The Ricochet Podcast - Not Sorry About It

Episode Date: October 17, 2013

Direct link to MP3 file This week, Troy Senik sits in for Rob Long, The Washington Examiner’s Tim Carney on the political fallout from the shutdown, and David Limbaugh (aka EL Rush Bro) is –not surprisingly– energized by the whole thing. Also, the media’s fixation on the Republican Party’s demise, and Lileks gets off the first Harlow Wilcox reference on any media in at least 50 years. Source

Do you like green eggs and ham? I do not like them, Sam-I-Am. I do not like green eggs and ham. Would you like them here or there? I would not like them here or there. I would not like them anywhere. I do not like green eggs and ham. Mr. Gorbachev, tear down this wall.

It's the Ricochet Podcast with Peter Robinson and sitting in for Rob Long, Troy Sinek. I'm James Lylex in Minneapolis and our guests today include Tim Carney, the Washington Examiner. And once again, we're going to try to drag an opinion out of the shy and retiring David Limbaugh. Our work's cut out for us. Let's have ourselves a podcast. You know, in restaurant lingo, 86 is the term for throwing somebody out. 186 in restaurant lingo is, oh, one of the chefs didn't make it. He's shooting his television show today. So this is appropriate for a throwing somebody out. 186 in restaurant lingo is, oh, one of the chefs didn't make it. He's shooting his television show today.

So this is appropriate for Ricochet Podcast number 186 because Rob Long can't make us for some strange reason. But I will tell you who did show up, and that's Audible.com, as they do every week to remind you that they are the leading provider of spoken audio information and entertainment today. Listen to audiobooks wherever, whenever you like.

It's AudiblePodcast.com slash Ricochet It's audiblepodcast.com slash ricochet, audiblepodcast.com slash ricochet for your free audiobook and your free 30-day trial. And there's more. Troy, why don't you tell them what else there is? Well, there's also Encounter Books where our pick this week is the book Terms of Engagement, How Our Court Rules the Constitution's Problems of Limited Government by Clark Neely of the Libertarian Institute for Justice. So you can go to encounterbooks.com slash ricochet

and get 15% off the list price and help them out. They've been a good friend of Ricochet's for a long time. Excellent. Now, see, I threw that to Troy Cold. I was supposed to read that. Troy was supposed to do the old Rob Long bit and buy because Rob likes to imitate old 1950s and 60s commercials for some reason. But Troy Sinek stepped right up to the mic and that's why he's sitting in here today for Rob Long. And of course, as ever, well, no, that's wrong because he's been gallivanting all over the place and leaving us lurch-wise.

Peter Robinson, you are here with us today, Peter, aren't you? I am leaving you lurch-wise. That's Peter Robinson. You are here with us today, Peter, aren't you? I am leaving you LurchWise. I've never heard. There's always at least one new coinage from James. Well, I know it's really early in the morning for you guys, but it is earlier than usual. I just don't know how you do it. I'm sitting here at the moment thinking about waiting for a knock on the door because we have somebody to collect our Japanese student and take her to the airport.

And that's been an interesting week of cultural exchange there. But when it comes to exchanging things culturally, there's no better place, except, of course, for the real world, than Ricochet. And I believe, Peter, you had something to say for people who are listening to this and thinking, this is so good so far. How do I throw money at these people? How? Peter, tell them how.

You go to the site and click join. And here's why. This site, Ricochet, means so much to so many people. You've got to experience it yourself. Yesterday, actually, I can hardly believe this as I say it. And it will strain your credulity, James and Troy. But I promise it's true. I had a cup of coffee yesterday with a Ricochet member.

He's never put up a post, although he swears he'll put one up in the next few days, who discovered Ricochet as a university student in Vienna. And after graduating, he's taking a few months off and he's biking from British Columbia down to L.A. Yesterday, he reached Palo Alto, and we had a cup of coffee. Michael Speakerman is half German and half New Zealand, half Kiwi. He spent no time in this country except biking here in the last few weeks. And he just loves Ricochet and has been listening to every podcast since halfway through his university career in Vienna. Now, if Ricochet means that much to a college student in Vienna, imagine what it could mean to an American who's trying to figure out policies that actually affect him. Join Ricochet.

That's extraordinary. And, of course, the money that people spend on this. Make sure that it's here in the future. We're going to discuss other things like the next budget shutdown crisis that the Republicans are no doubt going to fumble as badly as the last one. Careful, careful. David Limbaugh. I think David Limbaugh is going to tell us that everything went down just right. We'll see.

Well, we will. I was not particularly bothered by the shutdown. I thought it was – I think I made the point last week that if you're going to try to get something, you stake your claim as big as possible because we're used to these guys proposing a half measure and then caving and walking away claiming triumph because they, stem-to-stern shellacking. And more than that, there is this open, naked, intra-party warfare that some people in the GOP seem delighted to conduct in public. Troy, what's your take on this? Do you think that the naked and open contempt for Cruz by some members of, dare we say, the establishment is going to be good for the party in the future? Or is it just a sign that we've entered that phase where everyone is really going to be ripping each other's face off in the next two years to no effect? Well, I hope we haven't. I mean we've certainly gone through that for the past couple of weeks. My take on this has been, particularly now with everything over, I think the biggest danger, the biggest liability for us is that we stay in this state of being in each other's throats when –

I posted on this yesterday at Ricochet. A lot of people in the comments were still not very happy about it. But I think that what Eric Cantor said yesterday is essentially correct, which is that we have to keep this in perspective. This was a tactical disagreement between members of the Republican Party. There is no big ideological fissure as far as the major issues in that we are all opposed to Obamacare. We are all opposed to the way that the economy has been handled over the course of the Obama administration. We are all opposed to most of the major initiatives of the Obama administration. So I think there is a danger in overstating the differences between us.

Tactical differences will exist. It's good to have those fights. But when we're talking about going forward, this is behind us and I don't think that there's any reason to exaggerate the differences between us when on fundamentals, I think most members of the Republican establishment, if you want to call it that, and the conservative base, if you want to call it that, we basically agree. I don't think we should be overstating the chasm between us. Well, Peter, do you think that when Mitch McConnell comes out and says, boy, this Cruz guy and the rest of them, what a big mistake, that what they've done is to help undermine the legitimacy of the anti Obamacare position by equating it with people who are not banks in their minds. No, not yet. Not yet. I did.

I'd agree with Troy. Look, I have to confess. I'm sorting all this out myself. On the one hand, Ted Cruz took the party into a fight. It couldn't win. He himself was never able to explain the way out of this. We do this in the Senate, we send it back to the House, and then the Senate gets to act on it again. What then, Senator Cruz? And he was never, never able to answer that question.

Furthermore, he antagonized needlessly, in my opinion, a lot of extremely good people by referring to them as the surrender caucus. The Wall Street Journal has been fighting Obamacare since before Ted Cruz joined the Senate. They're not part of the surrender caucus. John McCain, in my opinion, on domestic policy has been more wrong than right for a long time now. But you don't attach the word surrender to a man who, as a POW in Hanoi, did anything but surrender. It was just crude and arrogant and completely pointless. That said, Senator Cruz drew a line in the sand, and he made the whole party and the whole country and the administration and the press recognize that there was something here worth fighting about. And I'm not sure that had been established before.

My final comment, this keeps coming to mind again and again, our member of the Ricochet board and a sometime contributor, he's too busy to contribute as often as he'd like, I think, but George Savage, Dr. George Savage, good friend of mine, he put up a comment on a thread somewhere in recent days that said, I think I'm quoting him exactly, Republicans cannot win the argument without making the argument. Ted Cruz is making the argument. That's not nothing. And I have the feeling that there's an opportunity now for the party to be re-energized. At the same time, it's going to require a certain amount of humility. Certain people, including Senator Cruz, are going to have to subsume their own judgment and that of the leadership. They're going to have to try to work together.

But I'm not entirely certain that what's happened is all that bad. Or all that consequential. Or all that consequential. Because the media in particular has really been fixating on this is the death knell for the Republican Party because it's an internet scene. Well, think about every one of these that we've gone through. I mean does anybody remember at this point? It was within this calendar year. It was in January that we were having this fight over taxes and that was going to be the end of the world because people were digging in their heels

on Congress. Same thing the last time that we dealt with the debt limit. These things come and they go and they're a big part of the news cycle for two weeks. Nobody, particularly 13 months from now when it comes to election time, nobody is going to be thinking about this. I mean this will be transitory and not have any – I doubt really any severe lingering effects on the Republican Party or politics in general. What's going to happen the next time is that miserable, sour, lemony little man Harry Reid is going to make it about sequester. And we're going to learn then that unless we restore these cuts and unless we raise taxes and unless we raise spending, that all of these horrible things are going to happen. That we'll be back to penury of the masses, starvation for the children, and the Republicans will be opposing the democratic efforts to help these people. That's how it's going to be phrased. And then we'll be right back where we were before.

Now, you know, we've been talking about – hey, wait minute i just realized something rob isn't here we can whine about the media yeah rob hates it when we whine away james whine away well i'm not going to but i mean the main problem is republican messaging because they're they're awful at it they can't get it across and some of the people they send out to do it are very good at it, period. But I had to just smile in a sad way at some of the interview questions that were posed to various Republican spokespeople. There was one on MSNBC. I hope it was MSNBC who said, why do you hate Obamacare more than you love your country? Yes, that was MSNBC. Okay. Which I believe actually is probably how most people in the mainstream media regard this. Why do you hate Obamacare? That doesn't even rise to the level of stupidity. It's just,

it's incoherent. Sorry, James. Go ahead. No, it is. Right. But to go back on Peter's point, Cruz did make, he put down a marker. He reminded everybody who was in favor of this and who isn't in favor of this and sort of set the stage for discussing it anew in the future. But of course we're not allowed to do that, are we? Because it's settled law apparently and once a law has been passed, it can never be modified or changed in any way. Don't you find this an interesting new standard as well? Unless it's from the executive branch. Right, right. Well, from which all goodness flows.

But I just – an argument that would never seem to be made when we were talking about gun laws or abortion laws or taxes or the rest of it. If the law is wrong, it has to be addressed as soon as possible. Actually, this is – I don't want to go on because this is a topic unto itself and I just began learning about it yesterday. I had a cup of coffee yesterday here at Stanford with a couple of healthcare economists. One is Jay Bhattacharya who is a Ricochet member and the other isn't a Ricochet member and I'm not sure he wants his name used so I won't use it. But they began – they've been studying Obamacare or ACA as economists, the Affordable Care Act, ACA as economists, the Affordable Care Act, ACA. And one of the things that's so striking is the sheer lawlessness of this piece of legislation. Because Barack Obama has delayed the employer mandate for a year,

it is impossible for the government to check people's incomes with their employers. There's no standard for checking when somebody says he makes $25,000 a year for finding out if that's true or not. They simply have no standard. They're just giving this stuff away. The way the thing is working, furthermore, the technical problems are so complicated and so endless. The website – they are they. Nobody even can define they. What bureaucracy? Who's in charge here?

They are making it up as they go along. It is of the nature of law that it's rigorous, that it's defined, that it sets limits, that it's specific, that three or four different people in three or four different places in the country can read the law and come to more or less the same conclusion about it. This isn't a law. It's a fog. No, it's not a law. It's a mirrored disco ball. You know, when you said they, that's interesting because everybody has their own set of they's. In the Wall Street Journal the other day, Daniel Henninger was saying that Republicans are constantly complaining that the media lets Obama get away with everything.

But Henninger pointed out that they, the message impoverished Republicans, let him get away with it. And I love this line. The Washington GOP is now a political Gulliver tied down by tweets and twerps, said Henninger. And, of course, there are some people who probably don't get the reference. And Gulliver, of course, was the Brobdignagian-sized character, not in Brobdignagian land, but in amongst the little people who were tying him down. And then he went off, I believe, to Cloud Cuckoo land where the wise horses lived and all the rest of those things. Gulliver's Travels, which a lot of people reference, but few people read, what they want to do. Right. And the Yahu's too, from which came the term, and then the battle cry, and all the rest

of it. There's so many little tiny, nifty cultural references wrapped up in Gulliver's Travels. But if you don't have the time to read Gulliver's Travels, you can listen to it wherever you want at audible.com, and you'll get it for free. There are so many versions of that book listed. One of them is by David Price, or I'm sorry, David Hyde Price Jones. Do I even have this? David Hyde Pierce.

There we go. The fellow, I believe, who was on Frasier. And he reads it. It's nine hours long and it's great. So if you would like to do that and you probably should

to catch up on all your cultural references, go to audible.com and audiblepodcast.com slash ricochets. That's embedded in this post, of course. I will get you your free 30-day trial and a free book.

It's got the Whispersync technology that allows you to pick up in one device where you left off in another. It's just great. We've been talking about it for months, and there's a reason. Audible's great. They support the podcast, and they're giving you something free, and once you try it, you'll be hooked. We also should probably ask if you've got some references yourself, guys, that you'd like other people to listen to. I would suggest for anybody – this is a book that I take off of my shelf. I try to at least once a year because as popular histories go, it's as good as they get. And it's long enough that if you're commuting, Audible would be a good choice for this.

Paul Johnson's History of the American People is available on Audible, and I would heartily suggest that, as well as Modern Times is also in there, his sort of world history of the 20th century. So either one of those are a great pick at Audible. Sounds great. And future books from Tim Carney, we should also listen to as well. But first, let's bring him on and talk about him. Tim Carney is a senior political columnist at the Washington Examiner and a visiting

fellow at the American Enterprise Institute. He's the author of The Big Ripoff and Obamanomics. That was a Rennery book from 2009. And we welcome him in this post-shutdown, post-disaster, post-cave, pre-whatever-is-to-come political situation. Welcome to the podcast, sir. Thank you for having me. You know, our first question is, Republicans have demanded that Obama enforce his own law. What kind of crazy world are we living in? So the Democrats had to pass Obamacare in order to change what was in it, is what we've noticed since this past.

There's been a whole string of kind of unilateral executive branch amendments to the law. Now, some of them, actually, the law said if the executive wants to do X, it can do X. If it wants to do Y, it can do Y. The Obama administration, for instance, got rid of its long-term care program because the law said, hey, if this isn't going to work, the administration can scrap it. But there have been other things where they've just gone ahead and pretended the law said things it didn't say. You know, things like that you can get tax credits on the federal exchange.

That's not in the Obamacare law. If you read the text of the law, delaying the individual mandate, that's not something the law said Obama could do. The individual, I mean, the employer mandate, that's not something the law said Obama could do. I mean, the employer mandate. That's supposed to start on January 1st. But two of these provisions, one was that Congress can't give congressional employees subsidies for health insurance. There's nothing in the law that allows them to give subsidies for health insurance,

and so Congress can't do it. And another one is that Congress is, that the administration is supposed to verify people getting insurance subsidies are in fact eligible for those insurance subsidies. And Obama basically said he was going to violate both of those. So the Republican demand in the budget negotiation was that he actually enforce both of those. Hey, Tim, Peter Robinson here. Simple question on that. Who has standing to sue the president in these matters? Who actually has standing to do anything about it?

Have we reached the stage at which a law gets passed and the president gets to rewrite it on the fly? So there is a lawsuit uh... being dropped by state of oklahoma on on regarding the fact that the government is the i a r s is trying to came down tax credit for

the federal exchanges even though the law only allows it for the state-run exchanges. So I don't even know. You should look up why the Oklahoma attorney general has standing in that case, but they're suing on that. As far as other things like delaying the employer mandate, I don't exactly know. I mean, you could argue since Walmart supported the employer mandate that they suffer by the smaller competitors not being forced into it but that seems like that your retail bad move by walmart who cares about public opinion uh... congress doesn't really have standing to uh... to defend the the law

not being enforced as far as i know uh... you know when it comes to the bitter amendment uh... it's just a question of taxpayers providing subsidies, and the court has repeatedly held taxpayers do not have standing qua taxpayers. You can't sue just because the government's illegally spending your money. So basically the answer is Obama does get to rewrite the law on the fly. Is that correct? Yeah, and this is something that all presidents have basically done. And so when it comes to the taxpayer, the congressional subsidies, it's a question of employer subsidies.

I get the Washington Examiner pays part of my health care premiums. Congress used to have a program called the Federal Employee Health Benefits Program where Congress would pay part of their premiums that's not extraordinary it's a nice benefit to get the new law says no you're not on congress isn't on the federal employee program anymore they now are going to go on to a version of the obamacare exchanges but the law never says here's how congress can subsidize it and this is part of being congress you don't get to do things that's not that are not in law congress doesn't get to hand out an employer subsidy just because they want to be nice to their employees

it has to be authorized it wasn't authorized and there's a good case to be made that that was a drafting error by harry reid who wrote the legislative language there but just because harry reid didn't mean it doesn't mean the law says something else and And the Obama administration says, well, we're going to go with what we think Harry Reid meant to say rather than what the text of the law actually says. So is this just a mess or is this a point of departure for the nation that we now get more or less formally ratified, at least previous, my general feeling about it? I mean, I can't cite circumstances and cases, but my general feeling is that previous presidents, when forced to rearrange the law in executing a new piece of legislation, would at least pretend to be lawful.

What's the old line about vice being the tribute that hypocrisy pays to virtue? Yeah, hypocrisy is a tribute that vice pays to virtue. That's it. No, I think Obama is pretending just as much as previous presidents here. With a lot of these things, I say, yes, Obama goes further than previous presidents, but only because every president goes further than the previous president. I don't think this is a case of sort of extraordinary obama it's a case of a uh... you know federal government steadily grabs more power and at the same time the executive steadily grabs more power from uh... the legislature

and in these cases he does his office of personnel management on this case of uh... congressional health care came out with some sort of legal ruling that, you know, at first glance, you might believe was true unless you read, you know, the actual law in question. On these other cases, on the employer mandate, they said, well, the problem is that we can't verify, we don't know how to, like, determine which employers are actually subject to it, so we're just not going to enforce it because it's impossible, and you can't force us to do something impossible.

So Obama does still at least pretend that he's following the law, but he really doesn't feel the pressure to do it. And so you get this ironic situation of Republicans who hate Obamacare insisting that Obama enforce Obamacare, while Republicans who want to change Obamacare, insisting that Obama enforce Obamacare, while Republicans who want to change Obamacare get the response of, it's the law of the land. You can't change it. Tim, this is Troy Sinek in L.A.

Let me ask you, now that it's over, looking back at the last two weeks, what's the upshot for the Republican Party, specifically for congressional Republicans? Are they in a better place than they were when they started in a worse one is anything changed all all put the optimistic uh... take on it the uh... traditional republican establishment has been eroding and collapse and it

basically doesn't exist anymore and so what happened was the people who are used to being backbenchers and just shouting at you know how we should be fearing this ship in a in a more principled direction they accidentally found themselves driving ship i think that's part of what happened to ted cruz and the tea party groups and they didn't really have a very good strategy because they weren't used to needing a strategy when you're just the dissenters within the party you don't need a strategy and so the optimistic spin is that it could be the case that republican

have that the the old establishment which i think was ultimately dysfunctional and to behold into business lobbyists that that has withered away and that now all the sudden the dissenters, the Tea Partiers, the conservatives, that they realize, wait a second, we now have a lot of clout. Next time, let's use it a little more wisely. Hi, Tim. James Lallix here in Minneapolis.

With great power, of course, comes great responsibility, as Spider-Man was always reminded. But also great judgment helps as well. You mentioned something there about how the old guard was seen as being aligned with business one of the things that i heard was that the new guard the tea parties uh caucus did not want the medical tax medical device tax repealed because they saw that as crony capitalism as a sop to business and that it wasn't fair to take that off and not take other things off for the rest of the people. Did you hear this? And if so, if they're that tone deaf when it comes to the actual mechanics of getting something out of a deal,

does this bode well for their maturity in the future? See, I don't think it's tone deaf. This is the way I view the medical device tax. I think it's a really bad tax. I think it hurts an industry unfairly. So that makes it one of about 100 things in Obamacare that hurts an industry unfairly so that makes it one of about one hundred things in obama care that hurt an industry unfairly just like i think it might be unfair to punish congressional staff by not allowing them employer uh... employer subsidies

and get get in line get in line behind the people who just got bumped down to twenty nine hours a week by obama care get in line by the people whose low premium high deductible plans that they'd love we just made a legal get in line behind the people who don't want to buy insurance in our force to buy the inch of the employers who are in force of the who are going to force in a year to buy insurance for their employees to get in line behind the little sisters of the poor the group of non-pickin before to buy contraception insurance

um... because of this law and if you're's going to be forced to buy contraception insurance because of this law. And if you're just going to say, all right, we're going to mitigate some of the harms of Obamacare, how typical, how typical is it of Washington and this Republican Party to start with the medical device industry, which is hiring up former Republican congressmen as their lobbyists and all these top staff and willing to spend $40, dollars for every day congresses in session how typical is it that they're the ones who get their problem address first so i think that as far as if there was going to be one or two things that the republicans were going to gain from this that going ahead and saying all

right you the first people were going to let off the hook on obamacare and probably the only people who were going to let off the hook on Obamacare, and probably the only people who we're going to let off the hook on Obamacare are going to be this industry, I think that would be a mistake. Maybe down the line, when it's not in the middle of a budget negotiation, you can repeal it, but hopefully you're also helping regular people and not just General Electric and AdvoMed. Well, I would need general people who are employed by those companies and regular people in the communities where these industries exist who rely on the continued health of these.

The reason that I brought that up and I think the reason a lot of Republicans did it was because they're supporting the other side of the aisle. Here in Minnesota, we got two Democratic senators who would vote to repeal in a second. They're not going to vote to help the Little Sisters of the Poor because they want abortion or Alice. They're not going to vote for any of the other things you said about the people standing in line because they believe dearly down to their toes in the rightness of Obamacare. But this one, they'll make an exception. I think you could have got that.

That's what I'm saying. I see that argument, and so this brings up a sort of standard negotiating situation, and I think it's perfectly analogous to what Harry Reid did. Mayor vincent gray here in dc walked up to harry reid how can you block a vote on funding dc the republicans passed a bill last week just to fund dc and not open the rest of the government and the and harry reid blocked the vote and reid said, come on, Mayor, don't ruin this.

We have to all stand together, even if that means the vets don't get their money, even if that means D.C. doesn't get the money, because only by standing together can we actually ever get anything. And so I don't think you can ever repeal Obamacare until you elect a, maybe in 2017, but I doubt it. But I do think that there are a lot of fixes where their groups that are specifically suffering from some of the worst provisions that you can get there can be a real

reform to obama care and if you start off by picking off the the medical device industry and you say no okay you guys get off the hook now then what do you lose you lose that pressure.

You lose that ally in an Obamacare reform, just like Reid didn't want to lose the people who cared about D.C. when he was trying to reopen government. He didn't want to lose the people who cared about the vets when he was trying to reopen the government. He didn't want to lose the government employees. He wanted all of them in the same boat so he could say, you know, help us all out. And so I think that that is a legitimate strategy for Republicans to undertake.

To say, no, you special interests who ultimately supported this bill, you don't get to be the first ones to get relief from this bill. I think that's a negotiating tactic that's perfectly legitimate. Tim, Peter here. Last question. Ted Cruz. His colleagues in the Senate, by and large, Mike Lee may be an exception. His colleagues in the Senate loat colleagues was not so much a filibuster or any of this. It's that he cut ads

with a group called the Senate Conservatives Fund, founded by Jim DeMint. At the same time, that Senate Conservatives Fund was attacking lots of incumbent Republican senators. So in the minds of Lindsey Graham and Lamar Alexander, it seems like Cruz

is campaigning against them, because he's joining with this group that is campaigning against them. And so that has really put him on very bad terms with his colleagues. So can he make that up? I don't know, because the other thing that upsets them is what upsets them about John McCain. It's sort of grandstanding. It's standing up and making himself sound holier than everyone else. And I don't see Ted Cruz ever changing that because I think that's part of his character for better and for worse. So question then. Ted Cruz became, in my judgment, the New York Times.

The Wall Street Journal has been pounding him because it says he's making errors in judgment. The New York Times has been using him, again, this is the way I interpret the stories, to humiliate the – to splinter, to fracture the Republican Party, to use Ted Cruz against any hope of unity in the Republican Party. Has Ted Cruz made it a little too easy for the new york times and other liberal organs to do that is ten years and i think it's a humility and try to work with his colleagues i guess is one question yeah and and i don't think that would come

easy for him um... if it all does he's he's he's an incredibly successful man who always was told he couldn't do it and always went ahead and did it and like that thing that the welfare funds probably he's ever the people who said you can't do it they were right this time and i don't think you'd use for that so will see how you i was today i'm very glad that there are republican senators who do not do it for told i'm very glad the republican senators court independent from the business

lobbyists. I just think in this case that Ted Cruz did not take into account the fact that politics is the art of the possible. Got it. Thanks, Tim. Thank you. Tim, that was

a perfect example of Peter asking the last question and then asking another one. You have just been baptized in the Peter Robinson School of Journalism, of interrogation, and it's worked well for him. And we hope to have you on again soon where he can ask you 17 questions on the way out. 17 final questions. And you'll give 17 great answers. We've enjoyed talking to you, and again, we look forward to seeing you on the podcast again. Timothy Carney, senior political columnist at The Washington Examiner.

I have one last question. No, you don't. No, you don't. You know, well, Troy, let me ask you this before we amble on down the road. Do you buy this idea, the strategy of everybody masked together, like Harry Reid telling the veterans in D.C. and everybody else they got to stand united, that on the right that everybody who opposes Obamacare has to be held off from any relief that we may mount a masked charge? You know, I've actually struggled with this a little bit because you have people – for instance, Richard Epstein wrote on Rickshay I think maybe last week about some of the

fixes that you could put in for Obamacare. We had several people in the comments who made the point, no, you don't want to do this. The last thing that you want to do is basically take out the democrat's garbage and go into this bill and strip out all of the things that are problematic so that when the time comes that we actually can do something about comprehensive about the medical device tax, I think I incline towards the position that you hold, James. I mean first of all, it does not particularly strike me as crony capitalism to help out an industry that's being hit by a tax. A tax that should be noted is not on their profits. It's on their sale. So this digs pretty deep.

And I understand what Tim was saying about the fact that, yeah, they've organized and they've got the lobbies. Well, that's because of the nature of that tax. I mean this is a small defined industry that can band together that way. I'd always be uncomfortable in a situation like that about the prospect of if you don't take that opportunity now, is it going to come back again? Right, and it's one of those few in which you could get some members of the other side to go along with you. Take that opportunity now. Is it going to come back again? Right. And it's one of those few in which you could get some members of the other side to go along with you. I, too, am sympathetic to the whole idea of let the thing – let this enormous machine come out of the arguments that say once X happens, the scales will fall from the American people's eyes, clang on the ground, and then they'll all come crying to us. Oh, we were so wrong. If that didn't do it, Obamacare isn't going to do it.

And if there are problems with that, who are they going to blame? Well, you know, it's going to take one speech by Harry Reid getting up and talking about how the Republicans have refused to fund this or pay for that fix. And it'll be obstructionism on the right that once again keeps the miracle of government from doing what they know it ought to. It just, I mean, if people want, if people didn't want Obamacare, they wouldn't have voted twice for this guy. So I, while I I say yes, go ahead and have it good and hard. On the other hand, if there are some little incremental things that you can do around the edge like the medical device tax that doesn't necessarily save the entire thing, we're not saving Obamacare by the medical device tax.

Do it because I'm sick of saying we've got to have everything our way or not at all. That's not the way the system works. And again, you have to get a population that's interested in limited government. And one of the ways you can do that is to sit them down and make them read a book called Terms of Engagement, How Our Courts Should Enforce the Constitution's Promise of Limited Government. It's by Clark Neely of the Libertarian Institute for Justice. It's published by Encounter.

Yes, those guys. Troy, you're on with the best right now. Just correct. Just sit there in awe. You inserted yourself in the middle of it. If you appreciate the art this much, let it play out. Go ahead.

Yes, Troy, bless your heart. Because Rob's not here, so Peter's got to be the one. Let me read you the praises of the copy that has been handed to me, and I couldn't have put it any better than Encounter Themselves. The new Supreme Court session begins, and this one is timely. They'll be considering cases on abortion, racial preferences, campaign financing, the EPA, stuff

that really does matter to all of us. This is a book that debunks the concerns about, quote, judicial activism, end quote, or the so-called conservative majority in the Supreme Court. To the contrary, Nellie says the Supremes have been asleep at the bench. Now, you think about this. Of the 15,817 laws passed by Congress between 1954 and 2002, the Supreme Court struck down just 103, two-thirds of one percent. The court struck down less than one-twentieth of one percent of the million-plus state laws passed during the same time.

A million laws. And it strikes down about three out of every 5,000 laws passed by Congress in the states in any given year. Clark explains why the U.S. Supreme Court consistently protects government prerogatives at the expense of ordinary Americans. Millions of laws. Think of that. Accumulating, piling up all around us like dead flies.

Dead flies with the ability to bite, I should add. But I'm off script. So go to EncounterBooks.com and get this book for a special price for listeners of Ricochet. If you enter the coupon code Ricochet at checkout, you'll get a 15% whacked right off all titles that you buy. So go now. Ricochet. Enter the coupon code and you get 15 off this or any other ricochet title and we thank them as ever for sponsoring the podcast

well you know what do we what should we do now here i'm wondering if we could find somebody who i believe is almost superhumanly uh able to control what he feels about the Obama administration. I mean, we've talked to this guy before, and it's just, it's hard to draw him out on the matter. He's just, he's so guarded about it. But let's give it a try anyway. David Limbaugh is a columnist, an author, practicing attorney in Cape Girardin, Missouri.

And his latest book is Crimes Against Liberty, and we like to call him our L. Rush. Oh, I didn't come up with that. David, hey. How are you? Who is this? Who's calling me? My name is James Lilacs. I'm up here in Minnesota.

Didn't you used to be a real crack columnist, funny guy, very insightful? Are you just a guy with the same name? When you put that in the past tense, I wonder exactly what I've done to disappoint you. We were talking before we brought you on, David, that we've tried in these podcasts over the course of the last couple of years

to find out really how you feel about the president's administration and his side of the political aisle. And you're just so coy about it. So if you could give us your take on on the latest shutdown fiasco and how you believe people acted and behaved and where you think it's going to go. Hold on. Wait a minute. Let me put the question, if I may, James. I'm sorry, David, you have been saying we needed to shut the government down. Stand by Ted Cruz. Stop the action, and they did it, and Republican poll ratings collapsed. You are here today to say you were wrong, and Ted Cruz was wrong, correct?

No, Peter. No, no, no, no, no, young man, and you are young. I am not sorry about it, and I would admit, if I were, subjunctive mood used with ifs, wishes, and conditions contrary to fact. That's what my dad always used to tell me. If I were, not if I was, son. Okay, so I really believe that we are better off for having tried and failed than for not trying at all. I don't see this as a loss overall. I never thought Cruz was promising to bring home victory. He was promising to enhance our chances in the short and long term if we fought rather than if we capitulated. He did fight. He led the battle. He awakened people. He energized people. I haven't been so energized since we lost the election, and I was energized when Rand Paul did his

filibuster. And it's not just meaningless symbolism. I really believe that one of the things that has been hurting on our side is a failure to give a articulate a principled alternative to the left-wing radicalism that now prevails in Washington and people feel disenfranchised and and I know it's cliched to say that people in the beltway don't realize there are people out here in the flyover country that really don't understand what's going on and really object to it. I'm here to tell you that there really are. I came into a talk to a friend, a small business owner the other day, who said he hasn't talked to one person who thinks Obama is on the right track and that isn't horrified about what's going on. And by the way, before I finish, your answer was multi-pronged, multi-faceted. Obama, I don't interpret the polls the way the other people do.

I wanted to get to the polls there. You said we're better off for having fought and lost, temporary loss, let's hope. But how can you argue, David, that we're better off when the polls show that Republicans have dropped to their lowest point in a couple of decades? Well, the polls are slanted. The polls are a fixed snapshot in time. They only are relevant for us to the extent that they affect our actions and our resolve in the short run, which they did for the establishment. But their main relevance is whether they point to a lesser or greater likelihood of victory in 2016, I mean 2014. And it's absolutely absurd to say they do, because things are so fluid in today's politics.

We won't be talking about that. We'll be talking about the next shutdown, if we're talking about any shutdown, or the fifth one from here uh... it's absurd and that these obama is the lowest he's ever been and that's him personally the but all about congress is a generic poll and everybody loves to answer how they hate congress i wouldn't

guide discount that totally plus you have the establishment and the mainstream media and liberals beating up on Cruz. How do you expect them to fare well in the polls? So had the establishment not been so hard and caustic on Cruz and accusing him of dishonesty, in addition to being wrongheaded, we might have had a better chance not to probably to win, but to galvanize support for ultimate victory in the long run. I also reject this idea that we can't chew gum and walk at the same time, that by drawing a line in the sand and fighting,

we detracted from attention to the Obamacare rollout. I dare say we might have accentuated attention to it. Had we not fought, it would have been a lackluster environment and we would have had the media talking about how great the benefits are to some people. They would have talked about it being a glitch but not a real failure. I just don't think we would have gained any ground. We have to show the grassroots we're willing to fight because we ultimately have to fight to win. David, hold on. Are you seated? Yes. I agree. I agree. I agree. But let me ask, why are... By the way, I have to say, for me, it was fasten your seatbelt. The last two weeks, the polls were bad and worse and then worse another day. And Mitch McConnell was off campaigning in Kentucky and keeping his head. What finally started to really make me concerned was when the markets began to respond and we got close to an actual deadline on default. Now,

of course, they wouldn't have had to default, but they would have had to shift. You know, they could easily, given Jack Lew, the Secretary of the Treasury, is one of the most partisan Democrats in the world, and he would have been very happy to cut off Social Security checks in order to divert resources to paying the debt service. That started to, I thought, whoa, whoa, whoa, we're getting a little close here. This could really end up in a catastrophe. However, now that we're 48 hours past it, I look at this and I also, I have to say,

David, here I'm not sure we do agree. Ted Cruz made some terrible mistakes, in my opinion. Referring to very good people as a surrender caucus was just, it was arrogant and foolish at the same time. I mean, his colleagues were going to have trouble with him because he was contributing. He was appearing in ads that were undermining certain Republicans that in the Senate they felt, but for him to make that so easy to be personally obnoxious, let's put it this way. It's nothing you would ever have done. It was just ungracious and needless. So he made it a little too easy for the press and others to portray him as a crank or arrogant or this or that. Nevertheless, I have to say, I'm with you.

This is a clarifying event. The public now understands that there is an opposition that is an opposition and that there are arguments. There is where I'm joined with you just at the hip, Brother David, in that you can't win without making the arguments. You must revert to principle. You have to articulate why you believe what you believe and show that there is a reasonable alternative that can be put in place. And Ted Cruz and Mike Lee and others in the House have forced the country to stop and take notice and listen. The press, of course, is gnashing its teeth. Harry Reid is

gloating. The Obama administration thinks it won one, but I'm not so sure. I believe the predicate for making the argument in 2014 has been laid in a way that it would not have been if we'd simply said, OK, go ahead. Let it roll out. We'll try to adjust this. We'll try to adjust that. I agree with you. I agree with you. James, Troy, come in and fight. Tell us we're both wrong, please.

When David and I agree, there's something is clearly wrong. David, let me ask you. This is Troy in L.A. Let me ask you the question that we just had Tim Carney on before you, and I put to him, I asked him what the upshot was of the whole situation after the last two weeks, what we've learned and where the GOP

is as a result. I think what he said, which I found interesting, is that the Tea Party or the backbenchers amongst republicans in the House had learned – maybe been surprised by how much power they ended up having because they were used to having the kowtow to the establishment. And here they sort of got what they wanted, not in the final outcome but in being able to push the shutdown for a couple of weeks. If anything, it sounded like Tim's take was that this shows that the Tea Party and those backbenchers are actually much stronger than that establishment, and that's sort of a paper tiger at this point. You've been referring to the establishment quite a lot in the past couple of days. I'm wondering if that's your read on it too.

You know, I wish – by the way, I hate to use the term establishment, but in this Twitter era, it's hard to be as diplomatic as you'd like to be and get everything in. And I'm being totally serious here. So sometimes I say the so-called establishment so as not to offend them. I don't want to offend. I consider a lot of these guys, a lot of these people my friends. Peter sometimes sides with the establishment. I consider Peter a great friend and somebody I have the utmost respect for. This is not, to me, a personal thing, although

I think it is to very many people on both sides. But I do think the Tea Party's emboldened. Now, that could be interpreted depending upon your position on all this, good or bad. To me, it's good, because I don't see them as irresponsible. But, you know, we never, Peter makes the point of Ted Cruz making some gratuitous insults. Now, Ted Cruz prides himself in not having gone personal. He always talks about that. And I think the distinction is he doesn't mention people by names,

but he does say generically surrender caucus. And I agree with Peter on reflection that's probably not good. It's not good. In his defense, I do think people were very personally demeaning of him, toward him, and it may have been defensive on his part. It may have been reaction. I don't know if he started it or they started it, but it's a rhetorical device. He's a great debater, and you're right.

He probably unnecessarily alienated people by use of some terms, but I don't want to criticize Cruz because he's my main man right now, and I don't want to attack the leader. But I don't think – see, I never thought – I'm going to respond to all these things Peter raised too. I never thought that we were going to take this to the hilt and shut down ad infinitum. I always thought there would be a certain point that we either resolve this or exacted some concessions on their part, and then the government would go on. But some things have happened here. Number one, by having fought, we showed Obama to be a liar again

in terms of how he portrayed what would happen, just like he did with the sequester. We allowed him to demonstrate his pettiness and his mean-spiritedness with the Veterans Memorial and various other things. And we also realize that the government is not that be-all, end-all thing. I mean, the media kept saying it was, and Obama kept saying it was, but no calamity occurred. We always focus on this short-term calamity of a government shutdown and a debt ceiling not being raised, and we never focus on the real calamity that's going to occur that Paul Ryan predicted if we don't reform our entitlements. I wonder, was Paul Ryan serious? I don't hear him talking about that much anymore with the sense of urgency

that he should. But I'm feeling a lot better about this. I really feel I'm not disheartened because I never expected to win-win in the short term. I'm disheartened only by the stridency of the establishment, again, short term, toward the Tea Party and some the Tea Party toward the establishment. The establishment thinks, and I could mention names, some of whom are prominent on this podcast, who have been so insulting and condescending and arrogant toward the Tea Party and treat us as if we are mindless people who don't calculate the long term, when in fact the crux of our disagreement with the establishment people as to this fight was precisely over whether we would be in a better position to win ultimately

2014-2016. That was, we didn't go into this mindlessly and passionately without and with putting our reason aside. And they imply that we're just a bunch of screaming banshees that are crazy. And really, I've seen so much mean-spiritedness and dismissiveness from the establishment side and such undercutting from the GOP establishment senators that I worry that a real schism, a real fissure has developed. And this is a memo, and I'll shut up after this, memo to people who don't realize this. The Republican Party may survive without the establishment, but it can never survive without the base.

And by the way, I'm not advocating. That's not a threat. I want us to work together. But the base is far more essential than the establishment. Excuse me. I've been away from the microphone. I had some stuff to do. I missed an awful lot of that.

David, how do you think the shutdown went? It sucked, but I'm still glad we did. Hey, David, David, the legislature, oh, I'm sorry, James, are you, I don't want to step on a segue here. No, I did have a question, actually. Oh, go ahead. Sure. This is sort of an evergreen, but we keep using the term Tea Party because it means something to us. It means something different entirely to the other side. And I think it means something not entirely savory to the low information voters or liberals who unfortunately rise every two years to decide the fate of the nation. Is there a point to be made for rebranding it to finding a term that does not have the

connotations? Or is it too late? Are they simply going to be the Tea Party with all the tri-corner hats and or sexual acts implied in the name? I mean, we're stuck with these words that are great words to us. When we talk about liberty, for example, we know

what we mean, but to an awful lot of other people, it means some sort of strange bircher concept of America. And if we talk about freedom, it's the same thing it's like people raise the roll of their eyes and say well how aren't we free exactly and you don't want pregnant women to be free and you want to oppress gay people so you can't cut yourself free are there terms that we can use and conservative you know who wants to be conservative

in this day and age when the hip thing is to be new and exciting and different what what term can we perhaps find that better expresses what we're about than uh than the ones that we keep getting draped around our necks or choose for ourselves uh i think that's a very good point although i don't think we have a chance to rebrand ourselves because the liberals love calling us tea party because they can slip into tea bagger, and you know what that means. And they do mean it, and they do say it, and Obama said it. But Tea Party, I think, had some symbolic association with the actual Tea Party and revolution. And that kind of lends itself to you guys are a little nuts. You want a revolution now.

You don't want to, you know, and so. But I think it's kind of moot. I totally agree with you. It's now a pejorative, but we're not going to get it changed. I think we need – there are some people out there that are on the fringe, but 95% of Tea Party people are merely people who want to rein in spending and make the government more responsible. They're not even social issue conservatives like I am a lot of, well, a lot of

them are. But by the way, as I think it was Stephanie Cutter asked me at the break on Crossfire if I was a member of the Tea Party. I said, the Tea Party doesn't have membership. I support the Tea Party. It's not a party. It's a movement, a spontaneous grassroots movement that rose up against statism and overspending and headed toward national bankruptcy. And that's really all we are. We're not extremists. That's what gets me about all this. But we are always easily caricatured as extremists. David, the legislation that got passed yesterday, the day before yesterday, I guess, yesterday, I'm sorry. Anyway, the legislation that got passed merely delays the entire argument, merely funds the government and raises the debt ceiling until just after the holidays.

What should Republicans do then? Well, I anticipated this question because I know you always ask good questions and I have no answer. Good. because I know you always ask good questions, and I have no answer. So it didn't do any good. No, but what I think is we need to do something right now, not wait three months. And what we need to do is start getting on using our own bully pulpit, and I'm talking about our own representatives now, our own official office holders, because we all do, the pundits, we don't ever shut up. But they ought to start talking about how bad Obama's plan is, how he won't quit spending, how the real government shutdown is going to occur with the financial collapse Armageddon in three years or whatever it is,

if we don't stop the spending, how he's the guy who won't negotiate, and how he's heartless about veterans and high-handed, all of these things. I know I sound real negative about Obama, surprisingly, but I do think we need to start making an aggressive case against him. Now, leading up to the three months from now when this occurs, I swear I don't know what they're going to do, because deja vu, people are going to be annoyed and all that. I think we need to spend our time in the interim healing wounds, and that means establishment people shutting the hell up. Just kidding.

Just kidding. And listening to us. No, but I think that we do need to work somehow to figure out how we can start respecting each other on our side. Because there's some vitriol, some intramural vitriol that almost equals inter-party. Two specific questions. I said this is my last question. Mitch McConnell and Lindsey Graham. Mitch McConnell, Senate minority leader, is facing a primary challenge back home in Kentucky from somebody. I don't know the candidate.

Maybe you do, but they're broadly described as a Tea Party candidate. And Lindsey Graham, I don't know the latest in South Carolina, but it looks clear that he's going to have at least one challenger in his primary. Two establishment figures, if ever there were. Do you support the primary challenger, or are you going to stick with supporting Senator McConnell and Senator Graham? Well, all other things being equal, if these people are reputable individuals and they have a chance to win, yes, I would support them. Support the Tea Party insurgents, so to speak? Yes, but I don't have the same animus toward McCain because he was just outright nasty. But McConnell, I go back and forth with McConnell, with Boehner. I disagree with some people on my side of the issues who think that these guys are really sordid calculating

cynics who are only in it for themselves and don't really believe in what we're doing, and they sell us out all the time for nefarious reasons. I think there actually are some good faith officeholders, who I would consider in the establishment, who just disagree with how we ought to approach this. Now, I do think it's more contrary to what the establishment pundits say. I do think it's more than just a disagreement over tactics. I do think establishment, so-called establishment, Rockefeller, Republican, whatever, are less conservative substantively than, for example, I am. Of course, that's not hard to be.

So I think we're fooling ourselves to say we don't have substantive disagreements, too. I don't think these – Can I just stick up? To me, maybe we disagree about this. My reading – I'm not sure about Lindsey Graham. I don't like the way he's – frankly, he strikes me as having been unnecessary. He's made some gratuitous anti-Tea Party, anti-cruise remarks in my judgment. In my judgment, though, Mitch McConnell, as best I read him, I've met him, I've interviewed him. So I can't say I know him well.

He is as conservative as he believes the politics of the moment and his position as minority leader who's responsible for holding together 45 votes, a caucus that includes Susan Collins in Maine and Ted Cruz in Texas. He's as conservative as he can be at any given moment. I read him as one of us who's got an extremely difficult job to do and does it pretty well, in my opinion. He may well be. That's why I started off that answer not being so sure. But I will say this, that I know some friends who have gotten into politics who are as conservative as I am and who get in and then have to, they change not because they become corrupt. That's the cynical view. They change because they realize that to get things

done in government, you have to make deals and compromise, and you have to advance the ball. But the trouble is, I think in that process, you get a little bit corrupted in terms of not morally corrupted, but corrupted by thinking inside the box and never thinking of what is possible. People talk about the art of the possible. They're talking about the art of the possible inside the box, zero-sum game. They don't think about the art of inspiring people at the grassroots and the voter intensity and getting away from those static numbers and looking at what can happen in a dynamic situation where you've got a Reagan kind of guy who can ignite a fire under people. And I think we overlook the possibility of the intangibles, and these guys on the inside

develop a cynical view about, we've got to make deals all the time, and they don't realize. I think they overlook what really is occurring. They're thinking they can win. A victory is if they cut $50 billion from something. And I think sometimes they overlook the fact that $50 billion doesn't make any difference. These little trees that we're, I mean, it makes a difference, but these little trees that we focus on instead of the forest, I think is really

dangerous. And I think that's what the establishment, well, that's what political insiders tend to do because they're in there and they make deals. I don't know why there isn't a sense of urgency. The government's never, we've gone 250 years and we're still going, and therefore, just like a pilot who's never had a crash, I guess they think they're invincible, some of them. But empires implode. I have never seen an empire implode at an accelerated rate like the United States is doing right now. Who would have thought five years ago, eight years ago, that we would be so far toward national bankruptcy and decline as we are now? And these people that are on the inside, I think, are myopic and too close to see it. Bless their hearts.

We need some outside thinking to shake it up. Now, some of the outside thinking is unrealistic, too. Sorry. No, it's just, Peter, I have done something. I permitted something to happen that I truly feel embarrassed about, which is I got a conference call. I have to drop off the recording right now. But first, let me say, A, thank you. B, I agree completely.

As you know, I came of age, so to speak, under Ronald Reagan. And what Ronald Reagan, the reason he was a dream to write for, for us speechwriters, was that his view of the way you govern is by going to the country again and again and again and persuading the people, inspiring the people, persuading the people, and rearranging the political landscape in the country. And when that happened, Washington would follow. Couldn't agree more. We had a better chance of that if the GOP Senate wouldn't have undermined Cruz. But anyway, I'm looking at the long view. Thank you, Peter. Well, we all have to go here at some point.

But David, you make some great points. The thing is that we have the Republican, quote, establishment, end quote, that is impugning the Tea Party revolutionaries on their motives, doesn't believe they have good motives. We have the administration looking at the same people and saying that these are people with bad motives. I think there's a bipartisan opportunity there. I think Washington can come together to expunge this metal sliver of radicalism. And there's hope. If we can work together to stymie change, what can't we do in the future? Well, I agree with that except this.

I don't think there's any compromising with Democrats. I think they are as extreme and ideological as you can be. They, even in the face of their policy failures, they will not change. Obamacare is a manifest failure with no hope, no prospect of succeeding, and I don't think they even care. It's not cynical to say that they're aiming toward a single payer. No, no, it's not. And they're going to blame this on not enough statism, just like they do every time their

government intervention messes up. And they really, we're dealing with serious radicals right now in the administration and in prominence in the Democratic Party. So we're not going to agree with them. I just want to have some harmony among ourselves. And your problem there is calling them radicals, because to the media, these are not radical ideas. I mean, for heaven's sakes are you saying that canada is a radical nation because it has single you know are you are you saying that europe is stuffed with radicals when you've got even the the the conservatives over there in europe are are all for the welfare state we are talking about the natural evolution of human society david limbaugh and for you to term it as radical just shows how out of touch you are with emotion and flow of history.

Really. I mean, really. Which, by the way, is an affirmation of the Judeo-Christian biblical worldview because it shows that human nature has fallen and we're naturally going to descend into chaos. And that's why the framers developed a system to limit government. And there you go bringing God into it. I mean, I had a tweet the other day from somebody who's on the left retweeting with just the greatest endorsement possible that the Republicans are now a fundamentalist religious organization masquerading as a political party. That's interesting.

But your point about me using the term radical, I use it here because I want to make the point. I really believe it. I don't think I'm a good messenger. I am not. I don't know about messaging, and that's not my thing. But I think I am saying what I really believe. I'm not even using hyperbole. I think they're so radical it's unbelievable.

I don't think Obama's a European socialist. I think he's an America-hating Marxist. Now, you guys can laugh at that. I really, really, really believe it. It was an uncomfortable laugh of people. Solidarity. Well, here we are in public and he's saying that. That madcap David. How you should articulate that to the voters. You certainly shouldn't have me out there

like so doing it because i'm too but but i just i wish we would say i wish we would call him on what he does you don't have to label it as radicalism or extremism but you have to point out what he's doing and and how radical it is i don't know how you term it. Troy is cynic, right? Yes. You are one heck of a writer. You come up with a way of articulating it. Oh, that's very kind of you, David. You really are.

That's very kind. I'd recommend that you either get new medication or adjust the dosage on your present one, but that's very kind. I got two kinds of allergy medication. They're working fine. Here's the problem, guys. When we look at what they're doing, we say that the redefinition of the relationship between the individual and the state goes contrary to the American experience, to the American foundational concepts. But that's because we're looking back 250 years. We're looking way back to the 18th century, to the founding ideas.

To explain that to a population, which has in the last 25, 50 years had that definition between the citizen and the state constantly redefined and seemingly constantly redefined in their benefit in as much as they get stuff. We're starting from way behind zero to tell them, no, no, no, no. What's set up here is A, unsustainable and B, it really isn't what America is all about. If people are getting stuff and they're happy with it and they see somehow that there's no downside for them, then why would they want to redefine the American experience if it means all of a sudden they're on their own and they're cheaper and they're poorer and the safety net's gone and it's nothing but a Hobbesian nightmare for the rest of their days? I mean that's the rhetorical, philosophical, intellectual quandary we're in. Eventually, I mean eventually our ideas are good for everybody because the liberty that comes from them brings prosperity. But that's so theoretical.

It is. It's so abstract. But your point is so profound, and I really do agree with you. And I read somewhere the other day where those of us, you know, grassroots kind of conservatives and those of us who are in the punditry always talk about restoring our founding principles. And that resonates with the base, but it doesn't mean anything to to the others who are not a part of our base. And so the person suggested that we need to talk about concrete things, how Obama's policies destroy economic prosperity and that type, not even freedom, although I keep talking because they don't understand freedom either. As Peter mentioned the other day, how do you mean, how is my, or one of you guys did, how is my freedom actually restricted? But we need to show the causal relationship without using the term causal, between his policies and what actually happens.

And maybe if you're talking specifically about, I want to keep my stuff, well, maybe we can convince these people that they won't be getting their stuff if this keeps going. Nobody will get any stuff because we're all done. It's over. Now, maybe that's an exaggeration. I don't know exactly the full impact of a financial collapse Armageddon that Paul Ryan had predicted, but it's not going to be good for welfare recipients, I wouldn't think. No. No, perhaps the only way is to just have some sort of, as I said before, some object lesson. And it may be the point at which, oh, who am I kidding? There's no point.

We're going to look 100 years in the future, and the conservatives are going to be saying, we need to get back to those American principles where you're allowed to keep at least 40 percent of the money you make. You know, yeah. And then that will be the fight that we're fighting. But on the other hand, who knows what will come? Who knows what we'll bring? We've been down before. We've been up before. It's almost as if politics in the American mood is cyclical. Well, you know, James, James, there is a – sorry, I was just thinking about this this morning, pertinent to what you're saying. Do you know socialism promises or Obama is always doing the class warfare thing, promising redistribution from just the wealthy, just the top 1 percent, and it won't affect the middle class. We're going to build up and buoy the middle class.

Well, you know this rollout of Obamacare? You know what it's really showing? And it is socialism. You know what it's showing? It is showing that the middle class. Well, you know this rollout of Obamacare? You know what it's really showing? And it is socialism. You know what it's showing? It is showing that the middle class gets stuck to it. I mean, these people are saying, my gosh, I didn't know I was going to have to pay for this. I thought I was going to get lower premiums,

and the low, low people would have transfer payments from Warren Buffett. But I didn't know I was going to have to subsidize. And by the way, people who don't consider-called, who don't consider themselves rich, who consider themselves in lower and middle and upper, well, let's say lower and middle class, they do not want to be subsidizing someone else on their health insurance. And that might be, if we can articulate it right, if we can fight Obama in scapegoating it and deferring his own accountability in it, if we can show that it's really his policies doing it, we can score some points because people are going to get hit, are getting hit. Right, and the other thing that I think we should do, and we've got to wrap it up but I'll say this, is that we should take the example from several European countries and Canada as well and have what they call the bail-in, whereas bank deposits are nationalized in order to pay for pensions, government programs, and the like.

The Republicans, in the name of sustainability, remind me, that word is very key because it means it has a great green penumbra to it. In the words of sustainability and compassion, which is also good because if your policies aren't compassionate, you're an evil person, it is necessary for us to take a certain percentage of all federally insured bank deposits. And really, it's only fair because the government has been providing insurance for these things. It's time that you give back. We're just asking a little bit of you to pay your fair share and that we propose a bill, float a bill that takes 10 to 15 percent of everybody's deposits in the bank and gives them to the government. And then when we put it up, we let all the Democrats vote for it and all the Republicans vote no. And they're standing there with this thing spattered all over them, having been revealed that they would absolutely, yes, love the idea of just starting to help themselves to that wonderful glistening pot of gold that the Kulaks have managed to hide in the back room. That'll never happen. David,

we look forward to having you on again. Always a pleasure. So much fun, so much energy. And like I say, one of these days I'm going to get out of you, what you think about this president and this administration, but I'll,

you know, I love, I love your, I didn't even realize this. I always say sustainable and I didn't realize I was showing my inner green man. Oh, yeah, absolutely. That is a great – thank you for telling me. I didn't realize.

When it comes to branding, if we start calling ourselves the new progressives, there's hope. David Limbaugh, we'll talk to you later, and we'll see you at Ricochet. Thank you so much. Thanks, David. Thank you. And Troy, again, great for sitting in with Rob. I hope at this point – well, if you get your own sitcom and start writing for it, it'll be great, Rob can come in

and sit in for you well you know, you do have a moment here without Peter and Rob, so if you want to do a segue for anything uninterrupted, I'll sit back and I'll sit back and enjoy it this is your moment, this may never happen again James I know, and you know, I have nothing

which makes me realize that it's probably the pressure, the feeling of Rob and Peter hovering over my shoulder, ready to spoil whatever. That's what I need. Without that, I'm nothing but Harlow Wilcox without a script. Well, you know who Harlow Wilcox is? No, that is a reference that's lost on me, James. He was a great old radio pitchman who would wander into shows like McGee and Mollie.

And the shows were constructed as such where it was absolutely normal for a man to walk into the living room with these people and start talking about Johnson's floor wax. And he would work it into the conversation. Harlow Wilcox was known for being monomaniacally obsessed with whatever product that he was doing. So you would walk up and you'd say, how are you, Harlow? And he'd say, why? I'm as fine as an auto light stay full of battery. You know, when you think about it, the most tiresome person that you could possibly in your life, social pariah, right?

And the vision, you know, the version of those guys, you know, who just simply cannot leave politics out of anything. I mean, for him, it was floor wax and auto light but we all know that people for you mention anything if you walk out and you say it's a little chilly today and somebody says yeah global warming you right you just want to step away because there's more to life than that and i i hate to think that the ricochet audience at some point is going to shift more to some of the interesting social and political and artistic topics and the like because the politics itself is just grating and wearing on the soul. I think it was John Gabriel this week who wrote when it came to the shutdown that he just tuned out. And so did I.

I knew something was going to happen at the end of it. I just tuned out. It's time to just sit down sometimes, put your feet up, grab your Kindle. And if you've got one of those Kindles that has an audio feature on it, you can actually use WhisperSync technology to have your audible.com book read to you. It's just extraordinary what they're doing these days. And you can get that book for free at audiblepodcast.com slash ricochet today. While you're at it and reading things and improving the garden of your mind,

encounterbooks.com as well. You see, Troy, that whole Tarlo thing was kind of a segue. Look at that. You said you didn't have it in you, and boom, there it was. Well, it was kind of a challenge, and I hope I rose to it.

Hey, everybody in the chat room, thanks for hanging around. David Limbaugh, thanks to our guest as well, and Tim Carney. And Troy, great to have you here, and we the chat room, thanks for hanging around. David Limbaugh, thanks to our guest as well, and Tim Carney. And Troy, great to have you here, and we'll see all of you at Ricochet.com. Thank you, guys. rain don't think i was acting so hysterically but i didn't see a thing until it came i'm mad to dump some burbles in the takeaway feeding up the shiny at the counter

i put a few inside me at the end of the day i took out my revenge on the revolution Thank you. I suppose all you ever do is run away Gunned up the motor in a half a drive I wasn't gonna take any of that Don't get bright ideas about a suicide Cause all I ever hear is zoom and fantastic Crawling from the wreckage, crawling from the wreckage To think by now a face that has a brain will get the message Crawling from the wreckage, crawling from the wreckage Into a brand new car RICCOSHAY

Join the conversation. To a brand new car Nothing seems to happen That ain't happened before I see it all through flashes of depression I drop my drink and hit some people Running for the door Gotta make some kind of impression Cause when I'm disconnected From the driving wheel

I'm only half the man I should be A metal-hating metal is all I feel everything is good as it possibly could be crawling from the wreckage crawling