The Ricochet Podcast - Happy Seasons!

Episode Date: December 20, 2019

It’s our last podcast for 2019, (but evidently not the last one of the decade) and we do our best to cover the ridiculous and the sublime. For the former, we call upon the Washington Examiner’s Byron York, the leading authority on all things impeachment (you should also be listening to his podcast which this week features a fascinating interview with Devin Nunes). We get the skinny on all of the... Source

I would rather be governed by the first 2,000 people in the Boston Telephone Directory than by the 2,000 people on the faculty of Harvard University. As government expands, liberty contracts. It's funny, sometimes American journalists talk about how bad a country is because people are lining up for food. That's a good thing. First of all, I think he missed his time. Please clap. It's the Ricochet Podcast with Peter Robinson and Rob Long. I'm James Lalax.

Today we talk to Byron York about D.C. and Jody Bottoms about Christmas fiction. So let's have ourselves a podcast. You know, if I started out this podcast with a Santa-like laugh, it would age like milk. And we don't want to do that. We want this to be timeless. We want people 50 years from now to be saying, gosh, what were they saying about impeachment in the last week of 2019? Because they're just going to be so fascinated, as we are, by the ongoing process. Nevertheless, I'm not going to do that. I'm going to tell you this is Ricochet Podcast number 477. I'm James Lallex, and I'm sitting here cybernetically with Rob Long and Peter Robinson.

Hey, guys. Happy holidays, as we say. Happy holidays. Merry Christmas. Merry whatever. Merry Christmas. Well, Bob's Episcopalian, so we never know. I heard once, which is my favorite,

because it's just so incredibly anodyne. Happy seasons. What does that even mean? That was my favorite one, because it's just, it's stripped it all of meaning. It sounds like those things you find in, you know, embroidered on pillows in

craft stores. Savor the festive. You know, there's these certain words that in various combinations are meant to be. Yeah, you're right. These anodyne little greetings. Merry Christmas, we say, and we mean it. So, gentlemen, it's been a week. It has been a week. It has been a historic week.

Why we haven't been able to talk about it. No, it hasn't. It doesn't feel like it. No. But I think that's kind of significant. I mean, I know what Peter means, but I think that this is possibly the least historic major vote that the House has ever taken. I mean, all the nouns and noun phrases used to describe what happened are really like shocking and powerful. If you told somebody 20 years ago or, or 50 years ago that, that, that this had happened,

you think, oh my God, did everything stop? I mean, did people just not leave their house to watch this on TV? The answer is no, it doesn't, it's completely, completely irrelevant. They have managed to remove from the words impeachment and House impeachment articles and presidential impeachment any urgency or value or weight or gravity or meaning. It's kind of staggering when you think about it. Right, right. And to follow up on your, I said, no, it's not historical. You've sort of taken that. But as you suggested a moment ago, precisely because it's not historic, it is historic. They have now, what the founders wanted to avoid, there were a lot of things they wanted

to avoid, but surely one of the things they wanted to avoid was a parliamentary system where the prime minister, the executive, is beholden to the legislature the way it is in Britain, for example. Boris Johnson can only run the government of Great Britain until there's a vote of no confidence in the House of Commons. What the Democrats have done is alter—we'll see where the precedents go if we live long enough—but they have altered the meaning of impeachment from high crimes and misdemeanor to a vote of no confidence, essentially, which is saying, we don't like you. We disagree with you. We think you're doing a

lousy job as president. Those are not high crimes. Those are not high crimes and misdemeanors as even begun to be specified. In fact, in the notes that we have of the constitutional debates, the founders quite explicitly wanted to avoid anything like what the Democrats have now done. So in some weird way, precisely because it is a yawn, if you think of it, let's say post-war, Richard Nixon was not impeached, but he was forced to resign. If he had not resigned, they would have impeached. It would have gone to the Senate. So you've got Richard Nixon. They tried it on Reagan. They didn't get as far as impeachment, but again, they held him up. They took six months of the nation's time and held up President Reagan. By the way, there was more substance to that. It was a serious era

of judgment in Iran-Contra. Iran-Contra really happened. It really happened. The president was not personally – nevertheless, this is something that used to happen, what, once every 50 or 60 years. And now we've got Richard Nixon, Ronald Reagan, Bill Clinton, and Donald – it's four presidents in the last 40 years. But can I offer a theory? Not healthy. I know we want to get to Byron because Byron's going to give us some good stuff. But let me offer a theory to the table. And that impeachments, certain modern-day impeachments, right?

There aren't even three, but this is the modern-day ones, were all about some revelation, some uncovering of what was, in fact, business as usual, to be fair. But the country had changed. So Nixon's behavior was egregious and awful. But look, if you really want to add it up, his IRS did no worse than the IRS under John F. Kennedy. His corruption was really of a piece of Kennedy, Johnson, and presidents before it. The language he used in the Oval Office was certainly salty, but no, saltier, probably a lot more respectful, the language that Lyndon Baines Johnson used in the Oval Office. Right.

It just showed that the country had changed. The same thing with Bill Clinton. Whatever we think of his behavior now towards women, his behavior was certainly no worse than John F. Kennedy's behavior. For sure. His general behavior towards women in general was absolutely generationally in sync, I should say. I mean, I'm not condoning it. We don't quite want to use the word normal, but prevalent, common. Let's say it was common. And the idea that five years or 10 years before, 10 years before, 15 years before, that this behavior would have led to impeachment

or a nationwide rebuke would just be ludicrous. People would just laugh. What on earth? This one, the Trump one, has no such underpinning. There's nothing about it that's surprising or interesting or different or – there's absolutely zero about this – about these proceedings that in any way has captured the interest or the outrage or the – I mean even the revelatory voyeuristic thrill of the American people. And that is why it is an utter and total and complete failure. And then as John Yoo, who's not with us this week, but as John Yoo has pointed out the last couple of weeks. I'm complaining about it, too, by the way. Complaining about it.

But what's the fact? There's no fact. So Richard Nixon, commonplace though much of his behavior was, he gave an order to cover up the break-in. It was on tape. He obstructed justice. He broke the law. Bill Clinton, dalliances with women, commonplace, so on and so forth.

But he lied under oath. He intentionally and knowingly perjured himself. You may argue that those were not impeachable offenses. I might argue that. But there were crimes there. These articles of impeachment say, meh, he abused his power because he used it in a way that we don't like. He obstructed Congress because, like every chief executive before him, he attempted to

defend the prerogatives of the president of the United States as against those of Congress. That one is not only is there not anything there, but Trump and his people, his legal counsel, were actually doing what they ought to have done, and that's an article of impeachment. There is just nothing here except we don't like you, we don't like your policies, you just disgust us. And that is a pretty good reason for defeating him next time around. It has nothing to do with the constitutional processes of impeachment. It's also the idea that they started it with the theory that no one this creepy and awful, no one this repellent could possibly

be clean, right? Clean. Let's find something. We got to find something. And the irony is, of course, they might find something in those tax. I mean, there's a reason why he's trying to keep his tax returns private. They might find something, but they also might not find something. It is entirely possible that Donald Trump is a thoroughly repellent individual, as I believe he is, a person of really low morals and of absolutely zero dignity or honor or decency. But he also might not be a crook. That is also possible. There are plenty of people in our lives who are really awful, who we just I don't like that guy. If that guy's there, I don't want to go. We have all those people in our lives. That doesn't mean they're criminals. And I think the

Democrats are learning the sad, hard lesson in a very sad, hard way for them. And I find myself unable, as much as I am not an admirer of Donald Trump, I find myself unable not to laugh. Unable not to laugh. You know, if I may say so, just set that one aside as the title of your memoir. Yeah, I'll try. What's interesting to me about this, Peter made a great point that this isn't necessarily about what he did. It's about how people feel about him. I was talking to somebody the other day who said it didn't matter whether or not the particulars of the impeachment were accurate. What counted was holding him to account for his life, for a lifetime of being sleazy,

for a lifetime of suingazy, for a lifetime of suing people, for a lifetime of corruption, that somehow this was the judgment of the heavens. And it didn't matter whether or not there was a particular constitutional basis or whether new things have been invented. This was finally comeuppance. And I said, okay, let's accept that as the standard going forward. Are you okay with that? And it made me realize that for a lot of people on the left, a lot of people in the liberal, or simply people who are in a different political camp, that they can't imagine that this would come, that the new standard would come back to bite them because what they do is good. And since what they do is good, that means it's constitutional.

If something is good and unconstitutional, then we have to do something about the decision and the ruling of the constitution. But generally they act from proper motives to do good. So the idea that something like this would happen to them is ridiculous. It's like saying, but you could have impeached Barack Obama over Fast and Furious, which is obstruction of Congress. We could have impeached him over DACA, which was taking under himself immigration policy, which had been delegated to the... We could have done something about the IRA. And this, if you want to get a technical about it, is about a Justice Department that actually had some foreign involvement, Russian and British, with trying to influence the election and get some dirt out of a political candidate. So tell me exactly how you think this isn't going to come back to bite you. But it doesn't matter.

What matters is Orange Man bad and getting him out now. And the result, I think, is to drive away a lot of people who were looking for some moderation and saying, you know what? Do you want me to stand over here? Do you want me to cross this dark line and stand over here? Because if the alternative is this madness and socialism, I'm sorry. I'm inching.

Here's what I'm doing. I just jumped up in the air expecting the earth to be the same when it got down, but somehow it spun a little bit over to the left by the time I was, my feet touched the ground again. And I don't want to be in this spot. I really don't. The other point is, however, is that in the year coming, we've got more prosperity coming and we've got more jobs, more money. And with more of that, the less debt you're going to have, unless of course your debt's already gotten out of control.

We need to talk about that. Oh, effortless. Effortless. I was applauding your last point, and I just didn't even notice. For decades, decades now, your credit card's been telling you, buy it now, and we'll pay for it later. With interest, by the way, some of these interests, you know, 20%, it's 24%. Well, despite your best intentions, that interest gets out of control fast. With Lending Club, you can consolidate your debt, pay off your credit cards with one, one fixed monthly payment. Since 2007, Lending Club has helped millions of people regain control of their finances with affordable fixed rate personal loans. No trips to the bank, no high interest credit cards. Just go to LendingClub.com, tell them about yourself,

how much you want to borrow, pick the terms that are right for you, and if you're approved, your loan is automatically deposited into your bank account in as little as a few days. Now, Lending Club is the number one peer-to-peer lending platform with over $35 billion in loans issued. How to start? Well, go to LendingClub.com slash Ricochet. Check your rate in a few minutes. Borrow up to $40,000. That's LendingClub.com slash Ricochet. LendingClub.com slash Ricochet. All loans made by WebBank, member FDIC, equal housing lender. And our thanks to LendingClub Byron York, who needs no introduction, but yet we're going to give him one anyway, because we just like to show you the important people we get on this podcast. He's the chief political correspondent for The Washington Examiner, Fox News contributor, and the host of The Byron York Show, available right here at the Ricochet Audio Network. And this week's show features a fascinating interview with Devin Nunes.

We'll talk about that in a few minutes here. Follow him on Twitter, if you like, of course, at Byron York. No surprise there. No surprise, perhaps, of course, at Byron York. No surprise there. No surprise, perhaps, Byron, this week with impeachment. Some people thought, no, they ain't got the votes. But they had the votes. And now this incredibly important thing that has the nation's future in its grasp is stalled and waiting until they reconvene in January. What's going to happen in the next 18, 15, 14 days or so?

Is impeachment still going to burn like a hot 18, 15, 14 days or so? Is impeachment still going to burn like a hot coal in the nation's psyche or something else? Is it burning like a hot coal in the nation's psyche? I don't know. Well, the surprise was this whole withholding thing, because as you said, everybody expected Democrats to impeach the president. They had the votes and they did it. Now, to go back 21 years exactly, Bill Clinton was impeached by the House. It was on a Saturday. The vote was about midday. And by 3 p.m., House Republicans, who had the majority, had passed a resolution naming the House impeachment managers, and they

had actually walked over to the Senate to physically deliver the articles of impeachment, which is how it's supposed to be done. So by three in the afternoon of the day of, that was done. So what was interesting was, is that we started getting vibes that the Democrats, when they impeached Donald Trump, were not going to do that. We're not going to take the articles over to the Senate. So they impeach on Wednesday, right? 16th, Lawrence Tribe, the Harvard law professor and a fanatical advocate of impeachment, publishes an article saying that the Democrats don't have to actually deliver the articles of impeachment to the Senate. They could impeach, pass impeachment bills, articles as they did, and then they could withhold them. And that would drive the Republicans crazy because they want a trial so bad that they'll do anything.

They'll meet the Democrats' demand for a, quote, fair trial. And it seemed like a crazy article, but it picked up steam in some Democratic circles so much so that by the night before impeachment on Tuesday night, the night before, people were starting to talk about this. And then by Wednesday night, when they actually passed the impeachment articles, we saw that they were going to subscribe to the tribe theory. And so Byron Peter here. Thanks for joining us, the gentleman reporter from Alabama. So I did what I do many evenings and turned on Fox News for a moment or two. And Fox News was saying they skedaddled out of town without conveying the articles of impeachment to the Senate because they're holding a losing hand. Once they deliver

that thing into the hands of Mitch McConnell, the Senate majority leader, their poll ratings are going to begin to erode even more than they did during—as far as I can tell. So question number one is, what has the polling been? I've seen different polling, but it seems to be the case that during the impeachment process, support for Donald Trump has either held firm or inched up slightly. So it does look as though maybe it hasn't helped the Democrats. And question number two is, in refusing to convey the articles to the Senate, is this because they're playing a weak hand or because they think they have such a strong hand and they want to hold it as long as they can? It's not because they think they have such a strong hand. Now, on Trump job approval, if you just go, let's base all of this on the RealClearPolitics average. Right now, the average is 44.5% approved, 51.9% disapprove. That's basically in the range that it has been ever

since he has been president. I mean, the striking thing about Trump job approval is that it is really never dipped below about 38 and never gotten above about 44, 45. Right. And it just doesn't move. It just bounces around in a very small range. If you remember with Obama, he was over 60 in the beginning and he plunged 30 points. Well, it just has never happened with Trump. He was never high.

He was the highest he's ever been in job approval rating in the real clear politics. Average was 46, which was in February of 2017, right after he takes office. So he's just never been very high. Now, on the impeachment thing, I think that is—let me go to that right this second—that has been bouncing around in a very small range itself. And I think what we have seen, if I look at the RealClearPolitics average of that right now, it has, yes, remove 47.2 percent. No, don't remove 48 percent. So eight-tenths of one percent separate the two sides. And it's been that way quite a long time. So it hasn't really moved since early October, which is when the Democrats began to make their case, which was made on not

just all the news channels, but all of the entertainment channels, as you remember, took or broadcast the House Intelligence Committee hearings live. So Colonel Vindman and Ambassador Yovanovitch, Taylor, and all that stuff live, wall to wall, on ABC, CBS, NBC. I mean, you can't get better than that for Democrats. And it did not move anything. Now, the last thing is, why are they now delaying this? I was on a special report on Thursday night with A.B. Stoddard, who is pretty well connected among a lot of Democrats. And so Brett Baier says, well, A.B., what's with the Democratic strategy? What's going on here? And she talked about all the information that might come out. What about payments to Lev Parnas?

What about more about Rudy Giuliani? Isn't the Southern District of New York doing something? And she said there's a lot—this is a quote—there's a lot of pressure on Democrats to wait this out until there is more to throw at the president. Wow. They've passed these two articles of impeachment that are quite specific, accusing him of abuse of power, specifically in the Ukraine matter. Right. And then contempt of, not contempt, obstruction of Congress, particularly in the Ukraine matter. So I don't know, are they going to pass another article if they get something really great? But that is not a sign of people who feel they have a really strong hand. So even as Lawrence Tribe said, they don't have to deliver these articles to the Senate, and everybody said, oh, you know, we don't.

They don't. In the last couple of days, I've noticed online saying, well, actually, Mitch McConnell doesn't have to wait for the articles of impeachment to hold a trial. They are a public document. He knows what they are. He's in charge of the Senate. If they need to pass a new rule or two to hold a trial, he can get that done. If Mitch McConnell wants to move to get this thing dealt with, he can with or without articles of impeachment formally delivered by the House.

Is that percolating in town? I don't think a rules change is—I think it would take a rules change. First of all, it's not a constitutional matter. The Constitution is very clear about this. It says the House has the sole power of impeachment. And Nancy Pelosi, with the majority, used that power, I mean, to the fullest. She didn't pay any attention to precedent. They did what they wanted, and they had the power to do it. And whenever they were questioned about it, their response was, because we can. And they could. Problem for them is that the Constitution says the Senate has the sole power to try all impeachments. So Nancy

Pelosi has no role in this. So the idea that she is holding out to get the Senate to agree to something is offensive to the Senate to begin with. And obviously, Democrats want to go along with it because they want to get Trump. But anybody who had the Senate's interest at heart in this would say, no, we handle this from here. Now, on the issue of having a trial, I've seen on my Twitter feed, you know, Lindsey Graham talked to the president, came out on Fox last night and said, you know, the president feels like he's being denied his day in court. And I thought, I don't know why Trump supporters and some Republicans are pushing for a trial like this. I mean, basically, you have a situation where Trump can say with some truthfulness, they impeached me, but they're too chicken to send these articles to the Senate for a trial because they know I'll be exonerated. Right, right. Trump can make something of that. He's good at this kind of stuff. And at his next

rallies and in his tweets and everything else, I mean, the idea that the Democrats would impeach him and then withhold the articles of impeachment from the Senate, it just reeks of gamesmanship. And it's precisely what Democrats said they weren't doing through all of this stuff. Hey, Byron, it's Rob Long in New York. That's for joining us. So I have a question about the original strategy, because it seemed to me, and I sort of said this on the podcast before, that it wasn't crazy, a crazy strategy to start the, you know, start the ship moving and then collect evidence as you go. Right. So I remember during the Clinton impeachment, which was really about a perjury, there was an evidence room in the Senate and senators walked in there and they read and they

saw stuff from the Star Report and other places about Kathleen Willey and Juanita Broderick and all that stuff that was not really germane to the central issue. But they came out and said, wow, there's a lot of stuff there. So in many ways, Clinton, the Clinton impeachment got momentum as it went along. Was that Nancy Pelosi's strategy? And if so, what are they waiting for? Is there anything specific that they're waiting for? Or is it just like, well, we're going to start this boat and we're going to send it. And as things go, we're going to add to it. And we might pass additional articles and we can add to it. Is this something you can add to every other month as you come up with one more reason? I think your memory is correct about the Clinton impeachment with a couple of additional facts. facts, there was an argument among Republicans, just like there's been an argument among Democrats

now, about how narrowly or broadly to make the articles of impeachment. And back then, the argument was, do we make the articles of impeachment just about the Lewinsky matter, or do we throw some whitewater in there? How about Travelgate? What about Filegate? Let's get that in there too. Let's get Arkansas in there, you know? And so there were Republicans who wanted to kind of throw in the kitchen sink. And basically, let's get Juanita Broderick in there. So basically what they did was they wrote four articles

and they held votes on all four of them and two of them didn't pass. And two of them did. So two of them go over to the Senate. Now, the Republicans, I believe, were encouraging senators to read evidence about things that weren't in the articles. Weren't in the articles. Were not. And I believe Democrats, to a man and a woman, did not darken the door of the evidence room, never saw stuff, would not see the stuff. And that was entirely reasonable. I mean, look, these articles are what they are. They're accusing him of certain actions.

Right. And so I think that the idea of somehow going back and taking another swing at this and broadening or passing new articles, boy, that's going to be difficult. Yes. So at the end of the day, I'm just trying to get to the mind of the Democrats there. I mean, it was clear Nancy Pelosi, it was clear, was not enthusiastic about this. My guess is that she was smart enough to know it wasn't going to work. But once, you know, the House, tell me where my narrative is wrong, because this is just my assumption. And once she sort of bit it off, she's like, well, you got to take Vienna, you got to take Vienna, we're going to do it. But she's the one who's going to pay the price, right? This is Nancy Pelosi's mistake. Nancy Pelosi's the head of the party. It's her blunder. She runs the house. Do you think she's sitting somewhere in her millionaires, wherever she lives,

and thinking to herself, why did I let them push me into this? I knew this was going to turn out this way. Or did she drink the Kool-Aid about a few months ago and she's all in? What's your sense? Well, I think that, you know, like most people who've done this kind of stuff, she's probably assessing where she is and trying to figure out how she can get to where she wants to go. And maybe not just, you not just kicking herself for listening to the zealots in her party who have wanted to impeach Trump from the get-go. I have been very surprised by this. You can tell it in my voice. I mean, I've been surprised by this withholding. I mean, the speaker withheld the articles and everybody's trying to figure out why is she withholding the articles? And do the Republicans know that the articles have even been withheld? Gosh, this sounds oddly familiar. It does. In fact, I mean, somebody tweeted yesterday

that one of the articles of impeachment is obstructing the impeachment process, which now the Democrats are essentially doing by withholding the articles of impeachment. Yeah. Suddenly it's gone slow. We're all surprised by this, but, I mean, the fact is Thursday night the House closed up, adjourned. Everybody went home. You saw that video. They just run out of the Capitol.

Right. Like it's a jailbreak or something. It's like I used to do when I was in third grade and the bell rang. It's like the bus is pulled up at the border, you know, and everybody's running. Nobody's watching. Everybody's running across. It's just amazing. So they're gone until I think it's January 7th. Let me look at my calendar here. Tuesday, January 7th. January 7th is the day the Clinton trial began, by the way.

Clinton was impeached on December 19th. This is almost exactly lining up to how things are happening now. Clinton was impeached on December 19, and the trial began on January 7, and Clinton was acquitted on February 12. So it took five weeks. So it's not going to happen on January 7th. I mean, Senate's gone, House is gone. So the articles are being withheld for at least three weeks, and we'll see how much longer. Byron, let's cast our eyes beyond impeachment for a moment here, because it's been actually sort of a momentous time in Washington for other reasons. It passed a trade bill. Space Force, I believe, has been authorized and funded. We have a deal with China where we're

selling them rice, which is really the Coles to Newcastle thing. In other words, there's stuff going on there, which you would think in a normal time would be first and foremost. But there was something that was passed recently within the last, I don't know, day or two. An anti-RoboCall bill by Chuck Grassley. Now, people out there would look at this and say, unless this anti-RoboCall bill includes funding for a flock of watchbird-like drones that immediately execute the people behind these things once we find their numbers. It's not enough. But it's something. Or is it? Or is it not?

Tell us what Grassley's bill does and whether or not they actually think this is going to have an effect. Because everybody gets these damned things, and they've destroyed phone calls for an entire generation. Do you think I know what this does? Do you think I've been watching this bill? Could you fake it? I've been saying, hey, I know the president. Would it just kill you to fake it? This is a podcast. Make it up for me. And I know Congress has also just passed his number one agenda priority of the trade bill. You know, I think I need to dip down into the weeds of the anti-robocall bill.

I have no idea what it does. This is why we trust you. This is absolutely why we trust you, because everybody else in this business would hum and haw and come up with some BS notion of what they think is in it and how it's what the experts say. It's a difficult thing. But for you to actually say you don't know

and you're in the news gathering and puniting business is remarkable, sir. And you've just earned yourself, again, our undying respect. Thank you for doing it on a podcast. If this has happened on television, I probably would have hemmed and hawed somewhat. Talk about what a terrible thing and how I hate him at my house. And boy, we're getting a lot of these calls. But no, I'm sorry. This is really a Chuck Grassley sort of thing.

He has Grassley written all over it in the best sense. I mean, he is a really valuable lawmaker. Well, that's a great place to end it right there. So we're going to let you go, and you have full knowledge now that the next time we have you on, we're going to go into the details and weedy little bits of this anti-Robocall bill. So if you wouldn't mind boning up a bit, Byron, it wouldn't kill you to kind of know your territory there before we get you on. That'd be great. That's right.

This is the only podcast where guests leave with homework assignments. Wow. I've been admonished. What can I say? Byron Rioric, always a pleasure. We'll have you on next year. Have yourself a merry holiday season, a festive time, however you want to phrase it.

And, again, we thank you for being on the podcast today. Thank you, guys. Merry Christmas, Byron. Merry Christmas to you guys. Bye-bye. Well, it's always fun to give Byron homework assignments, and he'll get to them the next time. You can imagine that in his job, punditry, reporting on the news, you've got to be up on all of these things. And you have to, does anybody, if you were in the business, would you set aside time?

Okay, I'm going to be 30 minutes for this, 30 minutes for robo, 30 minutes for the trade bill. No, I mean, the day you're just, it's a fire hose of information. You remember you do the normal stuff you got to do every day. I absolutely don't. But the thing of it is, is if you had, for example, a chair that would vibrate every 30 minutes and tell you, oh, it's time for me to change what I'm reading and studying, then you'd have good information habits because you'd rotate through the things that you need to do. Oh, if only there was a way to apply that to oral health, he said, expecting Rob to burst in. And there is. It works like this. The holiday shopping season is right here, right now, and this year your gift can start next year's good habit with Quip. Quip is something that's

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of modern Catholic intellectual life. His work shaped the minds of a generation, end quote. He's the author of best-selling Kindle singles from The Gospel According to Tim to Dakota Christmas. And it's been revised and expanded as part of his new seasonal volume, The Christmas Plains. He's a widely published essayist and poet with work in magazines and newspapers from the Atlantic to the Wall Street Journal. He lives with his family far off in the Black Hills of South Dakota.

Now somewhere in the Black Mountain Hills of Dakota, there lived a young boy named Rocky Raccoon. Welcome to the podcast. I'm a North Dakota lad, so we've got a rivalry to talk about here. Hey, Jody, it's Peter here. Merry Christmas. Thanks for joining us. And I would like to begin. I don't know quite why I read these two out of the many that you've written, but I read over the last week and a half, I've read Nativity, one of your Christmas tales, one of your Kindle, Syncdol short stories. And then I just read Wiseguy.

And they are just wonderful, gorgeously written, wonderful characters, sweet, moving. They're just wonderful. And so congratulations. But you can't talk about prose on a podcast. And people can go—they cost 99 cents. Everybody who's listening, go to Amazon and look for—we call him Jody, but he's listed under Joseph, B-O-T-T-U-M, Joseph Bottom. And look at his Christmas tales, a number of which you've written over the years. Everybody enjoys Christmas, or most people. I don't know. People enjoy Christmas. But here's a quotation from you. Quote, Christmas is so huge it would devour the universe if it could. Close quote. What do you mean? Well, I've been thinking about this a lot,

Peter. I've been thinking about what happened in the modern age, what the great sociologist Max Weber described as the disenchantment that is the fundamental feature of modern times. We disenchant medicine, we disenchant science so that alchemy becomes chemistry, we disenchant the stars so that astronomy becomes, or astrology becomes astronomy. All these wonderful scientific results happen from this stripping away of the mystery of the world. But, you know, something else happens because disenchantment is not a positive word. And I've long been interested in trying to find out how we re-enchant the world, how we try and restore a sense of awe and wonder and mystery. And years ago, I decided that,

discovered at least in myself and for many others, that it is at Christmas that the wall is thinnest, that the disenchantment and the bricks we have built up thin a little bit. And ordinary people have a sense that maybe there is something more to this universe, something that touches on the numinous, something that, you know, where the fabric between the divine and the human gets very thin. And so it's in my poetry, in the Christmas carols I've written, in my constant pouring out of pieces. I had a piece in the Wall Street Journal last weekend about Christmas poetry, and it must be the 100th Christmas piece I've published. And I return to Christmas again and again in this attempt to try and express and reinvigorate a world that has wonder in it, a world that is luminous with God and the sense that there is something beyond us, in particular this narrative about the time in which

God himself descended in the flesh among us. Beautifully put. Listen, I would like to start a fight if I can. I have the feeling now, I can't quote you on this, but I have the feeling that over the years I've caught you showing a certain limited appreciation for Charles Dickens and The Christmas Carol. And that piece of writing is of particular—Rob Long loves that in a particular way. Jody, would you care to explain to Rob why his appreciation for The Christmas Carol is misplaced? Rob will have joined her, that I am certain. Look, no one appreciates Dickens more than me, except maybe G.K. Chesterton. And Dickens occupies a whole chapter in my new book called The Decline of the Novel, which is a look at the art form of the novel and why it doesn't seem to matter as much to us as it once did.

And Dickens occupies a whole chapter there where I read David Copperfield with real care. Maybe not successfully, but I try. It's just even Chesterton shied a little bit at A Christmas Carol, and he shied a little bit on the grounds that something has gone deeply wrong when Dickens takes the event about which Western civilization and more, the whole Mediterranean civilization, had developed the largest mythology. And he is so detached from the deep roots of Christian culture there in Victorian England that he has to invent his own mythology for Christmas. If he had any European sense, he would understand Christmas in a deeper and richer way. Now, as a moral sentimental tale, A Christmas Carol might be the greatest thing ever written. But I got to tell you, the sentiment of Christmas is not enough. We need more than the sentiment of Christmas.

The sentiment of Christmas is the gilding on something that is already golden. And that deeper gold that is in the Christmas roots and mythology and all of this panoply of stuff that we folded around Christmas, that is something that Dickens didn't have access to. Hey, Jody, it's Rob. So I have to, yeah, you know, I don't disagree with you, but I would just say that I think A Christmas Carol, the Dickens story, which I mean I would not put among his masterpieces. For one thing, it's short and sort of – it's a very simple tale, three acts.

I mean it doesn't achieve the sheer genius of narrative that say Bleak House does, which is still an astonishing work of art. But I would say that Christmas Carol, the story, is much more of a symptom than a cause, right? I mean, his view of Christmas and what Christmastime meant was culturally in sync with his time. I guess what I would try to ask you is, all right, how are you not a party pooper? Right? I mean, I don't know. You know what I mean? Like, how is, where everybody's like running around and, okay, today, last night, I went

to pay for a cup of coffee and I didn't have my wallet and I lost my wallet and I don't know where I lost it. And I turned the house upside down thinking I just dropped it behind a sofa cushion, whatever. Couldn't find it. This morning I woke up and I had a brain wave that I had bought some batteries yesterday and I'm pretty sure I used my ATM card to buy them. And I went to the little bodega around the corner and I walked in and the guy said, yes, I have it. You know, and that's my racist South Asian accent. And he handed me the wallet.

And he goes, you dropped this outside and some nice person brought it in. In the middle of Manhattan, this is. In the middle of Manhattan. It's a Christmas miracle. And it's a Christmas miracle. And I said, thank you. Merry Christmas. And he said, Merry Christmas.

And he doesn't celebrate Christmas. He probably celebrates Diwali or whatever that is. And I was walking down the street. And I'm like, God, what a great, how great. And he said, Merry Christmas. And he doesn't celebrate Christmas. He probably celebrates Diwali or whatever that is. And I was walking down the street and I'm like, God, what a great, how great, what a great time of year. How magnificent. And I looked through, of course, and the wallet, everything was in the wallet except the MetroCard, the subway card. It had $40 on it.

But, you know, look, we take what we can get, right? I mean... We take what we can get. What do I mean— We take what we can get. What do you think? It's not a Christmas miracle, but it's— Right, but what Dickens is doing is anticipating—I mean, he is the deep reader. He and John Henry Newman are, I increasingly think, the great minds of the 19th century, at least the victory in England. And Dickens in a kind of unconscious way, but he's the greatest unconscious novelist who's ever

lived. And he sees what's coming in the age. He sees the sentimentality. He sees the privileging of childhood over the experiences of childhood, over the experiences of adulthood. He sees all that coming. And in A Christmas Carol, he surrenders to it. We get, you know, a great work of sentimental art there. And why not? Well, that's the point. Why not? You should be telling me that I'm a bad guy for loving it and for, like, singing Christmas carols and giving each other too much candy.

Rob, I think you're confusing two different things. Okay. Only two? Christmas is as a medieval festival, which is messy and filled with goofiness. I mean, you've been to Italy and you've seen, you know, hangovers in some of the smaller cities of medieval festivals, and they're a mess and they're sexy and they festivals, and they're a mess, and they're sexy, and they're

commercial, and they're vulgar, and they're hung on the hook of a saint who was martyred by the ancient Romans. And this is what medieval festivals looked like. They're tacky, and I love the tackiness of Christmas, but tackiness is not the same thing as sentimentality. Probably my most quoted line ever was a piece I wrote about Christmas in which I looked at the decorations in House Beautiful and Architect Digest and all these glossy magazines for the middle class to ache for and envy. And I looked at them and I thought, you know, whatever Christmas is, this ain't it. Right. Tastefulness is just small-mindedness pretending to be art.

Oh, that's a great line. You're right. And that line, you know, that I threw in there, I think is exactly or catches something about how I feel about the tackiness of Christmas. I love the inflated reindeer out on the lawn. I love the houses with enough lights on them to, you know, bring in a landing craft. Yeah, it sometimes does, right? I love the goofiness of it all, but that's not the same thing as sentimentality. No, I hear you. Whoa, whoa, whoa. So what is sentiment? Now I'm confused.

What is sentimentality? Sentimentality, this is a line of J.D. Salinger's. Sentimentality is loving something more than God loves it. Oh. He said, God undoubtedly loves little kittens, but he doesn't love them more if they happen to have a red ribbon around their neck. That's a great line. I was talking to a friend of mine. I don't think of Joyce Maynard with a ribbon around her neck, but go on. I was talking to a friend of mine who's an Anglican priest, and we were talking about, we all have friends who are the – well, actually friends. Well, actually, there's no record of a census in the Roman Empire, actually. Actually, there's no star.

They couldn't find the star. Actually, there are no magi. There aren't two magi in the Gospels. Actually, all that actually stuff. And a lot of it is true. Actually, that's true. But what we sort of were talking about was that what is Christmas Day supposed to be? And Christmas Day isn't a gift that we are given.

It's the realization of the gift that has already been given to us, right? Christmas Day is, you could easily say Christmas Day is an arbitrary date, but it's the date where we all sort of recognize that there has always been a gift under the tree for us. And that's the day that we choose to recognize it. And whether it was really March 3rd or whether it was September 9th, who cares? December 25th is the day that we all celebrate. Some of us who know that there was a gift under the tree for us all along, and some of us who are just finding it out for the first time, and some of us who have yet to find it out. I mean, I'm with you up to a point. Well, of course.

Because you're, you know, I'm an Anglican, so you've got to be against me. Right. And there is something a little, you know, prod about that. Yeah. Yeah. That's what we do in the Episcopalian Church. I don't know if you know that. Right.

But you dress up with ospreys on your chasables. We have better music. The bells and the bells. But the only thing I would say is if we've chosen the date arbitrarily, we did it in a world of grace. So there's that going for us. It's the darkest night of the year. But the other thing is, it's not, the point of Christmas is that the gift has not always been under the tree. The point of Christmas is that the gift came to us in history, that God himself entered time,

that the Christian vision is a vision of time moving in a direction. Time, it's not circular. We're not discovering the divine that has always been there. What we really were was given a gift with the birth of Christ, with the acceptance of Mary at the Annunciation, with the birth of Christ, with his ministry, with his death, and with his resurrection. We're given a gift in a particular moment in history, and the Judeo-Christian tradition is time-bound. And so I'm with you. I understand, you know, exactly why you described

the day as arbitrary and yet somehow meaningful. But I just want to hesitate a little bit to say we celebrate the fact of redemption entering time because we have need of that redemption. Right. That's for sure. So can I just— So a sillier question, but nonetheless, because I know we've got to run. But do you hate the usage or the style Xmas as much as I do? And if you do, why? Because I'm not sure I know why I hate it, but I just hate it.

Every once in a while, I run into a crank who has some beef with Xmas. It's like... That would be me. There are certain infallible signs of the crank. They have a theory about the Jews. They have a theory about Shakespeare. They have a theory about coinage and the gold standard.

And they have a theory about Xmas. This is another variable. I'll stop you when you and the bold standard. Well, all right, yes. It's about X-mas, right? This is another variable. I'll stop you when you're not describing me. It's the variable side of the crank. And, you know, it's just that the X is the Greek letter here. The chi, it's the X for the opening, the Greek letter of Christ. It's a medieval abbreviation. I don't, I don't, I think it gets, you know,

I think one's dislike of it got hooked up with the sense that secularized Christmas was looking for some way to avoid the word Christ. Yeah. And that's certainly true. I just don't like it. But you have you have accurately, accurately pinpointed me as a crank that that for nothing else. I think I have to thank you for that Christmas gift, because that was that was that's been under the tree for me for a long time. Jody, Peter here one more time. I I'm indulging myself yet again here because I want to hear two Dakotans.

We've had a discussion of Charles Dickens' Christmas Carol. Now let's go really high. James Lilacs loves the 1965 Goodyear Christmas album. Go, James. All right. Yes, I do, Peter. And I would like to hear what jody has to say about it i i'm not familiar with this classic i feel like my education in in the deep musical tradition of of the west has been revealed to be a sham that i don't know this now i i had joan baez's early 60s

album i think i think i had uh paul revere and the raiders wait joan baez's early 60s album. I think I had Paul Revere and the Raiders. Wait, Joan Baez did a Christmas album? Oh, sure. You could hardly avoid it. I think I had Zanfear plays the season on his pan pipes. But I never saw the Goodyear 65 album. They gave it to you when you bought a pair of White Walls? You would go to the tire store and you would buy Christmas albums. The Great Songs of Christmas,

Goodyear had them every year for about 10, 12 years or so. And Goodrich, seizing a market opportunity here, it couldn't be lapped by Goodyear. Goodrich came up with their own as well. You would go to the Walgreens and they'd have a Christmas album. The stores, the chains put these out. Everybody did. And when you say, you know, Joan Baez, if you grew up with Joan Baez's Christmas album, you were nine, 10 or something that fixed the sound of Christmas for you, perhaps for the rest of your life. And for certain boomers who grew up with these middle brow classics of the Goodyear stuff, the tires company put out, that was the sound of Christmas. And now when you listen to modern, I mean, this morning I heard Lady Gaga

covering a Christmas song and it was just awful. But, you know, every year, I know what you mean, we down, our adulthood is cast in the material of childhood. And yet every year—you surely have this experience—every year, a carol that you hear, often on an off chance, catches you and catches me and pulls me down into the season. I mean, one year, it's some boy soprano singing, you know, at King's College, singing Once in Royal David City. And another year, it's yet another, it's some folky singing Down in Yon Forest, The Bells of Paradise. And every year, it's one Christmas carol that just catches me and pulls me down into the season such that, you know, I drown in it thanks to that carol. But I think overall you're right. You know, there's a kind of rightness that one expects Christmas carols to have, a rightness of production, a rightness of arrangement, a rightness of sound. And that

rightness, for one, is defined by your first childhood deep dive into Christmas music. Absolutely. I mean, you can be standing in the mall and you can hear a song that summons up childhood and you're absolutely, your bow is unstrung by it. It summons up so much. It seems to bring back this prelapsarian past, which of course wasn't idyllic and never was, but we're always casting our mind back. Rob mentioned the X-muses. I mean, if you go a hundred years ago to newspapers, you'll find them use the term X-mus. And they're doing so in ways that say, modern times are so hectic. The modern mechanical age is so inhuman. Let us think back to the good Christmases of yore. And when you go back 20, 30 years, those people were talking about mythical Christmases.

We now have fixed in our mind this Dickensian vision definition of Christmas, which itself was a reaction to the way that Christmas was celebrated at Dickens' here, you know, aside from the fact that I really don't believe that a man could hallucinate his capitalist dead partner because of an underdone potato. But there is something about that story. I agree with you in that what it doesn't say sort of fixed what Christmas fiction was going to be for the rest of all time. You write Christmas fiction. I've written a ton of this stuff. And the difficulty is the expectation that the audience has that there will be something miraculous, that there will be something supernatural at the end. It's not a Christmas story, you know, unless a ghost dog appears at the end with a package in his mouth or something like that. So how difficult is it when you write of Christmas now, when you set them and pitch them toward the Dakota

mindset, how would you define the contemporary Dakota mindset, which seems to be so different from what perhaps the coastal slivers may tell us is the modern way of thinking? What is the definition of a modern Dakota Christmas story? And we'll leave it there. Well, I think, you know, I had a piece in the Wall Street Journal which formed the kind of centerpiece of some of my Christmas collections, the Kindle single and the Christmas Plains book, which was about being in Pierre. This, by the way, Rob, is how we tell Dakotans from outlanders. Outlanders say that the capital of South Dakota is Pierre, and Dakotans pronounce it Pierre like a fishing pier. But we were in Pierre.

He was a lawyer. He had to get something signed. So we drove across the river, up through the hills north of Fort Pierre to visit a rancher, and some horses got loose on this winter prairie, which is, you know, the coyotes had scared them, and they got loose, and they were running around, and they had to be gotten because they'll die out on the prairie in this winter. And I was 10 years old, and they saddled up a horse for me to ride out and look for these lost horses. Because a Dakota Christmas was an assumption that a 10-year-old boy was old enough to help. I mean, my mother would have pitched a fit at the idea, you know, 10 below I was riding out on the prairie.

But when we went out, I actually found one of the horses. But it's, you know, it's a tale of this kind of icy purity. It gets so bleak out there that the menus are bleak and the prairie is bleak. But somehow in that, it's almost like a burned over purity. The ice is like ash that somehow has exposed reality down to this kind of raw, bare thing, which makes you understand what a gift Christmas is. It should come in the bleak midwinter, as Rossetti put it. It should come at a time in which the world seems stripped of all of its glory and its gifts and its nicenesses and its pleasures. Christmas should come like a fire in the middle of winter. My great-grandfather in December, in a storm, lost the cows.

They got out. The storm came up suddenly, as they do, and he had to go out and find them. And when he was looking for one of the last cows, he was snowblind, and he couldn't find his way back to the house. He didn't know where he was. And the only way to survive the night was to kill the cow and climb inside and stay warm, which he did. This is all accounted in this marvelous account of early prairie life that I've read. He was one of the founders of Maple Cheyenne Church, which is an old, old church with a pressed tin roof. And you can still smell the accumulated wax of a century of candles when you go to the place. And the thing about it is, is that in a Dakota winter, at a Dakota twilight on a Christmas night, you are looking at a world that has been

drained of every single color except for this white, you're right, this ash, this burn, that the world has been burned away to something pure. And there in your car or in your sleigh or your horse or your snowmobile, as you approach the church, you see the windows. His name is in one of the windows because he founded the place, along with the names of the other founders. And they glow with colors coming out of the church as it's lit from within, colors that are nowhere else in the world. And that sort of Christmas in the Dakota Plains is a thing of absolute, extraordinary, simple beauty.

I can't wait to read the Christmas Plains. I'm remiss in not having gotten to it, but I'm off to Amazon to stock up my Kindle sock right now. Jody Bonham, it's been a pleasure talking to you, and Merry Christmas from everyone here at Ricochet. And the same to you. Merriest of Christmas. Merry X-mas, Jody. Hey, Jody, God bless us, everyone. Amen.

Dickens, whether you like it or not, Jody. Christmas is at our throats, as PG would once put it. There's more gravy in the grave in what you said, Peter. That's an awful line. That's just an awful line. Talk to you later. Bye-bye. Bye-bye, Jody.

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Terms apply. And our thanks to Norton LifeLock for sponsoring this, the Ricochet podcast. I know you guys got to fly. So should we sum up 2019 in three words or less? All right. Sum up 2019. I can't, but I know I can, I can, I can sum up how I feel about everything that happened in 2019 and 2020.

And here's what I really think. We're all going to be okay. It's all going to be fine. Yes, that's true. And then we'll all be dead. Okay. Yes, that's true. And then we'll all be dead. Okay. Well, yeah. Okay.

Well, thanks for dotting all the I's, Peter. Yes, that's true. Well, it is the bleak midwinter, as Jody said. It's not bleak here, as a matter of fact. There's not a sign of vegetation out my window right now. All the trees are bare, these little scratchy things silhouetted against a blue sky. But it's bright, and it's bright, and it's hopeful, and the end of the year finds me. Well, you know, I'm happy because I'm not where I was last year.

I didn't like where I was last year. This is better. It's been a hard year in an awful lot of ways, but optimism seems to be the only reasonable choice. What's the course? Turning into some sort of sour curmudgeonly pessimism and stopping my way through the next year, like Rumpelstiltskin waiting for everybody to disappoint me. That's no,

that's certainly the approach I intend to adopt. Well, Peter, why don't you just take your sweater, knotted around your neck and pull hard on each arm and end it all now. Okay. So 10 seconds on where you'll be celebrating Christmas, Rob,

New York, California, Baltimore. I will be in Connecticut. Christmas in Connecticut. Christmas in Connecticut with the way overrated movie with the family. Yeah, it is.

But Christmas in Connecticut is a lot like Christmas in Connecticut. The, some of it is insane. You just look at it. You think, come on people, a little look at it and you think, come on, people. A little less postcard, you know? A lot of it's kitten with a bow, to use Jody's phrase, or to use who's ever phrased that was, J.D. Salinger's phrase. A little too kitten with a bow. Although

it's great, but it's still too much. But I like it. We'll be here. We'll be here. We'll be at home, all children descending upon us. James? Same. All children, one. She's home right now, as a matter of fact. Oh, how great.

Wife, dog, daughter, dog. It's going to be perfect. Last year, of course, everybody was scattered. Wife was in Phoenix. I was here. My father was supposed to come down, but he didn't. Daughter was in Brazil. So I was by myself My father was supposed to come down, but he didn't. Daughter was in Brazil, so I was by myself

for the first Christmas. And let me tell you, there's nothing you can salvage out of that. There's nothing that you can salvage. You sit there with Lean Cuisine Swedish meatballs and some eggnog with about three jiggers of vodka in it, and there's no

way you can possibly get a Christmas out of that. All you can do is just endure it like a root canal and hope that the next one's better. And it is. So I'm great. And Rob's right. We're going to be okay. But only if you join Ricochet. Now, I want to tell you this here. Ricochet was brought to you by Lending Club, by Quip, by Norton 360 Life Lock. And if you support them, you support us. And Ricochet continues. If you do, it would be a Christmas miracle, as Rob says, if you go to iTunes and give us a five-star review or a four, whatever, as long as more people know about the show, more people listen and more people

go to Ricochet and more people join, which is great because then you get access to the member feed where everybody will be having our wonderful little verbal celebrations over the next week or so. So, yes, 2020 will be fine. And that mantra, Rob, you should carve onto coins. And as you walk around Manhattan, just sort of scatter them to the urchins. Scatter them around, yeah. Right. We'll be a little bit more enthusiastic.

Merry Christmas, my friends, and we'll see you next year. Merry Christmas. Merry Christmas. Okay, it is. Y' we'll see you next year. Merry Christmas. Okay, it is. All set? All set. Let's go. Look out! Look out! Just hear those sleigh bells jingling Ring-ting-tingling to

Come on, it's lovely weather for a sleigh ride together with you Together with you Outside the snow is falling and friends are calling you. They're calling you. Come on, it's lovely weather for a sleigh ride together with you. Together with you. Giddyap, giddyap, giddyap, let's go.

Let's look at the show. We're riding in a wonderland of snow. Giddyap, giddyap, giddy start next year's Good Habits with Quip. Because I'm reading the wrong ad. Because somebody changed it. Somebody changed the ad. No, no, no, no, no, no. Didn't change the ad. I was reading ahead. Somebody changed the ad. No, no, no, no, no, no, no. Didn't change the ad.

I was reading ahead. I saw the copy. The title said, because I read the wrong word and had the entire wrong segue built up right there. For F's sake. The one time I didn't interrupt you, James, is when I should have. You should have. You should have. You absolutely should have. I know. You should have. You should have. You absolutely should have.

All right. Coming out of Byron in three, two, one. I actually, honestly, I actually thought you were trolling me. You're getting me to interrupt you. Now, last year, a whopping 26,000. Sorry. Stop this again. This number makes no sense.

So after loss to hackers. Every time you bet a whopping 26,000 people reported being a victim, that's nothing. I can't be right. Okay. I really got to run. Come on, it's lovely weather for a sleigh ride together with you. Together with you. Sleigh ride, sleigh ride.

Oh, my God! Come on, Amy! Ricochet. Join the conversation.