and most Hot 100 entries. period, 258. My question, well, the internet is asking whether Drake is now bigger than MJ. My question to you, Steve, is, do you know who Drake is? Sarah, I'm so insulted by this question.

I don't know whether to laugh now or cry later. The question I have for you, is Drake a rapper or no? is that but like that could be that could be a real question it's hotly debated in oh my gosh circles oh wow with people Drake fans polarized over that question and by Drake fans you mean your kids in the back seat I mean maybe yeah maybe but others as well and you missed the album reference I'm sorry say i have to just point that out what was the album reference laugh now or cry later thank you very much wow wow see i don't i don't follow canadian artists so i don't know anything about any of stuff yeah he did mess with yannis uh during that uh that what was it the finals the NBA or

semi yeah yeah okay noted kentucky basketball fan drake as well Thank you very much. Yeah. Yeah. But, I mean, not to re-ank this into seriousness, but there's no way people actually think that he has a bigger cultural impact than Michael Jackson, right? I mean, this just shows you how the erosion of the old recording industry can give you the same stats as Michael Jackson, but doesn't necessarily mean you have the same impact.

So I think it's a really fascinating question because the question in and of itself is pretty unfair because we have nicheified media, television, entertainment. We've also nicheified music. So you never can be as big as the Beatles or Michael Jackson anymore because 30% or whatever of people who enjoy music are just totally way off in like the things they actually enjoy, which they can get access to, which they wouldn't have been able to, back in an unnitchified entertainment industry.

So in that sense, it's kind of unfair. Drake has broken all these records. And if Drake had, you know, done that or maybe been around in 1985, maybe he would be bigger than MJ. But no. Clearly the answer is, no, he's not. And can't be. And no one else can be.

And it's not because MJ was so huge. It's that you can't be back in 1985. The world has changed. In so many ways. All right. Thank you listeners for joining us this week. We always appreciate y'all. Be sure to rate us wherever you're getting this podcast. It not only helps us, but it actually helps other people find the podcast as well, which we're four. We're in favor of that. And we will see you again next week. This episode is brought to you by Squarespace.

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