The Ricochet Podcast - Independence Day

Episode Date: July 3, 2013

Direct link to MP3 file This week on the podcast, James and Peter talk Egyptian politics and culture with Hoover’s Fouad Ajami (read his WSJ Op-Ed piece here) and later, the Zimmerman trial and immigration reform with the WSJLive’s (and Ricochet’s newest contributor) Mary Kissel. What does the Zimmerman trial say about the current state of race relations? And what of the immigration bill currently... Source

Looking for reliable IT solutions for your business? At Innovate, we are the IT solutions people for businesses across Ireland. From network security to cloud productivity, we handle it all. Installing, managing, supporting and reporting on your entire IT and telecoms environment so you can focus on what really matters, growing your business. Whether it's communications or security, Innovate has you covered. Visit Innovate today. Innovate. The IT solutions people.

Activate program. This bill, 24 pounds, 1,000 pages of a rushed job of a bill that literally was rushed through. It was Pelosi, Pelosi, Pelosi, Pelosi. This is nonsense. Mr. Gorbachev, tear down this wall. It's the Ricochet Podcast with Peter Robinson, and usually Rob Long, but alas, he's not with us today.

You've got me, James Lilacs in Minneapolis, and for guests, Fauda Jami, and from the Wall Street Journal editorial board, Mary Kissel. Yes, Egypt, immigration, let the fireworks begin. Let's have ourselves a podcast. There you go again. Yes, indeed, it is a podcast. It's number 174, and it's brought to you as ever by audible.com. Well, not ever. There was a day when they didn't, and we're glad that they're here,

and we're glad that they're always going to be here, because if they are, that means that you, the Ricochet customer, can have an audio book and a free trial, 30 days worth, free books, whenever you want if you just go to audiblepodcast.com slash ricochet. Audiblepodcast.com slash ricochet for all that free stuff. And thank them for supporting this, the podcast. I'm James Lilacs. Rob Long, as we understand, is not with us. He is face down in his bed with his dog licking the croissant crumbs off his fingers

while he sleeps because he was up until 3 o'clock in the morning, I don't know, working or something like that. So he's not here, alas, but Peter is. Peter in California as well. Good morning, good afternoon, good day whenever people are listening to the podcast. Hey, Peter, how are you doing? I'm fine, James. Good morning to you as well.

I have nobody licking croissant crumbs and I have no croissant crumbs. What about you? Neither do I. I had some Trader Joe's Raisin Bran, which I'll be happy to get to the bottom of that box because it's about as flavorless stuff as you can get. Sometimes brand names are absolutely the best. And one of the big brand names, of course, in the right libertarian circles is Reason, which has released a list of the best states when it comes to spending their highway money. And I'm appalled to learn that Minnesota, where I am now, is like 42nd on the list. Horrible for gridlock and mismanagement, the rest of it. And it's odd because roads are

actually one of the things that we do reasonably well here. But if you could guess which state had the best expenditure, best roads, best state highway system, Peter, what would you guess it would be? It would not be California. Texas. Texas. North Dakota. Okay, that would have been my second choice. Because there's, of course, nobody to drive on the roads, except for out by the oil patch, where the roads are getting beaten into submission

by all the trucks coming through. But North Dakota increasingly is coming up in all these surveys as the Texas of the North, as this polar, the North Pole to their South, where freedom and low taxes and efficient government and all the Texas of the North, as this polar, the North Pole to their South, where freedom and low taxes and efficient government and all the rest of it. It's funny because when I was growing up, all the smart kids wanted to flee as quickly as possible from the basket case,

the backwards lands of North Dakota. And now here in our later dotage comes the revenge of the state itself. Could you ever see yourself moving out of California, Peter? And if so, and not Texas, where? Oh, not Texas, where? Florida, I suppose. I have a wife to consider here, James. And she would understand the attraction of North Dakota on paper. But when it came down to it, a Mediterranean climate is sort of part

of the deal when you marry a Cuban. I understand that. And the attraction of North Dakota on paper is that if you take a sheet of paper and turn it sideways, it's as flat and the same shape as North Dakota is. Now, down in Texas, they've got a rally. They've got the something, a little old abortion debate going on down there. And I've been looking at some of the protesters. And you always want to think the people on the other side are not acquitting themselves particularly well.

But they're not particularly acquitting themselves very well. When you show up with signs that say, and this is the one going around yesterday. Of course, we're not going to tar the entire movement by two idiots. But then again, they tar us by two idiots. So let's go right ahead. A couple of young women grinning like fools. One of them had a sign that said, Republicans cannot defeat us.

Defeat us being spelled D-E-F-E-T-U-S. Although, I'm trying to wrap my brain around that neologism. And the other one was hoes before embryos, which is a play on bros before hoes, something that, of course, is appalling play on bros before hoes, something that of course is appalling if men say it.

But this – that's a really remarkable sentiment, isn't it, Peter? Yeah, it is. And I have to say one of the things that impresses me – as you know, I love Texas. One of the things that impresses me about Texas is that there is a republican majority in both houses of the legislature and a Republican governor. And lo and behold, instead of rolling over and just saying, well, we tried to their constituents, Rick Perry is calling the Texas legislature into a second special session of 30 days because

he knows they're, in other words, the clock – as I understand it, what happened with State Senator Wendy Davis who stood up and filibustered, she filibustered longer than anybody expected. The session was going to expire at midnight and then there were some special parliamentary measures that could have been taken to shut down her filibuster. There were votes in the chamber to do so. But the folks up in the gallery started shouting so loudly that it made it impossible for the chamber to get any business done. So it is not as if in Texas, Republicans are some sort of strange minority. They are clearly the majority in the chamber. They clearly

represent the will of the people. And the pro-choice faction is refusing to permit the democratic business of the state to get done. And you know what? Rick Perry will not put up with it. I love that. I just love that. They're going to fight back. You'd say, well, why wouldn't they?

They have the votes. And the answer is because they're Republicans, because the whole culture puts us on the defensive, particularly when it comes to issues of life. But not those guys. They're going to go back and push back. Yes. Well, that's just more mansplaining. Of course, that's just more of the old patriarchy telling women what they can and cannot do with their own personal property, i.e. the bodies. So this this will, I think, do very poorly for the Republican brand across the country, because once more people will see that it's really about control and fear that essentially that's what it's about,

fear of women's sexuality, control of women's bodies, the two things that I know have motivated my move to the Republican Party, which here I thought was predicated on simple, pure economics and military strength. Nope, turns out that I'm a raging sexist patriarch. Welcome to the club. So if you can find any women whatsoever in Texas who are behind this peculiar decision about the 20-week ban, great. Meanwhile, of course, Marco Rubio is making noises about introducing a 20-week abortion ban in the Senate, which is interesting and some might say is an attempt to get around the damage to his reputation done in the immigration debate.

What do you think, Peter? Hard to say. I haven't seen polls on it. But excuse me, I saw a poll the other day that showed Marco Rubio, by putting his entire career on the line, by working relentlessly, tirelessly for some three or four months on this immigration reform, by persuading enough Republicans to vote for the thing that had passed through the Senate with 68 votes or over two-thirds votes, by doing all of that, he's managed to get his favorable rating up with Hispanics by 1%. So who knows?

But it doesn't look as though in terms of immediate political appeal, Marco Rubio has done himself any good. And of course, with a Republican, who knows where he stands in Florida? He's a very popular figure. I would like to believe – in fact, I do believe. I haven't met Rubio. I'm trying to grant that he did all of this out of conviction, but it wouldn't surprise me if it does occur to him that he could use a little repair of his reputation right now. The House is going to savage that bill, I think. Well, who would have thought that was going to be the way it turned out months ago when this process began? Then again, if you look around the world, you find many things that did not turn out as people anticipated. The spring in Egypt being one of them, as we see Egypt either pass back into military hands or devolve entirely,

the situation is quite fluid and demands that we talk to somebody who knows what he's talking about, and that would be Faouda Jami. MacArthur Fellowship-winning Lebanese-born American university professor and writer on Middle Eastern issues. Currently a senior fellow at the Stanford Hoover Institution, and his most recent book is The Syrian Rebellion. We welcome him back to the podcast. Good day, sir. Thank you very much. You forgot to add that I am a colleague of your great co-host.

Yes, indeed. Fuad, it's Peter on-host. Yes, indeed. Fuad, it's Peter on yet again. Hi, Peter. How are you? You write faster than I can read. It's just almost impossible to keep up with all your work. Thank you very much. A piece in the Wall Street Journal this very morning. It's headlined, Egypt on the Brink with No Clear Way Back.

So I'd like to ask about your response, what you'd like to see happen in Egypt. But first, can you simply explain to a layman what on earth is going on? There was the Arab Spring, Mubarak was overthrown, there was a free election, and the current president, elected president, first elected president in Egyptian history. I think that's fair to say. Yes, it is fair to say. And millions, millions are protesting in the street against him just months after he took office. What's going on, Fuad? Well, you know, Peter, the ballot doesn't decide everything wisely. The ballot doesn't always work. The ballot has its kind of peculiar ways. And the journey out of authoritarianism is never easy.

Part of understanding this democratic moment or this moment of transition in Egypt is really coming to terms with the damage that was inflicted on Egypt by Hosni Mubarak for 30 years. He humiliated his country. He robbed it of its dignity. He robbed it of its dignity. He robbed it of its political efficacy. He left it at the mercy of the thieves. He took 80 million people and in a way had nothing for them other than a harebrained scheme for transition, succession to his son. So you have to look at the damage that Egypt has sustained. Then there comes

this democratic moment, this transitional moment, there comes an election, and all these damages sustained by Egypt will play themselves out because when people come to a democratic moment, they bring their history with them. And in the end, there was this incredible standoff in the presidential election in June of 2012. The way the ballot worked, and that was an accident, is that you had two candidates for the presidency. One was Mohamed Morsi, a functionary of the Muslim Brotherhood, and one was Ahmed Shafiq, a man of the Mubarak regime. And the fault in that lineup, the fault in that runoff election, that that was the choice Egypt had lay with the liberal secularists. They ran too many candidates and they came up with this choice and here we are. I see. So are you cheered by what's taking place right now or is this a terrible thing to see happen?

No, no, I'm very chagrined and in many ways befuddled by it. Egypt is next to my homeland of Lebanon. Egypt is the country I knew best in the Arab world. Egypt is the country where I lived, where I did research. Egypt is the country whose literati and whose culture I savored and whose films I fed on for decades. It's really sad to see what has become of Egypt.

And I think the idea that somehow or another that the street will decide the verdict, if you will, that you have the Morsi crowd and you have the secular crowd. And the idea that the crowd, the idea that the public squares, the public squares will decide this great schism in Egypt is very depressing. Fuad, can you also explain again for the layman the role or the standing of the military in Egypt? I read during what I'm beginning to think of as the first Arab Spring, when everyone was protesting in Tahrir Square and we didn't know what would happen, I read a number of articles that suggested that the military may be the most

respected institution in the country. Is that true? Absolutely. Go ahead. You're absolutely right. I mean, there's a great reverence for the military. And in a way, the revolution in Tahrir Square, those 18 magical days that upended the Mubarak tyranny, they were driven peasants who enrolled in the army. It's not the army of Syria, it's not the army of Libya, it's not the army of these repressive Arab states. So there is a great regard for the army.

And the army played it well in the rebellion against Mubarak. It set out that rebellion. It was neutral and there was this proclamation, this chant, the army and the people are one hand. So there is this great deference to the army. But mind you one thing, the Egyptians don't want to be ruled by the army. They want the army as an arbiter of political life. And here's the kicker also, nor does the army want to rule Egypt because the generals know

how difficult it is to rule 80 million rebellious people who are in need of freedom, in need of bread, in need of dignity. Well, in that case, so if the military gave Morsi, the current president, the one you described as a functionary of the Muslim Brotherhood who is now the president of the country, they gave him an ultimatum. In effect, as I read it, stepped down in 48 hours, although it didn't say that. It said satisfy the people's demands in 48 hours. He has not done so. We still have millions of people in the street in Cairo. And what is the way out? It's not as if there are well-established parties so that if a Democratic leader gets in trouble, there's a Republican who could take a democratic leader gets in trouble there's a republican who could take over or vice versa if there's a republican they're looking for reliable it solutions for your business at innovate we are the it solutions people for businesses across

ireland from network security to cloud productivity we handle it all installing managing supporting and reporting on your entire IT and telecoms environment so you can focus on what really matters growing your business whether it's communications or security Innovate has you covered visit Innovate today Innovate, the IT solutions people

there are not well established parties how could there be? the country was a dictatorship until only months ago what is the way out? What would you like to see? What is the best possible outcome? And then, different question, what do you consider likely? Well, as a Muslim would say, I wish to Allah I knew the right answer to this question. We don't really know. I mean, I think the army, the army commanders, and we should remember the top army commanders, General

Sisi, who was also the defense minister, was appointed by Morsi because Morsi sacked the old head of the army, the general who led the transition from Mubarak. The army made a mistake with this ultimatum, because when you give someone an ultimatum, you have to know, you have to think, what will I do if this person doesn't succumb to my ultimatum? I listened yesterday to the speech that Morsi gave. He was defiant, and I tell you there was something about it which was chilling. He is ready to die, period. I mean, there is a way that someone speaks and a way that someone declares the readiness for martyrdom and for the ultimate outcome.

So the army issues this ultimatum to meet the demands of the people in 48 hours. Well, the demands of the people in Egypt are timeless and bottomless. You need a lot more than 48 hours to satisfy these demands. demands, what you might end up is with some kind of council, some kind of governing council that would see the country out of this cul-de-sac, out of this dark alley it's in. That's the best outcome you can have. And anyway, the Morsi government is falling of its own weight. By latest count, I think something like six ministers in the cabinet have called it quits. So he will find himself without a government.

And possibly what the best outcome would be, that Morsi would retain his presidency and a prime minister would be named who has genuine standing in the country, a prime minister who's independent and who's not a function of the Muslim Brotherhood. It's the way out. It's a faith-saving way out for all concerned. Where is the United States in this, Fuad? Do we have any influence? Should we care about attempting to exert influence in the situation, or should we simply step back and wait? I don't know if we really have much influence. I mean, we do have an aid bill, which we have approved again to the Egyptian military, something like $1.5 billion.

But, you know, inflation has wreaked havoc on money, and $1.5 billion doesn't get you much influence in Egypt. It's 80-some million people, nearly 90 million people. We do have influence with the military. And we are confused, if you will. The Obama administration is uncertain uncertain and it's not to pick on obama and and if one policy team it's a very very difficult situation you have a man who was elected

who was elected by fifty one point seven percent of the vote in two thousand twelve i could be wrong but that's close to the margin so i don't want my head in his own election we can't summon Morsi. He's not our messenger. He's not our crony. We can't summon him and say, it's time to step aside.

And we can't tell the military what to do. So I think, in a way, we just have to let this process play. And we have to hope, if you will, for some compromise, for some faith-saving compromise between the military, which it's premature ultimatum. This ultimatum was not wise. And I think even the secular Democrats

protesting in the streets at Tahrir Square, they're not wise. They're calling on the military to intervene on their behalf because they couldn't win the parliamentary elections. They lost those to the Brotherhood. They couldn't win the presidency. They lost that to the Brotherhood.

They couldn't win the battle over ratifying the Constitution. They lost it by a margin, almost a two-to-one. So you have a problem that these so-called democratic forces are now pleading for intervention by the military. It's the worst kind of outcome. Fuad, my co-host James Lilacs has a question or two. Sure. James. And I'm in Minneapolis, Minnesota, which may seem very, very far away from this, but for the last couple of days, the Somali community has been celebrating their independence with a soccer tournament two blocks away. And so highly amplified Somali language has been wafting through my window for the last two days.

It's a very small world. Egypt, one of the things that people were saying when the Muslim Brotherhood came in was this would introduce them to the realities of governance. And they would learn from this and they would be moderated. And people were a bit surprised to hear that they had appointed to the tourism, the director of tourism in Luxor, a fellow from a party that was actually responsible for a terrorist attack on the tourists in Luxor. But still people were saying, ah, this will show them that they have to make accommodations in order to get along, in order to keep the tourists coming. And that lasted about a week before the guy was out. What did that tell you? Was that a remarkably deft piece of political maneuvering for Morsi to put that man in and practically kill the tourism industry? Or was that just absolutely brilliant idiocy? What was he thinking there? Well, Morsi is a very clumsy man politically. I mean, he has a thin ear for politics, for the life in the street, for the life of politics.

With all due respect to engineers, I hope I'm not insulting any engineer listening. You know, he went to the School of Engineering in Cairo, and then he came to the University of Southern California, received a Ph.D. in engineering, and taught at Cal State in Northridge for a period of time. I mean, politics isn't exactly his beat. What happened then is that there was a very able operative of the Muslim Brotherhood, Khairat al-Shater, who was supposed to be a candidate for the presidency.

There was some silly rule, something he had, you know, he had been imprisoned and he couldn't run for the presidency. So at the last minute, they rushed in Mohamed Morsi. Mohamed Morsi is not really a very able political leader. When you see his speeches, when you watch his deed, you can understand that this was the B team. It wasn't the A team. The A team was on the bench and the A team is in the shadows, the supreme guide of the Brotherhood,

the political bureau of the Brotherhood. So he made his share of mistakes. But remember, this country, whether it's the Brotherhood or the liberals, they haven't had any genuine political experience now nearly for six decades under Nasser, under Sadat,

and particularly under that awful, terrible despot who was our man in Egypt, Hosni Mubarak. Mubarak took away from the Egyptian people their very sense of efficacy, their political experience. He took them out of politics. He demeaned them and left them with this vacuum that we are now watching. Fuad, Peter here one more time. Two examples of transitions from repressive regimes, tyrannies, let's just call them tyrtsin, completely free elections. The Duma was a wild rip-roaring place and the country just went into such collapse that Putin, this repressive figure who runs

Russia now, everything I've said suggests that he actually has, he actually commands, if you had a free election in Russia today, he'd be elected. He commands that the people feel they need a strong government. They're willing to surrender their freedom for stability. By contrast, China, which moved forward with economic freedom, but has never permitted any political freedom to speak of at all to the present day. Is it reasonable to say that what, well, let me just put it crudely, does Egypt need an enlightened strongman? Well, the late George Kennan, you know, one of the great wise men in American diplomatic practice and study,

was very, very down on democracy in many parts of the world, including Russia, including all the third world. The verdict on democracy is always uncertain. The verdict on whether people want freedom or whether they want to escape from freedom is also uncertain. And in fact, the belief in the man on horseback is present in every society, present in every society. And there could be people in Egypt, I believe now possibly millions of them, maybe not the majority. There could be people now pining for authoritarian rule, in Egypt, I believe now possibly millions of them, maybe not the majority, there could be people now pining for authoritarian rule, pining for the man on horseback, pining for

the junta, for the military officers to rule Egypt. But one cautionary tale, Egypt has seen this film before, it has experienced that before, a military rule will issue in calamity for Egypt. James? Well, it calamity for Egypt. James? Well, it's not just Egypt. There are people, I imagine, in Syria who want stability too, especially when the strongman they knew fails and is replaced by savages decapitating priests and eating their hearts.

Syria has fallen off because of all eyes turning to Egypt, but where is Syria now? Is this just the middle of a grinding, protracted struggle with no end in sight? You're right. There is no end in sight for the Syrian struggle. I mean, I think early on in this conflict, and I've written a book about Syria. I spent the last, you know, two and a half years going to the Syria-Turkey border, writing endless pieces, doing endless television and radio until I just, you know, in a way the heart grows weary of what's going on.

I think at the beginning of the war for Syria, at the beginning of the struggle between the Syrian rebellion and the Bashar regime, there would have been a very easy solution. We could have broken the tie between the regime and the rebellion. The United States could have done many, many things, a no-fly zone, the regime and the rebellion. The United States could have done many, many things, a no-fly zone, the bombing of the runways, the denial of the Air Force, the Bashar al-Assad forces. We did nothing of the sort. And now Syria unravels as a country and unravels before our eyes.

I think Peter was Peter are you still with us? we may have lost Peter am I here again? there you are Fuad we promised to let you go at this very moment but I'm not going to do it if you could utter one sentence

I have to run because I do have a meeting one sentence if you could utter one sentence of advice to Barack Obama and in the total confidence that he would follow it, what would you say? He would never take my advice. I'm a man of the Bush years. I mean, this is a very highly partisan administration.

It's very enclosed. I mean, the flow of ideas into the Obama White House and into the Obama inner circle is really very, very limited. I mean, basically, there is the president, and he is now awaiting the arrival of his ally, Susan Rice. He does have this very, very young, inexperienced deputy NSC advisor Advisor Ben Rhodes. I think foreign policy in this administration has been tailored to the political needs of Barack Obama. When he was waiting, prior to the elections of 2012, everything in foreign policy, I dubbed it in an article for Hoover, I said this is the foreign policy of David Axelrod.

It was tailored to the president's political needs, and now it remains the same. I think this president has shown remarkable disinterest in genuine pursuit of foreign policy. And whether it's in Africa, whether it's in the Middle East, it hasn't been a brilliant performance. It raises the question that the great Henry Kissinger once raised in a book he wrote, Does America Need a Foreign Policy? And Barack Obama has now answered that in the negative. It does not need a foreign policy. It has this president, a highly personalized presidency.

And if you look at what he has done on the question of Syria, you see total moral and strategic abdication. We could have taken on the Iranians in Syria. We chose to look the other way. We are now losing in Syria. And the Iranians, Hezbollah, and the Russians are winning. And that's the outcome. Fuad, thank you very much. Thank you, my friend. Bye.

Bye-bye. Yes, foreign policy is one of those things that comes in handy, isn't it? Something happens, you look around, you say, guys, where do we put that foreign policy? It was in my top drawer, but then I gave it to him and he borrowed it for a while. Is it in the closet or something? They have to have a big search throughout the entire house to find their foreign policy because it does come in handy. That's the damn thing. Peter, do you think he's right?

Do you think we have absolutely no foreign policy whatsoever? No, no, I was just trying to think that through. Peter, do you think he's right? Do you think we have absolutely no foreign policy whatsoever? Was it a bad – No, no. I was just trying to think that through. Fuad makes it – I mean Fuad says we have no foreign policy. Charlie Hill, who's a very good friend of Fuad's, Charlie was a very senior guy under both Henry Kissinger and George Shultz at the State Department and he now spends summers at the Hoover Institution. And the way Charlie put it is that Barack Obama has been engaging in a slow strategic retreat, moving so slowly that it doesn't get noticed as a foreign policy shift. But in fact, he's pulling back from the world. So his foreign policy is to shrink the American presence.

I don't know which way – which is a truer or more useful way of putting it but they're both right. Would you rather have a bad foreign policy or one that's just ad hoc and made up at the moment though? That's the question. I think I'd rather have a bad foreign policy. At least it's consistent. Ad hoc and made up at the moment is likely to be a bad foreign policy. But in other words, if you have a strategy, if you think you're doing something in the world, if you're thinking thoughts not just days and weeks into the future, but thinking thoughts months and years into the future, you can adjust, you can adapt, you can rethink, but you've at least gone through the process of thinking it through once, of hiring good people

to execute your strategy over time, and then you can make adjustments as you go. Even if you get something wrong, even if you have a bad foreign policy, so to speak, if you've engaged in the hard work of thinking of coming up with a strategy, that is, in my judgment, that's likely to be better than ad hoc, simply trim here and trim there for this political reason or that political reason. Absolutely, Especially when it's all predicated on an adolescent notion of America being a bad dad that somehow has to be taught a lesson and humbled here and there, which I believe is the basic foundational idea of this man's foreign policy.

A little pride in American exceptionalism here. There's a cringy... Looking for reliable IT solutions for your business? At Innovate, we are the IT solutions people for businesses across Ireland. From network security to cloud productivity, we handle it all. Installing, managing, supporting and reporting on your entire IT and telecoms environment so you can focus on what really matters, growing your business. Whether it's communications or security, Innovate has you covered. Visit Innovate today. Innovate, the IT solutions people.

Belief that, cringing insistence that the West is a manifest example of sins that have got to be paid for. It's not a grown-up perspective. It's not the sort of thing you'd find. Well, let's say, for example, Fawood mentioned Kennan, right? He mentioned George Kennan, right? Okay, now here's somebody who was extraordinarily influential in America's foreign policy, Say, for example, Fouad mentioned Kennan, right? He mentioned George Kennan, right?

Okay, now here's somebody who was extraordinarily influential in America's foreign policy, and a lot of people don't know anything about him. You know, who wants to pick up a book about him when you actually could just listen to what he said or even just listen to his life story and what shaped him? And that is why you should, if you want to, coalesce all these ideas about foreign policy, set them aside and go to audible.com and start doing searches for things such as George Kennan. You'll find a Charlie Rose interview about his biographer. You'll find a book about Kennan called The Hawk and the Dove.

You'll find a book called An American Life and you will find it with this whispering technology that will sync whatever you're reading to whatever device that you have. So you can pick it up in the car, stick it on the train and it'll be always at the same spot when you go back to it. Now, audible.com, of course, is our proud sponsor, and they will give you a free 30-day trial and a free audiobook. So just go there to audiblepodcast.com slash ricochet and claim your free book. And yes, Peter, that was a very roundabout way of getting to our audible spot there. But the idea of a foreign policy being absolutely essential. Well, in the –

I am in awe of you, James. You are – you have many talents. But you are the Mozart of the segue. There's no – By the way, you accused me of always reading, always having going an Aubrey Maturin novel, one of the – Yes. And I do... You were wrong for months.

I lay off them because they were going too fast and I never wanted to reach the end of them. But I'm back to it. For my summer reading, I'm on the Yellow Admiral, book 18 in the series. And on Audible Books, that one book, you have three choices, three different narrators. I'm not going to make a recommendation.

Let folks choose. But it's The Yellow Admiral. Don't pick it up first. It's important in this series to start at the beginning. But, oh my lord, these books are just such wonderful reading. And listening. I suppose I should draw that distinction, shouldn't I? Same thing. Glad.

Indeed. Well, let's – let me think here. You're praising of my segue. I always completely destroy whatever segue I was moving to. That's a mystery to me. But we should – I'll let you regroup. No, I'm fully regrouped, too, and we're on to our next guest.

There's just – there's so much going on right now. He was spending a lot of time yesterday on the air saying that between the collapse of Obamacare and the collapse of Egypt, it is an absolute obscenity for people to be spending any amount of attention whatsoever considering the Zimmerman trial. I see the point. But on the other hand, you have to be absolutely tone deaf to American culture at this moment not to realize why this matters to so many people and to find that fascinating. Are you following this thing at all or do you regard this as just a manifest – a proof that someone has a small mind and a gossipy soul? They know anything about the Zimmerman trial. I very seldom disagree with Hugh, but I'd have to disagree with his position as you just characterized it anyway because the Zimmerman trial, what's taking place right now, is a kind of snapshot of the current state of the American democracy in some ways, certainly the judicial system. But if we're heading into a situation as it seems to be the case in which your race or ethnic background, remember, I mean, to me,

what worries me is that in one way or another, it calls to mind the OJ trial in which we had Americans of one race or ethnic background and Americans of another race or ethnic background and Americans of another race or ethnic background looking at exactly the same set of facts and drawing two totally different conclusions. This is why one needs the Olympian view that you only get from an editorial board. From 30,000 people. And that laugh is Mary Kissel who's with us from the Wall Street Journal's editorial board. She's in New York right now and she's the host of Opinion Journal on WSJ Live. Welcome to the podcast.

Thanks for having me. Mary, it's a pleasure. Peter Robinson here. It's a real pleasure. Yeah, nice to meet you, Peter. Yeah, the Trayvon Martin trial, interesting. I see this as fitting into themes that we've seen kind of throughout the Obama administration. I mean, you had the Department of Justice emphasizing race in terms of voter ID

and the campaign to basically stop states from acquiring people to have IDs to vote on the premise that it somehow hurt minorities. You've got various arms of the administration implementing something that they call disparate impact theory, which is a statistical way of, quote unquote, proving discrimination without intent. And that's really throughout the bureaucracy. That's the DOJ, the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission. And then you had the president weighing in on the zimmerman trial saying you know if i had a son he would look like trayvon you know it's just another

emphasis of race and using race in a political way i think if you look back in the sixties in the civil rights movement what those folks wanted was equal treatment under the law. And what the Zimmerman trial, to my mind, is a part of is really not trying to use race to kind of tip the scales for certain groups in our society. I think it's terrible. Go ahead, Peter. Well, I was going to say, Mary, you know, you're following this thing. I confess, I will now make a total confession here. Everything I know about the Zimmerman trial, I pick up in glimpses at the big screen TV while I'm on the treadmill at the gym. So it's a little bit disjointed. But as best I can tell,

the large project of demonstrating racial injustice in this country through the Zimmerman trial is just not going well, is it? The prosecution witnesses almost are building the case for the defense. Am I right? Or is that clear now? Or are there any hints? It is right. What do you make of it? I think that's exactly right. I think that, you know, the main witness, Rachel Jontel, last week proved to be a disaster for the prosecution, totally unreliable. And there have been several witnesses that have testified and effectively just confirmed what Zimmerman originally told the police, which is that Martin was straddling him, beating him,

and he thought the guy was reaching for his gun. He got there first and had the terrible outcome that it did, but that there was no racial profiling or intent there. You know, I talked to James Taranto on the show yesterday about this, and James contends that there might have been actually profiling on both sides. But the real question here is, you know, was there intent to kill or was this self-defense? And, you know, I think that the judicial process is going to work and we'll find out. But as it stands right now, it's not going well for the prosecution. We've also found a new racial characteristic that did not exist before, I believe, white Hispanic.

And Zimmerman himself is half, is it one quarter African-American or one eighth or something like that? I mean, he just in himself is almost a an example of America being melted and mingled together. Yet, according to the stark racial divide that we got here, Zimmerman is a white guy. I that's one of the things that I find illustrative and peculiar about this. Well, to me, it's all really beside the point. It's like Chief Justice Roberts said, if you want to stop discriminating by race, stop discriminating by race. I mean, the problem here is you've got a political class,

particularly on the left, that wants to use race as a political weapon. And unfortunately, that works against the very kind of understanding that the president himself says that he wants to promote. I think it's really a wasted opportunity for the country's first black president who could have, I think, done a lot of good and instead is not. Mary, I'm sorry, James. No, I was just going to ask Mary, if you think there's any way past this, not in this generation, but maybe the next, whether the generation of kids who are coming up behind us are more likely to do the content of the character

rather than the color of the skin idea. I do not think America, I do not believe that America is a racist society. Look, the Supreme Court just told us in the Shelby case on the Voting Rights Act that really celebrated the progress that the country has made. I think the Zimmerman trial was used for political purposes. That's why it got so much attention in the media, particularly the left-wing media. And what I hope is that the jury will look at the facts of the case

and come to a conclusion, and that'll be the end of it. That should be the end of it. You know, Peter here, I work on the Stanford campus at the Hoover Institution, and I just came off eight years on the board at Dartmouth. And here's what I observe in both campuses, is that the kids, the rising generation, is genuinely post-racial. My old fraternity at Dartmouth, Tricap, when I was there, it was just white guys because that was all that was in Hanover in those days. And now it's about a third white guys, but everybody, it's Asians and Hispanics and black guys, and they just don't care.

It just doesn't seem to be a factor in their thinking at all in the way they relate to each other. So I conclude that race as an important category is in some ways kind of old fashioned. It's the old liberals clinging to this, to their great moment in American history, which is the civil rights movement and the use of race. What's contemporary about the use of race is just as you put it, Mary, using it as a political weapon. But I could be wrong. My sample is small, and of course those are both pretty fancy schools. I don't want to push it too far, but my goodness,

the rising generation just doesn't seem to care about the category as best I can tell. Why aren't we celebrating the achievements of all of these groups? Why aren't we saying, gosh, we had two secretaries of state that were black, the head of a major bank, the president himself, the attorney general. You can go right down the line. I mean, is it enough? And look, by the way, minorities aren't just black Americans.

How about Asian Americans and all of the other various varieties of minorities that we have? We shouldn't be focusing just on the black community. But again, I just go back to the missed opportunity of this presidency. I mean, wouldn't it be great if the president stood up and said, Hey, look at the success I've made of myself through my own hard work. Look at this lovely family that I have and my beautiful children. I wish this for all Americans, but especially the black community, which is one of the poor communities in which, you know,

there's a crisis of family and a crisis in employment. And, you know, let's figure out ways to lift this community up. Instead, we have it as a political tool. Well, the kids may themselves be post-racial, but that doesn't mean that they won't be taught and believe that the problem in America are all those warty old plutocrats out there who want

to return white privilege to its rightful spot. I mean, my daughter is 12, comes home and says that her friend told her that the Supreme Court just said that blacks can't vote in Texas anymore. Which is somehow that had been filtered through their news and families. Unbelievable. Right. So they may be post-racial, but they're still going to believe that the problem is the powerful

entrenched white racism and that's what they have to fight with government. You said a missed opportunity. Go ahead. Well, I don't think we should just beat up on the president and the Democrats. If you look at what's going on in immigration today and immigration reform and some of the messages that are coming out of the right and the Republican Party, I don't think that sends a particularly good message to the Hispanic community in this country. And you look at what Jeff Sessions and Ted Cruz are talking about,

basically building a wall, we don't want you. We think you're going to take our jobs. You know, it's not just the Democrats that have issues in the way that they speak to minority communities in this country. Let me push back on that for just a second. When you say we're building a wall, we don't want you, you're going to take our jobs. Those are three different points. One can make the point about a wall for border security and control and just knowing who's coming in, as opposed to we don't want you. To say that a wall means we don't want you, is that necessarily the case? Because if that's so, then the right has to completely give up the idea of physical border security in order to attract Hispanic votes. No, look, border security doesn't work, period. We've doubled the amount we've spent on border security.

And, by the way, net immigration is almost zero because who wants to come to a country where you've got growth like this? It's terrible. The way you fix border security is, sure, having folks on the border, but making it easier to come through legal means. I mean, nobody

believes, and I would argue, not even Jeff Sessions or cruises of the world believe that if you spend tens of billions of dollars, which, by the way, we don't have, to build this wall and to have drones and electronic tracking devices, well, people are just going to fly to America and stay past their visas. It's not going to fix your problem. That's why the guest worker program is so important and such a focus for the editorial page, because that is the way that you're going to stem the flow of illegal immigrants, however they come in. All right. One more then on Cruz, because Cruz said you're going to take our jobs.

He made a substantial, long speech talking about how Obamacare actually sets up an advantage for a business owner to hire somebody who's here and just got amnesty, as opposed to somebody who was a long-time born-in-America citizen. Well, if I'm Hispanic, and that is the bulk of our immigration today, and I'm listening to that, I don't take that as a message that the Republican Party cares about me or my family who may want to come here. I think that's very damaging to the Republican brand. But if Cruz is making the point that a citizen will be disadvantaged as opposed to somebody who came here however many years ago and did not come

through a legal process, if Cruz can't make that point without damaging himself, is there any hope then to appealing to that constituency if anything that you do that supports the privilege of the citizen is seen as racist? Because it's not. Well, it's just not true. I mean, immigrants who come here don't take jobs from Americans. They take jobs that Americans don't want and aren't doing. And by the way, they also create jobs through their own hard work and moving

up the chain. That's been the history of America since our founding. So I don't think Cruz himself represents the Republican Party. I think he represents a strand of the party that is at risk of alienating a very important community. And I think it's unfortunate. I'm pro-immigration and lots of it. So I don't want the impression to be that by pointing out people who are making points about the folly that they see in the new bill, that that means somehow that I don't believe that immigrants should be welcome and don't make a big contribution. I do, but Cruz's point on citizenship versus the attributes given to somebody who doesn't have citizenship and just came here and got a benefit, if you can't make that point, then we're in trouble. But listen, when we talked about a missed opportunity before,

we missed the opportunity to mention your show, which is WSJ Network. Explain to people what this is and why the attitude is part of it. Sure. Well, we have a weekday show. It's at 1 o'clock Monday to Friday. It's called Opinion Journal, and it's a short show. It's compact. We generally only have four or five guests. It runs 20 minutes, 1 p a bit. We have fun. It's a political show. We talk about economics in a way people understand. We also

take on controversial social issues. The Kermit Gusnell trial, we covered that. We covered the Zimmerman trial. We talk about other media outlets. Our guests are everybody from my colleagues on the editorial page to we you know, really

run the gamut. We've had Senator McCain on, the police commissioner Ray Kelly, Fox News contributors, I mean, you name it, we've tried to have them on. We've added book authors lately. It's a heck of a lot of fun, and hopefully it's another aspect of the editorial page or gives gives people another way to um have a view inside the editorial page and to get to know us who we are and what we think there's somebody peter here i just want to spend a moment being fulsome and fawning it is a wonderful it is and the what i'm particularly impressed by i do long form

interviews and then i see you and think, oh, my goodness. Really, why do I go on for 35 minutes when Mary gets through so much material? In three minutes, you can take a guest through everything that that guest wants to say and needs to say, get in one or two pointed questions. It's the compactness with which you operate. It is just stunning. Question. Friday, News Corporation became a new company split off from what is now known as 21st Century Fox. The stock is doing well. I believe yesterday, the News Corporation website went up, a slick, new, really beautiful-looking

website. WSJ Live is on my television set now because I have an Apple TV device. So what are the plans for the video component of The Wall Street Journal and your show? Or are you feeling it's still too early to say? There's a lot going on at The Wall Street Journal these days. There is a lot going on. And we never would have been able to do this kind of video production under the previous ownership. I think News Corporation came in and gave us a lot of money and a lot of leeway to experiment, try new things.

The video channel was part of that. We started off just online on WSJ.com and expanded to many, many online channels, including Apple TV, Google TV, YouTube, those outlets. But there's also a very, very, very nice iPhone, iPad app called WSJ Live, where you can also see all of the shows, not just my show. Now, that's distinct from the journal? That's distinct from the app you'd use to read the paper? Yeah. Okay, that's important for people to know.

It's almost like an online channel. It's really the future of TV. TV is not the four networks anymore. It's just going to be an app on your phone, and you're going to get what you want on demand. This is our way're trying to figure that out along with a lot of other news outlets. But as of right now, we just want to be out there talking about it, letting people know that we're there and that we have fantastically intelligent, interesting guests on really the news of the day, giving you news analysis that you really cannot get anywhere else and in a format where you don't

have to spend your whole day listening to it. You can just pop in, click on a segment, three minutes, four minutes, get what you need and move on. And so, Mary, we've been talking about a lot about lost opportunities during the Obama administration. We had Fuad Ajami on earlier talking about how – here is a glimmer of hope. You don't have to comment on this because it might involve you in an act of uncharity. But Robinson says, the world can't be all bad when the PBS NewsHour is tanking and Mary Kissel's show is rising. There is hope. There is hope.

That's very kind. There is hope. Look, I like competition. I'm a free marketeer and happy to have competition from all kinds, PBS, MSNBC, whoever wants to compete with us. I say go for it. Hey, Mary, one question. There's somebody in the news business on the print side. Go ahead, Peter.

We promised to let you go right now, but I just refused to let you do it. Hey, Mary, one question. There's somebody in the news business on the print side. Go ahead, Peter. We promised to let you go right now, but I just refused to let you do it because there's one question I just have to ask. You used to be at Goldman Sachs. You gave up the golden road for journalism. This is the one thing in your resume that makes me wonder, is this woman sane? Why did you do that? Why? Why?

Well, look, it was a great company, but 9-11 happened while I was working there. I was in London on the trading floor and, you know, hundreds of people on the floor. And the BBC basically flipped over to the U.S. news coverage, and we were listening to our colleagues in New York because we were on the radio line that gave us a direct connection to New York. So I was sitting there listening to it and watching it on TV and just made me reassess what I wanted to do with my life. And I figured that selling bond deals, while that's an important job, was not the job I wanted to have with my life. And I figured that selling bond deals, while that's an important job, was not the job I wanted to have for the next 30 years.

So that's the short version of the story. Wow, even more hope than I thought. Journalism, I mean, if journalism can still beat out Goldman Sachs, there is hope, there is hope. Well, it's odd because I'm leaving my profession as video producer at the Star Tribune newspaper this week to go into bond trading. So, you know, I'll email you with some questions.

But as far as I can see, it's pretty much self-explanatory. Mary, thank you for joining us here in the podcast today. We advise everybody to go to the WSJ Live, Wall Street Journal Live. Which you can sample on Ricochet.com because Mary's been kind enough to post videos and participate on the website. Thanks, Mary. Yeah, it's my pleasure. Thanks so much for having me. Bye-bye.

The question, Peter, has to arise, and I have to ask you whether or not I get the impression... Correct me if I'm wrong. I get the impression sometimes me if I'm wrong. Correct me if I'm wrong here. I get the impression sometimes that editorial at least, the Wall Street Journal is in favor of open immigration. Is that just me or am I just seeing things that aren't there? I believe that would be what the lawyers call an overconstruction.

I don't think they favor completely open borders. However, you were handling Mary just fine on this one. So I didn't feel the need to chime in. But I love – I consider the Wall Street Journal editorial page absolutely indispensable. As do I, except on this issue. At least – oh, I think it's indispensable. But at least on this – I think it's indispensable too because they – but – and some of my best – this is truly, literally so. Two or three of my very best friends work on that page.

What they don't because they're in Manhattan, the editorials are very dismissive of the notion that we need secure borders. What they don't understand is what Victor Davis Hanson lives with. He grew up in the Central Valley in California. I in California see it again and again that because the borders have been totally unregulated, totally – because there's been a breakdown of the rule of law at the border. Not this year. It began to improve under George W. Bush. But for a couple of decades, there are large areas of California in which assimilation has begun to run in reverse.

That is to say, whole towns now are effectively part of Mexico rather than immigrants becoming American. And if you see that with your own eyes and experience it as every farmer in the Central Valley has, as anybody who wanders certain neighborhoods in Los Angeles has, you have to say to yourself, now, wait a moment. At some point, immigration becomes a threat to national identity, to our culture, everything we cherish, our language, our culture, our democratic way of life. You have to think this through. And my view is that those folks have a very good point and you need to

address it or take it into account. You can't just say, oh no, you're just crude nativists and swat them away with the back of your hand. These, these are people who've seen it with their own eyes. Many, I mean, I, here in California, exactly you just you just can't you can't it's you can't diss the base of the republican party it's bad politics but more to the point they're on to something they're responding to something real they right when i when i when i hear the opinion expressed by by mary it's it's like arguing with somebody who's not just anti-abortion

they believe that life begins at insertion okay i mean there's no way that i could well i'm serious i just it just occurred to me but that's what it's like it's like when you start to bring up a very good technical point about the intersection between immigration and obamacare as ted cruz does and find that cruz is lumped in with a bunch of nativists who are who are sending bad vibes to people who otherwise otherwise mind you would completely embrace the republican agenda it's nonsense it's absolutely if you can't make a defense for the for the for the importance and the primacy of citizenship because you'll tick off some people who want to come here and make great contributions, I grant that, then I'm sorry, we can't have a debate about this because anything that I say in favor of the idea of the primacy of citizenship is seen as racist.

And I object to that just as when you talk to somebody about reconstructing and redefining marriage, all of a sudden, you're a hater. And it's bad enough when the left does it to us. When the right does it to us, that's what drives me crazy. You just can't resist it. And you're right. You cannot fly SWAT Ted Cruz. These are the people who have – they might not have the money, but they have the enthusiasm and the energy and the desire to change things within the system as opposed to going out and starting a third party, which is just a grand idea.

Let's do that, shall we? Let's split off and follow Sarah Palin. And bear in mind the vote in the Senate. Senators know something about politics, don't they? The immigration reform won the support, won the votes of 14 members of a 46-member Republican caucus in the Senate. It did not even carry the support of one-third of Republican senators, even as moderate and reasonable and pro-business a figure as Rob Portman of Ohio voted against that darn thing. So again, you cannot – you can't take two-thirds of Republican senators that include such reasonable people as Rob Portman and just give them the back of your hand, in my humble opinion. I've thought about this a lot.

I think part of it is location. At the Journal, you're writing your editorials in the middle of Manhattan, and it's almost a defining feature of New York that there's wave after wave after wave of immigrant, as there has been for more than 200 years when the Dutch turned up in lower Manhattan. And it's all worked out. The economy, you can almost – you see the boat coming into the harbor to let off more people and you know the New York economy is going to be revived and reinvigorated. But there are places in the country where there are settled patterns of life and you have to worry or at least folks have a point. I guess what I'm saying is both sides have a point and it's hard.

And you'd like to see – within the Republican Party, you'd like to see both sides treat each other respectfully or at least I would anyway. Right. Manhattan is a great pro-crusty bed and people come in. Then you get a new ethnic restaurant. That's great. In other parts of the country, as you said, it's different when the culture changes. Now, the question is whether or not people who live in a place have a right to hard question because if you grew up in a Southern California town and it was the 1950s, early 60s, and it was car culture and drive-ins and Big Bopper and all the rest of that stuff. And then you went and you got your nice little Rambo house in a neighborhood with – not with a picket fence necessarily, but all of the trappings of suburban life in california and the good and then demographically it shifted do you have the right to then say you know um we have to do something to change this because it's not what i agree i don't think you do i don't think that you do um i mean people have the right to state

to us to what am i trying to say here have the the right to come together and decide what american culture is going to be that's a it's an ongoing process where we're always chewing through new ideas and bringing new ideas into the mix, right? But you don't have the right for your block in the suburbs to remain exactly what it was when you grew up. I mean I've seen this here. When you go south from my place, you get into the neighborhood. It was a first ring suburb after the war. You're talking about Minneapolis now or South Dakota? Yeah, and now it's completely Hispanic.

Not completely, but mostly. There's a few old ladies who are hanging around, the old man having kicked off shoveling some snow. And it's a solid, stable community. And what's different is that the Embers restaurant that used to serve you an hamburger with some Thousand Island dressing on top is now a Mexican place that serves genuine, authentic Mexican cuisine. And there's a huge new Menards hardware store, and some of the signs

are in Spanish. Otherwise, it's still a same solid family-oriented go-to-church community. The language changed, some of the cultural references changed. But the people who grew up there would still recognize it. And that's the American experience. What VDH is talking about, about importing entire dysfunctional cultures with the criminality and the desire to just leech off the state or the people, that's different. That's different. That's different. And that isn't necessarily – it seems to me to be necessarily dependent on an ethnicity or it's endemic culturally throughout the world.

And you just happen to have a bad element that's changing the culture in large parts of California. By the way, I want to be very careful since I've mentioned Victor several times. I don't want to be characterizing his position on immigration. Frankly, I don't know where he stands. I haven't seen him all summer. I don't know where he stands on this specific immigration reform bill. But Victor has told me that if we just had 20 years of breathing room here in California, there would be no problem. These folks would assimilate. It's the notion that the borders remain open, that there's no – and that there is schooling and that the culture feels self-confident enough to say to folks, learn English, go to school, get through all 12 grades in high school. You need those – but Victor's – I don't want to mischaracterize – I don't want to characterize Victor's position at all because I don't know his position on the current immigration bill just to be fair to Victor. So there's that.

There's that. And I have to say the – I happened to be at a dinner last week at which one of the guests was the archbishop of Los Angeles. This is Archbishop Gomez who was born in Mexico, lived in Mexico into his 30s before he came to this country. He was a bishop in Denver and San Antonio and now in Los Angeles. And of course, what you get the sense from him, he's Mexican by birth and obviously he speaks Spanish fluently, but you listen to him talk about his folks and they have the same problems that we all have. The economy is overregulated, the public school system.

He has a couple of hundred parochial schools and just over 50 high schools, which are for many folks in Los Angeles, the only hope of a real educate. In other words, it's the same concerns everybody has. And you say to yourself, wow, in the last three decades, the population of the Los Angeles basin has increased by more than 50 percent. Overwhelmingly, that increase is from Mexico. And you know, it more or less – there are tensions but it more or less works. This economy is so vibrant. This country is so open. It's going to be fine. Just don't diss people who say, wait a minute here. Let's

be careful. Let's enforce the rule of law. What I worry about are people coming to America with religious ideas that are not consistent with the experience that we have in forming tight little communities that do not have any interaction whatsoever with the rest of civil society. And I think that's bad. But enough about the Amish. Oh, you drew me in. If you could have seen my face. Where is it, Amish?

You had me on that one, James. You had me. I'm just trying to get out of this. I'm just trying to get to the last thing we have to say before we go, and that is I want to wish everybody – well, a happy Fourth of July. Of course. I will be getting together with my friends who are drawn from all nations, including those who, when they're brought here, we're seeing pretty much as pestilential drain and everything else. And those who came from Canada via Czechoslovakia or Czechoslovakia via Canada, whatever. People like myself, who's an absolute American mutt.

People ask me what I am, and I tell them I'm a North Dakotan, frankly. That says more about me than any of the blood or ancestry. And Peter, I hope you're going to have grilled meat, charred hot dogs, corn in the cob, and all the rest of the American favorites. Yes, yes. Although I cannot count on my middle son, my oldest son is at school right now, to do the grilling because he had all four wisdom teeth removed yesterday, and his basic attitude is if he can't chew, he ain't grilling. Oh, the poor fellow. I remember when I had that just a couple of years ago.

One day of Vicodin and just – let's hope he doesn't have that dry socket experience that a few people do. Oh, no. If he does, he'll be on the hillbilly heroin probably for the rest of his life. Anyway, on that happy little note, we wish everybody at the Ricochet family a happy Fourth of July. If you're listening, of course, to this afterwards, you know, everything that we said pretty much is still valid. Timelessness is what we go for, even though this may be podcast number 174. We hope it'll stand along number 372 and number four as an example of the continuing nonstop wisdom that you get from Peter Robinson and Rob Long when he's here at Ricochet.com. Peter, have a great Fourth, and we'll see everybody in the comments.

Happy Fourth of July, James, next week. This land is your land, and this land is my land. From California to the New York Island, from the Redwood Forest to the Gulf Stream waters, this land was made for you and me As I went a-walking That ribbon of highway And I saw above me

That endless skyway I saw below me That golden valley This land was made for you and me. I roamed and rambled and I followed my footsteps To the sparkling sands of her diamond deserts All around me a voice was a-sounding This land was made for you and me. There was a big high wall there that tried to stop me.

A sign was painted that said private property. But on the back side it didn't say nothing. This land was made for you and me When the sun comes shining Then I was strolling And the wheat fields waving And the bass clouds rolling A voice was chanting

And the fog was lifting This land was made for you and me This land is your land And this land is my land From California to the New York Island From Redwood Forest to the Gulf Stream waters This land was made for you and me. Ricochet!

Join the conversation.