The Ricochet Podcast - Brainless

Episode Date: September 25, 2014

This week, we discuss a bevy of not so smart moments (including one from the producer of this show — more about that in a moment), from the former governor of a large western state, to Ferguson, Missouri, a really stupid salute, the current foreign and climate policies of a large western super power, and pervasive attitudes by large swaths of the population. Luckily, we’re blessed with a super... Source

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Here we go. Three, two, one. Activate program. More than our share of the nattering nabobs of negativism. Well, I'm not a crook. I'll never tell a lie. But I am not a bully. I'm the king of the nattering nabobs of negativism. Well, I'm not a crook. I'll never tell a lie. But I am not a bully. I'm the king of the world!

Mr. Gorbachev, tear down this wall. It's the Ricochet Podcast with Peter Robinson and Rob Lawn. I'm James Lilacs and our guest today is Jason Reilly from the Wall Street Journal to talk about his new book. And we'll be talking about ISIS, Holder, Sarah Palin, and why we love her, or do we? Let's have ourselves a podcast. There you go again. Encounter Books is also our sponsor. And for 15% off any title, go to encounterbooks.com and use the coupon code RICOSHET at your checkout. This week's featured title is Making David into Goliath, How the World Turned Against Israel by Joshua Moravchik. And as long as I'm on a roll, let's have three spots in a row. Here's Rob Long to tell you why you should sign up for Ricochet. Well, no, you're lucky. It isn't Rob Long to tell you that anymore.

If you are listening to this and you are a Ricochet member, we are pleased and happy to have you with us. I'd like to remind you if you're a Ricochet member, you should sign up in the Superfeed. Get all the podcasts. There's a million podcasts, a million more coming. They're all great. You get to talk in conversation. You get to interact with our contributors and members, all that stuff. You've heard me say it.

You can go to Ricochet.com and join if you're not a member. Why should you be a member? Don't take it from me. Take it from one of our own Ricochet members. We've got two member pitches this week. Make the case as to why you should join us at Ricochet. Hello, this is Reckless Benjamin, a.k.a. Garrett Snaggert, but for promotional purposes, I guess you could just use my ricochet handle.

Why do I love Ricochet? Well, it is because it is the best two-way street on a very crowded superhighway called the Internet. it. It is a one-stop shop for fun, smart, informative commentary, but it's also a place where you can feel like you're not a voice crying out alone in the wilderness. There are others like you, and it's a place to use as a sounding board and test your own ideas, hone them like a whetstone, hone them on a whetstone and make them even better. So I love it and I hope it grows and brings in more folks who have a diverse set of opinions on the right because that's what makes us better, mixing it up and putting the cream rose at the top of the pail. Take care.

Bye. You know, that was a great pitch. I really did like that idea. But I also want to remind people that there are three tiers of membership. There's, of course, the Sainted Calvin Coolidge level, which are my favorite president. And that's sort of the basic entry level. We were pleased to have you at course, the highest level. There could be no higher level. It is the highest level possible, the Ronald Reagan level. We'd like to thank for Ghost of Sky for making that pitch and for saving me from saying once again, please join Ricochet. We'd also like to thank our newest Thatcher, Mrs. Thatcher level members, Clandestine, Nick Krinsky, Sunny USA, D.N. Levy, Coniston, Gary M, Merrimsal, and Scarf. Thank you very much for joining. Thank you very much for being Ricochet members along with the rest of us. And if you're listening and you're not a member, what are you waiting for?

Join Ricochet today. So, fellas, what I liked about that, of course, was that they kind of got it, which is the conversation part of it, and the member fee part of it, and the comments part of it, which I think is the whole trick of Ricochet, what we're trying to do here. But there were three things that always set off the comments section in the old days. And one of them was Sarah Palin. Remember that? Right. Sarah Palin discussed 300 comments.

Yeah. And, and, and, and she's kind of not there anymore. Right. I mean, we,

I don't think I has, has anybody seen a Sarah Palin post in a year? No, not really. I, I, I think ever since she divorced her husband and had a gay marriage that Palin post in a year? No, not really. Um, I, I, I think ever since she divorced her husband and had a gay marriage that

she's fallen out. Yeah. Sarah Palin's Sarah Palin's gay marriage was the poet. I think 948 million comments at this point before it got threaded, crashed seven servers. No, I, I think that,

uh, that the, the enthusiasm for her has not disappeared. People still love her, but there just seems to be no reason to consider her to be particularly relevant at this moment. What has she done? As opposed to us who sit here and talk, what has she done? But what is interesting, though, is that she is – I read she is – she's stumping. She's stumping along with a lot of names.

She's stumping along with Ted Cruz. She's stumping along with a few others. She's stumping in – I believe she's stumping in Kansas. Ted Cruz was stumping in New Hampshire for Scott Brown. A lot of those guys, a lot of – I'm not lumping Sarah Palin together with Ted Cruz. But a lot of those people were criticized early on for being sort of out for themselves and, you know, maybe too conservative and polarizing. But it turns out that a lot of those names, those sort of bold-faced Republican names, the ones that get sometimes the true believers excited, are really being team players. Am I the only one who feels that way? Sorry, I'm just – Sarah Palin to Ted Cruz.

I know. I'm sorry. I shouldn't have done that. It's early in the morning and I'm feeling a little groggy. We've got rain here in California. So my brain is working somehow after 88 days of beautiful sunshine. I wake up, it's raining, and I can't think. So Sarah Palin – Ted Cruz is a team player?

You know, I do believe that. If you look at his campaign schedule for the Senate, and you look at the people he's campaigning for around the country, he did a couple of events for Scott Brown in New Hampshire. He's campaigning for, you know, Scott Brown wins in New Hampshire. You know, Republican Senator Scott Brown from New Hampshire. He's campaigning for, you know, if Scott Brown wins in New Hampshire, you know, Republican Senator Scott Brown from New Hampshire and Republican Senator Ted Cruz from Texas are going to lock horns in the Senate. They're not going to agree. I mean, Scott Brown's kind of a squishy rhino, and Ted Cruz is not. But he's being a good Republican. He's being a good team player,

and a lot of those, the rap on a lot of those people has been, they're not, they don't do that, and I feel like, I don't know, just because I read this last week, and I wanted to bring it up.

Okay, I would just like to point out that if we are a little low on comments, you've done a good job of stirring some up. That's Rob Long, ladies and gentlemen. He just attacked Sarah Palin as an ineffective has-been and has praised Ted Cruz as useful, moderate, hardworking, a real go-along-to-get-along kind of guy. That's Rob. And why don't you toss in there, Rob, that Ayn Rand is a lousy writer too. I don't care.

He is. I mean, I agree with that. I mean, so far I seem to be doing really, really well today. Well, let's talk about some other great writers, including Barack Obama's speech writers, who felt that it was necessary when the president goes to the UN to spend a great deal of time reassuring everybody that we know that we're not bombing ISIS from the position of we're a perfect culture and they're not. America has troubles, and it's very important that everybody consider our actions in the Middle East like the speech that he gave the other day that, you know, we're going to we have to do something about ISIS. And then the other half of it was, why are you also sad? We've got great universities and lots of jobs.

He can't simply give a focused speech on this without doing something that either tries to puff up his own record or apologize to the world for the fact that America exists in the first place. These are great, interesting issues, and we should bring in our guest to talk about them. Jason Riley. He's a member of the Wall Street Journal Editorial Board. Joined the paper in 94 as a copy reader, worked his way up through the internet section, and became a senior editorial page writer in March 2000 and a member of the editorial board in 2005.

His latest book, Please Stop Helping Us, How Liberals Make It Harder for Blacks to Succeed. Jason, Peter Robinson, thanks for joining us. Thank you. I don't know. It's unclear quite what you heard and what you didn't hear. But James Lilacs just raised the topic of Barack Obama's speech to the United Nations in which the president of the United States made it clear that we were going to go after ISIS, but not without a great deal of hand-wringing and soul-searching about our own faults first, particularly what happened in Ferguson. Did you catch that speech, and what did you make of it, Jason?

The reference to Ferguson? Yes. Well, I thought it was inappropriate i mean i i i think that uh uh what is driving tensions between black communities and uh the police department is not race or ethnicity it's black crime rates it's the fact that blacks commit a disproportionate amount of violent crime in this country, most of which, of course, is directed at other blacks. And, you know, cops are not in these communities to shoot blacks. By and large, they're in these communities to keep blacks from shooting one another,

sadly, if the crime stats are any indication. And for their troubles, it looks like cops are now getting compared to terrorists by the President of the United States. I think it's outrageous. Jason, so since Ferguson broke, you've been more or less everywhere. The Wall Street Journal, Fox, I've seen you, in fact, I've seen clips of you on television, on YouTube. Could I just ask, it would seem to me that a lot of people are holding you up as a hero, the man with the bravery to say what needs to be said. But what is it costing you? What kinds of attacks are you coming under?

Well, it's a mixture i mean you you get uh... the the i'd like to say that black conservatives in particular get put on the couch uh... by the left you know uh... justice uh... justice scalia it's simply wrong as far as the left is concerned and maybe evil

but justice thomas is a fellow and uncle tom self-hating is concerned and maybe evil. But Justice Thomas is a fellow, an Uncle Tom, self-hating. He gets psychoanalyzed. And so part of the reaction to the things I've been saying are along those lines. And I think that's a way for someone on the left

to dodge the argument I'm making. If you can dismiss someone as mentally unstable, you don't need to address what they're actually saying. But, you know, a lot of the other reaction, even on the left, when you talk to the black rank and file, it's a good response. It's a positive response. I think a lot of what I'm saying, a lot of what I write about in my book resonates with black people in communities, black ministers, black parents trying to raise

their kids, keep them on the straight and narrow. A lot of it is very commonsensical, the stuff Bill Cosby was saying a few years back. But it is controversial in the sense that liberal elites in particular don't want to talk about black behavior. They want to talk about white behavior as an all-purpose explanation for these bad black outcomes. And when you get off of that narrative that racism is the cause

of so much that we see in the black community that's going wrong, they push back. They push back very hard. Jason, Peter has one more question. Rob wants to get in in a moment. Rob Long.

I had thought, this is my own little theory – for 25 years that sooner or later, we would see a flowering of African-American conservatives, that Tom Sowell would not be alone, that Justice Thomas – in all this great nation, you can name three, four, five perhaps African-American conservatives who speak and write and present their views in public. And it has not happened until you came along, but you're only one. Are we going to have another 25 years in which it's Jason Reilly and two or three others, or do you sense that there's a change, that there's an openness, that there's a courage among young African Americans? Well, I hope it's not another 25 years. One of the reasons I wrote the book is because I think a new generation, a younger generation of blacks needs to be making these arguments for a younger generation of readers. And you're right, we have had your Tom Foles, your Shelby Steele, your Walter Williams out there. And I wrote the book partly at the urging of those guys. But my thinking at first was that they've been saying this stuff for decades. They're still right.

They say it more eloquently than I ever could, so why do I need to be around this path? But you're right. There have not been a lot of young blacks willing to pick up the baton, so to speak, and keep this going. And that's unfortunate because the arguments still need to be made, and you still have a left out there, a political left, a civil rights leadership, steering blacks down the wrong path. I mean, if anything, the Jesse Jacksons and the Al Sharptons have gained ground. I mean, Al Sharpton's got his own TV show now on NBC. I mean, if you want to go out there and talk about how white racism is an all-purpose explanation for black outcomes, you get your own TV show. Laptop. Check. Spanner. Check. Screwdriver. Check. A career built around me? Check.

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personal responsibility. Well, you don't get your own TV show. Hey, Jason, it's Rob Long. And I have to apologize to you. It kind of refers a little bit to what Peter just said. You and I were at the same table on Monday night at the commentary dinner. And I realized that on my way out, as I was walking away, it never occurred to me that you were that Jason Riley because you were so young. And I suppose, I just assumed

that Jason Riley, who wrote the book, please stop helping us. Just to make sure everybody hears the title. We'll put the link in the notes, but please stop helping us. How Liberals Make It Harder for Blacks to Succeed. I assumed that the author of that book was an older – had to be older. So let me ask you something. Now, does it – I mean we've talked a lot about liberals, and of course they're – it's an endless topic. But talk a little bit about conservatives. I mean does it make you a little bit uncomfortable when conservatives, white conservatives especially, fully embrace or totally embrace your argument? I mean, I know in the old days, it always seemed like there was some kind of white sheriff saying, see, this is what I've been saying.

How do you thread that needle? As an African-American conservative thinker, writer, speaker, how do you make it clear that there's still much to be done, not only in sort of reforming whatever our gigantic welfare state is, but reforming our whole community? And as the white underclass looks more like the black underclass, as Charles Murray has shown us, what what are the larger broader argument you make that american side in general well i i i don't think uh... it's it's particularly useful to spend too much time worrying about uh... unfavorite types sharing your viewpoint i mean if you believe and what you're saying if you believe that these are the arguments that need to be made

uh... i think you just don't make them and then let the chips fall uh... and that that sort of my my attitude i mean i i don't uh... denied that uh... racism still at the at the america and i don't expect to uh... uh... to live to be a bank which in america frankly uh... but uh... that different from saying that what residual racism we have today is an all-purpose explanation for these bad black outcomes.

And that's the point I make in the book. I mean, the general argument is that blacks ultimately have to help themselves by developing the same habits and attitudes and behaviors that other groups in America had to develop in order to rise socioeconomically. And to the extent that a government program or policy, however well-intentioned, interferes with that self-development, it's doing more harm than good. And I think there are a lot of good intentions out there on the left, have been for some time, and I think a lot of them were manifest in these great society programs intended to help.

But to the extent, again, that they've interfered with a group's self-development, they're not helping. Trying to replace a father in the home with a government check is not helpful. It does not encourage proper responsible childaring, or even childbearing. Open-ended welfare benefits may seem sympathetic, but they're not helping a group develop a work ethic, which is ultimately what that group needs to develop in order to rise. So, you know, the book is an attempt to push back at some of this altruism and rethink how we go about helping the black underclass because clearly what we're doing isn't working. And I thought the 50th anniversary of the Great Society

was an opportunity to point that out. Well, one more question. You say in the book the black crime rate in 1960 was lower than it is today. And of course, you ask the question, was there less racism or less poverty in 1960? And the answer obviously is no. So the question is not so much whether these well-intentioned programs have slowed development, but whether they have reversed it. Yes, that is. is and I and I would

contrast that statistic with another one as late as 1960 two out of three black children in America grew up in two-parent homes today more than 70% do not and in some of these inner cities it's as high as 80 or 90 percent. And I think that is the real legacy of great society to me, is the breakdown of the black family. And I think you can point to trends in out-of-wedlock births and the various bad outcomes we know associated with absent fathers, whether it's drug use, involvement with the criminal justice system, school dropout rates, all manner of bad things happen when dads aren't around. And that's what we've seen in these black communities, in the ghettos. No sense of what it means to be a man,

no sense of what it means to be black. And that is being manifest in the high levels of violence that we see and attitudes towards law enforcement. I think it's rooted in the breakdown of the family, and I point to the outcome in black America prior to the Great Society. You know, the black family was in much better shape coming out of slavery, coming out of Reconstruction, coming out of Jim Crow. But it has not survived the Great Society attempt to help left. Jason's book is Please Stop Helping Us, How Liberals Make It Harder for Blacks to Succeed. Jason, why, excuse me, you said something a moment ago that in the inner city there's no sense of what it means to be black.

Explain that. What do you mean by that? Well, the sense that – I guess it would boil down to something called the acting white problem where everything we would associate with the stepping stones to the middle class is associated in these communities with acting white. And counterproductive behaviors, antisocial behaviors, are associated with black authenticity. So kids who raise their hand in school study are bookish are nerdish are made

fun of are beat up are mocked in in these inner cities uh so you have an anti-intellectual strain um uh raising uh your children uh after you father them is not something considered, a high value is not placed on that. And there is no shame in not doing it. And so that's what I'm getting at, this very warped sense of what it means to be black and how early certain behaviors become manifest in children that only make things worse down the road. Jason, James Lilex here in the Twin Cities.

We have in St. Paul, every year there's something called Rondo Days, which is a festival in the African-American community for a neighborhood that was essentially demolished when they put the freeway through. And there's a great deal of nostalgia and affection for a time, which essentially was segregated. But the reason I think that there seems to be affection for it was that it was a cohesive community that had the entire spectrum of economic activity, and it had all of the classes who fled when they had the opportunity, when desegregation

came. When you mention the Great Society, it seems as if one of the unintended consequences of ending desegregation, which is a horrible thing, was that the striver class, the examples fled elsewhere and left an underclass that had no examples of how to behave specifically. And you can see this repeated all over the country. How do you get that back in other words when the people who are and could be role models, you mentioned Cosby before, is now held in disrespect because he's just a cranky old man saying get off my lawn and pull up your pants. How exactly do you present these new models, as you put it, of what it means to be black when the culture has such a seductive, attractive, and fairly easy-to-follow example of manhood as it's defined in the inner city? What do you do?

Well, I don't pretend to have the solutions to that. Other than, and this speaks to the title of the book, calling on us to stop doing things that, you know, don't work. And again, I think that so long as you have these outcomes in terms of the black family, so long as you have absent fathers, you're going to continue to see what we see. I just don't know how you get around that. There's no substitute for that. And I think another area where the focus could be is education. And it's interesting that you bring up segregation in this. I think that the Civil Rights Act and the Voting Rights Act were liberalism at its finest. I think those two pieces of legislation made this country more just for everyone. And what the Freedom Riders and Thurgood Marshall and Martin Luther King and the NAACP back then were doing, I think, was needed to be done.

And I'm glad they carried on and won those battles. But it is not the fight we face today. The fight we face today is about antisocial behaviors in the black community, blacks being their own worst enemies. And I think education is another area where the focus needs to be. And it's interesting because some of the best public schools we have out there, that is charter schools, get criticized for being too segregated. And there's still this belief, and it comes out of Brown v. Board and that sort of thinking, that black kids need to be sitting next to white kids in order to learn. And so you have the Justice Department trying to shut down, you know, a school voucher program in Louisiana because they argue that it violates

anti-segregation orders, desegregation orders from the 60s and 70s. Whether the kids are learning through the use of vouchers is a secondary concern as far as the Justice Department is concerned. It shows you how twisted our thinking has become. The problem was legal segregation. Forced integration is a whole other matter entirely, let alone arguing that black kids need to be sitting next to white kids in order to learn. Jason, Peter Robinson here.

Can you give us another few minutes? This is just fascinating. I'm sorry, I can't. I have to give a speech in a few minutes, and I'm keeping my host waiting. Don't you want to just call them all over to listen to you talk to us on the phone? I apologize, but I do appreciate you having me on. Oh, no. We'll have you back. Believe me. Jason Riley of the Wall Street Journal, whose book is Please Stop Helping Us, How Liberals Make It Harder for Blacks to Succeed. Jason, are you in the middle of a book tour or are you doing all your touring by radio?

How is that working and how much longer will you be promoting this book? That's the last question. Then you can go give a speech. Both. There's not a formal tour, but I am doing a fair amount of traveling around the country, and I'm doing a lot of television and radio as well, and then a lot of speaking gigs. I'll be speaking well through next spring about the book, college campuses, various economic clubs, and so forth. uh... well through uh... next spring uh... about the book uh... college campuses various uh... economic club and so forth so um... so yeah i am out there trying to promote

the book and one point the ideas in the book i think there's just a dirt book of black voices out there saying you think that and to me it matters that the person be black saying that that all matters uh... unfortunately it does it does still matter in terms of credibility for making these arguments. So I'm trying to do my part. Thanks for your time, Jason. We hope to have you on again soon and we'd love to see your words at Ricochet.

We'll see you at the paper. And thanks for being with us today. Thank you. Thank you. You know, they drop Jason's book off at my desk. They send it to me, which is great. I get all the right-wing books at the paper, which is amusing because everybody else gets the other ones. It's not that people at the paper know where to send them. It's that people at the publishing houses just send them to me, and I distribute them around the office, put them in the free pile has all of these very sensitive memoirs of somebody who grew up half lay ocean in an igloo in the 19th century. You're writing a story about bone handled knives or something. There's an innumerable number of memoirs like that. And then there are the CDs that nobody wants and the television shows that nobody wants.

And I always put these books there and they always disappear. Somebody at the paper always takes them. I always want to put a little camera up and say who exactly is under the dark of night is taking this conservative book because in a newspaper it's like pornography. You don't want to be the guy to walk up and say, that playboy is for me.

But I'll have to wait until there's, oh yeah, when the Sports Illustrated issue comes with the sim suits, that's under lock and key list. Somebody be offended. I'll have to wait, though, for somebody to give us a free little security camera because at some point a television show is going to publicize its new existence by sending small little security cameras to all the TV critics in the country. Somebody sent our TV critic a small Bluetooth-enabled speaker that promotes the show Grey's Anatomy, and I can't possibly think how it does so, but it's waterproof, and it's Bluetooth, and I can slam it up against my shower, and I can actually listen

to things streamed in the shower thanks to the freebie from Grey's Anatomy, which is great because one of the things that I have to do now in the shower. Oh, man, that I didn't even notice. Wow. Yeah. Continue. I just, I'm in awe. I'm in awe. This is what awe sounds like, James. Well, actually, if you, if you, if you could see it coming, then it's not very good. is it? I didn't see it coming. You're exactly right. I'm listening to the story, and I'm like, oh, I think, yeah, I've seen those little Bluetooth things, and I'm just like, I'm following along, and then suddenly. Well, the problem is that I have an electric razor. He's working. He's doing sound.

But a long time ago, the blades just became dull. They did. That's what happens with electric razors. You have to buy new ones and they're 20, 30 bucks. It's a lot of money. So I've taken to shaving my face the old style with actual steel blades scraped across the skin. And if you winced when I said scrape, you shouldn't because we're talking about the smoothest shave you'll ever have with a wonderful emollient that you put on before. And that's why in the shower now, while I listen to the songs, I scrape my face with the gentle action of a Harry's blade. That's right.

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So go there, do that. And then later, as you rub your hand against the smooth expanse of your face, you can think to yourself, what do I really, really, really want to do with this plate? How about shaving my hair? No, no, no, no. If you shave your head, what happens? You lose your power. That's what happened to Samson, right? Well, speaking of Samson and other biblical characters like David and Goliath, Encounter Books has got a featured book this month called Making David into Goliath, How the World Turned Against Israel. And you've been hearing about this here.

It's by Joshua Moravchik. Essentially, the book is about how, you know, they used to have the usual proper leftist reasons for hating Israel, which is odd given the fact that it had leftist governments and seemed to be socialism in action out in the kibbutzes. But now, because leftism has shifted to progressive narratives of victimology and imperialism, they're the bad guys for a whole bunch of different new reasons. As I watch the grievance industry turn its sights to Israel and turn what is the only democracy in the area, the only flowering place of freedom in the area into the villain somehow. How did this happen? Well, 15% off the list price of this or

any other book. If you go to encounterbooks.com and enter the coupon code ricochet at your checkout, how making David into Goliath, how the world turned against Israel. Well, we thank them for sponsoring this, the Ricochet podcast of which there is much left, I'm glad to say, and many things to discuss. We're bombing ISIS. Great. I'm all in favor of it. I think the president is doing the right thing. I just don't think he's doing enough of it.

Arming the Peshmerga isn't going to do it. Finding some tribe to go in there and do our bidding isn't going to do it. And let us all right now raise our hand and make a pledge. Peter, Rob, is your hand up in the air? It's up. I do solemnly swear. Well, I need to know what it is first. I've been to camp.

Iconoclast. It's essentially we promise to find another way of saying American military action, ground forces, without using the phrase boots on the ground. I agree. Agree. All right. Golf cleats on the ground or whatever. So you're calling for boots on the ground.

You want to push Obama into going further and putting boots on the ground. Do I want huge wedges of troops to wash across the desert in armored vehicles? They shouldn't be wearing wedges either. Like we saw, this is not either one of the Gulf wars. I think that it's possible. If you read some of these stories, these towns are lightly defended.

It's not as if ISIS themselves is a fearsome military force that, that, you know, they're not the Wehrmacht. I think you can, you can go in there with, with, with certain smaller groups and airdrop them in and break a lot of stuff and kill a lot of people.

Why don't we let the Kurds do that? The Kurds aren't very good at fighting in the flatlands from what I understand. They're mountain guys. They're small units. Putting them into larger units and forming battalion strength divisions that can go in and have that kind of operation requires a coordination that frankly, maybe they don't have, it's not in their toolkit. And let's train them for six months and let them do it. I have to say, I think on this one, we may have a little, I may actually, I may actually for the first time in this podcast, because I'm actually with Rob on Sarah Palin, I may actually, in the first time in this podcast,

disagree. We may have a clean disagreement here. You are, you're with Rob and Sarah Palin and I wasn't invited? I'm never invited to anything. No, I too think that Sarah Palin has become irrelevant, I'm sorry to say. But no, no, I'm not – there are two reasons I am extremely leery of putting American troops on the ground. And one of them is that there are Turks and Arabs and Kurds whose interest, whose interest in rolling back ISIS is even more direct than ours. And my view is they ought to do it. The United States of America ought as a first resort.

I, I, the parallel here is the Reagan Doctrine where you arm people on the ground who are willing to fight for themselves. That the Saudis, yet again, seem to think that they can play this game of paying our bills and letting us do the fighting while they stay at home. And by the way, they also pay the bills for spreading extreme Islamism. It stinks. I'm sick of it. I'm just sick of it. The Kurds are good fighters. If they need training, if they need weapons, let them. The Turks have a superb first world military.

Let's not forget they're members of NATO. They have an air force. They have an army. They have tanks. They're threatened by ISIS. On this one, Lord knows, I never thought I'd hear myself say this, but I support Barack Obama. But do you really though? I mean, I, I agree with you, but I, I agree with you, but I don't, I don't, I think this is, I mean, I think that, you know, Rush Limbaugh said this yesterday or maybe he said this morning. I don't, I don't know. I think he said I mean I think that Rush Limbaugh said this yesterday or maybe he said it this morning. I don't know. I think he said it yesterday. I think he's right.

So I have my issues with Rush Limbaugh, but I think he's correct. I think that we are bombing Syria and doing very little to contain ISIS, but we are probably bombing Syria because Barack Obama wants to win the Senate. There are in Kurdistan, right, and Turkey, there are now 130,000, 150,000 refugees in Turkey now. Right. And they're refugees from the war with ISIS. Right. If you really want to fight, you're right. We would say to Turkey and to the Kurds, all right, what do you need? Right. And we're going to fight and we're going to also give the Kurds that territory, right?

So if you're serious about it, that's where you're going to fight ISIS. You're not going to fight ISIS by bombing the Khorasan group, which nobody heard of a month ago. That was my investment company, I thought. You get a nice embossed letter from the Coruscant group? It doesn't feel like – what you're sketching out, Peter, is a fundamentally serious and purposeful and effective way of dealing with the threat in the region. But it once again feels like this administration is simply not up to that task. Also not willing to do it. The underlying problem is you could sketch two or three different plausible, as indeed, I am sure at the Pentagon, they have sketched it.

We know that they've outlined it because Jack Keane, retired Army Deputy Chief of Staff Jack Keane, put a piece in the Wall Street Journal, it seems to me it was two or three weeks ago, on how to take on ISIS. There are ways to do this, but do we trust the current commander-in-chief to get it right? Do we trust him to go after the problem without mixing it up with politics? Do we trust him and his people to achieve simple competence? The answer to all those questions is no. I mean, but look what he said. Before he could even begin to assert the value of American interests abroad or the principles of American security abroad, he first had to apologize for what a policeman may or may not have done in a small town in Missouri last summer. Right. in a small town in Missouri last summer. In his brain, these things are inextricably linked, even though in the world,

this is a matter of sheer physics, they are not. So he's unable to actually act in a forceful and decisive way in American interests abroad without first talking about a cop in Ferguson. It's just unbelievable. Even if the cop had done, even if we had on video the cop doing everything, all the terrible things that Barack Obama and now the now soon to be resigned Eric Holder say he did, it still would have zero to do with what's going on in Syria and Iraq and Kurdistan.

Correct. Correct. ISIS has beheaded Americans on camera. They beheaded Iraqis in unknown numbers. They've lined people up over pits and then put bullets into the back of their head and dump them into pits. They've set up people to die hanging from crosses in the cities that they've occupied. I've seen estimates. Clearly, nobody knows, but there are estimates leaking out that the number of people that ISIS has executed and all of their executions are brutal. There's nobody strapped down and injected with some sort of painless drug to stop their heart the way that we do it here in Oklahoma and other states that carry out the death. All the executions are brutal and they number in the tens of thousands.

Everyone seems to agree with that at the very minimum. Right. And so but before attacking these barbarians, the president of the United States has to apologize for American policing? The lack of a sense of proportion is just – it's sickening really. It's appalling. You may as well complain about junk food in the school vending machines for the absolute disproportionate relationship. But beyond that, even if it was – I mean even pick a terrible thing that happened in the United States. Pick a terrible thing a cop did somewhere that we know he did where the issue isn't even murky.

It still is inappropriate and completely, completely unconnected to American interests abroad. And this president is unable to – he's unable to frame that intellectually. It's like it's like a it's almost like there's a there's a brain lock there somewhere where he's simply unable to act in his constitutional role as the protector of American interests. It's bananas, really. But what I find so crazy is that is that what he can do, however, is stage a few air strikes. The airstrikes he did. That's fine. But without understanding the underlying – I mean if you have over 100,000 refugees in Turkey now, which is an American ally and a member of NATO, and you have forces in Iraq who are nominally on our side, who are unable to turn back ISIS. Bombing a few areas that are sort of tangentially related to them in Syria is not a solution.

Certainly it's not a solution to the problem of ISIS unless what you define as the problem of ISIS is the problem of how I look when I am facing these threats, which I suspect is what the White House is really much more concerned about. Agreed. I have to agree with all of that. I have to agree with all of that. But yet, here we are with a discussion, of course, of Ferguson, because in the president's mind, I believe that it's just all a continuum,

human behavior, human perfidy, and the problem with ISIS is they just went too far on their end. Instead of having a bright dividing line between the sort of society that America has constructed and the sort of society that the caliphate seeks to construct, it's all part of the same. Let us ask ourselves, though, why is Holder going? Isn't this curious?

There should be a million conspiracy theories spun today. He's getting out before something really hits the fan. He's tired. He wants to cash in, and he's impatient to go and get that little choice lobbying job that will enable him to live in complete luxury. Why? Why is he going? Well, I mean, who knows? But it is weird that he's still there.

I mean, just in terms of the general presidential way two-term presidential administrations go. I mean one of the arguments against – or one of the analyses of second-term presidencies like – well, for instance, Reagan. Reagan's second term was, oh, part of the problem was all this turnover and the staff was leaving and there was a sign of disarray. Well, now we've had the second term of remarkable stability. I mean I think the White House – has the White House staff changed in any meaningful way? Valerie Jarrett is still there. She's still there. The cabinet is really the same.

I mean not that the cabinet matters, but the circle of advisors is the same. His chief of staff is the same. I mean, not that the cabinet matters, but the circle of advisors is the same. His chief of staff is the same. His attorney general is the same. I mean, we focused on the change of the secretary of state, but, I mean, that seems very unusual, this amount of stability. And I think what we're seeing now is that there's a downside to that, which is this horrible bunker mentality they all have, this incredible inability to see the realities that's unfolding outside the gates of the White House. Well, the gates of the White House we've learned this week are not exactly quite secure. I was stunned that the guy made it as far as he had. And there was a, there was an article that I read that, that, that, that praised the guards at the white house for their restraint, for their restraint, which is not a factor that you really want to

have in the back of their heads. When somebody is running towards the way the snipers apparently discerned that he was not carrying explosives hmm interesting how did they figure that out do you want to be the guy on the roof who says you know just eyeballing this guy as he's running across the lawn at high speed i'm thinking there's no sim text there so i i'm gonna stand up it sounds insane and in this wonderful little metaphor now the white house has decided it's going to lock the door at night which of course is kind of a meaningless gesture because ideally nobody could really probably get in there at night anyway. But there's something about it you don't like. There's something like closing down Pennsylvania Avenue.

Which I'm against, yeah. Right. You want to talk a bunker mentality. There's a metaphor to the White House having to send somebody at night to check the locks that just really, really doesn't sit well with me. But let's say that the – It's actually weird. Do you remember that Harry Truman could get up from his desk and walk across the square, Jefferson Square, right?

Lafayette. Lafayette Square. Walk across Lafayette Square and go and have a drink at the bar at the Hay Adams across the street. In the middle, you know, 4 o'clock, 4.30, 5 o'clock in the afternoon. And that's just, I mean, I know that was 50, 60 years ago now, but that still seems like a different, I think you can do it during wartime. Clem Conger was the um white house what was he called white house custodian in any event he was the one who was in charge of all the carpets and the the art collector the curator the white house curator when i was working in the

white house lovely man and i said clem how did you first become involved in the white house and the answer was very simple he He grew up in Alexandria, Virginia. And he said in those days, there may have been some snobbery involved, but this is the way it worked. In those days, if you came from a Southern family of a certain standing, and you were a young, single man,

you could walk up to the front door of the White House, press the bell, a butler would appear, and you would take out your card and drop it onto a silver salver. And what would happen was that eventually you would be invited to a White House event because in those days, they were very careful to make certain that there were more single men at a dinner or dance than women because it was considered impolite for a woman to have to sit out a dance.

You wanted to have men standing against the wall who could step forward if it appeared that a woman was not going to have a partner at a dance. And so that is exactly what Clem Conger, after his first year at, I think, UVA did. He just drove over, walked up to the front door of the White House, pressed the bell, dropped his card, and began to be invited to events in the Roosevelt White House as an extra young man. You had to have a dinner jacket. That's the way it worked. It was as informal as that. During wartime.

Exactly. Exactly. Those were the days. Well, let's say that somebody is going to lock the front door of the White House in full dress, in this marine uniform and passes the president. Should the president salute him as he goes on his way to his errands or have we overblown the idea that presidents should be issuing a crisp salute when one comes to them? In other words, we have something that the left loves because it just shows how the right wing is just freaking out. It's crazy. They hate this guy so intensely.

They seize on anything and look, here's a picture of Bush with a dog in his arm. I just – Yeah. What Barack – what we can agree on is that if you're going to salute as president of the United States, you should salute. You shouldn't flip your hand up holding a coffee cup in this casual manner of total disregard and then salute holding a coffee cup in this casual manner of total disregard and then salute holding a latte from Starbucks.

Ronald Reagan started saluting. I remember this very well. Presidents had not saluted. They're not in uniform. They're saluted because they're commanders in chief, but they did not salute back. That was the protocol right up through the 1980s. President Reagan felt that it was impolite. It felt wrong to him. It felt discourteous to

these fine young Marines for him to step down from a helicopter and fail to return the salute. So he asked permission. He asked, I can't recall who the chairman of the Joint Chiefs was, but the reply was, Mr. President, if you would like to salute, we are sure that the young men in uniform would feel honored to have your salute. And from that point onward, Ronald Reagan always saluted. I don't think it's written down in any military code that governs who salutes whom. It was purely custom that Ronald Reagan started because it made him feel as though he was being courteous. I think it's – But whatever choice he makes, he should not be saluting holding a latte from Starbucks in his saluting hand. I think it's – I'm starting to sound like Andy Rooney.

I think it's engraved – Yeah. You know what annoys me? Go ahead. I think it's engraved in the mindset of people of his generation on the left that the salute is emblematic of everything robotic and laughable about the military oh you're right of course of course yeah it does embody but also it just embodies the kind of you know barely effortful gesture at the thing right i mean it mean, it is his foreign policy and his military policy in a gesture, isn't it? Hold on.

I just want E.J. Hill, who's listening trying to figure out what he's going to Photoshop for this, the barely effortless gesture towards the thing, I think, is the concept that we're going for. That's actionable. Well, you know what I mean? It's like, well, I got a salute, so I'm going to salute, but I'm not really going to do it.

I'm just going to kind of do it. Same way, like, well, I've got to do something about ISIS, but I'm just not really going to do it. I've got to do something, so I'm going to kind of do it. It's all just I'm going to talk a little bit about it. I'm going to do a little bit around it, and I'm going to make it a big thing, and I'm going to make a speech, and I'm going to run away. And that's kind of how this president is connected to all forms of. I am. I am more or less.

This is total speculation on my part, but I am more and more convinced that to Barack Obama, the presidency of the United States is merely a stepping stone to the job he really wants, which is the presidency of Harvard. And he's thinking to himself, oh, gee, if I salute these – if I look as though I'm really saluting, I have to instead demonstrate this sort of lethargic distaste for the salute because that's really what would go down in Harvard Yard. Is that fair? No, but it's fun.

I think anything that Barack Obama does that seems to fill out the requirements of the role will be accepted by the people who love him on the left. They will give – well, he has to do that or he had to do that or he have to. It's what the presidents do when they know in their hearts that he in his heart is one of them, a good progressive whose ideas about the world will remain as adamantly frozen as they were the moment that he entered the Oval Office, that after eight years, he will come out of that with his worldview absolutely intact and unchallenged and hence ready for Harvard. Well, speaking of presidents, there's a Ken Burns series on Roosevelt. Are either of you watching it or are you not up for 16 hours of panning and scanning across old photographs? I have watched big pieces of it, big chunks of it, not all. And you're quite right that at this stage of the game that Ken Burns – by the way, it's the only performance I can recall in which Meryl Streep bombed.

She just bombed. She's the voice of Eleanor Roosevelt and she's doing such an accurate Eleanor Roosevelt. She's overacting. She's speaking – every time her voice comes on the screen, it's – she slows down the whole narrative. And believe me, it does not need to be slowed any further. So I have been wondering because on the one hand, the old pictures are fascinating. It's a fairly good summary of what the country was going through. It's a way of understanding how FDR meant so much to so many people. That smile, the sense of, and of course, the knowledge that he had overcome polio.

All that is really quite good, useful to be reminded of. But the treacle, the sugar that's heaped onto this record, the total lack, the total absence of any questioning about whether maybe he was outside constitutional limits here. Every battle FDR fought, including his attempt to pack the Supreme Court, was for the greater good of the common man and ought not to be questioned, must instead be praised and be looked at in hindsight in a kind of rosy-tinted hue. Not a lot of Amity Shlaes is what you're saying. Zero Amity Shlaes. Zero Amity Shlaes. Even George Will saying. Zero Amity Shlaes. Zero Amity Shlaes. Even George Will, frankly, does not acquit himself terribly well.

Even George Will does not manage to get in the point that even if you want to grant what FDR did at the time, these decades later, we are now saddled with a social security program that doesn't work. Well, hold on. I got one for Rob here. It's entirely possible that George Will did say that, but of course it didn't make the cut. You're always at the mercy of the editor. And there's a theory, there's a little piece going around now that nobody on the right

should ever, ever talk to Jon Stewart. Because these are people who are designed to make you look stupid. Colbert's the same. How about you, Rob? Let's say Ken Burns, or Colbert, or Jon Stewart comes to you and they? Let's say Ken Burns or Colbert or John Stewart comes to you and they want to tape a segment, mind you, not live, but tape a segment. Would you do it or are you just that much of a shameless publicity sponge that you would jump in right away?

I would jump in right away. I don't know. I wouldn't, let's say, love them all together. I'm not sure that George Will was sort of selectively edited. I don't think that that would be the case. I think George Will probably said, you know, thoughtful and generally positive things about FDR, right? Or he was answering the question that was asked or – I think – I mean I'm now totally freelancing. I have no reason to say this. I haven't asked him. But I'm sure if you asked him, if you said, hey, listen, George Will, is this pretty much a fair representation of your views? He would say yes.

The other two are different because they're going for laughs and they're going for reaction. And they also have a much, much more specific outcome they want. And I suspect – so that'd be very different. I mean, I think if you go on, you want to go on live, and you want to go on live like John Yoo, right? John Yoo, who cleaned Jon Stewart's clock, basically ate his lunch and then ate the other lunch he had packed because he knew John Yoo was going to eat his lunch. So in a lot of ways, I mean, that was an old 60 Minutes thing, which is what they say, you've got to bring your own

tape recorder because you know you're going to be selectively edited. I suspect you could still be ambushed, but if you're prepared and you should prepare yourself, I don't think that you're going to be completely messed up.

But I still would prefer to go on live. Well, you can't talk about New York without talking about the Roosevelts and vice versa. And it puts me in mind of this great sprawling documentary I saw a few years ago called New York. And as a long documentary should be, it was by Burns. But it was by Rick Burns, not Ken Burns. And I always felt bad for Rick Burns being a great documentarian as well who had to live in his brother's shadow. It's like growing up as James Belushi. But New York came to mind in everybody's consciousness and inbox and website browsing this week when we saw all of those climate change protests, protesting the change, mind you, and capitalism,

and anybody with any gas whatsoever, thronging into the streets of New York, this incredible metropolis that was built by fossil fuel energy, mind you, and demanding, of course, the cessation of the very system that gave it birth. In between the people who had the sign saying that only full communism and societal revolution will save the earth, to Joseph Kennedy, screeding on about how the climate change deniers must be jailed,

that he wants to see them brought up in the International Court of, quote, justice, to stand trial for what they've done. Charles C.W. Cook has been writing over National Review about the left's increasing desire to criminalize free speech, criminalize inconvenient speech, shall we say. Is this a fringe thing or do you expect it to go mainstream? You two fight over that. It's definitely a fringe thing. I think it's definitely part of the fringe.

And I also feel like it's suicidal for the left to do that. I mean these things never, ever work. I mean I'm in New York City right now and what's remarkable is how much eye-rolling there was among people I know people, although once again, not for the first time in these podcasts or the last time. I have zero evidence to back up this assertion, but I will Google, Walmart, to deliver services in a competent fashion than they do the federal government. And so in the same way, they have more faith in a free market. It is the free market. It is capitalism that's going to save so in the same way, they have more faith in a free market. It is the free market. It is capitalism that's going to save us in the environment. It's capitalism that's going to fund and develop and invest in new technologies and new energies and new ways of saving and storing energy. It's not going to be the government that does that. I mean, no one believes, no one believes the government's going to do that except a few hippies, absurd hippies marching up and down

Sixth Avenue while the rest of Manhattan's kind of rolling their eyes. I like how you make the distinction between absurd hippies and the irrational, normal, everyday hippies. Peter, what do you think? Do you think he's right? Do they have faith in capitalism or do they just believe that capitalism and prosperity is the default setting for our culture and liberals are behind it 100%? Well, I guess Rob says he has no evidence and of course I haven't done any polling here, but I'm thinking about my own kids. Nico Robinson, middle child, worked this past summer at Proteus Digital Health. Ricochet's own Dr. George Savage is a founder of

that company. They have a number of high-tech medical devices, which if only they could bring them to market, would improve healthcare, lower costs, do all the things that Obamacare is claiming to do, but they would actually do it. But they have a little problem, which is regulation. And my son, Nico Robinson, was assigned to regulatory compliance, that unit of the company, in which he found himself condemned to spending this, I say condemned. It was a good job. It was interesting. But still, it felt like condemnation to read one long, extremely badly written, poorly organized regulatory issue finding from the FDA after another, and then to begin writing memoranda for the file to make sure that the company

could demonstrate that it had considered this or that or the other possibility. And I got a text from him in the middle of the day, in the middle of the summer, out of nowhere. And the text read, I can still quote it. It was one of the great moments of my life because I had no idea of my son's politics. Dear dad, I've decided I hate the federal government. So, you know, there you have it.

Kids are not stupid. They have an iPhone in their back pocket that works, that works remarkably. That even in the course of four years in college, there's a new iPhone coming out. The technology is always being updated. It gets better. It becomes richer. And the federal government doesn't do any of that. And when it doesn't work, that's the other thing. When Apple Computer releases an update or a new OS that doesn't work or there's an issue, there's this gigantic, earth-shaking reaction from the company and from the customers that they have to take action.

There's this responsiveness from a company. There's a responsiveness from Walmart. Walmart is constantly polling their customers, constantly noticing what they're buying at the moment they're buying it. And it's that kind of responsiveness. People just naturally feel like, okay, well, these are people who have a stake in my satisfaction, which of course the federal government doesn't have. And they have a stake in delivering me the sort of low cost – at the lowest possible cost to them with the highest possible quality for them um a product and if you don't want to pay for an iphone that's okay but the benefit of the iphone is that the iphone has set the standard for all the other phones so all

the other phones had to get better too and so yeah even if you're going to buy a cheaper phone it's still going to be better than the cheaper phone that was all that was available before the iphone because now your standards are higher. And I think it's really interesting, and I think the younger generation is used to, I've been saying this over and over again, the generation that gets on Facebook or a computer or anything, a piece of technology, the first thing they do is set their preferences, make it their own. The idea that these people are going to be duped into accepting the National Health Service to single-payer a federal program, basically the VA hospital writ

large, it's just never going to happen. Except that they did. Except that they voted for a guy who gave that to them. And as I was saying before... That's an unpleasant fact you mentioned, James. They believe that freedom and prosperity and technological – it's just the default setting for America. And of course the liberals are behind it because it's a good thing. And if you ask them if the government has a role in this, it's to keep bad things from happening. And one of those bad things, of course, is for the environment to go south and we should have green energy. They're all on board with the green energy.

They all want that and if you ask them exactly what does that mean uh well they shouldn't pollute okay it's a perpetual motion machine let's look at pollution today versus pollution 15 20 years ago let's look at how clean we're going let's look at what government has done let's look at state senator john marty in my own state here who has proposed through legislation somehow. It's kind of unclear in the details, but he wants Minnesota to be the first 100 percent fossil-free state. One hundred percent fossil-free. He's insane. When I went to look at the bill, I didn't find anything in the bill that would necessarily push us to that point.

But I did find, for example, under something called the Transmission for Future Renewable Energy Standard. Let me read you one little paragraph here. This is what the power companies in this state have to take into consideration when doing anything about supplying power for tomorrow. I'll be brief, but it goes like this. As part of the planning process, the Minnesota electric utilities and transmission companies

must incorporate and build upon the analyses that have previously been done or that are in progress, including but not limited to the 2006 Minnesota Wind Integration Study and ongoing work to address geographically dispersed development plans, the 2007 Minnesota Transmission

for Renewable Energy Standards Study, the 2008 and 2009 statewidewide Studies of Dispersed Renewable Generation. The 2009 Minnesota RES Update Corridor and Capacity Validation Studies. The 2010 Regional Generation Outlet Study. The 2011 Multi-Value Project Portfolio Study. And recent and ongoing Midwest Independent Transmission System Operator Transmission Expansion Planning Work. I read that and I said, you know what all that adds up to? Brownouts.

Nobody's going to get anything. Nobody's going to accomplish anything. I just quoted my National Review column from this morning. But that is what the – those are all the boat anchors that the government has put around the companies just here in this state. And so if you oppose any one of these, then you are for a dirty earth, you're for dirty air, you're for dirty petroleum. It doesn't matter whether or not any of this stuff actually adds up to anything. What counts is that a number of agencies over a course of a number of years did a bunch of studies and said, here, you got to deal with this now.

So while these kids may say, yes, when I get my browser, I'm going to customize it. I love the customizable world. I love having control. No, I don't want to be under the boot to the Fed. They are conditioned by their culture to vote left because left means compassion and healing for the earth, and you don't make the fake Indian cry in the ads, et cetera. So you've got to work on them. I mean my daughter is 14. She's coming home. I see what she's absorbing at school.

I have to work on her as well. And it leads to some interesting and contentious discussions like the ones you'll find in the comment sections where people have been blistering away and listening to nothing that we've said because they're defending Sarah Palin and gay marriage, which of course is how we started this whole thing. And now we have to end. Listen, folks, we want to thank you, the Ricochet members,

for going to Harry's. If you go to Harry's Shave and enter that coupon code RICOCHET, you'll get money off your first shave kit. And once you start shaving with Harry's, you're not going to Harry's. If you go to Harry's Shave and enter that coupon code RICOCHETE, you'll get money off your first shave kit. And once you start shaving with Harry's, you're not going to stop. Also,

EncounterBooks.com, thank you for sponsoring. Coupon code RICOCHETE, 15% off any of the titles, including Joshua Murovchik's new book. And, of course, Rob, Peter,

thank you so much. Thank you all for listening, and we'll see you all in the comments at Ricochet 2.0 next week next week fellas what would you do with a brain if you had one do why if i had a brain i could i could while away the hours confirming with the flowers consulting with the rain and my head i'd be scratching while my thoughts were busy hatchin' if I only had a brain

I'd unravel every riddle for any individual in trouble or in pain With the thoughts you'd be thinkin' you could be another Lincoln if you only had a brain. Oh, I could tell you why. The ocean's near the shore. I could think of things I never thought before. And then I'd sit and think some more. I would not be just a-nuffin'. My head all full of stuffin'. My heart all full of pain.

I would dance and be merry, life would be a ding-a-derry if I only had a brain. Wonderful! Ricochet! Join the conversation.