The Press Box - Mitch McConnell and Impeachment With Matt Jones. Plus, Listener Mail.

Episode Date: February 11, 2021

Bryan Curtis and David Shoemaker are joined by author and creator of Kentucky Sports Radio Matt Jones to discuss his book ‘Mitch, Please! How Mitch McConnell Sold Out Kentucky (and America, Too)’. (4:05) Later, on Listener Mail, they answer the question "If you could only read one book for the rest of your life, what would it be?" (37:32) Plus, the Overworked Twitter Joke of the Week and David Shoemaker Guesses the Strained-Pun Headline. Hosts: Bryan Curtis and David Shoemaker Guest: Matt Jones Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

David, you know those body language studies we like to do in sports writing? Yes. Well, reporters are doing it during Donald Trump's impeachment hearing. What I want to know is which senator's body language would you most enjoy observing? Is that it? I have the answer. Okay. I love this that they have to like write about or retail how people are, or, standing, presenting. It's not just sports. This is literature too, right?

I mean, you have to convey something about a person's personality. Have any of the senators related question? Have any of the similar has been said to have been standing with arms akimbo at any point? I give you some examples. McConnell, quote, according to the Washington Post, kept his eyes locked on the television as the gripping videos played, his face emotionless. Josh Hawley

Quote his feet were up on a chair as he studiously scanned through stacks of papers which he later said were trial briefs from both legal teams So his feet were up on a chair Now does that mean Not convict Like I'm just taking this thing is such a

Lark that I won't even take it seriously Or can we read that in some other way? I mean it seems like a forced sort of nonchalance right Like I'm the you know the way that you study and the way that you like read documents in your office when the reporter is there looking at you to write an article. But yeah, I mean, I guess Josh Hawley is interesting in the sense that like he is the very farthest end of the spectrum of like, you know, look at me body language. Yeah.

Kind of reminds me of like when the networks need B-roll when they're doing a profile of you. Like can you please look at your desk and do something on your computer while the network course. narrates. I mean, listen to this. Tim Scott and Ben Sass assiduously exchanged notes and whispered back and forth during the proceedings. John Cornyn, Republican from Texas, flipped through pages in a thick binder, occasionally underlining phrases. Oh, and here's the best one, David. Again, from the Washington Post, the notable exception has been Senator Rand Paul, who has repeatedly been spotted doodling in a notepad. First of all, I have no love for Rand Paul, but I need to defend the doodlers out there. I got in trouble throughout my school, my, my education for doodling in the

margins of notebooks because it was the only way I could like make my brain pay attention to what was going on. That said, Rand Paul shouldn't be doodling in his notebooks because I just don't like him. And yeah, I mean, there is a lot of people. I kind of feel like Mitch McConnell's hearing at the screen. He's been through this too many time. It's not impeachment hearings, but like, are we really going to, is anything interesting going to happen by the way Mitch McConnell or Chuck Schumer is like composing themselves. Probably not. They've been doing this for a while. I don't know. I mean, Dick Durbin's, I mean, all the, all the, all the, all the, all the, all the wips are, you know, and leaders are so practiced. I don't, I don't know. I say you can doodle, but then you have to put the doodles online after the day's hearings are over.

Yes. Right. That is public property. We paid for those doodles. You know, put those put those on Twitter so that I can. I can read those and decode what your vote's going to be. Also, anything that you've underlined or highlighted also has to be put online just to make sure you're not randomly underlining and highlighting just to fool the teacher and to make into thinking that you've read the, read the proceedings. Coming up on today's show, Matt Jones of Kentucky Sports Radio explains Mitch McConnell's end game during impeachment. Plus, your listener mail, including the question, if you could only read one book for the rest of your life, what would it be? All that and more on the press box, a part of the Ringer podcast network. Hello, media consumers, Brian Curtis and David Shoemaker here. David, we've got a very special guest to start us off right today.

He is the creator and host of Kentucky Sports Radio. He's also the author of the book, Mitch Please, how Mitch McConnell sold out Kentucky in America too, which I believe kicked off the monster run of Mitch puns on Twitter. He is Matt Jones. Matt, thanks for coming on the press box. Hey, thank you guys. I'm looking forward to it. You know, it was my co-author, Chris.

Tomlin who came up with Mitch Please, but I've watched how people have adopted it. And we haven't gotten credit. But that's okay. A good Mitch pun is, it's universal at this point. All right. So David and I are connoisseurs of strain puns here. Can you tell us how you landed on Mitch, please? So they have this event in Kentucky called Fancy Farm, which is once a year, all the politicians in the state come to this festival and it's like half Republicans, half Democrats, and people scream at it's a really bizarre thing that I don't know if anybody else in America does. And one year they had me be the MC and I decided to turn it into a roast. So I just made fun of all the politicians.

And when it came time to Mitch McConnell, there was a guy running for governor named Matt Bevin who ended up being governor and he was terrible. But he and Mitch McConnell did not get along. So Mitch always gives his speech and gets up and leave. So I said, hey, Matt Bevin, don't worry. I know y'all don't like each other. But Mitch is going to speak and then he'll leave. and you may still have 99 problems,

but a Mitch ain't one, right? So it was a really stupid pun about, and it was great because McConnell had no idea what that meant. And he was just staring straight ahead aimlessly. And everyone was laughing, and he had a look on his face like, people are making fun of me, and I don't understand why.

And that's what I realized that Mitch puns were the way to go. Yeah, and it was always going to be Mitch, please, on the book? No. So Simon and Schuster, you know, one of the best, publishing companies in the world. They wrote me and said, we need somebody to write a book about Mitch McConnell, and we think you'd be perfect.

And I really didn't want to write a book about Mitch McConnell, but, you know, I was like, okay. They said, we've got it all set. We even have the title. And Jonathan Carp, who's the CEO of Simon Schuster, says the title will be Teenage Mutant Senate Turtle. And I just looked at him, and I was like, I am not writing a book called Teenage Mechster.

mutant Senate Turtle. I'm sorry. That's not going to happen. And he goes, well, you got 24 hours to come up with another book name. And Chris Thalman came up with Mitch Pleas, which I think is maybe a little better than Teenage Mutant Senate Turtle. All right. David and I are going to need to take like 20 seconds to you. That's a top five for all time, David. Teenage Mutant Senate Turtle. Jonathan Carp is legitimately one of the most brilliant men in book publishing in the last half century. And you might have just gotten him fired by letting that story out. But I, he doesn't, he doesn't. He doesn't. He doesn't. love me saying that, but he knows, he knows that's what he wanted to call it. And, and luckily we got out of that. So, oh, man, well, I'm a Jonathan Carp fan, so I'll let that

slide. Um, you've been, you, I mean, you might not have wanted to write the book, but, you know, to those listening and those of us who don't live in Kentucky, you've got to made a cottage industry, uh, from about, you know, from antagonizing Mitch McConnell. Well, I didn't want to write the book. Like, I didn't want, I, I had a dream of writing a book. book. And I didn't like the idea that my first book would be about Mitch McCall. Understood. But he, but to Jonathan Carp and Simon Schuster's credit, they allowed me to sort of make it broader than that. So what I did was I went to all 120 counties in Kentucky. And I basically wanted to sort of showcase the state in the eyes of how Mitch McConnell had sort of affected the state.

And I also used it to tell the story of I was considering running against him, right? So I was, I said, if you will let me tell the story of my decision whether to run and talk about McConnell as I travel through the state. And to their credit, they did. And so it's a weird book. It's like part McConnell, part travel log, and part also a decision of a person trying to decide whether to run against the most evil politician. He's not really the most evil, but certainly one of the most evil politicians. And that journey is kind of what it is. And I was happy with how it turned out. It's about McConnell, but it's also about other stuff. And I think their view was, well, if he runs, then this is like his book about him running. And then if I didn't, which I didn't,

you could be about McConnell. But it came out one week after COVID broke. And so it was a weird time for it to come out. But I'm proud of it. We're going to talk. about this, well, what's going on in the Senate right now, this impeachment trial, before we get there, I just want to ask you a little bit about, well, I mean, the guy you wrote about, what do you think it is? One of the questions that I've been thinking long and hard about since basically the beginning of Trump's presidency is like what, what's in it for Mitch McConnell? Like, is it just that he wants his name on the Senate building someday? Is it just that people talk

about his dream of having a Republican court system, you know, of packing the courts with Republican judges? But that doesn't seem like, I mean, really, at this age, he's got to be thinking about his legacy. And right now, his legacy is like mean tweets, right? I mean,

like, what is, what is, what is his legacy? What does he want his legacy to be? So I think Mitch McConnell cares about two things. Number one is power, just pure, unadulter. power. If you go back and look, and I talk about this a lot in the book, about how he rose, he was literally just the county judge executive in Jefferson County, which is literally like the mayor of a county. And he wrote, and back then, Kentucky was all Democrat. And he decided,

I'm going to create the Republican Party around me. So he went to the whole state and he had McConnell allies in every county. And he got elected as a Republican when Republicans did not, get elected in Kentucky. And he did it because he was brilliant in how he set up that campaign, and I won't go into the details, but it was a really brilliant thing. And then he did the same thing in the Senate. I mean, he was the lowliest senator, you know, this guy no one knew from Kentucky, and he slowly put together a coalition. So he's about power. So when Trump won, the number one thing is power. Look, he's the president. I've got to find a way to work with him. But the second thing, and I think this is most important, Donald Trump was able, through his popularity with his

voters to get policies that are otherwise very unpopular to get them passed through the cult of personality. So tax cuts for the rich. The average person is not for that. But because Trump was for it, McConnell knew, hey, here's some things that I try to sell to the public and people don't like it. Tax cuts for the rich, really conservative judges. But if Trump sells them, they get passed. And all I really have to do is deal with some nonsense. And he did. Then once Trump lost, well, now he can't get that stuff passed anymore. So now Mitch is done with him.

He doesn't want him anymore because he's not useful. But when he was the president, I think Trump's two biggest long-term legacies will be those tax cuts and will be the judges. And that's all McConnell's doing because McConnell realized he could get that done through a politician that was a lot more popular than he was. So let's apply David's question to the impeachment trial that's going on right now. McConnell came out initially and said that Donald Trump, quote, provoked the capital siege. Yes.

Then he voted twice that the impeachment trial was unconstitutional. Yes. And yet, according to all these anonymous McConnellites that we see quoted in the newspaper all the time, he may still be at least notionally a yes vote to convict Trump. So what is Mitch McConnell doing there? Month ago, I would have predicted he was going to vote yes. I mean, as weird as it is, I'm kind of friends with or know some people in the McConnell world. And I think McConnell was definitely a yes.

McConnell wants Trump gone because he knows Trump electorally is deadweight for the Republicans going forward. He can't win. He lost the popular vote twice and now they want to, you know, nominate him a third time. Why would you do that? Plus, the Senate race in Georgia was a huge red flag. What happens when Trump is still the big figure, but he's not on the ballot? And the answer is you lose. We saw that in 2018 and we saw that in the Senate race.

So I think Trump wants him, or McConnell wants him gone. But here's the problem. McConnell wants to be the leader of the Senate, right? And his people do not, are not going to vote to convict. McConnell likes to tell this joke that being the head of the Senate is like being the head of a graveyard. Everybody's beneath you, but no one listens to you. That's his joke.

But there's a lot of truth to that. And these senators are not going to convict him. So I think McConnell realizes if he wants to keep him, power, then he has no choice, but probably to vote not to impeach. But if it were up to him, and it is up to him, he should vote, he should have courage. But I think he wants, he hates Trump. McConnell hates Trump. And I think he'd like to see him go away forever, but not going to happen. So your contention is he was sincere when he came out and said that stuff. I do. You know, people can say that that's, they don't think McConnell's ever sincere. I know a lot about Mitch McConnell.

I've studied him for two years. He isn't sincere. He isn't sincere. here, but he is about this. He is a complete realpolitik guy. Like, he is all about, and he knows, and I think he's right about this. Trump is dead weight for the Republican Party going forward, dead weight, and he'd like to see him gone forever. But I think he realizes he just doesn't have the votes to get that done. Well, I mean, I think this might not be Mitch specific, but, you know, I'm sure you're paying attention to the impeachment. It's really, really what's on trial is politics, right? I mean, supposedly we're talking about our former president who, you know, literally led an insurrection against the country he was president of. But every single

Republican, regardless of how they vote, is weighing the question that they're answering is, is it going to be better for my political future to vote to acquit or to vote to convict? I think most of them are doing that. I want to give a couple of them credit, okay? I don't think Mitt Romney's that. It's not going to be better for his political future. It's not going to be better for Ben Sasse's political future in Nebraska. It might actually get him voted out in a primary. It wasn't better for Liz Cheney. So, I mean, I think there are some that are doing it on principle. Some, but Mitch, I mean, as you said, I mean, he said he wanted, I mean, it was, but Mitch is not one of those. I agree with you. Right, right. Because if he, because if he votes,

if he votes that Trump, if he says Trump's guilty, it's because he thinks Trump's dead weight. Right. I mean, he thinks that in the far, at some point in the future. Let me be clear. For Mitch, I don't really think principal is ever what drives those decisions. It's always power. And then in the background, conservative ideology, but I don't even, listen, when Mitch was the county judge executive in Jefferson County, he was pro-choice. He was pro-union. He was pro-gun control. He was actually the old school Rockefeller Republican.

And then he just realized that wasn't where the Republican Party was anymore. So he just flipped all those positions. You know, so I don't think he is an ideologue. I think he is a power broker. And so he will do what is best for power. In all your McConnell studies, Matt, what did you find that McConnell thinks of the media? Unlike Trump, he does not hate the media. He considers the media very useful. I mean, the Kentucky media, the Courier Journal, the Herald leader are very liberal newspapers. But not when it comes to Mitch. Like, they give Mitch really favorable treatment. And the reason is, very simple. He gives them stories, right? Like, I mean, virtually every story in Kentucky, especially about the Republican Party, comes from McConnell's people. McConnell's people love the

Kentucky media. They're very smart. They realize that the media, and at the end of the day, they're doing a job. And if you can help them do their job, they'll be more favorable to you. So I don't, McConnell is not anti-meat. If you notice when Fox News and all these people talk about the mainstream media, McConnell is never part of any of that. And the reason is he wants the media to be his message. And unlike a lot of Republicans, Mitch McConnell realizes you can't win elections on Fox News. You have got to win elections on ABC, NBC, and CBS. And that's why he doesn't trash the media.

Okay. So that's interesting because I feel more than any politician other than maybe Trump, I consume McConnell's thoughts via sources close to McConnell. Yes. And you talk about feeding it. Here's Bloomberg this week. McConnell, quote, could still vote to convict the former president, according to three people familiar with his thinking. So should we understand that, unlike Trump leaks, which were often unauthorized and completely off message, that McConnell leaks when we read them in the media are authorized leaks. Here is the message I'm trying to get up.

Everything you hear about McConnell is intentional. Every single thing. McConnell, I will say, I mean, there are a lot of things I don't like about Mitch McConnell. I think he's been bad for the state. I mean, I have many strong thoughts. you could read him in the book. I respect his intelligence and I respect his sort of cunning of he, I'm not going to say he never makes mistakes. He makes mistakes, but he rarely makes mistakes. And when you read sources close to McConnell, Mitch has approved all of those. And depending on the outlet, I could tell you who the person is in every single one of them. Because he, his group is about five people. That's it. You know, Trump had part of his problem was he had a thousand people. he tried to talk to. McConnell has like five. And that's why I think he's so, he's ruthlessly effective. And one of the things, I'm not a Nancy Pelosi fan. I'm not a Mitch McConnell fan.

But they both are so much better at their job than the counterparts in the other party are at theirs. Nancy Pelosi is so much better than Kevin McCarthy. And Mitch McConnell is so much better at it than Chuck Schumer. And that's why they always outmaneuver them. That's really, interesting. So when if ever, I mean, if everything is deliberate, you understand why people and people on television will go on and say they're skeptical of, of McConnell's motives, because everything is deliberately leaked, right? It's like when he was, so when he came out, when it was leaked that he was potential yes for convicting Trump, but I think that was like tested out. He wanted to see what happened. I think, I think he leaked the potential yes to see if a lot of his

cohorts would come with him. And when they didn't, I think he had to retreat. That's interesting. I mean, but you can understand the skepticism, obviously. I mean, that's that you're skeptical of the man, too. And I agree that he's very talented. I think what makes McConnell hard for maybe the average political consumer to process is that he doesn't have the, I don't know, he doesn't present as a political animal. You know, he's very still. He's very, recessive sort of. And yet there's, I mean, obviously all this going on.

But I disagree with that. McConnell is not a political animal in the sense of 2021, where we think political animals means go on Sean Hannity and rant. But when what politics meant 15, 20 years ago, he's the best at it,

which is back room, making the, like, figuring the processes to get stuff done. The bottom line is, I go back to the Trump thing. I talk to Trump voters every day. I'm probably the only progressive in America that has a majority Trump voting audience. And that's actually, and I like that about what I do, but I talk to him every day. And they'll say to me, Matt, Trump was a great president. And I'll say, well, what did he get done? And basically, the only thing they like is his tweets. You know what I mean? From a policy perspective,

he really didn't do a whole lot, but everything he got accomplished came through Mitch McConnell. And if you think about it, whatever his policy initiatives, all were Mitch McConnell policy initiatives. And I think McConnell is very good at politics in the sense of governing. I don't think he cares about politics in the sense of like being on Laura Ingraham. That's just not what he wants to do. And so he doesn't even try it. So how does this work in a Biden presidency? Do you think that he's actually receptive to the, quote, bipartisanship?

He's going to read the win. So in 2022, the map, the Senate map is actually pretty good for Democrats. There are five or six competitive seats that they could win. There's probably two or three Democrat seats that Republicans can win. McConnell wants to take back the Senate. He's going to do whatever he thinks will take back the Senate. So if sort of the feeling of the country is bipartisan, he'll do that. If it's not, he won't. So I think he will read the political wins. Right now,

you'll see he's kind of getting along because right now I think that's kind of what the country wants. But the moment they don't want it anymore, he'll be back to doing the other thing. He wants to win the Senate in 2022. Here's my prediction. If they take back the Senate in 2022, McConnell will become the majority leader again. If they don't, he will retire after the governor's race in 2023 so that a Republican can appoint Daniel Cameron, the attorney general, to replace it. You mentioned, Matt, you took a look at challenging McConnell last year in the Senate race. Amy McGrath wound up losing that race by almost 20 points. Do you have any regrets about not running against him? No, I would have lost. I wouldn't, I don't know that I would have lost as

much as she did, but I would, she was a terrible candidate. Nice woman, but a terrible candidate. But I would have lost. It was going to be impossible to beat him with Trump on the bow. Now, like, in 2022, Rand Paul is running without Trump. Still very hard, but that's possible. Not possible with Trump on the ballot. Take Jamie Harrison versus Lindsey Graham in South Carolina. Had that been an off year, he might have won. But with Trump on the ballot, it's not happening.

Because Trump gets, and you saw this with the Georgia Senate races, Trump gets 10% of the electric to come out for him, and they ain't coming out for anybody else. And then while they're there, they'll go ahead, vote Republican. But I mean, in the Georgia Senate runoff, the reason Trump lost is 10% of his voters just didn't show up. And that is, that's what happens, I think. That's why it's going to be almost impossible to win a state like Kentucky with Trump on the bow. I want to ask you about your audience that you were talking about earlier. You're heavily Trump supporting radio audience.

You know, in this impeachment trial that's going on right now, we've heard a lot of Republicans and the lead up and during it talk. And they're sort of this talking out of both sides of their mouth, right? Like the people who stormed the Capitol were not representative of your average Trump voter, your average Republican. And yet, if we do anything to Trump, do anything to them, we might risk angering all the Trump voters or all the Republican voters. As someone who interacts every day with Kentucky Trump voters, what is their perception of what's

going on in this impeachment trial right now? And what do you think the reaction would be to, you know, know, a guilty or an innocent verdict in the whole thing. Well, they're against it. I mean, they're against the trial, most, the vast majority of them. I don't think, to be quite frank with you, whether you convicted or didn't Trump, it would make them like Democrats nationally any more than they do. I mean, they're not going to like them no matter what.

Here's the thing about Trump voters. And look, I'm not talking necessarily about the crazy people that storm the Capitol. Although I don't think those are like total outliers. There are lots of those kind of folks. But I don't think they're even the majority of Trump voters. The average Trump voter, especially in a place like Kentucky, and this is also true of rural Pennsylvania and Ohio swing states, they feel like the government as a whole has completely left them behind.

Their entire world has changed. And you used to be able to get blue-collar jobs in rural areas, and now you can't. And so in Donald Trump, they just see a dude who could, who, wanted to burn the whole thing down, period. That's it. That's why they like. It has very little to do with anything except they hate the government, and they hate politicians, and he to them is the anti-politician. They also, if you notice, like, they also kind of like Bernie Sanders.

Like Bernie Sanders won a lot of the same areas in the Democratic primaries against Hillary that Trump won in the general election. they like people who just sort of give middle fingers up to the to the establishment. Bernie Sanders did a town hall in West Virginia with like 900 people, 750 of which were Republicans, and he got a standing ovation. And the reason was they just hate the establishment. By the way, that's why they hate Mitch McConnell and that's why they hate Nancy Pelosi. To them, they are the establishment.

And I don't think that's going to change. I think the question is, who is the next political? figure that can harness that. And I don't see one on the horizon yet who can. I mean, like Josh Holly and Ted Cruz think they can, but they can't. I don't know who that person is, but the next person who does it, Republican or Democrat, it can be a Democrat. I think they will have a lot of success.

I'm going to ask this question on David's behalf, Matt. You are now a wrestling proprietor, a professional wrestling proprietor. Why to switch, by the way, from Mitch McConnell to pro wrestling? Well, well, that's the question. question, right? Because David and I were so amused by the Donald Trump pro wrestling metaphor that basically launched 1,000 think pieces over the last couple of years. What do you make about the connection between the performance art of wrestling and the performance art of the Trump era? Well, I mean, David would be much more qualified to talk about this than me. But for me,

the sort of good guy versus bad guy, us versus them mentality of wrestling is very much the Donald Trump mentality of politics. He does not care about issues. He does not care, even really about partisanship. He cares about, do you like me or not? That is his overall worldview. Basically, are you a good guy or are you a bad guy? And for Donald Trump is almost like the wrestling in the 80s, where that line was clearly drawn. In the 90s, it starts to morph and good guys or bad guys. But in the 80s, the good guys were the good guys and the bad guys were bad guys and they better not riding cars together when they're not wrestling because people will, the myth will go away. That's Trump. You know, Trump, if you remember when he first became president, he would tell people,

Nancy Pelosi loves me, we're going to be fine. And that's because he thought they liked each other as people and nothing else would matter. And what he didn't realize is politics trumped that personal relationship, no pun intended. That's Trump. So Trump, to me, in the wrestling world, he is just a guy who he's, you're either in the four horseman or you're not in the four horseman. And for him, if you're not, and you're Ben Sass and you're Mitt Romney, I got no use for you, period.

And in some ways, in the same way that, you know, if you were in the four horsemen and you turned on him, you're the most evil enemy. That's how he looks at the Republican Party people like Liz Cheney, etc. They have turned on him, and now they must be taken down. And so he's sort of an 80s wrestling mentality in politics.

Yeah. you all all the Republicans are, are lacing up their boots in the same dressing room. Yeah. And they're all coming out of the same tunnel. But it's all, but it's all a series of uneasy alliances, right? I mean, you're always trying,

everybody's shooting for the top. So, I mean, you're never a complete, unless you're, you know, riding with the horsemen. You're not, and even then. Yeah. You're always looking out for number one. No, I think that's exactly right.

And that, I like that analogy. You know, when we, when we purchased the majority interest in OVW, one of the things I tried to understand. stand were sort of the locker room dynamics that you were talking about, right? Like, what is it like for wrestlers? And wrestling's a weird thing because everybody's on the same side, sort of, but then they also have these like individual, like you want to be at the top of the heap. And I think that's kind of how politics are too. The thing about the Republican Party, unlike the Democratic Party, is that for four years, Trump was clearly the top of the heat. And so he got to

decide the order of everybody else. He's like, again, Hogan. in the 80s, who gets beefcake to be able to be high up just because they're buddies and the nasty boys. And that's kind of Trump. If you were his buddy, you're good. And if you're not, you're not. And I think that's now the question is who's going to be that guy or man or woman in the Republican Party who's the kingmaker or is it still Trump? And it may still be Trump. I just want all the people who come at us on this podcast for being too liberal to just note that we just referenced Brutus the Barber Beefcake. So, you know, take that anybody who has political complaints about this podcast.

I think the specific argument is that Matt Gates is the Brutus the Barber Beefcake. Oh, he's definitely. Yes. No, no, no, no. Tommy Tuberville is the Burris the Barber Beefcake. Listen, when I was covering SEC football and Tommy Tuberville was a coach, even amongst SEC football coaches, he was considered the stupid one.

And now he is a senator. After having been the dumbest SEC football coach, now he's a senator. That should tell you where politics are right now. there are so many Rick Flair, Jerry the King Law, there are all these Republican and wrestlers who ran for office before the way, before they would have been shoe ins now. I mean, all they had to do. Remember in 2000, I think it was 2000 or maybe 96, Richard Petty, a NASCAR driver ran for Senate, North Carolina and got crushed. And he just missed his time. 20 years later, he'd be, he'd be president. Let's end it here, Matt. You have thought about Mitch McConnell more than anyone has and probably more than anyone should. Correct. In writing the book, what did you find out about McConnell that surprised you in a good way? Let me give you a bad way while I'm thinking of a good way. This is actually not a bad. It's more of a sad. Mitch McConnell has no friends. And when I say he has no friends, I mean it.

Like, not because he's unlikable, just because he has no friends. You know, the dynamics that you have with your friends, where you kind of love them no matter what, whether they can give you something or not, he has no relationships like that. He is married, but he has very few relationships even with his family. And so he is really almost solely a power broker. He has almost no person, I know people who've worked with him for 30 years who will say to you, we never talk about anything but work ever. So I just think that was kind of sad to me. I think he, is someone that the moment, you know, Justice Rehnquist many years ago, he retired and then died like two weeks later, I wonder what Mitch's life is going to be when politics are over,

because I think it's all consuming. That's why I think he'll stay as long as he can in it. As far as in a good way, I do believe this. I believe that Mitch believes in the structures of government. I believe that Mitch believes in the structures of American democracy, which, by the way, that should be a given, but it hasn't been in the last six months. Like, I think he believes that elections, we should follow what happened in the election, right? I think he believes that the Senate as an institution is an institution that has a set of ideals they should go for. I actually believe he believes all that.

So I think a lot of people don't anymore in the Republican Party, but I do think he does. I do think he believes in something resembling a sense of fairness. which a lot of folks seem to not. I know this is, I'm going to mix sports metaphors here. We're already talking about a faux sport and pro wrestling, but isn't part of that, though, that he's just so good? Like, he's playing the game. The game is what interests him.

And if you're the home run leader, you above all others, don't want them to move the wall. If you're the three-point shooting leader, you don't want them to change the three-point line. If you're the scoring leader, they don't want to add the three-point line, whatever the right parallel here is, he's in it to play politics.

And it's a great point. That's actually a great point. He believes in the game because he's really good at the game. And if the game changes, he might not be good at it anymore. Right. So I think there's something to that. But I won't be so cynical. Let me put it like this. When COVID hit and our governor in Kentucky, I think, especially early, did a really, really good job. He was kind of one of the leaders in the country of how things were going. Mitch McConnell was very quick to praise him and to work with him to get stuff here. to Kentucky. I just don't think, I don't think he's soulless, okay? I think he does have some belief in the goals of government. Now, I think he's ruthless, and I think there's a lot of things that are, but I don't think he is, you know, I think there are some Republicans right now, maybe some Democrats, but more Republicans, who don't care if the people that don't vote for them even have a good life. Like, they just don't care at all. I don't feel like Mitch is like that. I mean, I don't feel like he's like, you know what, if you didn't vote for me, then go away. I've never talked to you.

I don't really think he's like that. Matt Jones's book is Teenage Mutant Senate. I mean, sorry, Mitch, please, how Mitch McConnell sold out Kentucky and America too. Matt, thanks for coming on the press box. Hey, thank you guys. All right, David, it's time for the overword Twitter joke of the week where we celebrate a gag that was so obvious that all of media Twitter made it at exactly the same time send your nominees to at the press box pod, where they are always

gratefully received. David, I regret to inform you that Mike Pence is doing a podcast. No. The single most generic career move for any politician, Mike Pence is on board with that. I'm not kidding.

It's a brave move. I mean, I have nothing nice to say about Mike Pence, but staring into the abyss that he might, I mean, you know, two months from now, maybe having like, you know, Republican think tankers we've never heard on on his guess, is a really frightening proposition for a guy who wants to run for president.

Well, I kind of thought it was a safe move because if you're Mike Pence, right, you're way too big to take like the Fox News analyst deal. You can write a memoir, though that's just kind of also kind of a generic, you know, I'm a politician who's thinking about running for the next thing. So I thought podcast was kind of a happy medium. In this case, for the Mike Pence podcast, it was an overword Twitter joke to write, get ready for the weirdest me undies ads you've ever heard. thanks to Andrew 3,000 for that.

David, have you followed the Nira Tandon confirmation hearings in the Senate? Yes. Is there ever been a better example of the people on Twitter care about something way more than average people care about something? I mean, I don't think the gap has ever been this wide. And partly because Tandon, who by the way is Biden's nominee for director of the Office of Management and Budget, is getting confronted by Republican senators about her mean tweets. Twitter is literally the subject of the hearings.

Rob Portman, Republican from Ohio, read a bunch of them the other day. And then he told Tandon, quote, there are still nine pages of tweets about Senator Cruz. It was an overwork Twitter joke to write, congrats to Nira Tandon on her upcoming 99 to one confirmation vote. Finally, David, there was an amazing story last week about a controversial Wendy's, a controversial Wendy's. It is in the northeast neighborhood of Washington, D.C. And this Wendy's is controversial, as I understand it,

because it's built on a piece of land that almost sticks into an intersection. And the presence of the Wendy's just is a mess traffic-wise. So Washington, D.C. is using eminent domain to get rid of the Wendy's. It was an overworked Twitter joke to write, sir, this was a Wendy's. See what they did there? If you wrote a good enough joke to justify my incredibly long preamble, congrats.

You made the overworked Twitter joke of the week. All right, David, in the notebook dump, let's do some listener mail. And before we get to the actual letters, I wanted to come back to the story of Donald McNeil, the New York Times stark coronavirus reporter who left the paper on Friday, a bunch of new developments in that case since we last talked about it. We now know a couple of other things.

If you did not follow this story, back in 2019, Donald McNeil went on a field trip to Peru with high school students. Why New York Times Star reporters are going on field trips with high schoolers? I still don't know the answer to that, but that's what he did. There were complaints about McNeil's behavior on that trip, specifically his use of the N-word. Here's how McNeil himself described that incident. I was asked at dinner by a student whether I thought a classmate of hers should have been suspended for a video she had made as a 12-year-old in which she used a racial slur. To understand what was in the video, I asked if she had called someone else the slur or whether she was rapping or quoting a book title. In asking the question, I used the slur itself.

Now, when McNeil left the paper on Friday, I would just like to say, somehow, miraculously, he was able to describe the incident without using the word itself. Yes. Yes. Not that hard. No, I just want to point that out. Now, when he left the paper on Friday, the editors of the New York Times wrote a kind of sweeping statement to the staff. They said, quote, we do not tolerate racist language regardless of intent. And a lot of people, including some that had no real sympathy for McNeil, said, no, wait a second, regardless of intent. That's, you're saying that it just, that there is no case that you could put where intent would matter at all in the way a word was used.

I mean, I was just thinking about this. Let's say a New York Times reporter, David, found out that a powerful person had used a racial slur in private. And in the process of reporting that story of holding that powerful person to account, they felt the need to repeat the slur even just to make sure they were getting the story right in private or something like that, right? I want to make sure that this person said, what you're telling me, they said, does intent not matter in a case like that? Anyway, Dean Bekaye, who runs the time, said in a meeting today, in our zeal to make a powerful statement about our workplace culture, we ham-handedly said something that some of you saw as threatening to our journalism.

Dot, dot, dot, dot. Of course intent matters when we are talking about language and journalism. So that is no longer an operative statement. And by the way, in that same meeting, Dean Bacay blamed the wording of that statement on the fact that he was doing it under deadline. I totally understand that. Isn't everybody at the New York Times working under deadline?

If you're a star reporter and you go to your boss and say, I'm really sorry, I screwed up, but I was working under deadline. Well, that's kind of the job of working at a newspaper. But anyway, when it comes to someone leaving a journalism job, David, as McNeil did, often we come in with a big take without understanding all the. of factors that were at play. And here, this was also something interesting that we've learned about

more in the last couple of days. In Vanity Fair, Joe Pompeo writes about there were other things, in fact, that were happening that caused McNeil to leave the paper. One was that he didn't make an immediate apology for what happened on that Peru trip after the story was reported by the Daily Beast.

Manil also made a statement to the Washington Post while the whole controversy was going on that said, quote, don't believe everything you read, which some people at the paper thought was not the right thing to do in that instance. Pompeo goes on to note, in addition to the lack of a public apology and his ill-advised comment to the post, managers were now assessing other complaints about McNeil that had emerged since the Daily Beast story broke.

It was made clear to me that these complaints did not involve things like harassment or cultural insensitivity. Rather, they were complaints that simply reflected poorly on McNeil as a colleague, or that cast him as someone who was difficult to work with or who hadn't always treated co-workers with respect. So, the answer. or two, wait a second, why did he leave the paper? Is probably a long, is probably a more complicated answer than David and I might have

realized on Monday when we were doing that segment. And of course, David, because every New York Times story must at some point involve Brett Stevens. We learned via NBC's Dylan Byers that Brett Stevens wrote a column about the Donald McNeil case that was supposed to run Monday and it was spiked. Max Tandy The Daily Beast reports that it was New York Times opinion editor Kathleen Kingsbury

who did the spiking. She says I have an especially high bar of running any column that could reflect badly on a colleague and I didn't feel that this piece rose to that level, she said, noting that she believed Bequet was planning on correcting the record about the paper's view on intent.

Well, I don't have anything. I mean, your recitation of the facts I think are about as compelling as they need to be. I'm not, as I said last time, usually advocate for people losing journalists losing their jobs because usually there's human stakes in both directions. But and listen, journalism is the idea of like a difficult or problematic coworker is not new to journalism. I mean, there are a lot of people, a lot of reporters are sort of lone wolves and a lot of them are real terrible individuals when you get down to it, you know, over the years. Even some of the ones that we deify as the greats of the business. You know, they're not people that you'd want to babysit your kids or something like that.

But this is a much bigger issue than that and obviously much more serious. And if we're handling it in 2021 in a way that it wouldn't have been handled in 1950 or 1990 something, will so be it. I mean, we live in reality. We're not, you know, grading on a curve here. This is a reality that we should, I mean, that is reality. We have to pay attention to this. And his offenses were real.

And I trust in New York Times educated this correctly. In slightly less serious news, listener Backward Sock points us to the Marty Schottinheimer Washington Post headline controversy. I don't know if you follow this. Marty Schottinheimer was the coach of four NFL teams,

famously the Chiefs and the Browns, who was dealing with Alzheimer's in recent years, died Tuesday at the age of 77. and this was the headline the Washington Post put up for his obit. Marty Schottenheimer, NFL coach whose teams wilted in the postseason, dies at 77.

Oh, wow. You want a bigger reaction than that? I don't know. I mean, it just, it's one of those things, right? Like, I could imagine an obit of Marty Schottenheimer starting like this.

Marty Schottenheimer, a long time NFL head coach whose teams wilted in the postseason died Tuesday, dot, dot, dot. And nobody really even noticing it. But it seems to me because it was in the headline and it was the only fact, right? You didn't even note that he was a hugely successful NFL coach. That's what set people off. I don't even, I mean, Marlisleavy's still alive. so I don't know how the Washington Post

would have handled that obituary. But it just, I don't even think of Schottenheimer as like a loser coach. Like it seems like, I understand his team's mayor may have wilted in the playoffs, but that goes for the vast majority of NFL coaches. And I don't know.

I mean, you have to reach a certain level of acclaim for the Washington Post to even be like writing your obituary. But that just seems like a real unnecessary low blow at this point. On Sunday after the Super Bowl, David, you put out a call for any movies or TV shows that involve the making of a Super Bowl commercial.

Oh, yeah. We got some. Chona Fox, I hope I'm saying your name correctly, Chona. Matt and Dave Holtz pointed us to an episode of the Disney show Smart Guy. I'm not familiar with this show, where the titular character gets his father's local

roofing ad put on during the Super Bowl. So that's one. And then we got another. Smart guy was the show that starred the younger brother of the sister sister twins. Okay. That's the extent of what I know about it. But it was like that kid was the star. It's also the extent of what I know about it now.

We got one more from listener Thorzal, super deep cut in head of the class. Remember the TV show Head of the Class? Oh, yeah. I love that show. Me too. Howard Hessman's character Moonlights in a series of local TV ads. He's worried about them being. scene, especially when the director jokes that they'll air during the Super Bowl.

Okay? Wow. I'm actually relieved that that was that we're talking about Howard Hessman era, head of the class and not the Billy Connolly catastrophe. Not speaking of deep cuts. Liz Gardner, our pal asked us this. How tuned into the impeachment trial are you? Background noise during the day, or do you get updates on the evening news or a daily

podcast? I've not been even tuned in that much during the day for just no particular reason. I keep turning it on and then getting some recess and just losing the thread. So I end up having to catch up after the fact most of the time. It is not, the Senate proceedings are not geared for, to be exciting television viewing. I mean, I guess we could probably say that every episode of the show every day of the year. But it's, you know, it's not the most straightforward watch. No, though the sort of when they were showing the videos,

in recreating the seizure of the Capitol. Sure. I got a bunch of messages, including one from my mom, by the way, this is you've got to watch this. This is incredible. And so I did sort of flip over

and watch a couple of those, and that was incredibly compelling. And also just, you know, regardless of what the outcome of the impeachment hearing is, it is a good reminder of how horrible that whole episode was.

And how easy and how so many people want us to just move on, right? They've literally used the words move on. And we, you forget, unless it is all laid out for you, that shot of Mike Pence being spirited to safety, that shot we saw for the first time of Eugene Goodman, the Capitol police officer, running into Mitt Romney in the hallway and being like, no, no, no, this way, come this way before he went and confronted the rioters.

I just, it has served the purpose, I think, of making sure that that stays lodged. Well, yeah, except for what I said earlier, which is that none of the people who were actually deciding this, the outcome of this, have any stake in the truth or the reality of what happened that day. I mean, honestly, I say this not entirely, ironically. The Democrat, the managers would be better off presenting an elaborate case that the Republican's reelection, re-election probability goes up. if they convict Trump.

If they spent their time doing that, they'd probably have a better, a greater likelihood of, of winning the case. Because that's how all, I mean, the vast majority of these Republicans are voting.

But you're right. I mean, this is the day in our history that we should not be forgotten. And this is what, like, I mean, you know,

there's this like 14 minute video that's floating around online now of this other presentation that I hope lives on in the history books because it's, it is, that important. And it was an incredibly good presentation.

From Aaron Schaefer, turns out Jim Kramer missed covering the GameStop thing on CNBC because he had shoulder surgery that week. Nate Silver missed the January 6th insurrection in Trump's second impeachment because of a probably much deserved post-election vacation. My question, in Ringer World, what would be the groundbreaking news event that would be the worst to miss because you're away on vacation? Man, but what would it be? It's got to be a big NBA thing, right? Well, that's always it. It's always, I mean, the NBA writers, God bless him, sort of get like two weeks off, right? I mean, there's like a, there's like a window between what is it, the finals on the draft or the finals in free agency or whatever it is.

It's a very, very, very brief window. Maybe it's three or four weeks, but like, you know, you got to work your vacation time really specifically. and almost every year somebody, you know, it gets interrupted by some trade rumor, some trade, something like, you know, something like that happening. And obviously, that would be the top thing for Ringer World. I'm sure, I don't know what you,

I mean, I don't even know what second place could be. I just, it amazes me, we touched on this a little bit on Monday, but it amazes me how the lives of sports writers have changed. I mean, first of all, used to have the deadline of the newspaper. And if any thing,

happened after the deadline or even happen the next morning, you had one cutoff point where you could write a story and put it in the paper. And after that, you just couldn't do it anymore, right? For the internet, just like, oh, well, I'll do this tomorrow or I'll get this tomorrow. That's number one, that changed that you're now working all the time, thanks to Twitter and the internet. And two is, as we discussed, the NBA schedule just became the whole calendar. it wasn't like, oh, I have these months and then I have the draft and I have a lot of downtime where I could do stuff. You're just on duty all the time. Yeah. And there really is no vacation. And it's quite a, quite a change from the old world. It's tough too. I mean, it's not enough

just to sort of be plugged in just to be opinionated, whatever. I mean, to be a top-notch sports writer, you have to be more, you have to know, retain. You have to have to have to. You have to, have more information at your fingertips than all of your readers put together, basically, right? I mean, that's like the, that is the reality of kind of operating on Twitter as a, as a journalist in, in, in this day and age, it's a lot. Jim Babcock has issues with the phrase making history. He writes, Kamala Harrison, Hank Aaron made history. Back to back, triple doubles on the road in February isn't making history. Can you discuss the seemingly recent overreliance on the trope in internet journals.

Well, if you do something for the first time, maybe we need a different signifier for something that is historical in the sense that it has not happened before, but not, but will not be recorded in any imaginary history book. Right? If you're the first person to use like, you know, the New Jersey Nets refurbished locker room,

that is a, that is an event that has never happened. and will never be repeated, but I can't imagine anyone's going to ever talk about it again. You can just drop the phrase making history. You can just say like he hit, he is the first player in NBA history to do blank. And you don't really need it.

Just remind me whenever there was like a great moment in baseball, like something happened, they would be like, oh my gosh, that bat's going to Cooperstown or that ball's going to Cooperstown, which was literally true that it was going to the Hall of Fame, but who cares? Like everything goes to the Hall of Fame,

to the Hall of Fame, you will almost never see that actual bat in a case unless you just happen to come on the right day. And it was just such a generic thing to say. Like, oh, it's going to Cooper. Okay. They made history. Let's just, let's just cut it out. I like the idea that you would go to, like, if you were getting a backstage tour at Cooperstown, there's like, they would just like lead you down a hallway, but they'd open the wrong door and just a bunch of balls would tumble out. You know, it's just like a giant closet full of baseballs.

And they're like, oh, shit. Oh, God. We got a Hossie Smith's one right here. And we got Bob Horner's over here. This is from James Raddock. Wondering if you guys ever see media outlets offering a pay per article approach to their paywalls, letting us pay, say, $1 to access a certain article rather than requiring a subscription. Yes, I mean, they should.

I think that if, I think the problem is that journalism is, I mean, the large-scale problem is that journalism is sort of, of a dinosaur industry that's really hard to, it's been a painful evolution on many fronts into the internet era for, you know, the institutions of journalism. And yet they've been forced to be on the front lines by virtue of being daily publications or weekly publications and publishing urgent things like news about our federal government, et cetera. Um, you know, if, if journalism were just coming into the internet era now, there'd probably be a lot of a different set of options for them, right? I mean, things that have already been established.

I definitely see a future in which you can pre-buy a, you know, a packet of tokens or they just, I mean, our phones do everything now. It's the easiest thing in the world to buy an in-game purchase on whatever, you know, whatever game you're playing or your kids playing or whatever else. If my phone was just like, do you want to read this? It's two and a half cents. Put your thumb here. I would say yes every single time, right?

And the fact that, I mean, the New York Times might not, or the New York Times would probably be able to monetize that at the scale that it would work. Now, with like the Louisville Courier Journal that Matt was talking about, would it be worth it for them? Well, that's a question not for them, really, but for Apple. They just sort of have to take a sort of nonprofit approach to it and wrangle all this money and give it back to the right people, sort of like, you know, like, like, you know, music revenues on Spotify.

or whatever, you know, I mean, I think that it could totally work. And I think that it would be a huge, huge windfall for the, you know, a lot of the outlets that we're talking about. Now, still, what people pay for news? Are people going to pay for one thing when another thing like it is free and you just kind of had to search for it a little bit? Well, that's a good question. But certainly for magazine articles and, you know, long-form stuff like that, you know, I just was reading a Sports Illustrated piece earlier today. And if my internet browser just said, this will cost 50 cents. I would have just said, okay, right?

I mean, there's a number, I'm sure, that works for everybody for different sorts of things. And it's just a technology question. I think that, I mean, I definitely think it's feasible. I do run into it with medium-sized newspapers like the Courier Journal or small newspapers. I'll find a piece. I'll be like, I just want to read this. Yeah. I am not going to even do the trial subscription, but I would just like to read this.

And if you give me a button that says, I can read this for a dollar. even. Up charge me a little bit. It doesn't, it doesn't have to be two cents. It can be 50 cents, it'll be dollar, whatever it is. I will pay that to read this if I can do that conveniently. Magazines are another interesting one because I think we all, you and I subscribe to a number of these things, but then sometimes you run into that like New Yorker piece, an older New Yorker piece. Like, I just want to read that. $3.99, what, what's your price to get me to read that? It's probably a bad deal for me, but I would probably pay it to read that piece. Yeah.

I really would. This is from Elijah Ackerman. If you could only read one book for the rest of your life, what would it be? I've said it before in this show. I mean, if we're talking about regular, like book books, as opposed to...

Like an encyclopedia or the Bible or something. Oh, wait. Oh, wait. You want to game the question so you can have the entire encyclopedia? Would you actually pick the encyclopedia? I mean, let's say you're on a desert island. I would probably put off the questions that I could find like the longest thing that I would actually read. In this scenario, you have like, let's say you're in a desert island.

You can read the whole encyclopedia and be way smarter. Or you can read something that is much, much, much better written over and over again. Dang. I'm sure there's some collected works of someone that would probably be a better answer. I mean, off the top of my head, like a modern library kind of thing. Yeah, but I mean, but like, you know, I think I mentioned on the show not long ago,

Luke Sans low life, which I can read. It's one of the few books that I'll like read to the end and start over at the beginning because there's just so many tiny pieces of information buried in it. And it's, it works as sort of fiction and nonfiction or at least works in those, works those lobes of my brain.

I don't know. What about you? You know, I was just thinking about like what books are on my phone that I can just like every night when I need to go to sleep, I just pull it up and it doesn't matter where it is in the book. It's funny, the ones I read are,

I used to be like Michael Crichton novels that I read as a kid. Like, those are very comforting to me to read. The other ones I read all the time are Paul Theroux's travel books, which I just really like and are really, really well written. So I'll read like the Great Railway Bazaar, but man,

do I have to pick just one of these books to read for the rest of my life? I don't know if I could do it. You might go like, I know. Correct me if I'm wrong. Didn't you like reread? Were you rereading James Bond or Sherlock Holmes?

I do read some of those. Both. Yeah, I mean, I could go, I could go the complete Sherlock Holmes. Like if you could get that in one volume. Sure. Some, there are definitely some, some, I'm sure there's some other examples of like old school mystery novels that were written a great, you know, that just had a million, a million volumes. And yeah, I mean, I could see that.

All right, it's time for David Shoemaker guesses the strained pun headline. Yeah. Monday's headline about Tom Brady winning yet another Super Bowl was goat load. By the way, I'm really still stuck on teenage mutant Senate Turtle. That's just incredible. Whoa. What a title. Today's headline, David, comes from Joe Walski.

It's from the Daily Telegraph over there in the UK. David, do you or does anyone you know watch Bridgeton? I mean, I know Bringer employees that watch it but we've not gotten into it at this household

yet. So this headline describes the notable amount of adult content in Bridgerton. The headline begins is Bridgetton

the closest thing to an X-rated costume drama? I'm going to need the next sentence and your hint is a Regency era undergarment.

Is Bridgetton the closest thing to an X-rated costume drama? what was the telegraph Chastity belt? No, chastity belt. What else could it be?

It's a little more conventional. Wait, wait, what's the, what's the, what's the, I think I got this. I just want to say it right. What is the, what is the setup? Is Bridgeton? Is Bridgeton the first, the closest thing to it, to X-rated costume drama? Damn, I can't figure out the phrasing. Is it like, of course it is?

There it is. Bang. of corset is. Corset. Yes, that's a great one. He is David Chewaker. I'm Brian Curtis. Production Magic by Erica Servantes. Programming note, we're off Monday for President's Day,

but we're back Tuesday with more lukewarm takes about the BDia. See you then, David. See you later, Brian.