The Ricochet Podcast - Angry Birds

Episode Date: March 22, 2013

This week, we’re all over the place. First, Fouad Ajami joins to discuss the 10th anniversary of the Iraq war. Was it worth it? Fouad says yes. Tell us what you think in the comments. Then Obama in Israel, Pat Caddell on the scourge of political consultants, Peter Robinson outs himself as an unabashed Rick Santorum supporter, and a crackling conversation on the role of video games in the... Source

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Get the f*** out of my face! You do your work and we will do our best. Mr. Gorbachev, tear down this wall. It's the Ricochet Podcast with Rob Long on the 405 and Peter Robinson in California. I'm James Lilacs in Minneapolis. Today we have Fauda Jami to discuss the Iraq War ten years later. And Pat Cadell will be along. And then we wrap it up with a rousing discussion of censorship.

No one's going to censor us. Here comes a podcast. Welcome, everybody. There you go again. Welcome, everybody. This is the Ricochet Podcast, number 160-something. Rob Long will be a while in a little bit. Peter Robinson is with us with a cold, working through the pain. I'm here in Minnesota, shivering with a cold.

We all have to compensate. We all have to buck up because we've got a lot of stuff to do. I've got to remind you, the podcast is brought to you by Hillsdale College, and unless you've been on Mars and or Venus, you know they've got a free online course in the Constitution and Western Heritage. We'll be talking about this a little later in the show. But right now, go to ricochet.com slash hillsdale to sign up and get yourself acquainted with it, close as you can get to being a Hillsdale student without ever leaving your home. Peter, we're going to go right first to the guest.

We're proud to have Faud Ajami with us today. He's a senior fellow at the Hoover Institution and the co-chair of the Herbert and Jane Dwight Working Group on Islamism and the International Order. From 1980 to 2011, he was director of Middle East Studies at Johns Hopkins. He's the author of many books, including The Arab Predicament, Beirut, City of Regrets, The Dream Palace of the Arabs, and The Foreigner's Gift. His most recent publication is The Arab Predicament, Beirut, City of Regrets, The Dream Palace of the Arabs, and The Foreigner's Gift.

His most recent publication is The Syrian Rebellion, and we welcome him back to the podcast. Morning, sir. Thank you very much. Fuad, how are you? It's Peter Robinson here. Hi, Peter. Fuad, let's start with the top question. Ten years later, 4,500 Americans dead, at least 100,000 Iraqis dead, incalculable tens of billions of American dollars spent. Was the war in Iraq worth it? You know, I think this is one of the great,

great questions and one of the great schisms, really, in recent American history. We invaded Iraq for very many good reasons. And then in the end, we opened this great fault line in America between people who favored the war and people who opposed the war. And one of the poisonous elements of this schism in America about Iraq is, of course, the attempt of many people who voted to authorize the war to rewrite their own history. In other words, to use a familiar expression, they were for it before they were against it.

And here, when you go back and look at the people who voted to authorize the resort to force in 2002 when the vote came to the Senate, when you look at the luminaries who supported the resolution, you have an idea of what happened in Iraq and over Iraq several years later. John Edwards, John Kerry, Joe Biden, Hillary Clinton, Harry Reid, Jay Rockefeller, Christopher Dodd, all these people voted to authorize this war. So when you vote to authorize this war, you have to accept the responsibility for the war that would come. You cannot say this isn't exactly the war we signed up for the war that would come. You cannot say this isn't exactly the war we signed up for, but that's where we ended up. In your column in the Wall Street Journal, this would be the day before yesterday, on the actual 10th anniversary of

the invasion, you drew a distinction between the first phase of the war, when the rationale for the war was largely, substantially, the notion that Saddam Hussein probably had weapons of mass destruction. And you said that when that turned out to be untrue, it was a major turning point in the war. The Bush administration offered a second justification for the war, which was to establish democracy in Iraq in the hope that it would set an example for the wider Middle East. And there just weren't very many takers for that second rationale. Why were there so few takers? You know, Peter, that really was, if you will, the turning point of the war. When Charles Delfer, our inspector, made this declaration in the autumn of 2004, the beginning of 2005, and said, when he announced that Saddam had no

weapons of mass destruction, the war now had to stand on its own. It had to be re-justified, if you will. And a new rationale was offered when we discovered that Saddam's weapons were rust and decay and he didn't have these weapons of mass destruction. We said, as you rightly noted, that we would use this war to open up the politics of the Arab world. Well, there were no takers in America to begin with because the liberals had turned against the war and they mocked the very idea that liberalism or democracy or freedom could stick on Islamic soil. It's a very interesting irony of liberal thought in America in 2005, 2006, and beyond. And in the Arab world, around Iraq, there were no takers because they were

looking at the war in Iraq through their own prism. And to them, this war to liberate Iraq was simply a war to empower the Shia majority. So if you were the House of Saud, if you were the Jordanian monarch, if you were the Egyptians, given the Sunni Shia system in the Arab world, we were never forgiven the fact that we empowered the Shia and gave power to the Shia majority. That was how the war was seen through that sectarian lens. I'm curious, after we won and we'd smashed the regime in Baghdad, was it a mistake to engage in debathification or should we have left some structure in there

that had held the country together poorly but done so? No, these are fundamental questions. It's almost like reliving a war that I was so intensely, if you will, drawn to. Someone said that I was embedded in that war. I spent a lot of time in Iraq. I knew everyone from President Talabani and Ayatollah Sestani to my young drivers who were taking care of me when I was there. And I knew all the military commanders.

And when we look back on what we did, we were innocent. We didn't know Iraq. We didn't know Iraqis. We didn't have enough linguists who knew Arabic. There was an irony in the green zone when I would go to the little American colony, little America, as someone called it. You would find these translators that the American military and the State Department had brought to Iraq, they were Arabs from Jordan, they were Arabs from the Palestinian territories from Egypt.

They opposed the very war. They opposed this very war that was giving them bread and giving them sustenance. So we were innocent. And when we look, there are two big decisions that people say were big mistakes, and I disagree with the prevailing consensus. Should we have banned the Ba'ath Party? Of course we should have. Should we have disbanded the army? Well, that one is, the second one is problematic. We did not disband the army. As a man I'm very proud to have been very close to, and still am, as General Petraeus said, he said, the army simply disbanded itself. It melted away. The officer corps went home, and the soldiers, these poor Shia grunts in the military, they just simply went to their villages. And everything that was in these military barracks was stripped down. There was an expression that said, if it didn't walk it was stripped down and I think this what happened who are Peter here again how do you grade the Bush administration's effort effort to continue arguing on behalf of the world I can remember this would be in say Oh 2005 or so I remember stopping and thinking one day that the only people I could

count who were arguing vigorously on behalf of the war were Fuad Ajami, Victor Davis Hanson, and Mark Stein. And I thought you cannot sustain an effort like this when you have the support of two academics and one journalist. And Charlie Hill. And Charlie Hill. And three academics. Three academics. Three academics and one journalist. But we now know from the former President Bush's memoirs,

from Karl Rove's memoirs, that they kept using this phrase inside the White House, well, we don't want to re-adjudicate this. We've already laid out our argument. They're either with us or they're against us. There was that strange, almost the same feeling I at least got in President Bush's first debate when he was running against Al Gore. When the camera cut to him and you could see a certain peevishness, I've made my argument now. It's up to you to go. Either you're with me or

you're against me. Did you feel that? How do you grade them on the war at home? You know, Peter, that's a very, very fundamental point. I grade them with great sympathy. I grade them with great respect. I grade them as people who had waited this war. They had built the scaffolding of the war around weapons of mass destruction. And the country went with them. We must remember one thing. On the eve of the war, the public opinion poll said 77% of the American people supported upending the regime of Saddam Hussein. We were just waking up. We were trying to somehow another deal with the emotional toll of 9-11. And the war in Iraq was seen by most Americans as a 9-11 war. Once that scaffolding came apart, what could Bush do? Call the war to a halt? What could Cheney do? What could Rumsfeld do? Indeed, they soldiered on.

And they did the best they could in the face of popular disaffection at home and a very, very difficult war abroad and a very skeptical region. We couldn't get any Arabs to buy into this war. And so, you know, when you went to the White House and I had the privilege of seeing the president now and then whenever I was called in, when you were talking to Vice President Cheney or seeing Secretary Rumsfeld and et cetera. I mean, these officials, they couldn't pull the plug on this war. They couldn't just say this war happened under false pretenses.

They did the best they could have. And I think an argument could be made that we drew the line. We drew the line in that war against Arab radicalism. It's always been one of my main arguments that the Kabul campaign, the war against the Taliban, was not sufficient. In Afghanistan. In Afghanistan. Yes.

The people who hit us were Arabs, and we had to take that war to the Arab world. And that we did. And indeed, some of the positive impact, the consequences, the positive consequences of the Iraq war have never been measured into the argument well so that gets us to that to the present day President Obama has pulled out the Kurds have gotten away clean as best I can tell there is an effect a kind of work in Kurdistan in the north of Iraq. Sure. What else, what good did the effort produce? Well, I think there is a passage about the war, a short expression, a short sentence, if you will,

about the war, which I think is better than anything that's been said about this war. And it came from a man not given to words, and that's Ambassador Ray Crocker, our ambassador in Iraq, who also is one of our finest Arabists and one of our finest diplomats. He served in Lebanon, he served in Kuwait, he served in Afghanistan. This man is like, you know, to me, he reminds me of Jimmy Stewart. You know, there's not exactly a man of very many words, but he said

at one point, he said, in the end, how we leave Iraq and what we leave behind will be much more important than how we came. The end, if you will, what we leave, the harvest of the war will be much more important. President Obama simply sacrificed the gains of the Iraq war, in my view, and that's the point I made in that piece in the Wall Street Journal. He didn't want to stay in Iraq. He didn't want the residual American made in that piece in the Wall Street Journal. He didn't want to stay in Iraq. He didn't want a residual American presence in Iraq. The Iraqis were straddling the fence between us and the Iranians. Once we left, the tilt toward Iran on the part of the rulers in Baghdad was inevitable.

You mentioned before the Afghan campaign, and those were the terms in which we were seeing things after 9-11, that it wasn't an Iraq war, it was an Iraq campaign, part of a much larger front, which now has evaporated. There seemed to be something that after the administration found nothing and pulled in its horns, that the entire pushback that the United States had mustered after 9-11 evaporated. Do you still think that there's a residual strength, spine steel in the American character and mood right now to take the fight again if we have to, if the extent of the threat is made apparent to us again? Is Obama capable of bringing the country to do what Bush did? To be honest with you, sadly, I have to say no. The answer to this is unequivocal. There

has been an American retreat from this greater Middle East. And the fatigue with Iraq, the fatigue, if you will, the Iraq syndrome, to use a familiar expression, has been used to underwrite and to justify a great withdrawal, strategic and moral. Look where we are watching the unraveling of Syria, right next door to Iraq. 70,000 people, it's said, have been killed in Syria. I believe the numbers are much, much larger than that. One point some million refugees have fled their country.

Two to three million people are internal refugees. And Syria cries out for an activist policy. Not so much for boots on the ground, but there's a lot that we could do. And guess what we learned about Syria recently? We learned that the following individuals in the administration, in the Obama administration, urged the arming of the Syrian rebellions. And they are former Defense Secretary Panera, former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, former Director of the CIA

David Petraeus, and the current Chairman of the Joint Chief of Staff General Dempsey. All four, the principal lieutenants of foreign policy, wanted to intervene in Syria on the side of the rebellion. They were overridden by one of the most, if you will, when you take a look at the dominance of Obama over the foreign policy process, the liberals used to say, ah, you know, when Bush used the term the decider, that he was the decider, they mocked that expression. We now have a real decider. We now have an administration that actually really has, there are no second opinions in this administration. When you look back at the Bush years, W's years, you know, there was an argument that could be made by Cheney,

it was rebutted by Condi Rice, there was a healthy debate within the administration. There is none here. There is, to the extent that there has been a foreign policy during the first term of President Obama, I dubbed it the foreign policy of David Axelrod. It was tailored to domestic politics and to the re-election of the president and nothing more. Well, we'll see you know it is a kind of built in dynamic of these podcasts that you try to end on an encouraging note

I'm sorry to disappoint you well the encouraging note is that I'm sure another book is in the works from Firewood and what might that book be about I think probably for the last 20 odd years or so

I've written books but I think I've been an essayist and so my next book which I hope will do with Hoover again like the Syrian Rebellion is to collect a series of essays that actually may tell us a story of the Arab world in snippets,

not so much in a book, but in this kind of fragmentary way. One of my great heroes, and I'm proud to have known him before he died, was allegedly Isaiah Berlin. And it's always a fault, it's always a mistake to invoke the gods. But I invoke Isaiah Berlin because indeed we know Isaiah Berlin Berlin not through books, but we know him through essays. So in committing blasphemy, I'm trying to have a book of essays that'm proud to be able to say that I, well, I didn't know him, but I encountered Isaiah Berlin, and I do know you. I can die a happy man, but only after you publish this book. Thank you, Peter. It's always a joy working with you.

I mean, it's just, and thank you, James, as well. Thanks for joining us, Fuad. Yeah, great. You guys have a good day. Bye. We shall. Bye-bye. Well, you're right, Peter. You want to end on an up note. But how many times really in the last 10, 15 years, 20, 30, 40, 100, 200, have we looked at that part of the world and said, my gosh, it's just brimming with potential and possibilities?

Hi, Gewalt. But the president has been in Israel, and the president has made some interesting remarks. I'm sure you've heard those. It's an interesting parallel that we have, isn't it, between the United States and Canada, which apparently stands as a metaphor for the Israelis and the Palestinians. Why, if Americans and Canadians can, those fractious, contentious, at-their-throats-for-centuries kind of guys

can get along, well, maybe that's a lesson there for the Israelisraelis i'm sure the zionists and the palestinians as well right oh i hard to believe he actually said that it's not it's not hard for me to believe at all and over now so insipid demonstrates such an ignorance of the actual realities in the middle east it's just breathtaking that he said that the The best news I've encountered about his trip to Israel so far is on Ricochet. It was Judith Levy's post the other day in which she said, you know, it's the Passover vacation. Most people are on vacation with their kids trying to keep the kids entertained. Really, family life is taking precedence here in Israel over the visit of Barack Obama. And I thought to myself, well, thank goodness for small favors.

There's that. I think it was on Prager or Medved the other day, one of those Salem dudes. He's talking to a staunch critic of the Obama administration's policy toward Israel. And the guy who was in Israel and heard the speech was rapturous about what he said. He was just enthralled with everything, the shout out of Zionism, to the uncertain terms in which he defended the historical claim to the land. I mean he thought it was just great. And I agree it was an inspiring speech in part.

But when you compare that speech as given, it was written in other words, to his unscripted teleprompter remarks where he came up with the American Canada stuff, it was two different men. One of them was a guy acting and the other was somebody who was asked to think on his feet and just – with the telltale face touching and all the rest of the – which is the guy? Which is the one? The one who gave the inspiring speech and wanted history to remember this moment or the guy whose brain actually goes to America and Canada because he can't mention Mexico because of all that, you know, fast and furious and racist stuff going on. I don't know. Peter, what did you think? Good darn question, which is which. This would be, I think I can count three speeches that everybody has felt, well, four if you include candidate Obama. Candidate Obama gave that speech in Berlin underneath the victory monument,

that huge statue in the Tiergarten. All of Europe was rapturous about that. He gave the speech in Cairo that everybody said was momentous. Maybe you could also include his Nobel Prize acceptance award. The speech that he gave in Arizona marking the shooting of Congresswoman Giffords, and then this speech today. Who knows,

or yesterday, I suppose it is now. But the four previous speeches about which everyone was rapturous led to nothing. They were not moving, they were not embedded in an actual decision about a way in which to move American policy. They just are these rhetorical moments that appear because the speechwriters seem to have been able to keep control of the text and not get it eaten alive, nibbled away by the bureaucrats. They just appear out of nowhere. They lead to nothing. They are just moments.

That's right. And here's the thing. Name one line. You are a speech writer. Cast your mind back to all of these great speeches. Name one line. Quote me something. Can't do it. I can't. No, I mean, you've got Teddy Roosevelt, who in his really little voice would say, speak softly and carry a big stick. And we remember that because it actually does affect and refer to the way that the guy lived his – did his foreign policy. You have FDR with his patrician chin tilted up telling us we have nothing to fare but fare itself. Again, not a particularly robust and baritone delivery, but we remember that line. What I remember from Barack Obama's speeches is the delivery is,

is the ebb and the flow and the up and the down and the sing, the, the musicality, if you will, the whole construction of the thing. But, but there's as much as there may be a lot of melody, I can't pull out a single thing.

I can walk out of the theater whistling. That's it. That's, that's just it. But then again, I'm not exactly predisposed to, to,isposed to look for them. That's my fault. I'm just too hard on the guy, Peter. I'm too much of a hater. I have to read the speech you gave yesterday, though, because there were some people, I've just been skimming around the internet this morning

here in California, you know, it's morning. I'm just coming to. And some people said it was a remarkable speech. Okay, so I'll read it. I'll read it. We'll discuss this later on Ricochet. Well, the interesting thing is, is he talks about equality an awful lot. And the difference between equality of how the Israelis see it and how the Palestinians may see it is a different issue. Because it's one of those terms that everybody can bandy about because it sounds nice and progressive and it has a holy glow about it. But unless people mean the same thing by it, saying liberty and equality,

you're just going to have an absolutely useless distinction, especially in America. The progressives say one thing, but actually it's contrary to a lot of the beliefs of the founders who wrote the Declaration of Independence. How do you know that? Well, maybe you don't. Maybe you do. But perhaps if you want to be clear on it, you need a history lesson and a free one. Who will teach you Hillsdale College? Maybe you do. But perhaps if you want to be clear on it, you need a history lesson and a free one.

Who will teach you? Hillsdale College. Now, hundreds of thousands of people took their time and signed up for that free constitution, the American Heritage course at Hillsdale. Now they've got what we need right now, which is at ricochet.com slash Hillsdale, a 10-week online course called American Heritage. It's based on the course that everybody at Hillsdale is required to take in order to graduate. And in this 10-week course, you will hear from President Dr. Larry Arnn, other members of their history faculty on topics like the American founding, the crisis of the Union, the Civil War, America's rise to a global power. Oh, good times. And the Reagan Revolution. Better times. And Peter was there and wrote things like Mr. Gorbachev, tear down this wall, lines that echo down through the ages. So if you go to this course,

you'll hear those things, you'll understand the context, and you'll have something with which to debate people when it comes up, you know, the family gets together and everybody's at each other's throats. But anyway, lectures, readings, quizzes, closest you can get to being a Hillsdale student without actually leaving your house. And of course, as we said, it's free. Hillsdale is doing this for free. After you sign up, you can take it at your leisure. So sign up now at ricochet.com slash Hillsdale and take the free American Heritage

course and thank them just by doing that for sponsoring this, the Ricochet podcast. Peter, I heard you inhale as though you had Yeah, no, you got me thinking of something. This will take about 90 seconds, but if Blue Yeti is off looking for Rob, maybe we have 90 seconds to do it. I said a moment ago that Obama has given a number of speeches that people swooned over at the time, but they didn't seem to lead anywhere. And I can contrast that. Here's what I have in mind. The contrast would be my hero, the man for whom I wrote Ronald Reagan. Let me just briefly name four speeches. 1981 in June – I beg your pardon, June of 1982, he spoke – no, take it would end up on the ash heap of history. It was a speech about the economic weaknesses in the Soviet Union. And there in that speech, which I did not write, I can say, he laid out the economic case against the Soviet Union. Big speech, but he meant it.

He was articulating the policy that he would then pursue. In March of 1983, he spoke in Florida, in Orlando, in what is now known as the Evil Empire speech. And he laid out the moral case against Soviet communism. Beware the lessons of history and the aggressive impulses of an evil empire. He called it what it was. June of 1987. And people freaked. And people freaked out. Yes, they did.

That went wild. Exactly. But the point I'm making is that these speeches were part of something that he was working on. They were – they represented what he was doing with his administration. Economic case against the Soviets. The moral case against the Soviets. By 1987, Gorbachev is in power. Brezhnev is gone. Chernenko is gone. Andropov is gone. Now, Gorbachev is in power. He's talking

about perestroika. And Reagan goes to Berlin and says, Mr. Gorbachev, if you're serious about this talk of perestroika, tear down this wall. Again, it's a speech people remember, but it was pointed. It was moving policy. It was an answer to what was happening in the Soviet Union. And then in some ways, my favorite speech, again, a speech I didn't write. In 1988, he goes to Moscow, Moscow Summit. The Cold War is effectively over. And declaring victory, he gives a beautiful speech at Moscow State University to the students, the children of the apparat, in which he describes the importance of freedom and talks about the power of, quote, unarmed truth. A beautiful speech. And it's a culmination of something.

It wasn't just a lovely moment that speechwriters produced. It arose from all eight years of Reagan's administration. That's the contrast I'd make. Those speeches, I would argue as a speechwriter, they were pretty darn good speeches. People responded to them at the time. Frankly, there was as much loathing of them as praise, but they arose from the eight-year effort that Ronald Reagan had in mind. Right. Four tentpoles, but not just the eight-year effort, but a lifetime of study and a lifetime of belief in these concepts, which he could feel in his gut. And I believe that President Obama is also feeling things from his gut, maybe not from a lifetime of study, but a lifetime of belief, of this sort of transnational vision.

It's the shining city on the hill as well, but it's all mirage. It's never been built. It is this chimera to which we are always compelled to march, shedding our baggage of individual freedom on the way with the assurance that when we finally get there to Shangri-La, everything will be perfect. That's what I hear.

I mean, I hear basic muscular realities in what Reagan was talking about, about economics and freedoms and Marxism and the rest of it. And in the president, I hear a lot of, I just see an enormous balloon filled with perfumed gas. In the interest of Glasnost, we have to engage in a little behind-the-show perestroika here

and pause for a second while we try to find rob and insert him into this the ricochet podcast and we've got rob long with us wonderful rob um rob we're talking actually to hillary clinton she called us and you've got a question go well i just want to know um where to send a check okay the the check i didn't know you were going to be a consultant but of course that, that is the big news nowadays, isn't it? At CPAC and the rest of it, people were blaming the consultants. It's almost like I'm setting up having one of them on. But do you think that's the problem with the party, Rob?

Is that consultancy is the bane that's doing it in? Well, I don't know. I mean, there's probably some, there's timidity in the message, I suppose. And that does often come from things that are focus groups do it fairly well. But, you know, you've got to run a national campaign. It's awfully hard to do when you're the candidate. You've been doing something else for a while. National campaigns are really difficult.

I mean, people forget that the republican nomination in two thousand twelve was decided by republican primary voters that's decided not not about a great peace in dc if anything uh... the republican party follow this tradition of nominating the next guy at work but we're much better shape coming up with you'll have a next guy uh... it's it's gonna be a uh... or gigantic real donnybrook and they're gonna be a lot of consultants in there too. But that's not the way it is.

I don't know how you're on a national campaign without help. The guy who seems the most bogriding fake is probably going to pay a price in the next four years. Do either of you guys get emails from some organization that set itself up as the Tea Party guys? I get them all the time. The most recent is launching a boycott against the increasingly left-leaning Fox News. Well, that's how it's done. When something disastrous happens and you have a real purge, you know, it's always that damn Joe Goldberg.

He's too left-wing. He's just fighting people. He's starting to re-other people out of business. The Tea Party, though, all the Tea Party mailings are pretty much hijacked by those very consultants, those very kind of political shakers and movers who are fundraisers. That's been true for a long time now. The Tea Party something, the Tea Party something else. They're all separate organizations, and all they really are mailing lists

to send to people to make them angry to send me $35 or become part of the Tea Party Steering Council Committee for Victory Fund. It's very gullible. People will send in a check for sometimes $1,000, and they'll get a certificate or a plaque or some little lapel pin, and they'll think, oh, I'm a member of the Tea Party. Well, that's not really the case. You seem to speak from great experience there.

$1,000, I'm sure you spent that money. Yeah, listen, if I get one more email from the Tea Party, I'm going to go broke. Hey, Rob, where are you at this very moment? I am on the freeway, Peter. I'm heading to Burbank. We shoot our show often for the first bunch of them. We're shooting on Fridays, which I don't really like, but especially because next Friday is Good Friday, which is a holiday.

So the studio is closed on Good Friday, which means we have to shoot that show on Thursday, which means everything moves up a day. So I'm coming in for an early reading of next week's show, and I'm shooting a show tonight. So it's going to be one of those weird schizophrenic days where I'm not quite sure what I'm doing. I'll just know that whatever it is I'm doing,

I'm doing it wrong and in the wrong place and the wrong people. Do you have notes on – go on, Peter. No, I was just going to say, Uncle Rob, may I offer you thanks on behalf of half a dozen college boys? So Peter's son is on spring break, and he came by with a bunch of his very tall friends, college boyfriends who they're all very tall and they're looking very fit and like they're about to break into some kind of very vigorous lumberjack song.

And so I took them around a little bit, and it was kind of an exciting day, because we had a fire. It was a very small transformer in the sound station. The sound station was like a thousand years old. And one blew up apparently, and there was flames and smoke, and so they could transform in an industrial

uh... you know location like a sound stage state uh... everybody arrived at uh... the local fire department that's the lot fire department the uh... union shop lawyers the you know lane kirkland everybody all you know the wobbly bill show up uh... and the smoke it cleared the guys walk around a little dust rags to make sure that no one's got any asbestos on their popcorn. And then we went back in, so we went back in, and it was kind of a press for time, so I couldn't really give them too much of a tour.

But I did show them what we have. Everybody who's ever been in show business knows it's called craft services. And craft services are the things you do for all the craft guilds meaning all everybody works on the set which includes the you know ironically the writer and the director and especially snacks like all the snacks the snack table and everybody i've never known it to fail that when you bring what we call a civilian into a movie set it doesn't really matter how complicated the set is if it's got a live gorilla or a giant airliner or a giant... Stop right there. Stop right there. You said live gorilla.

Hold that thought. Not to make any sort of relationship between live gorillas and our next guest. I just want you to hold that thought. Live gorilla. Hey, we've got Pat Cadell. You know Pat Cadell. He's the legendary public opinion pollster and a political film consultant and regarded by half the Ricochet audience as a live gorilla. We love him. He's here. He's the co-host of Fox News Campaign's Insider on FoxNews.com. Pat, welcome back to the podcast. Great. I'm sorry. I'm not going to have very much time. I've got some family. We have a lot of sick kids and stuff in my family.

So I can give you a couple minutes. It's going on. Okay, so tell us this. What does the Republican Party need to do? First of all, it needs to get honest with itself. That whitewash that was put out Monday, when I spoke at CPAC and caused some controversy because I accused the Republican consultants of a consultant lobbyist establishment complex that essentially was playing donors for marks, the grassroots for suckers, and basically inside dealing at a level that would probably violate certainly the spirit of the RICO Act and racketeering.

And there was a huge response from everyone but those consultants. And then Monday, Rance Freemus says, I had predicted CPAC produces whitewash. Now, what it did was, it was that in 19, 1970s, there was an article in Jerusalem Post which talked about there was a big controversy in Israel because both Likud and labor governments have been caught harming and violating the law with their detainees. And the Jerusalem Post ran a headline that I think sums up the RNC approach. It said, all are guilty, so none are responsible. No one was punished in Israel. And there will be, in this entire Whitewash, there's supposed to be an autopsy.

There is no autopsy. There's no discussion of what went wrong in this campaign except generalities. And then the self-flagellation. We've got to be more outreaching. We have to do it. Yes, and they browbeat themselves. And it's all about raising more money. But it was a total whitewash of what the corruption, the incompetence of the campaign, the RNC,

was exactly what was predictable. If the Republican Party wants to get back in the ballgame, to find a future, it needs to understand what it did wrong. And that route will then lead it to a question of what it ought to do. But right now, we are in self-denial because it's more important to protect the interest groups, the Gillespie's, the Roe's, and all of those people, and all of the people who ripped off the campaigns, a billion dollars wasted, including Lance Precipice, including the chairman and his chief of staff, who was one with Romney's political director, took out $152 million for that failed Election Day project, which their companies benefited from.

None of that is in any of this discussion. So, Pat, for a layman like me, this is Peter Robinson. You're talking about the consultants, the corruption, the self-dealing. All of that is very hard for a layman. I'm sitting in California. It's very hard for a layman to see and to grasp. So what's different? You broke into politics.

Well, you didn't break in, but you became well-known in the 1976 Carter campaign. Contrast the way politics ran in those days with what has happened with what happened last year. Very simple difference. Very simple. I can answer the question. Two things. One, there wasn't the kind of money.

There was no money in politics when I broke in, basically. You did politics if you were a consultant because you believed in it. Now you can make more money and more corruptly than you can on Wall Street. And it draws the same kind of people you would expect. And what they're all doing is self-dealing. The point is that the voters, the voters and the Republicans and conservatives do not get a real campaign. They get these people who don't care if they lose as long as they can control the arrangements and control the money. I can be as harsh as I can because it

is criminal nearly what is going on and nobody wants to talk about it. But what it has done is it has choked off the energy of new people in the grassroots in the Republican Party. And even good consultants are on the outside because all of this is about self-dealing. Okay, one more question then. Rob Long, we were chatting just because – yeah, we know you've got to run. So Rob is on the line as well. We were chatting before you came on. Rob said, well, now wait a minute.

I understand the point. There's huge money involved and so forth. But in 2012, Mitt Romney was chosen through a series of primaries in which the deciding votes were cast. All the votes were cast by Republican primary voters. Now, let's understand what happened. First of all, the right candidates,

the better candidates didn't run. He had a PAC operating for him. He super factored, did him, a super factor, did nothing, but Savage's opponents made no case, and Romney made no case for himself in the entire spring. And then the real thing that no one will ask Romney, when he claims in the spring after he was the apparent nominee and everything was over, and the Obama campaign went out to defy him, that was going to be a surprise. I mean, this guy had been attacked by Ted Kennedy on Bain. You don't think it's coming?

His consultants led by that incompetent, total incompetent, Stu Stevens, who are all lining their pockets. But let me tell you, they're all whining, we didn't have money because we couldn't get our general election money. In 2008, Romney wrote it through and spent $45 million in a hopeless and early disaster separate for president. The question we'll know about Romney is why didn't he write a check or at least even loan his campaign the money in the spring? So what could define itself? I don't know the answer to that. It tells you that he was not serious about running for president

if he had to risk anything, and no one has asked that question. The answer is the Republican Party got the worst candidate I think they could possibly imagine, because this guy didn't care to win. And with that, I've got to go. Okay, Pat, thank you very much. Uncharacteristically coy

about what he believes. Thank you, Pat. That's hard, stern stuff. Rob, are you still there? uncharacteristically coy about what he believes. Thank you for that. That's hard, stern stuff. Rob, are you still there? Yeah, you know, he's right. I mean, about most of it. Certainly he's right about Stu Stevens.

I said that to you, James, in January of 2012 in New Hampshire when we were doing the National Review thing together. Yeah, but it wasn't a twist of fate for a lot of money that got Romney the nomination. Really, look, it was true to form for the Republican primary process for the next guy to win. When did that not

happen? That always happens. That happened in 76, that happened in 80, that happened in 84, that happened in 88, that happened in 92. If it happened in 96, it happens, just what it does. So I don't think you can complain now that that was because he alone among winners in the end of a primary went negative. So did George W. Bush. I mean, you look back on it and it seems obvious to me that there were two kinds of people who were behind Romney. There were those who believed in him, believed in the man, and then there were those who said, you go to war with a candidate you have.

He is the most electable for a variety of reasons. One of the reasons that he was the most electable in the field was because the other people were simply not. We may have loved this aspect of them, but there was no way that Michelle Bachman was going to win. There was no way that Rick Santorum was going to win. You can't tell me that an electorate half, you know, 51% of whom goes for Barack Obama could be persuaded. There are a lot of people in the middle who had been tipped over to Santorum. That would have been the most absolutely, it would have been a blowout because they would have demonized him like you cannot.

But if you think the war on women stuff was hard on Romney, wait until they gear up and shoot that gun at Santorum. I'm trying hard to bite my tongue here because I've said it before and I'll say it again. I'll say it. I'll say it. I believe Rick Santorum might have won, might have been a better candidate than Romney. And let me tell you why. And let me tell you why. And let me tell you why.

No, well, I know that that's what people think. I beg your pardon. I know that that's what you think. And I know that that's what James thinks. There are other people who agree with me. Rick Santorum, I only need to make two points and then I will fall silent because I know that both of you think I'm crazy. And most of our listeners will think I'm crazy too.

One, Rick Santorum would have fought back and Mitt Romney virtually never did. Rick Santorum would not have permitted the other side to define him as Mitt Romney and his highly paid consultants did. Point one. That's not crazy. Point two, I grant that there may be craziness here. I know that this is – but point two is if Rick Santorum had been credited with the victory that he did actually achieve in Iowa on the night that he achieved it, you remember that the vote came in. They recalculated it and it was something like two weeks after the Iowa caucus. If Rick Santorum had had that momentum from that moment, a lot might have been different.

That's all. That's all. Peter, the idea that you— Hold on. Hold on. Hold on. Wait. Hold on.

Don't shout too much because the phone can't take it. Your phone can't take it. Go ahead. I know, but I'm also going out of range here, so unfortunately I'm going to have to drop my bomb and I might lose you. But the idea that Rick Santorum's great—the one thing that would have put him in the White House was an early announcement on Iowa is ludicrous. Lots of popular candidates, lots of winning nominees lose in Iowa. Iowa is not the great momentum launching pad that you think it is. But the problem with Rick Santorum, whether you agree with him or not,

is that he would need to fight back. You think they were tough on Mitt Romney? My God, they're going to be tough on him. No, actually, I don't think they were all that tough on Mitt Romney. I think they could have been much tougher on Mitt Romney. By the way, my point about Iowa. Go ahead, Go ahead. Go ahead.

The electorate in 2012, for whatever reason, is not as socially conservative and is turned off by the social conservatism of Rick Santorum. He lost Pennsylvania. He lost his seat. That's a big indicator. He did not lose his seat. He did not lose his seat by any more than Mitt Romney would have lost re-election as governor of Massachusetts if he, like Rick Santorum, had had the courage to run for re-election. Oh, give me a break. You cannot compare a loss to a hypothetical loss in the future and make them easy. Oh, absolutely you can. There's no doubt.

That's categorical. Mitt Romney didn't run because approval ratings were in the low 30s. He didn't have the guts to run. Wait, wait. So your entire argument is based on a hypothetical Rick Santorum win, a hypothetical Mitt Romney loss in Massachusetts, and an entirely hypothetical mousetrap of an announcement in Iowa?

That's it? That's your big... How about the actual demographics of the voters in 2012? How about that? How about who they voted for? The most pro-life, pro-gay president in American history. And you're suggesting that, no, no, no, an anti-abortion, anti-gay president, it would have won. There's just no logic there.

I think he might have. I'm on Rob's side. He might have fought. Let me just explain one point, though, really quickly. I mean, this is just my argument about Iowa is not necessarily that it would have launched Rick Santorum, although I think that it would have helped. But my I should have said this. My argument about Iowa is that we know four years ago when Mitt Romney lost Iowa, he was done. Four years ago, it was Huckabee who defeated him in Iowa. So my argument instead is

that my argument about Iowa instead is that it might have done some good for Rick Santorum. Rick Santorum would have been a fighting candidate, but it would have opened the field. It would have moved Mitt Romney out of the way, I think. But is it all hypothetical? Of course it's hypothetical. I'm arguing about what might have been. He would have fought back, I agree, but he would have fought back the charges

that he wanted to put gay people in prison camps like Cuba. And so that's the message of the day. You know, the message is Rick Santorum has come out and denied a specious allegation, which we're now planting once again in the American mind and reminding you that he denies it. He could have finally won. He was up against he was up against two headwinds, one of which was the economic platform that was more detailed than Mitt Romney's. That's true. I believe his middle class and working class economic message would have been very, very popular. But his social view, out of his own mouth, would have doomed him. I feel like I could not vote for Rick Santorum. He is too extreme.

More to the point is that we're having an argument now about the role of the so cons in the party right yeah if rick santorum had been the candidate and had lost decisively mondale style there would not be an argument about whether or not about the role of the social cons in the in the party there would have been a a general agreement that they had to go so i i mean i think he would have doomed that wing for four years so so I don't think they have to go. I'm not saying – no, I'm not saying – no, I don't think they do. Rick Santorum was in the primary. He lost. I'm sorry.

I didn't hear that. Well, Rick Santorum was in the primary. They should – everyone should be in the primary. I don't believe in a litmus test. He should run. And he ran and he lost. But he didn't lose because he was tricked or fooled or somehow swindled. He lost because Republican primary voters did not believe, for whatever reason, that he should be the nominee. And it wasn't a bunch of guys in Washington.

I mean, look, I'm not defending the guys in Washington. They're terrible. Excuse me, this is a criminal. They lie in their pocket. So what do we think? What do we make about what Pat Cadell called the whitewash, the RNC's report about what the Republican Party needs to do? Reince Priebus' big report that was issued, what was it, Monday or so? I think he's primarily right. I think he's correct. It does seem like a whitewash. I haven't read the whole thing, but it does seem like carefully calibrated

to flagellate only those things that everyone's already agreed were failures, and to then castigate the voter as if it's the voter's fault, and to completely ignore the new and different and better ways to raise money and spend money for a campaign. I think he's right about that. James? Well, I'm still chewing and digesting. I think you do have a problem when you're trying to rebrand a party and reach that younger demographic. And right there in the middle of GOP is the

word old. Hey, fellas, I think you're old. I have to go to my car now. Hey, wait a minute. Live gorilla. Live gorilla. The only thing they care about is the snacks. It's a snack table.

You have an entire movie star, a population of movie stars, and all people only care about is the snack table. Thank you, Uncle Rob. And I can confirm that because Pedro got back yesterday and said, oh my, how was Warner Brothers?

The food was unbearable. See you fellas. All right, Rob. Peter, I have to ask you. There's something else that's been controversial this week. If you care to discuss these things, your sons, do they play video games? Not much. Never in my presence. I have surprised them playing video games a couple of times.

I made a decision way, way back when the kids were little. My youngest son is 16 now. So my boys are, I don't have little kids around anymore. Well, I have a daughter who's 11. In any event, PlayStation, what is the Xbox, all of that? I thought to myself, no, those things are just too alluring. I will not permit them in the house. And we never have had them in the house. So as you know, and in those days when I made this big daddy decision, the kind of video games that you could play on desktop computers were quite primitive, very primitive by comparison with what you could play on the Xbox. Now, as computer power has become faster and they've been able to improve the video games on computers.

But generally speaking, they don't accept that at their friends' houses. In fact, I think that may be one reason they go to their friends' houses. Where are you going with this? I mean, my boys are just American kids. I try to stamp it out, but I'm sure they play those video games anyway. Well, there was a piece, I believe in the Daily News, one of those New York papers, that was saying that the Newton shooter had a morbid fascination with these games and had immense spreadsheets where he kept track of all his records and kills.

And they described the anal retentive detail that he used to this game to suggest that this was a contributing factor. And our friend Hugh Hewitt spent an entire hour on the radio saying that perhaps this is the sort of thing that a jury should decide. Approximate cause, that video games, violent video games were approximate cause of this guy going off. And, you know, I haven't had the chance to talk to Hugh about it. I wish I had because I think this is a very, very dangerous road down which to go. Now, when you talk about computer games of 10, 15 years ago, not having the computational power, that's true. Do they have the graphics that they have nowadays? No, they don't. But they were blaming Columbine on Doom. They were blaming all sorts of things on what they, you know, some expert called a murder simulation program.

Last year, 100, the top 10 games, which of which were first-person shooters of some variety or the other, sold 160 million units. That's a lot. Wait a minute. How do they even sell them anymore, James? You're not talking about DVDs. Aren't they all sold online? What does it mean to sell? Really?

Well, some of them are sometimes for an Xbox. Or you sell 160 million licenses? I don't even understand how the business model works. I mean, for example, you can go to the store and you can buy Call of Duty. You can go online with Steam and download the game and play it that way. There's a variety. There are 160 million units of these various games. You know what?

This is a really rich area for discussion and debate. And I haven't even begun to think it through. But I can tell you that, oh, it may be even eight or nine years ago now, I got in a big fight on the air with Virginia Postrel. Because I had just finished reading Judge Bork's – I believe it was Slouching Toward Gomorrah. I believe it was that book. If not, it was the book that preceded it. And he has a chapter in that book devoted to censorship, the constitutionality of censorship and the great loss to the nation that the Warren court made censorship virtually untenable. And there are all kinds of things in life that would probably be better and that all reasonable people could agree have no inherent value, largely pornography. As you know, you have to install dozens of dollars worth of filters on your computer before you give it to a kid because they're – along with all the marvels that you can access on the internet, there is just a constant sewage flowing through the thing as well, right? And I would actually – I would be open to the idea that if the power of the computer

enabled graphics that are so lifelike, so visually compelling that it does upset disturbed individuals, I'd be open to the argument that maybe that stuff should be illegal. Woo! Yes. Now, if I have the feeling that if Rob were still on the line instead of descending into the San Fernando Valley, he'd say, Peter, once again, twice in one day, you're categorically insane. Well, and I would join the condemnatory chorus with glee. Categorically? the condemnatory chorus with glee because um if that's if that's the case then we'd best ban the first half hour of saving private ryan which is more horrifying graphic immersive and and powerful

than any moment i've ever experienced in a video game period can't we draw distinctions can't we say that certain things tend – I don't know. I'm talking out loud now. I'm just thinking out loud. This is very rough draft thinking. Can't we say certain – can't we just know? Can't we say certain kinds of – I mean there's a difference between Venus de Milo who's naked and what you'll get, what we know we'll get if we type Venus de Milo into Google Images, right? Well, you get amputee porn is what you get.

Disgusting. Right. All right. It's not categorically insane to wish that didn't exist, is it? To wish it didn't exist? No. And the moves that some have made to create a subdomain, just to create a, shall we say, the.xxx where everything has to go, which would make it easier for people to avoid it. Not impossible because you can't. Okay. so here uh very good very good very good so

would you support what rudy giuliani did in new york rudy giuliani as i understand the process he looked over the legal regime and said i'm not going to be able to ban these porn shops but i do have the legal power to move them and so he shoved them out of the middle of New York, Manhattan Island, Times Square, 42nd Street, off to the perimeters. He got got them out of the middle of Manhattan. Now, that was censorship of a kind. It was it was containing and fencing off, setting aside so that it didn't interrupt the lives of most people, of as many people, a certain kind of commercial enterprise.

Would you have been in favor? Was that categorically insane? I am not opposed to using zoning for things like that. And this will make – Fred Cole is typing at this very moment and I know that the libertarians on the site would be appalled by this, by using zoning for social purposes. If we want to have the argument about whether or not we should have zoning, let's have it. But as long as we have it, it's there for certain reasons. And those, you know, I'm giving you the theoretical idea here that the people speak through their

representatives and the representatives then issue these things, which say we don't want a tallow rendering factory next to your house. You can't open a liquor store, you know, across maturity. There's all kinds of variations here. So, yes. What we've established is you're comfortable with the concept of zoning, not with the concept of censorship. But if I can devise zoning, if I can use the term zoning to accomplish what I want to, instead of using the term censorship, I can bring James Lilacs along with me. Well, there's a difference here. You're not forbidding access to these things.

You're simply saying that you've got to go across town as opposed to this. And so you'd be willing to set up zones on the internet, that triple X site? That's what I just said. Got it. If you have a triple X domain or you have a rating system that requires some parental input, which they have now and it's inefficacious. But those things, no. I don't see how you can say that we should attempt to build a neighborhood for the naughty things online that doesn't restrict anybody's ability to go find it, just like zoning.

What did they do with Times Square? What they did with Times Square was they completely revitalized the place. They brought it out of this taxi driver era filth hole it was. I remember 42nd Street. People – Yeah. Yeah. Nostalgia about the grindhouses and the porn.

It was an awful, awful, awful place. It just was. And now it's corporate and Disney-fied. It's safe and you can walk around. Would you argue that important speech was suppressed in America of the 50s because of censorship laws? Yes, I would. You would? Examples?

I would say that without particular resort to examples because if you had laws that said that Henry Miller, for example, cannot be published, that the same idea that Lady Chatterley's lover was pornography before, that Lenny Bruce is going to be busted for saying the naughty words on stage. Do I wish that these things actually had been – do I wish that the floodgates had been opened? No. Okay. There we agree. There we agree. That's the important point.

There we agree. Because a coarsening of culture came about when the floodgates were opened and the people themselves who lacked the artistic integrity or the intellectual vivacity or the artistic purpose of all the people who were doing these things before came in behind it and said alright, they rubbed their hands and said yeehaw, it's smut time and it's the

four letter F words in the movies. All of that stuff, of course, in American society but the only way, however, to have stopped that was back in those old days to really put the hammer down and keep it there. And I'm going to – Oh, you think that's the only way? You think it's – well, OK.

I'm going to earn the side of free expression. And this is where it got us. You're going too far. And I'd like the example to stand as to the dangers of not having any standards. But the other alternative is to have government going around and banning books because it has human relations. Oh, I don't think – no, no, no. That's a false choice. They're – OK.

We're running out of time. But so I won't – How convenient. Yes, exactly. Exactly. James, I'm sorry. You're out of time. However, I have 30 more seconds. No. But, exactly. Exactly. James, I'm sorry. You're out of time. However, I have 30 more seconds.

No. But back to video games. But I mean, this all goes back to what we were saying about video games. And this is why I'm saying just as you to ban literature in the 50s because of a salacious nature to ban video games now or to regulate them or to impose legal standards like you was talking about. Because the minute you take one of these things to a court and the jury says, oh my gosh, these guys made $300 million a year on this game, this poor family, let's give them $20 million. The minute you start to do that, then game writers, game designers start to think in the back of their heads, am I going to get sued for this? And they start to self-censor. Isn't that a good thing? So if you start to apply that standard to video games because 160 million units, one or

two people disturbed, reacted in an entirely inappropriate way that was never meant to strike any rational human being, then you've had the same thing where you're looking at art and saying art is dangerous because art strikes so...

No, no, no. That's a false – I don't think so. I think you could – How so? No, no, no. I just disagree. I believe that we're capable of making careful distinctions. And if Lady Chatterjee's lover is banned for three or four years before the legal regime realizes that was a mistake, so be it. There will be a little bit of sloppiness around the edges. But to say that either you ban Lenny Bruce or you permit every piece of garbage and dangerous

junk on the internet because it is just beyond us, we can land men on the moon, we can enact Obamacare, but we can't draw any kinds of distinctions that would protect ordinary people from the garbage on the internet is just untrue. I just don't buy it. The problem right now is the legal regime, which is rigid and doesn't permit us to make, go ahead. But you said protect people on the internet. What do you mean by that? I mean that I don't want my 11 year old-old daughter, as has happened a couple of times, to be typing away innocently and have horrible lurid images come up. I also mean, frankly – I think I mean this. Again, I'm talking out – I'm thinking out loud here.

So I wouldn't want anybody to say, Robinson, you go to the ninth ring of purgatory because of this. Maybe I would, but I haven't decided it yet. But there is this question of externalities. There is a, you refer to it yourself, your term was the coarsening of culture. It cheapens the entire culture for all of us, if large numbers of people, even if not James, even if not the net, even if not me, even if not my daughter, but if in large numbers of people become addicted to this or frequent viewers of the garbage that's on the internet.

It cheapens it for all of us, and I'm not sure that all of us should have to pay that price. I'm not sure. I agree. You do? Well, I agree in the sense that we – I'm done. It would be better if it wasn't happening. You get the last word.

I'm just thinking about what's required to do it. Like I said, when I started this, it was about video games because this is one of those things It would be better if it wasn't happening. I'm just thinking about what's required to do it. Like I said, when I started this, it was about video games because this is one of those things where people will actually want to constrain a form of art and entertainment without thinking about how this can apply to nearly everything else that we enjoy. Because most people don't understand what these things are. They don't understand what goes on in them. They just, they, they hear violent first person shooters and they think about nerds in the basement,

which is often the case and, uh, you know, and say, fine, I don't get it. I don't do it. Let's ban it.

And that's one of the things that always comes back to bite you because then you find that something else that you like has been demonized and has been, you know, but no, it, I'm – had too much coffee here and neither of us have really conclusively stated anything except there's probably enough internal inconsistencies of what I'm saying to aggravate everybody in the chat room. I have to say I enjoy this because it's something where neither one of us has actually thought our way through to final positions. And there's a certain canned quality even among friends when we're – I mean Rob has his positions. I have my positions on the social issues. Lord knows I've known Rob long enough to understand that I'm not going to move him and he knows the same of me.

I mean it's important to have those discussions too. But there's a certain fun about – there's a certain fun about looseness when neither one of us is really – we're thinking it through. We're thinking it through out loud. I throughout loud i enjoyed it well so did i and i'm also being a great hypocrite here because i'm i'm advocating for public behavior that is different than private conversation sometimes i've said some of those words that i don't want to see in a billboard and explaining why that hypocrisy is actually defensible to some people i still i still maintain in my lifetime i will see the F word on a billboard.

It's going to happen. Oh, without a doubt. Oh, I think that's without a doubt. Just, and, you know, it's always, eventually you're going to end up with these sybaritic boomers who loved their maranjata weed and margarita life in the 60s and 70s.

You're going to find themselves old withered people staring out at a society that is crass and dumb and base and ugly. And if one in ten of them realizes, you know, I did my part getting it all going by just saying that everything had to be out there and open,

if one in ten of them reaches that realization, I'll be a happy man. Anyway, all right. I'm off to – James, this is now – you have just – pity Rob isn't on the line because you've just sketched out a brilliant concept for a new sitcom, which is Boomer Nursing Home. Okay. If it could be done with a certain amount of brutal honesty as opposed to some sodden nostalgia, that would be absolutely wonderful.

It ran on cable. That would be great. But, you know, the interesting thing is that cable, just before we wrap up here, is the place where all of the interesting television shows that I've ever seen have been on. And they're all made possible because the broadcast regulations are not in place. So they can play around the edges with things. And the best shows are the ones that take that license and don't exploit it, but just use it sort of as a, you have the feeling when you're watching some of these shows because it's not network that something might happen or

something might be said that is beyond parameters. And even if they don't say it, it's enough to give the show an extra zing. Fine, fine. Very good. Wonderful. But now that you've offered an example, I have to offer at least a counterexample to think over. Ponder. The golden age of Hollywood coincided with the Hayes office. The best pictures ever made in America were made under a time of, by the way, it's important to note, not government-imposed censorship, but industry self-imposed censorship. And you and I both know, and Rob knows this too,

because all three of us are writers, that writers need, you need your canvas. You need a deadline, you need the format, and you also need rules about what is and isn't permissible. It's a kind of artistic grammar, what you may do and what you may not do. At some level, I would contend and I argue that you know it, even if you don't want to apply it to the question of censorship. At some level, it liberates the creative people, writers is what I'm talking about now essentially, it liberates them to have limits on what they may and may not do. And I just argue or I can come back with you and then I really will shut up because now we're going long and I'm just – I'm getting the last words which I foreswore a moment ago and now I'm taking it back.

But the cable stuff, I've downloaded it. Scott Emmerget, Blue Yeti has said to me, oh, you've got to watch this HBO production and that HBO production and so forth. So now when I take a long plane ride back from the East Coast, on the way to the East Coast, I have enough energy to get some work done. But when I'm coming back, I'm usually too tired. And so I've been watching – what was the one, the set in the West? Deadwood. Deadwood. And I went through all of Deadwood, and I'm watching The Wire.

And I have to tell you, James, both of those shows would have been stronger, I believe, not if all the bad language were eliminated, but at least half of it is there, at least half of it is there, purely to be sensational. And it's just, they'd have been stronger if they'd exercised more restraint, if there had been some form of censorship, even self-censorship at work in those productions. Now you have the last word and we've got to wrap. I understand what you're saying. And Al Swearingen, yes, Al cusses an awful lot.

And there's a Shakespearean quality to that, which I think is a little bit over the top, but it comes to define the character quite nicely. Now, you mentioned about censorship in the Hayes office. That's true. Censorship does impose its restrictions. If you are forced to make a love in a straitjacket, you come up with some interesting moves. Prior to the Hayes office, I don't think that the movies that they were making that had elements that they wanted to suppress were that good. Hedy Lamarr swimming around naked in a German movie, you know, that's not going to bring the American morals down. But when they clamped down on movies, what they created for at least five or six years was an anodyne series of stuff that really nobody wants to watch that much. The movies of the mid-30s, post-Hays, not that great.

What really came about and when the American movie flourished in the late 30s and the 40s and the early 50s as a dynamic genre may have had something to do with the fact that there was the Hays office, may have had something to do with the fact that there was the Hayes office, may have had something to do with the fact that there were other organizations that imposed by implication a certain set of morality and standards on these films. And yes, it created great art. It created a great American vernacular. However, what it did was to create this world that we admire and love so much now that was not a particularly realistic example of what the culture really was like. It was an ideal. It was a reflection of our better selves. I agree to that. And I think that it's good that we have a culture that is a

reflection of our better selves. But in so many ways, so many of those movies are absolute fantasy. And it's a wonderful fantasy that I wish was true, but often wasn't the case. And you can say that you look back at that and you see a strong, confident American culture. Yes, you do. You also see George getting your bags on your train for you, sir.

The best years of our lives was a true picture, James. That's a true picture. There's great truth about American life there. There are dozens, if not hundreds of examples, contrary to everything that I've just said. I agree with that, but I'm just saying the overall nature of what they produced

under that desire to self-censor and to deal with external censorship forces, yes, it created great art, but there's a difference between that and something that is, you know, without those fears, without that censorship, is going to have a different expression. And sometimes that's going to be as true to what the culture is and says as much about us as what the censored films say about us and what we want to be true. I'm not arguing. I'm not saying let everything go and let Bob Guccione stagger up there and say everybody take off your clothes, get out the Crisco,

and let's have a Roman orgy. That's crap. I am saying, however, that there is... By the way, under the Robinson regime, crap is forbidden. The word crap is forbidden. And hey, James, I beg you to forgive me, but I've got to go. We've got to go too. I have a call. Okay, go ahead. I don't use the word crap is forbidden. And hey, James, I beg you to forgive me, but I've got to go. We got to go too. I have a call. I have, okay, go ahead. I don't use the word crap. I use the

German word crap. Oh, that's permissible. That's high art. We thank our guests. We thank Hillsdale College, of course, and their new free online course in the Constitutional Western Heritage Vision at ricochet.com slash Hillsdale and sign up today. Goodbye to Rob out there somewhere. Goodbye, Peter. It's been lots of fun and we'll see everybody in the comments at ricochet.com. Next week and sign up today. Goodbye to Rob out there somewhere. Goodbye, Peter. It's been lots of fun. And we'll see everybody in the comments at Ricochet.com. Next week, James. Thanks. Bye. Субтитры сделал DimaTorzok Ricochet. Join the conversation. Sorry about that.