The Dispatch Podcast - Senate Approves Infrastructure Bill

Episode Date: August 11, 2021

At long last, infrastructure week is here! The gang contemplates what the bipartisan plan and Democratic reconciliation package mean for the country and the economy. Also, how would Sen. Goldberg vote on the bipartisan bill? Then the discussion turns to what should be done about the latest damning climate report. Plus, everyone’s worst fears about Afghanistan from a few weeks ago seem to be coming true. And finally, for dessert, Andrew Cuomo. Show Notes: -Uphill’s latest update on infrastructure -IPCC report -Pentagon press secretary John Kirby -State Department spokesman Ned Price -Cuomo resigns Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Welcome to the Dispatch podcast. I'm your host, Sarah Isger, joined by Steve Hayes, David French, and Jonah Goldberg. Today, we will start with the bipartisan infrastructure package, followed by the very not bipartisan spending package, then some intergovernmental panel on climate change report. Afghanistan continuing to become more and more dire. And finally, Andrew Cuomo. He's out. Let's dive right in. Steve, you are starting us with the Hill. Yes, major infrastructure news. I think this we could finally say, after several years, this is, in fact, infrastructure week. Whoa, what happened? Lots of false starts. The prophecies were true.

But the Senate passed a bipartisan infrastructure package earlier this week with 19 Republican votes, including Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell, a split Republican conference, and then moved quickly taking what the New York Times describes as a major step on Wednesday to enacting sweeping experience. expansion of the nation's social safety net, approving a $3.5 trillion budget blueprint. Let's not complicate this. Jonah, I'm coming to you first. How should conservatives feel about what's happened this week? And if you had been in the Senate, would you have voted for the bipartisan infrastructure package? Well, let's take a step back.

I think we can now officially proclaim the Tea Party is dead and the earth that it sprung forth from has been salted and poured over with concrete and no life shall puncture through again for another 10,000 years. The amount of money that we're talking about spending dwarfs anything that Obama had proposed that caused Rick Santelli to do his big grant. And the amount of opposition to all of this from to the hard infrastructure stuff has been even from supposed fiscal hawks really negligible um so as a as a conservative just looking at it from just sort of a conservative anthropology kind of hat i think the thing to notice is that at least for the foreseeable future fiscal conservatism is dead um and uh if i had been a senator

I don't know. I could be persuaded on the politics. Let's assume that I had given up enough of my soul to run for office in the first place, so I'd be more flexible on such things. But I could see going for the hard infrastructure thing. But if I actually thought that the Democrats were sincere in saying that they were going to make it tied up with this soft infrastructure thing through reconciliation, that probably to me would be a deal breaker. Under no scenario, even if you were skeptical about raging inflation, under no scenario do we need to spend $4.5 trillion in this fiscal year after we've already spent $1.9 trillion on the first COVID relief package. But I'm still unconvinced that the reconciliation and soft infrastructure thing is actually going to get passed. It seems to me the politics of this in some ways make it more difficult for it to pass, but people I trust keep telling me I'm wrong about that.

So I don't know. Actually, wait, I had a question about this because I'm watching Laura Ingram talk to Senator Cassidy. And she keeps just stating as fact that the passing the bipartisan infrastructure deal makes it more likely that the $3.5 trillion deal passes. No explanation of the politics. Could someone explain to me why one spending bill makes a number? another one more likely instead of my intuition, which is having a large one point plus trillion dollar spending deal actually makes the other spending deal less likely? You see, that's my intuition too.

And I don't, every time people explain to me how this makes the other one more likely, I get lost a little bit in the weeds and it feels like there's a paranoia thing about what Nancy Pelosi's witchcraft, but maybe Steve can explain it. No, I mean, this is this, let's turn that question to Dave. I was going to go to him next anyway. David, I mean, that's the argument we heard from Senator Bill Cassidy in a podcast that we taped yesterday for later this week, basically said the reason, you know, he made, I would say, a spirited defense of the substance of the bipartisan infrastructure bill, sort of walking line by line through what he, I mean, not literally

line by line, it was 2,700 pages, but item by item, making a case. He could have gone on forever. He made a strong defense of the package on its merits, even to somebody like me who starts pretty skeptical. But he said the politics of this are pretty clear, and it's what Jonah and Sarah have suggested, that the passage of this makes it less likely that the bigger packages would pass. It will split Democrats. He sort of deferred to Mitch McConnell, said if Mitch McConnell, said if Mitch McConnell,

McConnell thinks it makes the bigger package less likely. Nobody's a better vote counter than Mitch McConnell. How do you see it? I mean, I'm not going to dissent from the overall picture here. I think it makes it less likely. Does it the package of this bill mean it's now more likely that Joe Manchin in Kristen Cinema will support this? That doesn't make a lot of sense to me as to why it's going to be more likely to spend even more money after we just. added, what was it going to be, $250 billion to the deficit over 10 to the debt over 10 years, which in the scheme of things, this is how bad it's gotten. In the scheme of things, that's not quite as huge as one might have expected. I do think that we will see some elements of that, you know, that larger reconciliation project come through. And I would just really, and some of the elements of that,

I actually like. I like the child allowance plan. I think that it's not an A plus plan by like Romney's. I think it's more of a B or a B plus plan. And I would like to see it, I don't know, call me old fashioned. Maybe I'm in that tiny little square of earth where the salt didn't reach in the salting of the fiscal responsibility side of the party. But I would kind of like to see these programs paid for by cuts elsewhere? But apparently that's no longer in the cards. It's no longer something that we even really talk about anymore. But yeah, I'm very skeptical. We could be podcasting in two, three weeks and eat crow, but I'm very skeptical that this all makes the much bigger financial package more likely. Well, that would make it infrastructure month if we're

still talking about this. And then we would lose everybody, which we will. So Sarah, I want to talk about the Democrats. I mean, you saw some pretty aggressive back and forth between prominent Democrats in the House. You had moderates writing a letter talking about the need for this infrastructure bill. You had moderate Democrats as part of the Problem Solver Caucus who sort of jumped on and helped push for passage of this along with their counterparts on the Republican side, also in the Problem Solver Caucus. And then you had Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez sort of taking after them on Twitter saying, look, the moderates might think this is great, but there are people who matter to Democrats who don't just live in the suburbs and can't just be

set aside. And if moderates want to sink this thing because they won't give us progressives anything, fair enough, let them sink it. Do they find common ground? I mean, they don't have much room to spare on the Senate side or on the House side? Well, let's back up a little. This is what's going on in both parties. You have David's negative polarization, the great sort happening throughout the country. There was a great data analysis by, I think Jeff Skelly did it at 538. A whole piece on how redistricting is not the problem, and therefore redistricting this time

can't fix the problem of why we increase. have districts that are more and more safe, you know, more partisan, what, there's only seven Democrats in seats that Trump won. That's, I mean, just so, so tiny. All right. So what's happening in both parties is like being magnified right now in the infrastructure part of this for the Democrats. You have the moderates looking around bewildered because every time there's an election, they're winning. You have Joe Biden getting the nomination. You have the New York City mayor's race in New York City, hardly, you know, farm country Iowa here. And then you have last week, the Ohio Senate primary for the Democrats, where a well-funded

progressive Bernie Sanders Democrat is soundly defeated by the moderate, Joe Biden wing of the party. Every polling says that the Democratic Party is more centrist than this progressive base. But you come to D.C. and it's like you're in an alternate universe where the progressives have an enormous amount of power with Speaker Pelosi, less so in the Senate, clearly. They don't have really many people in the Senate. You're hard pressed to think of someone other than Bernie Sanders. And even Bernie Sanders feels like he's been tamed a little bit by the Biden administration much to the dismay

of the squad in the House. So, this is why my question of like, why would the one package make the other one more likely rather than less likely? If Republicans had said we are not going to join

in a bipartisan infrastructure package, we're not going to pass this thing at all, I can see how the moderates then are like, well, if you won't work with us, we have to then go with the progressives to do a reconciliation package. Therefore, we have to do $3.5 trillion because you won't work with us to do a more moderate, more centrist package.

So if you do do that, then they don't need to work with the progressives. Now, the progressors are saying they won't vote for the bipartisan package unless they get this. That's where the politics gets a little weirder. And that's why you have, I think, the voterrama yesterday moving out of the Senate, so that the House can vote on it. It then goes back to the Senate, though, where we expect, I think at this point, Cinema and Mansion to vote no on it

on like sort of the final final part of the $3.5 trillion. So this whole thing is to appease the House Democrat so they can say they voted for this crazy bonkers spending that isn't going to happen because they don't need them in the House either.

You'll have some Republicans vote for the bipartisan. package. It's majority only. This is just the purest form of democratic, flailing base politics that we've been talking about on the right for four or five years now. We just haven't spent a lot of time talking about it on the left. But here it is. This is your best example. And so we're doing this large kabuki theater to appease, you know, what, 12, 17 votes in the House. And that's like the high version of this number. And yes, we will continue talking about infrastructure month

because the final, what, Democratic Senate, sorry, the final $3.5 trillion vote in the Senate is set to happen September 12th, I think they said. We got a long way to go. So final question on this. I have to say it has struck me as more than a little ironic this week listening to Republicans, particularly Senate Republicans, become sort of fiscal hawks again for the first time in five years. After basically Republicans spoke nearly a word about fiscal conservatism, debt and deficits throughout the Trump administration, they're now deeply concerned.

And as Mick Mulvaney told us, Sarah, when we interviewed him several months ago, the Trump administration spent far more in its first two years than Barack Obama spent in his last two years. But that went unremarked upon by conservatives, by Senate Republicans. Is Jonah right that this is the end of fiscal conservatism? And if that's the case, I mean, who's left to care about the debt other than David? on his little square piece of earth. One might even say, David, it's part of a remnant. And me. Sarah?

Okay, wait. I have a, I mean, I have a more basic question. As a member of the American public, I'm starting to think that spending like this, the whole, all the money is just fake, right? We've been warned about spending too much by fiscal conservatives for 30 years since the Reagan days. spending continues to increase. The Bush administration wildly increased it.

The Obama administration increased it even faster. And then what the CBO says that we increased. The Congressional Budget Office. Yeah, thank you. The Congressional Budget Office estimated that the budget deficit increased 16% of GDP last year. That was more than triple from the year before. And the largest increase since 1945. The largest holder of our debt is Japan, followed closely by China, of course.

But of course, the largest actual holder of our debt, it's not even close. So Japan has one trillion. China has also one trillion. We have 20.8 trillion in public debt out there. What if none of it matters? We're only with the 43rd country out of 207 countries in terms of our debt to GDP ratio. I don't know. Like, how are Republicans even going to make the argument that this matters anymore after the last

20 years where it turns out it hasn't mattered? Maybe we should spend like drunken sailors. I think it matters. Why? I mean, I think you can point to inflation and suggest that it matters for one thing. Okay. I think you can, you can point to the ever increasing. Headline last yesterday said that inflation just from the last year has already wiped out

any gains in wages, which is like mind-blowingly awful. So I would say dramatically increasing spending can have that effect. It didn't have that effect as soon as we had thought, but certainly we're living some of that right now. I would say when you look at the prospect of interest rates increasing, continuing to increase, and taking even more of that chunk of the debt that we need to pay just to cover the interest on our debt will be dramatically rising in the future, and I think increasingly problematic. And the biggest problem is we don't know exactly what happens when you flip this debt-to-GDP ratio

or when you see it spike like it's spiked. But I think we can safely predict that it's not sustainable. And without reform of entitlement programs, and nobody from any either party is seriously talking about entitlement reform. Haven't even heard the term lately. No. I mean, you don't, you had a moment in Trump administration where they tried to repackage some of Trump's welfare reform proposals as entitlement reform, but it didn't really work

because it wasn't significant. So can I jump in real quick with repeating my phrase that I've used several times as we've talked about this? And I keep going back to this Noah Smith piece. and his substack from January 21, where he talks about, does anybody really know? One of the problems is we don't really know how much borrowing is too much borrowing.

And so he uses this great analogy of walking down an infinite corridor with an invisible pit. You're going to, you just keep walking, and you just keep walking, and you don't know when the tipping point occurs. You don't know exactly when you've gone too far, but you know that you can go too far.

This is not something where you can just continue to spend your way to spend, spend, spend, spend, spend, and pay for nothing. And this is the problem that I have is that, yeah, we just keep pushing the envelope as if there is no limit. But the problem that those of us who want to maintain some degree of fiscal responsibility have is we can't then turn to the American people and say, here is the limit. Here is what's too far. that there is a too far, but we don't know exactly what is too far. And so there's always an argument to go, well, another trillion. Let's just push it another trillion. Here, let's push it another trillion. And so this is sort of the problem that the fiscal responsibility argument has had for a while. And also, honestly, the fiscal responsibility side has cried Wolf on a few

occasions. And so we know there's a too far. We don't know how far is too far. And so that means you've got a bad argument compared to the person who comes, comes into the public square and says, I can give you this for sure. Yeah, I have two quick points here. One, I once heard of a fantastic interview with Pete Townsend of the Who when he was explaining how at the beginning, uh, when they were on their first tour and he loved to smash guitars and set fire to amps or whatever, you know, you would do that kind of stuff. I guess he didn't set fire to amps. That was more Hendricks. But, um, you smashed guitars and whatnot. And they would run up debt. And the manager, would have a band meeting and be like guys we owe like 10,000 pounds and towns and the band

adultery and all these guys are like oh my god how are we ever going to pay this back that we we don't make that much in five gigs or whatever it was and and then they have a meeting six months later and the manager's like you don't understand we got real problems now we owe like we're like a hundred thousand pounds in debt and they're like oh my god our lives are over maybe we should quit and get real jobs and oh whatever and then like Like six months later after that, the manager says, guys, we now owe a million pounds. And the band was like, all right, let's party. Screw it.

Because once it became inconceivable to even remotely pay it back, let's just keep the party going as long as we can. And I think that there's a big part of that in the ethos that we have now. It's sort of like Herman Kahn's thinking the unthinkable. the actual idea of taking the debt seriously at this point is so politically impossible that no one wants to talk about it. And they've convinced themselves that David's, you know, a bottomless pit just isn't there. And it's there. And then there's the second problem, which is that this may not have anything to do with math. You know, the Paul Ryan School of Entitlement stuff says that eventually sort of according to like Herb Stein's law, that which cannot go on forever,

must eventually stop. But it may not have, it may not be about math or classical economics at all. It could just simply be that we can keep running the credit card so long as people have faith that we can pay it off. And then there can just be some exogenous event that all of a sudden strikes, uh, that robs us of the world's confidence or even the American people's confidence. Let's put it this way. Imagine of January 6 had turned out to be the way the most, the most, you hysterical, you know, critics of Trump and all that thought it might have, right, where in fact it was a coup and that Trump became president for life. And, you know, of course, Mike Pence was banished to the Ural's to, you know, live out his days, smashing rocks or whatever.

Would we be able to sell bonds anymore? Would we be able to borrow on the world's credit? it could be that there's some political forcing mechanism that all of a sudden makes our debt status a much bigger problem than it is right now. And that is entirely impossible. It could be us trying to defend Taiwan and failing really badly that does it, or one of these kinds of things. And so for me, I guess fall back on sort of the old bourgeois values of you live within your means, you save for a rainy day, and therefore you don't put yourself in a position where those unforeseen events are as calamitous as they would be given the current circumstances. Yeah, if nobody cares about the debt today, everybody will care about it soon. That's my basic takeaway.

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I mean, listeners of my podcast know that I'm obsessed with people constantly calling climate change an existential or extinction level crisis. It's neither of those things. And I think they actually do, being those most concerned about climate change, themselves a disservice for the simple reason that it's a crying wolf problem when you say that and when you talk that way, if it were, and in fact, whenever, my rule of thumb is if you ever hear someone say, look, this is an extinction level threat. My first question is, okay, so why aren't you supporting massive investments in nuclear power? And if they respond with anything other than you're absolutely right, let's do it, or say, you know, then I know that they don't actually believe

themselves. Now that said, we should back up. The IPCC came out with this report. My takeaway from it, having, of course, read it cover to cover, including all of the footnotes. That's why I'm so bleary-eyed, is that there's actually good news in it in the sense that there is more certainty about climate change being real and man-caused, but less likelihood that the worst-case scenarios that we've been told are actually going to happen. And so that I can go on, but I've been talking a lot, as I'm sure everyone can attest. So let me put this back into the form of a question. David, the IPPC says we've got to do everything we can in the next 20 years to stay within our carbon budget, as they now like to put it. If we want to keep things below,

keep things at a 1.5 rate of warming, 1.5 degrees rate of warming. Will this have any impact at all towards that end? And will we stay within our carbon budget, globally or the United States of America? Well, I'm going to take the, let me just, let me just preface that, you know, one of the things I've started to do in the last few years is, A, follow this issue much more closely, and B, follow it from a, from what, the term is an echo modernist perspective. In other words, there's a movement within the environmental movement more broadly called eco-modernism, which kind of tough to explain in a soundbite, but essentially is really focused on human innovation.

It's a way through this path and is also focused a great deal on human flourishing within the environment and human innovation as a path through climate change. And from that standpoint, there are actually a lot of really good trends. So I went to my friends at the Breakthrough Institute was looking at how they were responding to this. And they were contrasting, if you talk about emissions between 2001 and 2010, emissions were increasing at 3% per year, increased by 31% between 2%. between 2001, 2010, coal use was increasing, you know, geometrically. It was a, it was a grim

scenario. Now, in the last 10 years, you're beginning to see some real changes. Global emissions rose 1% per year. They're projected to plateau in coming years. As they recount it, 32 countries have decoupled their emissions from economic growth. In other words, they can continue to grow their economies without growing their admissions. And in the last two years, electricity from clean energy, solar, wind, hydro, and nuclear produced more energy than coal, which is, again, very positive. So my view on a lot of this has been, I don't, you know, there are people absolutely, absolutely people who are motivated by the, everything is going to be over in 10 years unless we do X or Y or Z. there's also a lot of people who've been hearing that kind of message for a long time

and have seen a lot of negative projections not come to pass who are kind of immune to it at this point they're just they're just not going to listen to that anymore and I tend to think there's a different way through to get to those folks who quite frankly it's not that their climate change deniers in the sense that they don't believe that there is any relationship between emissions and climate. It's just that they are not,

they just don't buy the catastrophic, they don't buy the catastrophic projections. And I think there's a way to reach a lot of these folks, which is to emphasize innovation and to emphasize human ingenuity and to emphasize that there is a path forward to both, both economic growth and environmental responsibility.

And I think that if you can come to, you know, the American people emphasizing that, you're going to win over a few more folks. And there's a good story to tell. There's a good story to tell in that regard. And I just told part of it. So, okay, but I want to, like, for me at least, there's two problems here. One, I believe that global warming is real. I believe that it's man-made.

sorry, I know we're calling it climate change. I believe that it will be more catastrophic than Jonah is sort of spinning this report. I think it's been spun the other way too far as well. I think he's right about that. But I think it will have catastrophic effect on sea rises that we cannot reverse. We can't grow the ice back, even through innovation.

But here's the problem. the U.S. is not going to be the issue. It's going to be India and China as their populations, which are much, much larger and have been using far less carbon, move into the middle class and have advances in their standard of living. It will be far beyond anything the U.S. can, will, should, would produce. And so what's happening is that the U.S. is being asked to make sacrifices in its economy and its lifestyle and everything else. not only are we not asking that of China, we can't ask that of China. We can't, you know, say, well, you have to stay where you are, even though you don't have refrigerators or food.

So that's where I think you have to rely on innovation. If we do not innovate our way out of this, there is no world in which countries like ours can agree to what would need to be done for us to reduce our footprint enough to cover the increase in China and India's footprint. We can't decrease that enough. So it has to be innovation. Second, you know, there's the whole population boom thing that we haven't talked about, wherein, you know, the world was supposed to starve itself out. We were going to have too many people and not enough food. And so we were going to have mass worldwide starvation, and then Norman Borlaug invents dwarf wheat. This is a very simplified version of how this all worked in history, but dwarf wheat's invented and like, boom, he saved millions

of lives, and we no longer think that the world is going to starve itself out. As in we've had this before where all the science said that we would starve ourselves out. It made sense that we were going to have too many people and not enough food, and we did innovate. our way out of it in a way that no one particularly foresaw. I have every confidence, weirdly, that whether it's next year or 10 years from now, there's going to be a Norman Borlaug who's going to figure out how to make nuclear work better or get energy from algae that works. I do not think it will be electric or solar or wind or something we have now.

It's out there. No, look, I'm with you on the innovation thing. I should have said, you know, all praise and honor to Norman Borlaug save more lives than probably anybody of the 20th century. It's also worth pointing out that the population bomb stuff was wrong from the other end, too. Not only did we not run out of food, we ran out of population explosion. A total fertility rate around the world just was nowhere near what these guys predicted. And I always feel bad about dragging on Malthusians because Thomas Malthus was right about the way the world worked before he was born. He was just absolutely wrong about predicting what the world

would be like going forward because the trends all changed. And the Paul Ehrlichs of the world got all that stuff wrong. And again, look, I mean, I think climate change is real. I think it's serious. I think we should think about it. I think there are some very serious risks of very bad things happening. And we need to figure out how we adjudicate those risks. At the same time, you know, Like this IPCC report, again, which, you know, I spent days without sleep reading cover to cover, is that it's not actually any new research. It's a massive survey of existing research. And the potential for what Sarah's talking about here of groupthink is enormous because

what in the climate science industry, as it is, I'm not saying they're all frauds or all fake or anything like that. There are a lot of serious people doing serious work. But it's very difficult to have, to get funding. to get published, to get peer reviewed, if you are skeptical about the science of climate change. And so it should not shock us that a survey of the cream of the academic byproduct of this industry has an overwhelming consensus to it because people who are not part of the consensus don't get to be part of the conversation in a way that I think, you know,

Have you ever, if you ever go back and read Taub's history of where, like, the nutrition standards came from and how politicized the science was on that, having a little humility about where all the stuff, you know, the certainty stuff, I think is, is warranted. And anyway, I could go on because I have strong feelings, but we haven't heard from Steve. And the world wants to know whether Steve thinks, uh, uh, we're going to get a carbon tax. Well, you probably just invited me in because you know I'm likely to back up what you're saying on this, um, with actual additional. data. So Jonah's friend Ron Bailey, reason, has a very, I think, measured and thoughtful analysis of this report. And what he says is, you know, in effect, they outline five different scenarios from sort of best case to worst case. And the two worst case scenarios are, in his view, quote, totally implausible, unquote, because they assume that we're going to dramatically increase

globally are fossil fuel consumption, production and consumption. He says the humanity is not looking at temperature increases of 3.5 degrees Celsius to 4.5 degrees Celsius by 2021. Keep in mind that the temperature difference from the depths of the last ice age to today is around 6 degrees Celsius. And that change took place over millennia, not a century. And coal consumption, coal production consumption, peaked in 2013, so we would have to reverse again in the other direction and then dramatically increase use of fossil fuels at a time when I think he's right to assume that that's unlikely or totally implausible in his, even taking your point, Sarah, about China and India, we don't control, we can't control their consumption. I think part of the problem is the people who are

writing about this, people are translating reports like this for the general public in the mainstream media. Many of them are effectively climate activists. So they, I mean, set aside for a moment the natural proclivity of journalists to hype these things, to sensationalize these things. And we've seen that, you know, across any number of issues for a long time, the sort of, if it bleeds, it leads phenomenon. But they're hyping this. You know, know, you read some of these stories and they give, I think, undue amounts of attention to these worst case scenarios, these sort of extinction level framing, as Jonah put it, and far less to the positive changes that have taken place. And the other part that's frustrating about

a lot of the coverage is they do tend to separate people who discuss these issues, people who study these issues, into sort of climate change. realists and climate change denialists. And I do think there's a reason, we don't hear a lot from them, but I do think there's a reasonable number of scientists who look at this and say, yeah, you know what, this is real. It's bad. It should be addressed. But we're probably going to have, you know, humans on this sort of past 2100. You know, the innovation, I'm going just back to the innovation point. All of the trends are really good on the innovation front. I mean, the cost of solar power and battery storage has fallen tenfold in the last ten years.

That's not a trend that's going to stop. It's not like we have now peaked in our battery storage development. I mean, there are developments in nuclear power where, quite frankly, you know, one of the biggest barriers that we have to innovation and deployment of increased nuclear energy is far more bureaucratic and regulatory than it is technological. I mean, we have the ability to bring more nuclear energy to more people than we've ever had before. And so I think there's, and is coal going to be, I mean, as we've said, is coal going to become more prominent? It's just going to be less prominent. And so I think there's a lot of reason for some, for optimism here. And a lot of

reason to continue to double down on innovation because we don't want to leave any part of this world behind on the economic development front. We don't want to say, you know, sorry, huge chunks of the developing world. You don't get to develop more because of climate. That's just not going to work even if we tried. Of course. Of course. All right. Also, Sarah, when you sit, Sarah, just for the record, because people will be mad at me for not mentioning it since it's my hobby horse when you say we can't regrow the ice um you know i'm a pretty big fan of geoengineering and um one of the things you know one of my problems with the way climate change has been discussed all this time is that everyone says that if if you agree with the prescription that it's

happening therefore you have to agree with those people about how to deal with it and you know i can agree with the climate change scientists who say it's happening they're not economists for the most part and they're not politicians either and the idea of just dampening economic growth which has been a big part of their argument for a long time not anymore which is a good thing never was very persuasive to me if i have a disease i would much rather than treat the symptoms i would like to cure it and so i don't know in 10 20 30 years if we want to seed clouds to increase the albedo if we want to do all sorts of different things that actually fix the problem of warming the planet, you know, that's in the cards. I very much, I was had Jonathan Adler on my podcast

this week, and he raises something scary, which I had not thought of, which is that right now there's nothing in international law preventing the Chinese from just saying, hey, you know, this global warming thing is a problem. Let's unleash huge plumes of sulfates or, you know, clouds into the sky and create artificial nuclear winter for a couple years to lower the planet's temperature. And there's nothing we could do to stop them from doing that. He doesn't think it's is really likely, but I hadn't thought about bad geoengineers getting in the game because, you know, I just assumed it would be us in Canada or something. I didn't think we were getting into cloud libido. Albedo. Albiot. I feel like this has been a

large conversation on the Fermi paradox. All right. Moving to Afghanistan, another paradox. David, this is your topic. Joe Biden told reporters, look, we spent over a trillion dollars over 20 years. We trained and equipped with modern equipment over 300,000 Afghan forces. And Afghan leaders have to come together. And yet, at the same time, the country is now predicted to fall, the capital is predicted to fall, maybe within 30 days. Oh, they're coming together all right, Sarah. They're coming together under the Taliban. That's what's happening. So 7th provincial capital falls in five days.

There's a collapse of the Afghan army. I mean, this is not something, as I said, to lead my newsletter last night. This is the classic. This wasn't just predictable. It was predicted. Why? Because we've seen this movie before when we have allied forces that we've trained and equipped. often they're adequate when we

and they're typically adequate when we are there to support them the instant you remove our presence entirely like for example the way we did before the rise of ISIS and Iraq they quickly become combat and effective and that's what we're seeing

in Afghanistan and you know let me just go to Steve on this and it's really even hard to know how to sort of pitch this over to Steve because I think we're watching a humanitarian tragedy unfold in front of our faces. I don't think it's too much to say. I'm not sure the American people care about that. This is, do you also see this as a national security tragedy in addition to the undeniable humanitarian tragedy?

Yeah, I mean, I think it's a national security problem. I think we're already seeing that it's a humanitarian problem. You look at the numbers of people, hundreds of thousands of people, fleeing Afghanistan with nowhere to go, we've seen what that looks like. And on the national security front, you look back at what the world was like, what Afghanistan was like pre-9-11. And, you know, we know what happened when al-Qaeda had room to maneuver, room to operate in Afghanistan before 9-11. Look, I mean, the extent to which the Biden administration is just living in another universe on this. It's hard to overstate it. Interesting exchanges in the last couple of days

at the Pentagon press briefing with the Pentagon spokesman John Kirby. He was asked a couple different times, are you surprised at how quickly the Taliban has taken over these provincial capitals? It's a great question, and it's an impossible question for him to answer because if he says yes, you think, wow, why are we allowing this to happen? And if he says, no, you think, are you that clueless that these, that your Afghan-trained forces are inadequate and that the Taliban forces were going to do what pretty much everybody knew the Taliban forces would do? But listen to what State Department spokes and Ned Price said last week in talking to reporters about what's happening on the ground in Afghanistan. He said, if the goal is a just and durable solution, I think everyone can agree that they want a durable solution, including the Taliban.

I mean, that would make Baghdad Bob blush. It's so divorced from reality. I think it's a national embarrassment to have a Pentagon spokesman say something like that in this context. Then you had Zal Khalizad, who's leading the, you know, the non-existent negotiations. make a threat over the weekend, visiting with Taliban negotiators and others in Doha, Qatar, threaten the Taliban that if they take Afghanistan and establish a government by force, the United States will isolate them. Do you think the Taliban care if the United States threatens to ice? I mean, can you imagine even saying that, even articulating that thought, such a reflection of clueless?

about the situation in Afghanistan, global environment more broadly, and think of it especially in the context of what's happening next door in Iran, where we have labeled them the world's leading state sponsor of terror. Are we isolating Iran right now? No, we're doing everything we can in giving preempt, including giving preemptive concession after preemptive concession after preemptive concession to try to persuade the Iranians to do what's against the nature of its regime, something they've been doing for decades. You think the Taliban hears Zal Khalizad say, well, you might be isolated if you take Afghanistan by force.

They look at Iran and say, he's full of shit. Like, of course that's not going to happen. E rating. E rating. Sorry. Sarah. It's hard. I can't believe I actually got through that whole section without going blue. Sarah, will negative partisanship make Republicans hawks again?

Looks like not. It's like one of the few areas where just because Joe Biden says it, you expect the Republicans then to take up arms on the other side and nobody's there. Very interesting. By the way, I, I noted in one of these, the Taliban killing detainees in mass. We sort of saw that coming. That feels like that was obvious. And demanding that communities provide them with females above 15 to marry. So just in case we weren't sure whether any of the progress that we made over the last 20 years in that country,

allowing women to have education, allowing them to live lives that were not totally subjugated to these glorified warlords, no, we're going to take all of that away. I'm glad that Malala has become the international celebrity that she has because perhaps her maintaining that status will be a reminder to how pathetic this reality is. But yeah, politically, no, America has moved on. It's not coming back. This is the reality. So I have a question about that.

Go ahead, David. Ask me the question and I'll answer your question. And I'll ignore your question. Ask me the question to ignore. Let's obey the forms. Go ahead. Ask your critical question. So, well, okay, why don't you go?

Because I was going to vent in the form of a question. So you go and I'll vent. All right. So I was going to say when Sarah announced that absolutely grotesque statement from the Taliban about providing women for the guys to marry about whether or not Andrew Cuomo was booked his next flight to Kabul but um oh too soon so um um but no I mean I so I agree look it's a little bit like the infrastructure stuff um because Trump wanted infrastructure and I know he's complaining now that that you know they're

going to have they're going to give it to Biden but they didn't give it to him but it's just sort of sour grapey but the intellectual framework for opposing infrastructure was taken away by the Trump administration touting it for so long similar the same dynamic happens here in terms of you can't really condemn Biden consistently when you supported or didn't speak up against Trump wanting to do the same thing on a faster time table and if I could sorry just to jump in and saying the same kinds of ridiculous things that the Biden administration yeah remember Mike Pompeo went on a Sunday show and claimed that the Taliban was going to pick up, take up arms alongside the United States to fight al-Qaeda,

I remember that, despite a shared leadership structure. I mean, total absurdity all around. Oh, and don't forget the plan to do the September 11th Camp David meeting with the Taliban. Right. And so I agree that politically no one seems to really care except for a handful of people on this podcast. But I do wonder if you actually get the 21st century equivalent of the hanging from the helicopter skids on the American embassy in Saigon shots, if you do get the video and there will be video, at the very least, the Taliban will release the video of mass executions

and all of that kind of thing, does the short memory of the American voters and the general general patriotic pride and conscience of the American voters. Does it kick in? And no one's going to say, oh, we should go back in. I think that's sort of over. But will just the humiliation of seeing the Taliban raise the flag over Kabul, if they in fact end up doing that, which I think we think they will, and them celebrating and cheering how they defeated the United States, it's hard for me to see how that actually helps Joe Biden in any way. It's very difficult for me. to see how, like, his poll numbers improve because of those images. And so I do think even though on a policy front, the politics of the, on the policy front, nothing will

change. Politically, it's going to be, you know, not to be too glib about it, it just going to be a huge bummer. And it's going to affect the general political mood of the country, I would think, in ways that would hurt him. But that's my prediction of it. Maybe you guys disagree. So short, my short rant here, I'm really tired of the unrelenting failure narrative about our military operations in Afghanistan. We, if, I've said it before, I'll say it again. If we had told Americans on September 12th, 2001, we're going to pursue a military strategy that's going to help us be free of significant 9-11 scale or anything within shouting distance of 9-11 scale attacks for 20 years, and American people would have said, sold. Where do I sign for

this strategy? And we totally take for granted, totally take for granted the success we've had in preventing 9-11 scale attacks or anything approaching a 9-11 scale attack. And then, look, I know, we all know that in the last 20 years, Afghanistan has not been yanked into the ranks of the developed world. We know that. But that's not like nothing has happened that's good. I mean, Jonah's arch rivals over at Brookings have been putting together some key statistics about life in Afghanistan. And here are just some of them. Infant mortality dropped by half during the U.S. operation. Life expectancy increased by six years, electricity consumption by a factor of 10 years in school increased by at least three years for men and four for women

university graduates rose from under 31,000 to almost 200,000 so no of course we didn't turn Afghanistan into South Korea but to to sit there and say that what the last 20 years is some sort of record of unrelenting failure I think it's just completely false but it's a narrative that has locked in with the American people and I think it's a it's a fundamentally flawed narrative 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.

Terms and conditions apply. Learn more at amex.ca. slash Y Annex. All right. Now it's time for dessert. You've all been waiting. Cuomo resigned. And I don't think that was a shock that he,

he was forced out of office. I think what is more shocking is that he didn't wait for impeachment to get underway. There wasn't really that very Goldwater moment where, you know, folks from Albany like walk down to his house and tell him it's time to go, although my God, like everything short of it was happening. In his statement, his press conference where he announced that he was resigning, it was weird. One could be forget. given for thinking that that press conference happened in like 1995, because he basically said he didn't think he did anything wrong. He still thought he was the subject of a political witch hunt, but also that he understood that there had been generational shifts on acceptable

behavior. And somehow that's what was at fault here, which was maybe the most infuriating, outrageous thing that anyone has said in 2021, and the list was long, guys, and I'm going to put that at the top of my list, because the idea that you shouldn't have to resign because this thing that was obviously bad was okay before when you were doing it, which, by the way, it wasn't okay before. It's just that women lacked the power to have any say in it not being okay. By the way, you were accused of groping, kissing women on the mouth when they didn't want to be touching a woman's belly. I shudder. Anyway, so I just want to call out that as being particularly infuriating. But my question to you, David, first, is this a vindication of the

Me Too movement or something else? I mean, vindication. That's, That's a big word, I think. Is this something that the Me Too movement helped make happen? I would say, yeah, absolutely. But, you know, some of this behavior, especially the out and out groping, it didn't, this was stuff that was going to be controversial before Me Too. You know, I do think the Me Too, the Me Too movement did give more people,

more confidence to come forward with the expectation that they would be seriously heard. and also one thing that I think the Me Too movement did help is it really kind of you know here we are several years into it it really did kind of render the Cuomo explanation all that much more absurd it was just something that fell flat it was ridiculous as we discussed on the advisory opinions plug there is no I'm just a hansy Italian exception to federal sexual harassment law. You know, it's... Something they were going to change that law. And so, you know, that's why his emphasis of, ah, that's just how I am. This is, I just, I grab people, was not a defense. It was a confession in many ways.

And so, but, you know, I think the bottom line is if the senior Democratic leadership in the country had ignored this or... or backed him, he probably could have northened his way through this. But when Pelosi Schumer, Biden said, resign, that gave Democrats all the cover they needed. And in hindsight, you know, I know that on a lot of the Twitterverse, they were saying, oh, he won't resign. He'll get through this. In hindsight, once they all did that, his fate was sealed. So, Jonah, Matt Gates is under investigation allegedly for having sex

with a 17-year-old girl who was under the federal age of consent, who was 18 as the age of consent. By the way, just to run through what consent means, that means that we have decided as a society that she cannot consent to having sex. That makes it rape when you cannot consent to having sex anyway.

But, it is well documented, let's say, that this member of Congress and the Republican Party was frequently having parties with prostitutes, having sex with lots of women who he was paying through Joel Greenberg, who he, who has pled out and signed a plea deal to that effect. Why aren't Republicans responding in any sort of similar fashion? to Matt Gates the way that Democrats universally responded to Cuomo. Yeah, so with the reminder of Matt Gates, I should have made the Taliban joke about Mount Gates.

But I'm going to disagree with you a little bit by way of answering the question. I do think the standards have changed. And the reason why I think Cuomo's invocation of this is such BS is he pretends not to have known that, right? when he has passed laws that made sexual harassment easier to prosecute where he's tweeted all to believe all women's stuff, he served in the Clinton administration, he knew the rules changed, he just didn't think they applied to him. But if you go back 30, 40 years, and this sort of gets to your answer, first of all,

Ted Kennedy, going around making waitress sandwiches with Chris Dodd, JFK, basically pimping out an intern and doing all sorts of evil, evil things. Bill Clinton doing all of the things that he did and basically getting away with it and it's not just that they got away with it you got to remember and this is where I kind of disagree or this is it gets to the answer

of your question is that feminists you know pre-me-to feminists and then in the 80s and 90s had done historic work fighting sexual harassment and the disequilibriums of power and all of these kinds of things

that they talked about and, you know, they took out Bob Packwood, the senator who was a feminist ally, but he was also a pig. And then along comes Bill Clinton, and all of a sudden, all of these people, including Gloria Steinem, throw all of their credibility away to defend Bill Clinton. You had, you know, Gloria Steinem writing about the one free grope rule, which was dishonest on two levels, because one, you don't get a free grope. And second of all, there was far more than just one grope. and I can quote you a chapter and verse and all this because I was pretty involved in that stuff at the time.

And so you set back, arguably, the Me Too movement and all of this kind of stuff by decades because of all of that. And back then, Republicans, conservatives, Bill Bennett leading the pack, but a lot of other people talked a lot about character and decency and all of these kinds of things. And they claim to really, really care about it. And then fast forward to now, and largely in the wake of Donald Trump, they've defenestrated all of that. And they don't care about it. And so I think this character behavior, which has less to do with feminist ideology and all of that kind of stuff. It just has to do with basic decency and good manners and self-restraint and all of those kinds of things has become one of the great examples of the negative polarization football stuff that now because the last, really cares about this stuff, the right says we don't have to. And when the right really

cared about character and decorum and sexual probity, the left said, no, no, no, no, we don't have to care about this. And it is a great example of how, because of our screwed up culture war politics, the second you make any objectively nonpartisan good thing, a partisan issue, you invite people to say it's bad, whether it's patriotism, whether it's nationalism, whether it's anti-racism or whether it's good character and probity or all these kinds of things. The second it becomes, my team says X, the other team has to say Y or not X. And it's grotesque. The idea that it should matter whether Matt Gates is a Republican or not to condemn his behavior is one of the saddest indictments of what has happened to the sort of moral, majority,

intellectual right in my lifetime. And I have no different. of it. And I think to answer your question, it's just this tribalism BS. I'm not going to curse like the guy from Wauwatosa. And it disgusts me. I mean, it truly, truly disgusts me. So I want to pick a fight with you on the standards issue because to me saying, well, the standards have changed. And so my behavior should be judged by the standards. I thought were in place. Then we're talking about whether the preferred nomenclature is African American or black, where it's just whether society thinks it is good or bad and it used to think it was good and now it thinks it is bad or something. What we're talking about here is that we used to think it was

acceptable to treat women like shit in the workplace and grope them and sexually harassed them and now we punish that behavior. That doesn't mean it's okay. Like it doesn't mean the standard has changed. It didn't change for women. It's just that what society is willing to punish has changed. but that's what I think the difference, why I found that so offensive, because he was just saying he should get away with it because men used to get away with it. Not that it was ever okay to women what that standard was. Yeah, no, that's fair. I think that's fair. And I do have a theory. I think one of the reasons other than his invincible arrogance and pride and all those sorts of things and his ridiculous narcissism about thinking he can maybe one day run for office

again. I think one of the reasons why he won't admit what he did is to the extent that he should is, and maybe I'm wrong about this, but I think it's because his mother's still alive. He just doesn't want to say it publicly that he did it. But I agree with you on the point that you're making about, like, it was always wrong. There was always, and there were really the conservative definition of good character that said behaving in an ungentlemanly way was bad. And that used to be something that was a small C understanding that transcended partisan divides. And now because everything has been politicized, everything has been politicized. Steve, I just want to hear your rant on the media's coverage of Andrew Cuomo over the last

14 months ago. Yeah, pretty dramatic changes. I mean, this was somebody who was a hero. You had otherwise mainstream journalists, you know, with decent reputations, suggesting that that, you know, Cuomo should be swapped out for Joe Biden, even as Joe Biden was gliding to the nomination at the end of that path, because Cuomo had done such a great job managing the COVID crisis in New York, which I don't think was true at the time. And certainly now with the benefit of hindsight, we know not only wasn't true, even though he wrote a book touting his handling of it,

it was a disaster. I mean, his handling of it was disastrous. Just on the gates, versus Cuomo thing. I do think that there is another difference that's worth at least pointing out, and that is what we've been watching and reading about with respect to Cuomo came as a result of a formal investigation by the New York Attorney General and the U.S. attorney there with a detailed report, including the interviews of the victims and corroborating witnesses, or at least people who could corroborate what they were told in real time. And it has, I think, great credibility. The Gates reporting, on the other hand, has been mostly comprised of leaks to, anonymous leaks to newspaper and magazine types.

While, you know, I certainly think that there are a lot of, there's a lot of credible reporting around what Matt Gates is alleged to have done, I don't think it's quite the same as having a, you know, an investigation led not incidentally by people of the same political party that is such a strong and overwhelming condemnation. So I do think there's some difference there, as we think about Gates versus Cuomo. But the other, you know, the major. But you can do Trump versus. Well, this. So this is where I'm going with it. I mean, the real problem for Republicans is they spent years either downplaying and or actively dismissing what Donald Trump was alleged to have done. I mean, what we know Donald Trump to have done, right?

He's not alleged to have done. What Donald Trump admitted doing in his own voice, what we know he. did to pay off the porn stars, to have the affairs, et cetera, you had some Republicans making sort of affirmative arguments that that doesn't matter. It just doesn't matter. We shouldn't worry about these things. The inverse of the arguments Republicans were making during the Clinton era. And most other Republicans, including people like Bill Bennett, wrote the Book of Virtues, you know, in effect, remaining silent or downplaying it, which was most definitely not their posture during the Clinton era. So it is a little hard, I think, for them to say,

to take an active voice now and really condemn Andrew Cuomo. And I think that also explains why they're sort of at this point, in a sense, shrugging their shoulders on Matt Gates. I do think that many of them will find their voice on these things if Gates is, in fact, prosecuted. if we get a more formal judgment about what he's alleged to have done, it'll be pretty easy for those Republicans to say, oh, geez, that's really bad. We'll see. All right. We'll end with a little thank you, Twitter, and the creativity of the human mind.

Found this from a Twitter handle at Rudy betrayed. Roses are red, Megan the stallion. I'm not perverted. just Italian with a picture of the Fox Chiron and Andrew Cuomo. We'll leave you with that thought to really earworm into your brain. Thank you so much for joining us. We will see you again next week. This episode is brought to you by Squarespace.

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