The Ricochet Podcast - Not In Kansas Any More

Episode Date: March 27, 2014

This week on the podcast, we put Putin in his place, D.C. McAllister on that Charlotte mayor and the writer we’d all like to write like. Then, dean of all pundits Charles Krauthammer stops by to discuss his new book “Things That Matter: Three Decades of Passions, Pastimes and Politics” (Audible version available here). It’s a typically elucidating conversation with Dr. K well worth listening to. Source

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Well, I'm not a crook. I'll never tell a lie. But I am not a bully. I'm the king of the world! a bully. Mr. Gorbachev, tear down this wall. It's the Ricochet Podcast with Peter Robinson and I'm James Lilacs. Rob Long is off directing this week, which means he's got a writing crop in one hand and a megaphone in the other. Sitting in, Troy Sinek. Our guests, Ricochet's own D.C. McAllister and Dr. Charles Krauthammer.

Let's have ourselves a podcast. There you go again. audiblepodcast.com slash ricochet and get a free audio book and a 30-day trial. And the podcast is also brought to you by Encounter Books. Our featured title this week is Dancing with the Devil, 30 Years of Recollections of Democratic Inaugural Balls. No, it's Dancing with the Devil, The Perils of Engaging Rogue Regimes by Michael Rubin. We'll be talking about this a little bit later in the show. But in the meantime, if you want to get this book or any Encounter book for a mere 15% off the list price, what do I mean mere? A lot of 15%.

Go to Encounter Books and use the coupon code Ricochet at your checkout. And of course, the podcast is brought to you by Ricochet.com as well. And this would be the spot where Rob jumps in to get you to hand over money to him. But Rob isn't here. We're lucky that Troy is sitting in. Troy, of course, eventually will be robbing

Rob out and just pushing him out of the picture entirely because he's so good as a co-host. I won't get to that down the road. fellow that I'm going to take a little of this thunder and remind you the new ricochet, the brand new 2.0, the most reflexive responsive thing you've ever seen in the world of the internet is but $5 a month. Or if you want to pop for 39 95, you get the whole year in one fell swoop. There's also a matcher and a Reagan tier to which you subscribe it at that. I'm going to hand it over to Peter for an explanation of those ideas.

Peter, the Thatcher and Reagan tiers permit you, we give you the privilege of paying extra. $39.95 a year gets you a regular membership. For $99.95 a year, you may purchase a Margaret Thatcher membership. And for $499.95 a year, you may purchase a Reagan membership. Why would you do so? You would do so because you'll get a tote bag and a couple of thank you notes. And I have decided that from this point on, I am going to send a signed copy of my speechwriter's memoir of the Reagan White House, How Ronald Reagan Changed My Life. I will send a signed copy in gratitude of or another, important. That the conversation among

conservatives and this community that is developing online at Ricochet is important. And I am delighted, really delighted. The other reason you do it is just to boost morale around this place. The transition to Ricochet 2.0 has been filled with bugs and bumps, as anyone who has looked at the site knows. And we, in particular, Blue Yeti, have been working 20 hours a day to correct bugs, respond to comments. We've been reading your gripes and grumbles and reading them over and over. And it just is wonderful to know that two people just in the last couple of days have indeed signed up at the Thatcher level. And one person has already bought a Reagan level membership.

Now, Blue Yeti tells me that we really ought not to announce their names. For all we know, they wish to remain anonymous about this. There are some people who have supported Ricochet who want to remain anonymous. So I would simply like to say thanks to for purchasing a Thatcher membership and also for a Thatcher membership and a special word of thanks to for purchasing a Reagan membership. And if between now and the next podcast, we hear from all three that we're free to mention their names, we will. But in the meantime, thanks. It really does mean a lot.

It would be really bad if those actually were their names. Just out of them to everybody. Well, listen here, guys. That's great. That's wonderful. A Reagan tier, a Thatcher tier. But why don't we add a Putin tier? Because as we understand it now from the left, Putin is the new hero of the right. We all love him. Every single person in the GOP is just a flush with admiration for Putin. Troy, take it away. What's wrong with this attack and do you think it's going to stick? The reason they seem to keep going after this is because conservatives note from time to time this very sort of theatrical masculinity that Vladimir Putin seems to portray. He's always with the tiger recovering some antiquity from the bottom of the Black Sea and we inevitably make the contrast with President Obama on his bicycle with the tassels on the handlebars and the mom jeans. That is not to say that thus commands an affection for

what Vladimir Putin is. That's not really the issue on the right. The issue on the right is that we would be very grateful to have a president who displayed that kind of resolve. It's just the aesthetic contrast. But this is the easy out if you're in the media. This is the way to discuss this issue without having to really seriously breach any of the substance of it. And that's all they're doing. Is it going to stick? No, because I think this is a conversation that liberals have with themselves. But it's a contrast.

That's what gets under people's skin is because they see the aesthetics of the president's weaknesses as a metaphor for the policy. I don't think this would be an issue if they felt that we were very – you were really forcefully responding to the Russians. No, I mean you have a president who I think most people would suspect that when the wife is out of town and in China is still not going to have a cigarette in the house. He's still going to go to the garage and make sure the door is open. The other question is though is that we have the Pauls.

Ron Paul, the elder, has become a bit known recently, shall we say, Peter, for the ties – not the ties but perhaps the affinity demonstrated toward the Russian position. It's bizarre. It's a strange thing. I don't see this creeping into the Republican foreign policy establishment much, but there may be a point at which Rand Paul has to decisively break with the ideas that his fathers are proposing. Or do you think that's irrelevant too because Rand Paul is never going to be president? Well, I'd like to hear what Troy has to say because Troy actually put up a post about that very subject, Putin, the Pauls, and the direction of the GOP's foreign policy. I know he did. And I was giving him the

opportunity to say something about it. He didn't. You whiffed it. Sorry, Troy. I'm passing it along. You don't understand. Troy is not as attuned to your subtle segues as are Rob and I. And since Rob is out off directing Sullivan and Sons, we have to be very blunt with Troy and say, Troy, this is the moment when you're supposed to talk about it. Yeah, okay. Let me try that again. Troy Sinek, you wrote post, please elucidate. There we go. Well, you know, I actually wrote this response and I didn't get the chance to follow up on all the comments because Ricochet 2.0 sometimes takes us away from the conversations, takes me away anyway because they're editorial responsibilities to be tended to.

But there are a few people in the comments who I think misinterpreted what I was trying to say here. John Yoo put up a post shortly before mine taking Rand Paul to task for the speech that he gave at Berkeley going after the NSA and included a couple of criticisms of Senator Paul that members in the comments said were probably not quite fair, that they seemed more like characterizations of Ron Paul's position than Rand Paul's. And the reason that I wrote my post was to underscore the fact that I think that's a legitimate criticism. I think a lot of times there's a conflation of Rand Paul and Ron Paul's positions, which is unfair to Rand Paul but for which he is partially responsible because Rand Paul has been consistently somewhat vague when it comes to foreign policy. This is a guy who has not been on the national stage for that long. So these areas are going to remain hazy until he tells us where he's at. And he's given a couple of major speeches on foreign policy, which for the most part are distinctive when you read through them for a certain kind of vagueness.

It's hard to figure out where he is based on that, which leads you, as I said in the piece, to one of two conclusions, which is that he hasn't perhaps quite figured out these issues yet. Totally understandable. A guy who's been in federal office for just a handful of years, you don't expect him to have the whole thing mapped out necessarily or that it's something of a fig leaf for the fact that he realizes that his positions, if they are fairly close to his father's, could be unpalatable to a republican electorate, particularly one that is considering – could be considering in a few years the prospect of elevating him to the presidency. I wrote this mainly to say that I think there's a lot of us out there who would just like to know, who feel like maybe in the last decade we did go too far in one direction on foreign policy. But that doesn't mean that we want to correct all the way back to the Ron Paul position.

I am perfectly comfortable with where Rand Paul is right now, having him in the United States Senate for as long as he wants to be there. But the presidency is different. You only get one at a time and it's for a long period of time and it's primarily a foreign policy job, which we always forget. Trevor Burrus, Jr.: Yeah. I want a realist who knows that engagement with the rest of the world is an inevitability regardless of the ideas that you bring into it.

Barack Obama has found out very poorly for five years how his ideas contrast with reality. I don't want somebody who's – you're right. We're not going to go the other way. I, however, and I think by the time we roll around to the presidential election, would want somebody who at least believes that it's important for us to have a navy sufficient to meet our global obligations. Yes. We want to become a regional superpower as the president so inaccurately described Russia. Peter, what do you think?

Yeah, I would – I want to go back to Troy. Troy, John Yoo's original post said – the headline was Rand Paul's speech at Berkeley not brave. And the point was to go to Berkeley, California and inveigh against the NSA and the spying functions of the United States government is roughly like going to Vegas and say that you're in favor of legal gambling, right? But that's valid, isn't it? Only Nixon can go to Whittier, California. Exactly. I think it is valid. As a few people pointed out on that post though, I don't think that bravery was the sum total.

I don't think that the major calculation for Rand Paul was I'm going to look defiant and like a statesman in this moment. I think it was a way – it was a wedge. It was a way to start a conversation with a group of people that he otherwise might not have had common ground with. So I think John's point is valid. I just don't know that it's – I don't know that it's an attack on the reason that Rand Paul did it. Okay. Well, the person Rand Paul was defying was not the liberals of Berkeley. He was cozying up to the liberals of Berkeley. He was defying Chris Christie and Ted Cruz. Isn't that right? If he's brave, it's because he's starting a fight within us.

I think that's right. I think that's right. Ted Cruz, Chris Christie and Marco Rubio, who has – those are the ones that – I mean I think Cruz actually a little bit less so. I mean Christie and Paul have already kind of had these verbal skirmishes over foreign policy. Again, sort of remarkable for how – they operate on very vague terms. I mean you know that they don't like each other's positions but they've never gotten into a deep articulation of the differences between them and Rubio seems to be staking out a fairly aggressive position on foreign policy too. And then Ted Cruz I think

within the last couple of weeks around CPAC indicated that he disagreed with Paul on foreign policy. So yeah, these are – and you know what? These things are healthy. I mean this is the conversation. This is kind of the point of the post. This is the conversation we should be having for the next couple of years because if you think about it, after the Bush administration ended, we went through one of these identity crises that parties go through when they get battered that way. We've kind of answered a lot of the questions about who we are in terms of domestic policy, right? I mean there are still significant fights, no question. But we are in a different place than we were five years ago. There is no real

constituency in the – iron this out yet. We don't know where we're at and there is a spectrum that runs all the way from Ron Paul at the one end to John McCain on the other. And this is what this debate needs to be about the next couple of years is finding out where the various people who could be standing for president in 2016 are going to fall along that spectrum. And that's why I think this is a good thing. We just need to see it played out over the next couple of years. Got it. Well, if you want to talk bravery, bravery might be defined these days as a journalist in a newsroom who reports on corruption and notes that it's a Democrat and actually attaches a D somewhere up in the story. Maybe even the first five graphs, which would be unusual. I mean you've got a case of corruption in North Carolina that's extraordinary.

You've got one in California that's extraordinary. And while we could ask Peter about the case in California, it would be great to go to somebody who actually has some North Carolina, shall we say, Charlotte experience to talk about the latter. And that brings in D.C. McAllister, who of course is a graduate of the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, and a famed Ricochet writer, editor, slash all-around great person at the site. He's been a reporter for the

Orlando Sentinel Lake, I'm sorry, the Orlando Sentinel Lake Sentinel, United Press International, and the Aiken Standard. She's also worked in TV news as an associate producer at WFTV Orlando. And for the past few years, she's been an editor and writer in various industries, from education to business to science. And we welcome her back to this, the Ricochet Podcast. Hey, Denise.

Hey, how are you? We're fine. We were talking about this Democratic mayor arrested on corruption charges who could have thought it was going to happen. Why is this significant, I think you asked, on a national level? It's significant, I think, with its application to the Senate race and its impact on the Kay Hagan re-election campaign. Not that it will have a direct impact as far as issues go, and we're still far out from the election, but it could be a vote suppressor, especially in Charlotte, which has a high Democratic turnout.

Denise, Patrick Cannon, right, was the name of the mayor who resigned within the day, basically, once he was gone. And he's relatively new. He'd been there for, what, about six months? Yeah, five or five. Yes. Okay. Very new. Well, my question for you is, it six months? Yeah, five or five. Yes. Okay.

Not very new. My question for you is – it might have been hard to tell in that knew was so venal and so dumb that it would have come as no surprise whatsoever in Los Angeles. In fact, it would have been baked into the cake. It would have been a one-day story. Was there a perception already that Cannon was maybe a guy that you couldn't trust in this position or was this a shock for people in Charlotte? This was a shock to the skeptical minded, of course, of any Democrat in power. It wasn't a shock, but to, to most people, I that's mean, but to most people,

it was a shock because he was in the city council for years and he's actually friends with our governor, our Republican governor, Pat McCrory, who was mayor of Charlotte for many years, a very successful mayor. And Cannon was in the city council when he was mayor, and they knew each other. I think they were friends even. And McCrory has been quite upset and vocal about this and very surprised. So yes, I think it's been quite shocking to the community. The Senate race in North Carolina, what are the implications for that? Hi, Denise, it's Peter here.

Hi, Peter. Yes, this is a hotly contested race. The primary is getting very heated. And as you know, North Carolina is key in us getting back the Senate. So the defeat of Kay Hagan is very significant. And she came in in the 2008 election on the coattails of Barack Obama. So is she a woman of substance or did she just ride his wave and will she be easily defeated? This is one of the questions. We're hoping she'll be easily defeated. And so this kind of thing can be, like I said, a vote suppressor for her. She wasn't directly related or in did a lot with Patrick Cannon. But, you know, with the with the D in front of your name or behind your name, you know, she is going to be influenced by people maybe not being very motivated to turn out for a midterm election. And that can be significant for her. And like I said, Charlotte is a blue city and

Democrats are very reliant on the Triangle area and Charlotte to get the vote out. So that's what I think could be the impact. It could just be a vote suppressor. On the Republican side, are you having a fight between the Tea Party and the establishment? Oh, yes. That pattern is shaping up in North Carolina as well. Whose side are you having a fight between the Tea Party and the establishment? Oh, yes. That pattern is shaping up in North Carolina as well. Whose side are you on? How's that going? I am on the side of, I don't want to say Tea Party.

I really like Greg Brannon and his stance and his positions on things. I want to say up front, I'm going to support whoever our candidate is. Whoever comes out of the primary, he's my guy. So I'm not going to do any of this. Well, if my guy doesn't get in, I'm not turning out. I think this election is too important to play that game. We need to support a Republican candidate, whoever it is. I do want Greg Brandon to win.

I like his ideas. The problem is that you have three or four very conservative candidates opposing Tillis, so you're going to have a split of the vote, especially with Mark Harris. He's a Baptist. He's been supported by Huckabee in our race, and he's splitting the vote with Brannon. So Denise, you've got – Tom Tillis, who you just mentioned, who I believe is the speaker of the statehouse. Yes. He is sort of understood to be the establishment candidate. And then Brannon seems to be the most prominent of the Tea Party candidates.

What are the major differences between them? I mean are there issues where there are real severe cleavages between the two? The big one, the driving wedge between the two right now is just Obamacare. Tillis came out and said Obamacare is a good idea that just doesn't work, practically speaking. And that rubbed a lot of people the wrong way, especially when the opposition to Kay Hagan is Obamacare. I mean, people in North Carolina are really running hard on the Obamacare issue. And because Kay Hagan came out like 20 times saying, you won't lose your insurance. You can keep your doctor. She just parroted that over and over again.

We're seeing it in ads. Well, then you have someone like Tillis who came out and said, well, I'm for Obamacare. Yeah, it's great. I'm not for it. But yeah, it's a good idea. But, you know, we just can't really work it. He hasn't come and supported Burr's repeal agenda. You know, not that that's a great one, but he hasn't really done a lot to get it repealed or to bring up alternatives. Whereas Brandon is a, let's get this thing out of here, repeal it guy.

Denise, could I, Peter here, could I take you from mere pesky matters of the state of the American Republic to matters of genuine importance? You put up a post to which people responded wildly with great – it was just fascinating in which you asked Ricochet members what writer they most wished they could write like. Most depressing post I encountered yesterday. I am not Cory Doctorow, all right? I am not Cory Doctorow. So then I took some of my latest novel, which is all 40s, slangy, hard-boiled, present tense, zippy stuff and dumped it in there. I'm L. Frank Baum. I'm trying to write like Raymond Chandler and I'm L. Frank Baum.

Allegories of monetary policy. No, I'm sorry. No, it was a great post. It was. So what's the answer for you dc um yeah i think there were two posts of the mine was the original who would you like to be and then someone brought in and brought that um algorithm and that was an interesting um yeah i got many different writers when i put my stuff in on that one um what did you ask me i'm sorry peter no for you for you personally when you were when you were let's say when you whencence, maybe in college, when you're really falling in love with the English language, what writers did you wish you could write like? Whom did you try to copy? Well, when I was really young, I loved J.R.R. Tolkien.

And it wasn't really his style, though, that I wanted to emulate. It was his imagination. And I think I would go with that with C.S. Lewis as well. In college, it was a little more refined. I was going for those romantic poets. Wordsworth? Yeah, Wordsworth, you know, and Coleridge, just all these poets that I could never emulate if I even tried. I'm not a poet. But later, C.S. Lewis came more in because I really do like, John Gabriel made this comment that he's theological, he's social.

You know, he brings in a wide variety of thought and creativity to his writings. And I enjoy that as someone who studied at seminary and who also loves politics. But I also love the arts. I like that diversity and bring that to the writing. But I wrote in my post when it comes to actual style, actual writing, I really enjoy E.B. White. And it's not because of my journalism classes in college with E.B. White and Strunk and White.

It's Charlotte's Web, which I think is a great American novel. And just the style and the simplicity. Hemingway also has that style that I enjoy. I'm wondering if anybody in Charlotte has used the term Charlotte's Web when describing the corruption charges. Is that possible? Probably. I'll have to do that. I'll have to do it.

If they involve the symphony, perhaps, then Trumpet of the Swan would be next. That's another E.B. White book. He's known for that, less so Charlotte's Web and, of course, the elements of style which make everybody feel guilty because they're always violating them every other time they turn around. So you have to read the thing I suppose. But the interesting thing about E.B. White is that he left New York and he went I believe to go live in the country somewhere but is still regarded as sort of a – Up in Maine.

Oh, okay. So he left New York but is still regarded somehow as encapsulating a quintessential New York attitude of a particular time, probably because of his work from The New Yorker. And if you're curious about that, actually, if you go to audible.com slash podcast, Ricochet, you will find a collection of E.B. White in which there is not just him but other voices of The New Yorker. And if you go through – the book is called Wonderful Town, by the way, and it's yours for free for a 30-day trial. And yes, Denise, we're using your time for the ad because we've got to get it in before Krauthammer because you're part of the family and there's no reason that we can't embrace you in this, the necessary ad. The book that I'm talking about, The Wonderful Town, New York Stories from the New Yorker, get this, guys. Tell me if you don't think these sound like absolutely typical titles by these authors. From Woody Allen, The Whore of Mensa, which I seem to remember.

From John Cheever, The 548. Because, you know, a suburban guy is going out somewhere to get drunk and commit infidelity. From Hortense Kalischer, In Greenwich, There Are Many Traveled Walks. Busts me up. And let's's see what else do we have here symbols and signs by nabokov arrangement in black and white by dorothy parker from from isaac beckshida singer the cafeteria and of course from uh eb white the second tree from the corner which just sounds like a perfect of that era style of new york story anyway the the New Yorker magazine, which I still read and still love, you will find some of its best stories read to you by the cultured voices of people who know New York well. And you can go there and get it free, Ricochet, or the, sorry, audiblepodcast.com slash Ricochet.

Now, I wanted to write like, well, not Thurber, but S.J. Perlman, Woody Allen, Fran Lebowitz, and Anthony Burgess. So mashing all of those together. And Burgess, of course, wanted to – I think you've succeeded, to tell you the truth. I think you've done it. Yeah, I was going to say. You're that far off the mark, James.

Burgess wanted to write – Burgess was channeling James Joyce at the same time in the tumble of wordplay that you got from both of them. And the point at which you get your own voice, you refine your own voice out of the raw oars that you've been using in college is a great moment if you get around there. The great thing about Ricochet, of course, is you find all these individual voices like John, like DC, like Peter, like Troy. It's just it's a marvelous place to be. But now I have to ask here, which one of you, maybe Denise, would like to note that Mr. Krauthammer's books can also be found on Audible?

Yes. Go for it, Denise. They can. Yes, you're receiving instruction in radio announcing from the greatest. Go ahead. Oh, I never did well at that. I was always in the producing. I was in the back writing.

So I'll leave that to you, James, because you have the voice for it. I would rather hear you talk about this book. Things I will say, we should note the title. Things that matter. Things that matter. I do know that. It's a compilation of Dr. Krauthammer's essays over the years, which, you know, this is really, this is the acid test of a columnist, because you think – it's such an ephemeral medium that if somebody – George Will does these as well.

If you can anthologize them and they stand up over time, that is really – that's a remarkable accomplishment for a columnist because the shelf life on a lot of these things is 24, 48 hours. It is a fantastic book. I have a copy of it. So everybody should go on to Audible and get Things That Matter from Charles Krauthammer. He's got a ready-made sequel, doesn't he? Things That Don't Count a Wit. And I would read it. Who wouldn't? Who would not want to hear Charles Krauthammer telling us all the things that really don't matter at all. Well, let's see.

DC, one more thing. When you look at Ricochet 2.0, how do you – I'm not asking you to give it a thumbs up or a thumbs down. Where do you see its – which strengths are you looking forward to exploiting? Let's put it that way. I enjoy the look of the site. Definitely, it's slicker and the design and how you have the front page is just beautiful. I do enjoy the look of it. And I understand it's going to take a while to get all the bugs worked out of it. So there's patience as far as that goes. I enjoy posting in the platform of posting. That's nice. And the image uploading, the conversations and links of conversations

is also a nice added feature that you're able to say more in our comments. Now that we've worked out all that nesting thing that everyone was upset about. And so I do enjoy that. The member side as well, just it's working faster and rolling faster. And people, I think once they have the comfortability back, it will just take off. Absolutely. The one thing we have to remember, and maybe people forget, that Ricochet is not just a news website. It is a community. And so you've changed,

you've rearranged the furniture in the home and people need to get used to the new setting of the home, but we're still in the home. The home has not changed. Just the furniture has been rearranged and we just need to get used to it. And that's another thing I think you meant to say that you really appreciate is the crack editorial support. Absolutely. Virtual editorial. Okay. Just be clear about that.

No, and I do love that you're editing things before they go on. I appreciate that. As an editor, I appreciate that. As a writer, I appreciate that. Well, yeah, you're right about it being the same community. It's like coming home from college and mom and dad have changed all the decor in the house. And they're dressing a little hipper themselves. But they're still mom and dad and it's still the house.

And when you talk about bugs that people aren't seeing, yes, you want to talk bugs. Think the last reel of the 50 science fiction movie Them. And that's the sort of thing. The fact that the site has actually been up and working at all is extraordinary. So, yes, I look forward to where it goes from here. And it's already feeling familiar, which I like an awful lot. And the other thing, when you mention community, you can put out a post about who you'd like to write about, write like, or which obscure movie do you think should have a little bit more attention? And all of a sudden you have 565 posts, replies, which you wouldn't have in the old days.

A depressing thing about that though was seeing the number of people who believe that Buckaroo Banzai is an obscure movie. There was a lot of support for Buckaroo Banzai. Do you have a screed that you'd like to deliver, James? This feels like it's been marinating. Well, it's just, it's one of the greatest movies in the history of the medium, period. And the fact that we never even got

to see the sequel where they take on the World Crime League. I mean, it's the only movie which delights you from start to finish and gives you endless catchphrases which 30 years later you find yourself rummaging through something in the house and somebody says something stupid on the talk radio you're listening to and you turn and say laugh for a while you can the monkey boy and you realize you know i haven't seen the movie in nine years and i'm quoting dr lizardo and then you you go back and you watch it and you realize that the end credits consist of nothing but the characters walking

back and forth in an empty concrete riverbed in Los Angeles. And it's the most inspirational thing you've ever seen. It's an incredible movie. And for anybody to think that it's obscure or underappreciated just pained me. But that's again the great thing. That's what we

love about it. Politics and culture and social and all the rest of that stuff. Well, folks, wherever we go, there we are. DC, you got something you want to send us off with before we move on to Dr. K? No, I just want to encourage everyone about the site, you know, that it is going to take some time to get used to it. And familiarity is such a big part of the community. And that's what we've lost during this transition, but we will get it back. And it is about the people and the ideas and that we do need to stick together as we move forward in these elections, because we have a lot to overcome and that we need to stand for freedom and liberty in this country and not some other ideas that have come down the pike from our progressive brethren.

So we need to stick together and we'll work through the little details. That's so sweet. That's so sweet. Thank you, DC. Kisses. But don't you want to, just before you leave, don't you want to say that we really should go back to a single column? I do like single columns.

You're being used as a pawn right now, Denise. You did not have to do that. Thank you. See, Troy. See, Troy. We're in agreement on this. You're exploiting the young lady. Yes.

So that's all I can say. When Rob goes off to direct an episode of a television show, when he's on a soundstage in Burbank. All bets are off. Exactly. We get to say we want a single column back. All right. Thank you, DC.

Thank you. Bye-bye. Bye. Well, as president of the single column fan club, I'm not exactly sure what's holding us up here precisely. It's only a matter of time. I think there's an absolute consensus actually on this podcast. I think all of us are on that.

It's just easier to read. It's just better organized. And also, what we're going to do is go back to that one column design and also have the ability, like you used to, to pull down and expand a post instead of having to click through. Because one of the things that's important about Ricochet is that it feels like one big conversation. And I think this design, the way it started out, felt a little bit too much like a series of segregated conversations. So we want to get back to the feeling that it had before using all the new bells and whistles we have and hopefully it will be the best of both worlds. But the answer to that question is it's only a matter of time. design of it, the structure, is encouraging them to click excessively in order to gin up count and embedding things that may toss a few shekels in the cup but really can contribute

with the experience. I was at Cult of Mac this morning, I think. And Cult of Mac, which was a legitimate Macintosh news site, all of a sudden has given you the dreaded double blue underline links. You guys know what those are? These are the ones where you scroll over it and it pops up the box. Yeah. I hate those things.

Those are the ones. And they're linked as though there's content remotely connected to the term. So if you scroll, if you see wow, it says sex and you scroll over it, you get a box that tosses up insurance or language classes or something like that. And then you have to hunt around for the tiny little grayed out X in order to dismiss that thing. It is like taking a thumb and grinding it into the eye socket of the viewer. People hate those things and they break faith. And Ricochet hasn't done that.

We haven't broken faith yet. But then again, you know, when you're putting a site together like this and you're trying to make money from it, you're making, there's always a trade-off. You're always making a choice about what you do that enhances your business model that may somewhat, you know, impact the way people feel about it. And then eventually the site feels like you're all sort of struggling and grumbling with it together. I've never gotten that feeling with a ricochet, but some people have gotten that feeling about American foreign policy, particularly, you know, when we seem to cozy up to regimes we ought not to have done. That was the big thing in the 80s, the authoritarian versus totalitarian distinction, the, well, dancing with the devil,

you know, as the term goes, which leads us, of course, if you've been listening carefully to every phoneme I've been saying here, to the Encounter Books spot. As we mentioned, Dancing with the Devil, The Perils of Engaging Rogue Regimes. It's by Michael Rubin, and it is our pick of the week. Couldn't be more timely. Let me read you from the summary. The world has never been as dangerous as it is now. Rogue regimes, governments and groups which issue diplomatic normality, sponsor terrorism and proliferate nuclear weapons, challenge the United States around the globe. The American response of first resort is to talk

and talk with such rogues and the theory that, well, it never hurts to talk to enemies. Seldom is conventional wisdom so wrong because while it's true that sanctions and military force come at high costs, case studies examining the history of American diplomacy with North Korea, Iran, Iraq, Libya, the Taliban in Afghanistan and Pakistan demonstrate that problems with both strategies do not make engagement with rogue regimes a cost-free option either. In fact, rogue regimes have one thing in common. They pretend to be aggrieved in order to put Western diplomats on the defensive. Whether in Pyongyang, Tehran or Islamabad, rogue leaders understand that the West rewards bluster with incentives and that for the State Department, the process of holding talks is often deemed more important than results.

And if I can deviate slightly from the text, yeah. When we used to talk about engaging with rogue regimes back in the Reagan days, it was in the attempt to say, well, we'll deal with these bad guys now to keep the commies out of the hemisphere and then hope – ideally we can hope – move them towards a more civil society later, which sort of was how it turned out. Now it seems to be that the United States is fracturing its backbone, bending over in order to give things to monstrous regimes. The entire process of talking to Iran ought to make your head explode. And if you would like to get some ideas as to why you can argue with people that it's a bad idea, pick up this. Michael Rubin's book, The Dancing with the Devil, The Perils of Engaging Rogue Regimes, can be got for 15% off that list price. Go to encounterbooks.com and use the coupon code RICOCHET at the checkout. We thank EncounterBooks for sponsoring this, the Ricochet podcast. Well, we welcome to the podcast with gratitude Dr. Charles Krofhammer,

whose book is the number one New York Times bestseller, Things That Matter, Three Decades of Passions, Pastimes, and Politics. And I've been reading him since, well, since I read The New Republic, and he wrote for it back when perhaps we were different political folks of the time. Welcome to the podcast, sir. People may not know that you were once a Democrat. And I guess the question is, was it a gradual erosion of your position and leaving of it? Or did you have some spectacular moment where you said, that's it, I'm out of here? Well, you know, in fact, I do write about this in my book, Things That Matter, where I have an autobiographical essay.

It sort of explains my movement from left to right, and the answer is no. There was no epiphany. There was no aha moment. I didn't wake up in the morning, and the clouds parted, and a shaft of light came down, and I heard a voice saying, Thus spake Ronald Reagan. It's rather simple, actually. And that is that I'm open to empirical evidence. I trained as a physician, actually practiced for a while. And I was sort of one of these Scoop Jackson, Cold War liberals,

believed in the Great Society in my 20s, war on poverty. And then in the mid-80s and into the 90s, the social science evidence on the results of the war on poverty started coming in, and it was quite evident that not only was it doing no good, but it was actively undermining very communities. It was meant to help. So once I began to see that as a psychiatrist, as a doctor, you give your patients medicine that starts killing them, you reconsider the therapy. And I began reconsidering. This is Peter Robinson here. More on this. You write in Things That Matter. I'm quoting you now.

The path, this is the path from left to right, the path is well trodden, most famously by Ronald Reagan, himself once a New Deal Democrat, and more recently by a generation of neoconservatives. You mentioned Irving Kristol and Norman Podhoretz. But in saying the path is well trodden, you only provide three names. Iken had a fourth, Charles Krauthammer. Are you surprised at some level that in your generation, many more one-time liberals, particularly New Republic liberals who always believed in a strong national defense, that at the failure of many more to join you in making this movement?

Well, no, I mean, I do see around me, I mean, I'm just thinking of people like Josh Maropchik, Horowitz, Iowitz, other people who are fairly prominent in their writing. Most of the people of my generation, which means college in the 60s and then sort of gradual move, the Abramses

and the others who actually made their move with Ronald Reagan. I think it was quite a wide movement. I mean, that's why people used the word neoconservative, because there were enough of them, people who became conservative later in life, and also carried with them into their conservatism

some sensibility which you might still call residual liberal, in the sense that I have some sympathy for the ideals of the New Deal, things like Social Security and Medicare. And I do think the government has a role to play in safety net, helping the helpless. So there is some residue of that, and that's been a critique of more old-line conservatives that this is sort of a contamination of conservatives and people who are still tainted. But I mean, I do think a great example, of course, is Ronald Reagan, who was a New Deal Democrat.

Right. More on, again, from things that matter. You sum up the Reagan years. You sum up accomplishments. I'm quoting you. Reagan let Volcker's inflation-breaking recession proceed throughout the 1982 election year. He challenged the Soviets to an all-out arms race with which they could not keep up. The final straw was the Reagan Doctrine, which put American arms and money behind a worldwide anti-communist guerrilla campaign that gave the Soviets bleeding wounds on three continents.

Close quote. I felt – you were at the New Republic in those days. I was writing speeches in the Reagan White House. I felt that the country was actually getting someplace. There was a lesson being learned that to encourage economic growth, you did a few things, you cut taxes, you rolled back regulations, that to assert America as a force for good in the world, you did just that, you asserted American force. And now here we are in the administration of Barack Obama, and it is almost as if Ronald Reagan had never been born.

Do you sometimes despair of the ability of the American Republic to get any place, to learn lessons? Well, no, I don't despair, first of all. And as I write in the book, I'm very optimistic about America because it is so unique. It is the only country founded on an idea. There is a sort of a basic, almost providential arrow to American history. You know, the improbable genius of the founding generations. You know, the fact that we needed a Lincoln in the 19th, we got a Lincoln.

FDR and then Reagan in the 20th I mean there is something about American history that is quite astonishing what I do think and I write about this in the book quite a lot because it covers as you say from the early 80s right through till today

I think it's far more cyclical I don't see us heading downwards than what people do when they talk about American decline I think we's far more cyclical. I don't see us heading downwards in what people do when they talk about American decline. I think we are in decline, but it's a world decline by this leadership that we have. There is nothing intrinsic in our condition. In fact, the last chapter of the book is called Decline is a Choice.

It is not a condition. And we are choosing decline under this administration. I don't think this is inevitable. I don't think it's going to continue very long. But I do think this. Barack Obama came to office with the idea that he would be the man to reverse Reaganism. Reaganism was not just eight years.

This was a 30-year ascendancy for his small government, less regulation, strong America ideology. Because when Bill Clinton came into office, when the other guys came into office, and this is how you judge a political

ideological ascendancy, they retained the fundamental elements of Reaganism in the same way that Tony Blair did in Thatcherism. Remember what Clinton said in his 1996 State of the Union. The big government is over, and in that year he signed abolition of welfare. That's really something. That's when you know when the other guys end up acting in the spirit and accepting the premises of your political philosophy,

then you know you've reached that. Obama came to office with the explicit intent of starting a new, however long, decades-long, liberal ascendancy, a return to the 50 years from the New Deal until Reagan. And in fact, he said in the 2008 campaign, Reagan was historically consequential in a way that Bill Clinton was not. And that's what he meant. Ideologically, Clinton was not a liberal. He was sort of a continuation. He was Reaganism-like. And Obama came to office to be the anti-Reagan. That's what he's tried to be. But he's incompetent, so he hasn't really been able

to pull it off. But that's what I think is to be, but he's incompetent, so he hasn't really been able to pull it off. But that's what I think is a raison d'etre politically. You're absolutely right. When I was reading The New Republic back in college in the 80s, the repudiation of Reaganism was the goal of all. And now, if you'd gone back to the 80s and said, hey, in 2014, they're going to have gay marriage, they're going to have state support or state control of the medical system, They're going to have their death grip on education unchallenged.

We'd have been happy and said, oh my gosh, we attained utopia. And yet the left and the progressives are as angry today as they've ever been, if not angrier, and seemingly as dissatisfied with America as they were 30 years ago. Will they ever be satisfied? Will there ever come a point when actually they feel as if they've got what they wanted? Maybe when we have the word Soviet in the title of our country. It's a slight exaggeration. Don't quote me.

It was a joke. You know, like on television, if you ever say anything ironic, they need to put the words under you, irony alerts, people. No, I do think they really, they are chronically unsatisfied, and that is because I think America is fundamentally a center-right country. They can make their incursions. You know, clearly the country was tired of Bush, tired of the wars, tired of the exertions in the middle of a financial crisis in 2008. My God, the 2008 election was an election that, you know, even the Italian Communist Party could have won. I mean, that was a gimme for the opposition. Some people will say that they did win, but I would never say that.

You know, and then we nominated a very weak candidate, honorable guy. I liked him. I thought he would have made a good president. It robbed me in 2012. I don't think all these people wringing their hands and gnashing their teeth and rubbing their garments about, you know, the failures of conservatism and how it needs to reform itself. I think I'm wrong. I think this is the center-right country. We remain so.

And we just need articulate people who can make the case, from Paul Ryan to Marco Rubio. We're going to have, in this generation, we've got some good young leaders coming up. And I think the country will follow, but you need good leadership, and you've got to be able to have some appeal. We haven't quite had that in the last eight years. Dr. Krauthafer, Troy Sinek, you mentioned American decline.

I want to ask you a question on that front. The question is in regards to Russia. You've got President Obama at the moment responding to Vladimir Putin using what he seems to believe is the most powerful method of deterrence the United States has, which is delivering speeches. And then you've got much of Europe timid about coming down too hard on Putin because of the commercial ties, which is to say because of the reliance on energy. Do you see any overlap on the Venn diagram between what the West can do to keep Russia in check and what the West is actually willing to do to keep Russia in check? Well, that's a very good question, and it really depends on leadership. You know, people say, well, I'm just reflecting the polls.

People don't want to get involved. They think we're overextended. They don't want to increase defense spending. Well, of course, if you have no leadership, America is sort of intrinsically and healthily, I think, and it's a long, long history, anti-interventionist. It was Bismarck who said that America is uniquely blessed geographically among the great powers in history

because we're bordered on two sides by weak and friendly countries and then the other two sides by fish. You don't have that in Poland. You're bordered by Russia and Germany. You better have a foreign policy or you're going to wake up with somebody else's tank in your bedroom. But for us, that's not a concern. It's never been.

So you need to rally the country. You need to make the case. I think the great irony is that the Europeans and we, we joined them in thinking this, that after the fall of the Soviet Union, if you could enmesh Russia within the Western economic system, you would constrain its adventurism or its revanchism because they'd have too much at stake. Well, that turned out to be a boomerang because it turned out to be that by adverting the Russians, we have constrained not the Russians but the Europeans.

They value economy far higher than Russia. Russians, or at least Russian leadership, is more interested in pride, in glory, in dominion, in recovery, and standing with the great powers of the world. That means expansionism, at least as Putin sees it, much more than economics, whereas the West, being democratic and far less warlike, is intrinsically more interested. So we ended up enmeshing them, and it turns out, if you can just look at Europe, it didn't in any way inhibit Putin. Certainly it inhibits any response by the West Europeans.

So we were sort of caught in that the Europeans are reluctant because of economics, and we are reluctant because we're naturally non-interventionist and we have a president who refuses to to lead i mean the country had no desire to rearm and get involved or even get ready for the second world war it took an fdr to do that it took leadership and vision and without that there that, Americans are not going to clamor to go on imperial adventures. It's never been the case. So for us, it's like a leadership, and for the Europeans, it's being caught by their own petard with their economic ties.

Dr. Krauthammer, Peter Robinson, last question. The Republican primary is effectively already underway. You mentioned lots of good leaders coming up And last question, the Republican primary is effectively already underway. You mentioned lots of good leaders coming up in the next generation. And one dispute, it hasn't assumed clear outlines yet, but it's there, is over foreign policy. Rand Paul was out here last week and spoke at Cal Berkeley against federal spying, received a tumultuous response. Chris Christie and Rand Paul have taken potshots at each other over that very issue. There's a piece in the Weekly Standard about the distinction between Ted Cruz, who's more interventionist, and Rand Paul.

On it goes. You made a remark at PRI this past winter when you spoke there on your book. It was a throwaway remark because you mentioned it in passing in answering another question, but I'd like to hear you comment on it more. You said, as far as you were concerned, this is a paraphrase, but I think I'm being fair to you. As far as you were concerned, libertarianism is more of a critique of conservatism than a governing philosophy in its own right. What did you mean by that? Well, I meant it in two ways. One is simply in terms of the electoral map. I simply, I think, you know, libertarians are very energetic.

They're very active. They're mostly young. That's why you get these responses. That's why the polls, Ron and Rand, win every seat back poll. But I don't see see that given the political history political inclination of the country is ever preparing majority so what that means i don't see that the governing in that sense mhm i think will always be sort of a minority

active vocal critical of that's good now it was a political issue is the other aspect of that i think we don't think it's practical. It would be nice to go back to pre-New Deal. It would be nice to go back to the gold standard and all the things that Ron Paul used to talk about. You know, abolishing the Federal Reserve and who knows, dismantling. I didn't even remember how many departments he wanted to dismantle in the federal government. It's just not realistic.

I mean, we're just not living in that world. And I think, Tim, that's not a governing philosophy. It's a very good critique, department by department. They should justify their damn existence. You know, and have somebody saying, I'll shut you all down and close your doors. Show me why you should exist. So I think it is very valuable in that way. But I just don't see it.

I mean, the country will adapt to the post-New Deal understanding of a far more energetic federal government than ever envisioned by the founders. In the modern industrial world, that seems to be necessary. I think it's

unimaginable to go back before that. You're not going to be a governing philosophy if you want to dismantle Medicaid or Social Security. I don't think you should. I think those are good things. I think it's part of a decent society. So in that sense, I see perpetually within the big tent by his republicanism

which of course there were conservative party broadly speaking of the country there will always be a libertarian edge i'm glad that it's with a bit at that time outside you'd be able to rock paul right at the independent several times he did damage presidential prospects in the way uh...

you know that happened on the left now gore was damaged by ralph later it's possible you could see that what they perhaps uh... being outside and influence it uh... being so alienated from mainstream conservatism has to be an opposition so i think it's good to have a bit of a bit of a critique but what you are a more of a government

conservative by that i think except that the new deal you can't explain why you need to justify it so i think it's happening it's good to have it at the party uh... i think red ball of course is a far more appealing spokesman for uh... libertarianism than his father was. And there, I think his influence will be greater.

I don't know. I may be wrong. He might actually win the nomination, although I think that's extremely unlikely. Again, because it's a more critique of the governing philosophy. But I'm glad he's inside the tent. Again, there will always be some people who are never satisfied and say that a big government conservative is somebody who believes that the north side of Fargo

and the south side of Fargo should have a common mayor. You know, they want to split the government down to the most atomic level possible. Well, when Peter said that was the last question, Dr. Krauthammer, he means it. And so we're going to take

that little snippet that you said about not happy until the term Soviet is in the Constitution. We're going to remove it from context and send it to Alan Grayson so he can use it for fun. I was going to put it in the headline. I was going to say it shows the media matters. Yeah.

Why go through the middleman? You know, just do it. I think you're absolutely right. We'll get on that. In the meantime, we thank you for coming to the podcast and advise everybody to pick up a copy of Things That Matter, Three Decades of Passions, Pastimes, and Politics by the inestimable and invaluable Dr. Charles Krauthammer. Thank you for being on the podcast today, sir. It's been a pleasure, guys. Thank you. Thank you.

I was sitting here listening to him talk, and I hear him talk on other shows. I hear his television appearances, on other shows. I hear him, his television appearances quoted on other shows and I'm, I'm sitting here listening as ever to just the plain obvious truths that he spells out so clearly. And then I was reminded, Oh, I'm on a show with him. That's the peculiar thing about doing these podcasts is saying,

Oh, I'm, I'm not just sitting here in my sweatpants having a cup of coffee. I'm actually – he's actually here and I can ask him something. Alas, didn't get to some of the things that the chatroom people wanted to. I think Nanda was saying, how do we unwind the culture of dependence was a question that she wanted to have asked and – or he or she. Nanda, am I getting the general – Nanda's a woman.

OK. That's what I thought. And that's one of those – that's the big thing, isn't it, guys? I mean how – when you look at a federal government that seven out of every ten dollars is a check that's cut to somebody, how do you begin to untangle that plate of cold spaghetti when all it seems like we have are boxing gloves on our hands? Yeah, I think if either one of us had an answer for that question, we probably wouldn't be sitting here. I've had this conversation – Rob and I had this conversation before about – we were at an event once. It was a conservative event and a question came from the audience. How do we – this is always what you get at conservative functions.

There will always be one person in the audience who raises their head and says, how do we convince people to see things our way? Well, that's an enormous question. The real question is there is how do we fundamentally alter the philosophical precepts of one half of the country? I don't know. I don't know. You do it incrementally is the answer. I mean at the margins because that's where these fights really are. It would be nice if there were a cleaner

answer to that question. But in a democracy of ours, there's not. And these are – they're important questions precisely because they're not easily answerable. I think there is an easy answer to that because I believe in large sweeping symbolic actions that make everybody feel good. OK? Actually, I think the first thing that I would do if I were king of the forest is to get rid of withholding on your paycheck. Yes, I completely agree with you. And I would make everybody send the check in every two weeks. I would even do it every quarter. I would just say like every other bill, you're going to pay. You want to think this is an investment? Okay. Then here's what you do. You get out your checkbook and you write the check. We're not even going to take any sort of that automated bank transfer stuff that you do. No, I want you all to either pull up a wheelbarrow to an office and give us pigs and chicken and bars of gold or send us a check or whatever. But you're going to know exactly what it costs for you.

Right. And that would be the most instructional – that's not pie in the sky. Do you know who agreed with you? That's not ridiculous. Who? Who agreed? The person – one person who agreed with you was – Milton Friedman perhaps?

Milton Friedman. Milton Friedman. I used to – I did this a couple of times. Who lived in regret of this. That's exactly right. Milton Friedman was part of the small team. All it needed in those days was a small team during the Second World War, working at the Treasury Department that figured out the mechanics of going about tax withholding.

And Milton said in those days, they were very young. It was thrilling to be a member of the Roosevelt administration. The country was at war. It seemed the right thing to do. And I chid Milton about that maybe two or three times thinking that it would be – I mean because he devoted the rest of his life to liberty thinking that you could make a little joke about his having been the man who invented tax withholding. And, you know, I think the last time – this would be maybe he was in his 90s and he still didn't think it was funny. He still actually felt really bad that he had had any hand in introducing tax withholding because he would have agreed with James that it was just a catastrophe. It began to blur the distinction between – people began to think, oh, that's the federal government's money anyway. It was never really mined in the first place, which is a catastrophe. There's a point in your life where you realize that tax time does not mean let's see what I get.

Right. There's a whole bunch of people whose opinion about April 15th revolves around the idea of a refund, which I just find absolutely, completely alien. I see it as sharp talons digging into my midsection and pulling out organs and ropes of intestines. And the idea, I mean, if you watch Judge Judy enough, which I do because Judge Judy is one of the few. You actually live tweeted.

I've noticed this. I do. The other day I said there are three – if you want the list of three top evil people in Judge Judy's world, number one is Hitler. Number two is a musician who doesn't pay child support and number three is Hitler. I mean she's – the sense of – she will look at people and be angry at them because they don't have a job. She does not accept the idea that you ought not to work. There's an ought culture, an old – to use David Glertner's term. There's a real old style, here's what an adult does mentality that informs everything that she does and there's nobody in the public sphere that pours such absolute acidic scorn with just a look on people who skate and scam and don't pay

their way i mean it's a delight to see and it's one of the few voices you get it's like the judge judy willingness punishment hour these people show up and just put their skulls in front of the whirring blade and it's good. Anyways, where was I about that? Well, can I exert a matter of personal privilege for a moment while we're on the topic of James Lilac's tweets? Because James, you put out something the other day which – this is the essence of a good tweet. It's like good sort of observational stand-up. It's something that has flickered through all of our minds for half a second and we've never actually committed to paper.

And you put something out that said, I think – I actually have it in front of me. This is the quote. I think rock, rock music. I think rock invented the emotion of singing along with a song whose lyrics you don't agree with. Which is exactly right. But my question, this has been bugging me all week since I saw that. What is the song that precipitated that tweet? I remember.

Imagine. Imagine, right? I don't think that I can because it was about 10 o'clock, 11 o'clock at night or so. I was revising the novel. I had my iPod on shuffle and I was just listening to whatever came up and I found myself enthusiastically singing along with some lyrics that were twaddle or drivel or wrong or evil or something like that. I can't remember. I'm sorry. I take no responsibility for the late night tweets.

Except I do remember one that I had from a couple of nights ago when people were doing fake BuzzFeed lists. And I had – I think I had 20 – let's see, 23 times this adorable sloth totally owned these outdated municipal ordinances. Which I looked at that and I just thought – and it – I can actually see it on their page too. That's the thing. It's plausible. It's deeply plausible. Imagine is a good nominee though, Peter. I mean that one has to – I think John Lennon himself said it's essentially the Communist Manifesto set to music.

Yeah, yeah. It's Bill Buckley wrote it, one of his last columns. He wrote a column just attacking that. It was real, with real anger. And of course, Bill was right on the lyrics. It did take a political position. It was ridiculous, offensive political position.

Still, it's one of the most hummable tunes you can imagine. You know, I've always thought with that song that the lyric that a lot of people focus in on, and I understand why, offensive political position, still it's one of the most hummable tunes you can imagine. You know, I've always thought with that song that the lyric that a lot of people focus in on, and I understand why, but is the imagine there's no heaven. Right, right. The atheist life. But that falls into – I'm not an atheist, but that falls into an understandable category. That's – we understand that there are a significant number of people in the world who think about life that way. The one that's always bothered me is the line in that

song that is imagine no possessions because I can't, because at a certain point, I'm wearing the clothes. I'm eating the food. At a certain point, it is a possession. You're not asking me to imagine no possessions. You're asking me to imagine no possessions. You're asking me to imagine a society in which there are no protections for those possessions and it all is enforced at the blunt end of a hammer. That's really what's being said there. Exactly. And I don't even know if it's that hummable or whistleable or singable. I don't really think so either.

It's just that banal anodyne piano that just says, oh, this is serious and spiritual and important. And I mean I've been listening to this song for so many years. You're standing there in a store and it plays and whenever I hear Lennon sing, you may say, hey, I'm a dreamer. I always say out loud, you're a dreamer. You want me to say it, I'll say it. You're a dreamer. I can't say that. But no, it's an anthem that supposedly says that if we just divorce – that puts possessions and religion and conceptions of the afterlife as impediments to some sort of utopia. As opposed to –

It's adolescent. It's precisely that. It's the attenuated eternal adolescence that has been enshrined in worship in this culture since Holden Caulfield shrugged and called the grownups the phonies. And people said, oh, man. It is exactly the worldview that every 15-year-old is entitled to indulge one month before he first picks up Atlas Shrugged. Yes. Right. Exactly.

Well, well, well, well, well. So I'm still trying to figure out why I came up with Judge Judy. It may have been because I was checking the chat room and EJ was saying something about putting us all as Wizard of Oz characters. Frank L. Baum. Frank – there we go. Back to Frank L. Baum. Exactly.

And a reminder, my daughter was just in the Wizard of Oz at the school play and the kid – I may have mentioned this. The kid was doing – Playing her role? Well, Peter, you've met me, right? What do you think? Munchkin, OK? Everybody who descended from? What do you think? Munchkin, okay? Everybody who descendeth from my loins is going to be Munchkin.

One of the things that you never realize when you're a kid, when you watch The Wizard of Oz, is you never understand that the audiences at the time were seeing these actors with a familiarity that you don't have as a child. And you can make a larger point about this, that every, at some point, just as you realize that you're paying more taxes than you get in, that withholding is a very bad idea, that the world is not a John Lennon song, that we do have geopolitical enemies. You realize that there actually was a culture and a context and lessons that preceded your existence on the earth. And once you begin to get interested in that concept, that's the beginning of wisdom. And so when you're a kid, the cowardly lion is just the cowardly lion.

But everybody else knew that's Burt Lair as the coward. Right. The witch is just this wonderful, wonderful, ethereal creature. But everybody knows that's the role she's played in every movie we've seen her in for the last ten years. So they had a context for that that we didn't. But this kid was trying to do the lion and he was doing a little bit of bertlar but he wasn't doing enough and i if you're going to do the lion you gotta go full bertlar and it's very it's not that hard to do actually there's a movie he made about 15 years later which i love and it's a movie about burlesque the end days of and he's he's teaching a starlet how to be funny. And he's playing a cop.

And he walks up to her thinking that maybe she's a streetwalker. And Burt Lahr walks up to her and says, you're breaking the law. You're breaking the law. And she stops and she said, why did you have to say it twice? And he breaks character and he gets really sweet and he says, honey, that's what makes it funny. And that's all it was. And then once I heard that, I went back and looked at everything that he did. And even the line, he's doing the same thing.

I mean, it was a style that the people knew. And when they saw it on the screen, it added something that we don't get. We got Star Wars dumped in our lap with all of these characters. And except for Alec Guinness, nobody knew who any of these people were. Nobody had seen whatever Mark Hamill movie he had been in. Nobody had ever seen whatever Harrison Ford had done. It was all brand spanking new. And there are very few movies that actually do present you with a new world with new people that you've never met before.

Except of course for Ricochet when anybody showed up and said, Robinson, Long, who are these guys? And so you established. There's a political point to be made in there, although I won't make it right now. But back in the 50s, when the antitrust enforcement action against the studios broke studio ownership of movie theaters, it was the beginning of the unraveling of the studio system. And of course, these days, agents are the ones who put together every single package. So every single time you shoot a movie, you have to put the director together with the cast, with the this, with the studios invested in characters in their actors and actors over the longer term. They represented a kind of running ensemble. So an actor would work with a given director over and over again.

They get to know each other. Anyway, I'm going on. And it was the federal government of the United States that killed the old Hollywood. By the way, I do believe in spooks. I do, I do, I do, I do believe in spooks. It wasn't just Hollywood. The destruction of that system also had an impact on the theaters of the small towns and whatnot. So I mean the destruction – part of the devolution of the American small town can be seen in what happened to their movie theaters.

And I spent more time than I should prowling around on Google Earth looking for the old marquees and the old buildings. There was a piece that we had in the Star Tribune a little while ago that said, while downtown main streets in Minnesota aren't doing very well, actually the rural parts of our state are doing quite, quite well, which is heartening to see because – But what does that mean doing quite well? Financially? Financially because of the land, because of the crops and because of the rest of it. I mean I live in a highly … The small town community is – because I mean here in California, we still believe that in the middle of the country, small town communities are dying out.

That stopped? Well, not all. The larger ones are consolidating and making their way. The ones that have 700 people, yeah are are struggling and dying on the vine it's actually it's the agricultural communities in california that are dying out i mean that's the irony of that exactly we're the state that's killing that and and it's the opposite here and here i live in a highly regulated highly taxed state but it has this nordic communal ethos with a lot of social capital from which we can draw and we're not in decline and so what dr k is exactly

right decline is a choice and i don't see i keep saying this i don't see america declining from which we can draw and we're not in decline. And so Dr. K is exactly right. Decline is a choice and I don't see – I keep saying this. I don't see America declining, consciously choosing to announce its weaknesses, which is entirely different from a country itself that is devolving into a rusty mess from which we will never get out. Anyway, so the – you did believe in – I'm just trying to backtrack where I was before. I can't remember what I was saying. No.

Oh, oh, oh, oh, oh. Sorry. When you mentioned the studio system putting together actors, right? They made about seven different versions of Casablanca. It worked and they kept finding new combinations from Peter and Laurie to come in. Fat fella. Yes, sir. Yes, sir.

And it was wonderful and people went to those movies knowing that they were going to see exactly what they had seen before with everybody playing the parts that they had played before and they wanted to see it again and again which is why next week people will listen to this podcast expecting well the exact same thing they got before except for the little different couple of lines. And that will be the case if Rob is back. Now, of course, if Troy is with us, then all bets are off. Man, it's going to be another just Katie bar the door because he brings his own special style to it as well as it does to the comments.

Sixth man, yeah. Actually, I keep telling you, Rob ought to be nervous here, you know, because the CENIC option is something that we're happy to see. No, Rob has told me before, actually not specifically in reference to me, but I think he's right about this. He said that the people who get picked in this world to guest host

are always the people who represent no significant threat to the host. And I am entirely fine with that. Because I like listening to the three of y'all. You're Joey Bishop sitting in on the Tonight Show. Exactly right. Got it, got it. Exactly right.

Well, folks, we will see you, of course, at Ricochet.com. We will see you in spirit at Audible.com. Audiblepodcast.com slash Ricochet is where you can go to get your free 30-day trial and your free book and thank them for supporting the podcast. And, of course, we'll see you over at Encounter Books, where the entire catalog, the marvels therein can be had for 15% off if you enter that coupon code RICOSHET at your checkout. Peter, Troy,

it's been a pleasure. We'll see everybody in the comments at RICOSHET 2.0. Next week. See you, fellas. D-Ball! Everybody's talking No one says a word Everybody's making love No one really cares There's nachos in the bathroom

Just below the stairs All of something happening Nothing going on All of something happening Nothing going on All of something cooking Nothing in the pot They're starving back in China So finish what you got Nobody told me there'd be days like these

Nobody told me there'd be days like these Nobody told me there'd be days like these Strange days indeed Strange days indeed Ricochet. Join the conversation. To the North of Captain Duke Everybody's crying And no one leaves the ground Everybody's crying

And no one makes a sound It's a place for us in movies You just gotta lay around Nobody told me There'd be days like these Nobody told me there'd be days like these Nobody told me there'd be days like these Strange days indeed Most peculiar, Mama.