The Ricochet Podcast - Guns and Vicodins

Episode Date: January 17, 2013

It’s another super-sized edition of the podcast with our guests The Weekly Standard‘s Andy Ferguson and The Washington Free Beacon’s Matt Continetti. We cover James’ dental adventures, Lance Armstrong, guns and the Chicago way, dueling Nixons, Republicans adrift, and Zero Dark Thirty. Music from this week’s episode: Bicycle Race by Queen The Ricochet Podcast opening theme was composed and produced... Source

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It's a high-capacity show capable of firing at multiple targets and... Ooh, can I still say that in America? Well, let's find out. There you go again. Welcome, everybody. This is the Ricochet Podcast, and it's number 152. This particular episode is brought to you by our friends at Audible.com. You know who they are, don't you? Right, the internet's leading provider of audiobooks with more than 100,000 downloadable titles. Literature, fiction, nonfiction, periodicals even. For a free audiobook of your choice,

go to audiblepodcast.com slash ricochet. Now, why haven't you done that yet? Come on, you got a car, you got to run, you got an exercise routine, you need something with a story to waft you along. Audible podcast.com slash ricochet a little bit we'll be talking about our picks and by we i mean peter robinson and rob long i'd like to welcome you guys to an epochal moment here because i at this very moment am proving mayor

bloomberg wrong dead you were you're eating salt you're eating fat you Well, I had salt earlier today. Big gulping. You're committing a gun crime? No, I had Kellogg's crunchy foie gras with fiber this morning for breakfast. I'll admit that, yeah. But no, I am looking at a container of prescription painkillers right here that still has some in it, and I'm not taking them. What's more, my kids aren't taking them. I'm not taking them and getting hooked. And what's more, there are no thieves at the door right now battering down my hatches to get at these two little remaining Vicodins here. Vicodin? Yeah, exactly.

What do you want for each tab? You can make some money here. You sell them by the tab, apparently. Apparently you do. And Vicodin, I do not understand. I mean, I've had a little experience. No, I had experience in college with various sorts of things that you take that you're not supposed to. But I do not get the appeal of this thing.

It is an idiocracy drug. It makes you stupid. It makes you dull. It fills your body with cement. There's just nothing to it. So, no. It's painkiller. It kills pain.

It's incredibly, incredibly effective at that. Yes, if that's what you want it to do. But recreationally, if you have no pain, that I don't get. You all have pain, James. Anyway, so this is my first day off of the Vicodin. What were you on the Vicodin for? Ah, well, I had number 30 taken out. Number 30 was a contentious molar in the back that I cracked in college on a piece of bone in a hamburger at the Valley Restaurant in Dinkytown, USA.

And over the years, it has been arguing with me. And finally, we just came to that point where we just had to call it off. It wasn't working for either of us. So they yanked it out. And then I decided to get myself off of it because there's just nothing going on with you personally if you take Vicodin. Everything shuts down. Everything shuts down. Digestion, libido, everything shuts down.

It's the dullest drug I've ever seen. But Mike Bloomberg now wants hospitals in New York to limit the number of painkillers that they give to people because they might not use them all and then they would get into the bloodstreams of children. It caused a bit of an uproar. I don't know if you saw the post. I wrote about it at Ricochet. But let's ask Peter what he thought about it because Peter has said not a word. I've been hogging the entire broadcast. Peter, over to you.

What do you think of Bloomberg? He's being Bloomberg. It doesn't actually interest me to tell you the truth. I'm so used to Mike Bloomberg coming out with comments about how he knows better what's good for us than we know for ourselves that I've sort of – and then of course he's term limited. What's interesting in New York right now is who's going to succeed him, I think. So I am sort of just – I'm with you on Vicodin though. When you need it, you need it. I have back trouble from time to time. I have bad back trouble. Vicodin is useful. And I'm,

like you, I'm capable of keeping quite a few tablets in the medicine cabinet without turning into a wild-eyed drug addict. So that's what I think of Bloomberg. He will be gone soon. Isn't he angling for a third or Chavez term? He's in his third term. He got it. Oh, that's right.

He got it. Okay, so he's going to, then he'll do the Putin thing, and he'll have an underling step in, and then he'll probably come back. When you have a back spasm, do you act like Jack Lemmon in The Odd Couple when it hurts and just say, My back! My back! My back! Try it, because it's a classic callback. Rob, we also had a little drug news with Lance Armstrong this week.

Were you A, surprised? B, do you forgive him? C, do you care? You know, I think no on all of those. But here's what's interesting about Lance Armstrong. In a way, he's sort of the sports version of Obama because for years it was considered beyond the pale by people to criticize him. For years, he was absolutely protected. He had his goons.

I mean there are people – I mean Rich Karlgaard is one of them in Forbes who a couple of years ago wrote a piece saying Lance Armstrong is a doper and everybody knows it. And his guys, his PR team, his acolytes, his friends just went after Rich. I mean their rapid response team was huge. And in a way, the guy reminds me a lot of Obama. It was absolutely illegal to criticize him. In a weirdly sociopathic way, frankly, this guy. I mean, we are, I think we're seeing with and I mean specifically at this point Lance Armstrong, we

are seeing a sociopath in action because he's just been, I mean, the brazen lying has been amazing for years. Now, whether it's right or wrong, whether the doping is, I mean, whether whether it really constitutes cheating, I don't know. I don't – that seems like body chemistry stuff that I really don't understand.

But for whatever reason, it's illegal, and for whatever reason, it's hard to detect. But he did it, and I love the idea that now in this culture we go to Oprah. That's the first person you go to. That's our father confessor is Oprah. Oprah can forgive you. And people, now I've just noticed people saying like, do you think she's going to be tough on him or easy on him? That's the big story. I mean, like how Oprah's going to treat him. But what's amazing is I know people who were such, such acolytes of his that they would become enraged if you suggested that there might have been something funny going on. So, I mean, in a way, it really is.

I mean, I hope one day this happens with the Obama administration. The people – the fever subsides or something or ebbs or something or the Vicodin leaves the system and people are always saying, oh my god, this guy is a crappy president. With Lance Armstrong, the story was so terrific. He beat cancer to become one of the world's leading athletes. The story was so true. I have to confess, I myself wanted it to be true. There was something so uplifting and so

ennobling. And now, of course, everybody who admired Lance Armstrong, well, at least the person who's speaking right now, just feels like a sucker. What a jerk that guy was. But I agree. It's the sheer brazenness now of supposing that he can just carry it off. Well, Clinton did.

Right. Yeah. Clinton, who's father of the year. Isn't that astonishing? Yeah. Yeah. And I just got – Politico today, which just made me laugh. There's – I think it was yesterday. There was a real clear politics.

There was – he's joking around about Hillary. And he says, oh, she's really, really healthy. She's got low blood pressure, low standing heartbeat. She's going to have time for three more husbands after me. I think she'll live to be 120. and he's like wait wait it's as if now we are all supposed to believe they're just one kind of cute older married couple they're just empty nesters like everybody else right um and and he actually says something like you know uh i always know i'm actually i found it i'm reading it i always know that she's thinking about that something like, you know, I always know – actually, no. I found it.

I'm reading it. I always know that she's thinking about that whenever I'm stubborn about something in her constant quest at my self-improvement. She refers to me as her first husband because I told her once she's going to be 120 and have time for plenty more. I have the idea that that's why she refers to him as her first husband because she's so healthy. Yeah, and it's though some scene where she's walking past him puttering at the workbench table in the garage when actually, of course, they're living about 1,000 miles apart. I was thinking when you were talking earlier about Lance

that kids today for their role models have Lance. And what did we have? We had Neil Armstrong. The biggest scandal you could see attached to him would be perhaps that he wore lifts in a picture to make him look slightly taller. But I was looking to see whether or not Neil Armstrong had read any books. And indeed, Neil Armstrong has narrated a book. And you can find it at audible.com.

And it is quite relevant to our discussion, and I'll tell you why. I've read the book. It's interesting. It's called Longitude. Now, latitude was one thing. Longitude was another. How do you figure out to get your ship from here to there and get it back to the place where you came from with your cargo at a certain amount of time so you can make money? How do you do that when you have no navigational features? Well, if you go to audiblepodcast.com slash ricochet and look up longitude, you will find this fascinating little book about how exactly Western civilization invented or discovered longitude, took money, took a cash prize, took things like the invention of dependable clocks. It's a great story.

It's one of those how things that we accept now completely, how those lines on the map came to be. Longitude is the name of the book, narrated by Kate Reading and Neil Armstrong at audible.com. That's audiblepodcast.com. I should also note that if you search for Neil Armstrong, you're going to find a book called, he didn't narrate it, but for some reason he's attached to it. The Price of Love, 11 Ways to Pay with Your Life by Peter Robinson.

Peter, I had no idea you wrote sex thrillers. Do tell, but give us also your Audible pick this week. My Audible pick – it turns out – who knew this before Google came along? But now if you Google your own name, you'll discover that – well, if it's a name as common as Peter Robinson, you'll discover there are several hundred Peter Robinsons easily available on Google and one of them is a mystery writer. The steamy stuff, that must be yet a third Peter Robinson. In any event, my scoop pick this week – I beg your pardon. My audible pick this week is Scoop. Son Pedro Robinson asked the other day for some comic novels. And Evelyn Waugh, Scoop is the funniest novel ever written about journalism and maybe one of the funniest novels ever written full stop.

I confess I have not listened to it on Audible, but I just was looking and indeed it's available. Absolutely brilliant and killingly funny book. I happen to know, by the way, that San Pedro wrote an email to Mr. Long asking for Mr. Long's suggestions of comic novels. I don't know what Mr. Long replied. You don't? I don't. Has Mr. Long written any?

Has he written any? I'm just curious. Just curious if he's written any. Not novels. No, they were in the non-fiction shelf. Right. One was in the non-fiction shelf and one was in the fiction shelf, which is unusual since they were

essentially the same book. I didn't bring myself to suggest those. Hold on, stop. Thank you for raising the point, James. Rob has written two brilliant books. He is so strange. It was either fiction nor nudge.

He had them both published in Britain as if nobody would notice it that way. He won't, he will not. They're just fantastic. Conversations with my agent and Set Up, Joke, Set Up, Joke. Thank you. Neither, by the way, is available on Audible, just. Thank you. Neither by the way is available on audible.

Just so you know. All right. What is available on audible? I still think you should read Ken Levine's me generation. It's funny. He does a great job at it. He reads it beautifully. Um,

and it's just, it's different. It's a different, it's, it, I mean, I keep looking for, for the,

the, the, uh, timely and relevant, audible titles. But honestly, I'm just – I'm kind of burning out on public policy. Maybe it's because public policy is just so atrocious in the way of burning out on Vicodin or actually I think Vicodin is what we need at this point. And this is just funny. And he writes a beautiful story, and it's well done.

And I just love the fact that Ken reads it, too. Because Ken knows how to deliver a joke. Ken was a writer on Cheers with me and worked on a bunch of his shows, and he's helped out on a bunch of mine. He's been a friend for years, and so... Burned out on public policy. Gee, gosh, I wonder why. Come on, guys. After all we've been

through, this is like, you know, the Pharaoh lets the Jews go, and six weeks later somebody walks in. Sire, I wonder why. Come on, guys. After all we've been through, this is like the Pharaoh lets the Jews go, and six weeks later, somebody walks in. Sire, I've completed that history of the Jewish people. Put that in the pile. I'll get to it later. We're all getting hammered here. We're all getting our keisters handed to us. We lost an election.

It's a rebuilding time. It's time to read escapist stuff. It's time for fantasies. It's time for hobbits. It's time for all that fun stuff in the middle of the winter. I know it's not time for hobbits for you, but anyway, it's time for anything but politics. But on the other hand, when you've got somebody around who can talk about things of a social policy

nature and he's as brilliant as Andy Ferguson, then you've got to take the opportunity. Carpe that particular diem. Andy is the senior editor of Weekly Standard and the author of Fool's Names, Fool's Faces, and Land of Lincoln, Adventures in Abe's America. Ferguson's most recent book, Crazy You, One Dad's Crash Course in Getting His Kid Into College, was published in 2010 to tremendous acclaim by Simon, also Ann Schuster. And we've got to talk to him about Chicago, we've got to talk to him about the country, the Weekly Standard, and everything else. We welcome back to the podcast our friend Andy Ferguson.

Hey there. Hey there. Thanks for having me. I agree with every word of your introduction, by the way. I know. I thought that you might. I thought that you might. So you wrote a book.

No, actually, I should interrupt. I reviewed Rob's first book for the Weekly Standard way, way back in the 1970s sometime. That's right, exactly. And anyway, it was, it's one of the funniest books I've ever read. And if anybody... At LiveScoreBet, we love Cheltenham just as much as we love football. The excitement, the roar, and the chance to reward you. That's why every day of the festival,

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Terms apply. Bet responsibly. 18plusgamblingcare.ie You can figure out any way to lay hands on it, buy it, whatever, steal it, whatever you have to do. It's just a fantastic book. I always say that it received the kind of dignified reception that caused me no tax trouble, which is why it's available for a dollar on Amazon in various places. No, I mean, Rob, if you have the rights to that, the electronic rights to that, and you quite possibly do, why don't you just put it out in Kindle form and let us all hoover it up?

That's a very good idea. I think I did just sell some version of it to Bloomsbury again for both those books. So I think they're going to be bundled up into one. Bloomsbury, Bloomsbury. It is just astonishing. Two of the best writers I know, Rob Long, who just sort of shuffles along and hems and haws and has his books published.

You might as well have them published in China, for goodness sake, for the way you promote them, which is not at all. And then Andy, when Andy, Andy used to have a column from Bloomberg News. And Andy, this is literally true. One week Andy called me and said, listen, I know you look at my column sometimes. This week, please just don't.

Don't even look at it. He would call people to ask them not to read his stuff. Well, I think – that was in my passive-aggressive days. I'm through that now. Now I don't even bother mentioning it. I just don't know what he it. I just hope nobody does. You're a former speechwriter. The President of the United States will deliver his second inaugural address on Monday.

What should he say? I resign. Actually, that's not true because then you'd have Joe Biden. How about I fire the Vice president and now I resign? That would be better. Hey, Andy, how bad is it going to be? I'm a pessimist, as you know, because I believe that that's the only legitimate perspective on world events. But it does seem to me like

we're in disarray, at least politically and message-wise. This guy, he's going to get his... He's going to stand in front of a bunch of children today or somebody said on Twitter, Barack Obama is going to make a speech surrounded by children and guns.

Surrounded by children and men with guns while he complains about men with guns. I think Ceausescu used to do that too. Ceausescu and Saddam Hussein both had the same technique. Exactly right. Surround yourself with children. What can we do? I mean what's the – is it just time to hunker down and hibernate and just hope things don't get bad? Or are there little moments where we can, like in the movie Red Dawn, like the Wolverines, put some points on the board?

Well, yeah, sure. I think that's the only way you can go about it is just incremental, little incremental victories. And sometimes you have to count victory as just stopping something bad from happening. And those are the kinds of victories we're going to have to settle for, I think, for quite a while. You know, and that's not a terrible thing. I mean, I'm a little alarmed. You're producing one campaign slogan after another. Little incremental victories. Vote for us. We're not a terrible thing.

Keep talking, but my underlying question is, what do you do for Republican morale, especially for those poor saps who are stuck serving in the House and the Senate when all they can hope for is little incremental victories, if that? Well, as I was going to say, I mean, I'm surprised at up completely all at once in the American governing system. And I think everybody's sort of assuming that that's what Obama can do. Now, I have to say, he has done amazing work so far in trying to screw things up. And my hat's off to him. But most of that was in the first two years.

And he's not going to have complete control of the government probably ever again. And so we've probably seen the worst that he can do. And as I say, I mean, there's nothing wrong with being negative and reactionary. I mean, I've lived my entire life that way. Andy, could Peter here one more time? I know because you and I exchange emails and phone calls and we're old friends that you have in recent months begun to think less about Washington and more about a major American and more about the state of higher education in this country. Can you tell us a little bit about your thinking on the humanities? And if you're willing to, are you working on a book yet? Is that something you're willing to talk about? No, but I will. Well, no, basically, Joe Epstein, Joseph Epstein has written some very, very profound things for the Weekly Standard and elsewhere about the sorry that because the humanities have died in higher education, which is sort of

the place that they were supposed to be preserved, trying to understand the human condition through art and music and literature and all that, since that's all kind of veered off into little specialties and weird kind of deconstruction know, deconstruction, nihilism and all of its various forms. People have started to ask or stopped asking the kinds of questions that humanity's answers, which is like big things like, why are we here? How do you live the good life? And they have recourse only nowadays in the in the public sphere to

social science and brain science and neuroscience so you know if you want to understand the secrets of the human heart we don't go to Tolstoy or Aristotle we go to you know somebody who has a brain image to show us what part of the amygdala has lit up when you, you know, say something nice to your wife. And there's going to be long range, long range ramifications to the fact that we've let the humanities just drift away. And we're all sort of becoming, you know, pop scientists in the interim. And you don't understand the pervasive gloom on our side? Well, you know,

what's the I suppose the conservative view is always short-term pessimist, long-term optimist, right? That's where I find myself. Got it. You mean, but long-term optimist because we believe in an afterlife, right? Right, right, true. That's where I find myself. Got it. And you mean, but long-term optimists because we believe in an afterlife, right?

We don't necessarily... Right, right. Exactly, yeah. I don't think anything's going to get better around here. No, no. Okay, so the long-term ramifications of permitting the humanities to slip away from us would be what? Well, as I say, it's a kind of nihilism. You know, just as we are starting to acquire these incredible scientific powers, you know, and manipulation of genes and our understanding of how the brain works and so on,

we are losing a conception. We're having an extremely flat conception of what human beings are, you know, rather than the full, deep, sort of juicy human picture that's given to you through all the great works of our civilization. We have this view of sort of a mechanistic meat dummy, you know, kind of propelled by electronic impulses and that kind of thing, just at the point when we should start thinking what is it that we're manipulating when we start manipulating genes or when we start poking around in the brain. And when you start to think of people...

My God, how did this get so heavy all of a sudden? Yeah, what happened, Andy? Oh, I'll make it even worse. It's Robinson's fault, it's not mine. I'll make it worse, Andy. When you start to think of people as nothing but goomy poop and they can be manipulated at will, then you come up with a physical environment that fits that, that is bereft of humanity and cut off from humanity's history.

And if you want to look at a city where it has more manifestations of this sort of idea than any other, it would be Chicago. Now, Chicago is a contradiction. It is an incredibly beautiful city. It is the best example of Miesian-style architecture that you will find elsewhere. But it is also the example of a tremendous Beaux-Arts tradition

and a postmodern architectural tradition which attempted somehow to revive the old styles that were destroyed by modernism. I mean, it is a gorgeous thing. And I love the skyline of Chicago intensely, sometimes more than New York.ism. I mean, it is a gorgeous thing. And I love the skyline of Chicago intensely, sometimes more than New York. But sometimes I look at it also and think that every one of those great towers is an empty, decayed tooth where the nerve is gone. And it just will take a push and the whole thing will fall. Is Chicago in trouble to the extent

that some people say, well, they look back 30, 40 years at Detroit and say, you know, Detroit will never be anything other than the powerhouse that it is. But you wrote this great piece for the Weekly Standard about Chicago, and we'll ask you here, could Chicago become the next Detroit? I don't think so, partly because it just has advantages of location and infrastructure that Detroit never had uh... but can't take away from the fact that that we we still use interstate and railroad lines to move products in the united states and if

if u with chicago is the natural hub for that uh... it probably will never again be a uh... a center of finance the way it was even up to twenty years ago it'll'll never be hog butcher to the world, as Carl Sandburg said, stacker of wheat and all the other things that made it a great city. But how many cities are going to survive on the old manufacturing model? Probably not very many, but I think Chicago has as good a chance as any of them. Except it's so damn cold. That's the main problem.

Hey, Andy, I'm now in full Ask Yoda mode here. I do so love just asking you what you think about almost anything. And as opposed to telephone conversations when you can deflect me, this is being recorded. And I know that you feel some obligation to our listeners to answer the questions. So we just passed – we just celebrated – actually, we didn't celebrate Richard Nixon's centenary. You've written quite a lot about Richard Nixon. Sum him up for us. What is the legacy of Richard Milhouse Nixon?

Well, my God. I don't know. Nowadays, whenever I think of him, I just think of Dan Aykroyd and his fantastic impression, which I guess he hasn't done in years. I used to – this is actually true as opposed to many of the other things I've been saying. I actually used to go to the National Archives every once in a while up in College Park, Maryland, which is right outside of the District of Columbia, where they keep the Nixon tapes. And a lot of them still haven't been transcribed. And you can go in, if you have a special kind of ID, you can go in and just dip in at random, just open up one of these great big file cabinets and pluck out any day of the week and start listening to what Richard Nixon was doing with his henchmen in the Oval Office that day.

And it is fascinating. I mean, Nixon could never not be Nixon, it turns out. I mean, he was Nixon all the way down to the wingtips. I had a fantastic experience the last time I was up there, actually, which is now a couple of years ago, where I pulled out one that was, I think, October 1971 or something. And, of course, there's nothing about Watergate. It's just Nixon sitting there with one of his aides. It wasn't Ehrlichman or Haldeman. It was a guy junior to that.

Anyway, he was trying to figure out why they hadn't yet cut off funds for the Peace Corps, which apparently was something he wanted to do, because it was filled with, as he said in fantastic Nixonian language, these goddamn little eastern seaboard snobs. And he said, you know, all we're doing here, I'll stop the Nixon impression, I sound like Dan Eckerd, anyway. He said, all we're doing here is paying for these kids to have a vacation, and they all want to go to the South Pacific, or they want to go somewhere in France, or they want to go to Italy. Well,

let's send them to the goddamn Congo, then! So he tried to manipulate the funds in such a way that he could have all of these eastern seaboard snobs from Harvard and Yale get shipped off to Africa so that he could kind of teach him a lesson. It's really, I mean, it's just, he was endlessly fascinating. And now at the remove of, you know, three or four decades, he's actually quite comical. It didn't seem so at the time. But, you know, on this National Review cruise, this post-election National Review cruise, James Buckley, former Senator James Buckley was there. And I confirmed with him a story I'd first heard him tell 20 years ago. When he was elected to the Senate in New York in 1970, the White House

flew him down to meet Richard Nixon. And as the door to the Oval Office opened, President Nixon was concluding a meeting with John Ehrlichman and George Shultz. And as James Buckley walked into the Oval Office, the first words he heard Richard Nixon utter were, I don't give a good goddamn what Milton Friedman says. he's not running for re-election in two years. Yeah, and Nixon won pretty big on that. Of course, we all paid the price for it over the next eight years. Right, because he enabled the smugness of all the boomers and the other post-hippies, the smugness that they would be able to shove down our face via Doonesbury about what a corrupt batch of people the right were.

Rob, you had a question, or was that Peter? At LiveScoreBet, we love Cheltenham just as much as we love football. The excitement, the roar and the chance to reward you. That's why every day of the festival, we're giving new members money back as a free sports bet up to 10 euro if your horse loses on a selected race. That's how we celebrate the biggest week in racing. Cheltenham with LiveScoreBet. This is

Total Betting. Sign up by 2pm 14th of March. Bet within 48 hours of race. Main market excluding specials and place bets. Terms apply. Bet responsibly. 18plusgamblingcare.ie I was going to say that the Nixon tapes are always a treasure trove of awkwardness. That's the thing that's so interesting about Nixon. Just the

his inability to be comfortable even in an oval office that he won by a landslide. That's the thing that's so interesting about Nixon, just the his inability to be comfortable even in an Oval Office that he won by a landslide. There's one moment when, because I also love to listen to them, the more obscure ones where, I think it's the middle it's got, maybe, it may not be the moment of

during Watergate, but Watergate is brewing. It's certainly not on the, maybe not on the front page, but it's happening. And a bunch of people from the milk board come in and they all come in for the photo op to meet the president, shake hands, get a picture. You make 30 seconds of small talk and you're escorted out. But Nixon didn't – he didn't want to let them go and he starts pitching them new slogans for milk. And the awkward – you can hear the strange – you hear like – actually it's audible, the awkwardness and the total lack of understanding of what's happening from the guys at the milk board. They come in.

Oh, hello. They sort of shake hands and everything. I like milk. How about helps you sleep? That could be a slogan. What do you think of that slogan? And then the guys are like, oh, that'd be an excellent

slogan. Helps you sleep, because it does. Helps you sleep. Good for your bones. And if the thing goes on much longer than you... You're vaguely aware, I think, I think the first time I heard that, I checked the date and then went and found out what else was happening in the world

at the time. So there was Vietnam and there were the Paris Peace Talks and there was Kissinger's shuttle diplomacy and there was inflation and the country was in flames and there was fallout from shuttle diplomacy and there was inflation and the country was in flames and there was fallout from Kent State, all sorts of things happening. And Nixon's there in the Oval Office pitching dairy slogans. Milk, it's good for when you've just been fornicating.

You know, it's a pity, Andy, that you never met Nixon. I'll bet you would have a tale to tell about that if you did. Well, as I think you know, I did actually meet Nixon. But it involves an obscenity. Can I tell the story anyway? Oh, sure. What the heck. It's historical obscenities. Those are different. Yeah. Well, it was, oh, God, that's almost more than 20 years ago now. He gave a speech to the American Society of Newspaper Editors here in Washington at the Marriott Hotel.

And, of course, he'd been out of office for years, and he was in the middle of his comeback, where he was now being thought of as kind of an elder statesman. And so he, I guess it was right before the 88 election, so it would have been 87, so that's 25 years ago. And these newspaper editors, you know, of course, asked him questions, and the air of condescension was just incredible. And then somebody asked him about the coming elections in 88. And the man stood up there and without a note, went through in the course of about maybe 20 minutes, went through every state in the union and gave about a three sentence summary of what the political situation was there, who was running for governor or Senate, how the state legislature was up and gave a prediction for each one it was the most breathtaking political tour de force of analysis i've ever seen

and of course even these guys these newspaper editors were blown away by it and they all spot at the end of the that was the last question i'd say good half of them stood up and applauded him you know i did almost a standing ovation in this room full of newspaper editors. So as he was leaving, a friend of mine worked for him at the time, and the friend said, do you want to go meet the president?

We can walk out to the car with him. I said, oh, yeah, you bet. So I was riding up the escalator with Nixon making small talk, and I said, you know, Mr. President, I've never thought that I would see a room full of newspaper editors give anyone a standing ovation, much less, you know, let's face it, much less you, of all people. And he kind of looked back over his shoulder and said, yeah, well, they're all a bunch

of sh*** anyway. And I remember thinking, at the moment I thought, I am going to be able to dine out on this story for the rest of my life. Well, I mean, the American Society of Newspapers, editors, they chose a name that when you put the initials together is Anthony. Anthony, Anthony. I mean, I got an Anthony award. a name that when you put the initials together is ASNE. A-S-N-E. I mean, I got an ASNE award.

I've got an ASNE right up there on my wall. ASNE just says everything you want to know about the craven little stoop-shouldered beta males that are on the joint. Peter, you had a last question before Andy. Well, it's the last topic anyway. Andy, as you've just demonstrated, you've been politically alert since you were a kid.

And we know that you began in political journalism back when the American Spectator was still out in Indiana. So politics interested you from a very early age. I also know, and now our listeners do too, that you've got two kids in college. Both your kids are in college now. Our generation talked a lot about politics. We talked about the Cold War. We talked about Vietnam. What is your advice to students of your own children's generation? What is the right way to think about the United States of America? I sort of have this – on the one hand, what I hear a lot is, oh, I tell my

children to forget it. The country's doomed. Just go make money and prepare to lead the best life within your own terms that you can. Forget about public life. Somehow, I don't think that's quite what you'd say, but what would you say? Really? You have friends who say that? Well, in California, particularly with regard, I mean over – I had lunch the other day. Oh, I thought we were talking about the United States. No, I am talking about the United States. I am talking about the United States. But out here in California, it begins with California.

We've got to get out. I've written it off. They're against us. The government here is predatory and by the government will be too. I do hear that. Yeah. Well, I guess I've heard a little bit of it, too. Why would you think that?

Even if the facts pointed that way, which I don't think that they do, why would you succumb to that? You know, there's a reason that the Catholic Church says that despair is a sin. It's not helpful. That's why. So, you know, even somebody like me who kind of almost takes sensual pleasure in my pessimism, I'm not despairing. And, you know, the thought that my children will grow up in a terrible country would be despairing. And it just doesn't seem to me to be plausible either. I mean, there are too many self-correcting mechanisms, informal self-correcting mechanisms that the American people have to let this thing get too far afield. And it just doesn't, you know, our history shows it.

I mean, Jesus, you know, we had a civil war where people were actually killing each other. American citizens were killing each other. And somehow we got through that. We lived through 25%, 28% unemployment for a period of almost a decade back in the 30s. You know, we survived Jimmy Carter, for God's sakes. So how can you not be optimistic about the potential of America? Thank you. All right, well, when everything collapses...

I'm going to turn that into a Hallmark card. That seems like a column. When martial law is declared in 2014, we'll have you back to eat those words, Mr. F. We'll have them printed up on gum and script, and you can pour some melted free gum and cheese and ketchup on them, too. But that'll be at the re-education camp,

and I don't know if we'll be able to get a good Skype system carrier from there. No, I agree with you. I'm as optimistic as you are. We had a president who had arbitrarily set gold depending on what number he dreamed about the night before. So yeah, we'll make it. But we thank you. And I want everybody to go to the Weekly Standard

and read Andy Ferguson's piece on Chicago. And it's just the beginning of it, the delightfulness in which he just offhandedly demolishes the career of a writer of one of those Larry King-style asterisk banalities that used to fill newspaper columns back in the day. It's just a thing of delight, and we are always delighted when you're here at the podcast. Thank you, sir. We'll talk to you soon. You bet. Bye-bye. See you out here in a couple of weeks, Andy.

Yeah, that's right. Looking forward to it. And now we pivot, turn, and go to another publication. This one is mostly virtual, but that doesn't mean it doesn't have a lot of heft and punch, which it does. It's the Washington Free Beacon, which ought to be in your list of daily favorites. It's edited by Matthew Continenti, and he's our next guest. Now, prior to joining The Beacon, Matt was opinion editor of The Weekly Standard, where he remains a contributing editor. He's the author of The K Street Gang, The Rise and Fall of the Republican Machine. Fall? I'll talk to him about that. And The

Persecution of Sarah Palin, How the Elite Media Tried to Bring Down a Rising Star. Continenti's articles and reviews have appeared in the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, Financial Times, the LA Times, the Washington Post, all the usual suspects which have been happy to have him, as are we. And he's also Bill Kristol's son-in-law. So we welcome to the podcast again, Matt Conor Nettie. Thanks for having me. Matt, Peter here.

First of all, before we get to your prescription for saving the republic, give us about two sentences on the Washington Free Beacon. We want to give you every opportunity to let people know about that splendid – it's not a publication exactly. What do you call it? That organ. How is that? Free Beacon. Yeah.

We love your splendid organ, Matt. It is a fantastic organ and FreeBeacon.com is a conservative online newspaper that we specialize in, in investigative reporting stories that you won't read anywhere else. And then we top it off once a week with my commentary on Fridays, but my commentary is the only commentary allowed on the site where our real focus is on breaking news and covering the left in the same way that the liberal allowed on the site. Our real focus is on breaking news and covering the left

in the same way that the liberal media covers the right. There is, I just say on the front page, right now there's a great piece, you do have some great reporting. It's a great piece, the headline is simply this, fists killed more in New York than rifles in 2011. And then in the subhead is a usefulness of New York gun laws remains to be seen,

which I think is great. It really is the newspaper that the right would print in a bizarro world. In a bizarro world, that's the newspaper you pick up on the side of the – on the corner. That's what the guy is doing. But it's terrific. Now, so let me ask you this. How – I think I know the answer to this.

How hard is it every day to choose from among the possible stories? I mean is it just like you kind of come in like a kid in a candy store and people are pitching – because you could print – I mean I don't think – you could hire probably twice as many reporters and still not cover all the stories daily and they want to become you know they want to become left-wing muckrakers and use journalism to further the goals of progressive liberalism and most people on the right most young people i mean and myself kind of included in this one 10 years ago when i graduated from college was you know we want to be an opinion journalism and there are some great conservative reporters and there's a question about that but one one of our jobs at the Free Beacon is to create more of them, and so a lot of what we do is working on stories, training stories, and we have researchers and stuff who also come up.

They're working behind the scenes to come up with different angles, things like that, but a lot of our best stories are things that maybe the liberal media reports, but the most interesting pages of the New York Times, I find, are always the news and brief pages. They're buried in like A8 or whatever, and then kind of in the little corner. And very often, I'll see an item in there, and I'm like, well, that piques my interest, and then I give it to a reporter, and they turn a great story into labor perfidy or something like that.

But you are right, though. I mean, there's no shortage of stories that liberals are uninterested in covering, and so that means that we have to do it for them. Where do you find your reporters, Matt? Where do you find the kids? Well, when we started, you know, we're about a year old. We celebrate our first birthday on February 7th, and when we started, we brought on people from different conservative publications, one from National Review, one from American Spectator, one from The Daily Caller. The Franklin Center for Investigative Journalism is a pretty good nonprofit, right-leaning.

We've got a guy coming over from the Heritage Foundation's investigative blog. He's coming over. You'll find them. It's kind of like going through the haystack. And then, of course, once they're there, the job is really training them, improving their copy. A lot of young conservatives want to be reporters, but they just don't know how to do it. And it's even, they're ready to pick up the phone, but they don't know who to call. And so a lot of my job as editor is saying, well, call this person,

call that person, get out of the office, go to this event. And so that over time, the hope is that they build up kind of the routines and habits of the reporters who staff the Post and the New York Times. Got it. By the way, before – I offer you for free an idea that I think Rob Long will second immediately, which is a bureau in Sacramento, California. Here we have the biggest state in the union with a budget of over $100 billion. Real money moves through the state. The politics are fascinating, dismal at the moment. Within two years, it's going to be out of money.

Everybody knows all this. And the reporting on California politics and budget is just, in the first place, it's almost unbelievably thin. And in the second place, it's appalling. It's just a sort of rewriting of press releases. I do not know why that should be, but hurry and set up a free beacon in Sacramento, please. If only the state capitol were in Santa Monica, I would set it up. Exactly, yes.

I would staff it. Exactly, right. But I'll keep it under consideration, Peter. So, what I would say is, is this going to be, I mean there's this feeling now when – we just talked to Andy Ferguson. We're trying to fight despair here. But there's a feeling that we're kind of – these are maybe the catac to the top or moving to the bottom in a way of sort of either energizing your audience or cheering your audience or enraging your audience? I mean do you think about your audience at all? Because it does seem to me that we all kind of know. We're all kind of in the same general national mood on the right. And I certainly think about it when I post on

Ricochet. Yeah, I mean, I think about audience in terms of informing them. So it's because most of almost all the content on freebeacon.com is is repertorial or aggregation or video. You know, we want to present to the reader, it's something they didn't know the very definition of news. And that's the big job. So when i'm thinking about what we highlight a look you know what's new what's the angle that's new uh... and uh... or the piece of information that's new uh... you know in my column uh... during the campaign maybe i was but kind of more to kind of

rubbing up the audience kind of talking about how what strategy of the obama campaign was and how maybe conservatives need to deal with that reality. In the week since, I've turned to more just, you know, I really think if liberals are so empowered, they really need to be kind of judged by their own standard. And so that's what I've been writing about a little bit more now in terms of my column. But really, when we're shaping the site on a given day, it's informing people. And oftentimes, the news does make people outraged.

You know, there's no question about that. We've had some great stories on kind of the response to Hurricane Sandy in New Jersey and New York City in particular, and just the ridiculous way that Bloomberg handled that hurricane. And also, you know, the real mishandling in many cases of FEMA in terms of getting aid to the people who were devastated by the hurricane. Those stories were kind of just covered over, you know, papered over, literally, in the run-up to the election, and even in the aftermath, people not that concerned.

As long as Bloomberg took care of Manhattan, all was well. But, of course, that's not most of New York City. And that's, I think, that's something that does get people outraged, but it's also our job is to inform them of it. Matt, the mood in Washington, the president will give his second inaugural address on Monday. And I have been struck over and over again by how aggressive and partisan he's been since the election. He won big, not as big as Nixon defeated McGovern or as big as Reagan defeated Mondale, but he won big. And typically, you'd expect a president to be magnanimous, to try to put out, least rhetorically invitations to the other side

to work together, so on and so forth. So is – what do you – what's the feeling in Washington? Are you expecting to see an aggressive and partisan inaugural address? Are the – and the question – I keep thinking to myself, what must life be like as a Republican member of the House or Senate right now when even in his trumpet blast editorial in the Weekly Standard of a week or 10 days ago on what the Republicans should do, Bill Kristol ended up suggesting that they look for places for small incremental victories. That's really not what you run for Congress to do, but that's the best you can hope for now. So what do we expect on Monday? And what's the mood, if it's fair to ask such a vague question, of a reporter who's insistent on specifics among Republicans on the Hill?

Well, the first thing I'd say, Peter, is I'm not sure the Republicans on on the hill think obama one is big as some other people they're really they'll be well they go back you know and their cliche is well you know if that were the case why were we re-elected the house majority they lost eight seats but they still have the majority um you know and the senate the senate was not nowhere near what republicans expected but i mean still 45 seats. I was doing some calculation. I mean, in terms of victories, you know, Republicans are in a better place than they were just, you know, certainly after 64 and even, you know, even after 92.

So it's not necessarily, it's a bad victory. It's a, you know, it's a bad situation for Republicans, but I think that they're a little bit more optimistic maybe than some of the conservative writers and thinkers. However, I would just say this. I think that Republicans do need to be realistic about what can be accomplished. I mean basically after the 2010 ten election everyone said myself included we have divided government in washington well i think now looking back that turned out to be totally wrong we don't have to fight government washington we'd have divided government in washington if the republicans controlled the congress

they don't control the congress to control one house the lower chamber in fact of the congress and then if it is similar situation in many ways to the democrats after the reagan revolution in nineteen eighty when reagan took that the senate do you know it and and the republican control the senate until eighty six election so so they are the republican you know they're in that case the democrats that deal with reagan they really weren't you know the energetic party uh... at the

time uh... and so republic Republicans are in a similar situation. There's very little they can do. And so I agree with Bill in the sense that they have to kind of think realistically about what they can accomplish, what they should oppose, how they should oppose it. As to what Obama is going to say on Mondayay i really don't have the famous idea i think you're right that obama has become been very aggressive and partisan since his reelection but of course obama was very aggressive and partisan during his reelection campaign he is governing in character of his campaign

which was very much let's divide the country let's rally the majority against the minority. In this case, the minority is the rich or the Republicans or whomever, you know, the gun lobby or whatever. And they're going to carry on this as long as they can. And so when I just look at the news, I see conservatives being assaulted on every front, whether it's the tax issue, whether it's now the debt ceiling issue, whether it's Chuck Hagel, whether it's gun control, but now it's immigration.

We're going to have the immigration reform on Obama's. So it's every single front he is doing what he can to push the envelope, to divide the Republican Party, and to rally the majority against the minority of conservatives in this country. And we'll see how long it's effective. Wow. Well, how long will it be effective? I mean, it just sounds to me as though... No one does.

Obama doesn't know either. You know, something will happen and or they'll overreach or, you know mean typically historically six terms uh six uh six theory elections uh aren't very good for the presidential party but who's to say i mean i think that they're trying to have all they can to just crush the republicans and take back the house in 2014 i think they the democrats think they can do that and you know who's to say they can't? Yeah, hey, Matt, it's Rob in LA. It does – I mean part of what I'm sort of frustrated by I think for whoever controls the national conversation or maybe it's the Republicans controlling the debate is that we're talking about – we're always talking about stuff that's perfect, that's right for Obama. I mean we're talking about gun control and we're talking about the debt ceiling and we're talking about little components and not sort of the bigger picture. And as long as we're talking about little components and as long as we're sort of being

distracted from unemployment and a faltering economy and just general stagnation, we're on their – we're playing on their – by their rules. Is this the sort of time for us to shake it up a little bit? Just tap it. I would love – I mean, yeah. I mean, I'd love for that to happen, Rob. I just don't see how it can. I mean, the truth is the presidency matters. I mean, this is the most important office in the land.

When you're the president, you control the conversation because you have the spotlight pinned on you. And I mean, this is a case that Democrats felt the same way, I'm sure, after George Bush's reelection in 2004. Oh, my God. In that case, they wanted to talk about the economy and instead Bush wanted to talk about Social Security. Right. And so there's just you're at a disadvantage when you don't control the White House in terms of the conversation. I'd also say, you know, during the campaign, it was quite explicitly run on the issue or at least on the Republican side on the issue of the economy. And Romney lost. And so maybe the economy actually isn't the best issue on which Republicans to make their stand. Right now, they're trying to shift the conversation to spending. And, you know, the truth is, I think that some of the polling shows

and even some liberal commentators suggest that, you know, they're on a little bit firmer ground to talk about spending and to try to bring spending out of control. Whether they're serious about it is another question entirely. But, you know, I mean,ama's not interested in cutting spending and so he's giving the republicans the choice you either raises that feeling there or uh... or your i'm gonna pin you responsible for whatever happened next and so republicans have to think seriously about how they're going to

negotiate that what exactly they're going to do whether it's worth you know standing standing on this debt ceiling issue, or maybe just letting, you know, calling his bluff on the sequester, maybe, and letting that go into effect, and then giving him the debt ceiling. I really don't know. Matt, Peter here with one more, one, I guess, last question from me in any event, we've got to let you go, about the, just the nature of politics on our side. We had Andy Ferguson on a few moments ago, and we were talking about Richard Nixon, whose centenary we just celebrated,

if celebrated is the word. But of course, from the time he stepped down as vice president, well, from the time he lost his own campaign for president in 60 until he was elected president in 68, he was the leader of the Republican Party, the principal spokesman without doubt. Ronald Reagan from his – throughout much of the 1970s, Reagan is the principal spokesman for at least one wing of the Republican Party, the conservative wing. There were large figures even when the GOP was out of office, who represented the principal

spokesman for the GOP. Now we have in Washington, Mitch McConnell and John Boehner. I think we'd all agree they're excellent inside the game tacticians, but probably not the most impressive faces for the party. And then you've got a scattering of 30 Republican governors. How does the party coalesce around or conservatives or describe it in any way you our side find spokesmen? How does someone emerge? Well, I mean I think the – obviously I wasn't around during the 60s. But, you know, I mean, Nixon and his allied Rockefeller were contrasted with the Goldwater wing, the Buckley wing. You know, so there was a divided. It was much less of Nixon's a leader. And there was kind of a contest.

And, of course, Goldwater won the nomination in 64. And then, of course, in the 70s, Reagan's second. People forget Reagan actually dipped his toe in the 68 contest. But, you know, when he ran again in 76, he was challenging an incumbent Republican president. least is divided between a tea party wing, a tea party minority, basically, and kind of establishment Republicans who are not necessarily going along to get along, but, you know, they just have, they're more accepting maybe of the realities of the political situation. I'm talking here like, you know, the difference between a Paul Ryan and a Rand Paul, you know. And I think that's the debate that's going to continue over the course of the next four years as we approach the next nominating contest. You know, in terms of people who actually control the party, in terms of, you know, who has the most influence and most pull in terms of party apparatus connections. I would say Jeb Bush is a huge player that people should be following, obviously,

with all of his deep ties to fundraisers and to Florida and things like that. Where's the Wall Street money going? Well, I think Wall Street likes Paul Ryan, and I think Wall Street likes Chris Christie. I think they were mad at him over kind of what he did after the Hurricane Sandy and kind of his belligerent speech to attacking Boehner over the $60 billion in relief. But at the end of the day, I think they're going to forget about that. And really, you know, I see Christie making moves that are infuriating to conservatives in the short term, but in the long term are working pretty well for his political future. So, you know, I mean, it will resolve itself eventually. And there's no, you know, look, I mean, there's no substitute for a great candidate.

And we've kind of lacked, Republicans at least, have kind of lacked a great candidate in the last two cycles, and arguably even before cycles previous to that. And I happen to think that there are some talented Republican politicians coming up, whether it's Rubio or Christie or McDonald. I mean, none of them are perfect, but they're all good. And so it's an open field. Matt, isn't it?

Yeah, it's an open field, and the ground is, I think, better for us in four years from now. Lilac's here. Isn't the real question, America is hungry at this point for another Bush? Isn't that what a lot of the smart people are saying is, where's a Bush that we can put up there? Do you think that Jeb is just snakebit and cursed because of the four letters that happened to follow his Jeb part? Or does he have a chance nationally? If only his name were Bosch instead of Bush, it would be so much of a difference. The truth is, I love the cliche that I learned from Chris Matthews many years ago

when he was still sane. And he said, you know, we always correct from the failings of our past presidents. And, you know, that suggests that the next president will once again try to make the, I think, more kind of the argument for not only bipartisanship, which is obviously lacking in this Washington, but also kind of, I don't want to say competence, but kind of just like, I'll tackle the big problems. You know what I mean? And, you know, that's a message that Republicans can deliver just as well as Democrats, who by that time will have governed the White House for eight years. Well, according to Chris, of course, the only problems that our great leader has

is that he's insufficiently sometimes progressive. So what Chris means is that the next president will make Obama look like Barry Goldwater. I'm going to let you go, Matt, and we thank you for being here, and we look forward to speaking to you again before the Republicans take control of everything once more and show that they're as confused about the next direction as the Democrats are. But thanks, and we'll continue to watch the beacon. Go there now, everybody, to Washington Free Beacon and find everything from Harry Reid talking the usual Reidian nonsense to a piece about how cats actually predicted stock market picks better than the experts. It's a zesty brew of information and fun, and we advise it to all. Thanks for stopping by, Matt. We'll talk to you later. Thank you, guys.

Matt, thank you. Absolutely. Well, you know, later. Thank you, guys. Matt, thank you. Absolutely. Well, you know, we were talking before the show. Those of you who are new to the podcast may not know this, but before the show, we like to talk for 10 minutes amongst ourselves and essentially burn out our stammering or our stomach and exhaust all the things that really would be fresh and new if we brought them up on the show itself. But we were talking about Zero Dark Thirty, and there was a groundswell of Peter to talk about it, not from me who hasn't seen it,

and not from Rob who hasn't seen it. I generally, when people describe movies that they haven't seen, I go to a little place in my mind where I can amuse myself until the person's lips start moving, and then I can say, really, fascinating. But Peter has seen it. And so, Rob, you can make coffee. Me, I'm going to apply this steroid cream that I just have here to my hands for a while.

And Peter, do go on. Zero Dark Thirty, your review. I will wait until the two of you have seen it to review it. But I want to set it up by asking rob to take notes as a technical matter the first the movie divides into two bits the second bit just is totally gripping and and you'll see why but the first part first half there's a huge amount of exposition that they have to get in you have to know what's taking place you have to know something about what counts as torture, what doesn't count as torture, which terrorist is which. And so, of course, they do what

screenwriters, the resort of screenwriters, which is they have people rolling their eyes and trying, there's a lot, as you pointed out, Rob, when you have exposition, there's no substitute for having an actor or actress smoke a cigarette. You can do interesting things visually. But I just would love to hear if you think they handled that as well as they could because the first half of the movie is a little leaden, I think. That's it? Well, I just – I mean I will do that and I think that's – it's always a challenge with those movies, especially ones that want to be accurate to – or believable I should say to have the – to deal with that exposition and all the technical stuff. But what I find fascinating about it as a cultural artifact is that this is a movie that even Catherine Bigelow, the director, says doesn't endorse torture, but it clearly comes down in favor – if you're in favor of killing Osama bin Laden, anybody who's proud or happy that Osama bin Laden is dead, for instance, current sitting presidents and their left-wing acolytes, must by definition also accept the currently allowed forms of enhanced interrogation including waterboarding and sleep deprivation.

If President Barack Obama had ordered waterboarding, it would be called hydrotherapy. Well, he clearly did. I mean this went on during his presidency. We wouldn't have that argument. If Abu Ghraib had erupted under Obama's watch and we saw prisoners stacked up in pyramids, they would be called training for male cheerleader jobs afterwards. I haven't seen it though, Peter. Okay, so we'll hold off.

Am I correct in that? Because that is what's driving some people on the left. Here, I think is what you can say. And truly, you two didn't have an assignment. Go see the movie because it's worth talking about, and we should next week or the week after that when the two of you get around to seeing it. But, so question number one for

the two of you as professional writers is, how did they handle the backstory, the exposition? And then question number two is whether it's true what Rob just said. I believe it is just objectively the case that anybody who watches that movie will walk out saying, oh, the critical piece of information that led us to Osama bin Laden came out of treating a prisoner pretty rough. And that is just the way the movie portrays it. Now, it doesn't go into suppose they had treated the prisoner more nicely. Might he have given that information in any event? But it is pretty clear that that was the actual sequence of events.

So what is the political effect? What does somebody who's politically alert conclude after watching the movie? And then as a technical matter, I'd just like to love to hear the two7,000 sins of the Bush administration was, of course, their descent into the barbarism of torture where people regularly had their testicles interrogated with dental picks and the like, right? And supposedly the entire culture has swanned back in revulsion like Andy Sullivan and regarded this as a dark turn in our history from which we, thank God, rediscovered our humanity and stepped back from it. At the same time, however, that people were talking about how bad it was under Bush, the torture, and all the rest of these things, you had robust DVD sales and television ratings for a show called 24, which in one of its seasons featured the hero of the show decapitating a guy, putting the head in a box and then showing it to somebody else prior

to shooting him in the knee to get him to talk. And I think at that point, they were looking for something like a UPS package they've been missing for a couple of days. When they were talking about nuclear materials, Jack really got nasty. So the idea that the whole culture was caught up in this

ethical reconsideration and thought we really were bad then, and then is going to do a 180 after seeing this. I don't think large swaths of the culture ever thought, boy, treat these guys nice. Please, please, please do. Even if the information is good, what do we lose as a people? Sorry. If that argument is made, maybe four or five liberals perhaps in Washington, D.C. will say, hmm, perhaps I should reevaluate this position that I stuck with such conspicuous gallantry. Perhaps I was wrong. It's fun. It's fun.

It's actually fun for me. There's not that much fun in my life in this respect, but it's fun for me to remind people about Guantanamo still being open. It's fun for me to remind people about Guantanamo still being open. It's fun for me to remind people about drones. It's fun to remind them about the benefits of waterboarding and sleep deprivation and that there's – one of the big movies is out that people – and there's those same people who are crowing about how bin Laden is dead and Barack Obama killed him. I mean it's fun. It's like i like the look on their face i like to see their face look confused and sad and confused and then confused some more and then a little bit a tiny little bit of shame i like it um there's not that there aren't many high points james and in in being a a right-wing kook in this world and this is one of them This is a perfectly clear, absolutely inarguable case of total left-wing hypocrisy.

Right. In the face of something they claimed was a deeply moral issue. And it's fun. I'm enjoying it. Oh, you think that's fun? I've got a French brother-in-law, as I've mentioned before, my FBIL, who I love dearly and he's a great guy. But we went around and around and around on evil George Bush and the Iraq War. And, of course, the only reason that Bush went into war in Iraq was to compensate for his father's failure to do so and for the oil.

Well, you can just imagine the fun I'm having with Molly. So let me get this right. France invades Molly with Molly. So, let me get this right. France invades Molly. Molly. I thought you meant Molly Hemingway. No, no. What are you guys doing down there? Because there's oil in Molly, you know.

So, Total Fina, that big French company, which incidentally was heavily invested in Iraq, and which incidentally got more contracts out of the Iraqi oil industry post-invasion than the United States did. You guys, you wouldn't be down there for oil by any chance, would you? Well, I don't think, what does he say? I don't think

they are down there for oil. I mean, the French aren't that practical. They're down there because they believe they're fighting Islamofascism, right? They're down there for perfectly, for almost, I would call them American reasons. They're down there for perfectly – for almost – I would call them American reasons. They're down there because they think that – and they are correct that the Islamofascists in the Maghreb in North Africa are going to be moving down and trying to take over all those states.

They are surprising – been surprisingly effective at it. Naimeh, the capital of Niger, is now I think the only city still held by the original corrupt but not Islamist government. They're looking at – it's not really Niger they're scared of. What they're scared about is Algeria because the Algerian Islamic revolution has been going since the late 90s. So the French – what's interesting about the French is that they are very, very practical and extremely strategic and very cold-eyed when it comes to their own national interests. But they just don't care about anybody else's national interests. So they don't – they didn't – they really just honestly even to this day did not see why we needed to invade either Iraq or Afghanistan. And their argument isn't so much that it's – they don't think that we should act in our interest. It's that they don't understand anybody else's interest at all except their own. So this is a perfect example of containment, a containment strategy for the French, which is they need to get into Mali because if Islamic fascists get a toehold in – can control Mali, it makes it much easier for them to use Mali to stage their eventual successful coup and revolution in Algeria, which does have lots of oil and is on the coast and has a huge French population and will just be this – it would be like suddenly Iran taking over British Columbia.

You're absolutely right. But as I was saying, we have so few joys today. The joy of refusing to accept all of that which is perfectly sensible in real politic combined. Idealism and practicality in an almost you're right, an American style attack. And to throw it back in their face and say, you naive fool to think that it's anything

other than a grab for resources. I really pity your naivete and applaud France's return to the cowboy-style diplomacy. Of course, Bill Maher made fun of Mitt Romney when Mitt Romney brought up Mali in the debates. Here you've got this gray-haired, onanistic homunculus going to Twitter and saying, and I quote, Mitt, you do know that most of America thinks Mali is one of Obama's daughters, right? That's the extent of which Mr. Maher felt that his wit could touch on the subject, making fun of Romney for bringing this up.

So, James, your assignment now is to ask your French brother-in-law to see Zero Dark Thirty and then to tell you, not in general terms, of course, this American barbarian. No. To say at what moment in that film did you see an American doing something he should not have done? At what moment? Which scene specifically? Was it that interrogation or that one or that pursuit? Just ask him where exactly you see an American doing something wrong. Because when the question is framed that way, it gets very hard to answer, I think. Well, in the first 40 seconds when he put the non-dairy creamer in the cream in the coffee. That is true.

Barbarism from then on. No, it will be interesting. I don't think he'll see it and I may not see it in the theater alas because I see so few things in the theater because I find it such a dreadful experience to see movies with other human beings. They behave poorly. I like to go in the middle of the afternoon with my daughter when you have the theater all to yourself and it's like your own private projection room. That's great when you can choose the seat right in the middle and there's nobody around you and there's no cell phones and talking and chattering and especially people talking back at the screen. I always love that. I always love the people who believe that they can interact

in a meaningful way with the flickering of shadows projected. Well, I will see it eventually because it's required to do so. It seems to be one of the few films that has come out of this entire 10-year war on terror process that isn't some ridiculous, grim propaganda that nobody wants to see. And hence its success. But do you think that it was denied its Oscar nod, Rob, because it actually may be pro-torture in a way? No, I don't think so. I just don't think enough people saw it.

I think people – I just think in general there were just some bigger pictures out there that kind of swamped everybody. These are the – the Academy voters tend to be older and a little bit more conservative anyway. So I'm not sure they would care. But they probably believe that Catherine Bigelow already made this movie. It was called The Hurt Locker and they're just not that interested in the future. And that's normal. I don't think that – Hollywood doesn't really operate like that. I mean whenever – Hollywood never punishes.

They only reward. So if you made a – if she made a courageous picture of a whistleblower, she'd be rewarded for that. You're rewarded for your courage, your courageousness in making a movie about Lincoln or something. That's always – if you watch the Golden Globes, that was pretty much the constant Golden Globes accolade to somebody who was courageous. Some courageous movie star courageously accepted a million-dollar role, was courageously in a million-dollar picture and courageously did it and then courageously got paid and courageously bought you know uh new outfits yeah if they come if they come up with abraham lincoln whistleblower that would have been even better you know yeah first year of his administration he finds some some scandal and shoot it all over stone style with multiple film stocks from daguerreotypes to

the rest of it and he looks to the camera with his sort of scraggly beard and top hat and says, one day this nation will be healed, and men and women who wish to marry other men and women can get married. There's always some bizarre, anachronistic, liberal anachronism. The president's in favor. President Lincoln was passionately in favor of gay marriage. Yes. Well, he would have been if he'd been around long enough, and he probably would have come. If he'd lived long enough, he would have come to that change in his thought

about 45 seconds after Barack Obama, because he would have been blinded by the shining brilliance of the man's decision. Well, speaking of shining brilliance. Eight years before Dick Cheney, exactly. That doesn't matter. None of it matters. Everything restarts the day we wake up. The past is irrelevant. The future is a golden place we can get to if we can just stop arguing and do what they want to do. What they would like us to do is to not come back next week, of course, because it was just a vital, vital element in the fight against the future they want to give us. But I'm afraid that we promise to be back next week with something else. We also have coming up next week the return of the big story. I may actually come up with a new piece of awful music that precedes it. You know, I actually did my own E.J. Hill-style Photoshop this week on the site.

I was actually quite proud of it. I think it was so good that everybody thought it was actually a real picture. But that lets you know, folks, that if you go to Ricochet and something gets promoted to the member feed, you can stick in your own Photoshop illustration there, show off your own skills. Because I know the people who belong to this site are good not just with words and thought but with music and painting.

The depth of talent is astonishing. So while you listening to this podcast know all this because you're already a member, we tell you to tell your friends about it and get them hooked and get them subscribing as well so Ricochet can continue to profit and so we can someday bring you podcast number 300. But this concludes 152. I have to say thank you to our guests. Thanks to Audible for sponsoring audiblepodcast.com slash ricochet if you haven't burned that in your mind already with a with a tandy wood burning kit do you know the tandy used to be the largest chain store in the world yeah and they turned into radio shack and they had more outlets than anybody else and now they're dead

and or dying but we're not and we'll see you next week rob peter it's been a pleasure we'll see you ricochet and we'll see you all down the road. Next week. Bye. Bye. Bye. Bye. I want to ride my bicycle. I want to ride my bicycle. I want to ride my bike. I want to ride my bicycle. I want to ride it where I like.

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You say God. Give me a choice. You say Lord. I say Christ. I don't believe in Peter Pan, Frankenstein or Superman. All I want to do is bicycle, bicycle, bicycle. I want to ride my bicycle, bicycle, bicycle. I want to ride my bicycle.

I want to ride my bike. I want to ride my bicycle. I want to ride my bicycle. Races are coming your way. So forget all your duties, oh yeah. Ricochet. Join the conversation. On your marks, get set, go!