The Ricochet Podcast - Lesson From Lincoln

Episode Date: June 14, 2013

Direct link to MP3 file This week, Rich Lowry, National Review Editor and author of Lincoln Unbound: How an Ambitious Young Railsplitter Saved the American Dream–and How We Can Do It Again sits in for the perpetually vacationing Peter Robinson to discuss his new book, the NSA, the IRS, and a host of other 3 letter acronyms. Also, is Edward Snowden a hero or a traitor? Can Honest Abe resurrect the... Source

At LiveScoreBet, we love Cheltenham just as much as we love football. The excitement, the roar and the chance to reward you. That's why every day of the festival, we're giving new members money back as a free sports bet up to €10 if your horse loses on a selected race. That's how we celebrate the biggest week in racing. Cheltenham with LiveScoreBet. This is total betting. Sign up by 2pm 14th of March. Bet within 48 hours of race. Main market excluding specials and place bets.

Terms apply. Bet responsibly. 18 plus gamblingcare.ie Take your business international. Enterprise Europe Network is the world's largest network providing free support and advice to SMEs with global ambition. With over 450 partner organisations worldwide, we bring together unparalleled expertise to serve businesses like yours. We can help

you discover partners in new markets, advance your digitisation and gain valuable insights into EU funding opportunities. Take advantage of free expert advice and innovation resources. Visit een-ireland.com and take your business global today. And now, for our last

speaker, one of the greatest presidents in American history, Mr. Abraham Lincoln. seven minutes ago, we, your forefathers, were brought forth upon a most excellent invention. Activate program. Does the NSA collect any type of data at all on millions or hundreds of millions of Americans? No, sir. It does not. Not wittingly.

This is nonsense. Mr. Gorbachev, tear down this wall. It's the Ricochet Podcast with Rob Long and Peter Robinson. Or it would if Peter was here, but he's not. So you've got Rob in L.A., me, James Lileks in Minneapolis, and sitting in for Peter, strange hybrid of guest host and guest, is Rich Lowry from National Review. We'll talk PRISM and we'll talk about Rich's new book on Lincoln. Let's have ourselves a podcast.

There you go again. Welcome, everybody. This is the Ricochet Podcast, as previously noted, and it's number 172. It is brought to you proudly by Audible.com. Who are they? You know, the leading provider of spoken audio information and entertainment on the web. Listen to audiobooks wherever, whenever you want, thanks to Whispersync technology. Go to audiblepodcast.com slash ricochet and get a free audiobook and a 30-day trial. We'll remind you about that a little bit more,

perhaps at the bottom of the hour. My name is James Lilacs, and if you hear lawnmowers and jets, that's because my window is open, possibly for the first time in six months, without getting in freezing breezes. Maybe that little ass time. And I ain't in freezing breezes. Maybe that's the last time. And I ain't going to shut it. It's your tiny window.

Literally, you have a tiny window of opportunity to open your window. And, of course, that's Robin L.A. And we have to give props, as the kids say, to whoever it is. And I forget, somebody will remind us in the comments that your name actually should be changed legally to Robin Leigh. Robin Leigh. What do you think about that? Robin, I mean that's a classic guy's first name, isn't it, if you're the youthful ward of a secretive millionaire?

Well, I've – which I – family, that kind of Harry Potter story that I live under the stairs of a horrible family but I'm really sort of secretly a prince. The Freudian term for that is the family romance. Yes, and it runs through the majority of young adult literature today, even kids' literature. Nearly every story that – Children feel it. I know. It's a children's thing that you feel that – it's a thing that all children at some point go through a phase. It's very brief, but it really is in their subconscious, this idea that you are not my parents.

This is not my family. I am really much more important than this. Right, and a lot of these books just deal with it by killing off the family entirely. Very confusing. The number of families that are just ushered off the stage in the first chapter, it's almost necessity in these books to get the story moving. It's okay, they're not really yours. And I think there's a secret, there's a thing that there's an itch that scratches in every child.

Right. But on the other hand, it's good that kids have a, shall we say, their attitude towards authority figures be modified somewhat so that they don't live in fear, but they still have a healthy respect for those who are over them. Like, say, for example, our editor at National Review, right? Just you and me talking here, Rob. I mean, Rich, he's a great guy. He's a tremendous talent.

He's a brilliant intellect. But, I mean, I've heard you slag him when we were at the – Oh, he's up? Oh, okay. Sorry. Oh, my Lord, he's actually here. I didn't realize he was actually here. Yeah, nothing of the sort.

No, of course, Rob has never slagged Rich, and we're just so happy to have him with him here today. Sitting in for Peter Robinson, by the way, who is off in the woods somewhere, you know, going with his kids. We don't know. Let's be honest. I said this last week that Peter was off camping as if there was some, you know,

he's sitting there with a sort of miner's cup staring at the sunrise and saying to his family, now we have to prepare for the end times or something, a survivalist. No, I think he's actually gallivanting along the North Fork of Long Island. I think he's having his own little private Gatsby. Oh, I see. Wherever he is, there's a sweater tied loosely around his neck.

His sweater. I mean, it should be just as clear as that. That's right. Well, Peter, then, if you catch me on Long Island somewhere or out in the woods, we'll be back at some point. But, you know, right now we've got the man himself, the editor-in-chief of National Review, syndicated columnist, commentator for Fox News Channel, writes for Politico, Time magazine, and appears in such public affairs programs as Meet the Press, Face the Nation, and KCRW's Left, Right, and Center. And most crucially, he's got a new book, Lincoln Unbound, How an Ambitious Young Rail Splitter Saved the American Dream and How We Can Do It Again. It's available now, and we'll talk to him about that a little bit later.

But right now, we welcome to the podcast Rich Lowry. Hello, sir. Hi, gentlemen. How you doing? Can you hear me? Yeah. Yeah. All right. Welcome to Rich Lowry. Hello, sir. Hi, gentlemen. How are you doing? Can you hear me? Yeah. Yeah. All right.

Welcome to Rich's Podcast. Scott sent me this fancy new headset that has a big blue blinking light. I'm trying to figure out how to turn down the volume. Well, so far you sound great. That's assuming me. The blue light indicates mind control in progress. Yes, right. There are no deadlines.

No deadlines. That Tuesday morning has been moved to Wednesday at his discretion. Tuesday morning has been moved to Wednesday. We wanted to ask you, though. I mean, we'll get to Lincoln. I can't believe you guys are doing this to me. This is what every radio and TV interviewer does when you're on with your book. They're like, oh, he's got a new book out.

And we will talk about that sometime in the future, sometime later. We've got you. I mean, what on earth could we possibly, you know, it's like, how could we possibly let this opportunity go? Because the truth is, the truth is actually, I mean, the weird thing is, and I, you know, I was talking about this, I think, a while ago, ago but i was trying to remember i started writing for this magazine but i say this magazine i mean national review in 1993 so that's 20 years ago and um i i never was in new york or dc so people always talk about these great traditions of nr you know the the Monday night and sort of the camaraderie and then the lunches and stuff. I never – I think I went to one when I happened to be in New York and then by accident happened to bump into somebody on the street.

You know what I mean? It's like James and I are like kind of these weird satellite – we are about to have, I think, the longest conversation with the editor of National Review. Yes, I think that's right. Uninterrupted than we ever have. James always gets, if I email James, he gets worried. He's like, what's wrong? You don't like it, do you? I know, I think you called me a couple of weeks ago and I said, what's wrong?

I'm just used to that. It's fun when we're on the cruise and people will lean over and say, so what's it like to work there? And they're imagining sort of like the New Yorker magazine with a secretive wall of Sean in a back room and an interesting atmosphere of young fact checkers and the traditions seeping the halls and the rest of it. And I say, I sit in Minnesota and send my column to a guy in Utah who fact checks it

and then sends it to New York. So I wish I could tell you the tales of the great meaty, rum-soaked camaraderie, but alas and alack, it's been a while since I've been to New York. I started here in 92, Rob, so slightly before you, but you were probably writing for the magazine before I was because they wouldn't let me write for the magazine when I started here as an intern researcher. But I remember the major event when you were revealed to everyone at the NRI conference in Washington.

It was a big deal to actually reveal the anonymous authors' letters from Al. Yeah. Do you not remember that? I just assumed that they were trying to pretend it was somebody important. They were trying to, like, the idea of not revealing who was writing it was the idea it was thinking well no it's somebody you're really gonna know who this guy is uh and then when they figure that the joke was over they might as well tell but i but i do remember no you were you revealed to be jack dunphy posing as theodore galleyripple

um so so uh so it's uh if we could just get a few few little – let's get a few current events out before we talk about the book, which is excellent. And then before we even talk about the book, I have one question about the book, which is do you have an Audible? Is it Audible yet? So can we make that our pick of the week? It's not Audible, I'm afraid. Okay. Do you want me to start reading it now? Yeah, you should start reading it now because you really should.

We get so many emails from people saying, I have a 45-minute commute each way and I can knock off a great book, two books a week. You know what I mainly use iTunes for? It's just so lame. There's so many free lectures out there. You can listen to an entire course at Yale on something, you know, at the gym and it's really a wonderful thing. So I should bring it up with my publisher. Cause you're not the first one to ask. I'm just now shocked that you're listening to courses at Yale.

I didn't listen to them when I was there, but there you go. So, all right. Clarify this for me. I've been a little bit busy. The kid who revealed all the PRISM, the NSA PRISM stuff, Edward Snowden. I have this problem with him in that I think he's a – I think he's just a – he's everything I hate about kids because he's an overgrown child. Any decent – in a decent culture or decent era in American history, he'd be in uniform. A kid who didn't – had a problem getting to high school and college, he'd be in uniform. He'd probably be fighting a pointless war somewhere.

And he's not. Instead, he's revealing state secrets. On the other hand, I'm glad he did. So is there any way I can separate my contempt for Edward Snowden, really on probably completely unfair grounds, but nonetheless, my contempt for him with his actions and with the very same thing, and you state it very eloquently, because I don't like the leak. I don't like the idea that he takes it upon himself to decide what should really be secret and what shouldn't be. But on the other hand, when you have this massive program ongoing that obviously has all sorts of implications that we'd want to think through as a democratic, small d, society, and it's going on as a matter of routine for years you should have a

public debate about that and he started the public debate and i don't think ideally it's not the right way to do it you would have had ron wyden or one of these guys who was concerned about it and making hints about it going to the floor every day and saying look i know about this program i can't reveal it because it's classified i'm alarmed i think a lot of other people are going to be alarmed i urge the president united States to talk about it in some responsible manner so we can discuss it as a society. That would have been the right way to do it, but obviously that didn't happen. Yeah, I mean, on the other hand, I mean, I kind of feel like the national conversation is going to be really hard to have with a country and a population that's just so uninterested in its own technology. I mean the reality is that any digital signal, which is really what 95% of all of our communication is these days,

is almost impossible to secure fully for all of our communication. It's just really not. I mean, up until Edward Snowden revealed Prism, emails were being hacked, Gmail's hacked, Yahoo Mail's hacked, Twitter's hacked, Facebook's hacked, Bank of America records were hacked, I think American Airlines, things are hacked constantly. It was really only a matter of time before telephony, I guess is the way you pronounce it. Telephony is hacked. Anytime you take an analog signal and digitize it, that makes it searchable and you collapse it like that. In a world sort of they say unlimited bandwidth, unlimited store width, it's really hard to secure all that. I mean if the government isn't hacking us or isn't isn't if the government isn't watching us

and reading our mail someone's going to be aren't we deluding ourselves anyway into thinking that the communication we make over the phone or over the web is secure I mean we might as well just face the fact that it's that someone's going to be able to read it yeah I mean and doesn't everyone just assume that already, really? Yeah, that's my point. Well, not my point, but yours. Let's define what we mean, though, by hack. Rich, when you hear the term hack, what do you understand that to mean?

Well, it has an I'm one of these horrible... It means us. It means you and me. Yeah, hack is a verb or hack is a noun. Right. For me, it has a pejorative connotation, but I'm one of these technology knaves that Rob is slamming here. hackathons and actually apparently produce apps and things that are positive contribution to society or at least an attempt to create such a thing. But I think of a hack as going in and taking information that's not yours from an organization that wouldn't provide it to you otherwise. Is that an accurate definition? That's one of them.

Rob, what would you say the word means? Well, I would just say – I mean I think – what I think you're gesturing at is somebody doing something illegally, breaking into a secure or what is supposed to be a secure facility or secure database illegally, doing illegally what the government is supposed to be – what's supposed to be doing with FISA authorization or court authorization. Right. When you were saying before, this was hacked, that was hacked, this was hacked, this is true, but sometimes when we look at a website and say, oh man, it was hacked, you just had some people who either ran some scripts

and elbowed their way into the site by very little technological knowledge. At LiveScoreBet, we love Cheltenham just as much as we love football. The excitement, the roar, and the chance to reward you. That's why every day of the festival, we're giving new members money back as a free sports bet up to €10 if your horse loses on a selected race. That's how we celebrate the biggest week in racing. Cheltenham with LiveScore Bet. This is total betting.

Sign up by 2pm 14th of March. Bet within 48 hours of race. Main market excluding specials and place bets. Terms apply. Bet responsibly. 18plusgamblingcare.ie. Or they guessed a password. There's all these different levels of sophistication that we're talking about.

About getting into systems, about decrypting things, and having computational power to break down a 256K encrypted password. But when we talk about PRISM, we have to figure out exactly what we're defining here. Some people are not saying that this is the government bashing its way into the servers of these places and extracting the information that they want. There's a description I've heard of the program that actually describes this sort of Dropbox thing where there's a separate server that's not actually even connected to either the NSA or to the company that they want information to, that they're transferring information there at the request

of NSA, like leaving it in a public, like leaving a package under a park bench and then walking away. That's not hacking. That's not hacking. My understanding is that the original Washington Post story, which suggested that the NSA was tapping directly into the servers, was an error. And that isn't right. And as far as I understand it, and you know much more about this than I do, I think, it's foreigners overseas who are being monitored whose data flows through our tubes.

And we're looking at it when it comes through our tubes. But if that basic understanding is correct, I have no problem with that whatsoever. No, no one does. Because foreigners have no expectation of privacy when it comes to the U.S. government, no Fourth Amendment protections. I think it's the telephony stuff that is more problematic. And I'm basically sympathetic to the goal, obviously, of the program. I'm sympathetic, I think, to the program more or less. But you are vacuuming up this huge amount of material from Americans who

have done nothing to earn anyone's suspicion. And then what happens to it? Well, some of it ends up on the desktops of the like of Edward Snowden, right? And if there's one thing you can debate, whether he's a hero or traitor, certainly he has not demonstrated the utmost discretion in handling sensitive data. So do you want that stuff on desktops of people like that, especially in light of the IRS scandal, which has cast appalled suspicion over this whole thing? Now, hey, so Rich, that really is, to me anyway, that seems to be the interesting juxtaposition here.

Is this just one of those things that it's a weird coincidence that we have an IRS scandal where what is supposed to be the most unpolitical federal agency of all the federal agencies, the IRS is supposed to be the one – the most unreachable by federal – bipartisan politics. It has obviously been politicized. And the EPA too, recently, you know, last week, it's been that EPA, the EPA scandals, I think are almost not quite as bad as the IRS, but right up there. And that's been sort of smothered by this, by this PRISM story. I mean, is this just all a bad coincidence? Or? I think that the timing of the release of the story is I doubt Edward Snowdenden was sitting there thinking, oh gosh, this IRS thing has me really worried. Better do it now.

Let's add to the scandal trifecta with another one. But David French had a very good post on the corner the other day about this. Just federal bureaucrats are liberal Democrats, right? So the idea that they're not politicized at some level is just a fiction. And, you know, even if we accept, which I don't, you know, the most innocent explanation of the IRS scandal, which is, oh, these folks in Cincinnati, just a little overzealous in efficiency, you know, and using these words to target certain applications. If it had been happening to progressive groups systematically and progressive groups had been screaming bloody murder about it for years and Democratic congressmen had been picking up those complaints, considering them credible and screaming bloody murder about them as well and asking IRS officials whether it was happening, it would have stopped in

a minute. And it's just that a lot of these people were cued to believe the worst of the Tea Party and to believe they were doing God's work in targeting them. Right. And does this mean that – I mean I'll speak only for myself. I had heard those things for years. Black helicopters and the one world government and all that. And then when that stuff happens and then suddenly we hear about prism, it does make you think. OK, wait a minute. You know, it's that moment in the movie where the reasonable person, you know, the close up in the second act and the reasonable person says, wait a minute. Are you seriously? Wow. And so even though I'm sympathetic as you are to the goal of national security and the completely legitimate purposes of a surveillance program designed to follow up on international conversations and especially ones that are – in which we are profiling certain countries and certain locations, it does make me wonder. And it certainly makes me think to myself, we are only we no longer can

have 100 percent trust that this information will not be used politically. Yeah, I'm exactly the same place you are. My instincts are exactly the same. I'm always I'm much too naive about government. I just can't beat it out of myself at a certain level. Right. When these sort of allegations come out like, no, they wouldn't do that. You know, they're not that dumb or corrupt or malign, you know, but they were with the IRS. And that's why it's really cold comfort. Some of our hawkish friends, Max Boot and Mark Thiessen, have said accurately, right, about the NSA program, well, what's the demonstrated instance of abuse? And I can see myself, hear myself making those sort of arguments in the Bush years when so

many of these programs were attacked from the left. But it's kind of cold comfort. That argument doesn't have the same resonance it does in the wake of the IRS thing, which is just astonishing and went on as a matter of routine for years. Yeah, I mean there's a guy on Venice Beach who sits in a card table and will tell you for – I think for a dollar. He'll explain to you why there's a pyramid and an eye on the US dollar. It's a very complicated explanation that involves all sorts of conspiracy theories. I was walking my dog there the other day

and I'm thinking, maybe I should just give him a dollar and hear the story because he could be right. I've been sneering at him for 10 years. Tell me again. I can't hear the helicopters above my house because they're whispered.

Yeah, I think that's a real problem. No attempt on the part of the Obama administration to do the right thing here and to explain how this happened and to try to build back that trust. I mean that to me is the – will be the worst part of his legacy. It won't be a socialized medicine, which we can trim and cut and do whatever we want to if we have the political will. It will be this creeping, undermining faith in those institutions of government, which if we don't have really, really will have a lasting, corrosive, toxic effect. What needs to be done is for the blood to slosh like the lobby of the hotel in the shining is what needs to be done right if he was to if he was to come out point to a couple of individuals line them up against the wall and do some wholesale firing the american people would nod and say well that's what an executive is supposed to do as it is floating above this campaigning like you know this combination of

perpetual candidate and royalty where he's he's somehow this is the job that he got, but he wants to convince us that it's the other people still in power who are causing his problems. And he's really not responsible for anything, really, because the government's just so darn big. The disconnect between that and the corrosion that Rob talked about is extraordinary. When he could just come out and use that masterful sense of oratory and that beloved persona that the American people are so enraptured with and just lay waste and on we move. And at that point, the rest of us who continue to talk about things like the IRS would be regarded the same way as people who talk about Benghazi, which A, nothing happened, and B, only right-wingers akin to birthers bring that thing up. I mean, go on, Rich.

This is such a good point about the corrosiveness and the lack of trust in government. It's such an irony, right, that you saw in the 80s, in the Reagan administration, actually more trust in government because you had someone who believed in limiting government, but a limited but a strong government in the areas where it needed to be strong. Here you have a guy who believes in government and all respects doing everything, and he's corroding trust in it. One thing that's very important and very basic is just telling the truth. Benghazi, they didn't tell the truth. The IRS, they didn't tell the truth when they initially denied that this sort of targeting

was going on. Then when the scandal broke, literally the fourth sentence in Lois Lerner's confession at the ABA conference was untrue because she blamed it on lying people in Cincinnati when IRS officials in Washington knew about it very early on and in some important respects guided it. And then you have Clapper. You know, maybe Ron Wyden's putting him in a very awkward position. Well, he was putting a very awkward position by asking him that question in public. But you don't have to lie about it. You can say, look, I can't confirm and deny this is too sensitive.

Let's talk about it in closed session. But instead, he gave us the least untruthful answer, which is maybe you expect that from a White House press secretary, right? Maybe that's in their job description. But in a high government official in such a sensitive post dealing with such sensitive information, you at least want the truth or an honest evasion. And he couldn't even give us that. Yeah, it's very – I mean it's in a very strange position when it is conservative saying please defend and shore up public trust in government institutions. It just makes me feel uncomfortable to have to ask that of this president. Hampton said you set up a system that has the checks and balances to control the people in power, but then you

have to yield power and trust at a certain level in government. That's very important for any system and if it's gone, it's a very bad thing. Even if you want to limit government, the government we have should be, people should consider that it's on the level and it's abiding by the rule of law and we're getting told the truth about it.

I also hate when our officials are put in a position of having to lie when we know that it's absolutely preposterous to ask the questions in the first place. The idea of getting up the head of a spy agency and saying, now, are you spying on China? Yeah, that's right. What is he going to say? No, he wouldn't do it. It's just it's something that sort of decriminalized people do. Are you collecting any information about Americans? I mean, here's this poor guy.

I have no love for this guy, but the way he just sort of put his head down and scratched it like saying, let me get this straight. Here we are in public and you're asking me if the National Security Agency occasionally might cast its gaze toward people within the borders. What are the names? Of course we do. I mean, it's ridiculous.

And yet we have to go through this theater. But I mean, it's like getting Emma up there and asking her exactly. This James Bond fellow we keep reading about. You know what just happened to me? I just said getting Em up there and asking her. Because now we've made the assumption. It's not her. It's actually him in the next one. But I digress.

Yes, indeed it is. So the thing is this. When we talk about faith in our government, faith in leaders, I mean, it's not as though the country hasn't suffered this before, right? We've gone through this a couple of times where all of a sudden there's this, I mean, corrosion isn't even the word. The foundations are completely leeched away. The 70s, I remember this. Rob, you remember this.

Rich, you remember this. Or maybe you don't. Exactly how pervasive the idea was that the government was run by the most venal sort. But the difference here is that now we're looking at veniality and idiocy. We're looking at incompetent people. At least in the 70s, they thought it was run by cold, maniacal CIA killers. Now we don't even have the luxury of thinking that these guys are smart

because we just see incompetence in every single aspect of the government. Well, that was a function of the left, actually. It was a great, great function of left. The childish view of the world that the left sort of brought to bear in the 50s, 60s, and 70s was always that the world is controlled by highly effective, organized malevolent grown-ups right which is really what

children think the world is controlled by you know the grown-ups all talk and it all works out and they've got it all figured out they're mean and um and they've got a plan and the plan is to make you miserable um you know day three days the condor everything happened and then and oh my lord i'm just i'm a little innocent and I just discovered this huge plot and all these mean grown ups have it all figured out and it's all about oil or chemicals or strip mining or something. No let's just stop for a second here

because you brought up something very good three days of the condor the guy leaves for lunch and he comes back and everybody in the office is killed. Why was he spared? Well first of all because he's Robert Redford and we want to have a charismatic, handsome guy throughout the rest of the movie. But two, because everybody in that bureau

had stumbled upon a deep secret, a secret so malevolent that if it got out, it would change the nature of America forever. And that was that the CIA had prepared a plan, a plan, mind you, to invade the Middle East and get their oil. Not that they're going to do it, but they just had some contingency operations sitting around. That was the great thing, of course. And at the end of it –

Was that really the thing? That was what it was about. That's what they were killing everybody about was they stumbled on a plan. I worked with an old writer once who the thing, whatever the thing was, I mean, Hitchcock called it MacGuffin, but he was like, he called it the Stummi. At LiveScoreBet, we love Cheltenham just as much as we love

football. The excitement, the roar, and the chance to reward you. That's why every day of the festival we're giving new members money back as a free sports bet up to €10 if your horse loses on a selected race. That's how we celebrate the biggest week in racing. Cheltenham with LiveScore Bet.

This is total betting. Sign up by 2pm 14th of March. Bet within 48 hours of race. Main market excluding specials and place bets. Terms apply. Bet responsibly. 18plusgamblingcare.ie The stummy, the thing, the stummy, the thing they all want.

Whatever, whether it was a movie, whether it, the plot or the car keys or whatever, even if it was a comic thing. That was the thing. Really? Because the last scene, remember the last scene? Oh, yeah. You watch it now, it's hilarious. The last scene, Robert Redford gives the information to the New York Times. There's a big crane shot in front of the New York Times building and you're supposed to walk out of the theater with an absolute relief that the good people have this information now. Yes, but what did Cliff Robertson say to him as he was walking into the New York Times?

Are you sure they'll publish it? Meaning, how do you know that the tentacles of this nasty organization don't extend to the corruptible boardroom of the New York Times. I mean, everything was supposed to be that way. Everything, every institution was corrupt. Everything was bad. It just, we, what did I find yesterday in the archives? I put it up on my site today.

It's a newspaper story about Tomorrowland. It's just a simple little story about opening up a new wing of Tomorrowland at Disneyland. And the whole article is, now that we've completely screwed up the world, now that everything is so miserable today, it's nice to look to an imaginary future and wonder why Disneyland doesn't secede from the rest of the country. And this is a new story about Disneyland. But the national mood was so low. But here's the difference. That was because there was a Republican administration doing it and the people in the in the journals of media, in the in the in the journalism community,

in the media community, all regarded this as as the fault, the natural end result of Republican rule. We're not seeing that same sort of corrosive, pervasive feeling in the media today. Are we rich? Yeah. I'm asking Richard. Yeah, I think the media has been – by the way, Rob, is stumi? Is that a Yiddish? I don't know. Like it's made up Yiddish, you know.

Stumi. I think it's made up. Sounds very Yiddish. Most comedy writing jargon is made up Yiddish. Huh. Okay. For the three Christians on the podcast right now. I think the chains of press have been pretty tough. I think the last three or four, five weeks or so, I think there was a slight turning on Benghazi, not major, but Hicks was a serious and compelling guy.

So it got a little more attention than it had before. And most of the press seemed legitimately outraged or not willing to defend the IRS stuff. And then it was the AP that was really the tipping point because that hits them where they hurt. And they just spent months and months treating the NRA as these absurd extremist paranoiacs and their opposition to the possibility of creating a gun registry. But then you tap into the AP and then the press is right there in the same place the NRA is. If it's their, quote unquote, their amendment, the First Amendment, rather than the Second Amendment, they're just as suspicious and hostile to government power. And then I think this stuff, the NSA stuff, it has to do with

national security. So the media has kind of inherent suspicion there. It's kind of leftover Bush stuff. So there's another layer of suspicion there as well. So I think the media has been pretty tough. I think if President Obama is ever fundamentally threatened by any of this stuff politically, they'll turn. I recall during the Monica scandal, the press was so tough, including Maureen Dowd. And then she wrote this one column that you read the entire thing, at least some of us did, 780 words. You'll never get that time back, Rachel. Yeah, I know, exactly. And you think it's this harsh attack on President Clinton as a sexual obsessive.

Then you realize in the last 20 words he's actually condemning Ken Starr as the guy who's obsessed with sex. And that was the whole turning when all of a sudden the whole scandal became about Ken Starr. And, again, if there's a real threat to the president here, I think you'll see that sort of turn. You haven't yet. And I think the press have been pretty tough on him. I agree with that. Yeah, they've been tougher than they have been before. What I what I'm talking about is the the idea throughout the culture, however, that there's that there's something rotten with the society and that you're not getting that.

Because we can't be as bad as a society as we were in the 70s if we've elected President Obama twice and we have national health care. I mean, these are such obviously manifestly wonderful things that we can't be on the wrong road like we were in the 70s. That's what I mean. I mean, I sense a lot of that culture. I sense the sense of cultural despair out here somewhat, even in nice, liberal,

wonderful Minnesota. But you'll find I believe the cultural elites, to use the irritating cliche, are more likely to stifle it now than exploit it as something to be... Maybe, but I know we've got to go to Audible. We've got to talk about – we've got to buy Rich's book, and I want to get right to that.

But I have a question for Rich. Is the big – all of this cultural stuff, all of – I mean political scandal stuff, EPA, IRS, the AP, James Rosen, and now NSA prisms, all kind of the same thing in a way. Misuse of bureaucratic power, government overreach. Doesn't it – and if you're a young person, doesn't it kind of push you in the Ron Paul, Rand Paul direction? Yeah, I would think so. I mean, that's sort of the political resonance and charge to the entire theme is that we can't trust government. It has too much power. It's too broad.

No one knows what's going on or can control it. And I think we're really in a Rand Paul moment that started with the filibuster over the drones and I think is going to continue to roll on. And I would just be, you know, it's never too early to make political predictions you're going to regret and you hope no one remembers. But I would I would be pretty feel pretty certain that Rand Paul is going to be the front runner for the Republican nomination for at least for some significant stretch

of 2015. You know, the way Howard Dean was, I guess, what was that, way back in 2003, except for I think Rand Paul is a more serious figure than Howard Dean. But he's really, you know, tapping into, one way to put it would be the id of the Republican Party, but this real deep distrust of government. And every day the headlines seem to confirm, you know, his worldview. And he's working it really hard, I mean, in ways that you can see, in ways that you can't in a meeting with donors and potential supporters. So yeah, it very much is a boost to that wing of the party. There's no doubt about it.

Yeah, so I kind of worry about that part of me, and then part of me thinks, oh, well, maybe that's a good thing. Yeah. Guys, Ron Paul has just put up there to make you people think that there's an alternative to this. If you listen to Alec Jones, man, if you listen to Alec, you'd learn exactly what's going on. I mean, they're meeting over in Bilderberg right now. They're out front about it. They're even happy to know that you know. What if he's right?

I don't know. What if he's right? The conspiracies, the conspiracies are everywhere. I mean, three days with the Condor isn't just the sort of thing. But what about a guy who finds all of a sudden that the world is being threatened? It's very existent by somebody who's taking his cues from an ancient Italian novel that begins in

Mezzo della camera di nostra vita, which would be, of course, Dante's Inferno. Why would you want to make everybody go back and read Dante's Inferno? Well, you don't. You can either listen to it to yourself on audiobook, or you can get Dan Brown's new book, widely panned by everybody who's got a couple of neurons

in their head to rub together. But do you want to be the person at the party when they start talking about Dan Brown and you didn't read it? No. That's why you need to go to audible.com right now and download it for free. Pay not a cent. And you get all of Dan Brown's wonderful prose read to you as you drive around. Or you can have it synced to your various devices using Whisper Sync.

So audiblepodcast.com slash ricochet. And that is where your free 30-day trial begins. We at this point ask our guests and – well, we know what book Richard is reading, but I'll ask Rob. Rob, do you have a suggestion you can quickly throw up there now that I've caught you completely by surprise? No, no. I'll tell you what I was liking. Because I don't believe in conspiracies or if I do, but I also believe that they will all fail because I'm a conservative. I think everything – things don't work.

I think The Black Swan, which I actually read by Nassim Taleb, is pretty good. I mean it's dense going, but he reads it very well, and the stuff you don't understand, just don't – just enjoy the sound of his his voice and then he picks up on fun stories and you get the gist of it it's actually a lot of fun very it's a lot but you don't have to follow it all excellent audible podcast.com slash ricochet and claim that or any of your other 100 000 choices you have a month 30 days to burn through 100 000 you won't so you'll want to sign up and we thank them for sponsoring of course this podcast enough of all of this stuff. Let's go back to the 19th century because Rich has written a book, Lincoln Unbound, how an ambitious young rail splitter saved the American dream and how we can do it again.

Let's basic question. It's about Lincoln. Why another book about Lincoln? Well, it's a book that portrays Lincoln as the foremost proponent, apostle of opportunity in American history. And how that played out in his personal life rose from literally nothing. How it undergirded his policies and his politics, almost everything he cared about, including his opposition to slavery. And then what lessons we can learn about it today when we're experiencing, I think, a crisis of opportunity in this country. So I like to think that the book isn't so much the what and how of Lincoln. We know so much about the Civil War and the drama attached to that,

so much about the assassination. This goes back, covers a lot of ground people probably aren't familiar with, even if they're Lincoln fans. And it really gets to the why of Lincoln, what his animating purpose was. And it how we can do it again, how we can do it again. I mean how special was this guy? How lucky were we that we had him? I mean they always say, well, you need a Lincoln. A Lincoln suddenly appears. But it doesn't seem – he seems such an unlikely chief executive, certainly an unlikely chief executive at a time when the country was having a nervous breakdown. Yeah. Well, in terms of, I'll take it all the way very briefly across his life. In terms of his rise, I mean, he had a year of formal schooling.

It was an area where it was just largely subsistence farming. His father didn't like the fact that he read books, and he needed money for the family, and he would hire him out to do things like split rails. And there's that great mythogenic moment when he's nominated for president, or when Illinois makes him their favorite son, and they bring out the rails, and he split these. And that's where he gets known as a rail splitter. But he hated splitting rails. He never wanted to split a rail in his life, and he split these, and that's where he gets known as a rail splitter, but he hated splitting rails. He never wanted to split a rail in his life, and he never wanted to do it again after he was done with it, and he rose because he was determined, and he

had an exceptional mind and intellectual abilities, and that really played into his success as a president. I mean, it does not hurt to be brilliant. And, you know, William Seward thought he was going to be the nominee in 1860. He's not. Lincoln is a nod to his prominence in the party, makes him secretary of state. And Seward thinks he's going to run the whole government. And, you know, here's this hick, this nobody from Illinois. He shows up and very quickly, to his credit, Seward realizes that Lincoln is the superior man, both in intellect and in judgment. And that's the other thing is just there's no substitute for having judgment. And how do you get judgment?

You know, in some respects, it's just an innate quality. But if you've been banged up a little bit through life, if you've encountered a lot of disappointments, if you've been in politics for decades, that there's perhaps, you know, we tend to look down on career politicians, but there's no better school in human nature than having to be in politics and to appeal to people with trade-offs. I mean, 19th century politics, maybe. I mean, I don't think there's a qualitative difference between somebody who's been in politics – the kind of politics that Lincoln put up with and the kind of politics that Maxine Waters has been in politics for a long time. Yeah, that's a good point. And Lincoln would – you didn't have the staff obviously, the cosseting staff that you have now. Someone told me the other day, I actually didn't realize this.

I think Lincoln, the only two staffers he had in the White House were his two secretaries. And there was no one else. And people, when you read about what the White House was like then, it's just incredible. I mean, just random people showing up and they want to meet the president to tell them their conspiracy theories. Like the guy you walk by with your dog every day, Rob, or petition for a job. And Lincoln, he called it his public opinion baths when he obviously didn't have polling, but he would go out of his way to meet with these people. And it drove everyone else crazy. They thought he was nuts to do this.

But he learned through these experiences and these contacts with people. And just the informality of the White House is amazing. There's some guy who showed up in January, New Year's Day, I believe, 1864, wanted to see Lincoln about something. The front door was locked. So he opens a window from the outside and climbs in. In the middle of a war. In the middle of a war in the middle of a war. Anybody who's been by the White House these days know that if you even put a foot on the fence, these guys in dark suits come out of silos that are hidden in the grass, you know,

and deploy invisible tasers. That's that's remarkable and gone forever, isn't it, Rich? I mean, there's there's no way that we, I mean, how much of this culture that you're describing that seems so distinctly American is now absolutely impossible to achieve today? Yeah, well, that's one of the reasons it's such a fascinating period is because there's incredible intimacy. At the same time, you really have the modern America

as we know it rising through this. And, you know, the Erie Canal, which greatly inspired Lincoln when it was built, it was certainly the biggest canal in the country. It might have been the biggest canal in the world. I'm not sure. But there was such a can-do spirit. So New York's like, build this enormous public works project. And it's so big, we don't have enough engineers, right? So they just hire lawyers. And their lawyer's like, okay, we're going to learn how to do this and we're going to do it. And they did.

And you just can't imagine anything like that happening today. And one of the things that I think would be most astonishing to Lincoln, who had a very favorable view of government, much different kind of government in the mid-19th century, but one of the things that astonished him was we do so much to put obstacles in the way of the development of the country. You try to build something big now, you get all the lawsuits,

you get the pervasive environmental review, and you end up with a Keystone pipeline, which is something that will be debated, I guess, forever, and never built. And that just would have been so anathema. I know, it's stunning. The other day I read in our paper that they're building a pipe. They want to build a pipeline between North Dakota, which is while they're getting all this extraordinary amount of resources, they're blowing

off 25, 30 billion barrels a day just because there's no place for it to go. They want to build a pipeline to bring natural gas from North Dakota into Minnesota. And my first thing upon reading the story was thinking, who is going to block it? You naturally assume that somebody looks at this and says, we can't have this pipeline. Because A, it means that people will want to use more energy, and that's bad because polar bears will drown. And B, we just simply can't because we don't want to set a precedence

where they can just build a pipeline willy-nilly wherever they want. Well, we've seen that. We've seen that. I mean that is in fact a dirty little secret. If you ask Peter Orszag, who used to be the Obama budget director, what happened to the shovel-ready projects after the – with the great stimulus failure at the beginning of the Obama administration, the truth is what happened was those projects were shovel-ready. They just weren't – they weren't more recently permitted. And what stopped a lot of those big building projects were environmental concerns. And you can see that now in our deployment of the number of people with the word, with, with the word engineer in their job title, it has gone from mechanical

engineer and building engineer to sort of financial engineer, virtual engineer, computer engineers. I mean, that's why we have a whole bunch of people sitting – were in the 90s and the early part of the century sitting in banks coming up with new ways to engineer things financially. It's much easier to engineer a virtual world than it is to engineer physical world because nobody stops you. And development was – Lincoln supported it with such a passion because where he grew up, you had subsistence agriculture. And if you didn't live near a waterway, you couldn't get your goods

anywhere. There's just no way to get them over land and efficient, cost effective manner. So you might be able to float them down the Mississippi, literally in a raft you might make. And his dad did this a couple of times and you get them down to New Orleans, and then you've got to walk back. His dad literally walked back to Indiana a couple times, according to various accounts. So Lincoln, he loves the steamboats. He loves the canals and the railways. Because as soon as the railroad touches an area in the hinterland, then the market comes. Then you can buy the manufactured goods from the east, the clothes from the east that your wife and daughters might want. You can't buy them without cash. How are you going to get cash? Well, then you have to grow goods for the market. So it

utterly changes everything. And Lincoln, he supported, obviously, government subsidies for these things because we didn't have financial markets that were sophisticated. We didn't have angel investors. You didn't have big industrialists. So this is a case where you had government support for something, but that support led to a more vibrant market, and that was the ultimate end that Lincoln was seeking. And it just drives me crazy that Obama has done so much to associate himself with Lincoln, apparently successfully.

I had this experience just yesterday where my wife and I, you know, we're elitists. We live in a doorman building in Manhattan. And I gave one of the doormen my book. And he's a great guy. He's an immigrant from Ireland. Just had a child. Real hardworking and basically conservative instincts. Whenever he pops off about something politically, he's like, oh, that's great.

That's great. You have a book. Oh, you wrote a book about something politically. He's like, oh, that's great, that's great, you have a book. Oh, you wrote a book about Lincoln? I thought you were a Republican. No! Yes, yes. No! Prayer to God. And that's where we are. And yesterday, of course, MSNBC

identified George Wallace as a Republican. Right. So, alright, that's the subtitle of your book, how we can do it again. All right. I mean, obviously, we can't start splitting rails. But first of all, I mean, there does seem to be a cultural problem, a person with Abraham Lincoln's background. something strange about a country that since 1988 has only had ivy league elite uh very very privileged um extremely cosseted and pampered um men mostly uh i mean or one female came close hillary clinton be serious contenders for the presidency,

all of whom came from a handful of schools, all of whom came from very pampered backgrounds. A guy from the last person who came really from the outside of the system was Ronald Reagan. Yeah. I mean, how do we... That seems like a very deep cultural problem. Yeah, I mean, that do we – that seems like a very deep cultural problem. Yeah, I mean, that's a great point.

We just – we don't really have working class politicians anymore. You know, probably the most working class major politician we've had recently is Sarah Palin. And the fact – kind of the working class aspects of her were held up for contempt and derision, you know? Right. So, and this is, again, not exactly into this question of our politics, but more broadly as a society where you have an elite that kind of feeds on itself. College educated people marry other college educated people. College educated people have figured out the kind of basic bourgeois cultural norms are very good for you and help you. And the breakdown of marriage, kind of breakdown of work ethic,

all the things that Charles Murray wrote about and coming apart. And if those trends continue, I just fear we're going to get a class society of the sort we've never really had in this country and shouldn't have so long as we're going to be an America worthy of the name. So it's not inequality exactly. That's perhaps part of it, but it's obviously that's inevitable as well in a free society. It's mobility and how you get people up. And by that metric, we're not doing so well, and it's possibly getting worse.

But I want to follow up a little bit. Lincoln goes to the White House and he puts mcseward a very powerful figure and seward kind of you know the first couple months whatever it is he thinks things to himself well clearly i'll be the brains of the outfit we have got this rube here i don't even know if he knows how to tie a tie and he quick quick very quickly sizes up lincoln as Lincoln as the master that he was, probably the greatest president we had. And that says a lot about Seward, but it also says maybe a lot about the time that in America at that time was not nearly as class bound and ossified and snobbish as America. And that is inconceivable now that I just think That is inconceivable now.

I just think that's inconceivable now, it seems to me. Yeah, but we've got to be a little careful here, Rob, because we don't want to fall too much into the kind of myth of Lincoln as a common man. Because one, he was exceptional in his abilities, and two, he always sought to be respectable, one of the quote-unquote nicer sorts. No one called him Abe in his presence, according to historians. It was Mr. Lincoln, because he had this dignity to him. And even though where he grew up, everyone was basically a Jacksonian Democrat. And the Jacksonian Democrats,

they celebrated that rural way of life. They celebrated naturalness and natural passions. And Andrew Jackson, this volcanic man who didn't control his temper, but unloosed it in righteous ways. The Whigs had a totally different cultural ideal, which was self-discipline and self-improvement. And that was Lincoln to the core. So maybe Seward would have looked at him as a rube, but Lincoln didn't look at himself as a rube, didn't act like a rube, didn't want to be a rube, and had a formidable dignity and self-confidence to him. Fair enough, but he wasn't a fancy-pants East Coaster. Right, but he did send his kid to Harvard, so it all started there.

He had one year of schooling, and then he sends his kid to Harvard. All right, well, okay, all right, well, fair enough. So the cultural changes aside, how do we do it again? Well, I think there are three basics, and how you fill them in with various policy details is a huge question. But one is just economic dynamism. What do we do to create a vibrant market? And I think conservatives have pretty good answers on that. What do we do to improve our education system, which is just at the bottom of so many problems. And we've spent, you know, we spend two or three times the amount of money that we did in the 70s getting worse

results. I think the whole thing needs, the whole system needs to be rethought. It's handed down from the industrial era and carries all those assumptions. And it's not working. And then finally, this comes back to the cultural stuff. I think conservatives in particular, we talk about liberty a lot, understandably and appropriately so, but we also need to be concerned with order and discipline because you can have all the freedom in the world and if you have the sort of social breakdown we have, people aren't going to be able to take advantage of it, and you're going to inevitably end up with a big welfare state because people aren't going to be self-sustaining and self-sufficient. So I think those are the three prongs of the agenda, and I think it behooves conservatives to kind of fill those

prongs in with policy details and sell everything in terms of opportunity and aspiration. Because we've seen if you don't have that thrust in your program, it doesn't work out very well, as we saw with Mitt Romney. If you're seen as looking down on the bottom half who aren't making it as well as the others, that's just not going to work in this country. So grow more Lincolns. We've got to grow more Lincolns.

Well, if we do find more Lincolns like that, we'd best make sure that they have more telegenic qualities than the original. Because in this era, a gawky guy with a godface who looks as Lincoln did is simply not going to be taken seriously once

Colbert and Stewart decide that he's an object of derision. Or Letterman, for that matter. Yeah, he communicated through his words. And the best writer we've had as president, except for perhaps Thomas Jefferson, I guess you can have that argument, but soaked in the Bible, soaked in Shakespeare, an amateur poet who cared so much about the music of the words. And then when you wed that to his purpose of going back to the founding and returning to those ideals, that's when you get these majestic speeches that obviously echo down through all time.

But we don't need more Lincolns, though. Lincolns come around once every 100 years or so. You just need a party that speaks in a Lincolnian key and hits Lincolnian notes. It doesn't have to be Lincoln. It can be Marco Rubio. It can be Paul Ryan. It can be Bobby Jindal. But opportunity and aspiration have to be the prism through which we're arguing about everything

and presenting our program. Just the debt is not enough. I just think the party has been much too debt obsessive, not jobs and opportunity obsessive. I audibly groaned there when you talked about what a great writer Lincoln was. The idea that Lincoln himself could possibly be a better writer than the man who sits in the White House

now and gave us that magisterial disquisition on identity, which was the best thing written by him or Bill Ayers or anybody else. I mean, it's... We gotta run, and we gotta thank you, Rich, By him or Bill Ayers or anybody else. I mean, it's... Well, we don't know. We got to run, and we got to thank you, Rich, and we look forward to the next cogitation on the president.

Remember, deadlines are real. No, they're not real. Come on. I got mine in. You have a secret calendar. Just go tell us what that secret calendar is. All right, see you in Norway. Thank you for being on the podcast. Thanks, Rich.

All right. Thanks, gentlemen. Rob, I have to ask you, are you still there? I'm still here, yeah. Now I'm not going to wait for the Audible. I'm going to Amazon the book right now. And I think I'll probably see him in August, so he'll sign it there. I do want to sign a copy. And I know enough not to say

to people who write books, oh, I can't wait to read it. Send me a copy. Oh, no, never say that. You mean you're actually going to schlep the printed version to Oslo? Oh, maybe he'll sell them on the boat. I don't know. I bet that he would. Or just, this is what I love my Kindle, but I would like for there

to be a space where authors could just, this is what I, I love my Kindle, but I would like for there to be a space where authors could just with their finger, you know, just draw a little squiggle that indicates that. But I'm not a big autographed book. The only autographed book I have that really means anything to me is one by Will Eisner, who was a great cartoonist. He did a, well, actually, remember that horrible movie,

The Spirit? It was based on the marvelous work of Will Eisner. And I had somebody who knew him sign a bunch of his works for me. And that means more than anything because it's not just some guy who looks up from you at the table at Barnes & Noble and scribbles something and then hands you to the next one. But anyway, so we have to go. The reason I kept you on here is it was rich a guest or a co-host or some peculiar hybrid of the two that we've never seen before. I think it was a peculiar hybrid because we didn't have anybody else,

but it's kind of fun to have him on, and I know we talked about the book and only about Prism, but that was kind of fun. Yeah, absolutely, and there's so much more to go. I mean, if Snowden starts spilling his guts in China, and the more that comes out about this fellow from his embellished military record, it's always an embellished military record with some of these guys. They can't just...

I mean, if I was four years in the Army and that's it, I would not feel compelled to say I tried out for Special Forces and broke both my legs. He doesn't look like that guy. He does not look like a Special Forces guy. No. I mean, all due respect to him, I don't think he looks like he was ever in the Special Forces.

So there's more to come. Just let it not take our eye away from the other things that are happening in D.C. Interesting times. Interesting. Yes. So off I go, off you go. We'll see everybody in the chat room

and the Ricochet comments down the road. And thanks for listening to the podcast. This is, as ever, the Ricochet podcast brought to you by audible.com. Go there, claim your free 30 day trial, get a book and start your summer reading with any of the suggestions that we've made over the last few weeks. Thanks, Rob. We'll see you later, folks. James, see you soon. I'm just an average man with an average life. I work from 9 to 5. Hell, I pay the price. All I want is to be left alone in my average home. But why do I always feel like I'm in the twilight zone? And I always feel like somebody's watching me. Tell me, is it just a dream?

When I come home at night, I break the door real tight. People call me on the phone I'm trying to avoid But can the people on TV see me Or am I just paranoid When I'm in the shower I'm afraid to wash my hair Cause I might open my eyes

And find someone standing there People say I'm crazy Just a little untouched But maybe showers remind me, I'm psyched for a month That's why I always feel like somebody's watching me And I have no privacy I always feel like somebody's watching me Who's playing tricks on me

Ricochet. Join the conversation. I don't know anymore Are the neighbors watching me? Well, it's the mailman watching me And I don't feel safe anymore. Oh, what a mess. I wonder who's watching me now. Who?

The IRS. I always feel like somebody's watching me. And I have no privacy. I always feel like somebody's watching me.