The Dispatch Podcast - Was That Wrong?

Episode Date: January 27, 2021

Biden administration folks are claiming they inherited a nonexistent coronavirus vaccine rollout plan from the Trump administration, with one anonymous administration official going so far as to tell CNN last week that the team will “have to build everything from scratch,” a claim that even top epidemiologist Dr. Anthony Fauci later disputed as patently false. Joe Biden spent months on the campaign trail criticizing Trump for deliberately misleading the public. Is his administration now falling into the same trap? “It’s a meaningful stumble,” Steve says on today’s podcast, “and I think they got caught basically misleading the public about the status of the vaccine program.” After Sarah and the guys chat about vaccine distribution logistics, they discuss Trump’s upcoming second impeachment trial, the media and its rewriting of history, and the latest drama with former DOJ officials in the Trump administration. Show Notes: -“Come on, President Biden. Set some loftier COVID vaccination goals” by Jonah Goldberg in the Los Angeles Times. -“Biden inheriting nonexistent coronavirus vaccine distribution plan and must start 'from scratch,' sources say,” by CNN’s MJ Lee. -“The Washington Post Tried To Memory-Hole Kamala Harris' Bad Joke About Inmates Begging for Food and Water” by Eric Boehm in Reason. -The New York Times Magazine’s 1619 Project. -“Send In the Troops” by Sen. Tom Cotton in the New York Times. -Take our podcast survey Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Welcome to the Dispatch podcast. I'm your host, Sarah Isgir, joined by Steve Hayes, Jonah Goldberg, and David French. Today, we are talking about the Biden administration's handling of the coronavirus pandemic and vaccine rollout, as well as some talk about the upcoming second impeachment trial of former president Donald Trump, the media, and its rewriting of history. And we'll end with a little talk about the Department of Justice. Jonah, coming to you first. There is still a pandemic going on in the country, but we have a new president who says that they will be rolling out a better vaccine distribution network. Yes, they say that.

They say lots of things. I mean, I was actually kind of frustrated. I wrote my L.A. Times column about how, which came out for Monday, which was, I wrote on Monday about how Biden was playing the expectations game too ham-fistedly. Basically, he was saying a million doses a day is this incredibly ambitious thing. It's like we're at war. But the daily average, the last week of the Trump administration, was 9.00. 172,000

vaccinations and their last their best day was 1.5 million and so you can't come in every administration comes in they claim that they didn't realize how bad things were because they want to set expectations back low I think the Biden people have been caught trying

to do that pretty ham-fistedly and and so then on Tuesday he kind of upped it to 1.5 then Jen Saki the next day says, well, that was more aspirational. He said, I would like to do it, but we're not actually raising it to that. And frankly, I just think it's fairly obvious that the numbers, the ambitions are,

the sites are being set way too low so that they can exceed expectations. And I think they're getting kind of a honeymoon from the press about a lot of this stuff. But what do you guys think? I mean, for example, Sarah, is it a problem that the Biden administration? administration seems to basically be siding with the teachers' unions on the single most searingly controversial issue for most working families about reopening schools? I think that the politics of that will largely be what the reality is, meaning if schools are open in the fall, that no one's going to really remember this little kerfuffle

along the way. And I think if schools aren't open in the fall, it will be catastrophic for the administration for the teachers union for everyone because we will have so many vaccines rolled out. I don't see a world in which schools aren't open in the fall. I'm not sure where the teachers union is even raising the possibility. You know, that being said, I've gone and actually read a bunch of their press releases and statements from several of these, you know, teachers union of Chicago, Fairfax County. And they're not as egregious as the headlines have made them seem as well. You know, they're basically saying at least the Fairfax County one, for instance, that like, As long as everyone has been vaccinated, including staff, janitorial staff,

everyone, and they've had the four, two doses and the 14 days after the two doses, like that's when they're willing to go back to school. You know, I don't see that not happening by the fall, especially considering Virginia moved all those people to the head of the line. I think that, you know, the teachers union has never been too afraid to take wildly unpopular political stances. and it hasn't, it has hurt them gradually and over time. But there has not been, like, truly a catastrophic, like, oh, no, teachers are bad

because it's sort of like Congress, right? You can say you hate Congress, but you like your individual congressman quite often. And while people may not like the teacher's union, they tend to like their child's teacher. So I think that's kind of where I think that will play out. And it's really looking all about the fall. But I have a question now. Can we like to do a round robin questioning? I like it. Just like a hot potato. We just pass a question down. Pay it forward. Steve, conservatives often tout federalism is sort of the end all and be all good in and of itself.

Now, like really good conservatives will tell you why it's a good in and of itself. Because basically, when decisions are pushed down to the lowest feasible level, they tend to be more responsive and more accountable. When you think about vaccine distribution and that it was pushed down to the states to figure out how to do this and it has been an unmitigated disaster, does this undermine the case for federalism? Yeah, that's an interesting question. And you can't pass it off to David. No, but I'm going to punt on it to a certain extent because I don't think we know enough to answer it fully. I mean, right now you look at what's happened in the states. I mean, there are obviously huge differences between the states in the efficacy of getting people vaccinated, some of which can be explained by the support they've gotten from the federal government, but a lot of which cannot be explained by that.

And you have to, you know, I think we'll have to take sort of a deep dive into why exactly some states succeeded in other states failed. but it's not clear that we have all the answers right now. I think if you look at a state like West Virginia, which has gotten real good marks for moving quickly, what has West Virginia done that some of the states that have struggled have not done as successfully? I think if you go back to the original point that Jonah raised with the Biden administration playing this game of expectations,

I think effectively they got caught doing that. There was a CNN story that came out, I believe it was over the weekend, in which a senior administration official was quoted saying, we really just have to start from scratch on the vaccines. And that's just flat out untrue. That was not true. And it didn't get the kind of pushback. And it wasn't just the CNN story.

This was the story that the Biden administration, I shouldn't say it was an administration spin effort because I don't have that kind of visibility on what they were doing. But it wasn't an isolated story. The coronavirus czar, the science guy, flatly said, we're starting from scratch. It's worse than we ever imagined, yada, yada, yada. It was clearly a messaging thing. I mean, maybe from the bureaucracy and not from set by Biden, but I don't know why we would give Biden that benefit of it out. Well, and then you had Anthony Fauci, who was asked about this when he appeared at the White House press briefing, and he said, no, of course it wasn't. We aren't starting from scratch. There were, there were things going on. So I think it's a, it's a meaningful stumble. And I think they got caught basically misleading the public about the status of the vaccine program. That's not okay. Like that's, you know, we've spent the better part of four years beating up the Trump administration for. for misleading people about, you know, everything from crowd sizes to the coronavirus.

But it's not okay for the Biden administration to come out and make a representation about the status of the vaccine program that's just flat out not true. I'm glad they got caught on it. I would say it was more conservative media that caught them and called them on it than it was the rest of the mainstream media. I hope that this is not a pattern as we go forward, as we go deeper into the administration where you have sort of dueling media narratives. Yeah, that's never happened before, David.

Can I jump in on the federalism issue? So, you know, when you say federalism, I don't think, I don't know any conservative who's going to say about any situation federalism applies. I mean, so, for example, nobody's talking about. about federalism in the context of defense policy, for example. I mean, vaccine distribution is a multi-state. I believe some of the people trying to launch militias are, in fact, doing exactly that. I don't call those conservatives exactly.

Yeah, brown shirts, fascists, I don't know. But when you're talking about a multi-state, interstate, massive, logistical, national challenge, that's something that's almost tailor-made for the federal government to do. Nobody has sort of the resources to distribute the vaccine on that national scale. I suppose there's some argument that says, okay, well, once we dump in your lap X million doses of the vaccine, that perhaps you're going to have some better ability to distribute it at the state level. But even that I'm dubious about just as a matter of sheer resources available to states versus the federal government. One of the things that we've seen in the pandemic is that when it comes to resourcing, nothing beats the federal government.

I mean, the way in which the government is financed, the way in which government dollars get to governments in this country means that nobody can resource. in an emergency like the federal government, period. It's just not possible for anybody else to do it and scale up the way the federal government can scale up. And that's the result of many, many long years, of many, many decisions that have consolidated a lot of this power in the federal government, but there it is. There it is.

And so it strikes me the distribution of a vaccine, which is very different from saying in different states with different population densities, what kinds of lockdown measures or COVID safety measures are ideally suited for different states. That's more of a federalism issue. But when you're talking about we need to get millions of doses of vaccine into millions of arms the way this government is resourced

and the resources available at different levels of government seem to say to me this is more of a federal issue. And on the fundamental underlying issue, I'm with Sarah on a lot of the sort of early controversy. A lot of this strikes me. just sort of news cycle chum that if six months from now, pretty much everybody's vaccinated and there's a program to make sure that when I need a next vaccination, I'm going to be able to get it.

If that's in place, all of these little things will be totally forgotten. Nobody will care about them except a few people on Twitter and you will look back and Biden will look back and Biden will be able to say four years later within six months we got everybody vaccinated. I think even look back at the Obamacare website rollout. I mean, that was considered like the biggest rolling news story for 21 days or however long that lasted. And they fixed it and like, not that many people remember it who don't live in this zip code. Yeah, although I for one will never forget that they hired the very finest computer programmers,

the Amish community had to provide to do that website. And I will just never let go over that. I thought that was awesome. So, Jonah, what do you make specifically of the teacher's issue? I think teachers unions are full of decent people in them, who are, as you point out, people like their teachers, but they are functionally evil institutions in the United States. I think that they, I'm against all public sector unions. My standard position on this is that I think that you can make a case.

for like firefighters and cops because of the dangerousness of their of their jobs but even there i think they're a net negative for the country um you know i understand why coal miners organized because in the 1920s because of working conditions and all that and i'm big a much more sympathetic to private sector unions where was the great department of motor vehicle ceiling collapse of 1962 that justifies public sector unions i just don't see it and um and specifically i think I don't know that this will be the case because of the polar of the big sort and all of the rest. But if there were a single issue that I think could really shake up the on the ground local monopoly that Democrats have in a lot of big cities, it is the teacher union stuff,

particularly with the pandemic. You got a lot of working parents. A lot of them, like you look at Chicago. A lot of them are in public sector unions themselves. And they're like, you want me to come in and drive the train in the morning? Well, what am I going to do with my kids? And it is so clear that among the major institutions of the first responders, frontline workers, the essential workers, as a class, the group that has failed Americans more than any other, isn't hospital workers, it isn't national guards, those guys have all stepped up. It isn't grocery clerks. It's freaking teachers unions because they have a stranglehold over local democratic machines and it would be great if the GOP weren't crazy right now so it could take advantage of these things because

all the GOP need to do is not be crazy and it could take advantage of liberal craziness and dysfunction no sign of that happening uh and proof not betting on that proof will be our next topic which is Steve Hayes take it away um So I want to talk about what's happening with impeachment and conviction and the United States Senate. You'll remember shortly before I believe the House actually voted to impeach, Mitch McConnell was featured in a New York Times story saying that he believed the president committed impeachable offenses and that McConnell was featured in a New York Times story saying that he believed the president committed impeachable offenses and that McConnell was. inclined to vote to convict. The New York Times story was accurate. I was hearing the same thing in my own reporting. That was about two and a half weeks ago. And yesterday, the United States Senate took up a motion from Rand Paul, the point of order from Rand Paul, suggesting

in which he maintained that trying to impeach or convicting a president who is no longer in office is unconstitutional, that point of order was supported by 45 Republicans in the Senate, opposed only by five. And one of the 45 was Mitch McConnell. do, Sarah, right back at you, can you help us understand what happened here? So, okay, there's a constitutional issue here and there's a prudential issue here. On the constitutional side, there is an argument that you can't impeach presidents or other federal officials after they've left office. It's the minority argument, but it's not unsupportable. There are two parts of the Constitution that deal with this.

One part basically exclusively says that if a president is impeached, he shall be removed from office. Fine, but this isn't a president, and we can't remove him. The other part just says that the Senate's only judgments that it can issue are to remove someone, any federal officer, from office, or to disqualify them from holding office in the future. And so the majority side says that the fact that you can disqualify someone from holding office in the future, and that punishment can be applied to a former official, means that the power of impeachment, therefore, is impliedly available to former officials. But the text of the Constitution doesn't speak to it one way or the other. And the argument on the minority side is that that same section says, you know, president, vice president, federal officers. It does not say former officials,

and there's the canon of interpretation that by excluding something, that we read that to be intentional, that could have said former officers, and it didn't. Okay, so that's the constitutional argument. Then on the prudential argument, which they didn't really make yesterday,

but I'm going to make it for them because I frankly think it's stronger than the constitutional argument. And that is, we don't want to get into the business of every time a president leaves office, we have an impeachment vote. You know, after Obama left office,

we could have had an impeachment vote over Benghazi, for instance, because it has so few consequences, you know, Obama could run for Senate if he wanted to or he could be appointed to the Supreme Court. And so therefore, you have this impeachment vote with the purpose of ensuring that Barack Obama cannot be appointed to the Supreme Court

because of Benghazi, or, you know, fill in your pet. issue. And so this idea that we're going to spend valuable congressional time where they could be confirming cabinet members, doing the coronavirus stimulus bill, any of the other number of policy issues that we have to deal with in the country. And instead, they're going to spend time doing this. Not great, Bob. Now, of course. That's, now, wait, just to just to pause you for second just so I'm sure I'm understanding. This is the strong argument. I just want to make sure. It's this stronger. Okay. I will say it's the argument that Ted Cruz made on Sean Hannity's show

saying he was very concerned that Republicans, if they get control, when they get control, might go back and impeach Bill Clinton, Jimmy Carter, and Barack Obama. Yeah. Yeah, look. So that's why this is the minority argument. There's, I think that the time issue is a real one. The problem is that Congress could, you know, not waste their own time and yet they choose to do so. So if you want to hold them accountable for that, you cannot vote for the people who you think are wasting Congress's time,

for instance. I don't think that that's what people are going to vote on on this. I think there's also, you know, we had this conversation a couple of weeks ago about the slippery slope. Like, everything can be a slippery slope, and therefore, like, then we do nothing because everything could be slippery. Right. To the extent you feel like what happened on January 6th was a difference in kind, not a difference in degree from Benghazi, for instance. Then we don't need to worry about impeaching Barack Obama over Benghazi type thing.

So, yeah. I have one question, just a factual question, since you've read all of these arguments. what is the smartest most serious good faith response to the question to the problem I have with this you can't do it at the end is so you're saying a president can pretty much do any abuse of power he wants in the last three weeks to month of his presidency because there's no time to have an impeachment before he leaves office what is the smartest Respond to it. Because I have a really hard time believing the founders believed that you, that presidents couldn't be tyrants except the last 30 to 45 days in office. I think that the argument would be that the check on that is that as soon as they leave office, you can arrest them and try them for a crime.

So you're talking about this Venn diagram that needs to be something that is a egregious abuse of office, but not actually criminal or found in, you know, code, and that, sure, if you're able to get into that small little sliver, then, yep, you can get away with it. I think a good example of that, let's, you know, pick something not what we're dealing with right now, although I suppose some might say we are, a truly corrupt pardon. So then the president, you know, accepts money, for instance, for the pardon. The pardon power is absolute. It's a huge abuse of power. There's no time to impeach him. He leaves office. Then you would charge him with bribery. Or if it's too hard to make the bribery charge, he would get away with it. But that impeaching him for the purpose of having him not run for office again, that the founders

were less concerned about that because they figured that the American public would reject someone who did something so egregious. And there was this political check that existed beyond just Congress's check and that Congress's real power here is to fill in when the people don't have an opportunity to remove someone from office. They voted in someone for four years. This person then does something bad. The people can't vote them out for four years. That's why Congress can step in in the interim and remove them. Once they're already on their way out, then you can leave it to the people the next time that person stands for office. But let me add another hypothetical. Now, I just want to note for the, I just want to give the audience the benefit of

the very final gesture that Sarah made at the end of that that nullified everything she just said, which was this shrug and look of utter contempt at the words that had just come out of their mouth. But this is sort of quintessential dispatch, right? I mean, one of the things we said that we were going to do from the beginning is air the best arguments we could, even when one or all of us didn't necessarily agree with them. So I think Sarah actually get a very fine job of making the best of several really poor arguments. That was not meant as a back-ended compliment.

That was meant as a compliment. But, you know, I mean, we can take. We don't need to, we don't need to take these, I happen to think it goes too far, but indulge me for just a minute. What if, for instance, I mean, This is something that would have been unimaginable 20 years ago, but maybe less unimaginable today. What if, for instance, to dive deeper into Jonah's hypothetical, you had a president who had nearly four years, four years minus 20 days, had had a contentious relationship with the rogue state,

but had never actually finally decided he was going to attack the rogue state, decided in his last, three weeks, he was going to bomb the heck out of, you know, somewhere and did it not only to take revenge on the way out the door with this, this dictator who'd been giving him troubles, but also because he knew that it would cause problems, create difficulty, political headaches for his successor, and was caught on tape saying so. What do you do with the president like that? I mean, you can't impeach him? You don't vote for him again. But he's already not, he's already, he's already been voted out of office.

He's not been reelected. And then he's got three weeks, he's got three weeks more to cause additional problems. He's acting in a way that's contrary to the plain interests of the United States. He's doing it for reasons that are unfathomable, indefensible. and you just have to let him be in office for the next three weeks. A, Congress could move faster. Congress doesn't have to move at a glacial pace. They choose to.

Bless your heart. Second, I think that the American people have a responsibility not to elect bad people in the first place. And there's a little bit of like, well, you know, dance with the one that brung you. And lastly, yeah, there was a. a whole lot contemplated if the person is leaving office. I mean, you could argue that in fact limiting the lame duck period, remember originally in the Constitution, you would be inaugurated in March that now has been moved to January,

was a back door sort of way to deal with this a little and shorten the time of where political accountability has come down and bitterness can take place. although this year perhaps it wasn't enough. No, I think that's actually a good suggestion. David, what do you think about all this? I think a huge, a critically important project right now for Republicans is to essentially minimize in memory whole what just happened.

And the slippery slope arguments, I think, are a part of that, quite frankly. What they're trying to do is they're trying to bring Trump back into the spectrum of normal presidencies or trying to bring Trump back into a calculus that places him within the realm of somewhere in the realm of behavior that is defensible or relatable in some way to historical precedent and and honestly that's kind of gaslighting because what we just witnessed was something we've never seen in the history. of the United States. We witnessed behavior we've never seen in the history of the United States. We witnessed an action, an attack on the capital by our own citizens that was

catastrophically, you know, catastrophically horrible. On about every level you can imagine, the violence of it, the attempt to essentially end the peaceful transition of power, the attempt to impose upon the country, a president that the country did not vote for? I mean, and all of these things now, it's, when I look at this slippery slope argument, oh, what's next impeaching George Washington? Come on. You know, what's next impeaching Barack Obama? Did Barack Obama incite the sacking of the capital in real time on live television? Come on. But this is of a piece with something that we're just seeing. And we began to see this thing unfold within two, three, four hours of the last protester leaving, which was the effort to bring what just happened into, to what about

it and to de-emphasize it to the point where we no longer believe what we saw. And, you know, even hearing Republicans say of an attack on a government building trying to stop the transition of power and undo an American election to hear Republicans say that accountability will be divisive, Republicans, Republicans saying accountability here will be divisive. To me, it's just a symbol of how incredibly thoroughly the Trumpist rot has set in and how much of a grip on the Republican Party that Trumpist rot, that Trumpist fury still has. And I honestly think that the difference between, say, the vote yesterday and a lot of the momentum in the days immediately after January 6th

is that a lot of these senators have heard an enormous amount of volcanic outrage from their still Trump-committed base. I mean, volcanic outrage. And look, we all see it. We see it ourselves when we talk about what happened. happened, the way in which Trump's base supporters will deflect and evade and what about and minimize as if this was just, wow, it's just kind of a crowd that got a little out of hand. I mean, what are you going to do about that?

Look, I mean, did you see the statement from Oregon? The Oregon GOP flatly says it was a false flag operation. I mean, like, that's not what abouting. That's like, oh my gosh, the unicorns are raping our women. I mean, it's just made up weirdness. And, look, I have, I have, I have some rage issues about all of this kind of stuff because, like, I get in these arguments constantly with people about who, who twiddle their thumbs and ring their hands and we're like, I'm just so concerned about the dangers of a snap impeachment's becoming a precedent and all these kinds of things. First of all, you have to get 67 votes. the idea that the Senate is going to go crazy over is going to go so crazy that it's going to

want to impeach someone and get 67 votes to do it for some non-trivial thing, I think is a trivial concern. But second of all, these are the same people, like, so the question, the way I formulate the question is, let's come up with your worst case scenario about what one precedent, the slippery slope argument. What, like, what, like, your nightmare is confirmed if this precedent stands. We have one president, which is we now have snap impeachments that waste the sentence time after a president has left office, that all it can do is deprive them of like a secret service detail and being able to run again, okay, which will not apply at all to two-term presidents

anyway. Okay, so it's only going to be for one-term presidents that this is going to even be an issue. And let's just say, like they said, wildly abused and presidents are just impeached the day they leave office all the time, woe is me, the republic. Now let's say the worst case scenario of letting the precedent of unleashing a mob on the Capitol to steal an election in an unconstitutional power grab. What's the worst case scenario from letting that precedent lie? And, you know, I mean, it's cats and dogs sleeping together. It's Mordor ascendant if you're going to go to like the worst case scenario where that president lies. And meanwhile, the people who say no

accountability, they say it would be divisive to hold the president accountable, want vicious punitive accountability against the handful of Republicans who want to hold the president's accountable. Yeah, exactly. We shouldn't punish people for their beliefs as if believing the election was stolen in some massive conspiracy theory is a kind of identity politics, identity that is sacrosanct now. It's offensive, you know, it's offensive to call people bad racial epithets, and it's offensive to tell them that they're wrong that the election was stolen. Screw you. I mean, these are just very different things. And the gas lining about all of it has me despairing for the republic in ways I didn't think I would after Trump lost. So let me, we need, excuse me, we need to move on, but let me,

let me just ask one last question on this topic. Given the fact that 45 Republicans have, I think probably very few of them believe the argument Sarah courageously made on their behalf earlier. And this is a procedural safe harbor for them to avoid. Sarah's skill at making wrong arguments is second to none. Yeah. I could say something and I'm not going to say anything. I'm sorry, I'm still giggling over unicorns raping our women. Yeah. See? See? I'm trying to get you. I didn't need to ruin your train of thought.

Trying to get, yeah. What does that say about this moment? I mean, you know, to sort of put a fine point on both the arguments that David and Jonah made. You have the president who incited this attack. He incited because he lied for two months about the election being stolen when it wasn't. He's on tape pressuring. threatening a state election official to commit fraud on his behalf, if these things aren't worth impeaching a president, convicting a president for, what would be? And what does it say about Republicans in general, Senate Republicans in particular, that they're not willing to sort of own up to this, particularly when it was clear that at least some of them, including Mitch McConnell, did think this was impeachable conduct, was inclined to vote to convict. And can I also throw this in there? Because we focus a lot on Senate Republicans and the elected, the elected Republicans. And I agree completely that they should, they should, you know, put on their big boy pants

and vote to convict here. This is a matter of leadership. It's a matter of the rule of law. It's a matter of the health of the republic. 100% put on your big boy pants, vote to convict. But can we say something about, I know you're not supposed to do this, but what the heck?

What the heck are rank and file Republicans thinking? Like, do we not have responsibility as citizens in this country when you look and you see a mass scale attack on the capital from people waving the flags of the Republican president to say, instead of saying, but, but, but Antifa in Portland, you know, don't we have some responsibility here as citizens? And this is the one thing, you know, everyone is like, oh, don't come after Trump supporters. Are you, are you as a free citizen of this country? Do you not have

responsibility? Do you not? I think you do. And this is where I get so frustrated at our political discourses. We talk as if the only responsible actors are the politicians. Those are the only responsible actors. No. If you're going to, you know, the old saying it's a republic, if you can keep it, does not just apply to elected officials.

And do you hate Democrats so much? Do you hate Democrats so much that you're willing to minimize the sacking of the capital, the sacking of the capital to elevate your gut. If you do, that's on you. That is on you.

And as a free citizen, as responsible for your own conduct, your own actions, that is on you. And I think we can't be afraid to say that. It's not like I'm running for anything, you know? It's not like I'm,

but it's not like, you know, right-wing Twitter or whatever is running for anything. But that's the third rail. You can't touch that. You can't touch that. But doggone it, people are responsible for thinking about thinking these things and believing the election is stolen in all of this conspiracy nonsense. 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

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That's ethos.com slash dispatch. Application times may vary. Rates may vary. Let's flip David's outrage to move to David's topic, which is the fine, fine distinction between receiving an Army Ranger tab and serving in an Army Ranger unit. Tell us more. Yeah, so I'm almost embarrassed to bring this up because we just talked about the sacking of the Capitol and now we're going to talk about

one of these like typical political micro scandals. And so I have two, I'm going to intro this and then I'm going to have two questions. So the intro is there was, a salon did a story talking about early in its political career. Tom Cotton said he was a ranger who volunteered to go to Iraq. He did not serve in the ranger regiment, but he had finished and completed the ranger course, which means in the army you're entitled to wear a tab on your uniform that says ranger. It means your ranger qualified, but he led troops in combat with

the 101st Air Force Air Assault Division. He was not part of the Ranger Regiment, but he was Ranger qualified. And so what Salon and many others tried to say was that, this was a kind of sort of stolen valor situation that Tom Cotton sort of puffed his military experience, which is very taboo, not just, you know, in politics, but in the military,

sort of puffed up his military experience. And in the ensuing back and forth debate over this, Newsweek, which had reported on Tom Cotton's ranger qualification, went back and stealth edited some of its previous articles that had called the women who had finished the ranger course, Rangers, even though they did not go on and serve in the Ranger Regiment. And my own assessment of this, you know, I served and I served with guys in my regiment, which was Third Armored Cavalry Regiment, who had the Ranger tab. And sometimes we'd refer to them as Rangers. We'd say, like, John's a Ranger, you know, speaking of somebody who was Ranger qualified. And I thought it was just a tempest over nothing that I thought what Cotton said was fair. He never said he served in the Ranger Regiment.

But it, you know, of course, lit up Twitter for a couple of days, lit up online, got into cable news. So I have sort of two questions. One is, is it a, was that a big enough deal to even bring to this pot? And I guess the other question is, what, I mean, what did you think of the underlying substance of the attack? Steve? I thought the underlying substance of the attack was relatively weak for the reasons that you just laid out. I do think it's worth discussing on this pod, if only because we can't talk about impeachment and Donald Trump 100% of the time. I think, you know, the way that you framed it that this was a relatively minor issue compared to the sort of existence of the republic issues we've been discussing is appropriate.

having said that, you know, we have seen, I think, early in the Biden administration, some examples of the kind of behavior from the mainstream and mainstream left media that contributed to the lack of trust in media that so many conservatives have. And this would be one of them. You know, you can't, newsweek can't. go back and rewrite an old story to fit a modern political smear. It's incredible that that would even be, that we're even having the discussion. And there was something similar that took place with a rewriting of a lead in a Washington Post story about Kamala Harris this week, where she had used in a really good profile from Ben

Teres, a very talented Washington Post writer. I think that the piece ran in 2019 before the Democratic presidential primaries, he had done an interview with her, and she had used an analogy about the prisoners groveling for food and water that some thought reflected poorly on her. She got some grief for it, apparently. And the Washington Post scrubbed that lead out of the story. You know, Washington Post spokesman said, you know, we didn't do it. We didn't do it because it was embarrassing to her. We did it because we were repurposing some of that reporting for, you know, a look at Kamala Harris now as vice president. But the lead they replaced the earlier lead with was much gentler and much more favorable to Kamala Harris. You can't do this in journalism.

And when you're caught, they were caught by a journalist at Reason Magazine, libertarian magazine that does some really terrific work. When people find out you're engaged in this kind of stuff, it chips away further and further at the ability of us all to have faith in media institutions that are reporting on what's happening in Washington. and it's it's not what aboutist to say there's a reason that so many on the center right have diminished faith in the mainstream media um and this is i think these are some of the reasons so i i have i have i'm not i agree with all that um i think it's worthy to bring up i think

it's um i mean maybe the merits of the actual ranger tab brouhaha maybe not worthy to bring up i should also say i hereby no longer like referring to this by the abbreviation odd

we should call it a cast if we're going to break that podcast word in half right i mean why not anyway um well this is just turning to the segment for really important conversations no but um i just want to get i want to lay down that marker because i will return to it but um i think you guys left out i mean so the fascinating thing to me is actually this this this this sort of retconning this sort of

soviet airbrushing of the past thing and the two best examples of this i think you guys didn't bring up one was um the 1619 project rewriting its foundational essay to because donald trump pointed out rightly that the New York Times said that 1619 was the true founding of the United States of America. That turned to be politically disadvantageous for the 1619 project. And so they went in without adding an editor's note, without clarifying to the readers, and they just changed the reality of the past to fit the present circumstances. There used to be a time you get fired for doing that kind of thing. The problem is that there also used to be a time where you literally, it was impossible to do that kind of thing.

You couldn't go in and recall all the newspapers that had been printed. You know, this is one of the weird ways we're doing mostly newsletters like we do. We're kind of behind the times. And it's one of the great frustrations is that if you have a typo or a mistake in a newsletter, you can't retrieve it and fix it. You can fix it on the website, but it's out there. And the other truly Orwellian example, which I think gives you an insight into some of the paranoia on the right that is, in some ways well-founded was during the Amy Coney-Barritt hearings when they found some passage

where she had referred to sexual orientation sexual preference and Webster's literally in real time change the definition of a word to try to turn her into a bigot and that's the kind of institutional forces arrayed that conservatives look at and say wow the system really is rigged against us. I mean, they're just cheating. And I think there's a very interesting Marshall McLuhan kind of point to explore about how the mere fact that you have the ability to make these kinds of changes about past material gives you the power to do it and therefore the ration, the permission structure to do it. Whereas before, technology didn't allow it, so it never would have occurred to you. But it's a very scary thing to see how it's the

equivalent of old Soviet textbooks airbrushing members of the Polo Bureau out to fit the marching orders of the day. And that's the thing that I think is more interesting than this swing and a miss on the Ranger tab. Let me bring a different angle. I would say it's the same thing, right? I mean, it's basically the same thing. It just might not be as significant. I mean, I think the Washington Post rewriting of the Kamala Harris lead is a, is a, it's not a small deal. I think this, this really does matter in the broad, broad scheme of things. Sorry, sir, I jumped in. No, I think that the Ranger Tab story is great news for Tom Cotton.

I think it means, yeah, I mean, everyone just nodded along. We haven't talked about the political implications of the fact that this is, A, they wanted to go after Tom Cotton, and B, this is what they had. I think that Tom Cotton is seen as not a frontrunner in the polling sense, but in sort of a cocktail party sense of a Republican with the most upside, least baggage heading into 2024 at this moment with the potential to capture a lot of different groups of voters. And if the Ranger Tab story is any indication, maybe not a whole lot of dirt to toss up into the air if that's what they've come up with. So if you're buying stock and candidates, Tom Cotton is looking like a good pickup right now

on those grounds, in part, yes, because Cruz and Hawley have cast their lot in both together, but also in this, like, lane that doesn't seem like it has a whole lot of room to grow. Tom Cotton's whole thing that caused the most controversy, I think, in the last four years probably, was his op-ed in the New York Times in which he suggested that we should use the military to intervene in some of these protests that were going on around the country over the sun, about George Floyd, I think that wasn't great politically for Tom, except that A, he was consistent. And during the January stop the steel rally, he re-upped and said the same thing. And during that time, a whole lot of other people agreed and the National Guard is still at

the Capitol. And so it's going to be pretty hard in a few years to go back and say that Tom was just, you know, un-American and it was egregious to even suggest that you would ever use the military to come in and talk about, you know, a peace, you know, peaceable assembly happening where people were exercising their First Amendment rights. And then you have Tom looking pretty good on coronavirus. You know, Steve, you've talked about this plenty, but at the beginning of the pandemic, Tom was waving his arms up and down saying, hey, guys, look over here. And people were rolling their eyes mostly. So, for me, the Ranger Tab story is a political story. It shows that the, you know, the activist journalist left sees Tom Cotton

as a real threat to Joe Biden in 2024. Doesn't mean he can get the nomination. Doesn't mean he will be a real threat to Joe Biden, but you got to feel good sitting in Cotton Camp right now. Oh, I mean, the combination of this, the combination of this and the New York Times scandal, which, by the way, it wasn't, and this distinction is lost on people because they see someone in a uniform and they just see a soldier. They don't know who, they don't know the chain and came in. They don't know the difference between active duty and National Guard. But what Cotton was arguing for was the invocation, the Insurrection Act, over the objection of state and local authorities, which is a really extraordinary move before even the deployment

of the National Guard, which is under control of state. authority. So that was a, he made a very bad argument that rather than, then there being space and time to obliterate it with other better arguments, the New York Times just went ahead and like fired the people responsible, which was a giant political gift for Tom Cotton, too dangerous for the Times, you know, and even though they invited him to do the op-ed, what a mess for the Times, what a gift for Cotton, and here you have it again. What a mess for Newsweek. What a mess for salon. What a gift for cotton.

Instead of dealing with cotton's ideas on the merits, once again, you escalate and treat him badly. You treat him unfairly. You smear him. And it's, yeah, it's a gift to him, but it's also, politically it's a gift to him, but it is also symbolic of the problems we have in the press, as, you know, Steve and Jonah have articulated. So you have the problem with the press, the problem with the press in our polarized time gives a gift to cotton. In the meantime, you know, cotton under the underlying merits of one of his worst ideas, just gated.

With Amex Platinum, access to exclusive Amex pre-sale tickets can score you a spot track side. So being a fan for life turns into the trip of a lifetime. That's the powerful backing of Amex. Pre-sale tickets for future events subject to availability and varied by race. Turns and conditions apply. Learn more at Amex.com. all right last topic which we're going to do quickly we're still having some trickling stories coming out from the end of the Trump administration that we're learning more and more about and one of the most concerning to me has been this story about the Department of Justice and that there was basically an attempted coup within the department in order to fulfill what Donald Trump wanted,

which was to continue the legal course that the election had been stolen from him and go directly to the Supreme Court again, although folks on his side had lost twice by that point. And the story goes something like this, that the Senate confirmed head of the Environmental and Natural Resources Division, that's the Assistant Attorney General for ENRD,

is the acronym that we use for that. When became the acting head of the civil division, when the Senate confirmed head of the civil division stepped down. And when Jeff Rosen, who was the acting attorney general for the last three, four weeks of the Trump administration, was telling the president that the Department of Justice had found no evidence, that there had been widespread fraud, no evidence the election

had been stolen could make no legal arguments in court to that effect that basically this acting head of the civil division had a secret meeting with the president told him that he could do it

if the president would fire the acting attorney general and put this guy in his acting attorney general and they could, I don't know, hum off merrily together down the sidewalk. Was that wrong

or just frowned upon? It's an incredible story. And I think, I mean, there's a ton of thoughts and feelings that I may have about this. But the one thing that seems the most relevant is this idea that I think folks are still struggling with as far as how to think about people who went into the Trump administration. And on the one hand, people seem quite happy that Bill Barr, for instance, said that there was no widespread fraud, that Jeff Rosen, the acting attorney general, didn't sue or continue for the department to pursue this idea that the election had been stolen. But at the same time, they're angry about those people choosing to serve in the administration in the first place. But if they hadn't, then you would have someone like this guy, Jeff Clark, being the attorney general. And then he would have pursued those things. And I just think it's this really tough,

especially in the national security and law enforcement context. It is a interesting, nuanced argument that I just don't see people grappling with about whether it was better to have good people serving in government, even if they were propping up. a rotten regime, or whether we should have let the rot take over to show the American people what a true Trump administration would have looked like. And these stories are an even bigger, starker reminder than I think a bunch of the like, well, Trump might have started a war in Iran if John Kelly hadn't been there. We just don't have a whole lot to make that, I think, true in the like but for like it was any minute going to happen this was it was going to happen thing

if Jeff Rosen and it sounds like a good half dozen or more of the other senior Department of Justice officials hadn't threatened to resign over the issue what do you guys think I hear you I mean I think sometimes because you struggle with this as someone who did work in the administration and trying to, and you have friends in there, you think are decent people and smart people and conscientious people who were on that side of the argument. What I think is kind of fascinating is how if you had drawn up a list of a thousand people

who went into the administration and tried to guess who is going to go body snatcher crazy and go all in for coup talk and who isn't. I'm not sure a monkey throwing darts would do better than any of the four of us, right? I mean, I know people who know this Clark guy. I mean, I guess you've met him, Sarah. I mean, I guess, you know, like, no one, he's like a, he's just a normal, like, partner

at a normal big law firm. And he went to Harvard. I mean, my favorite touch is that he also went to the Biden School of Public Policy, which I just think is just glorious. But, like, there are a bunch of, of these people, you know, like, who went in. I mean, I would have guessed Peter Navarro for sure, right? Because anyone who used that many exclamation points in academic studies is got, that's a tell, right? But a lot of these people, you wouldn't have guessed what happened to Pompeo,

right? Or you wouldn't have guessed what happened to a lot of these people. And I find it sort of fascinating. I mean, it's not, it's not, it's not, it's not, it's not, it's not, it's not, darkness at noon. It's not the Soviet Union. It's not Nazi Germany or anything like that. But there is this sort of banality of evil thing here of that. It turns out that a lot of people who go along with really horrible undemocratic, illiberal ideas are just mice in the maze of American meritocracy. And if the institutions do not provide them an opportunity to show their true ambitions and true natures, they never show it. You would never guess that they had those true natures. I think it's just, as almost a literary thing, I think it's fascinating.

All right. Quick thoughts from Steve. Yeah, I agree with, I agree with Jonah. You know, to me, what this says beyond sort of a windwind to human nature is a glimpse at just how serious some people were, at least, including apparently the president, about actually true. trying to steal the election, right? This was not, I mean, Rudy Giuliani too, right, when you think about it. Yeah, I mean, you know, John Eastman. John Eastman. You, you think because it's, I can't remember, David or Jonah, one of you wrote a terrific piece about this. I think it was David. Because it's so absurd, there's an inclination not to take it as seriously as we ought to. And the reality is you actually had real people, some of them accomplished, some of them, like this fellow from the Department

of Justice, not just sort of musing over a post-workday scotch about what it would be like to engage in a coup, to try to steal an election, but actually taking steps and doing the planning and having the conversations to really, really do it. And it is, again, this goes back to the earlier discussion we had about impeaching and convicting. And one of the reasons why I'm so appalled by the cowardice from these Republicans, none of this was theoretical. This was all happening. Part of this was a plan that had been put into motion. I expect that we'll learn a lot more about that in the coming days and weeks.

But just because it was, it seems so silly to sane people. doesn't mean that it should go without punishment and serious punishment, in my view. David? You know, on that really interesting point, which I think is just a really fascinating question about the service in the Trump administration, I had a number of people asked me right after the election about serving in the Trump administration, who were never Trump, who then went on to serve. And my advice that I gave then is I stand by.

today, which is this government needs good people in it, but you have to hold it lightly. This can't become who you are to such an extent that the desire to hold on to this powerful position begins to trump everything else in your life and be careful about assuming what kind of person you are until it's tested. I think that that is one thing that I think that we have learned in this time of extreme stress that's been put on an awful lot of people is you don't know who you really are until you're tested. You just don't. And so you might have an idea about yourself that you would hold power lightly or that you wouldn't get too consumed in your title in your prestige and your fox hits or whatever it is and that you're above all of that

until you're in the middle of all of that. And then you have this constant ability to rationalize. you know one thing that a lawyers understand pretty quickly or should understand pretty quickly is that people have a near infinite ability to believe their own BS just a near infinite ability and one of the things that one of the things that was kind of funny to me about what it was it like to conceptualize being a lawyer and actually being a lawyer because there's this question about it's often asked of law students to lawyers well how how is it that you can take cases you don't believe in. How is it that you can represent clients

that you disagree with? What I found when you became a lawyer was that didn't really happen because you know what? You start to identify with your client. You start to believe your own BS. And this is, I think, there are people who were able to keep that at arm's length

and were able to do the right thing and there were people who were not able to do the right thing. And to Jonah's point, it was not always predictable going in as to who would be, you know, which person would fall in which category. All right. We're going to leave it at that, but I do want to end our podcast with the best headline that I've seen this year in 2021. I'm going to read it slowly because it unfolds like a fine wine breathing when it needs air. Each word building on the next. Target joins Costco in dropping coconut milk brand over forced monkey labor allegations.

I saw that. I love that. It sounds like something that would appear in a G-file. Or maybe something that will appear. And it is true. It is a real headline. There is concern that this brand of coconut milk has been using monkeys to get the coconuts from the trees. I think it's interesting that they say forced monkey labor. I don't, I want to dive more into the legal terminology there. I mean, are the monkeys getting paid in food? I was going to say, does this mean we have to raise

the pay of our monkeys? Right. Right. What also. Pressure on us. Don't talk about Declan that way. In my very limited experience with monkeys, it is really hard to get to order them to do things they don't want to do. I just, I want to put it out there, you know, it's like once they're up in the tree, if they're not on a leash, and they think you're unfair to them, they're going to stay in the tree. They're not going to be like, oh, I got to come back because, you know, they have my, you know, my most precious possessions as collateral or something. They will just go be monkeys. The company in question, by the way, denies that they used forced monkey labor. And in fact, says that it audited its coconut plantations using a third party and found no use of monkeys

for coconut harvesting. You're welcome, dispatch listeners. But I was going to say, what's the alternative forced monkey labor? Would it be monkeys who answered wan ads? You know, just justly compensated monkey labor, which I'm entirely in favor of. All right, folks, we will see you again next week. I want a whole podcast on living wages for monkeys. This episode is brought to you by Squarespace. Squarespace is the platform that helps you create a polished professional home online. Whether you're building a site for your business, you're writing, or a new project, Squarespace brings everything together in one place. With Squarespace's cutting-edge design tools, you can launch a website that looks sharp from day one.

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