The Dispatch Podcast - Scramble to Evacuate Afghanistan

Episode Date: August 25, 2021

Today, the gang leads the podcast with yet another conversation about the crisis in Afghanistan. As they tick through all the bad takes floating around the internet surrounding the situation one by one, it’s clear the main takeaway is that it’s still really bad and sad to watch. Plus, more infrastructure talk! Has Nancy Pelosi lost her political touch? The Dispatch Podcast team breaks down how the political maneuvering of infrastructure will affect 2022. And for dessert: the California gubernatorial recall election. Show Notes: -Can the Taliban become a reliable partner to the U.S.? Only time will tell. - David Ignatius -History of the Dunkirk evacuation -David subs for Jonah on The Remnant -TMD tries to explain the House infrastructure rule -TMD on California recall Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Welcome back to the dispatch podcast. I'm your host, Sarah Isger, joined by Jonah Goldberg, David French, and Steve Hayes. We are going to do Afghanistan, infrastructure, 22 midterms, and the recall effort in California today. Let's dive right in. Steve, once again, we start with you. David, directly to you, Joe Biden has said that the United States is going to try to abide by his administration's self-imposed August 31st deadline, which has now, we hear from Taliban spokesmen, become a red line for the Taliban. Yet, if you believe the reports coming out of briefings to members of Congress, several senior members of the Biden

administration, including uniform military secretary of defense, secretary of state, believe that, that won't be possible. We will not be able to get all of the Americans in Afghanistan out by August 31st to say nothing of the Afghan allies to whom we've promised a safe extraction. What is Joe Biden thinking? You know, it's so hard to say. I mean, it is so hard to say. I mean, it is so hard to say. I mean, it's absolutely clear that he is dead set, that he is totally determined, that he is going to get us out of Afghanistan, and that he is not going to be swayed, apparently too much even by events on the ground in meeting his self-imposed deadlines. He is getting out. And yet here we are. So I've got a paragraph or two from the New York Times to read. The Biden administration has provided a stream of updates about its airlift of Americans, Afghans, and others since August 14th, when the Taliban closed in on Kabul, yet U.S. officials are reluctant to offer an estimate of the one number that matters most. How many people ultimately need to be rescued

and they're down the line. But U.S. officials believe that thousands of Americans remain in Afghanistan, including some far beyond Kabul, without a safe or fast way to get to the airport. Tens of thousands of Afghans who worked for the U.S. government over the last 20 years and are eligible for special visas are desperate to leave. You know, I'm just going to keep saying this. I've never seen anything quite like this in my lifetime. I have seen collapses of Allied forces in my lifetime, very recently, in fact, in 2014 when the Iraqi army just melted away.

But that was long after we had gone. And fortunately, the Obama administration intervened to stop the ISIS advance before it could get close to Baghdad and essentially saved the day in Iraq. I mean, saved the day from the mess. it helped create, but saved the day nonetheless. This is total capitulation, complete collapse, without providing the American people any reassurance that Americans and the Afghans who worked beside Americans are all going to get out, along with arguably the lowest ebb.

I was reading a piece in The Guardian today that's folks in Great Britain are calling this the lowest ebb in American and British relations since the Suez crisis. Since the Suez crisis, that's remarkable. And this was going to be an administration that we're back now. It's competent. Now, everything is under control. Now our relationships with our allies are going to be strong. Now, it's really a remarkable, it's remarkably incompetent,

compounded by stubbornness. Because, you know, Jonah has said something recently. that Trump could be remarkably incompetent in foreign affairs, but sometimes he'd change his mind when people piled on him enough. What seems to be happening here is you have remarkable incompetence compounded by Joe Biden's stubbornness to the point where Americans right now do not have true assurance that their fellow citizens and their close allies whose lives depend on us now are going to get out.

and it's mind-boggling. It's staggering. It's something that I don't, you know, the ramifications and consequences of this, whether or not they're politically salient over the next months and years, I mean, news cycles move on, but the actual consequences and ramifications strategically and in human life are going to be felt for a long time. So, Sarah, I want to set aside the Biden supporters, Biden defenders who are claiming that this is all going swimmingly and there's really no problem here. Because that's not really worth engaging, honestly. But let me make an argument that I've heard from some of them. People who say, look, it was a bad situation. Like, clearly, we didn't in fact plan for every contingency. Clearly, there were things we missed.

Clearly, the advance from the Taliban happened faster than we had anticipated. But we are where we are. And right now, the Taliban controls Kabul. The Taliban controls pathways to and from the Hamid Karzai International Airport. The Taliban has a big say in who gets to the airport and who doesn't. The Taliban is telling us we've got to be gone by August 31st because that was Joe Biden's original deadline. Shouldn't we listen to the Taliban? Don't they have a say?

And if you weren't going to do that, wouldn't that mean pouring troops in beyond the secure zone at the airport and potentially dramatically escalating this fight and possible U.S. loss of life. Yeah, I mean, let me reframe it a little. It's not that the Taliban has a say. It's that there's whatever the equivalent at this point of sunk cost fallacy is. A lot of what David's talking about is woulda coulda or shoulda. I agree with a lot of it. But here we are now. So what do you do starting at this moment there's the threat from the Taliban, obviously. ISIS-K, which is not a Taliban friend, I understand,

is also trying to assert themselves in the country. I mean, there's chaos in the country. And if you have people left behind, what are we willing to do to get them out? I think that's a reasonable conversation for everyone to have, but it's that conversation. It's not what should you have done a month ago. I mean, we can have that conversation,

because we're podcasters, and, like, that's what we do, I guess. But it's a different conversation than what can be done today between now and August 31st or post-August 31st and whether that's worthwhile. You know, I was picking a fight with Steve a little bit in the green room before this to say that I haven't seen anyone else say this, and I'm not sure why, but I always am a little annoyed when we send helicopters and a whole bunch of rescue folks

to like mountain ranges in the West because someone who had no business climbing is wearing like flip-flops and didn't bring any water finds themselves stuck and now we have to expend tens of thousands of dollars potential lives of our rescuers

to go like get these people when they had no business doing it in the first place it was a very selfish thing to do. There's some similarity to me in the Americans who chose to stay in August, frankly.

versus the Afghans who had no ability to get out because the State Department had delayed their visas by so much. They weren't getting anywhere. It was just delay after delay after delay. They had no choice. They could not have left. And now we're talking so much about prioritizing Americans. And look, I totally get it.

I do understand why. But my sympathies, I got to tell you, all of those Americans who chose to stay, you know, I saw this video of this father of a three-year-old, what were you doing in Afghanistan? you knew the pullout date for U.S. troops. Biden had said that repeatedly. You live there so you know the situation. And the seats that you're going to take on that plane are seats that could have gone to Afghans who had no choice and couldn't have gotten out earlier. So I think there's a lot

to be frustrated about in this situation. I don't know that the August 31st, no, no, we're really leaving. Like I said, we'd be leaving for months now is the part to be most frustrated over. So, Jonah, the August 31st withdrawal date was announced well in advance. However, you had the President of the United States giving speeches, assuring folks in this country and in Afghanistan, and Americans and Afghans alike, that there would be an orderly transition, that everything was taken care of. We wouldn't anticipate a significant deterioration in security. You had the Secretary of State, telling people that the embassy operations would continue, our diplomatic corps would continue to live and operate in Afghanistan. They made it sound repeatedly in public

statements. Things would go on more or less as they had, just without a, at that point, it wasn't really even a massive troop presence. It was 2,500 American troops in perpetuity. So do you agree with Sarah that they share some of the blame, given the assurances they've gotten from their leaders? So I'm going to I'm going to go Salomonic on all you guys and split all the babies.

That's bad. That's bad when she's as wrong as she was. I had this conversation with my wife yesterday. Like, if you've got little kids and you're an American, get out of Afghanistan before the end of August. I mean, like,

like there's a difference between being you're living alone, you're fully, realized human being and you're you have only obligations to yourself as you're an aid worker or whatever and you're going to take your chances and you're going to you're going to take the government the u.s. government at its word about things um that's one thing if you got little kids you know just get out of afghanistan at the end of july for a little while and see how things go and um but beyond that i think you know i take sarah's point about like the problem with monday morning quarterbacking all of this, but I think the source of greatest condemnation and greatest

sympathy for the Biden administration all revolves around the fact that by withdrawing support for the Afghan military, they did not realize that they were guaranteeing the Afghan military would crumble within days instead of months. The entire gamble, the administration made wasn't that the Taliban wasn't going to take over. This is something that both the Trump administration and the Biden administration basically thought was a foregone conclusion. They just thought it would happen far enough in the future that they wouldn't pay a political price for it and all the Americans would have been long since out. And so you're all these people talking about how this was going to be inevitable. We just didn't think it was going to happen this fast.

We got surprised by the timetable. I think that's repugnant in a lot of ways to say, yeah, we knew we were going to give this country to the Taliban, we just screwed up because it happened a lot faster than we thought it would. But the fact is that happens to be true, and they were basically admitting it if you listen closely to it. And so the problem is that I think a lot of people did take the U.S. government at its word that the Afghan National Army and the Afghan government would hold on for months. And that would give them time to sort of do a more leisurely departure. and everything flows from that fundamental screw-up. And this is why I find so many of the lies and spins coming out of the administration.

So just outrageous because you have like, you know, saying how, well, you're going to have chaos, you know, with any, you know, seizure of power by a, you know, an opposing force in a civil war and blah, blah, blah. Okay, sure, that's true. but there's a difference between like a little sort of you know like i don't know which way this is going to go kind of chaos of a certain day and basically the just wholesale screw uppery of this thing and of forcing these events the way that they have and then wanting to get credit for it you know wanting to the spin coming out now from the administration i mean i know it's a minor thing but Ron Clayne, you know, retweeted someone comparing this to the Berlin airlift favorably.

And it may, you know, it makes you, it like, like it, I was saying, I was joking with a friend on Twitter that you should create a boggle game where everyone gets one minute to come up with all of the reasons why that analogy is bad. And so I think that the problems that we see on display here, if, you know, Sarah's right that if, if, you know, if we're not allowed to look backwards at why we're in the mess that we're in, then you can have some sympathy for the problem that the Biden administration is facing. You know, I think that they are, they take seriously this threat about August 31, you know, you could, the Taliban has every interest to see the American, troops get out while embarrassing them as much as possible and then saying, oh, by the way,

we forgot to tell you about all these other Americans we're holding on to. Let's get some aid flowing in here. And it's a delicate game where they want to humiliate us, but not humiliate us so much that we stay. And I think they're playing it pretty well. I think if I were in the administration, I would have an existential fear that every day we go longer there increases the odds of some suicide bomber just driving a truck into that crowd, killing dozens of Marines, dozens of Americans, dozens of Afghan allies, and they're like,

we got to get out of here. And I can see how in so many ways this is a diplomatic, logistical nightmare. And we can actually, for the sake of argument, give them credit, they're handling it great. I don't think they are, but let's just say they're handling great. It leaves out the problem that they created this problem. That by the

way they did the withdrawal, throwing the Afghan army under the bus, and then blaming them for complaining about being thrown under the bus, created the problems that they're scrambling to fix. And so, you know, you can grade everybody on how they're doing if you start the grading process right after their biggest screw-ups. And I think that like, you know, A-plus for dealing with your catastrophic mega-fail is a kind of fair way of describing. And I would, let me add to that. Let me add to that a point that I think compounds the problem. Okay.

Part of it, I think you're right. I mean, part of it was the obvious failure to anticipate the speed with which the Taliban was going to take control again. But the other part of it is a misjudgment of the Taliban itself. You have the Biden administration and the Trump administration before, but the Biden administration still to this day talking about having, you know, formal relations with the Taliban, talking about U.S. aid going to the Taliban, talking about the Taliban as part of a quote-unquote inclusive Afghan government. It's like they haven't paid attention for 20 freaking years. But Steve, I assume that some of that do.

Should I assume that some of that has to do with the fact that they're trying to find whatever freaking carrots they can to deal with the Taliban, which I think we have to assume has huge numbers of hostages. I mean, sure. I think there are practical considerations that are shaping the responses that we're seeing on sort of a minute-to-minute hour-by-hour basis. No question about that. But I think it was the case. You only have to go back and look at the rhetoric that we got from Joe Biden, from Anthony Blinken, from Jake Sullivan, and others that they saw the possibility of a real Taliban-led or Taliban-inclusive. government that would be broadly representative of the Afghan people. They said that. They've held out hope. And I think sort of fundamentally misjudging that again and again and again from administration to administration to administration plays a huge part in this. And look, there's an interesting David Ignatius piece in The Washington Post Today. David Ignatius is a Washington Post columnist,

very plugged in in the intelligence community, certainly well sourced in the Biden administration. And he says the central question is whether the Taliban is going to be nice with us, whether we can have good relations with the Taliban. No question channeling senior Biden administration thinking and senior military thinking. And it just strikes me as so fundamentally misguided at this point after 20 years, seeing what the Taliban have done for all this time. All right. I'm changing my question to David.

So David. Wait a second. I had way more to say then. Fast forward, well, first to September 1, and we have 50,000 Afghans who have been evacuated. We've cleared the airport, and we have all U.S. forces out. And then fast forward two years, whatever time length you want, and there has been no terrorist attack from the Taliban on U.S. soil.

How will you then look back on this month? Aside from it being, obviously, chaos, this is bad, there's some foreign policy ramifications down the road maybe, but aren't we maybe, is it too soon? Well, I think that if you're going to, so there's a couple of questions. One is what would be the political ramifications two years down the road if this is a memory 80 news cycles in the past with no current terror attacks and no, and let's follow up. say no massacre of Americans or no prolonged hostage crisis of Americans. Yeah.

But I think the bigger, like 50,000 Afghans, we get all of the interpreter, you know, everyone out of the country, 50,000 would be an accomplishment. Yeah, it would be, let me put it this way. Dunkirk was an accomplishment, right? I mean, they got several hundred thousand allied troops, but it left Hitler in charge of France, okay. But we have no plan to go back. Yeah, just noting Dunkirk, like he didn't get to keep France.

Right, exactly. So this is like Dunkirk with no plan to go back. And the fact of the matter is, you know, one of the things about, you know, there's so many national security ramifications, whether it's from our, just the mere fact of our presence in that part of the world, whether we're talking about how long does it take a terror threat to, gestate. How long does it take a terror threat to manifest? All of these things are unknowns about the future. But what is known is that we have lost a war. We have lost a war that we fought for 20 years.

And all of these people, right now the main thing, one of the things, I just want to interject a bit of realism here into a lot of these discussions you have on Twitter, all of these people who are sitting there saying, well, if we were in charge, we would have lost this war. a lot more gracefully, okay? We would have lost this war in a way that was a lot more palatable. I don't see that. I don't see that because the reality is

the only way that there was going to be a slow fighting retreat was if American forces were conducting the fighting retreat. Once we decided to yank the rug out from the Afghan army, it was going to be this. Also, this is something that's bothered me, me, okay, it was always going to end this way, but we wish the Afghan army had fought harder and

lost more lives along the way. That's an odd thing to have. Right. I wish more people had been killed. That would make us feel better about our standing, you know, historically. That's the problem with this. It was going to happen eventually anyway argument, which you're hearing from everybody, is that they're saying that they just, they wanted the same tragedy and horror to occur just on a more politically convenient timetable. With 20,000 more Afghan combat casualties. I mean, And that's like drilling, Sarah, you drill down to the core of it. They're saying essentially, hey, you guys, you should have done the alamo. And because you didn't do the alamo, you have, you've betrayed us.

You've betrayed us because you didn't do pull an alamo. And that's absurd. That's absurd. The bottom line was- With Alec Baldwin, 13 Days of Glory, highly recommend have to throw that in there since we're talking about my home republic. But once we rip the rug out from the Afghan army, and that deal was done and that was laid out before Biden came into office, once we ripped the rug out from them, this level of collapse, losing wars is an ugly business. It is an ugly, deadly, unpredictable business. And this idea that people are sitting back going, well, I would have ended the war neatly.

and their version of Neatley, usually imagines that the Afghan army would have suddenly fought much harder if they had been in charge, which strikes me as just pure fantasy. I think what happened is the Biden administration got mugged by the reality of withdrawal, and that reality of withdrawal was baked into the cake. And from the moment that these deals were done and there was a commitment made to leave. So one thing that hasn't gotten nearly enough attention, I think, and it's directly related to the question you asked, Sarah, is the longer term, medium and longer term security implications of what we've seen here. Everybody has understandably been focused on kind of the immediate crisis, getting people out, what's happening on the ground in Kabul, what have you. But there are things taking place now, not getting much attention, that I think will be huge

hugely problematic for us in the future and make your hypothetical of no attacks here on the U.S. homeland vanishingly unlikely. You now have reports, credible reports, that the Taliban have in effect put the Haqqani network in charge of security in Kabul or parts of the Haqqani network. They are deeply aligned with al-Qaeda, have helped sort of birth Al-Qaeda. al-Qaeda back in the 1990s, inextricably tied to al-Qaeda's leadership. Saraj Haqqani is the deputy leader of the Taliban. These are bad, bad people who are at least partially in charge of security in Kabul. You have thousands of al-Qaeda and ISIS prisoners that have been released.

You have jihadists from throughout the world talking openly about flocking to Afghanistan because of the safe haven that they assume will be there. You have huge caches of advanced U.S. military equipment now in Taliban, al-Qaeda, ISIS-K, hands. You have really no U.S. military presence outside of Kabul whatsoever, and a coalition intelligence effort that basically collapsed overnight with the withdrawal and the end of the U.S. embassy. I mean, all along, the argument was we would be able to keep our embassy. we would continue to have, for people who don't know, embassies in virtually every country serve as kind of the hub of the intelligence operations for various countries overseas. That is gone.

So we are going to be facing, I think, a threat that is orders of magnitude greater than it has been, and al-Qaeda, we should note, was never gone from Afghanistan, a much greater threat, and we're going to be blind looking at it. Can I interject real quick and recommend the remnant? Just real fast. I'm going to recommend the remnant again. So I recommended the remnant last week. I'm going to recommend the remnant again this week because of the guest.

I was subbing for Jonah and the guest we had Clon Kitchen. I was going to say, aren't you just recommending your own interview? Awkward. Yes, I am. But because of Clon, not because of me. So Clon Kitchen, who has experience with an. an unnamed intelligence agency on the ground in Afghanistan, really had a great discussion of the difference between dealing only with the kind of surveillance,

sort of what you might call sort of like tech surveillance versus human surveillance and human intelligence. So, yeah, we can learn a lot of things through satellites and through drones and through intercepts of radio transmissions, et cetera, et cetera. But there's no substitute for that human presence. in the world of intelligence and in the world of targeting. And we're going to have, that's gone, that's going to be gone. And that renders us so much more vulnerable. And this is the thing I keep saying, when in the last 20 years has it been in the national interests of the United States of America

to give al-Qaeda a nation-state-sized safe haven? I don't, it's not, it has never been in our national interest, and it's not in our national interest now. All right, we're going to move on. However, you know, I did communications as my career before this, not branding. They are different. However, it involves some branding. And I just have to say, ISIS K sounds like Pig Latin.

And I think they should rethink that. I'm sure they're very deadly, very bad guys. Your name sounds stupid. I think it sounds like some really cool new brand of street meth, you know, going down your ISIS Khole kind of thing. But I don't know. 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 and give them that extra layer of security brings real peace of mind.

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slash dispatch. That's E-T-H-O-S dot com slash dispatch. Application times may vary. Rates may vary. All right. We're doing infrastructure next. David, it's, I don't know, it's infrastructure groundhog day now, just over and over again. So I'm ping ponging back to you, Sarah. Okay. So one trillion dollar deal, what, 19 Republicans voted for it in the Senate? one of the few pieces of truly significant bipartisan legislation in recent history would be a big political win for the Biden administration if they weren't like stepping all over themselves in Afghanistan and losing a war in the in in the way wars are lost and now in the house we once again sort of like tottering up from the grave is this

sort of zombie three point five trillion dollar reconciliation monster and once again we're having the argument as to whether or not they're going to try to condition one on the other and rather than pocketing the win and just, you know, realizing you don't have the votes for the 3.5 trillion. What's the strategy here from the left, Sarah? Because is the goal to pass them past the 3.5 trillion in the house and then dog pile Joe Manchin first of his name, Lord of the Cold Coal Soaked Hills on Twitter enough to where he relents? That's not going to happen. What's going on? Yeah, so I actually think, and I have been loath to say this because I think she is, I've said this before, one of the best political strategists of my lifetime. But I think Nancy Pelosi, you know, might be time to retire. I just don't think she has a good grasp on what's going on in her party, on what's going on nationally with politics. And so she's making weird, inexplicable,

deals with the progressive wing of her party. I mean, speaking of recommending things, I recommend the morning dispatch from Wednesday of this week because I read it twice and was deeply confused, not because the writing was bad or anything else, but because the reality is confusing. They pass this rule along party lines. And, well, we don't really know what the rule does

because one side, the moderates say they got what they wanted, which is there will be a vote decoupled from the $3.5 trillion on just the bipartisan infrastructure package by September 27th. That made sense to me. Cool, cool. But the progressive wing is going out saying nothing has changed. This is non-binding. They are very much coupled together.

And there will be no bipartisan infrastructure package without the $3.5 trillion infrastructure package. And you can read these quotes next to each other in the morning dispatch newsletter. and you're just like, huh, this to me is a Nancy Pelosi leadership problem where once again allowing the minority in the progressive pack to hijack her, she's running the house and probably not for that much longer. This is a huge mistake. You need to get this done out of the way and move on to something else. They're desperate to do the HR4 John Lewis Act, which by the way has

this whole Trojan Supreme Court horse hiding in it, stripping the Supreme Court of jurisdiction on various things. It would be a nice talking point for them heading into 2022, but they can't really get to that because she's sitting there haggling over something. The $3.5 trillion is not going to happen. Stop trying to make fetch happen. And so they're delaying this. They're costing themselves talking points, political time on the clock. There's no upside to this. And now this rule vote where maybe it's decoupled, maybe it's not, maybe we're having a vote by September 27th. It's bizarre politics intra-party fighting on the left, which they don't have time for.

So, Jonah, let me, let's just put aside the fact that it does not seem that Joe Manchin is moving on this. and he's demonstrated that he's immune to the Twitterati. Kristen Cinema, by the way, has also put out statement after statement saying, not going to happen. What's the SNL? Not going to happen. Not going to happen. Not going to happen.

Not going to do it. And so cinema also is immune to the Twitterati. I mean, both Mansion and cinema are immune to the Twitterati. So a lot of this is academic. But let's have the academic discussion. And I'll give you an argument from the left. Jonah that says Mansion and Cinema need to wake up

and the argument essentially is this. Look, the natural thing to happen in midterm elections is you lose some seats. This always happens. The only time in recent memory where it hasn't happened was this 02 right after 9-11.

So you just have to assume and with these razor-thin majorities you need to make hay while the sun shines. Get what you can get now. and forget this idea that by being more moderate, that you're going to somehow hang on to the House or Senate, that that's just naive politics.

So get what you can get now, and Cinema and Mansion are playing a, not just a game that, you know, their moderation isn't just ideologically repugnant to the left. It's just futile. It's not going to help anyway. What are your thoughts on that argument? Yeah, so, I mean,

taking a step back, I think the logic of make hay while the sun shines is one of the reasons why we can't have nice things. And for the last 30 years, both parties have basically subscribed to this point of view where they get into office. They think that their hold on power is going to be temporary and fragile. So they swing for the fences. They get, which opens them up to being called radical by the other party. And because they are open to being called radical by the other party, the majority making independence flip to the other, flip to that, the anti-radical party as a way to counterbalance. And that's why you get this seesaw effect. That's why Obama's first two years were the way they were. Arguably, you can say the same thing about W's first

two years. You can say the same thing about the entire Trump administration. And you can certainly say at least the effort in the first, you know, 200 days of the Biden administration. And so there's an irony here in that there's a self-fulfilling prophecy about this they say oh we got to get all this stuff done because we're going to lose our majority one of the reasons why i think they lose their majorities over time maybe not this time because they is so narrow um is precisely because of that attitude that said i was stunned to hear sarah criticized nancy pelosi just now because i watched morning joe and i was informed reliably that this was yet another example of how she is a world historic genius and she knows her institution better than anybody and um i too read the morning dispatch

and i came away uh first of all profoundly depressed having returned from california that i'm still talking about infrastructure at all but um uh my sense is, is that what Pelosi is doing, whether it's a genius or idiocy, is basically just fighting to win another day. And this stuff was procedural and at least allows the potential to have this stuff reconciled and worked out in the future. And so that's what she's done. My view is that the moderates kind of did win on this because the way this is set up on the reconciliation thing, they have to have 51 votes to do it. And I don't see how they get 51 votes. I mean, like, some of that Twitter audio argument could work

on, on, on, on Kristen cinema, I suppose going by her, her institutional structural, you know, weaknesses in Arizona, which is a more swingy, purply state than West Virginia. Virginia? Like, I mean, like West Virginia, I mean, we keep saying it on here, 40 points for Donald Trump. The idea that somehow Joe Manchin puts himself in some sort of political jeopardy by voting against the $3.5 trillion human infrastructure spending spree admits talk of inflation and all the rest is just weird. And you can have as many blue checkmark progressive Lilliputians throwing their cute little. you know slings and arrows at at at you know gulliver of west virginia i just don't see how it it's going to work steve so jonah's right that's my question steve yeah jonah's right um look i don't think that we look at what's happened over the past several weeks and conclude that nancy plossey is either a failure or a genius i think she had a certain uh a certain number of difficult options, and she has postponed them to fight another day.

I think, you know, we're likely to see another round of these fights with the same groups and the same dynamics at the end of September. And I think, you know, the people who are praising Nancy Pelosi, what they're saying is she kept this off from collapsing right now. She didn't make the moderates happy. She didn't make progressives happy. but she didn't send both sides away screaming. And, you know, in some ways, you could read the passage in the morning dispatch this morning

as a temporary win for her, because you have both the moderates, the moderates, if not quite claiming victory, not sort of frowning in defeat, and the progressives offering warnings, consistent with the warnings that they had been offering all along, but seeming to be satisfied that these are going to be linked in one way or another. So I don't think she hasn't won. We're not at the point where she's won. And the difficulties, the challenges in the Senate are, I think, as difficult as they've ever been. But they will have these fights later.

And, you know, when you get to the point at the end of a negotiation like this, you know, as September may turn out to be, that's when you have people making concessions or moving from what seems to have been their hard and fast ground. And I would expect that you'd have a stronger hand from the White House at that time, from Joe Biden. You could see when he gave his remarks yesterday at 5 o'clock that I think everybody wanted to hear from him about Afghanistan, but he led with this back and forth on Capitol Hill and tried to sound notes of optimism, you can see that he wants to, I think, get back involved in this fight because there are huge parts of his domestic policy agenda that depend on them prevailing. The margins are so thin.

I think there are reasons to be skeptical that it'll look anything like what's being discussed now by the progressives. But I think as we get closer, the likelihood of of some kind of a compromise grows. All right, I'm doing a lightning round for my topic a little bit. 2022, still looming. And there's very small margin in the House. There's no margin for error for Democrats in the Senate. I'm curious what each of you guys are watching as you sort of balance in your head

the likelihood that the Republicans take over one or both. For instance, we still don't know if Ron Johnson is going to run again. in Wisconsin. They're trying to do candidate recruitment like Sununu in New Hampshire, which could make a big difference. Herschel Walker just jumped in, which is at least high name ID in Georgia.

But then you have redistricting happening where like Adam Kinzinger not looking good for him to keep his seat in Illinois. So I don't know. With that as an entry point, Jonah, what are you watching most closely for 2022? So as fate would have it, I'm actually one of the things I'm watching most closely is what my subject is

on this podcast, which is the California recall. So I'll leave that for when I get to it. But I think how the Virginia governor's race shapes up, I think is kind of really important. I mean, I'm not necessarily saying that this Yonkin guy is going to win or anything, but if he comes to them two and then you're like, hmm. Yeah, because I mean like Virginia. now is such the northern Virginia suburbs are such tipping points

and that's where our mutual friend your former colleague Barbara Comstock you know she lost her house seat if if for being a sort of Trump critical Republican

if Republicans seem to rally a little bit in places like Northern Virginia I think it's going to be very good for for the GOP I think that I have a harder time gauging the Senate in part because of just those

variables that you mention and Senate ratios are so personality kind of dependent you know the actual talent of the candidates matters more I'm a I think Sununu could do quite well there I'm very skeptical about Herschel Walker

and that could lead to problems so I guess the thing I'm looking for beyond that is just basically Biden's approval rating. And if the general mood of Democrats, which we're seeing, you know, foreshadowing in California as disengagement, that I think is going to be another big sign that the GOP can have a big night. And it doesn't need to be that big a night. I mean, what? They can win net five seats. And all of a sudden, Kevin McCarthy has got his big star from Gabble. David, what's you watching? You know, if you go back and you look, and just to pick up on the theme from the previous

discussion, there's only one time when there haven't been some pretty significant gains by the out of, you know, by the opposing party in midterms, and that was O2, under highly unusual circumstances. You're just a year removed from 9-11. You're still in the glow of victory from apparent victory, I should say. Temporary victory in Afghanistan. You're in the build-up to the Iraq war, which was broadly supported by the public at that time. And my question is going to be, is 2022 going to be conducted under similarly, highly unusual circumstances? And by that, I mean, what is going to be the after effect or the continuing effect of this pandemic and the political responses to the pandemic, more so than Afghanistan? And, you know, I do think

the Republicans are set up to do pretty well, but they also have a vulnerability. And the vulnerability is this disproportionate political support for anti-vaxing and vaccine resistance that is increasingly weird and strange. And I do think that that could very well be a liability. You know, even in my own in my own circles around here of Trump supporting sort of Gen Xers like a lot of my friends, there's just this increasing division and this increasing frustration with sort of this hardcore kind of MAGA vaccine skeptical mindset that's out there. And not just frustration, but actual anger at it. And so I do wonder to what extent will this highly unusual once in a century pandemic still have some electoral effect in 2022? And would it be, and how will that cut? And I don't

know. It just feels to me like we might have a midterm election that is conducted under unusual national circumstances in much the same way that 2002 was conducted under unusual national circumstances. Steve. So I agree with David's assessment. I think there might be other dynamics of play. And of course, we should caveat this by saying November 2022 is a long time away. A lot of other things could intervene. There will be externalities that nobody will have predicted. But if you look at where Joe Biden was six months ago politically on three of the biggest issues, I would say, COVID, performance on COVID, economy, and national security foreign policy broadly. Joe Biden was pretty happy, I think, with where he sat politically at those times. And in the

intervening six months, we have seen a maybe not quite a reversal of fortune, but many, many difficulties. Some of them, I think, brought on by the White House itself. And I think if you look at Republicans and the way that the map tilted in their favor, tilts in their favor, regardless of the current political moment, regardless of these difficulties, you would have predicted that Republicans were likely to take the House. And I would have said likely to take the Senate, too. If these problems persist, and I think some of them are likely to, and I think that the Joe Biden, even if you believe that people aren't going to be focused on Afghanistan in November 2022, which is a safe bet unless you see the kind of security issues arise that I think

you will, this is a competence question. He came and he said he was going to return America's sort of adult leadership and competence. And, you know, we were going to go back to normal. Well, this is not competence in many different ways. And I think that makes Democrats who already had a very difficult path to keeping their majorities, presents them with a much, much more difficult path. John McLaughlin style, wrong. The answer is the Ohio Republican Senate primary. And who comes out ahead in that? All right, Jonah, your topic. So I was in a California for a week. I was there to send my daughter off to college. And we don't need to talk about that more because nobody except for Sarah wants to see me cry. But I want to see you cry for

different reasons. You know, like it's not it's not as much fun if it's over that. And but it was you know, it's so it was interesting. I saw quite a few recall protests. And, um, I should say pro recall demonstrations. And I happened to be in Santa Monica on the day of the anti-vaccine mandate protest, which was a rich panoply of humanity that spanned totally normal Midwestern tie up, you know, nuclear families there with their homemade signs to people who weren't that. And so, and the TV commercials are full of recall stuff. And so the situation there, as I understand it, is that a majority of Californians probably don't want Gavin Newsom recalled, but a majority of Californians aren't likely to be voters.

And among the likely voters, all the energy is on the recall side. So I have more thoughts on this, but rather than more diatriving for me, Sarah, what, first of all, what do you think is going to happen? And second, what do you think the GOP's lessons from an elder governorship would be? The California recall is so interesting to watch because you're right. it is an entirely turn out question. We know that if you polled everyone in California, Gavin Newsom would stay governor, but that his margin is pretty small, actually,

and that there's no question the enthusiasms on the other side. So I'm hard-pressed to say that he's not going to get recalled, even though it kind of feels like he shouldn't be, and I don't mean on some sort of moral question. I just mean politically, it's not, so bad, and yet the enthusiasm is just so over the top on the recall side. The other thing that's odd is that there's not a great option on number two. So you wonder how many people are going to go in, look at the recall question and be like, yeah, recall. And then look at number two

and say like, oh, wait. Right. So we should explain to people that if the proposition passes that he should be recalled, that's it. And then the leader of the second question, which is who should replace them, even if they have a minority of the vote, of the total vote. Yeah, it's first past the post on that second question. Gavin Newsom won't be included as an option in the second question. By the way, funny lawsuit that David and I have not talked about on A.O where they claimed that this was a constitutional violation to have the recall set up the way that it was. That's not going to happen. So, yeah, I think it's weird because, you know, in the most famous one, you had Arnold Schwarzenegger sitting there in number two question slot. And it's

like, well, Arnold Schwarzenegger, I know who that is. How many people know who Larry Elders is? So, yeah, I'm watching it really closely. I feel like I can't handicap it. Steve, Sarah, definitely dodged the second part of my question. Wait, what was the second part? I tune you out. I just didn't even hear it. You just got distracted by the thought of me crying. How will the GOP, if Larry Elder becomes the governor, which if Gavin Newsom is recalled, he will. How will the GOP, which is outnumbered in California two to one by Democrats, but apparently a lot of the Democrats are sufficiently unmotivated to show up.

the polls to actually keep Newsom in office. How will the GOP interpret this totally legitimate, totally legal, totally constitutional, but in a strict polysized sense, anti-democratic victory for a radio talk show host? So operating an assumption that Elder wins, I don't think it will change much. I don't think it will change much in terms of governance, and I don't think it will change much in terms of the Republican Party and its standing in California. In terms of governance, Larry Elder is still going to be faced with Democratic majorities, strong Democratic majorities in California. That's not going to change. It's hard to imagine that he could be successful in shifting the government to

a, you know, even a center right, a broad center right set of policy options. In terms of the politics, I think what you're likely to have is, you know, this, this hardcore base of the Republican Party that likely includes a lot of people who are Larry Elder supporters. I mean, I do think he has, you know, he didn't have Arnold Schwarzenegger kind of name ID, but among, you know, Republican activists, conservative activists in California, do you think he's known? He's a celebrity on the right. He's been there for a long time. Yeah. And I think he would, you know, he's unlikely to take the party to the left. He's not going to moderate the Republican Party. And I think part of the challenge for the Republican Party is it's in California in particular

is it's had so many of the people who were once moderates leave the party. They're not in the party anymore. And I don't think, you know, a Larry elder governorship for a short period of time is likely to change that. So, David, feel free to respond to any and all of these things. But just to throw the one more thing into the pot here, I believe Diane Feinstein is 12,306 years old. And should there be for any reason vacancy in her seat, should she not be able to fill out her turn, you then have Larry Elder in the position of being able to appoint, I don't know, Kirch Lichter to the U.S. Senate. So what, how do you view this fact that we could very well see?

And look, I don't know Larry Elder very well, I know a couple times, I think, but he's a talk radio host from that wing of the party, actually running the largest and wealthiest state in the union, if it happens. And the fifth largest economy in the world. Yeah. What could go wrong? Yeah. I mean, look, could the Republican Party sort of have hacked California politics? Because California has this really weird provision.

And so you don't have, the Republicans are in the decided minority in California. But they, there are enough of them to basically start recalling every governor. They could, they could, they can do this again. Yeah, it's really one of the more breathtaking political possibilities that I've seen. You're talking about, just to put this concretely, you could have a very low turnout election where a governor who, you know, truth be told if this was regular course of business,

would likely win re-election if he makes it through, it would certainly win re-election if you made it through the California primaries, being voted out of office as an extremely low turnout election and then being replaced by somebody who could get conceivably 20% of the vote that that could be actually something that happens who then could potentially nominate a, you know,

if something happens where Senator Feinstein can't finish your term, change the whole balance of power in the Senate and make Mitch McConnell majority leader again. I mean, this is, you kind of look at it in this sort of, it's hard to put into words like how bizarre this is in how this system, how broken that system is

that enables that to happen. And so, you know, what ends up happening is I think California has a real instability problem on its hands. Because if they accomplish this, if the GOP accomplishes this, will the Democrats sit around and allow Larry Elder to be governor, can he be recalled? You know, this is the kind of thing that, you know, this system, which was designed to try to create popular accountability, is now essentially being hacked to make governance of our largest state extraordinarily difficult

and to introduce a greater degree of instability into our largest state and most important component of our national economy. And it's quite frankly pretty darn ludicrous. Yeah, Although we should say that the Democratic Party of California and the Republican Party of California deserve everything that they get. The people of California. Yeah, well, that's my favorite line from Ed Koch, right? When he lost a third term, he was asked if he was ever going to run for mayor again. And he said, no, the people of New York fired me and now they must be punished.

And that's my view about recalls in generals. I never like recalls because I think that they, They mess up partisan accountability, but at the same time in California, when it really is a one-party state that has really messed up how to run what should be the most easily to, easy to run state in the country economically, you can understand why people would vote for a recall and B for for Larry Elder. I mean, I'm not against recalls in principle, but I'm not, I would vote for recalling. Gavin Newsom. I think one of my, my main objection, I think recalls, I'm generally against recalls, although I'm, I hold that position. I'm not hardcore on that position. I think the greater issue is how they then select the next governor with no runoff. Right. You know, so that it's the plurality winner of a, how many 15, 16 candidate circus. That's where this process gets just really

broken in my view. All right. With that, we are ending with a story that is maybe more my generation than y'alls, but never mind. The baby on the cover of the Nirvana Nevermind album has sued, alleging the album cover was child pornography. He is now 30 years old. If you remember actually just a few years ago, he actually posted pictures of himself

recreating the image, so that's a little weird. But here's something interesting. He was four months old at the time of the 1991 underwater photo shoot claims that the band went back on an alleged promise to conceal his genitals on the album cover.

If anyone remembers, this is a baby underwater reaching for a dollar bill, kind of, and you can see his little part. So he is suing and he is seeking damages and an injunction to prevent the

from profiting from the hit album. So I guess everyone, there should be a run on the Nevermind album now because you may not be able to listen to it ever again because this lawsuit, no doubt, has a lot of merit to it. Also, it turns out the father was friends with a photographer and that's how this all happened. It was like 15 seconds. Although even then, I don't know.

David, how old is Lila? Are you going to like plunge? underwater for a photo right now? No. That would be a no. And she's eight months old. Yeah. I'm not, no. That's weird. Yeah.

So for listeners of another generation who want to feel old, we are recording this on Wednesday. And then 46 years ago today, Bruce Springsteen's Born to Run was released. Wow. Yeah. 46 years ago. Wow. My main beef was. Nirvana, never mind, was that it ended the hairband era,

which was glorious. For you. Like that, it was objectively glorious. Oh, okay. With that, thank you all for listening. Definitely rate us,

wherever you're listening to this podcast. You can give Jonah a lower rating than the rest of us, and that's important to know. You have to click through a few places, but it's definitely a possibility. Or just troll them on Twitter as so many of you are want to do.

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