The Ricochet Podcast - Hello Captain Hi

Episode Date: September 6, 2019

Here’s what we don’t discuss on this week’s show: not a word about Sharpie markers, maps, or the tracking of certain weather events. Nope, not a word. Here’s what we do talk about: The WSJ’s Kim Strassel stops by to talk about Comey, Mueller, and an investigation that went far off the rails (P.S. feel free to pre-order her new book, which she will discuss in more detail on the show next month). 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 with people lining up for food. That's a good thing. First of all, I think you missed his time. Please clap. It's the Ricochet Podcast with Peter Robinson and Rob Long. I'm James Lylex, and today we talk to Kimberly Strassel of The Wall Street Journal,

and it's the launch of The Long Poll. Let's have ourselves a podcast. It's the Ricochet Podcast, everyone. It's number 463, and we assume you've been here for at least 462 of those. If not, well, go back in the archives and find them somewhere on iTunes, somewhere back in the dim, distant memory before our current situation manifested itself. But at least our current situation gives us something to talk about. Rob Long will be here to add his two cents in a second. Peter, you're there right now. I am indeed. We have a list of things to talk about, including Donald Trump and the Sharpie. I couldn't care less about Sharpie. I couldn't care less either. Actually actually i would like to recap

briefly it's a discussion you and i were having because it's fascinating and it touches on on how young this country is which you realized when you attended another funeral not quite as close a family member as last time when you buried your dad but you went back to north dakota to bury your aunt and why did that put you in mind of how young the country is? Well, because her husband, my uncle, his mother knew somebody who fought in the Civil War. Knew somebody, not what's descended from him. Knew somebody. I had a distant memory of that old man in the corner there, Charlie Newton, who fought in the Civil War.

North Dakota's a young place. It's a young state. And it's remarkable the civilization they built. And that's the thing that struck me as I drove from Minneapolis to Fargo up Highway 10, was this sense that I'm traveling through a part of the country that certain people don't like existing. It requires cars. It requires petroleum. It requires plastic straws. It requires a whole bunch of stuff. And when you get up there and you live in a place where essentially things

work and things are clean and disorder is not lapping and gnawing at you every moment of the day. I mean, I realized that Norman Rockwell upbringing I had may have given me a false sense of how the world actually works, but it does work up there. And they built something remarkable in North Dakota. James, when you say that things work, does that include families? Yes, although I'm sure they're subject to the same strains and stresses that they have before. But they're building a new school about every other day. So that tells me that they're having families and that they're reasonably sticking together. I mean, when it's that cold that often, people tend to huddle together. At the old small church in the Plains where I attended the funeral, it's 120 years old, I don't know exactly how old, there's a stained

glass window of the founders, and one of them is an old relative of mine. And there's a book that I read. I mentioned this before. I think there's a book I've read about early pioneer life in which this man went out to get his stock because alive, because a blizzard had hit and he got lost from the house and he found a dead cow. And the only way he could survive the night was to cut it open and sleep

inside, which he did. And I always thought it'd be amusing if he woke up the next day and he was about four feet from the house, but that's what he did. The scene from Star Wars that I saw when I was a kid actually happened to one of my forebears, because those are your choices. Die or get inside a dead cow. And it breeds a different sort of spirit, I think, than people who maybe grow up in a big city and sort of have the belief that food just appears magically at the chock full of nuts because of the magic commerce fairies. So as I was saying, though, I mean, Sharpie Gate, I don't care.

The president said something, did something weird. Big surprise. Britain, the whole thing. I'm waiting to see how that plays out. Really, at this moment, we could say something and it would be overtaken by events in a day. What fascinated me this week was that climate change seven-hour marathon show and what it said about the candidates in the party. Fascinated because you watched it? I watched portions of it. I mean, I watched the cleverly

selected and highly edited versions intended to reinforce my views, but I did. Rob, welcome. Glad you joined us. Sorry, I was just racing here thanks to a lot of traffic. I imagine they're all on their way to the Mugabe funeral, to the wake, to the morning ceremonies. But we were beginning to talk about the climate debate and what it showed about the party. Either of you want to take on what you took away from the things, the emanations, the penumbras of what you heard? I'll let Rob go. Honestly, a small point, and then I really will let Rob go.

I am just numb at this point. And this campaign has barely begun, and I'm already just numb to the other side. Meaning, I can hardly believe, at some basic level, political reality, what I think of as political reality, will it reassert itself? And it just doesn't. So this weird cognitive dissonance is in my head, and I just can barely, I just sort of numb. It's like brain freeze. Yeah, it's strange. It always reminds me of the thing where in show business, whenever you're dealing with a crazy person, usually an actor, you have to let them get the crazy out. I remember talking to someone who was managing a wonderful actor and a really, really great person.

A great guy. He said, listen, we're going to sit down, we're going to have dinner, and he's going to talk a lot, and it's going to sound crazy. Let him get the crazy out. And then it'll get normal. And that's exactly what happened. None of it was bad. It was just, if I hadn't had that warning, I would have been alarmed. And so the question you have to ask yourself when you're in politics is, okay, is this the Democratic Party, or is this what a party does to get the crazy out? But we can we can say i mean i mean and i don't think donald trump is crazy but he was a crazy choice in a sense of like completely unexpected and totally not within the model and a radical shift a historic total outlier in terms of republican

party politics uh the the Republican Party in 2016 did not let the crazy out. It nominated the crazy. And the question is, is that the way American politics in general is going? I mean, we tend to think of like Republicans and Democrats do different things, always different times. And those people, primary voters in either parties are totally different, but they're really not. I mean, they have different policies, but they don't really have different you know uh outlines and characteristics so i i i don't know i mean i i what's what's what's strange to me is that the that the the big fat middle is so undefended right now like right like you know

most americans are like well yeah you know i bet you there's something to the climate change stuff. And I'll bet there's stuff we could do that'd be better for the environment. Everybody wants clean water. Everybody wants clean air. Everybody wants lots of green space for the children. Sure. But I don't want to get my cheeseburger. And also natural gas is a perfect solution for this and technology and all sorts of things.

But their argument is no more burgers. And I feel like that's so weird to me. It's like psychosis. Why isn't anybody just standing up there shrugging and saying, give me a break? Come on. Well, all you have to do to be defending the middle is just simply not take up their arguments. To fight back against the burger banners is taking up the mantle of the undefended. There are two kinds of crazy, though, Rob. I mean, there's the crazy person who sits there across the dinner table and saying, I'm converting

everything I own to pennies, and I'm going to give every one of those pennies away by placing them on benches, but the benches have to be oriented north to south. That's a sort of philanthropic crazy that doesn't have any effect, but it's crazy, but it's harmless. And then there's the crazy across from the dinner table that says everybody is actually a lizard robot from the center of the earth, and I'm going to cut them all. I'm going to cut them all. So the crazy that you're seeing perhaps from the right side of the aisle – You keep those examples a little too close. Yes, exactly.

I've got to say. But what's the end result of the crazy? If the end result of the crazy is more freedom, more prosperity, the diminution of the state, and the actual ability to choose a bleeping light bulb that you want to choose, then that crazy is okay. When the other side of the crazy is saying that by some strange coincidence, this climate crisis, this imminent looming emergency, by some odd aligning of the stars, the only things we can do to save ourselves perfectly align with the ideological premises of our party. What a miracle that is. and what bothers me is not that the middle is not being defended it's that nobody is telling them exactly that everything

that these people want to do results in the diminution of your liberty in the expansion of the state they're all about control you want to talk authoritarian look at the people who want to tell you where to drive where to live how to get there and it's also and it's also specific right it's like right there in your house. It's all so specific. That's what I find so weird about it. It gets into your light bulbs and your burger, your lunch. It's like, wow, that's not my food. You're part of the problem. But, you know, Butt-Edge said you're part of the problem. He went on after that to say, you know, but we can fix that problem. But I mean, there was there's this discussion that I saw yesterday on Twitter between a very,

fairly well-known film critic and television writer who I respect and like a lot. But sometimes when he gets into politics, it's peculiar. He gave me the perfect example of an old style liberal being swamped by modern events in which he said that plastic straws should go. He hates plastic. Paper should be the default. But if anybody requests, they should be able anywhere to get a plastic or metal straw. Well, he was set upon by all sides. And one of the things that he said was that he believed that in order to make sure that plastic choice was available to people, it should be illegal to deny it or to ask why you need it. And this is a perfect example of this sort of new frontier, great society, guys, isn't it?

Here's something which was previously uncriminalized. The state had nothing to do with it, saying all of a sudden we are going to make a law regarding this most elemental of human transactions, and nobody would ever be prosecuted. Nobody would ever be charged. But there it is. There's a law. There's a new illegality about questioning somebody. So, I mean, when they can't realize how idiotic they seem and how micromanaging their life, they appear to most people. Perfect example, and I would like to take it one step farther. What this demonstrates is how religious this has become to them. How far from anything rational, how far from anything empirical, because the notion of

making it illegal for somebody to deny someone who requests a plastic straw follows exactly the pattern of religious carve-outs. The state requires everybody to go to war, except those with a religious conscience exemption. The state requires every institution to provide contraceptives and insurance, unless you have a religious objection, it is as though the idea that anybody would just like a plastic straw because it really, there's no evidence that plastic straws cause any harm to the environment above and beyond what paper straws, and that anybody would like one because it doesn't collapse. It's an act of religious faith requiring that they disagree with us, we'll give them a carve-out. Unbelievable! And it really is, I mean, it is amazingly personal.

I went to Japan a few years ago. I wrote about this in National Review. I went to Japan a few years ago, and I discovered that the Japanese have really, really cool toilets. I knew you were going there. I knew it. And in a sense, I'm going to talk around the issue. But you, everybody knows what the issue is. There's jets and nozzles and water, and it's really fantastic.

At first, it's alarming and terrifying, and then it's like, whoa, this is civilized. It's civilization, right? The Japanese have perfected this thing. And I got back to L.A., and I went to the fancy appliance store, and there they have a few of those. And I said, hey, how much are these? Yeah, can I get one? And the first thing is, well, wait, where do you live? I'm like, well, I live in L.A.

Well, do you live in L.A., L.A., or do you live in Santa Monica? Because in Santa Monica, the city has banned these because they use a little too much water, apparently. So the city is now telling you, a government is now telling you exactly how you must do this process, hygienic human process. That's how close they are to you. You must do this process, hygienic human process. That's how close they are to you. They want to be inside the bathroom with you. And that to me was like, and we both laughed like what on earth? And then they could have been, they could install them in LA.

And I thought about it and I thought, well, I don't know what it was. They were like $1,400 or something. I said, well, you know, that's, I i can i can live the way i'm living now uh but i just thought it was remarkable that somebody in santa monica city government thought wait a minute wait a minute wait a minute no you can't do that just wait until they start to regulate the actual thickness of the toilet paper and then people will be lumped into two groups the one ply and the two the two-ply. Oh, look at that guy over there. Look at Mr. Top Hat two-ply over there. The rest of us have had the government-mandated one-ply. Hey, listen, when it comes to getting hosed, as Rob was sort of describing, credit cards will do that to you,

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right for you. And if you're approved, your loan is automatically deposited in 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. So go to LendingClub.com slash Ricochet. Check your rate in minutes and borrow up to $40,000. That's LendingClub.com slash Ricochet. LendingClub.com slash Ricochet. All loans made by a Web Bank member FDIC, equal housing lender. Our thanks to LendingClub for sponsoring this, the Ricochet podcast. And now we welcome to the podcast Kim Strassel, member of the editorial board for the Wall Street Journal. She writes editorials as well as the weekly Potomac Watch political column from her base in Washington, D.C. She's got a new book,

Resistance at All Costs, How Trump Haters Are Breaking America. It's available for pre-order and comes out October 15th. You can, of course, follow her on that old Twitter thing, at Kim Strassel. Welcome. Hey, tell us about the book. A lot of people would say that resistance is necessary, that Trump himself is breaking America into parts like a cold bar of taffy smashed with a hammer. But your point is actually that, no, the resistance and what it's doing is one of the things that's taken the country in a bad direction. Well, this is the conventional wisdom that it is Trump that is the wrecking ball. And I deal with that in the book and look at it. And I think the reality is a fair appraisal of it. If you step back, yes, Trump rhetoric is certainly unlike anything we've

had in a modern presidency. And you could maybe argue that there has been damage to the reputation and office of the presidency. But if you take a really close look at his departments and the people he put in charge there, many of them are constitutional conservatives, and they've gone out of their way to not do the things that were so prevalent in the Obama administration. For instance, erecting legislation by going around Congress or changing the law willy-nilly when it doesn't work for you, as happened in Obamacare, or issuing executive orders that accomplish things that you can't do through the law. And so my argument is that if you look at the resistance to him and the damage that

they are doing, it will be more lasting in terms of institutions. I mean, look at our Senate confirmation process and the way that that was destroyed with Brett Kavanaugh. Look at the loss of belief and respect for the Department of Justice and FBI, given the actions they took against the Trump campaign. And the book details a number of examples like that. Kim, Peter Robinson here. First of all, I just want to say thank you, because among major print journalists, the Fox News and talk radio has been after James Comey and on the story of the deep state, but there's a difference between what they do and what a serious reporting journalist does in print. And you're it.

You have just stayed with that story from the beginning. And just a little praise because in my mind, it represents one of the great sustained acts of American journalism in the last decade at least. So thank you for that. Oh, that is incredibly kind. Thank you. No, no. I'm for that. Oh, that is incredibly kind. Thank you. No, no. I'm lucky to have a newspaper that backs me up. Yes. Well, we are all lucky to have the Wall Street Journal. So James Comey and the IG report, was it just about dead on what you expected? Were there surprises in there for you? It was. Well, I was thrilled to see it, by the way. And I know that there are a lot of

people out there that are unhappy that Jim Comey, you know, isn't getting strung up in an orange jumpsuit, that he isn't going to jail. And, you know, I think it was a tough call for the Attorney General here. I do believe that had they tried to bring charges against him for leaking classified information, they would have had a very hard time making it stick in court, in part because Jim Comey was so clever about how he did this. He purposely did not subject his own memos to a classification review prior to his leaving. And so it was retroactive. So that would have been hard to do. But I am thrilled, look, that the IG, they called him out.

It was a devastating report. It named all of the policies and regulations and his own employment agreement that he violated. It was critical of him in the harshest of terms. And I think that this is very encouraging because when we see the ultimate IG report, what it means, at least for me, is that this is an IG who's not scared to go over the people in the highest power that are media darlings, that he's going to call them as he sees them. The one thing that did surprise me, and I think is also an interesting sign, is that the IG also went out of his way to include some information that was very eye-opening,

including the fact that when Jim Comey gave that initial briefing on January 6, 2017, to the president-elect, which was supposedly about telling the president about the Russian interference in our election, that in fact, Jim Comey went in there, having hopeful that the president would actually say something incriminating, and immediately went back and reported to his investigatory team that was running this counterintelligence investigation. So that briefing was done under duplicitous circumstances. It was a setup. The idea is aware that it was a setup. He was going in there. He purposely did not tell the president about the counterintelligence investigation,

which is an astonishing thing all on its own, by the way. The FBI has long claimed that Donald Trump was not the focus of this. Well, this proves that that's not the case, that he was always in the center of their sights. Kim, another question. Let me just name three names. And you tell me what we're supposed to make of the notion that our intelligence agencies were being run by these three people for many years? Comey, Clapper, and Brennan. Yeah.

Discuss. Let's not discuss. Well, look, I don't think any of us should be naive and think that even the heads of intelligence agencies aren't partisans or Democrats or Republicans. But I will say that in past, we have tended to have people nominated for those positions who keep those impulses in check and understand that they have some of the most serious jobs in the country and they can't mess around with politics and that we can't let that drive things. I think these three guys simply from the comments that they have made since they left office and the positions that they have taken tell you all you needed to know about how they ran those offices when they were there, which is highly disturbing.

They're clearly deeply partisan actors. very suspicious of their motives and what they were doing in the wake of the Trump election, because it seems as though they were all engaged in the setup of the incoming president and trying to cover their own actions, having spent the prior six, eight months trying to bring down that campaign. Right. Kim, I have one more, and I know James and Rob Long want to get in here, but last question for me is as follows. The press, we now have it on record in the IG's report what you've been reporting for months.

And that is that, I hate to use the term, but I'll go ahead and use it. There was a deep state in the sense that there was, at least we know this much, the FBI under James Comey was behaving as if it were a law unto itself. They chose to put the president-elect under investigation to lie to him about what investigation was taking place. This was straightforwardly in violation of correct constitutional arrangements. And who's been on the story? Kim Strassel and, and, and. How do you, how do you explain, let alone grade, how do you explain the response to this story of the rest of the press? Well, the grade is obviously an F. But I mean, the explanation is outright hatred for the current occupant of the White House. And look, look, all of us in the press, we don't always like the person who's there.

You know, the Wall Street Journal editorial page has been critical often of Trump policies here or there. But we've always felt that our obligation was to look at him critically the way we look at any critically, like we praise the things he does that we think are good for freedom and for free people and free economies. And we we criticize that or don't. We just try to run that run him through that lens. The rest of the press, so much of it has been incapable of doing that. And so a story that normally they would be all over, right, the monitoring by the FBI of U.S. citizens, the monitoring of a presidential campaign, the abuse of power of some of the most highly placed officials in the country. They wanted nothing to do with it. And instead, they were

willing to run fact-free narratives fed to them by this sort of former power abusers, and never do a gut check. Hey, Kim, it's Rob Long. Thanks for joining us. So I get that from the press, right? I understand the press are pretty much partisan political operatives for the Democratic Party. They're not even liberal anymore. They're just mostly pro-dem. And I get it. So I understand why they're going after this guy. Of course, they would go after this guy if his name was mitt romney um but i get in all the republican insiders that i know and of course you know i'm a rhino so i know tons uh when when trump was elected they kind of said that's it's going to be weird but you know they all kind of looked and rolled their eyes up but you know he's going to be here for 24 hours and he's going to figure it out and he's like he's going to he's going to be well within you know there's nothing to worry about he's going to be here for 24 hours and he's going to figure it out. And he's like, he's going to, he's going to be well within,

there's nothing to worry about. He's going to be a standard Republican president. And I got that sense that Washington was kind of, you know, like, yes, it was, it was a good story and a circus for the rubes. But, you know, the minute those guys come to DC, we'll teach them what's what. We did it with Clinton. We did it with George W. We did it with all of them and we do it with Reagan we're gonna do it with him so why suddenly did the deep state like to try to why do they target this guy who seemed i mean maybe i'm paulie in here he seemed so ripe for the kind of washington moderation that you expect in a politician. He seemed so ripe for it. He

didn't have an ideological underpinning. He had been a Democrat in the past. He was kind of a show business figure, basically. Why did they poke the bear? I don't get it. Well, look, first of all, I do agree with you. I think that had a lot of people played their cards differently, if they hadn't met this presidency with such immediate hostility, that there would have been an opportunity to have molded the president more in the way that they wanted to. And I don't mean that in a bad way, like suggesting that, you know, Trump is just someone to lead around. But more just that this is a guy who likes to make a deal, right? And he wants to get stuff done. So, you know, but here's my theory. So what you're fundamentally asking is, you know, how did we get to a point where the FBI thought it was a good idea? And my, you know, some people go, oh, the partisan FBI. I don't buy that. i don't think

jim comey the definition of partisan is someone who sits around and is like i don't like the policies that this guy i'm going to oppose i don't think jim comey had a problem with you know trump's tax policies or anything like that i think jim comey was one of the first undiagnosed cases of trump derangement syndrome yes yes freaked out over the guy. And then they set a train in motion. And then, you know, one of the points I make in this book that's coming out is, remember, everything that the FBI did, no one knew what was going on. And the expectation also that Hillary Clinton was going to win. And I think what really turned what was some bad ideas into a cataclysmically ugly event was when they realized Trump had won and that he was going to find out what they had done. And then came the attempts to get the dossier out there to make it look as though what they had done was responsible and right.

And that was the circus we've dealt with for the past two years. And in a way, I mean, there's sort of a Jungian thing going on here because they keep thinking he's going to fold and he keeps doubling down. They keep thinking that, well, I mean, surely he will shrink in the face of the FBI or the House Judiciary or somebody or the collected sort of wise people and deep state institutions that exist in D.C., surely he will crumble. And he never crumbles. In fact, he just doubles down and that's louder. And it's almost as if what they don't understand is he's the echo. They're creating him.

They are – he feeds off of their anger. And do you think it's ever going to dawn on i mean certainly not going to dawn on comey anyone can dawn on anyone that they're the way you handle somebody like this is not to is not to be aggressively uh negative but instead to sort of you know make a deal i mean a lot of banks yeah i don't think they will get it. OK. And I mean, that's a real shame to you because there are some real things that could be getting done in Congress. You know, the people agree on. Right. Everyone agrees that we need an immigration fix. OK. Everybody agrees that, you know, a new Mexico trade deal would probably be in people's interest. Like everyone agrees that infrastructure needs to happen.

But so you have Democrats that rather than doing that, and he would do it with open arms. He's like, come on, let's get it done. But they're too invested in impeachment. They're being run by their progressive base at the moment, which is demanding, you know, they want nothing except for the end of Trump. But I can't agree with you more. He's never going to stop because he's A, not conventional, but B, he now believes that he's under onslaught. And he has some reason to believe that. And so even the worst accusations that are leveled against him, he's able to put them to the side and say, look, fake news. This is what they do to me. I've got nothing to apologize for.

They're on a campaign. It reminds me of that great Kissinger quote that even paranoids have real enemies. That's true. We could say that every day. Kimberly James-Lalix here in Minneapolis, Minnesota. You know, the other day I was on the highway and I passed a car. Bumper sticker said, buy American. Putin certainly did. And I thought, okay, all right. And oddly enough, I couldn't tell whether or not the guy had taken some razor blades to try to get it off his car. Probably he won't because he still believes it. Amongst the population, there's just an ironclad belief.

Putin put Trump in office. But if you point out a story that says that new bank records show that the DNC and Fusion GPS actually did pay Christopher Steele for the dossier, a lot of people would roll their eyes and cross them because they would say, Fusion GPS, what's that? Steele, who's that? During Watergate, everybody knew about Creep and Watergate and the plumbers and the dirty tricks. They knew all the nomenclature of everything that was going on. But today, among people who just sort of casually follow the news, there doesn't seem to be any comprehensive understanding of what exactly happened. I've just seen people wave it off and say, ah, something was there, didn't work out, let's move along. When actually what happened is quite significant. Is this because the media, you think, perhaps just didn't like the second phase of this story as much as they loved the first?

Because the second phase sounds like it's going to get real messy and nasty and people they like are going to get in trouble. No, that's exactly why. And by the way, it's not for lack of facts. Right. I mean, I want to give a shout out, despite the fact that most Americans don't know the story that you just detailed, Fusion, GPS, and the payments, and Christopher Steele, and how this all works. You know, there were members of the House Republican committees and the Senate Republican committees that did yeoman's work here. They did an amazing investigation. By the way,

they reached the conclusion that Bob Mueller reached a year before, and they had just as much information about everything that went on. But the press didn't want to hear it because they wanted to write it off as a partisan exercise and say, well, they're just covering for Trump. Well, no. In fact, if you go back and look at those reports that were put out by Devin Nunes, by Chuck Grassley in the Senate, they were dead on. And they were exactly the conclusions that Bob Mueller ended up presenting to the nation. And so the facts have been out there for a long time. But again, they don't they don't promote the narrative. continuing adam ship you know the new head of the house over intelligence committee is so convinced that there's some unbelievable trump russia tie-up that's happening via deutsche bank or something we

just don't know about it yet i mean we gave bob muller unlimited resources all the staff in the world and all the time he asked for to investigate every claim, no matter how crazy. And he came up with bupkis. There's nothing there. I know that Peter has the last question, but I just want to note, but the press seems sometimes not willing to construct the overarching narrative. I mean, I remember around election time, there was a story in the New York Times that the FBI, a government agency, had detected that there were Russian servers pinging Trump Tower computers. Okay?

And then Trump later said, well, I'm being wiretapped by the Obama administration because obviously that's how they knew the stuff that they said. And then the story after that is, crazy Trump says Obama wiretapped him without any reference whatsoever to what started this in the first place. It's like they don't want to construct a narrative where elsewhere they're so eager to construct a narrative. Yeah. And by the way, watch for this. If it, you know, we're still waiting to find out who all had wiretaps on them. You know, some we know for certain Carter Page, I would wager that Michael Flynn, there's been press reports that Paul Manafort, well, if they did

indeed have a tap on Paul Manafort, he's, by the way, where did he live? He lived in Trump Tower. And, you know, this was essentially what the president was saying, was that there was a wire tap in Trump Tower. You know, I'm not defending that or criticizing it, but you're right. They don't want to look at this. They just, everything that happens, they want to use it as another way to say the president is unhinged, he's not worthy of office, or he's somehow corrupt, or he's a crook, because they desperately want him gone. But I mean, I think this goes back to Rob's point, in their desperation to do this, they've only hurt their own industry, and they haven't necessarily done anything to hurt him with his supporters. And in fact, they've kind of fueled a resistance that is producing for us a bunch of very crazy Democratic presidential candidates that may make it that much harder for Democrats to have a shot at winning the White House and accomplishing their only goal in the world. The book, again, is Resistance at All Costs, How Trump Haters Are Breaking America.

However, the pub date is not until October 15th, and we intend to have you back on once people can go to bookstores and buy the book. So this is a teaser. The real book interview is yet to come in a couple of weeks. Last question, Kim. In brief, will there be time? Will we actually get an accounting? The Attorney General, William Barr, apparently investigations of one kind and another going on. The IG has issued one report, and yet we see that James McCabe, this miscreant from the FBI who got fired, just got hired by CNN. The press is still, will there be an accounting? Will the act of intellectual and

legal hygiene that needs to take place, take place? Yeah, I have every reason to believe that there will be. One is because what we have seen come out from the inspector general so far suggests that he is a straight arrow, that he cares very much about holding people to account, whether it be law-breaking or rule and regulation-breaking. But the second reason I'm incredibly optimistic is, look, you know, Bill Barr needed this job like he needed a hole in his head. And he made it really clear in his confirmation hearings, and he's made it clear, I think, since, that he took it precisely because

he felt that the Department of Justice needed to have a house cleaning. That, you know, it isn't just what happened at the FBI and the Department of Justice in terms of this investigation, a counterintelligence investigation into a presidential campaign, by the way. That's still an astonishing statement to me. But also, you know, thuggish prosecutors, you know, special counsels gone awry. There just needs to be some humility injected back into that department and a remembrance that their job is not just to nail people to the wall and put them, but rather to enforce justice fairly, which also means sometimes exonerating people, too. And I think that was his whole view when he was there the first time around. It's pretty clear that once you want and he understands what went on here and he's determined to kind of root it out and have an accounting. And we'll get the rest of it in whatever comes out from John Durham, the U.S. attorney that he is named to look into this. Well, we can't wait for the appendix to your book to the the multiple appendixes in your book, as they describe what happens in the future. That book,

by the way, is Resistance at All Costs, How Trump Haters Are Breaking America. Pre-order is available now at Amazon, and it comes out October 15th. Kim Strassel, thank you very much for joining us today. We'll talk to you in a month or so. Thank you. You guys are the best. I am an obsessive listener of you. Oh, really? That's good. Well, now we have to revise our view of ourselves upwards. Exactly. You just changed the valuation of the company. Thanks, Kim. That's great. That's great. You never know who's listening to the podcast, of course. It's probably just because of Peter and his awesome Rolodex, because we know, right, that Peter has got at his fingertips, can summon up anybody connected to the deep state.

Right, Peter? Oh, yes, yes. My tentacles reach deep. You are a bathysphere into the swamp. Oh, my goodness. Anyway, I keep going on about this. I don't want to yammer along, too. But back in the old days, it just struck me over and over and over again, A, that the intelligence agencies, there was just a lot of stuff going on all the time they had enormous discretion and i'm talking about back when i was in the white house and b the only time

i had a clearance that went up what was it secret autopsy i did not have anything like the highest clearance but i only read one piece of information ever in six years in the government that i didn't already know from reading the newspapers one piece of class of supposedly classified information and it was dirty tittle tattle on some prime minister of some caribbean island who apparently was having an affair with that and that i hadn't read in the newspapers years later i mentioned it to a former ambassador to that island and he said oh everybody in the entire island knew about that so i just i've been i've been i just you got to take these intelligence agencies with a grain of salt they are run by human beings who face all the same temptations and all the same incentives as everybody else right and if you like rob but hold on rob i mean i know you right now you're

you're in new york right oh right right and, right. Right. And you're a paranoid guy, right? I'm very paranoid. I have to lower my blinds. I'm so paranoid. Well, I'm just thinking you're the kind of guy who would lower them and then put his fingers between them and peek out to see the guy who's standing under the lamppost smoking, watching you all those times. Yes, it was rather inexpert and clumsy segue, but it must be done. It has to be done. But I was kind of proud of myself because I really didn't know where you were going, and And I thought, oh, I got it. You got it very quickly. You did very quickly. And

might I add that your clumsiness kept me from establishing and taking that bit on for another minute or so. Eventually, I would have surprised you both. But no, Rob, right away. When I say blinds, a lot of you who listen to radio are going to say, I know where you're going with this. And you're right. Blinds.com. You've heard about Blinds.com, right? I mean, if you've got your own blinds or whatever you have in your windows, sometimes it's just an afterthought. You need something to cover it up and you got something, you've been living with them, you forget what they look like. But with brand new made-to-order custom window coverings from blinds.com, you really transform the look and the feel of your entire home. When they're right, everything in the house looks better. And when they're wrong, everything in the house looks cheap. If you need new blinds

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They'll even send you free samples to make sure everything looks good in person as it does online. I mean, who knows? The colors on your computer screen may not be adjusted accordingly. You want that real thing to have it in the real room. See how the light hits it so you know it's right for you. And if you mismeasure, if you pick the wrong color, if you make a mistake, in other words, blinds.com will remake your blinds for free. They really made it easy for you. There's no excuse, really, to leave up those mangled blinds with the tangled cords and they're out of style and out of date and yellowed. Now, for a limited time, our listeners get $20 off a Blinds.com order when you use the promo code Ricochet. That's Blinds.com, promo code Ricochet for $20 off

faux wood blinds, cellular shades, roller shades, and more. Blinds.com, promo code Ricochet. Rules and restrictions apply, of course, but our thanks to Blinds.com for finally sponsoring this, the Ricochet podcast. And now we have a couple of things we want to talk to you about. The first is going to be, well, should we do the long poll? Because I think the long poll is important. And let's say, insert trumpet fanfare music here.

Okay. Yeah. Great. Thank you for that. And then Rob, what is the long poll? So we're going to change the name. I don't think it's going to stay the long poll. But what I want to do is I want to have a regular poll of our members, but not about policy and stuff. Because I want to have a poll that other people, not Ricochet members maybe in the media, would be interested to know so um uh so it's really more about how you feel

and what you expect than um you know a way to express your political views so that's a complicated way to say it here's what i here's the first poll question is this which democrat do you hope runs against trump and uh we're only going to have choices of the Democrats that are eligible for the next debate. So it's not going to be, you know, you can't say somebody, you know, Leon Trotsky, right? It's going to be some actual Democrat who could conceivably in the realm of possibility win. And which one do you hope of all of them, which is the one that you think easy to beat? You must be a Ricochet member to participate. So if you're not a Ricochet member, please join today.

What I'm hoping comes from this is this kind of running consensus of how, for the liberal media, how the other side is squaring up for the race. Is Ira Glass behind this? Is your friend behind this, Rob? No, I don't. I mean, what I'm hoping is that he'll be interested and then people will talk about it because i really got it the collective hive mind of ricochet members is sort of smart and interesting and revealing and thoughtful and probably unexpected in a lot of ways and um one of the our problems on the right is that we don't really you know we just we're still in our little you know cubbyholes and it's uh you know we should

we should be a little bit more public and we should be a little bit more public, and we should be a little bit more out there. And what I want is I want people to say, well, not Republicans, but conservatives, like ideological conservatives, center-right types. Ricochet members represent that, a full spectrum, really, of thought on that side. And I'd like to know what they think. So if you're not a member, join for a whole lot of reasons, not the least because it's a good thing to do. And we'd love to have you be a member. And we definitely need your support. But if you are a member, please go and vote in this poll. And then we'll probably keep it up for, I don't know, it's not very scientific, maybe a week, maybe less than a week.

And we'll have a new one next week. And we'll talk about the results. and we're going to release the results. I want everybody to know what the results are. I want people to talk about it. My dream is that Jake Tapper on CNN mentions the Ricochet poll. Yes. Well, this being Ricochet, there will be a civil discussion that follows afterwards, of course, as to the different reasons people have for answering that question as they did. I mean, there's still going to be some people who say, I want this person because this person can beat Trump and will be better

for America, even though the lot of them seem to be practically foaming at the mouth to lead the Red May Day parade, but we'll get around to that. I don't think this is dirty to do, but I do think our listeners should know about Rob's hidden life. He has friends at NPR and will occasionally admit to MSNBC, actually, and MSNBC. And they say, and Rob's, this is perfectly standard. They'll have dinner and midway through the dinner, they'll look around the restaurant, make sure nobody else is listening, and then lean across to Rob and say, Rob, listen, every week, I listen to the Ricochet podcast. Right. That's true. That is true.

And I'm glad they do, because I think it's probably the only 50 minutes of thoughtful oppositional thought that they get. But I do remember talking to a friend of mine who I will see later this evening who was a smart guy, economist, very, very smart businessman and worked in the Clinton White House. And we were talking about this early 2016, and we had just seen one debate, I think one or two of the primary debates for Republican candidates. And he said, you know that Trump, you know, I know he's nuts and all that. But, you know, he had the right answer to the Iran deal question. Back then was the question of the Iran deal. And the question was, will you throw it out? And every candidate said, absolutely. Day one, I'm'm gonna put a giant line through it and throw it out only trump i mean he later of course sort of changed his stripes but only trump had the

right answer which was no i'm gonna look at it look at the internals maybe go back and get some stuff changed i'm gonna look at it first and that was the that was trump the deal maker having asked a question and answering a real question. I'm not going to throw it out now. We're going to play around with it. We're going to kick the tires. We're going to badmouth it a little bit. I'm going to see what I can get.

Of course, he changed utterly at some point. But for a while, he was the – I mean, that's why I asked Kim Strassel that question. For a while, he was really – the moderate to liberals that I knew were like, well, he's nasty, but, you know. Well, there's something to be said for intellectual flexibility that is not completely bound and cinched with steel bands of certainty. My daughter in college is taking a class called Liberalism in the Media, which I think is an interesting idea. I was very keen to see how the first day of class went, and apparently it went really well. And my daughter spoke up like three or four times and nailed some questions pretty nicely and got into a discussion about how the definition of liberalism has morphed over the

last 50, 60 years. So I'm gratified to know that I'm spending all this money on a class that is not just simply here to say that the media is not liberal enough and i'm and all of you must march out and do this i'm less happy to know that one of the classes that she has requires her actually to do a uh a spin-off of a netflix show black mirror and i'm thinking i'm not sure that's worth every damned dime i'm paying but it did lead to an interesting conversation where she called up and said uh dad, I need the Netflix password because you changed it. And I said, yes, yes, I did. If you're a parent and your child is far away, you can actually get them to call you by changing the Netflix password. It's an instant, instant, you know, and she, but she texts all the time and calls. So it wasn't that, but I was able to find, she said, no, I really legitimately,

I need to watch Netflix for school. And she did. But even, you know, the odd thing is she's out there in Boston University. And I could, if I wished, if I was that sort, I could monitor and control her Internet usage. Now, she's an adult, so I'm not going to. But, you know, sometimes as a parent, you want to limit screen time. You want to keep it to, you know, no more five minutes more. It turns into three hours. No, you want to be able to control what your child can do because there's a lot of bad stuff out there. And sometimes having an uninterrupted, untrammeled flow of screen time hours at a time is bad.

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Enter the promo code Ricochet to save $30. And our thanks to Circle for sponsoring this, the Ricochet podcast. Well, there's your poll. We had another feature coming up, didn't we? Remind me what that was again. Oh, yeah. The Lilacs member post of the week. Yeah, the Lilacs member post of the week.

All right. I love the member-only section of Ricochet, but there's some stuff that is great there and migrates to the homepage. And you'll find discussion on every single issue of the day at Ricochet. But what makes the site different and special is when it flows outside, overflows its banks, and people add their own little interests and their own expertise. And Gary McVeigh had a piece, excuse me, on TV's color wars. It was called Autumn 1946, 49, 51, and 53, that traces the long history, technologically, socially, etc., of color TV, going back to something that people may not even remember, that there was another even remember that there was another standard that there was a day actually when they invented color tv before we think that they did

it's quite remarkable and it's if television is inexplicably intertwined with american culture post-war and color television started a whole new world of simulating reality that got us to the point where we are today in the immersive environments of sitting in front of our vast 4ks it all started with these devices and with these brilliant men who came up with how to do this and frankly a lot of us have our hard time wrapping our brains around the transmission of images in the first place for that matter some people can't figure out exactly how you can talk into a phone and a wire vibrates and goes across the country and comes out as a voice the other end thanks to members like gary mcveigh these things are explained and given humor and wit and interesting explanation of an american cultural phenomena i know i know the russians probably invented color

tv pop up check off and tell us but there you go that's the member post because it's not just pop but life is more than politics and the more time you spend or ricochet the more you realize that most of life is in politics and that's reflected on the site right right now rob there's a jet headed for your house i believe or i think it must be is it me or is it you i thought it was you babe i got the jets overhead but i have my windows closed i have an app on my phone actually that tells me where every jet going overhead is from where that's cool do you i do and if i was to upgrade it to you know 299 a month i would have a 3d version that would show the planes wherever they are you know topographic um verity showing the little shadow on the ground i mean it's

astonishing when my wife landed home from Boston last Sunday, she didn't have to call and say, I'm here. I'm looking at my phone, and I'm literally watching the plane taxi to the gate. And when the plane got to the gate, that's when I got in the car because I figured by the time I got there, she'd have her baggage and be out.

Amazing world, isn't it? Yeah. Well, remember when you used to meet people at the gate i mean i remember yes yes yes i have a friend who's such an uh such a geek such they call him av geek such an uh uh aviation geek that i i told him i said i'm i and i was i flew here i told him about a trip i took recently and he said oh wait what what was the equipment which is like a very you know i i use that i said i i knew you're gonna ask so i told him and he said oh did they have the curved bins or were they had they replaced them with the

angular one oh well that is a little too much detail for me i don't remember the shape of the overhead bin and he kind of looked at me like then why fly then why are you together i get it we have a new neighbor in the house next door which has been unoccupied for years and um i met him the other day and he's a pilot he's a pilot for delta but then he's going to work for alaska uh and it's great because i'm horrible with names and his name is actually high so now i i have no problem remembering his name at all but the same thing as rob rob's friend like to throw around the terms what is the equipment what's the equipment that is surely that is surely the start of a novel by james lilacs the house next door unoccupied captain high captain high captain high yeah he comes and goes and keeps strange hours and lives

in the house the unoccupied house next door. All right. We'll see where this is. I don't want to be flown anywhere by Captain High, to be quite honest with you. Well, maybe if the bins are curved. Well, here's the great thing. So we're talking about, we just get talking about stuff, I don't know how, across the fence, which is funny. He's holding a kid, and I'm holding my dog. So the dog doesn't bark. And he describes his family, how long they've been in the cities and whatnot. And that one of his relatives used to run a very famous Vietnamese restaurant in town because his

family comes from Vietnam. And he, he went at one point, he says, and then my uncle had this ad in city pages, which is a publication I used to work for. And I stopped them and I said, I know the ad. It's a picture of this guy smiling. And he says, I didn't come 4,000 miles to cook you a bad meal. I didn't come 4,000 miles. And he said, that's my uncle. And I used to look at that ad all the time and say, no, you came 4,000 miles to escape a murderous collectivist regime. But as long as you're here, you're going to cook us some pretty good food.

Yeah, right. And so small world, small world. Captain High next door to me, his uncle, was the guy who was in that ad that I saw for years and years back in the 70s and 80s at whose restaurant I ate. Minneapolis, big big town small town gentlemen um i kind of have to go to the office now you're gonna work you know you got a job i do have a job and but there's one more thing that rob's gonna tell you but before he does and peter will tell you too before he does i gotta tell you it's lending club it's blinds.com and it's circle three great products and you will avail yourself of them promptly.

Support them for supporting us. You'll find all the codes, which are Ricochet, and all the links at the site. And if you enjoyed us, please go to iTunes right now because unless you do so, we will all burst into flames and be in eternal peril. And you can leave a review and then then more people discover us, and more people listen. And the next thing you know, Kimberly Strasser will be unable to download because the servers are crashed because so many people are trying to get the piece. Peter, Rob, you had one last word of advice or observation for folks for this week. My observation for folks is to join Ricochet and make your voice heard in the poll. We're going to go big. Always be closing.

Coffee is for closers. Yep. And Peter, the steak knives go to you for? Simply, my advice is simply to reflect upon this podcast, which began with breaking the sod in North Dakota and ends with curved bins in jets that we track as they pass overhead. It is a young and astonishing country. It is, and the gratitude that I feel having been born to it is boundless. And as for those young whippersnappers who don't share it, get off my lawn.

Thank you for listening to this, the Ricochet Podcast. Rob, Peter, it's been a pleasure. We'll see everybody in the comments at Ricochet 4.0. Next week, folks. In the eye of a hurricane there is quiet For just a moment A yellow sky When I was 17 a hurricane destroyed my town I didn't drown

I couldn't seem to die I wrote my way out. Wrote everything down far as I could see. I wrote my way out. I looked up and the town had its eyes on me. We passed a plane around. Total strangers Moved to kindness

By my story Raised enough for me To book passage on a ship That was New York bound I wrote my way out of hell I wrote my way to revolution I was louder than the crack in the bell I wrote Eliza Love letters until she fell I wrote my way out of hell. I wrote my way to revolution. I was louder than the crack in the bell. I wrote Eliza love letters until she fell.

I wrote about the Constitution and defended it well. And in the face of ignorance and resistance, I wrote financial systems into existence. And when my prayers to God were met with indifference, I picked up a pen and I wrote my own deliverance. In the eye of a hurricane there is quiet But just a moment A yellow sky

I was twelve when my mother died She was holding me We were sick and she was holding me I couldn't seem to die Wait I'll write my way out I couldn't wait. All right. My way. Write everything down

far as I can. All right. Way. Overwhelmed them with honesty. This is the eye of the hurricane. This is the only way I can protect my legacy. Wait for it, wait for it, wait for it, wait. The Reynolds Pamphlet.

The Reynolds Pamphlet. Have you read this? Ricochet. Join the conversation.