The Ricochet Podcast - A Supreme Moment

Episode Date: September 29, 2018

No guests this week, just our hosts reflecting on a week that will not soon, if ever, be forgotten. We look at the testimony from both Kavanaugh and Ford, the reaction and remarks from the Judiciary Committee, from the media, and from friends. We wind up with some predictions from the hosts as to whether or not Brett Kavanaugh will get confirmed. Give us your predictions in the comments. Source

Feel the surge. The air is electric. Anticipation is everywhere. Following last year's incredible success, Cooper's On The Pulse DJ competition returns. Cooper invites Ireland's rising electronic music artists to create a 30-minute mix that takes us beyond the ordinary. For a chance to perform at Beyond The Pale 2025 and €2,500 to elevate your artist's journey, submit your mix online before April 6th. Search Cooper on the polls for more. T's and C's apply. This is not radio.

This is not radio. This is not radio. I will be silent now. I will be silent. We have special news for you. The forgotten men and women of our country will be forgotten no longer. Are you going to send me or anybody that I know to a camp? We have people that are stupid.

They weren't laughing at me. They were laughing with me. We had fun. Mr. Gorbachev, tear down this wall. It's the Ricochet Podcast with Rob Long and Peter Robinson. I'm James Lileks, and our guests today are Rob Long and Peter Robinson. Let's have ourselves a podcast. Bye-bye.

Welcome, everybody, to the Ricochet Podcast, number 418. It's brought to you by the fine people at Calm. Calm. It gives you the tools to live a happier, healthier, and more mindful life. Just five minutes of Calm can change your whole day. Get 25% off a Calm premium subscription at

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Ricochet. And of course, we're also brought to you by Ricochet itself and apparently Max Ledeux who is our Director of Technical Operations insists that I read the pitch today. Okay. That's fine. He's had enough of Rob's subversive pitches.

Yeah. Well, you know, the point of Rob's pitches is, you know, if you're not subscribing, you should because we've got bills to pay. But that's not their problem. If somebody is listening to this and they're not paying for it and we're saying, well, we can't pay our bills, that's not the listener's problem. Unless, of course, they have a heart, a soul, and a conscience. So let me see what Max says. Max says, and of course, we're brought to you by Ricochet. Ricochet.com slash join.

Membership levels start at $2.50 per month. That's $2.50, by the way. No, it's $250. If you just want to support the podcasts, you're listening to them for free. So $2.50 per month supports that great deal. I'm going off Max's script here just to toy with him. And back to the podcasts. You're listening to them for free, so $2.50 per month supports that great deal. I'm going off Max's script here just to toy with him. And back to the script. $5 per month. Cheap

if you want to write your own posts. Wow. $5. That's just so cheap. Join today. Ricochet.com slash join. Ricochet.com slash join. And now we bring in Rob and Peter, the founders, who want to tell us about this week, which has been another brand new nadir. You know, next week, I have no idea what we're going to be talking about next week, but I have the feeling it's going to be something about how everything that we've gone through up to now has been forgotten because now there is a new criteria a new reason that

kavanaugh can't make it on the bench and his besmirchment will be utterly complete in a mere seven days so let's go back to the start go back to the testimonies did you guys watch it and tell me what you think rob go ahead um i did watch it uh and i was pre-irritated by the whole thing because I'm in New York and I don't have cable. So I had to figure out – so I was already mad at DirecTV and its complicated system of passcodes. So by the time I actually started – by the time the hearing started, I was already furious. So maybe this is the – I was in – it's hard for me, right? This is a hard thing for me to say because I know I'm not supposed to say it. I was struck, and I'm not going to say specifically by whom or by the two people.

By the weird – it may be understandable i i fully admit this is a character failing of mine and i may just be a terrible terrible person but i was struck by the strange frailty and emotional kind of uh instability of the grown-ups involved in this. I understand it was a traumatic moment, and I understand it's horrible to be accused of those things, but maybe it's because I feel like I'm connected to these two people because they're my age. One of them is my classmate. Brett Kavanaugh was my classmate at Yale. There's this strange – like what? These are people in their 50s who have had careers and lives and children and have seen life and have had time. I'm not saying the scars are not there.

But the idea that they are incapacitated by these events is – I mean – and then this other guy, Mark Judge, is – he can't – he's been struggling with depression. He can't speak. And then her friend who can't speak because she's got health – everyone – all the adults in this arena seem utterly, utterly incapable as adults. And that is – I understand is a totally ungenerous, unchristian thing to say, but it's the one thing that struck me. I sympathize with both of them. I empathize with Brett Kavanaugh in a way because I drank a lot in college. I'm not going to lie about it. I drank a lot, but I just found it – I don't know.

By the way, this is the least Christian, most mean thing I've really thought. I mean honestly, and I would only share it with you guys and, of course, with a million listeners who now despise me, and this will probably come back to haunt me, and people will probably come back and say, you're a bad person, and maybe I am, but I'm just being honest. That was one of my responses, and one of them that I haven't heard anyone else say. Everything's been said about the past two days, but that's the one thing I haven't made. So maybe I'm just alone. Maybe I'm alone in this.

Well, I'll go next. I guess this is what we're engaging in a therapy right now. All right. Thank you, Rob. My name is Peter. It makes me a bad person, right? All right. Thank you, Rob. My name is Peter and I'm – It makes me a bad person, right? No, I think that's – no, that's very interesting. I have to say it's an – it is astonishing that in the 100,000 words that have been written about this and tweeted about this, I haven't heard anybody make this point. Yet again, Rob Long makes an original point and it strikes me as exactly correct. Exactly correct. By the way, speaking of adults, one of the puzzles to me in the story is where were the grownups who were grownups at that time?

Whose house was that party in? And where are Dr. Ford's – where were Dr. Ford's parents the next day, the following week? For that matter, where are Dr. Ford's parents now? As I understand it, they're still alive. They don't – there's some – anyway. Okay, so I will speak to that. You want to? Go ahead.

Well, I was just casting my mind back to the high school parties of my youth. And I remember that there was one favorite location because the parents would be gone for the whole weekend, both of them, they'd just be gone. And they were, they were also very modern parents. I see them now in my head and they're sort of like stepping out of a 1966 Pepsi commercial.

Um, and they had a great stereo system console with the fabric speakers and the tapered legs. And they just had a very modern TIAC Eames chair kind of life. And they would disappear on weekends and the son would be left to have the place by himself. And consequently, there was consumption.

But there was never consumption to the point of blackout or imprecision with your memories or assaults or anything like that. So it is entirely possible that a house in high school could be left completely unattended. But you go on, Peter. Well, so I was on an airplane while Dr. Ford was testifying. I landed at SFO, got in the Uber, and I walked in the front door just as Dr. Christine Blasey Ford's testimony ended. And my wife, who has been with Brett Kavanaugh through this whole thing, greeted me and looked at me and

her first words were not how was your trip out of things go in washington she just looked at me and said i believe her all right we have that and then we sat down and watched brett kavanaugh's testimony together and i kept glancing back at my wife now my, my wife is, I guess, what, a third of a few years older than Brett Kavanaugh. And I'm a few years older than my wife. I'm an ancient person. But my wife grew up in Bethesda. And she went to one of those Catholic all-girls schools that he mentioned. And her older brother went to the Catholic boys' school that he attended and every detail every mention i don't want to make too much of this there weren't a lot he didn't layer on a deep sociological account of that neighborhood and those schools in the 1980s but everything he said about those parties including that the holton arms girls didn't usually turn up at the Catholics. Everything he said rang true to my wife, as did his the emotional pitch of his account. And so about halfway through, she looked at me and said, I believe him, too. I don't know what happened here.

Something happened to her. Right, right. But it wasn't him now i'm still at a disadvantage if that's the way to put it because i've i've still only gone back and watched clips of dr ford's testimony and then blue yeti and i taped an episode of uncommon knowledge yesterday and my the the lady who does makeup for us is a friend of mine for years we've been doing this show for years and and she's been doing makeup for years and she not only believed dr ford but was convinced brett kavanaugh is lying and i so right and i'm sure in the last couple of days i'm just mentioning these we've all had conversations

like this and you know what i come back to this to? This is the thing that's going to sound cold and reptilian, but I just come back to there is a reason that 700 years of Anglo-Saxon jurisprudence has taught us a presumption of innocence. It's taught us to look for corroboration. There are standards involved that are useful here because, as best I can tell, we have an emotional deadlock. I am past saying that Christine Ford is lying. It just rings too emotionally true. Somebody is mistaken. And I can't judge between these two human beings you think just an ordinary human reaction that you'll get

it in your gut because we all we all grow up learning how to tell whether this friend's telling when they're little kids you know as a parent and then i thought to myself wait a minute what am i even thinking here my own kids thank goodness not about anything serious, but my own kids. I had sons who were 10 and 11 years old, 10 or 12 years old, and I gave them money to put in the collection basket and told them to bicycle to mass on a Sunday afternoon. And I found out they spent that money at a Mexican restaurant having a basket of chips. And they came back. They came back and lied. you're a bad parent why weren't you going to mass i'd already been to mass and they came back they they lied to me so believably so if i can't the point is i i the day. I mean no disrespect to Dr. Blasey.

Certainly I mean no disrespect. I have to say this is something my wife said to me. Listen, high school and college, there are guys who get drunk and do very stupid, offensive things. And women experience this far more than they talk about it to men. So there is a pool of anger and distrust of which the depths and extent of which I have to admit I was unaware. Still and all. As best I can tell, maybe a week from now, the FBI will have turned up something, although that's a separate conversation. And I doubt it because but still, if some new evidence, but we have no choice here but to go on the evidence and the evidence is there is just no corroboration i mean no corroboration for her

account as far as i can tell at this point that's where i come down and it sounds cold and i'm feeling i know that but i can't figure out any other way to think it through. Can I just jump in on my meanness? No. Just lack of Christian empathy? I think he is lying. I think he's lying about drinking. I think that's ridiculous. I mean I don't know this for a fact, but I think it's ridiculous to suggest that –

He admitted that he drank a lot sometimes. Yeah, he drank a lot, and I think – Yeah, he drank a lot, and I think – yeah, I do. And this is completely unfair and incredibly mean to say, but I have had more than one friend, two or three actually, who have struggled with alcoholism. Right. No, I should say who continue to struggle with it. All three of them would be – are probably on balance or on Judge Kavanaugh kavanaugh's side they think he should be confirmed right but all three of them said to me independently that his reaction when someone said how much do you drink that enraged well how much do you drink is a classic

classic reaction from somebody who feels defensive about the drink. That's just – that's what I love about this whole thing is we're all putting on caverns. We all have this pallet knife, and we're getting big gobs of lard from whatever bucket that we happen to carry around ourselves. I still want to be mean. I know you've got to keep talking about this. I still want to be – I have one more mean thing to say, but go ahead. No, don't go on. Well, the mean thing was I want to be mean and cruel and unfeeling to both sides. And the other side is Dr. Ford. This thing happened to her in the early 1980s when she was 15, and it was probably very traumatic. However, it wasn't rape. I mean not that we – we have – we do – in this society, we do create grades of assault, murder one being the worst, involuntary manslaughter.

We have – we decide what these things are, right? And she is a psychologist. And she struggles with this thing. And I'm trying to be sympathetic, but she's in her 50s. And the idea that this event that took place meant that she had to remodel her home differently as a grown woman. It's just these things either either she's extremely fragile which is what could be and that's very sad in which case i think she's a lot more fragile than a lot of women i know who some of whom are rolling their eyes now a little bit or she's there's something else going on and i just watching these two people it just strikes me as just as a as emblematic of my

generation they are in my generation. We are all the same. We listen to the same music. We went to the same parties. Not really, but you know what I mean. This is a kind of a weird lack of resilience that it's one thing to have, but we are acting as if it's completely normal. Right. That the four adults that we're talking about have anger. Four people who are in their 50s.

In their 50s and have careers and like one of whom is psychologically damaged and she is in fact a psychologist. It's so strange to me that no one – we're not allowed – I am not allowed to say what I just said. I'm not allowed to think what I thought. I'm not allowed to say it. If I said this in public, which of course I am, I would be run off the – I would run out of town. It's because neither of them are individuals. The reason that we're accepting this sort of behavior that Rob is describing is because neither really are have had to endure, period. And Kavanaugh, for the same people, is a symbol of every prep school, East Coast, white kid boy who's got lots of privilege and a chip on his shoulder

and it's everything they hate. So because they are these two archetypes, we can invest in them anything that we want. They're not real people. And that's where the emotion comes into it. It's idiocy to listen to this to listen to the people and feel your heart tugged in one direction or the other and decide that you know anything based on that but of course that's what we do and what's appalling to me about this and the thing

that we're going to take away at the end of it is how the democrats are completely willing to just throw aside dare i say the ang the Anglo-American legal tradition. All of the presumptions of innocence and the burden of proof and all the rest of those things don't matter because we've got to get this guy out. We've got to give Trump a kick in the nads, and we have to do everything we can to preserve the sacrament known as abortion. That's it. And they will burn down every tree in every tree in england in

order to get to the in order to get that done so which is incredible because it's kavanaugh is the is the least of their worries in that respect yes he is james what you said that is very profound that viewing these people dr ford Judge Kavanaugh, as symbols rather than as individuals, that is very profound. In the French Revolution, people got beheaded because of the class to which they belonged, not because of crimes they themselves had committed. Stalin, people were condemned to death, again, because of what they stood for. They were not judged as human individuals and human beings.

And the glory of the tradition that we have inherited, which, let it be noted, didn't just get written down on paper overnight. The founders struggled with the Constitution, but they were operating on a body of law that had emerged over centuries. This is a historical – one of the great historical human achievements is to say in effect, no, you must treat people as individuals. This society must resist the temptation to view anyone as a symbol and to do things against that person because of what he or she stands for rather than who he or she is. You sift through the details. You get to the facts. And that – so we've been talking about whether we – whom we believe, the conversations we've had.

This almost – to me, it's almost taken for granted now, but we need to spend some time talking about it I suppose. What the Democrats have done here is outrageous. Outrageous. They have butchered the norms. And speaking of butchering – I was wondering what you were going to – I was going to go with – they're treating these people like just pieces of meat. But go ahead.

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And by the way, for you people who are already ButcherBox subscribers, you know you're happy and well-fed. And if you're wondering, yes, you will have a special deal on ground beef. You can take advantage. Just log into your account and take a look. So thanks to ButcherBox for sponsoring this, the Ricochet podcast. All right, we were talking about the destruction of norms. And Rob, you wanted to respond to Peter's assertion that we're back to sort of – I mean, and you're absolutely right. Your assertion, That was your insight. I would say only this, that – three things, really simple. Let's sit quickly.

One, that the idea that people on TV and people in life are saying, oh, she's credible. Oh, he's credible. Oh, I believe her. She's – all that is just pure emotion. People can lie and they can lie really, really, really, really well. Unless you – and saying I have felt that way or I've been in that position makes you more vulnerable to a lie. I was a freshman at Yale that year. There was a lot of drinking.

I can – I find it hard to believe that the things that he's accused of doing there actually happened. But that's because I was there. So I believe him when he says they didn't happen but he could be lying and likewise she could be lying she could be having this half memory she could be absolutely convinced not lying but convinced that this happened because she's got a huge amount of emotional investment over the past few years in it and now a gigantic reputational investment in this story people dig in they dig in so so the idea that credible not credible the one thing that every every defense attorney or prosecutor says all the time is you can't tell when someone's lying which is why we have evidence right and the second part of that I would say is the irony is that the entire progressive capital P from the turn of the 20th century on attitude toward jurisprudence and fairness has been every now and then a guilty person walks.

And that's the tax that we pay for a fair system. And we seem to – not I'm saying he's guilty, but we seem to have forgotten that the whole point of the process is to bend over backwards for the accused and pay the price for that when we have to. You don't have to personally pay the price, they will say. This is a system set up in order to enable old white men to hide behind these ideas of constitutionality, and all these are the little fictitious pieces of paper they have built in order to preserve themselves and their power. And they're right.

It's easy for you to say that, they'll say, because you're not the one who historically has been oppressed the way that women have. So rules, laws, evidence, that's great. But in a time like this, with so much power and balance, with a cis-normative, heterophallic, patriarchy system that you've got, it's time for emotions to come to the fore, which is why you're perfectly justified in running after somebody who is utterly tangential to your own life and yelling at them because, as the person who cornered Flake said, you wanted them to feel your rage. That's what today's culture is all about. I have feelings. Let me shove them into your face as far as possible for as long as I want because – I think that's really true.

There is an out-of- controlness to the culture, right? I mean, we have an emotionally unstable, whether you agree with it or not, we have an emotionally unstable president. We have this emotionally crazy, emotionally unstable set of hearings. We have these emotionally unstable people running around screaming at people in restaurants. We have we seem to be having the sort of national freak out because we're tired of repressing our feelings for so long. I mean I would just say this about the sexual violence component of this nervous breakdown we're having is that no matter what we do, no matter how we change the laws or – that's actually not true. But no matter how we try, we will never – there will be more cases like this, especially from the past, where we will never know the truth. And there will be more cases like this I think in the present where it's impossible to know the truth.

All we can do is – and I think that that is something in which I'm in favor of. Like all we can do is remind women who are younger, young women and middle-aged women and women in general that this behavior is unacceptable and that they have a right to call it out when it happens. And that is probably the one thing that hasn't happened. The one thing I've heard from women, I'm sure Peter just said, is that, oh, yeah, yeah, yeah. You know how often this happened? How many times I had to think about, worry about where I parked or my mother would say when she would come to New York City on business, she would

say, can you please get a reservation for me at the Yale Club or the Colony Club because she didn't want to go to a hotel because she wants to go and sit and read her paper or she wants to go sit and send her emails with a glass of wine and she didn't want to go to a hotel because she like, you know, she wants to go and sit and read her paper or she wants to go sit and send her emails with a glass of wine. And she doesn't want to, she doesn't feel comfortable at a, she's my mom. So whatever, but like there are women just

naturally don't want to go sit at a place and have a drink and do their thing. Like, I mean, men think nothing of it. Hey, Rob, you were saying that people lie exceptionally well. Yeah. Another point. This is just occurring to me now. I can tell a story here. People lie exceptionally well and memories do get reconstructed. They just do get reconstructed.

We're talking about events that she is claiming took place. Something took place. I'm willing to grant that. We're talking about events that took place in what 81 is 81 is what we think now, the 81, 82. All right. Now I, I know I've mentioned this before and I don't want to go on and on about it, but I wrote a speech in 1987 in which Ronald Reagan said, Mr. Gorbachev tear down this wall. And that speech was opposed by the national security council and the state department, and for that matter, the diplomat we had in Berlin. I didn't say anything about it or write anything about it for a full 10 years because in those days, the rule was the speech is the president's.

The speechwriter stays in the back. But then the diplomat in Berlin was nominated by Bill Clinton to become our ambassador to Germany. I'm sorry, this is going back to Dr. Ford and Judge Kavanaugh, of course, but you have to bear with me. And in the German press, he was taking credit for writing that line, which he opposed. Right. And at that point, I thought I have to write something. Well, I did write something about it, and I have talked about it since. I wrote about it, and I got a phone call from someone called Peter Rodman. Peter Rodman is now dead.

He was a brilliant man. He was on the staff of the National Security Council. He was a Kissinger protege, and he opposed the speech, and I said so in print. And I got a telephone call from Peter Rodman. This would be a dozen or 15 years through the documents. And I found a memo from Peter Rodman to Colin Powell, who was then number two at National Security Council and was running the vetting of the speech, as it would have been called. And he put in writing, the staff is unanimous that the speech is mediocre and a missed opportunity, but we've given up trying to persuade the speechwriters to make any changes.

On top of that, I had found copies of the speech that Peter Rodman in his own hand had marked up and he had put a huge and unmistakable X through, Mr. Gorbachev, tear down this wall. And so I described all this to Peter Rodman. Now, he was a decent guy, and he said, Peter, if that's the documentary evidence, then I have to admit you're right. I must have opposed the speech. That's just not the way I remember it at all. All right. These memories can just get rebuilt. Peter Rodman, if asked by Senator Durbin, with what degree of certainty do you feel that you support it instead of oppose that speech, Peter Rodman would have said 100%, just as Dr. Ford said 100%,

and he would have been 100% wrong. So these things happen. These things happen. I love that you're still pissed about it too, by the way. Oh, are you kidding me? There's no way you can like drain that from your voice. It's the word. You know.

You know. It's the word. It was the mediocre thing. That still stings. It still stings. Guess what? He tore down the wall. He did it.

Well, memories get reconstructed because people either consciously do it or something in the back of their head does it, right? I mean it's entirely possible that he decided that he was going to take credit for that because it went over well in the end, and he was sort of in its vicinity when it happened. And then over time, that just reshaped itself into his head that he came up with a line. But that sounds like a lot of work for his subconscious to be doing. It sounds like he actually just decided to take credit for it thinking that nobody would call him on it. I don't know. I don't know about that. I hear your point.

The large point I'm trying to make is that we remember ourselves better perhaps than we were. We may not remember this, but we don't construct memories that are utterly inimical or repressed memories that are utterly inimical to our character i know i never killed anybody that i've never murdered i never murdered that's fair this this is not something that i've covered up and you know if somebody presented me with i can tell you right now this is something i never did there are things i know that i have never done because they are not in my nature. They just absolutely are not in my nature. And I know if somebody said that I did that, you stabbed that man at a pool hall arguing about a bet.

And yet – I know that that's not true. And yet there are more than dozens, there are dozens of cases of people confessing to things they didn't do because they think they did them. That's true as well. The mind is really, really plastic, which is why waterboarding works

and why torture tends to work. That's a different logical concept. No, no, no, not necessarily. A lot of people confess to things because they want the attention. No, no, no, not necessarily. A lot of people construct a thing – confess to things because they want the attention. Some people – No, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no. We're wrong. Let me finish.

That's not true. There are people who confess to child molesting who did not do it where they've been kept – I mean the Amaro case in Massachusetts is a perfectly good one. The McMartin case in California is a perfectly good one. These are people who were kept in a room and told that the children have said this and that and that they had done it. And if they would just confess, everything would be easier for them. And usually they keep them up. They keep them awake because sleep deprivation is a really powerful thing to do to the brain. And there are people who – and their psychological movement is I didn't do it, but I can't remember doing it because of course I would never do it. But this child is telling – this guy is telling me these children are saying that I did it, so maybe I'm just crazy. Maybe I did it and I'm another person, and that is exactly what those people, the McMartins and the Amoros, people who we now know literally could not have done the things they were accused of doing.

But they still were convinced in some crazy things. The brain is really, really plastic, and you can get people to do stuff, and you can tell yourself – like Peter Rodman, I'm sure because of whatever the shame he felt in – now we're getting amateur psychology, but the shame he felt in not supporting that speech became sublimated to, no, I was a favorite. No, I wrote it. No, I'm proud of it. And it wasn't like conscious. He wasn't consciously lying and trying to get away with something. He really, truly believed it. Yes, he did.

And people really, truly believe things that are not true, and I don't think that Brett Kavanaugh doesn't think that he drank a lot in high school and in college. I think he believes that he didn't drink a lot. I think that even – I don't think he did this, but even if he did do this, I believe that he believes he didn't primarily because he's a grown man now and realizes what he did, and he's got daughters. But I'm not sure it's all sort of Machiavellian kind of like a stage villain creating a lie and then spinning a web. I think at the brain – the most fragile person on stage, and I do mean stage, was Dr. ford and she is a psychologist and can analyze these things better than it was a professional better than anybody else and she still is incapacitated by something that happened to her when she was 15 um and and i it just shows you how i think how plastic the brain is i'm wondering if the people, however, who confess to these things, the Amoros, et cetera, whether or not that it's a how many fingers Winston moment or whether or not it's realizing that the power of the state arrayed against you is simply too great where you rape them with knives at some – and they're telling you this is what you did and you have seven kids who said that you did, I can't imagine the situation in which I would say – well, I – Yeah, I hear you.

We're getting off topic. But Dorothy Rabinowitz has written a lot about this case and written a lot about the tick tock it takes to get somebody to convince to to to to to utterly confuse and baffle a normal person for whom this behavior would be just anathema repellent completely out of the question. And it's a lot more subtle than that. And it and it works i mean when you i mean i maybe i'm just maybe i'm i may just be a voice of one at this point but when a cop stops me i feel like i feel guilty i feel guilty too i i couldn't agree more i couldn't agree more I had cops come to my door because somebody else in the neighborhood had had some vandalism. And I opened the door and the cops – now, I'm a grown man. I'm a – you know, I pay my taxes. I have five children.

I opened the door. There are two policemen there. And the first thought in my mind was, what did I do? Oh, my goodness. Hey – go ahead. I know we have to talk about this, but if we could just for one minute. Sure. This is a great – everybody watches Law & Order.

Right. The show Law & Order has been on for a million years, all these different permutations and iterations of it. And certainly in the early days, it was so hard-boiled and hilarious because people would – the cops would – cops like cops would come up to somebody at the gym and say, did you know – do you hang out at this strip club? And the guy would be on the treadmill like, yeah, sure I do, detective. Like do you know this girl? And you go, yeah, she's one of my favorite strippers at the strip club. Well, she was found murdered last night and her body was in a dumpster oh well i saw her last night but i didn't do that and he doesn't get

off the treadmill now any normal person would be like oh my god oh wait wait let me turn the treadmill wait i i didn't do we get panicked and nervous like it's your it'd be what was the last time you talked to a homicide cop about the a homicide of somebody that you saw the night before who died the night before. I mean I would be like, whoa, whoa, let me think about this. This is crazy. But because TV can't do that because it would take forever, they just always wrote the witnesses as hard-boiled and completely unmoved, which if you start watching the show and watch for that, it's actually hilarious. But it's not human.

I mean no human – it's more TV because we only have 42 minutes to tell the story. Anyway, we should change the subject I think or at least a different facet of it. I'd like to switch from what has happened over the last couple of days to what we expect to happen over the coming week and see what you fellows think about that. But James, do we have another spot to do? Yeti is telling me to shut up because James has a spot to do. Do I? Is that spot time here? I'm sorry, guys.

I'm doing your segue for you. Far be it from me. Go ahead. Go. Yeah, I was off brushing my teeth while you two were doing whatever you needed to say. And it takes a predetermined amount of time. That's how I know I can step away and still be back because I use Equip. I use Equip.

Do you use Equip? Rob, Peter, we all use Equips. I do. And our dentists are happy that we do because we are brushing our teeth correctly. Until then, most of us are brushing our teeth wrong. Not long enough. We forgot to change our brushes on time. Because most of the brands force, you know, they want to sell you flashy gimmicks rather than better brushing.

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That's your first refill pack free at getquip.com. That's G-E-T-Q-U-I-P.com. As I've said before, I go to my dentist, and he doesn't even bother to give me that complimentary toothbrush on the way out anymore like they usually do because he knows I use a Quip, and there's nothing better for your mouth than that. Our thanks to Quip for sponsoring this, thechet podcast peter you were saying well i just wonder if if you feel as what is there to say i'm if you feel as relieved as i do that even though courtesy of senator jeff flake we now have another delay that now the Judiciary Committee has voted the nomination through. And what happens next in the Senate is in the hands of leader Mitch McConnell. And I don't know whether Brett Kavanaugh is going to get confirmed or not. But I just do have the feeling that Mitch McConnell is going to end this as promptly

as he can after the one week period expires. I just, Chuck Grassley, I started to think, first of all, I thought to myself, how fortunate that this is in the hands of an older man, Chuck Grassley is now 85 years old, if I recall correctly, and an Iowan who has a sense of fair play bred into his bones. But I have to say, by yesterday, I was thinking, oh, my goodness, Senator. No more delays. They're playing obviously political games here. The aim here is to delay and delay and delay. And Chuck Gratt, in in any event that is over and mitch mcconnell it just seems to me he's

not perhaps telegenic or charismatic but he's smart and he's tough and he will bring this to a close you feel it um i don't know oh really well, it's just that what do we know so far? I mean the dots when connected all point in one direction, which is more and more and more and more things coming out, like foolish things, ridiculous things, tabloid-style things, fake news kind of things, but more. And I just, I don't, I don't, I'm not hopeful that at the end of the week, we're going to feel that we did the right thing. And we did the process. I think at the end of the week, we're going to be so exhausted and disgusted that even people who support Judge Kavanaugh are going to say, you know what, it's too much. Oh, you're already seeing him. You're seeing, I mean, Bill Kristol the other day saying that it's time to move on in order for the sake of the Constitution and the sake of constitutionalism. And this is, you know, let's let's try again. And this next time it won't be so mean.

And I think Megan McArdle with The Washington Post, and I love her and respected her stuff for a long time, says pretty much the same thing that this whole episode has been so tainted. It'll happen with the next one. I mean, it works. There will be another version of this done for Barrett, for example, and it won't be sexual assault. It'll be something that indicates the essential, basic, inherent heartlessness, misogyny, internalized or otherwise, of the Republican Party. If the Republicans and the GOP and anybody on the right is, by definition, basic inherent heartlessness, misogyny, internalized or otherwise, of the Republican Party.

If the Republicans and the GOP and anybody on the right is, by definition, a bad person because they believe in a set of ideas that are injurious to the disenfranchised, and they use constitutionalism and originalism and all the rest of their isms as just fig leaves in order to maintain the power structure, then anybody they put up essentially is a threat to the utopia that we know is right around the corner. If we can just get that Constitution to be more like silly putty and less like an iron bar. And when we talk about the truth that was mentioned earlier, Peter, in his wonderful, heartwarming naivete,

spoke about using rules of evidence and procedure and all of these established orders that we have in order to get to the truth the idea of the truth is no longer in session is no longer a common currency ever since that moron came out and said this is my truth as a gay america something like that the concept of my truth has surpassed the truth if you the truth is now something that people can own individually, and the rest of us really have no standing to challenge their truth. We upgraded it. I mean the word truth is just the fancier term for my opinion.

Right, right. That's exactly – I mean nobody wants to say this is my opinion because that just sounds like, yeah, I know it's your opinion, but my truth means it's like – well, it's better than an opinion. It's true to me. Well, that's literally the definition of an opinion. But we don't say that anymore because it just sounds like all we're doing is spouting off our opinions, which we've devalued.

Well, that was my point. So you can finish that and tell me what I was going to say at the end of that. No, no, no. I'm sorry. But I was just jumping. Go ahead. Go ahead. Go ahead. I'm just wondering what the next issue is going to be because whoever confronts Barrett in the elevator the next time is going to have a version of their truth that is going to be even more metat OK, all right, we really are looking forward to an opportunity to having a discussion just on constitutional issues here. Well, their response is that they let Gorsuch go through.

Yeah, OK. Without doing this. All right. So then – and that's a good point. How do you respond to that then? Well, I was asking you. I don't know. Go on. The reason – I mean there's a practical bad reason, practical reason, and then there's sort of maybe a larger reason, right?

The practical bad reason is that it didn't matter because he was replaced with Scalia. Scalia was a right-wing kook, and Gorsuch's a right-wing kook, so we didn't lose. And Kennedy was sort of a reliable swing person, kind of unreliable conservative, not really conservative. He protected abortion on every important vote. Anthony Kennedy protected abortion. And what's ludicrous about it, of course, is that – I mean not that I know the list, but of the – everybody on that list, the most appropriate replacement for Anthony Kennedy was Brett Kavanaugh. It's just sort of like kind of ridiculous that this is – we're going to go one for one. This is one. So on a practical level, it's sort of silly.

I would – I mean here's I think the problem for the American culture as large, and I think it's for the left and for the right. We have forgotten that there's a mechanism by which all of these things can be easily resolved, and that's elections. And when you win them, you get to do stuff, and then if you don't like the stuff that the person who won the election is doing, then you win elections. And in our lifetime – I mean in my lifetime, we have seen the American people – now we complained about it. They voted for gridlock. They've done this. They've done that. But the American people have been perfectly willing several times to kick the ruling house out – the ruling party out of both the House and the Senate.

And the guy in the White House out and replace him with somebody who's different they have been perfectly willing to do that the irony is is that actually is hard work you know it's like when you want to lose weight you know there's a bunch of ways to do it there's there's you know you lose a pound a week because you do this you do that and you exercise more and you don't lose a lot of weight at once but you do you create change or you can just go on a starvation week because you do this, you do that, and you exercise more, and you don't lose a lot of weight at once, but you do. You create change. Or you can just go on a starvation diet, or you can go to liposuction, right? And that is where we are culturally. Our first impulse is what's the fast way to do it?

How can I go on TV and destroy a guy and get him – and destroy the canvas? It doesn't really – nobody is thinking long term. They're just thinking like, yeah, I want to do this now. And that to me is – that's the problem because we act as if there's no mechanism for this. There is a mechanism. Just win. But to win, you have to appeal to half the country. And that for a lot of people, zealots on both sides, is really irritating and offensive, right?

Another aspect of the current politics that this makes clear is how the incentives seem to have changed both for members of Congress and for the press. So the press, we've gotten used to the idea that tweets are extreme, out of control. We've gotten used to the idea that cable television, that people tend to take sides. What astounds me – well, maybe it didn't – yes, it did. It shocked me. It shocked me is that the New York Times, totally partisan. The New Yorker, totally partisan. Even organs of the media that have covered themselves in glory over the last couple of weeks are the Wall Street Journal, particularly the editorial page, where they are

retaining a tone of sobriety, but insisting on evidence and fair play, and Fox News. Not all of Fox News, but there were Brit Hume and Chris Wallace, two old pros who still understood standards and fair play and expressing the arguments of Chris Wallace. To this day, I couldn't tell you how he votes. Brit Hume is more open about his own inclinations and his own politics. But the willingness to on the air repeat the arguments from the other side before making your own point. But – so the one-time crazed right-wing outfits, the Fox News and the Wall Street Journal, particularly the journal editorial page, are now – I mean truly they're the only places I could find even shreds of journalistic integrity. Everybody else is responding to the new incentives where you play to your base, you sell papers, you sell advertising online is what you're doing. And the more extreme, the more partisan, even handedness and fairness doesn't even matter.

That is horrible. And we will reap the whirlwind of that. I had thought that we'd gotten used to it, but it's getting worse. The other bit that I don't quite understand is what's happening in the Democratic Party. There's no – now, of course, I'm going to date myself. I'm going to really date myself here. But there's no Mike Mansfield or Scoop Jackson or Walter Mondale to say, wait a minute, wait a minute. This is an honorable man. He deserves our vote. Our turn will come next time.

We will win an election. It'll happen next time. Every member of the judiciary committee was engaged in an obvious and destructive and underhanded ploy, holding onto this information, on to Dr. Ford's testimony for weeks and then releasing it at the last minute. And 10 out of 10 members of the Senate, Democratic members of that Judiciary Committee were all on board with that. That too, you can't have one of our two major parties taken over by a kind of insanity. This is – excuse me. I was trying to – I'm trying to work my way to a cheerful note, but those are bad, really bad.

Yeah, but it's like – it's kind of like we're all Trump now. I don't mean that he's lame. He's the emblem, the flag for this kind of crazy emotionalism that you get to say – he said for eight years Obama is a Kenyan. He's a Kenyan. Right, right, right. Ted Cruz's dad killed Kennedy. It's kind of like every new – I mean it's the sort of national choir. I don't mean the fake news part of it, but I mean the urgent, crazy crisis attitude that everything is – the sky is falling.

I mean everything is in bold. Everything has got exclamations all over it. Everything is underlined. Everything is breaking news. Everything is urgent. Everything is going to kill us. Net neutrality will kill us. It's all so incredibly highly amped that I would have thought at this point everyone would be just so thoroughly exhausted by all this that they would just get over it. But in fact, there seems to be a renewable energy source here for crazy and for – and the crazy sections of the nation and the body politic, which have always been there, seem now to be more normal and more normalized and on TV and like regular, that it's perfectly okay now for The New York Times, for The New Yorker, which was famous for – it's famous for one thing, The New Yorker was for its reporting. In its reporting, it was famous for its relentless and bizarrely meticulous fact-checking. Right. That if you – if I said that this guy picked up a number two pencil, there was a fact checker, the New Yorker, who would find out if it was a number two pencil. And if it wasn't, they couldn't verify it.

They wouldn't print it. That was the whole brand of the New Yorker. at the 1987, class of 87 Facebook for freshmen in 1983 where Brett Kavanaugh was a freshman and meticulously going through everyone there and asking them if they have any dirt on Brett Kavanaugh, which is a level of scrutiny and weirdness that requires everyone to pretend that they don't live on Earth. That, well, there are things that I did my freshman year in college that I am embarrassed about.

And that you could probably embroider into some character flaw. I'm sure that's true. I have character flaws and when they were at their most bold and in highest relief was, frankly frankly my freshman year in college. So that – but that seems to me to be a very, very high standard that we're inventing now and saying this is now the new normal, which is so strange to me because we all know it shouldn't be. There's not a person who doesn't think it should be.

We're just pretending now, which I think is – that's what's dangerous is that we're – we are entering that phase in the culture where we have to pretend to have beliefs that we don't have. Anyway. Go ahead. No, Peter, you're going to say something. No, no. I was going to reply to Rob's point, but I don't want to get in the way of your copy. We're having a little blue yeti. You'll edit this out and make it work, right?

Do you want me to go now or do you want me to do the copy now, James? No, no. I mean, Peter, you can come in if you want to. But the thing is, Rob's going on and on. He's making these great points, and I'm wondering when I'm going to be able to get in there and interrupt because I'm just getting stressed. I've got to get the commercial in in and I can't get the commercial in and I get anxious about these things. But you know what?

If you're anxious in your own daily life, that's why you need calm. I mean, do you have any coping tools for being anxious? Except for putting Rob on mute, which I can't do. Have you ever meditated before? And if not, why do you think meditation would benefit you or wouldn't? Do you have any trouble sleeping? All of these things are, you know, signs that perhaps you're a human being. And in these times, our stress and our anxiety are completely normal reactions to the way the world comes at us. That's why we're excited to partner now with Calm, which is the

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They're like bedtime stories for grownups. So much more. Rob, I believe that you've taken advantage of this particular program, right? And you find it to be helpful for your own life? I mean, New York is battering outside your windows, but yet you remain internally centered. Can't you tell? Um, actually, I think it's actually a great, I mean, meditation is one of those things where, um, there's a huge amount of research on why it's good for you, why it's good for your heart, why it's good for your, you know, your, whatever chronic diseases you might have, uh, why it's good for, uh, dealing

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Rob was answering the question, how did we get here? And part of the answer, Rob says, is Donald Trump. And I'm in no mood to disagree with that. I know. I don't mean, just to clarify, I don't think that he's the reason why. I think he's emblematic. I don't think he's the disease. I think he's a symptom. Okay. So I'll tell you what I think is the disease. And I don't need to make this point at great length because we already know this, and I'm sure our listeners already know this too or are aware of the argument. So I'll just touch on it, but I won't feel right unless I do say it.

And the disease is the Supreme Court. And in particular, a 1973 decision, Roe versus Wade, the 1992 Casey decision, which reaffirmed that, and more recently, the decision in 2016, I can't remember, the Obergefell case, which announced that there is a right to gay marriage. Now, I am not commenting. I'd be happy to at some point, but this is not my point. I'm not commenting on the rights or wrongs of abortion or gay marriage, but that the Supreme Court announced rights which removed from the 50 states the ability to establish their own laws, their own regulations for the people of the 50 states to decide those matters for themselves in obvious disregard for the

Constitution. obvious uh disregard for the constitution as robert bork famously said in the entire decision in row there's not a single sentence of legal reasoning it's sociological mumbo jumbo and by the way the late robert bork isn't the only person who believed that cass sunstein a very prominent liberal legal scholar, says the same thing. It was a bad decision. And why do we have essentially mob – why do we have such virulence in these hearings today? Because the left believes – I think wrongly actually. I believe that Brett Kavanaugh would be very measured in his approaches because these decisions have been decided and now the court has to take them as precedent. Nevertheless, this is a point James made right at the top that the left believes that social issues here that they on which they believe they have won

are now at stake, that the Supreme Court has the right to flip those in against liberals just as surely as it flipped them for liberals. All of this is just wrong. Those were bad decisions. The Constitution does not pronounce upon abortion or gay marriage. And the point that you made, Rob, is, of course, looking for the easy way. The easy way is to get issues decided through the courts as opposed to 50 political battles in 50 different states.

That's what should be a matter of state law even today. So thank you. I feel better now. Yeah, I agree. I think it's easier to go for nine votes than it is to go for 63 million votes. Right. And it's happened on the right and the left. And the truth is that we are a 50-50 country.

And if you want to govern and you want to govern in something other than chaos, you can win the presidency. You can win it. You can become president of the United States. We now know. We've known the past two presidents have become – are highly polarizing presidents, occupants of the White House who are having a hard time. One of them had a very hard time getting anything through except for his one big spending bill, which was Obamacare. The rest of it he was stymied. conservative issues here because the culture demands for some reason that we have all of our elections on twitter all of our elections on cnn or all of our elections and all of our

our disputes are settled by nine unelected lifetime appointments which is bananas when we have we have the mechanism is staring us right in the face it's just hard it's just difficult and it's not glamorous i don't get to be famous and um i just i have to like eat a lot of bad food and be on a bus a lot but that is how you that is how you affect change in this country um the great social movements in this country have been people essentially on the back of a pickup truck driving around evangelizing audiences that how you – that's how this country banned – constitutionally banned alcohol, right? A country that is basically 70 percent whiskey. We managed to pass a constitutional amendment to ban it.

Now, obviously that was moronic, and we then unbanned it, but that just shows what a country can do when the elements of persuasion are in effect and we have ceased to do that we don't persuade we don't compromise we just scream and now that's i don't see it until we've screamed ourselves hoarse and are exhausted i don't see a way out well peter i think you're right to blame those decisions on a great deal of this unrest. I was thinking to myself, who exactly is to blame? And I thought, well, Lee Harvey Oswald, because you had a leftist Marxist who shot a beloved president, the cognitive dissonance of a culture on the liberal side that had been bitching about America throughout the 50s and realized the poisonous fruit of this was the elimination of their own beloved president.

The cognitive dissonance was so great they had to say that the right had done it and then blame them as evil for the rest of their own beloved president. The cognitive dissonance was so great, they had to say that the right had done it and then blame them as evil for the rest of their lives. But then I thought, no, maybe it goes back farther than that. Maybe it was Kennedy himself. By Kennedy, by start, by getting us involved in Vietnam, he radicalized an entire generation that masked their disinterest and disinclination to go to war as a noble concept and sort of bought into a whole leftist line

of thought that would later infect the universities. But I thought, no, you know, actually Kennedy was responding to what actually happened. It was Ho Chi Minh, actually, that was the guy we should blame for all of this. But, you know, Ho Chi Minh got a nice stay in Paris, so it's the French. It was the French who put up Ho Chi Minh and let him stay there and have a nice little time. And we have to blame for what's happening in America today. I'm fighting with my dog as we speak. Anyway, so where do we go then next guys where's

what's your what's your prediction for up or down whether or not this works first of all whether whether they get to the vote this week whether they actually vote this week i feel fairly confident that mitch mcconnell is going to get this thing done even if he doesn't believe he has the votes he's going to want to get it done and move on to a new to a new nominee if he can i think and my judgment on the votes jeff flake is critical and here the in my as best i can tell and who knows what the next few days will bring you're completely correct the the the Democrats, this machine is going to be throwing up one new allegation after another. According to some reports, Dr. Ford's lawyers have already said, no, no, no, a week is arbitrary. That's much too short.

So they'll fight for more delays. And who knows what garbage will come up if Mitch McConnell brings it to a vote this coming week my own judgment is that the critical figures here are jeff flake and joe mansion democrat running for re-election in west virginia which donald trump carried by almost 40 points right uh and if you get one democrat that you can lose either actually if you get if you get one then you you may lose Susan Collins and Lisa Murkowski. Susan Collins, Republican of Maine. Lisa Murkowski, Republican of Alaska. And the vice president could break the tie vote. But I don't know what's – I mean Joe – I just don't know.

Jeff Flake is the critical figure. I think Joe Manchin is going to vote for if Jeff Flake holds. I think probably, but this is is all i mean can i say can i say one more unkind thing and then in my prediction my other unkind thing is this um for all the people who thought back you know while i was watching the hearings and they're suddenly the senator from delaware democrat from delaware sheldon whitehouse or no no chris no no he's chris coons. Chris Coons. Everybody back – I have a long memory. I can remember people saying, oh, no more establishment rhinos as Republican senators from Delaware.

And so they nominated a moron, and she lost, and we turned a solid, solid Republican seat blue. And all the people, the Breitbart crowd, the Steve Bannon crowd in Alabama supported a moron for the Senate, and they turned Alabama blue. They took a red state, a red seat in Alabama, and they turned it blue. And so now we have to do this complicated parsing of Jeff Flake is very important, and maybe if we give him a flake, we'll get a mansion, all that stuff. We have to do that because politically, our side plays a very foolish emotional game about we don't like the rhino republic you you it's a 50 50 country you have the the rhinos are the most important people in your life right now right and and and and by by by tossing them aside you end up right here where we are right now with a 50 50 senate and that's not a good place to be if you want to get things done. That's my main thing to say.

The second thing to say is I don't think he's going to get confirmed. I think it's going to be this horrible, disastrous week. We just lit the fire. symbol clash for new allegations left and right, and there will be a no end to it, and there will be the speeches on the floor of the Senate are going to be revolting because every senator, the worst people on earth, they're all going to want to give their speech, and they're all going to say, we just don't have enough information. I can't in good conscience do this. And so he will not be confirmed, and we'll know he's not going to be confirmed by Wednesday probably or Thursday when it is leaked that the administration is already vetting new candidates.

Right. I agree with every word of that. Sounds very odd that rob and i are i know i know well we agree when things are bad we agree sounds entirely plausible i'm still casting my mind back to uh peter's point about that that walter mondale would have said wait a minute wait a minute wait a minute and i i love that mondale has now entered that phase where we retrospectively invest in politicians things that at the time we would never have believed. Just the way that George Bush is now a model for some Democrats. Why can't Trump be like those Republican presidents of the past we loved, like Ronald Reagan and George Bush?

Right, right. And now we're saying, where are the statesmen? Where are the men of your like Walter Mondale? Which for a Minnesotan of a less than liberals cast is amusing. Whatever comes of this, there are two things. One, the Washington Post, I think, no USA Today, I believe, had a story tweeted out that whatever happens until the Kavanaugh thing goes through, better keep them away from coaching girls basketball. Wow. Because there's no level of personal destruction that isn't necessary at this point. And what the second part that's more personal for this and that I really hate is when you

have something like that approvingly tweeted out by somebody you know and somebody you follow on Twitter who just usually tweets anodyne things about pop culture and fun and dogs and the rest of it. And you see their name attached to a retweet and an endorsement of a sentiment and you realize, oh my gosh, this person with whom I've been in the elevator X number of times hates me, probably, for general purposes and you you just realize that twitter and these other means have allowed people to amplify what was usually just sort of the small little still voice in their head that says just keep that to yourself but now it's virtuous to be hateful it's absolutely virtuous to be enraged and full of feels all the time so yeah if the kavanaugh thing ends with somebody else it'll just be a breathing spot until the next

bit of civil discord and clawing at each other with nails uh happens the good the only question is is anything going to stop it is there any is there any end game here where both sides finally or one side or where eventually a truce is called because it's simply too exhausting to do this constantly? Or do people just get so much satisfaction out of the virtue of their anger that it's they miss the rush? I don't know. I don't know. Well, what are you going to do this weekend, guys? Let's end on a light note here because life is not all this.

I intend to indulge myself this very day in two or three hours of one activity that remains untainted, and that is watching college football. Stanford versus Notre Dame in South Bend, Indiana, which looks as though it's going to be a very good game that's what i'm going to do today purge myself of all of this by watching something i was about to say still innocent those big boys hit each other pretty hard but there's still beauty in that game i just read a piece the other day talking about how college cheerleaders used to be male until that paradigm shifted and it was part of the whole sexism that attends the industry and the violence and the rest of the misogynistic male thing so it's not untainted peter there's nothing untainted there's

there's nothing that left the left does not want to infect and ruin and that's that's what always cracks me up supposedly the right we're the people who want to run everybody's lives, and they're the ones who just want a thousand flowers of freedom to bloom. I'm sorry, it's the other way around, and they've got to realize they're the ones who want to change everything to fit their particular specifics, and we just want to be left the bloody bleep alone. Rob, what are you going to do this weekend? I'm going to turn that little sentiment into a rant as well.

Sure. No, I'm going to do – I'm going to – I finally – I'm going to – as soon as we're done with this podcast, I'm going to walk down to Spring Street. I think it's Spring. It's either Spring or Prince. Oh, you're back in New York. You're back in New York. I'm in New York, and I'm going to go to the Apple store. I'm going to buy one of the brand new Apple TVs because I am a devotee of a service called Filmstruck. So if you're – listen, if you're Filmstruck and you want me to advertise Filmstruck on our podcast, I will do it.

I'm a huge devotee of Filmstruck. You probably are too, James, right? They will – I mean Cr mean criterion is hooked up with them right yeah right yeah so you can get but can you get 4k versions of these old fine hollywood that's a really good question you often you cannot um what is filmstruck i've never heard of this filmstruck it's a streaming streaming service for classic films and and and not just classic classic obscure weird uh foreign all sorts of cool stuff that you would never find. And I'm going to have some – I'm going to make dinner.

I have some people in, and we're going to watch – we're going to pretend that our film selection is democratic. But in fact, I'm going to insist on watching what I want to watch. Which is going to be what? I don't know yet. It'll either be – my problem is it's either going to be something I really, really want to watch and love or it's going to be something that I feel that my guests need to see if they have some kind of glaring omission in their film history. And I will ruin it for everybody by stopping and pausing and talking and pointing things out, and no one will have a good time except me. Wow. I didn't realize I was going to say all that, but it's true. That's exactly what's going to happen. You know, you unchristian to the last moment of this podcast. Yeah. Unrepentant to at least I was repentant and I

genuinely feel bad about my feelings about the hearings and my feelings about these two, you know, damaged people. I generally feel bad about it, but I don't feel bad about cooking dinner for my guests and serving them some good wine and then making them watch the movie that I want them to watch the way I want them to watch it. James, a beautiful autumn day in Minnesota. What are you doing? It's overcast. It's a bit chilly. I'm going to walk the dog because he really wants to get out and look at some bunnies and chase after them and the rest of it. So like I say, my wife is still on her cruise with her mother. So I've got some housework to do.

I've got some Swedish death cleaning to do, as we say. The entire culture could use a Swedish death cleaning. Have you ever heard the term? What does that never know? What is that? It's where you go through your stuff and you presume that you're dead and that one of your relatives is tasked with getting rid of the stuff you've left behind. And it's a way of saying, do I really need this? Do I want this around?

Should this go in a box? Should this go into the Goodwill or whatever? And you just throw out an awful lot of stuff that really you've been carrying around for an awful long time, which the culture could stand to use. So I have to do that to a couple of rooms. I bought a new hand steamer that's supposed to take pet stains out of a carpet because the dog himself had a massive accident

of a gastrointestinal sort on the white carpet the other day. And my wife's going to come back from a trip and her mom – it's the spare room where her mother sleeps. I can't get this out of you. Vinegar, baking soda. Oh, no. Chemical stuff, non-chemical natures, varieties, everything. Nothing works. So I have this oxycleaner steam thing, which I'm going to sit and – so that's my day. Well, you guys are watching football.

While Rob is setting up his TV with that little fun that people have when they have new gadgets, I'm going to be bent over a carpet trying to get the vomitus out of a rug, which is somehow symbolic of something or other. That is a metaphor. That is definitely a metaphor. And yes, and then in the evening, I will probably grill something and get back to work on the project that I have.

I'm going through the entirety of Esquire magazine from the 1960s, pulling out advertisements and sort of studying the contrast between the ads and what Esquire itself was saying. Esquire was the quintessential liberal publication back in those days. And it's interesting to see what that meant then. You could actually have pictures of girls in swimsuits at the same time you were espousing progressive politics.

Boy, that now looks like an era of absolute pro-magnets. So that and other things, and then off to work on Monday and then another week, And then we'll be back next week to talk about this, probably with somebody from the D.C. media establishment who's exhausted and their head is spinning and reeling and the rest of it. By the way, I have one more thing to say, and I'm going to say it after this. We've been brought to you by ButcherBox, Calm, and Quip. Please support them for supporting us, and you'll find all the links that you need in the description of the podcast at Ricochet. And if you enjoy the show, as we always say, go leave a review on iTunes. Would it kill you? Would it just kill you to do so?

Xander Toonsbach was a reviewer who said that the chemistry of the hosts and guests makes this podcast very easy to listen to and enjoy. The Ricochet Code of Conduct helps keep everything civil here, as well as on their website. Not too much screaming and vitriol. Taste it. You'll like it. Not too much screaming and vitriol. Not it. You'll like it. Not too much screaming and vitriol. Not too much.

Just enough. Is there any screaming? Is there any vitriol? I wouldn't say there's none. All right. We'll leave with this then. Peter, if you were to say a movie that Rob should show his friends and ruin it for them, what would it be? My wife and I yesterday, the answer is Suspicion with Cary Grant and Joan Fontaine.

The lighting, it's black and white, and you just get this richness that I'd forgotten what actual film you would know. And it's Hitchcock. And furthermore, Cary Grant, we know he was a good comic actor. We know later in his career he was a good romantic lead. He was a good actor full stop. The way he could suggest that he was a murderer, the way that throughout the movie he leaves the audience unable to decide whether he's a good guy or a bad guy, even as Joan Fontaine is trying to work it. Just a brilliant thing.

I think that Rob should show his 12 angry men for his guests, but he could show them how today's culture that wouldn't work. First of all, that's too many men. It should be six. And then there should be a balance demographically, so it should be six angry people, but maybe six amusing. Interesting.

I think you can actually buy for high schools there's a version called 12 angry people oh you're kidding well mostly because you can't get 12 dudes to like try out for a play like you give a lot of women in drama in high school and you gotta give them you know parole

so it's 12 angry people and i think they make little tiny adjustments so that you know it's uh believable. Anyway. Well, we're not angry here. We're still smiling and we're done. And we'll see you.

We'll see you, everybody, in the comments at Ricochet 3.0 next week, guys. Next week. Thank you. I didn't know what I was getting into So you had a little trouble in town Now you're keeping some demon down Stop dragging my Stop dragging my Stop dragging my heart around It's hard to think about What you wanted It's hard to think about

What you lost This doesn't have to be The big game This doesn't have to be the big game This doesn't have to be anything at all I know you really want to tell me goodbye I know you really want to be run down Maybe you could never look me in the eye Yeah, you're buckled with the weight of the world

Stop dragging my Stop dragging my Stop dragging my heart around Ricochet Join the conversation Ricochet. Join the conversation. Thank you. better to do make a meal of some bright eyed kids you need someone looking after you I know you

really want to tell me goodbye I know you really want to be your own girl baby you could never look me in the eye you're about to win the weight of the world Maybe you could never look me in the eye Here you are going away to work Stop dragging my

Stop dragging my Stop dragging my heart away When you see Sotomayor and Kagan, tell them that Lindsey said all of them. Because I voted for them. I would never do to them what you've done to this guy. This is the most unethical sham since I've been in politics.