The Ricochet Podcast - High On Life

Episode Date: January 9, 2014

Direct link to MP3 file This week on the podcast, Professor To The Stars Paul Rahe stops by for a little conversation on Greek classicalism and modern day politics, and later, Rick Wilson on the conservatives and weed, the inevitability of Hillary, and races we should be watching in 2014. And of course, we set the stage for our big 200th live show in Los Angeles on January 26th. Ricochet members... Source

Yes, as you may have guessed, it's the Ricochet Podcast, number 196, and it's brought to you by Encounter Books. This week's pick, Glenn Reynolds, the Instapundit, has brought us The New School, How the Information Age Will Save American Education from Itself. For 15% off that or any other title, use the coupon code RICOSHAY at your checkout. And of course, we're brought to you by Audible.com, the leading provider of spoken audio information and entertainment on the internet. Go to audiobooks wherever you are, and there you will have the entertainment you had when you left the device elsewhere, thanks to WhisperSync technology.

AudiblePodcast.com slash RICOSHAY a free audio book and a 30-day trial. And Rob is laughing about something. I am. I like that. And there you will have the content that you had when you were elsewhere. Yes. Good copy. That's, well, I'm making this up as I go along.

That is essentially the internet, isn't it? Everything, everywhere, constantly from the cloud, except there are no clouds where I am now. There is merely a blue, pitiless sky in which no sun really truly shines, but a yellow dot that reminds us of what heat once was. Lord, it's cold up here, but the one thing I'm not going to do is complain because up here, January, we get this.

Now, however, they're calling it the polar vortex when it's just an Alberta clipper, as we used to say. Troy Seneca sitting in for Peter Robinson. Rob Long, of course, is scattered about the country. Where are you now, Rob? I'm in Miami Beach. Are you now? I hate your stinking –

Yeah, that sounds calibrated just to stick a finger in your eye, James. It is. It really was. But I want to make you feel better. Can I make you feel better? Okay. It's rainy. It's want to make you feel better. Can I make you feel better? Okay. It's rainy. It's 75, but it's rainy. Rain does sound wonderful.

Now, you're in California, right? Are you, Troy? Yes, yes. Okay. Now, what do you have there? For those who are saying enough with the weather and the throat clearing, I'm getting to something here. What do you got? We got low 70s actually right now, James.

I hesitate to even mention that to you. But we're floating around 72. Good enough. Hate you both. Here's the drill. Miami, raining. California, in January, you can get a little chilly as well. You might have to put on an extra sweater.

And come a Sunday evening, there's no beach to go to. There's no sunning to be done. There's no cafe outside to go to. No, on a Sunday night, what you want to do is join some of your favorite ricochet people ever in the world at a special event, the 200th podcast episode live. That's right, at USC.

Who are your guests? Well, listen to this. Rob Long, Peter Robinson, I'll be hosting, Jonah Goldberg, Pat Sajak, Dennis Brager, Andrew Klayman, Troy Seneck, Dennis Brager, Andrew Klavan, Troy Senec, D.C. McAllister, and about 47 other people. Yes, it's Mahler's Symphony of a Thousand with the entire choir up there on eight risers doing one podcast all at once.

It's going to be great. It's also going to have a special VIP reception before the show. And if you're listening to this podcast, you are a member who gets a special deal. You get to elbow everyone ahead of the queue and fight your way to the top. At the member feed, you'll see until Monday, until Monday at the member feed, special prices for the tickets, $25 for the live show and $75 for the VIP reception where you can rub shoulders and elbows with the aforementioned great people. That includes a ticket to the show, of course. Now, if you're not a member, quick, sign up, get those tickets.

Monday is the day the prices go up. So $25 for the live show, $75 for the VIP reception. What a deal. And then, you know, come and see us all. See how much air Dennis Prager can try to suck out of the room when there's that many other people on stage. It's challenging. You know, Jim, can I just – this is our first one we've ever done like this and we're really, really excited.

But it's not a large venue. I mean it's not just – a meet for brunch on Sunday morning. We're going to try to do as many things as we can and make it a really fun weekend. There's a bunch of things to see in LA on Saturday. There's the Reagan Library, which is fantastic. I mean it's fantastic even if you have complicated thoughts about Reagan, which nobody, I'm sure, Ricochet members do. But there's lots to do here, and I think you'll have a lot of fun. I think we're about 20 years away from complicated thoughts on Reagan.

No, we have complicated thoughts about Nixon now, but we have complicated thoughts about Reagan. Those will be en route. My thoughts about Nixon aren't complicated. He was a liberal. There you go. Well, Troy, let me ask you this. As long as we're retrospectively recasting history along with our psychological complications, Gates has a book. Gates' book either is or is not causing a tsunami in the Washington establishment.

What do you take on this and his revelations and surprising things he said? Like apparently Joe Biden isn't that bright. Yeah, and I don't know if you saw it because this came out late yesterday I guess. I didn't read it until this morning, but the National Security Council put out a response based on the statements about Biden in the book. Defending Biden as one of the great statesmen of his time, which I'm – his time there I'm assuming is a five-minute window at some point in 1997. I have no idea what that's supposed to be a reference to. But this is going to endure. I think this is going to stick around for a while. One of the things that I thought was the most

interesting, Bob Woodward wrote a piece in The Washington Post yesterday which, as happens with books like this, they take the five juiciest paragraphs and about a week ahead of the release date in anticipation do this kind of piece. Gates references in the book the fact that he was in a meeting in the Oval Office where both Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton copped to the fact – Clinton is not a surprise. With Obama, it is for me a bit. Their opposition to the surge was entirely political. They had no objections on the merits. This was just what they had to do during campaign season.

I think we're going to be talking about this for a while partially because Gates was a figure – even when he came in in the Bush administration but especially because he was retained in the Obama administration. He was always a guy who was seen as pretty nonpartisan, as playing it pretty straight down the middle. So it's a little bit different coming from a guy like Bob Gates than it would be from the guys who usually write the book, some partisan – some guy like me, some second-tier speechwriter who's got an ax to grind. This means a little bit more coming from Bob Gates. And it's funny. The excerpts I read – I mean the guy is sort of a – I always thought he was sort of a colorless bureaucrat, which is why the Bushes loved him so much in national security affairs. But he really comes off as somebody amazingly principled in the excerpts that I've read, surprisingly principled for somebody who's been in Washington. And I don't know whether this is going to have any legs. You're going to hurt Hillary or – I mean I think by the time the presidential campaigns gear up, it will be old news. It is remarkable how OK it is now for some people in Washington who – certainly the uber-establishment class like Woodward to say things that are now darkly, darkly critical of the Obama administration.

That's a good sign I think. Yeah, it's a good sign and they'll really start piling on I think after November because once you get into the last few years, nobody has got anything to lose anymore. But that is the sad thing is that's the relationship of the press with this White House is that they will get out the long knives when it means the less – when it means the least rather. I mean the first four years when it probably would have been the most relevant for us to be hearing this kind of thing, not a peep. But now that there are no consequences, sure, you'll get more of it. Well, do you think – so Troy, do you think this is going to be the first of a lot of tell-all books or do you. Bush and the Barack Obama administration have been remarkably free of these kinds of sort of nasty tell-all books, much more so than Reagan, two terms of Reagan and two terms of Clinton. Is this a trend? Yeah, we had a few of them in the second half of the Bush administration, nothing that seemed to have any sort of lasting impact. I don't know that you'll see that many more of these from within the Obama administration because the reality is Gates was kind of an aberration in the way that they staffed it.

I mean for the most part, their people are their people. I mean they were people who were part of this machine well before they ever inhabited the White House. Gates is an exception there and there's not a lot of other people I could see being candidates for that without it being sort of really shocking. The guy I actually wish would do it who won't was Gates' successor, was Leon Panetta, who I think was one of the few people who came in. There was not – had a career that well predated the Obama administration, seemed to be a voice of conscience in a way that most people in that White House weren't. I don't think he'll do that because he's a good democratic soldier. But that's the one I'd want to read. Well, now we find ourselves in a position of waiting for more books to tell us what we already know.

I mean the revelation that Joe Biden actually is wrong in every single foreign policy issue. It's just – it's delightful for somebody to point that out and have it brooded about as a topic of discussion, but it's nothing we don't know. And the idea that politics above all motivates this man and not a sense of core values when it comes to projecting American power abroad. Well, stunningly surprised. In any case, what I need to do here is to shift gears drastically without even the benefit of the lubricant of a segue because we've got to get to Paul Ray. But I want to tell you a forehand that all of this is brought to you by Encounter Books. And their pick this week is Glenn Reynolds. You know him, the instapundant.

His new book, The New School, How Information Age Will Save American Education from Itself. And I have to tell you that it is not one of those ponderous, thick tomes with 600 pages of indexes alone. No, it is a slender, brisk, quick read, and it's good. And it sets the subject up quite well the next time you want to debate with somebody who says that the educational system should maintain exactly as it does now. And to quote, of course, the book, Economist Herb Stein famously said that something that can't go on forever won't. A quote that Insta uses a long time, for a long time now.

And for decades, the America has been invested in ever-growing fortunes in its K-12 education system in exchange for steadily worse results. Now, in the new school, Glenn Reynolds, I'm sorry, Glenn Harlan Reynolds explains how… Oh, that's his fancy name. That's it. When he's going all three on you, he's either doing a book tour or he's a serial killer. Reynolds explains how parents, students, and educators can and must reclaim and remake American education. Already, Reynolds explains, many Americans are abandoning traditional education for new models, and many are going to charter schools or private schools or going another step beyond and making the leap to online education, like the kind you're getting here.

There's over 1.8 million K-12 students already. So 15% off this book. Go to encounterbooks.com and use the coupon code RICOCHET at your checkout. I have to say, I'm going to go after this podcast and buy that book. I have the book. Glenn writes brilliantly. He's a brilliant

writer. Really super lucid, clear, witty. If you don't go to Instant Pundit, you're really not using the internet right if you don't go to Instapunit, you're really not using the internet right if you don't go to Instapunit. And I know he's going to be a guest on the podcast the next couple of weeks to talk about it. But this issue of online education and education reform and radical restructuring of the way we educate kids,

to me, this is my favorite, favorite issue in America. Yeah, and I literally have skin in the game. I mean I have a child that I sent off this morning in nine below temperature, 22 below, and we had to have an argument about whether or not she should put a scarf around her face. Now, if we were doing some sort of online schooling, we wouldn't have to go to a brick-and-mortar place, schlepped there by a big bus, chuffing out diesel fumes. I can see where this is going to have to change. But, you know, that's another subject we'll get to when we have Glenn on. Now we have somebody else, Paul Ray, professor of history at Hillsdale College, where in the terms that you can only find in academia, he holds an endowed chair.

In this academic year, he's a national fellow at Stanford University's Hoover Institution, and we welcome him back to the podcast. Professor. Good morning. How are you? We're okay. So first of all, can I just, hey, Paul, it's Rob Long. Can I ask, how's California going? It's beautiful out here. It is, the last I looked in Hillsdale, Michigan, it was 16 below zero. Do you just keep that on? Out here, it's in the 50s and 60s. Today, it's overcast, which is very rare. I gather it would be good if it were overcast for three weeks and we had rain and rain and rain because you've got a drought out here. But it's lovely, and Hoover is a very good place to work, and Stanford's library is pretty good.

And what I can't get from Stanford I get from Berkeley. But I'm spending all of my days mostly in a DAZE thinking about Sparta. Really? So I don't think I've ever asked. What are you studying out there? Or what are you teaching or researching? I did my PhD years ago in ancient history and I wrote a dissertation on Sparta. And I took parts of it and used it in a book called Republic's Ancient Modern. And I'm going back and I'm doing ancient history again.

So I have two book manuscripts in press at the moment, one called The Spartan Regime, Its Character, Its Origins, and then another called The Grand Strategy of Classical Sparta, The Persian Challenge. And I'm now working on the next volume in the series, The Grand Strategy of Classical Sparta, the Athenian challenge. So the earlier book, the one that's in manuscript, is about the Persian Wars and the lead-up to the Persian Wars. Now I'm working on the Peloponnesian War and the lead-up to the Peloponnesian War. And I hope to do a third volume in that series called The Grand Strategy of Classical Sparta, The Imperial Venture, which would be after,

well, it would be the defeat of Athens at the end of the Peloponnesian War and then the Spartan attempt to create an empire. When the Spartans took other territory, did they attempt to remold other cultures into their own or were they content just to keep their own culture pristine, intact, and superior. Okay, that's very interesting. Early on, they wanted to conquer, subject, and divide up the land among their own people. And they found that they could do this up to a certain level, and then they discovered that they just didn't have the manpower to sustain it. So they changed their policy. And the policy was to seek alliances with nearby cities in the Peloponnesus. And the ground for the alliance would be hostility to tyranny. So the Spartans would overthrow tyrants and install sort of broad-based oligarchies of gentry essentially.

And that was their game prior to the Persian Wars. And one of the reasons everyone turns to them is they're the great champion of liberty against tyranny in the period before the Persian Wars. And that remains their policy down to the imperial venture. And when the imperial venture takes place in the wake of the Peloponnesian War, they install narrow oligarchies. And instead of staying at home, they go out abroad. And the problem is it's a shame culture, the way Sparta operates.

And when Spartans are not under the gaze of their fellow Spartans, they fall apart morally. That's fantastic. They're subject to corruption. In other words, it's all about how you appear to other people. But if you don't appear to other people, then you will engage in misconduct on a very grand scale. And this is known, by the way, very early about the Spartans, that they're very different in private from what they are in public. And so the original book, The Spartan Regime, is all about that.

It's about the form of government, but also the way of life, how it shapes character and how it fails to shape character. And then it works pretty well as long as they practice a kind of Peloponnesian isolationism, as long as they stick to the Peloponnesians. But when they're out in the larger world and they're going abroad for six months and a year at a time, it's a disaster. It just gets too juicy. You know, it's funny. I remember someone telling me that during – in DC during the Cold War, that was always the problem that American diplomats had and American sort of defense analysts had who

were in DC rubbing shoulders with the Soviets and the Soviet counterparts there because the Soviets when they were in DC were – they would drink and they went out. And at a certain point in the evening, they'd say, listen, you guys are so far ahead of us. There's no way. And they were extremely candid and they kind of – they went native, right? Then the minute they went back, it never affected the actual official policy of the Soviet Union ever. Because when they went back, they sort of marched – they got back in line. And they always say that about North Koreans speaking – because people talk about North Koreans.

North Koreans in Beijing. The North Koreans in Beijing, it's sort of like – they've gone to Nirvana and then every now and then they're recalled back to Pyongyang for discipline. Yeah, I'll bet. Well, that's a terror culture and the Soviet Union was a hangover culture. I mean the shame culture. Right, right. It sounds more like what Japan had when somebody would have to commit ritual suicide because the profits of the electronic company didn't meet their third quarter projections. Part of what I'm doing with these books is I'm arguing that in foreign affairs, regimes

matter. In other words, I'm attacking the realism of Hans Morgenthau and of Waltz and sort of the academic students of foreign affairs who think every state is the same and they're sort of black boxes and they have the same goals and the same purposes and the same ends and you can predict how they're going to behave. And my argument is no. Yes, everyone is concerned with security, but there are regime imperatives that drive them in different directions and that if you want to know how, for example, the regime in Iran is going to conduct itself, you can't just assume they're just like us because they're not. So when you're writing these books, I mean, somebody who thinks a lot about contemporary

politics, although famously, famously wrong about 2012. Infamously wrong. Let's get it right. Humiliatingly wrong. When you're writing these books and you're sort of deep into Sparta and the Peloponnesian War and things, do you ever think to yourself, oh, this is just John Boehner and Barack Obama or this is just Obama? Does that ever happen or do you fight against it? It doesn't really happen when you're dealing with antiquity because there isn't – no one has any illusions about war. No one operates on the presumption that if we don't bother the outside world, they'll just go away and leave us alone. In other words, the sort of Cato Foundation view or the view of the American left, nobody holds that view.

They know better. They know that if you aren't able to defend yourself and if you're not ready to defend yourself and if you don't involve yourself in alliances as a way to defend yourself, you're cooked. problems that we have. So it's a different world. And it takes one away from this larger world. If I'm working on Tocqueville, yes, I think an enormous amount about contemporary affairs, about how things have changed since the 19th century, about the manner in which the United States has become rather like Tocqueville's 19th century France. If I'm writing on Montesquieu and he's examining England and the way the English constitution works and the political psychology of it, I think a lot about American affairs. But when I'm writing about Sparta, I think about the differences more than I think about the similarities. Now, that's useful too because it reminds you that we have a regime also, that there are regime imperatives here as well, and that every regime involves a kind of blindness to a part of the truth. And so we have a tendency, scholars have a tendency to write about Sparta as if it's a modern state. It isn't even a state at all. There's no police force. There's no standing army. There's no bureaucracy. All of the apparatus of the state is missing there. So part of the story is that modernity stands out in all of its peculiarities if you go back and take your mind into antiquity.

So you can see yourself as they would see us, which is to say is a very strange sort of creature. And that I think is the larger use of the study of history. You can understand yourself as other. It's different. Troy Sinek here. I want to nudge you to where I think Rob was starting to lead you to current events. So let's do it this way. Let me put the betters question to you because you did write – as Rob mentioned, you wrote recently at Ricochet about the fact that you were very enthusiastic about the republican prospects in 2010 and you were right in 2010.

Huge wins in the house, best results at the state and local level in over 80 years. And then you also mentioned, of course, that you were also optimistic about 2012. It didn't turn out that way. So you are now also optimistic about 2014. So I take that hunch to Vegas, knowing that Paul Ray has a 50-50 track record over the past two election cycles. Make the case for me for why I should be betting on Paul Ray's 2010 track record instead of his 2012 track record this coming November. Okay. Now, one of the things is you've got to notice that my predictions about 2014 are chastened by the experience of 2012. I am more aware of the manner in which the Republicans

can blow it. It's always the beginning of wisdom. Yes. I've qualified that prediction in the following way. The Republicans have done well in the House. They've not done so well in the Senate. And in my view, the difference between the two is that the House election in 2010 was a national election because John Boehner did what Newt Gingrich had done in 1994, which is to say there was a kind of contract with America. They actually ran as a party rather than as individuals in their individual districts on local issues. This was not done in the Senate. And the Senate elections went every which way, and it depended on local matters and the quality of local candidates.

In my view, Mitch McConnell and the Republicans in the Senate need to take a leaf out of the playbook of Newt Gingrich and run a national election. And there is an issue that would allow everyone in the country to rethink their commitment to Barack Obama and the Democrats, and that's Obamacare. And you've seen the ad that was run against Gene Shaheen up in New Hampshire. You can change your senator if you want to. Right. It's brilliant.

It's a brilliant one. Oh. That's a brilliant one. Oh, it's a wonderful ad. But that could be done everywhere. Well, let me ask you the question about Obamacare, Paul, because that's an essentially static problem and that you can probably ameliorate it if not outright extinguish it. However, the big systemic sort of cancers of this program endure because they have to, because they are the program. The policies get canceled. Your premiums go up.

Quality goes down. The economic logic or lack thereof I guess of the program sends it into a death spiral. So here's my question. In terms of public perception, is that an episodic failure of progressivism? That is do people say, wow, Obamacare doesn't work or is it a systemic failure of progressivism where the general public, not just our side, says, wow, liberalism doesn't work? Yeah, is it an episode or is it the end of an epic? Right. And that is where leadership matters. One of the arguments I was making leading up to 2012 is you need a standard bearer who can make your case.

Politics is at the deepest level about persuasion. And what that means is you have to have somebody who knows how to frame it and who knows how, for example, to take the episode and turn it into a change of epic. Now, how do you do that? Well, you do it the way FDR did it. You take the depression and you turn it into a critique of a system. Now, that takes courage. That takes a certain kind of ferocity.

That takes a certain kind of eloquence. And that's exactly what is needed. Somebody or a group of somebodies who can speak up and frame the thing. And this is an opportunity of the sort, and this I believed back in 2008 and 2009. This is an opportunity of the sort that comes along at most once a generation. You've got a moment where the other side has done something that has deeply upset people and people are willing to listen to you. Right. But if in those circumstances you stand up and you say, vote for me. I'm a better manager you will get nowhere well for once we have an example of a policy that people actually feel the effects of their personal life uh they can vote they can vote i vote for the candidate who wants cleaner air because i don't want my children to have asthma who does and

there are regulations that roll out the crippled businesses because they're asking for a standard of cleanliness you can't get in this planet i want to have solar energy because we have to have a greener planet. I'm voting for this person here. And they never see what happens to their own bottom line because they don't see the power plant that isn't built. I mean, it's easy to vote your conscience and your heart and your emotions and your willingness for everything to be wonderful and good and pink and fluffy. And then actually when it comes back to bite you in the fact of your policy canceled and

then your premiums jacked up all of a sudden, yes, it's the first time that these wonderful sentiments of do-goodism have actually manifested themselves in these people's lives. And that counts for something. Yes. But, Paul, I think our problem is our side anyway. Our problem is that we don't run as persuaders. For the past 20 years, we've run as sort of micro-dividers, these little micro-audiences here or there. And we've kind of – we haven't tried to persuade anybody. Instead, we've tried to convince them that they – we've only gone to them and said we agree with you.

There hasn't been really a leader who's tried to persuade what is now – just today, Gallup released the largest number of Americans who identify as independents ever. It seems like that's like the persuasion attitude. I mean we haven't had a persuasive candidate since Reagan. That's right. That's absolutely right. Look, the elder George Bush didn't believe in persuasion. He believed in management. The younger George Bush in a way did believe in persuasion, but it had mainly to do with foreign affairs.

In a way, he came in intending to be a domestic affairs president. That's right. He ended up as a foreign affairs president, and to support his position in foreign affairs, he made deals with the Democrats that essentially sacrificed everything. And then you had the micro divider move, which was the prescription drug benefit, which deepened our troubles but bought off a certain part of the electorate. And part of it is we've got these advisors for campaigns who – they look at the census data. They look at the polling data and they're very good at slicing and dicing. And what happens is you forget the big picture. And it's – my view is this – the ad that was run against Jeanne Shaheen, it should be run

everywhere, including places the Republicans have no chance of winning. And the reason is, you set up your victory later by the arguments you make today. Let me turn this around slightly. Suppose Mitt Romney had lost, but he'd lost as not the managerial candidate, but as the man who made the argument over and over and over again, not just that Obamacare wouldn't work, but that social engineering like Obamacare wouldn't work. Suppose he'd said, I tried it in Massachusetts, and look at the disaster that came about it. I'm a guy who used to believe in this stuff, and boy, did I learn the hard way. This sort of thing doesn't work. Now, where would the Republicans be today?

In a way, the argument I'm making is Reagan's victory is prepared by Goldwater. That's a great point. Yeah, that's a good – yeah. Well, that's a bigger point. We probably don't have time to get into that today. I actually feel like 64 – our loss in 64 was the beginning of the end for conservatism because that was the beginning of huge – not big government liberalismism but gigantic government liberalism and we still haven't gotten out from under that. I'm not sure I'm willing to lose in a landslide and then the next president would be Nixon and have the EPA and the Department of Education and Medicare and Medicaid and all sorts of

big government programs that we still haven't unraveled even after Republicans in the White House, even after Reagan in the White House. We're still – he didn't manage to slash that at all. Well, in fact, if you go back and look at the details of what happened, LBJ does less in the way of creating huge government than Richard Nixon does. Richard Nixon is every bit as much the architect of the great society as was LBJ. You know, it's funny, Paul. We're having a big Ricochet meetup in LA in a few weeks, and if you're listening to this podcast and you're a Ricochet member, make sure you get your tickets soon because we're going to open it up until Sunday night I think. And I was saying that if you come in early, there's lots of stuff to do in LA that's interesting especially for Ricochet members.

The Reagan Library is fantastic. It's got Air Force One in it. And of course I forgot there's also the Nixon Library in your Belinda at his birthplace. But it's funny because you can go to the greatest Republican president of the modern era and you can go to the greatest Democratic president of the modern era. You're not going to feel good about the Nixon Library.

Yeah, right. Who was nevertheless reviled by Doonesbury at all because he was – well, as the song said, he went to Kent State and had students shot. Dr. Professor, Dr. Professor, I know we have to let you go and we thank you for coming on. Good luck with the Spartans and can't wait to read the results and the fruits of your research. Okay. Thank you very much. Thanks, Paul. Take care.

He's not the first guy to take a crack at these ancients. The book – the movie 300 is having a sequel and they're going to go back actually and look – How does that work? Well, it may be a prequel sequel actually we're going to go back to look at xerxes and his rise to power and how he actually became you know a nine foot tall golden guy with nipple piercings which apparently was uh what the historical record now tells us he was the persian story the xerxes stories the invade what they did is a fascinating tale and how they rose and fell. And I'm waiting for VDH to do something about that because I know that he's got a lot of work done about the Greeks, about the ancients. But I'm unaware as to whether or not he's gone in and plumbed the soul of the Persians as they existed in that time because that's – there's a model there for the culture today.

They trace themselves back to that. They see themselves as the inheritors of that. It would be a marvelous story. And I know that it's one of the things he'll probably get around to. Previously he wrote a book about who killed Homer, which is one of those things where you scratch your head and say, don't we know? No, you have to ask.

And it's more than that. When he talks about who killed Homer, he's talking about what we see today in the educational systems in America where classical education is being devalued in favor of trendy studies. He would say that we should recover Greek wisdom in order to form a foundation for what we know and an intellectual rigor that will allow us to apprehend the world as it is. You don't necessarily have to read about it. You can hear him say these things, and these words narrated by a professional, mellifluous voice can be found at audible.com, an Amazon company.

Now, if you would like to get your free audio book, you go to audiblepodcast.com slash ricochet, and you can get a 30-day trial and a free book, and you can find Victor Davis Hanson and other great writers, scholars, popular, academic, and otherwise. And, well, I mentioned before that WhisperSync technology. You can listen to something on one device, pick it up on another.

It's a miracle of the modern age, and we advise you to go there and thank Audible for sponsoring this, the Ricochet podcast. Now, having said that, I'm off the hook for giving my recommendations. It's up to Troy and Rob to tell you what you should go there and listen to now. Troy. Oh, no, Rob leaped in here. I was going to say,

I am not a fan of science fiction. Too bad. As has been demonstrated many times on the podcast. However, there is a wonderful book called Ready Player One that's out, and I don't remember the author. I have it on my iPhone, and I've been listening to it. It's audible, called Ready Player One that's out, and I don't remember the author. I have it on my iPhone, and I've been listening to it.

It's an audible. But Ready Player One, if you're interested, it's a really interesting futuristic look at 80s nostalgia that's fantastic and really interesting. And it's called – it's great geekery. So if you're interested in – Well, as somebody who was playing the arcade games in the 80s, I can't wait. That sounds exceptional. Ready Player One. You will love it.

I'm hearing the pole position in my head right now. It's lilac's crack is what it is. You're going to hold yourself up in a hotel room and listen to it and emerge and we're going to have to stage an intervention. It's going to be horrible. Troy. Are you talking about Ready Player One? Hold on a second. It's like we've been invaded by another consciousness that has penetrated the show here.

Is that Rick Wilson actually talking? It is indeed. Oh, well, then we've got to bring you in. We have no choice. Troy, you're off the hook. Here you go. Rick Wilson is a Republican political strategist, one of Ricochet's most popular contributors, and he's just insinuated, he's elbowed, barged his way into our spot to tell us that Ready Player One is actually the book to read. Would you agree with Rob's recommendation, Rick? I enjoyed it tremendously. It was a rich cultural pastiche of 80s video game lore.

Were you there? I was indeed there. It was a rich cultural pastiche of 80s video game lore. Were you there? I was indeed there. Okay, so you were pumping your quarters. I was indeed. Were you a Donkey Kong guy, a Missile Command guy? See, I was an Asteroids guy because Asteroids was random. Asteroids, unlike the rest of the games, did not involve patterns.

It involved mastery of the random. I like Asteroids. I like Xevious. I like Tempest. It was a lot of that fast twitch stuff. Well, Tempest had the fast twitch in the form of the trackball, which Centipede also had. Centipede was a back and forth more. Tempest was more of a lateral 360.

Tempest drove me absolutely crazy. Oh, Rob. Rob objects that we're discussing the thing that he – No, not at all. Not at all. This is really more just purely mercenary. Troy, please give us your audible spot. We need to finish the audible – we actually have to finish the audible spot in order to get paid. That's important. Oh, in that case. Yeah. I don't care what your pick is, Troy. You just got to finish the audible spot.

Well, I will very quickly, I will recommend a book that I wrote about over the Christmas break at Ricochet, which is this relatively recent book. It's called Days of Fire, Bush and Cheney and the White House. It's written by Peter Baker, who is the chief White House correspondent for the New York Times, used to be at the Washington Post. And all I'll say about it so we can move on with Rick is there's – we've all heard this notion and all probably experienced this at some point that you don't realize how incompetent journalists are until you see them write about something that you know. And that's sort of the aha moment for most people when they understand how the craft worked. Having been in the Bush administration for a couple of years, this is the first book that was written that not perfectly but about 95 percent gets it right and I think will be palatable to people who are critics of President Bush and who are fans. So Days of Fire, Bush and Cheney in the White House.

That's my Audible pick. Excellent. Go to Audible.com. Go ahead. Sorry. Rob, would you like to step in? No, no. I was just jumping in to get the money.

Go ahead. You first. AudiblePodcast.com slash Ricochet. That, would you like to step in? No, no. I was just jumping in to get the money. Go ahead. You first. AudiblePodcast.com slash Ricochet. That's where you have to go. AudiblePodcast.com slash Ricochet. Enter the coupon code nothing. I think it's just go there and you get your 30-day free trial and a free book. And do so to thank them for sponsoring this, your favorite podcast on the face of the earth.

Now we bring back in Rick Wilson who is going to tell us exactly how the Republicans can win. And I believe, Rob, you were about to ask him. Yeah. There's an issue that actually we got to get ahead of and just bite the bullet and go with it or otherwise we're going to lose the coveted youth vote. This is the perfect transition from video games to pot. Exactly. Rick, so we got to be in favor of marijuana legalization?

Well, look, what I think we ought to do is start to have a conversation about it because increasingly the polling – and I know I'm going to get accused as I was yesterday of being the shallow, vote-chasing, rhino consultant class. Well, welcome to the club. Well, yes I am, and well compensated for it. But the changes that are happening in public attitudes about marijuana are comparable to the things that happened about gay marriage, which was a fight we lost on the social side of the equation long before we lost the fight on the political side of the equation and as a guy who doesn't like us to get caught on the back foot I would like us to at least start talking about how we

become the pro-liberty pro-freedom side of this equation how we start talking about how we start talking about getting ourselves out of the posture of being the dorky dad party and start talking about what are the negative externalities of this war on drugs that has patently failed. Society's made a decision. They don't mind marijuana in certain contexts and certain degrees, and that it's time for us to stop thinking about this as a you know the 1970s 80s 90s version of tough on crime you know the whole zero tolerance don't do drugs this is your

brain on drugs in the frying pan thing you know it's become a bad cliche now and don't you think i mean haven't we already the country yeah we were having that conversation right now don't you think i mean national review has been uh pretty much vocal about drug – Bill Buckley, I mean he was in favor of drug legalization when I first met him years and years and years ago. So that's already there. I mean – so does this tie in at all with – and I should say I saw – I was drawn to this – the Gallup poll by one of your tweets this morning. The largest number of Americans ever identify as independents. And the smallest number of Americans ever

identify as Republicans. Correct. And how is this good news? Part of this, well, part of this is that there's a thing in polling called the socially desirable response. So when people ask polling questions that say, do you consider yourself a Republican, a Democrat, or an independent, being an independent has now become this sort of gold standard of civic behavior.

It's like saying, do you believe in an environment? Are you an environmentalist? And people would, of course, say, of course I am. You know, I like the fluffy animals. I like the blue sky. You know, without punching through to what that means in any degree at all. So the socially desirable response has become to say, oh, I'm an independent. Now, the voter registration numbers in states are also moving more towards non-party affiliation and independent,

which should trouble Republicans particularly, are also moving more towards non-party affiliation and independent, which should trouble Republicans particularly, because frankly we've done a really crappy job of registering voters in the last few years. We don't do the things that the other team has learned how to do. To the same capacity, we outsource too much of that. It has become an unforgivable degree of laziness on our part that we're not actually focusing on getting new voters. So, you know, and once you register someone, they frequently stay with you for their life. Democrats do this in ways that we don't even think about doing it anymore. They are at every immigration ceremony, every citizenship ceremony,

voter registration form saying, join us, join us, be with us. We don't do that. Yeah, nobody talks about, yeah, everybody talks about Reagan Democrats. Nobody talks about Obama Republicans. I mean, so is there a possibility that this enormous, this spike in independence are people who believe it is socially undesirable to self-describe as Democrats? Is there any way this is hurting our political opponents? Or am I just kind of grasping it? There's some small fraction there. I haven't looked at the numbers on that.

I haven't parsed through any sort of research on that. But I'm going to tell you that the shy Republican effect is one that is a known factor in a lot of states where people behaviorally are Republicans, but they don't want to say that they are. So to say that they're independent is a safe haven for them. And it's important not to conflate independence with moderates as well. Independence and moderates are not the same creature. What do you mean by that? Because I always do in my head, but maybe – what do you mean by we shouldn't do that? Well, there are plenty of people that right now are starting to self-idea of independence who are pissed off conservatives, conservatives who hate the Republican Party so much that they view themselves as independent

of the traditional Republican-as-conservative safe haven. That's just not where they go anymore. They now call themselves independents where the Ron Paul voters have migrated from being Republicans to being independents in a lot of cases. Rick, it's Troy. Let me ask you a question about sort of the Republican coalition because there's been this notion for a long time that amongst the three legs of the Republican stool, the social conservatives, fiscal conservatives, national security conservatives. This is what I always heard in DC. The salient difference is that the social conservatives are the foot soldiers.

They're the ones who will walk the precincts for you and who will knock on doors for you. This was a while ago. Maybe that's too narrow in the era of the Tea Party. But I think the question that results is still the same. If those people are told, sorry, the world has passed you by on gay marriage, you got to knuckle under, and sorry, the world has passed you by on pot, you got to knuckle under. Sorry, the world's passed you by on pot. You got a knuckle under. Does there come a point where they say, what are we in this for? Especially because a lot of them think that the GOP uses the abortion issue like a dollar bill on a string and that they're never going to get it. So is there a danger that in trying to stay with the times on some of these issues, the GOP gets over their skis and starts taking hits among those voters that are bigger than the benefits that they're getting from others. Well, the difficulty for social conservatives, just to put it as bluntly as I can, is that the Democratic Party hates and despises every single thing about them. Right.

They could. Right. Republicans, you know, of the other parts of the coalition, the Venn diagram overlaps in a lot of these cases. And there's a lot of commonality of both behavior and belief and interest with those folks. However, with the Democratic Party, they are overtly hostile to organized religion. They're overtly hostile to social conservative values at any level, and they are decidedly and persistently antagonistic to people of faith. So, honestly, I mean, I'm not a social conservative in the traditional evangelical sense, much more in the more Catholic conservative sense.

But I recognize and I appreciate their role in the coalition. But it is a coalition, and not everything that any part of the coalition wants to chase down and do is necessarily politically effective. And the sad part of this for them, like I said, you don't have to like gay marriage to recognize that society has changed fundamentally in the last ten years on this, or last five years on this question, and that it has now become politically detrimental to focus on that as the central issue of your party. It's just not going to work as the central issue of your party.

And, you know, math doesn't lie at that point. And I know that's disappointing for social conservatives, but it's true. You don't have to be a social conservative, though, to say that government promotion of drug use moves us a little bit closer to the brave new world here. Have your sum appeal and enjoy your feelies. Maybe the approach to. Unfortunately, right now we have government promotion of drug use, you know, by school systems essentially forcing Ritalin down kids' throats. That's a whole different issue. Exactly.

But nobody sees that as recreational drug use. They see that as a scientific way to combat things that need to be changed like, oh, I don't know, masculinity. But I think we'd be better off as a party to say that if it's a local issue, if states wish to decriminalize it, that's fine. And you can point to, oh, you know, I was just in Amsterdam where pot is virtually legal. And it's a great way for idiots to self-identify. You can tell the people who've dropped out of society and have long white Rasta braids and, you know,

and have a picture of Bob Marley on their shirt and essentially accomplish nothing in life. So I'm, I'm, Hey, I've accomplished things. Well, I don't, I don't mind Darwin doing his magic with people who overuse pot. But when we talk about the war, when we talk, but hold on, when we talk about the, when we talk about the war on drugs though, we are not just talking about marijuana. I mean, if we want to say that some guy who gets caught with some ditch weed in his pocket or his car shouldn't go to jail, I agree.

Most of the people who go to jail for marijuana, I believe, are people who are in the distribution business and involved in something else as well. But even if we say that all that is off the table, we've got a problem with a lot of other drugs that nobody is going to be willing to say should be legal. Nobody's going to get up there and say meth. And certainly not advocate that. So the war on drugs and all the confiscatory elements of it and all the police powers that are involved, all that maintains, all that stays, doesn't it? I'm sorry, James. I lost you there. I said so. If we just say pot's going to be legal if the states want it to be, but everything else, meth, coke, crack, all that stuff is still going to be illegal. All of the elements of the war on drugs that people hate, the confiscatory powers of the police, the police powers that they have to stop.

I mean, all of that apparatus remains in place. The war on drugs that people complain about is still going to be there. We're not going to get away with that just because we legalize marijuana. Correct. I mean, there's not as slippery a slope as people want to think that there is in terms of this. It's not as, you know, this means meth is legal tomorrow if we let, you know, Colorado decide that they want to make recreational use or personal use of marijuana legal. It doesn't necessarily lead to the next day we're unloading Bolivian marching powder at every Walmart.

Right. Well, and if Walmart did it, it actually probably would be cheap. One of the things that they're finding out at California is when the state says, great, let's sell it. Let's tax it. Everybody always said that, you know, the state can tax it,

man, because right now the state doesn't get, they can get tax money on it, man. And so the state taxes it. Yeah. I'm also, that was a weak argument.

There's already an existing system of tax avoidance and, and regulatory avoidance built into the marijuana distribution. Right. Right. And so it ends up being more expensive when the state does it, and people say, I'm not going to pay this man. I'm going to go back to the guy I got it from before, which I just find hilarious. All right, well, we're probably not going to win an election with that,

but I can see what you're saying about getting in front of the issue. There are other ones, and let's – Rob has got this – had a point on about – on Ricochet about focusing on fixing Obamacare together, a great bipartisan hand-holding kumbaya where we would get some credit if we helped them out. Wouldn't we? Is this a winning electoral strategy or is this just caving in and saying that this thing is here to stay? Well, I think – Go ahead. Go ahead. I was going to ask rick no i was going to say that i think it's a trap and i think that um you know we we we shouldn't

be we shouldn't have our fingerprints on obamacare at all but i do believe the republicans need to have some set of uh principles that they can uh campaign on certainly in 14, I mean, or maybe Rick's got a better idea. No, in fact, one of my previous ricochet pieces was, yes, let's have a plan to do health care reform that is de novo, that is absolutely disconnected from all things related to Obamacare, that is completely a red line between Obamacare and what we're going to propose, because if we get in the stink on this thing, if we start getting just a little bit corrupted by it, we are completely corrupted by it.

It is going to be a full-on train wreck if we allow ourselves to get sticky on it. Yeah, I agree. So it should just be really simple stuff, right? I mean, isn't that all we need to do? I mean, this is the Republican health care reform plan of 2002, just super simple stuff, three simple things. I mean, look, here's the cheap political answer. If you go through the focus group and the survey research, the same stuff they had, we had.

We knew all along that they had certain popular arguments that were made in this pre-existing conditions. It scares the crap out of people do something about it had a separate republican proposal for pre-existing uh... workouts how you can do the church over state lines which is a way that will drive down costs inevitably and absolutely uh... do things you know what i think of the twenty six-year-old tipping it ridiculous and as as as

many state as it is it certainly is something that polls pretty well steel if you look at the at the soft popular ideas in it the don't call it the same kind of dislocation damage in economic train wreck that that is caused by obama care as it is today at proposed separately but it must come after Obamacare is killed.

It cannot be fixing Obamacare. You cannot fix it. It will not get better. It's like fixing an engine. You are going to get greasy. Hey, so Rick, I got two. Even if you can't fix the engine, you're still greasy. Right.

I've got two questions for you, two exit questions, so I know you've got to run. One is, is it time for Republicans to come up with another contract with America to head to the midterms, to be sort of – have a unified – very simple unified message and to sort of nationalize a bunch of local elections? And two, what are the chances that we're looking at a Republican Senate? Well, let me answer the first question first, which is easy, yes. It is good to have a set of stated principles and policies that are identifiable, that are understandable, that people can go and run the checklist on. And they don't have to be enormously specific, drilled down, granular proposals, but they have to be things that work in the current political climate. That is vital. The second thing is, you know, a Republican Senate is possible, and I think the Republican Senate is, if we get back on Obamacare,

which is the thing that kills Democrats right now, it is a Democrat-killing machine. If we get back on that subject and we bring the pressure on to vulnerable Democrats and not engage in ridiculous primary follies like trying to beat John Cornyn, the $10 million that you could spend against John Cornyn if he somehow suck to go raise that money which still end up being ten million dollars thrown a bonfire but two million dollars spent to get to take it to alaska or against prior or against landrew those that that matter such a good money that counts

and that's going to be something that is that that is you know as as we as we move away from some of the the that did the primary frenzy and get focused on the Democrats, I think we have a better chance of getting a Republican Senate than I would have thought even six months ago. Oh, because you're a cautious optimist. I am. I'm a cautious optimist. All right. That's good news. We leave you with that. Thanks for joining us today.

We will see you again at Ricochet. And Rick Wilson, once again, happy to have you on the podcast. You know, when he was talking about – Thanks, Rick. When he was talking about – Ready player one. When he was talking about spending all that money on these fruitless challenges and it ends up just – you might as well just throw it in a bonfire. I couldn't help but think of the Joker in the Batman movie who burned a huge pile of money and said it's about sending a message.

But the message that gets sent is what? That the establishment is absolutely unmovable? That we had best go along with the betters that the establishment gives us? Or even talk about establishment, the sort of thing that makes Robin Troy scowl and reach for things to shred. Is that too, is that too simplistic in us versus then a machine versus the people kind of look?

I think it is. Yeah, I think it is. But I also, I feel like we have to decide what the establishment can do. We can't do much. I mean, it can,

it can blow some races in terms of apportioning out money, which is what, you know what bureaucrats always do. They always make mistakes. People – Washington bureaucrats almost always are wrong about stuff. But as far as these primary challenges on good, solid conservatives and people who have been on our side and have fought hard for it just because they're deemed establishment, I just think that's suicidal. The Liz Cheney challenge in Wyoming was pointless, and I say that as somebody who likes Liz Cheney, but there was nothing wrong with Mike Enzi, and I think she was right to drop out of that. But James is right. It's too simplistic.

It's a false dichotomy, this idea between the Tea Party and the establishment in this respect, there are people out there, and I count myself among them, who say, no, we can walk and chew gum at the same time. It's possible to believe simultaneously that the Tea Party is correct in wanting to get our focus back on limited government and that we have to accept within reason the limits of electoral politics as you find them, which for me breeds the following insight. If you want the party to become more conservative – I think I've said this before. You do it in the states that are already conservative, which is you find a credible, composed Tea Party candidate in a state that's pretty far to the right. Ted Cruz in Texas, Rand Paul in Kentucky, Mike Lee in Utah. Those guys can win. What you don't do is run to the right of the general electorate, hell, probably the right of the Republican Party,

in a purple state like Nevada or a blue state like Delaware. If you're in Illinois, you're not going to do better than a moderate like Mark Kirk. If you're in South Carolina, you can almost certainly improve on Lindsey Graham. Right. I think that's a really – that's a very, very good – the Senate law. You improve where you can. But I also feel like we keep forgetting that it's important to organize the Senate. That's an important power. So a bunch of rhinos who still caucus with the Republicans who allow us to form a Senate Judiciary Committee and a Senate Finance Committee and a Senate Banking Committee and to approve all sorts of things, that's really, really valuable. That it's OK if we have a rhino Senate. It's much better than having a Democratic Senate. and that's something we should all be working towards because that is a lot of mischief that an administration can get up to when it has a Senate, a compliant Senate. Well, when you say a rhino Senate would be better, you're just giving in.

You're giving in to them. You're accepting their ideas. I'm giving in to Troy. You're saying that incremental doom is better than doom all at once. No, no, no. Everybody in there has to be pure, pure as the driven snow, mind you, except for the snow that is speckled with the blood of my enemies. We saw this thing that went on last week or a couple of weeks ago over at National Review where one of the editors takes a fence argument with something that Mark Stein wrote in one of his pieces, and to judge from the comments, which went on for I believe 7,942 pages. meant that the entire magazine itself had now fallen wobbly and floppily into the left side of the ditch because they wanted curried favor served warm at Washington cocktail parties,

even though the editor in question doesn't even live anywhere near there, which is one of the most specious, tiresome things I've ever heard. And you hear it again and again and again and again. And from time to time you hear it on the ricochet uh the idea that unless everybody toes the line 100 there's no point in having them in there and rob's right it's i mean everybody probably on the democratic side of the aisle if you got them hammered would say you know bernie sanders he's the one bernie speaks for me but i can't say it you know so. So in the absence of that moment of truth, they moderate what

they believe in order to get across incrementally the things that they have gotten across, which is why we are where we are now. I would say that as a corollary to Senec's law, I would have Long's pattern, which is that a party that gets big

and influential, getting big ends up serving the political ambitions of its most extreme section. So I would – I mean – and I don't mean extreme as a pejorative. I just mean the most pure. So the Democratic Party from 1964 on just got big. It got huge. It was the majority party for years. It had all these members and the members didn't agree with each other. But what happened was the country was moved left without unbroken – an unbroken move to the left and the people who were considered radicals in the 60s and early 70s are now the mainstream of the Democratic Party.

And they have a president of the United States, Barack Obama, who is absolutely installing the McGovern slash – McGo govern and Mondale platform. And that – so if you are – if you consider yourself very conservative and too conservative right now for the Republican Party, your best political ambition to get the country back to the right is to join the – make the party bigger. And then Long's Law will say that you will get much much more of what you want by joining a bigger by making a party bigger anyway that's my that's my rhino that's the rhino code well would that it were so i just can't see uh the population as it's currently constructed believing that anything that the republican party and its extreme elements would want doesn't it sounds just like uh like laws and restrictions and things taken away and daddy slapping the fun out of their hand and having to throw your lot in with a bunch of bearded weirdos who got married at 15 because Jesus told them to.

I mean that's what they think. I'm saying that's what they think. I mean that's the monolithic approach of the party from people outside who have no idea that actually what we're about is liberty and freedom and individual choice and all the rest of these things because they've hijacked those words as well. But they were upright. They're upright, uptight, Polish, you know, autoworkers, factory workers with buzz cuts and windbreakers who went to mass once today, who voted the Democratic ticket all the way to 1980 and they voted in democrats and and the democrats they would see on tv were you know bearded hippies weirdos with round glasses who were voting for you know well we're smoking dope all the time and that coalition for 16 years actually beyond that i mean

the reagan democrats he siphoned off a few but there were some staunch democrats they still are the big labor um and they vote for the Democrat. And even though the Democratic Party includes widely, wildly disparate social groups, they stuck together and we had to figure out a way to bust them up. Well, for one thing, that old labor coalition has changed. It's no longer the Polish buzz cut guy with the windbreakers. Now the labor, the dominant labor force, if I'm correct, would be government employees and school teachers. So these are people who do not necessarily, the average guy in the street doesn't look at them and have the same

fellow feeling because he's paying for them. And in many instances, the state is the enemy, the impediment to their life. So he doesn't really feel the same way. When it comes to teachers, everybody loves teachers. They love the teachers individually. They want to do more for schools. But at the same time, I've been saying this for years, and especially in this podcast, we have to take control of the word progressive and apply it to things that break up their old models, which are 100 years old. They're calling themselves progressives for believing in public schools when the idea is over a century. It's moldy. It's cracked. It's

dusty. It's antique. It's nonsense that we don't take the word back for ourselves. Before we quit, I want to really make Rob angry here. Oh, no. Ready, Troy? This is fun because one of the things that gets Rob's dander up

is pointing out that the press is against us and that the press is in favor of Obama. Well, they are. What's coming? I mean I agree that they are. I know. And whenever we point these out, he tells us that we have – we can't concentrate on this.

We have to take it as a given and we have to get out in front of it. He's right. Absolutely. I just say this to set up a couple of things here in the paper. One thing on page – let's turn to A4. They get around to front of it. And he's right, absolutely. I just say this to set up a couple of things here in the paper. One thing on page A4, they get around to the Gates book. Here's the headline. Tell me if this fits with what you've been hearing about the Gates book. Headline, Obama lost faith in his Afghanistan strategy, Gates says. This is the New York Times. After ordering a troop increase in Afghanistan, President Obama eventually lost faith in the strategy. His doubts fed by advisors who continually brought him negative news reports suggesting it was failing.

Who? As I understand, that was Biden telling him and nobody else. But advisors apparently. So the president himself made a wise decision based on the intelligence that he was given. But here's my favorite. Obama's approach in region faces test. This is the Associated Press. President Obama is confronted with a recent burst of strength by Al-Qaeda

that is chipping away at the remains of Middle East stability, testing his hands-off approach to conflicts. Wow. Yeah. Yeah, that'll do. Yes. When you vacate a region and remove yourself from any influence in it, things

might flow into that region that will not only test your policy of not doing anything but confirm the idiocy of it. Do you think they have a thesaurus for when Democrats are in office, just find the weakest, most emaciated verb possible?

It's embarrassing, right? Yeah, it is. Well, this doesn't make me mad, James. This makes me happy. I find it hilarious. We can still win, though. I just don't want to make it the reason why we don't win. I think it's true.

It's amazing how in the tank they are for this guy and amazing how hard it's getting for them to come up with those kind of weasel words to describe what is in fact an abject failure. But at the same time, we can still win. We don't need them to agree with us to win. We can still do it and that's all I mean. When I get mad about it, I just get mad that sometimes people go, oh, well, the narrative, the media narrative is such that – and sometimes we get in the weeds with it. I just – it's fun to make fun of. Every now and then, they are embarrassed. What's happening at MSNBC right now?

It's delightful. I know that Iona Johnson is writing wonderful stuff at NRO and I know that Mary Kissel posted something that was very, very funny today on Ricochet. I mean it can't be – it's like a late Christmas present. It's just – this is delicious. They simply can't keep their mouths shut. They simply believe in their little – we hear them when they talk at MSNBC. That's how they talk when we're not listening. Dismissive, angry, racist.

That's how they are when we're not listening and now we get a chance. We get to listen to them and it freaks them out. Well, what I remember, I think my favorite moment of from the last campaign was when Mitt Romney had said something post post Benghazi and then he went to London and there was a reporter who asked the deathless question, what about your gaffes? Which to this day, what about your gaffes? What about those? Talk about those some more. Right. Establishing the fact that gaffes had been made. And why were there gaffes? Because the media had looked at what he said and decided that they were gaffes. And that was just simply sufficient to throw the fact of gaffage into his face? Yes, and we'll get that if we get somebody who's persuasive and has a great sense of ability to persuade as Paul Ray said.

Well, listen everybody. I know that you all have to get to your daily lives. Rob, you have to get to the pressures of Hollywood. Troy, you have to get back to shaping and molding ricocheting on this daily basis, right? That's right. And I have to put up a blog entry and take my dog outside before he soils the carpet even more,

write a column, and then figure out exactly what I'm going to wear when it comes to taking the stage in Los Angeles later this week. Wait, wait, wait. Is there a question? There's a yellow muscle shirt that has a national audience already, James. What are you thinking? I burned that.

Yeah, the weather will be nice. No one wants to come see Superman without his cape. Wear the damn muscle shirt. Yeah. Well, okay. All right. It'll be under a white shirt. Perhaps I will rip it off at the last moment.

Oh, that's 50 tickets right there. We're now sold out. And those tickets, incidentally, are $25. $25, the price is going to go up if you don't snatch them up now. That's right. So if you're a member, go to the member feed, and you will find an opportunity to buy your tickets for number 200 of the live podcast, live in Los Angeles. Dennis, Prager, Rob, all sorts of folks.

It's going to be marvelous. They're on sale now. You have to be a member. If you're a member, if you're a member and you're hearing this and you want to come, buy the tickets now. If you're not a member and you want to come and want to make sure you come, become a member right now today and then buy your tickets. That's the best way to do it. And by today, we mean today. Otherwise, they're going to just be gone.

You're going to be kicking yourself. And you may also want to say, hmm, what will I listen to when the plane ride out or the car ride up? Well, audible.com if you go to audiblepodcast.com slash ricochet and use the coupon code ricochet at checkout, you can get a free free book and a 30-day trial. And also we thank Encounter Books, Glenn

Reynolds, the new school, how the information age will save American education from itself. Very pertinent as can be and probably one of those ideas that's going to shape the 2014, if not the 2016 elections. Use the coupon code RICOSHAY at checkout and get 15% off the list price.

Glenn knows of what he speaks. He's been covering the higher education bubble for a long time and has got great ideas on how to make education in this country work again. We're not exactly going through one of those Sputnik-type panics. Why can't Johnny read? Why don't we have the science

that we do? But it's coming, eventually. And when it does, you're going to want to be forearmed with arguments that tell you how we can fix these things. Thanks to our guests. Thanks to Troy for sitting in for Peter Robinson. Thanks to Rob Long as ever. I'm James Laddix here in Chivary, Minnesota. And we'll see you in the comments at Ricochet. See you, fellas. See you.

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