The Press Box - Russian Bounties, Protest Rebrands, and Listener Mail

Episode Date: June 29, 2020

Bryan Curtis and David Shoemaker look at the story of Russian intelligence offering bounties to the Taliban for the killing of American troops (01:30), the Overworked Twitter Joke of the Week (14:45), the Dixie Chicks' new name (18:45), and listener mail (29:30). Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

From the Ringer, I'm Tyler R.R. Times. When I spoke to NFL star Cam Newton in January, his mindset was clear. I want my whole career to be in Charlotte. Cam won't be getting that wish. He was released by the Carolina Panthers in March. Cam is a complex figure, and my interest in him goes far beyond his exuberant smile and transcendent style of play. Cam broke the glass ceiling in American athletics, ascended to a place in a sport that few black quarterbacks have ever reached, making his fall that much more dramatic.

Over the past year, I've traveled the country speaking to coaches and teammates, friends and family, reporters, and even briefly to the man himself, trying to unravel the enigma that is Cam Newton. I uncovered contradictions at every turn. How can the hardest work on the team be depicted as a bad leader? And how can a franchise icon with the NFL MVP and Super Bowl appearance on his resume be so abruptly cast aside. The Ringer NFL show presents the Cam Chronicles. The series premieres Monday, July 13th. Hello, media consumers.

You've got the press box. Brian Curtis and David Shoemaker of the Ringer here. We got a lot of stuff for you today. We're going to talk about the country band formerly known as the Dixie Chicks and the art of the post-protest rebrand. What do the chicks, Lady Annabelle? and the state of Rhode Island all have in common. We'll do some listener mail, including the question,

what do we think about Bob Woodward, wanting to out Supreme Court Justice Brent Kavanaugh as an anonymous source? All that plus, David, guess is a strain pun headline and the overworked Twitter joke of the week. But David, let's begin with that unbelievable story that came down late on Friday, which is about Russian intelligence, offering bounties to the Taliban for the killings.

of American troops. 20 American troops were killed in combat in Afghanistan in 2019. At least one of those deaths was believed to be related to the bounties. American intelligence has been investigating the bounties for about 18 months, and the White House has reportedly been discussing the issue since March. The New York Times is Charlie Savage, Eric Schmidt, and Michael Schwartz, right, officials developed a menu of potential options, starting with making a diplomatic complaint to Moscow and a demand that

it stop, along with an escalating series of sanctions and other possible responses. Nevertheless, and I know this is going to surprise you, Trump has denied being briefed about this major foreign policy event. Here's a Trump tweet. Intel just reported to me that they did not find this info credible and therefore did not report it to me or the VP, possibly another fabricated Russia hoax, maybe by the fake news at New York Times books wanting to make Republicans look bad. I guess we start by by asking what do you make of President Trump's claims not to know

anything about this story? This seems like the appropriate time for something from the soundboard, be it like a sad trombone or a slide whistle. I don't, I mean, it's clearly bullshit. I think that, you know, a lot of this story is developing today. Trump's been tweeting about it, and it seems like there's ongoing reporting going on every time I turn on the news channels. So it's hard to speak with any sort of real confidence, although I kind of feel like

the past four years have given us a sort of like skeleton of confidence to believe implicitly every single aspect of this reported story, right? I mean, like, I would assume that even the skeptics of the quote unquote Russia hoax, the more, you know, Trump supporters, maybe not the most diehard of them, would hear the story and just kind of be like, oh, aha, that makes sense, right? Like, it all just sort of fits neatly into a, into the structure that we already have and, you know, it's been built over the past several years. Now, maybe I'm, my vision is blurred because of my various, you know, political biases. But it really does seem like there's no way that. Trump didn't know about it. And if he, as what people keep saying over and over again on the news and writing everywhere

else, if he didn't know about it, that's almost more damning than if he did, because the implication there would be that his intelligence sources or intelligence apparatus didn't feel it, weren't confident enough to tell him about it. Or maybe more pedestrian, the pedestrian answer is that it was in the president's, the president's daily briefing, but it wasn't presented to him orally. and so he counts that as not being aware that he wasn't aware of it. Regardless,

there's no version of this story that is particularly flattering to the president and I'm not sure his denying it. The only benefit of the doubt that I give him is that the denial doesn't really help him at all. Although I think that he clearly thinks that it helps them and so it's clear that he's bullshitting. That's all.

Yeah, and I don't know if we're just trying to split hairs here if that's what he's trying to do because this is a big, big, big, international story, right? So even the odds that it would just be like a line item in the president's printed daily briefing that nobody would bother be, hey, show, I just want to make sure you see the bid here about the Russians putting bounties on American soldiers. It seems like that would come up orally.

Did you like, by the way, how he also tagged at New York Times books? Yes. In this denial? So it is the book review desk at the Times he is somehow angry with, not the not the ace reporters in the A section. I thought Pamela Paul has got something to answer for. Let me tell you. I thought this Tom Skokut tweet was really good.

It says on the Russian Taliban bounty thing, it seems more or less equally likely that Trump wouldn't sit through the daily briefing about it, got briefed but didn't understand it, got briefed but didn't want to think about it, didn't get brief to protect his feelings. There's no real point in arguing about whether Trump, quote, knew about it. Yeah, I think that's right. I think that the one sort of, I don't know, the version of those events that kind of makes me most anxious is the one where, and it's one that I'm fully prepared to believe and probably do believe, that our government intelligence agencies are deliberately kind of like slow walking a lot of this information before it gets to Trump to see how much they can do on the matter and their normal channels before they have to deal with the presidential stonewalling or whatever else. that they fear they're going to face there. Because there's no, there's no clear.

I mean, if that were true, there'd be no, you know, better symbol of just a totally broken White House. But yeah, I don't think there's much of it. I don't think that the distinction matters terribly when it comes to Trump's culpability. Yeah, don't, and don't give Trump a deep state avenue to get out of this. Oh, they were slow walking it to me. You know, they're too scared to give it. No, no, no.

You know, we, this is where the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, reside. By the way, the I Was Never brief strategy is not working. We should also know. Trump getting heat from checks notes. Senator Liz Cheney who asked, why didn't the president or vice president, why weren't they briefed? Was the info in the PDB, the president's daily briefing? Who did know and when and what has been done in response to protect our forces and hold Putin accountable? Trump has also been tweeting furiously about anonymous sources. As big an enemy in the Trump mind as just about anything foreign or domestic. We should also note this, David,

and I thought this, when I was reading these stories, media-wise, what's it going to be like when we have a new president? And everything that president does in the Oval Office every single day is not immediately leaked to the New York Times or the Washington Post. I almost think we're underrating that feature of the Trump administration. that we find out, like seemingly, and I don't want to put a percentage on it because we really don't know, but we find out so much on a daily basis, both big information and small information, that just happens, sometimes seemingly minutes after it happens.

And that is almost certainly not going to be the case with any other president. Yeah, and I'm interested to someday find out how to kind of square the circle between Trump surrounding himself with the most like sort of non-functional peons and and them also being like the craziest leakers of all, right? I mean, I guess this is a story where you can make sense. I mean, you can kind of see how it was probably leaked by sources outside of the White House, or at least there's some of the reporting certainly stemmed from there.

And it's a national security matter. I mean, it's really not that hard also to connect it to, although this isn't the, you know, the military, military branches we traditionally think of it. I mean, we have seen a tidal wave of military

significant military figures coming out and speaking against Donald Trump lately. So I don't know if this is sort of part of the, again, don't want to give Trump the Avenue, but the establishment sort of the military and intelligence establishment kind of working in conjunction and getting this news out there. But how it got out is, you know,

you're right. we're in it's a very strange world that Trump has created there and where at times it seems like you know people are make I mean people are kind of talk openly about you know who's who Jared is sources who Jared's people in the media are and in everybody else Stephen Miller it does seem like you know it's a different world than we're used to and who knows what it's going to feel like when this all dries up well it's probably like an incredible combination right I mean you probably have like career government people who are appalled at what they at what they see as the stewardship of American government generally. You have some sort of career Republican types who are

appalled at Trump. You have as you say, just kind of randos who get in government and wind up being these incredibly leaky sort of public servants because they're just like happy to be there. You've got people like Ivanka and Jared who have their own motives, right, for leaking to the press or having some channel, shall we say, to the press to put them in a good light. And then you have Trump himself, who often confirms disputed stories on the record, right? When he was saying slow down testing, you know, that speech the other day. And everybody said, well, he was just kidding when he was talking about slow down testing. And then Trump on the record was like, no, no, I wasn't kidding. I was actually, I was actually being serious. And all that adds up to this just critical mass of

leakage and this kind of real-time portrait of the White House. And there's also the aspect that we've talked about many times before, the people, the Lindsey Graham types who say they have to go on Fox News to get the president's attention. I mean, if anybody, even a Trump supporter, even a pro-Trump operative in the White House feels like the only way to make headway and something that they think is necessary is to leak it to the New York Times, the Washington Post, then that might be another byproduct of this just like totally dysfunctional presidency. Yeah, it's having a presidency in public, right? you know, just sort of not only public proclamations, ceremonial things that we're used to with any president, but having like your thoughts, your, you know, random things that come out of your mouth, your fears, your anger, all that stuff, just being served up to the public on a daily basis. It's truly weird and truly unique, I think, at least at this level, right? Right. You've seen beleaguered politicians, you know, eventually everything starts leaking because the motives of people. are like,

hey, let's get it out there because I'm going to have another job anyway. This seemingly started since day one. Here's a funny one from over the weekend.

Way down the list of importance, but Robert Costa over at the Washington Post tweeted, Trump has been asking advisors if he should stick with his current nickname for Joe Biden,

Sleepy Joe, or try to coin another moniker such as Swampy Joe or Creepy Joe. The president is not convinced that Sleepy Joe is particularly damaging. Well, no,

I mean, Sleepy Joe's killing him in the poll. So I would see how we would reach that conclusion. You know, maybe this is one of those times where you just, you know, get Trump a Biden-niqued task force together and just let, you know, Trump work on that for the next three months while Pence and whoever else can go about, you know, dealing with coronavirus and racial unrest and Russia putting hits on our soldiers. But yeah, that's, I don't know, swampy Joe. that might be the worst nickname I've ever heard

Swampy Joe Creepy Joe I think is actually I mean Swampy Joe sounds like a sandwich Is it either I mean it sounds really really strange By the way in this scenario You're talking about where we do the Trump nickname thing

In public does Lindsay Graham go on Fox News and say I don't think Swampy Joe is a good idea Let's try creepy Joe Just if I were advising the president Creepy Joe might actually stick Swampy Joe does Zombie Joe sounds like the sandwich shop That's a block off your like university campus

that has like funny names for everything. Swampy Joe's cosmic subs. Yeah. Yeah. Creepy Joe might have some legs, but I don't know that at this point it really matters, especially if, you know,

Trump's, Trump's inability to do more than one thing at a time, I think was like artfully disguised or people were able to look past that four years ago. But I think the fact that there's any, I mean, just the stories that he cares about nicknames at this point are sort of inherently damning. He can't get anything done.

And he's spending time talking about Joe Biden's moniker. There is a small, the small matter of the pandemic sweeping across the country. And we're sort of road testing swampy Joe and creepy Joe with your advisors in the White House. All right, David, time for the overworked Twitter joke of the week where we celebrate a gag that was so obvious. But 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. We're going to talk in a minute about how the Dixie Chicks have rebranded themselves

after the protest as the Chicks. Just the Chicks. It was an overword Twitter joke to write the board of Dixie Cups, currently running focus groups on their rebrand to a new name Cups. Thanks to Steve Hulsapfeld. That was almost a Jay Leno joke. I'm glad Dixie Carter is not here to have to live through the... Washington Post headline about the coronavirus.

Quote, making men feel manly in masks is unfortunately a public health challenge of our time. This was a column about how certain men were not wearing masks and it was a whole, it was wrapped up in being a man somehow. It was an overworked Twitter joke to call this toxic masculinity. Wow. Wow. That's a good one. All right. Thanks to James Beard for that one. And David, have you been following the shifting release date of the time-bending Christopher Nolan movie Tenet?

Yes, yes. Mostly the ringer slack, but yes. It was an overword Twitter joke to write. Christopher Nolan announces the release of Tenet has been pushed back to December 2017. That's funny. I just, can I put a filter on Twitter just to tell me when we have a release date? Like, I don't need to know any of the machinations.

And actually, screw that. Just a filter to tell me like two days before the movie comes out that it's about to come out. Yeah. Yeah. That is all the content I need to consume about Tenet's release date. I'm going to be just fine. I totally agree. I'll be, I mean, listen, if we can safely go to a theater to watch it, that'll be a great day for America and the world.

But until then, let's just worry about staying healthy. If you made a joke about Tenet, you could have made about Memento or Inception. Congrats. You made the overworked Twitter. joke of the week. David, let's do the notebook dump. But first, standby for a trailer from the newest show on the Ringer podcast network. I'm so excited to introduce the Bukari Sellers podcast in partnership with the Ringer. We're tackling the issues of the day through interviews with high-profile guest and

conversations with a rotating panel of the country's best and leading thinkers, influencers, and writers. You know, I'm not only an attorney and a former elected official. Sometimes you see me on CNN and I'm a new author of a New York Times bestselling book, My Vanishing Country. But now we're introducing the Bukari Sellers podcast. And we're going to cover everything from the 2020 election to sports and culture to the larger movement for racial equality in the United States. We're going to have some of your favorite quarterback, some of your favorite politicians, some of your favorite athletes, writers, singers, actors, actresses.

The Bukari Sellers podcast will debut on Monday, June 29th. Listen free on Spotify or wherever you get your podcast. All right, David, in the notebook dump, the country crossover band known as the Dixie Chicks, put out a new song last week. Now, knowing the way the band has used their voices over the years, it's no surprise that March, March is a protest song. Here's a little bit of it. Now, March March is not just a song, David. It's part of what we might call a post-protest rebrand.

The Dixie Chicks have followed in the footstead. steps of Disney Splash Mountain and some of the other people and things that have tried to be more sensitive after the George Floyd protests. So the band dropped a reference to the Confederacy of the Old South. They are now known as the Chicks. Just the Chicks. What do we think of that? Wow. When Lady Annabellum dropped the Entebellum from their name and decided to go by Lady A.

I thought that was a good move. I'm not, man, I hope I'm not, like, betraying any sort of, like, you know, pro-southern upbringing bias of mine. But, like, the Dixie Chicks are like, I know they're still making music, and this is, like, this is a good, this is a very important gesture for them,

but they're a band of the past, and I feel like I'm not, I feel like I didn't need this to the degree I would have needed it if they were still cranking out, top 10 hits every year. Now they do have an album coming out next month. No, no, I know there's still an active band. I know they still exist.

They're just not quite as vital as Lady A. Well, and even Lady A's have been, it's been a couple years since their real, their real potency, but like, you know. They're better than Lady A, though. Yeah. And they actually, I mean, here's the thing, right? Back in 2003,

the one thing everybody knows about the band known as the chicks is in 2003, Natalie Mainz, a lead singer, spoke out against the Iraq war. And I had to go back and look it up. She spoke it out before the war even started. So this was not that massive sort of anti-war sentiment that happened a year or two later, right? And really sort of stirred up the Democratic Party. She was way out ahead of that.

And the ban was too. But to me, it's sort of telling about, you know, certain progressives that that was such an obvious idea. to speak out about and then having the name Dixie in your having the word Dixie, excuse me, in your band name didn't really register at all for another 15, little more than 15 years. And I know, I know whenever this happens, like, this is just like T-ball for conservatives on Twitter, like, oh, look at this. You know, this is so stupid.

But kind of don't they have to change the name? I mean, these are, these women are interested in progressive. causes, right? That's true. They want to, they want to talk about this. So what, what do you do? Yeah. Well, you won me over. I mean, they, they, I don't feel I was very convincing, but, you know, no, I mean, I, you know, I think, I think for, you know, we have, we have, our country has a long history of bands changing their names, you know, I mean, you can, you can, you're allowed to change your name. Jefferson Airplane became Jefferson Starship. You could, you know, you can find new things. I think it's just, I guess in some sense it's more momentous to just completely just remove that part of the name.

And the awkwardness that remains is sort of part of the statement, right? The fact that it's just the chicks, which has its own baggage and which doesn't exactly sound like the thing you would want to name your band, I mean, unless you're like in the London punk scene of the 70s, you know, maybe just that makes us stop and think every. time we see it and that's and that's part of the kind of the victory of what they've done. I think what is telling about this and the Dixie Chicks have been around under that name in various forms since 1989 is the way the old Confederacy symbolism just kind of hung around at this low level. You and I are both from Texas. We know this.

Unquestioned, right? Or unquestioned by, let's say, lots and lots of people, you know, this was in the name. It wasn't like this is this, this was not subtle. You know, and again, no matter what the band's politics were, and I know they were quite, quite different, but the band never thought to question this stuff. And I just think, I think that's just so telling, you know, and that again is part of the point we're making about people are making about statues, right? And other things like that, right? This stuff has just been sitting out there in the open. And it's pretty amazing.

You mentioned Lady Annabella, aka a lady. a Lady A. Now, this to me is truly awkward. The Grammy-winning country band, and by the way, I don't ever need to hear something described as a Grammy-winning country band. I'm just going to assume that they've all, everybody's just won a Grammy at some point or another. The Grammy-winning country band, Lady Antebellum, announced on Instagram they're changing their name to Lady A. Quote, we are regretful and embarrassed to say that we did not take into account the associations that weigh down this word, that is Anabellum, referring to the

period of history before the Civil War. We feel like we have been awakened. Now, over the last few weeks, David, we've been talking a lot as a society about how our high school education did not teach us a lot of things about history. However, you and I went to high school together. You and I did learn what Antebellum means in high school. And we did learn that it was about, it was

predominantly used to mean the period before the American Civil War. It was not about the period before the invasion of Grenada. That is not what it was. It's clearly not with the spades. The idea that you just had no idea what this was referring to is to me somewhat implausible. And also, Lady Annabelle, I remember when Lady Anabellem came out. There was a kind of odd tension, at least for me, kind of built into the name. I mean, it's not like Lady Anabellum was like a, I mean,

maybe that was the name of a steamship or something that we were not aware of, but it's not like this is a turn of phrase that people say. And like the Dixie Chicks, it's not like a spin. It doesn't have that, it doesn't have that, you know, that little rhyme built into it. There's no reason to have paired lady and antebellum. Well, I mean, I guess even if there were a reason for it, one would think that one of the three leads of this band might have searched Wikipedia. They got their name in 2006. this wasn't, you know, the long distant past, right?

The idea that they, like, only became aware of it now is a little bit hard to believe, but kudos to them for doing it. Rob Barvilla wrote a piece for The Ringer when it came out, and I think that when this, when this transpired, and I do think that there's, that this is all sort of, everyone should read it. This is all sort of part of this shift in the country music world that we're seeing in other places like NASCAR we discussed last week and, and other more sort of entrenched quote unquote southern

pieces of American culture where just sort of hand-waving and paying lip service to low-key progressivism isn't going to do it anymore. Right? And so in some sense that's what I mean, clearly

that's why Lady A changed their name. And that makes the case, you know, conjunction with you said for the Dixie Chicks as well. It's not, it can't be you can't just have L Cool J rap on your song and just be like but the Confederate monuments are cool right uh not that those two things were the same person but the genre the culture overall is it's in need of of you know a harder turn yeah and I think you're just putting out this vibe that references all these things and even if it's just a word antebellum right you were vibe as a band you're vibing off that for more than a decade right even if you don't understand or if you claim to not understand or if you claim to not understand what it means, there seems like you're sending a message to people. And messages again had not been thoroughly examined or examined enough until this point. Now, their name change got complicated. So the band says, we're Lady A. Well, it turns out there's a 61 year old Seattle blues singer

who is black, who was already Lady A. She's used the name for 20 years, put out several albums. She is also, according to a Rolling Stone article, which I encourage you to read, an activist who has written a song about Trayvon Martin. So in order to not cause offense, a band appropriated the name of a black blues singer who wrote a song about the killing of Trayvon Martin. Good job by you,

Lady A, not the real lady A. I don't know that it matters, but they were definitely like country music DJs calling them Lady A before this thing happened. That was their nickname, apparently. Yes, but I guess no one stopped to pay attention to that then either, so that's whatever. the original Lady A real name Anita White tells Rolling Stone,

if it mattered, it would have mattered to them before. It shouldn't have taken George Floyd to die for them to realize that their name had a slave reference to it. She continues, it's an opportunity for them that is the band to pretend they're not racist or pretend this means something to them. If it did, they would have done some research. By the way, the chicks had this issue too. There's a New Zealand band called the chicks, but they reached out to the New Zealand band apparently. And it's cool.

So just make sure when you're changing your band name. The final one I wanted to kind of cram in here, David, is Rhode Island. Did you know that the official name of Rhode Island was the state of Rhode Island and Providence Plantations? No, I did not know that. That was a totally new one to me. Has come under new scrutiny. The governor there has already banned that name from official state documents and the state legislature is going to going to attempt to change the name completely.

So Rhode Island will become Rhode Island full stop. I don't know if they need to check with any other states, but I think they're probably in the clear this time. Wow. I had no idea. That's really crazy. You and me both, pal. All right, here's some listener mail.

We only have one show this week. So we push the listener mail button a couple days early and got a lot of good ones. This is from our pal Josh Peterson. books are you two reading during quarantine? You know when I picked up, we were joking the other day about nonfiction books we've pretended to have read. And I still want that to be a segment at some point. And please check your email, David, because I may have already sent you a partial list.

I saw. But Patrick Radden-Keeves say nothing has been recommended to me by like 19 people and they all recommend it and they say, no, no, I know everybody's. read it, but it's really, really good. So I have say nothing. I'm excited. I am actually going to read a popular nonfiction book, which I am really, really excited about. This question comes from the

immortal Byron Fist. If you could redesign major network Sunday shows from the ground up, how would you improve them? Where do you even begin? I mean, we go through this all the time. We're talking about relaunching sports shows or relaunching, I mean, late night shows the Sunday shows

just feel so stuck you know I mean I don't know I kind of find it hard to imagine how you would reinvent the wheel there without just totally tearing it down and starting over and even then I mean it's not like you're going to get you know David Brooks and Lindsay Graham to come on and like answer trivia questions I mean you

whatever you like you Was that wait is that what we wanted or? No, I'm just saying the guests, like you could change the format entirely, but the guests are going to still have the same, like, you know, the same script. So I don't know. I mean, it's, I don't know. I mean, do you have any ideas? Because get me started here.

I don't have, I can't imagine it all. Well, it's so funny because that the immortal Byron Fist, uh, asked this. Because even this weekend, I was thinking one weekend, we need to record the Sunday shows and come back and just do a whole segment about this. I was just thinking about this because I feel this is something I now only consume via the 90 second long Twitter clip that comes out Sunday afternoon. I have not watched these shows. You and I were both voracious watchers of these shows at a different era of media time

because that was kind of like where you found out about political news back in the Stone Age. But whenever I watch them and I think they've been a little bit better job of this, I always think like the pundit roundup to me is always just like these same people that just kind of go from show to show to show. And I think this when I watch when I watch CNN, it's like, oh, there's David from again, like on every show. Like, can't we get the young, like, there's a bazillion funny people on Twitter right now. They're right about politics.

And why aren't they on the shows? It's a great question. And shouldn't they, shouldn't it be? So I just think part of it's at. But we're going to do, let's do a whole segment about that too. That's going to go right after nonfiction, we've pretended to have read in Biden's digital divide. We'll just, we'll just slot that into the, into the lineup. This is from sports radio listener.

Thoughts on Kirk Herb Street and Chris Fowler. potentially getting the call up to Monday night football if college football is canceled this fall. So there's a report out there, a couple of reports that if we don't play college football at all, you would take your best college football team and let them call a season at pro ball. What do you think of that?

I mean, I think it's hard to argue that it's not worth a shot. I'm not sure if that's, well, you know what? Forget it. I mean, it's worth a shot. It's worth a shot. They're good at their jobs, you know? Let them do it. I mean, I think they should,

I frankly think they should do this stuff more often and not put people in like a sort of position to to fail, you know, by like putting them on a big platform like this. We should have like guest announcers like this. Yeah, why not?

Why not? Would anybody have been mad if they called week eight last season? No, not at all. I'm just saying like, let it be a special event. Let them do. I mean,

whatever. I mean, it's, I think it could be, I think it could be good. I was always wondering if they could do both, you know, because so essentially Fowler and Herb Street called a big Saturday night game on ABC ESPN, right?

Which is a big college game. And Herbie does the pregame show college game day on Saturday morning, right? But you've essentially got the better part of two days until Monday night football. So would it be completely out of the question to say, okay, call the game on Saturday night, take a deep breath, even stay wherever you are, Sunday morning, fly to the NFL site. maybe you get him a charter plane or something like that. Then you have all day to spend at the NFL site and you call the game Monday night. Is that completely crazy? Like, I don't know.

Could you do, I mean, you know, you had Buck and Aikman doing Thursday night football and then a Sunday afternoon game. Now it's the same, it's pro football. So they're not having to learn a completely different, you know,

set of players. But that doesn't strike me as completely insane. Well, didn't Al Mike, was it Al Michaels? Wasn't Al Michaels like, like, like anti doing Thursday night

football or at least was in, you know, he demanded a lot more money in the deal because of the amount of extra work it would be. I mean, there's no denying there to be extra work. I don't know how much of that was sort of posing for money. But yeah, yeah, I think, I mean, I think it seems like it should be feasible, right? If someone said you can stop doing all your jobs and your new job is calling a college game on Saturday and a pro game on Monday, I think in your head, you'd be like, yeah, I can make that work. Yeah, and especially if the pro game is something that ESPN has taken forever to get right. It's a huge deal for Disney as a company because they want to be way into the NFL

when this new, if this new TV contract ever happens, which was sort of interrupted by the coronavirus and showing the NFL that they want to put their best announcers at the network or two of their best team, I'll put it that way. That's seemingly make a lot of sense. This is from Sammy Clemens. Can you guys explain the rhetorical significance of Trump's quote, quote unquote silent majority? I get the Nixon connection. Is this like some genius cone puzzle?

If a majority makes a noise but no one hears them, do they really exist? Yeah, I mean, there is certainly like an 8D chess or whatever like aspect to it. But I think that there's, I think that what, what, I mean, what made Trump's, you know, coalition or whatever really potent force four years ago and what, and what continues to make them significant is that there was this great. sort of, if not silent, than like, you know, underpolled or underserved electorate in America.

But also I think it's the feeling, it's the same part and parcel of the whole drain the swamp thing. It's like you have to feel like you're part of this movement, even though it's a fake movement. And referring, and even in the most dire moments, when it seems like even your neighbors

who had Trump signs in their front yard four years ago are, you know, bitching about how bad he is it being a president. If you're still pro-Trump, it's reaffirming to feel like you're part of a silent majority, even though no, everyone seems to be going to the direction. There's still this crowd that you're a member of. That's what it is. And I think the Nixon thing is so interesting, right?

Because Nixon got elected twice. But as far as I can tell, just about every other usage of this is somebody like Trump, who is way behind in the polls trying to conjure this idea that there's all. all this momentum that is out there that the media is not picking up on or not covering. As a way of saying, no, no, no, it's real, this is a really a competitive race. It's just the media's lying to you, right? They're just, they're not, they don't understand this. They don't understand the true will of the people.

Right. So in that sense, it's like really basic for somebody who's trailing. There's also this sort of sense of, you know, it has all it, we could go, we could go beyond that and talk about the connections to, you know, what is the silent majority? you want and all that stuff. But you know, what's so funny about this particular duration of it, right, is when we see these polls about coronavirus, right, or about the way people feel about Trump's handling of the pandemic, of race relations, the majority is actually against Trump. It feels he has a very large majority of Americans feels he has mishandled these things.

Yeah. So this is probably one of those where it just really doesn't exist at all. this is from lead a man 87 do you guys have a take on bob woodward being so fed up with everything that he's outing a supreme court justice as his source from over 20 years ago so this comes from the ben smith column in new york times it came out sunday night it was about the washington post more broadly but what happened with smith was able to figure out is that there was a bob woodward column in the post publishing system during the confirmation of Judge Brett Kavanaugh. And let me read to you from Smith's column here. Mr. Woodward was his planning to expose Mr. Kavanaugh because the judge had publicly denied in a Huffy letter in 1999 to the Post an account about Kenneth Starr's investigation of President Bill Clinton that he himself, that is

Kavanaugh, confidentially provided to Mr. Woodward for the book. Mr. Kavanaugh served as a lawyer on Mr. Starr's team. The article described by two post-journalists who read it would have been explosive, arriving as the nominee, battled a decades-old sexual assault allegation and was fighting to prove his integrity. The article never wound up running. So I guess the question is, it's really complicated, right? Yeah. Because the question sort of is, Brett Kavanaugh was your source for this anecdote or story or whatever it is, this account.

you granted him anonymity, apparently. Then Kavanaugh goes through the motions of denying publicly the account that Woodward had written. Am I reading that right? So he gives the goods to Woodward. Woodward writes it and then Kavanaugh writes a letter to the Washington Post saying, that's not true. That's the chain of events here. That seems right.

Not denying I was the source for that, but denying that the, that Woodward's writing was not true. I mean, it's interesting to me because on the one hand, we can consider this of like, Brett Kavanaugh is about to get a lifetime appointment to the Supreme Court. Right. So is there a certain suspension of journalistic rules at that point just to get the public and the Senate who's approving him

as much information as humanly possible? Right. That's number one. Number two is, do you lose your anonymity that the writer granted you because you publicly rebuked the story that you helped the writer write? is that the thing that triggers it like okay well that's it i it wouldn't surprise me if the latter was uh in somebody's journalism rulebook um you know someone like bob woodward has i'm sure has a very precise sense of of you know how these things are legislated at least in his mind

um and you know i mean i don't think anybody would disagree that like separate from the disqualification that I mean that we were that I was just talking about it's like you know if he had anonymously disclosed that he was part of like a murder ring and like fingered the the ringleader or something then like no one would say like oh you shouldn't bring that forward right that you know I mean if he was actually if he did something like it seems like it seems important to know about a Supreme Court justice yeah so yeah so I mean there's some things that we can know that I mean that you can just toss those toss out the wind I don't know I don't know It is interesting. It is interesting that, I mean, it's an interesting question. I don't, I don't know what the answer is, though. Let me just, let's just let me put it in slightly different terms here. Let's say I am a secret wrestling source and I give you the goods of what's happening in a major wrestling promotion. Okay. And you protect my anonymity. You write a big article for the ringer. Article comes out. Okay. It makes the wrestling organization look bad at someone. Now, if people come out and say, Brian Curtis, were you the

secret source of David Shoemaker's article. And I say, hell no, I would never talk to that guy. I wouldn't come within a million yards of that guy. I don't think that would be grounds to then expose my anonymity. No, I don't think so either. That would be, that would be an expect, it would be assumed that you would do that in some, you know, depending on what the story was about. So I would be able to tell that lie in public and you would protect my anonymity.

Now, what if I came out and wrote this giant letter to the ringer that said, David Shoemaker is completely full of crap. And these are lies he is telling about this major. wrestling company. And everything in his article is wrong. Now at that point, would you come out? Would it,

would it then be okay to come out? Hey, hey, pal, you are publicly discrediting me and you told me all this stuff. I think a sort of snide note from the editor-in-chief

would probably suffice, right? I sort of just like, yeah, okay, we, okay, Mr. Curtis, the ringer stands by its reporting.

You know, like, that would probably be enough. But I would certainly feel the impulse to do that, sure. And then the other question is, and then have you were running for this, if you were nominated for the Supreme Court. I wasn't going to, I wasn't going to quite take it there. But the fact that this Kavanaugh letter was written in 1999, and it's what, 20 years later that Kavanaugh is coming up,

if it's a matter of, well, that cancels out the anonymity or granted, why does it, why do you have to wait 20 years to cancel it out? Shouldn't you just do it in the moment? It's true. Very true. I guess don't understand that either. I think probably at the end of the day, I sort of vote for, for just for letting Woodward run the story. And it's sort of, if Woodward wants to, wants to burn a source, that's that's sort of up to Woodward, I think. And the public certainly, and the Senate certainly has an enormous need to know as much as they can in a very short, as we found out, a very limited period of time. Fascinating question. This is from Carson. When there's Breaking news, which anchor or TV personality do you most want to hear from?

It's a major story happening, David. You've got the cable dial at your disposal. Oh, my God. Or I guess Twitter. Who do you want to hear the most from? Who do I want to, like, who do I trust the most? Or like, who do you want in that anchor chair, I think? Kind of holding your hand and, and sort of, you know, taking you through a major event in

American life. This is not my answer. but you remember when we talked about Chris Matthews for like eight consecutive weeks on this show? Certainly hope that's not your answer, but yes. No, I'm just saying if there's anybody that has the sort of like grandparent appeal that would make me feel comfortable.

He is not, but he lets even even pre. No, no, no, no. Chris Matthews was like the least comforting person on television in every possible respect. Yeah, no, no, I'm just trying to think if there's anybody, I mean, if there's, you know, MSN. In the old days, we would say Tom Brokaw, Peter Jennings.

NBC would still roll out Tom Brokoff or, you know, a certain situation. But, but yeah, I don't know if there's anybody else that really fits that description anymore. I mean, at this point, it's just sort of like you want a kind of a sober, almost like a data analyst, you know, you almost want like. Oh, Steve Kornacki of a little. Cornacki or like, or like Erieveli or somebody who's just like down the, you know, just like, I know, I have background. I have an, like, I know of what I'm speaking, but I'm mostly just reading information for you, right? But don't we want someone to throw it to Steve Cornack? Steve Cornacki is also, I love Steve Cornackie.

He's not the most comforting presence in the world, I think. He's more like pointing at, point at boards and stuff like that. Look at this county. Oh, this is incredible, right? You kind of want the, you kind of want the anchor person to kind of drag you through, right? Yeah, it's true. I mean, I, none of them are quite built like that name. Well, I just like, is Jake Tapper quite built like that?

I don't think of him and he can certainly do that. is Anderson Cooper the vote on CNN generally if you had to pick one person? Yeah, Anderson might be the one. I will say go ahead. No, I was going to know Chris Cuomo and it disqualified. But Anderson Cooper is, I think my CNN in the MSMDC vote, who God, do we, are we pushing the Brian Williams button? I mean, it feels like we'll be scolding for saying that. Chris Hayes would be good.

I mean, Rachel Maddow is really good when she's, I mean, she's very good in lots of ways, but I don't have any problem with her reading me, you know. No, Matt, I think she's great on election night. And those are those kind of situations for sure. I don't know. I will say that with, you know, in the absence of a clear frontrunner, you know, my mind immediately goes back to the way that I, I mean, speaking of like, breaking news, the way that I, the person that read to me the news that Osama bin Laden had been killed.

by U.S. Special Forces was John Sina during a professional wrestling event. Uh-huh. We have caught and compromised to a permanent end, Osama bin Laden. I hesitate to say it. I don't think there's anybody that we've mentioned that I would prefer over John Sina at a moment of great national significance. I was about to bring up Bernard Shaw from the old days of CNN, who I saw on TV the other bit. All right, John Cena it is.

Tyver David Shoemaker guess is a strain pun headline. All right, let's do it. Thursday's headline about a JCPenney store that was spared from extinction was a penny saved. We also got to vote for Penny Wise pound foolish. Yes,

fantastic. I guess this blows up on JCPenney. Today's headline comes courtesy of Jamdad. It's from the Atlantic. It's a column, David, about the offensive statute controversy that is ongoing. going here in the United States and elsewhere. The author Yasmin Sir Hahn makes an interesting argument.

Quote, towns and cities would hold a mass review with their monuments, say, every 50 years. At that point, citizens would be tasked with deciding whether to maintain the memorials as they are, reimagined them, or remove them from the public square for good. All right? So Sir Han is proposing a codified 50-year review period. Oh, easy. This is easy. My mind's trying to go to like bust puns and stuff. This has got to be Statue of Limitations, right?

We're done here, folks. We're done here. Statue of limitations. Thank you. That might have been the quickest ever. It's like half a second. I read down the document and you said you wrote you typed the words, your pun word is statue. So I'm like, you know, I got an assist there.

But yes, that was that was a good headline. This is like a network news where they read the teleprompter ahead of you and just pull that and then get that lie for themselves. Statue of limitations. He is David Chewbaker. I'm Brian Curtis. searched by Chris Almeida. Production Magic by Erica Servantes and Jim Cunningham today. We're fully loaded. We're off for the 4th of July holidays. So no show on Thursday. Have a

fantastic week. However you're celebrating or not celebrating, join us back here Monday for more lukewarm takes about the media and other stuff. See you that, David. Later, Brian.