The Ricochet Podcast - Over The Top and Completely Useless

Episode Date: May 14, 2021

Who says we don’t break news on this show? The whole gang is back this week, and they’re joined by National Review’s senior political correspondent, Jim Geraghty for a long chat on Republicans leaving the party, fealty to you-know-who, and an update on Wuhan lab theories. Then, Elliot Abrams, who’s most recently served as President Trump’s Special Representative to Venezuela and Iran... Source

That's the Philip Seymour Hoffman facial hair. I have a dream this nation will rise up and live out the true meaning of its creed. We hold these truths to be self-evident that all men are created equal. The conference will decide, but I don't think anybody is questioning the legitimacy of the presidential election. I think that is all over with. With all due respect, that's a bunch of malarkey. I've said it before and I'll say it again. Democracy simply doesn't work. Mr. Gorbachev, tear down this wall. It's the Ricochet Podcast with Peter Robinson and Rob Long. I'm James Lallex. Today we talk to Jim Garrity about the GOP and the COVIT and Elliot Abrams about the Mideast and more. So let's have ourselves a podcast.

I can hear you! Welcome everybody. It's the Ricochet Podcast number 544. It's the flagship podcast of Ricochet.com join us be part of the most stimulating conversations and community on the web forget facebook forget twitter ricochet is the site you always wanted go there join you'll be glad you did i'm james lilacs in minneapolis peaceable at the moment talking as ever with the founders of ricochet peter robinson in california and rob long in new york we span the nation gentlemen how are you apprehensive i get my second jab in an hour and a half. I had, I think, perhaps three hours of what I presume to be post-jab discomfort. It turned out to be Weltschmerz.

I thought it was malaise since the 70s have come back, and then I thought it maybe had modulated to ennui, but I think in the end it was Weltschmerz. Rob, have you had your jabs? I've had them both. I don't even need them, but I've had them both you don't i don't at all all right well enough of this gay banter uh let's bring in our guest because you know why should we sit here and flapper jaws and we could talk to jim garrity the indispensable as he's known i think on the show are you still known as the indispensable garrity because uh hugh is on too early in the morning for me to listen alas yeah hugh does that, and I think he still plays Don't Mess Around with Jim,

which I thought was really flattering until I listened to the whole song, and I realized what happens to Jim at the end. He gets chopped into little pieces. He dies terrible deaths. Yes, he does. One of Jim Croce's two great story songs. Anyway, so Jim is the senior political correspondent for National Review, yay for NR, and the author of the Morning Jolt newsletter. Morning Jolt, that's the most important thing. All the other stuff is okay, but Morning Jolt is absolutely, speaking of indispensable, if you don't sign up for that, you're missing out. And I keep reminding that I have to log in.

It's funny when NR says to me, you've used up all your free articles. Hey, wait a minute. The thing about having Jim on the podcast now, I have to say, is the problem is what I usually do is I usually read the Morning Jolt and then take all of his insights as my own. But he's here. You know what? That's what it's there for, Rob. Then congratulations. Mission accomplished.

If you complain that you don't get compensation for filling in for me on the Three Martini Lunch podcast, that's your compensation. Yeah, you're right. No, you owe me. That's yeah. Forget debt discharged. Three Martini podcast, of course, is available right here on Ricochet.com. Another great guarantee product in addition to his books. But, Jim, you've got your finger on the pulse on the carotid artery throbbing as it is in dc and i think the whole nation has come to believe that

where evan mcmullin goes the rest of us must follow um and so 100 republicans are threatening to form a third party and that always works out so well uh tell us a little bit about this and what you said jolt wise sure um so i guess it guess it was on Monday, the New York Times had broken the news that a hundred Republicans, including, you know, prominent former officials were thinking of breaking away from the Republican party and forming a third party. Now I understand like the guest who will be following me, Elliot Abrams is among them. And if I'm not, if that's not the case, I hope I'm not you know casting false aspersions i looked over that list of 100 names but for a couple days we didn't know who these

100 people were we did know it was being organized by miles taylor uh who was the anonymous author of the op-ed and then the book i mean all due respect to miles he's like 17 how old is this kid he's on the younger side yes you know he's talking to an old man like how old is that kid is he 60 15 he's not even out of high school like but he's a grown man he's maybe 30 i mean he's yeah okay uh it is one of those things where look i have and we could spend a lot of time on this podcast laying out all my griefs and beefs and you know problems with donald trump when a republican says i can't stand it, I don't like what the party's turned into, it's a cult of personality, trust me, I get it.

I also don't necessarily feel like I want to walk away completely from, like you can say, I'm walking away from the Republican Party. Fine. But if I'm conservative, it's not like I can join the Democrats. Democrats are not going to give me anything. And so like a lot of, probably a lot of listeners out there, I feel like I'm kind of a man without a party. I have a set of beliefs, but neither party seems all that interested in catering to it. And forming a third party, well, we're going to be conservative values if the Trump party, if the GOP is going to become the Trump Party. That's a long, difficult climb there, guys. Ask the Libertarians. Ask the Green Party. We have a two-party culture that's really tough. Maybe in a decade you could do it. But I just went through all the offices that are up on the ballot just in 2022. Never mind the presidential race.

30-some senators. All 435 members of the House of Representatives, 30 governors, 30 state attorney generals and other down-ticket statewide offices, something in the neighborhood of, I want to say, 3,500 state legislative seats, 18 of the mayors of the country's 100 largest cities, not to mention city council, town council, board of education, all that kind of stuff. So if you you say that's it, I am forming a new party. Well, you got a lot of slots to fill. And the Republican Party as it is, for all of its flaws, runs people for almost all of those offices. Like building a new party from scratch is enormously difficult. So then we get the list and it's a hundred names. Some folks I respect a great deal.

Uh, Elliot Abrams, uh, Mona Charin comes to mind. There's a bunch of, I like if you're on that list and you know me, then I like you. If you're on that list and we haven't met,

then no, I don't like, are there a couple who I think are jokers? I think Joe Walsh is a, is a clown. Um, I think that, um,

uh, Scaramucci for, for his 11 day run is just not a guy who people are necessarily going to take seriously uh and having served in the trump administration right um mark sanford uh people start chuckling and making uh appalachian appalachian trail jokes and one of them was william weld who's threatening to leave the party if it doesn't go in a different direction now you may remember listeners out there are probably already jumping out of their seat and William Weld, who's threatening to leave the party if it doesn't go in a different direction. Now, you may remember, listeners out there are probably already jumping out of their seat and saying, wait a minute, William Weld was the vice presidential nominee for the Libertarian Party

back in 2016. So he already left the party, came back, and now he's threatening to leave again, except the last time he left, Republicans won a whole bunch. So last time William Weld left the party, they thrived so i was on seriously underwhelmed by it the only thing i see on the website is asking for email addresses phone numbers and zip codes now look obviously if you want to build another party it's going to take a lot of effort you're going to need to build those lists of supporters but um underwhelming i guess is what was my assessment these guys just looked at the lincoln project and said whoa but wait there's a lot of scratch to be had can i offer a a a

just an amplification for my own self i have i'm also a person without a party but i have been told for four years that i am not a real republican i've been told that i shouldn't be a republican that republicans support donald trump and i don't support donald trump therefore i'm not a republican um now it could be absolutely foolhardy i i believe it's a disingenuous kind of childish ploy to say we're going to leave to start our own third party that's kind of kind of silly but i do understand the impulse i don't i'm not a republican i don't support the republican party as far as i'm concerned, the Republican Party can go to hell. It has it has continually elected to support and defend and stand behind a person I found manifestly unfit for the job, and he's made it so incredibly easy. It's a soft pitch. It's an underhand, slow pitch from this person. You can knock it out of the park by attacking

his character and personality, and the Republicans still refuse to do it. In fact, they replaced a conservative leader who is an actual conservative. You may not like her, but she's a true conservative with someone who's not a conservative. I mean, if this is a party that's supposed to be pro-life i mean i'm not pro-life but if it's supposed to be pro-life it certainly isn't choosing pro-life leaders uh it is choosing leaders solely because they are loyal to don trump so if that's the hold on if that's the litmus test then if i'm one of those hundred people then i i don't belong there i don't belong in the republican party explain to me why I belong in the Republican Party. If I get this right, Rob Long does not support Donald Trump. And they say we don't break news on this podcast. Yeah, that's right.

Jim, help me out. Sure. My gripe here is I don't see. So right now, probably if you're if you're a Trump critic in the republican party probably the best news to come down the pike in the last couple of weeks and months and there hasn't been much very good news at all but there was a poll i think was by nbc news that asked republicans do self-identified republicans do you think of yourself as a person who's loyal to the party or do you think of yourself as a person who's loyal to donald trump and after a whole bunch of polls that had said Trump first, Trump first, Trump first, this one actually showed 50% of respondents saying, I think of myself as being loyal to the party, and only 46% saying, I consider myself loyal to

Donald Trump. So for the first time, traditional Republicans have a slight advantage over the Trump loyalists. Now you point you point out though it's not a big one and it's one of those things where if you get a 50 to 46 you know like if the 50% of the basically if you try to have 50 of the party say to the other 46 that's it you're out of here we don't want you here anymore you know maybe you can win how popular or influential was former president jimmy carter in their democratic party between not his ignominious and well-deserved defeat in 1980 and the nominee of his you know the the hapless vice president the late great decent man uh walter monday how much influence did he were people trooping down to planes to sit with him and get was he an oracle for the for the for

the um am i did i miss that when i was in no you're completely right my sense here is that there's there's no you're not going to see trump defeated in a grand clash between the anti-trump republicans and the trump loyalists i'd be more satisfying i'm sure a lot of people would love it and a lot of stuff i do think you could see the air fall out of the balloon slowly and steadily. And for people who think, oh, Trump's never going to go away in that way. What are the indications that it is now? Keep in mind, I would say in 2009, people would have said Sarah Palin was the most influential figure in the Republican Party. And by 2014, 2015, people have moved on from her. Jim, timing. Why now? He is now a loudmouth in Florida.

He's no longer president of the United States. Launching a new party would have seemed, struck me as much more plausible four years ago than it does now. That's the first question about timing. The second question about timing is Liz Cheney. In the first effort to unseat her from the leadership of the GOP, that was defeated.

And she was reelected. Excuse me, she wasn't reelected. She already held the position. But there was a vote that was more than two to one in her favor. And now some weeks later, she's just been kicked out of the job. So something changed. and it wasn't Donald Trump, because the first pro-Cheney vote was closer to the events of January 6th and closer to having Donald Trump in all of our faces. Timing here strikes me as pretty peculiar and, well, at least worth asking Jim Garrity to explain in both instances. Sure. I think that my colleague Kevin Williamson observed when he was talking about a special house election down in Texas, when the guy who was most explicitly anti-Trump, he got like fifth out of nine Republicans and like two or three percent, and he really just

utterly flopped. And he observed that you can see a day in the not too distant future where the Republicans become a post-Trump party. It's very hard to see the day when they become an anti-Trump party. And so I think there are a lot of, you can argue, you can say Republicans, House Republicans and Republicans on Capitol Hill are being cowardly. I think that's a fair criticism. You can say that they're ducking their duties. You can say that they're excusing. I think all of that criticism is valid. But they have largely decided they want to ignore Donald Trump and hope that he slowly

starves of a lack of media oxygen. Because what does Trump thrive on? Conflict. He loves to fight. He loves to fight with Democrats. He loves to fight with media. But he loves to fight with other Republicans. And the Democrats love it when he fights with other Republicans. And the media loves it when he fights with other Republicans. So I think that first Cheney vote was a lot. And so the rap on Liz Cheney was, Liz, Liz, quit it. You're giving him a foil. I think that's a fair gripe. Now, she can point out, he's the one who is not being, nobody's saying leave the House of Representatives. What they're saying is we don't want you in leadership anymore because you're not doing a good job of leading. We need to hold together the pro-Trump voters and begin to piece together a post-Trump agenda. This is tricky work. We're working politicians. You're not helping.

Is that roughly that's the argument? It strikes me as perfectly legitimate. Yeah. I mean, look, ask John McCain how easy it is to lead the party and be a maverick at the same time right you know you you have to choose one of those two roles and you can argue and if liz cheney i think what she's done is a very principled stand to say look house republican caucus i think you're wrong on this i don't think we get any better by ignoring trump i don't think he's going to go away i think the only way that we really deal with this is by standing up and having this conflict right here and now who's advocating right now jim if you want who's advocating right now for ignoring trump who in the leadership is ignoring trump certainly not the certainly not the minority leader

would you how do you say mitch mcconnell is handling donald trump oh doing a very good job yeah but yes if you ask mitch mcconnell about donald trump he'll say well i'm much more focused on what joe botten is doing he's the only one there are who in the house oh no i think this house is much every time i turn around i see kevin mccarthy down in mar-a-lago yeah mccarthy is one of those things like the good news for republicans is they're right on the edge of taking the the uh the house of taking the House of Representatives. All they need is like one mild breeze at their back in 2022. And they're going to get this between redistricting and retirements and open seat races.

Everything's breaking their way. One of the things is that when it's that close, everybody gets really risk averse. And I think McCarthy is terrified some time between now and 2022 either trump says personally this guy mccarthy he's not loyal enough he's not my guy all that kind of stuff so there's that possibility or just you know you know the republicans never stood up for me right linwood is right the whole thing is rigged stay home you know and you end up in that same situation of just georgia runoffs where a chunk of the Republican Party shows up, but another chunk of the Republican Party says, oh, no, Trump told me to stay home, and they end up doing it. Like,

again, I would really love for the Republican Party to get really unified to put you say, look, yes, 2020 election is not only done and over with, it's fairly done. There is no Venezuelan hackers. There is no bamboo traces from Chinese printed ballots in Arizona, that all of this stuff is crazy. Let's focus on what Biden's doing. Let's focus on what we want to do. It's not like Biden's not doing enough that Republicans for objective. I agree. I agree with you. I just don't understand. I don't think it doesn't help when the president says every couple of minutes, you know, let's talk some more about 2020.

Right. I don't I don't I just don't see anybody in the House saying, can we just not talk about the silence about Trump, ignoring him, not going to Mar-a-Lago, not using him as a fundraiser. Well, there's a lot of money in those. The Trump base was willing to donate to somebody who's considered one of their guys, and they're trying to finesse it. They're trying to balance it. But it's not working out very well. What I'm saying is that ignoring him is not on the ballot. It's a fair argument. He doesn't have that choice.

It's either take a stand, and her stand is she didn't like him. And McCarthy's stand is I did like him. It's a problem. But it seems to me that if you're a Republican, if you were a Republican, it was for them. Why is that a problem? These guys are working politicians. They're trying to hold the party together and reach out and get enough votes to win the House of Representatives. You go down to Mar-a-Lago, you get your picture taken with Donald Trump that pleases certain people. You don't come out with some sort of agenda that Donald Trump has dictated. Nothing like that. You're trying to hold the party together. These guys are working politicians. It hard work it's sloppy work it's difficult irritating work in all kinds of ways and but everything everything kevin mccarthy is doing

strikes me as plausible understandable reasonable for a guy who's who's trying to hold the party together maybe i i think it's silly i think that what the democrats did in the the deep ice age they put jimmy carter in in 1980 was the smart move. And that a president like Trump, who's a one-term losing president, who left ignominiously with incredibly low positives among male Republicans in Georgia, should probably be turned into a pariah at least for the next 10 years. Move on. It is politics, I agree. But for some reason, the cold, hard realities of politics seems to escape. Donald Trump seems to escape those. He is a loser. He lost ignominiously.

He stained the party with his loss. He should be shunned. There are plenty of people who like what, oh, now we're going to bore each other to sleep in a moment there are plenty of people who like the policies that donald trump put into effect while thinking the man was a jackass and in the last six weeks an outrage you got to go for those people and although he still has he still has some supporters politics is tricky it's difficult and uh you and i've had this conversation over and over again for the last four years jim let's talk about something well hold on but non-trump no don't protract it go ahead james go ahead unless you can unless you can find some way of putting a bow on this thing after i i was and

then i was going to transition and then you just james lilacs is transitioning this is the you do break news on this podcast yeah um you've written about china and the wuhan lab theories um i never thought it was crazy but we were told that it was and now everybody's circling around to it saying that at least there's a 50 50 shot at it that it's not some naturally occurring zoonotic thing, but actually, yeah, they were doing gain-of-function. And it's been fascinating this week with Rand Paul versus Fauci about whether or not the United States actually was shoving money to the lab for gain-of-function research. If you spend some time on Twitter, everybody was talking about fur and cleavage all of a sudden, as if they knew what they were talking about. I enjoyed pretending for a day what I knew what I was talking about. But bring us up to speed on where it is right now and how do you think this

plays out because we seem to have an administration that is not necessarily peering at china with a laser-like focus as we had in uh well that other guy he's lost his name he's just the other guy you know um i was among the when this first happened i i you know bought into what was considered kind of a pretty broad scientific consensus we didn't know where the virus came from but they had these wet markets and in wet markets they're slaughtering animals right in front of you and for years virologists had said this is exactly the kind of environment that a new virus would probably jump from an animal species to a human being so i initially had believed okay this is very plausible people have been warning about this for a long time

that's probably what happened probably around like march or april of last year actually i came across this youtube video and yeah it comes across oh it's a youtube video what does this guy say yeah that is not a very good beginning but i i his name is alex jones and he has these great documentary called tight change yeah yeah so i started so what in this video can i verify and i started looking around all right so they said this person worked at the wuhan institute of virology let's go check on that and that part checks out and okay let's check out that you know and much to my surprise a lot of what was laid out here made sense and then all of a sudden it's something kind of clicked that it seemed odd from the very beginning of this like um when we've seen you know we've seen and what one of the reasons i think america had such a hard time with this pandemic is that going

back for 15 20 years they weren't actually americans don't remember the first SARS outbreak at all because it was occurring around the same time as the invasion of Iraq and we kind of had a lot on our plate at that time MERS Middle East respiratory syndrome Zika H1N1 all of these we were all you know you have to care about these viruses and to most Americans it had almost no impact on their lives whatsoever so that's one reason why we felt very unprepared for this but this one showed up in the middle of a city, not on a farm, not from somebody who'd been out in the wilderness or something like that. It could have been at a wet market, but it also was in a city that happened to have not one, but two high-level research labs that were researching viruses and bats, novel coronavices. And that just seemed like an amazing coincidence. Like if there was a terrible disease outbreak somewhere in Atlanta tomorrow, people would fairly wonder, huh, I wonder if something that the CDC did had something to do with

this. If there was one in Fort Detrick, outside Fort Detrick, Maryland, people would say, well, the U.S. Army's got a bioweapons research facility there. That, you know, it seems kind of strange. It would coincidentally just pop up right there. But we used to do gain-of-function research, and then we stopped because it was dangerous. The interlock

leaked. So, in a way, the lab in Wuhan, I mean, assuming I'm just jumping to the end here. I think that's probably what happened. That lab, yeah, that lab... As we were about to uh log in and have this conversation i actually just finished a corner post over at national review online

um i i broadly speaking i think you're right you're correct rob that the most likely scenario is they're doing research in one of these labs because we know that about 40 of the people who get this are asymptomatic let's keep in mind that you could have a punctured suit or a punctured glove or your mask isn't there, that some sort of innocent seeming mistake occurs. And the person who's in the lab is in that 40% who'd be asymptomatic. They'd have the virus and not go. But then they go home and they kiss their wife and they hug their kids or they interact with people. And that's how the virus gets started because going back to the very first research on this they could trace a bunch of the first cases back to the hunan seafood market which was the original suspect of where this came from but they couldn't trace back all of them and obviously contact tracing is complicated people

don't always remember every person they interacted with or something there was always this you know a couple months into it the chinese government said you know what it wasn't the seafood market um and while it's certainly possible this went through a pangolin or one of these other species between jumping from a bat to a um a human being for a couple weird thing one nobody's found this virus in nature yet we have not found a bat that's got it. We found one that was very similar, but we've never found this precise. Now, this doesn't necessarily mean it was dabbled with in a lab or something like that. I mean, it could have been gain-of-function research. I assume listeners are familiar with it.

The gist of gain-of-function research is... Sure. Should I walk through it? Yeah, you should walk through it, because if I do it, it'll come out something different. All right. So the gist is you want to know how dangerous viruses work so you can treat them right you know so you you want to um take a a sample of a virus and you apply something that kills like 90 of it but not all of it and then you got that 10 then you take that 10 you grow the sample again and then you apply some other agent that would

kill off 10 or kill off 90 so then you got 10 you know that would kill off 10% or kill off 90%. So then you got 10, you know, that little remaining. And you repeat this process. And you're basically speeding up evolution. You're speeding up survival of the fittest. So after a couple of rounds of this, you don't just have any old virus. You've got the strongest and most durable and arguably more contagious and most virulent version of this virus. Now, here's the thing.

You don't need, you know, what i'm describing is not going in and tweaking the genetic code or something like that it's an entirely natural process you're just kind of getting fast forward on the evolution so seedless watermelon yeah there you go and the curiosity so you're right the uh it did the national institute of health said don't do this research we want to review it more back during the obama years and early in the trump years they said yes this is okay as long as you're taking certain safeguards. Both decisions were made by Francis Collins over at the NIH. There's no indication that this was an Obama thing versus a Trump thing or anything like that.

I'm agnostic on this. I don't know. I certainly can see. Well, if you want to know how to stop a really dangerous virus, you need some sample to work with. You need to see, you know, what stops it. stops it right i also totally understand this is like making the strongest spot this thing is dangerous but there's got to be a way we can make this more dangerous does seem like yeah it's the sort of thing jeff goldblum is always worrying warning people about in the first act yeah i was gonna say yeah right you're jeff goldblum in jurassic park your nature

finds a way okay so let me ask you a judgment question. Assuming that what is deep in our suspicions is true, that this was a laboratory experiment, and the very nature of coronavirus, which is that it spreads wildly without symptoms, doesn't kill itself, is in fact, you could host it and never even have a sniffle, is also why it can escape and lab very easily is also why i can get from wuhan to my neighborhood in 24 hours without any

trouble um all that is true and that is what happened the four five of us are now talking about this the four of us talking about this thing are there people in the cdc are there people in government or in the research community who are nodding their heads saying yeah we yes you guys are a year and you we've been lied to for a year and a half and now that it's almost over it's time to tell the truth is that what's going to happen here well there's like you know 18 fairly prominent virologists who have a letter in science magazine that are, they're not saying this was a lab leak. They're saying we can't rule out any possibility. And there's kind of been this rush to judgment and dismissal of this possibility. Now, I realize we got to wrap things up. So I'll just kind of observe,

like, you know, what if this is the case? Starting in arguably the 1980s, certainly by the 1990s and by the year 2000, both parties and corporate America and Hollywood and almost every major institute, academia, almost every major institution in American life placed a very big bet on the table, which is that if we interact with China more, they'll become more like us. And we totally wouldn't become more like them with censorship and thought control and and all that kind of stuff um it was a wrong bet we you look back and you read what bill clinton said when he was signing uh most favorite nation status and and permanent normal trade normalization with china and all that stuff it comes across as wildly spectacularly naive that giving greater trade with china was going to make them nicer was going to make them nicer, was going to make them more responsible players on the world stage and make them less draconian and authoritarian and cruel and all that kind of stuff. Yeah, we made that bet. And now we're left with that bet.

And now we're left with, oh, 20 to 30 years later, oh, crap, that totally didn't work. And not only that, we're now completely economically intertwined with them. And it's very, very hard to say, oh, we got to undo this. It's as if we'd invested in the Soviet Union and suddenly woke up and realized, oh, these guys really are the bad guys. It wasn't because they were too isolated.

They really mean it. And now we got to figure out some way to economically disentangle ourselves and arguably prepare for something akin to another another cold war except one that's much more advanced it depends whether you make that deal with an antropov or a gorbachev or somebody like i mean the question could be whether or not china turned out the way it did because of the nature of xi's leadership or whether she is the inevitable result of that system that you're going to get a Xi no matter what. And we would love to talk about that with you as long as, as well as the colonial

pipeline thing, because of course you're out there in the East coast. And I imagine that you've been driving around looking for gas stations. You can pump unleaded into a big garbage bag and throw them in your trunk. I love the pictures of the trunks where people are putting, you have these garbage bags full of gasoline. It looks like somebody went out to do drug testing on elephants and they're bringing it back to the lab. But we run out of time as we like to lie when it's time for another guest. So thank you so much for being with us. Everybody go subscribe to the jolt. Of course, listen to three martini lunch.

Follow Jim on Twitter and you'll be smarter for it and you'll be happier for it because he's a fun guy to read and uh and a good chap to talk to jim again guys it's great to see you again can't wait till we can do this in person see you see you on the cruise ship oh wait right you know sad maybe next year i've got my fingers crossed anyway bye i mentioned to jim of course the the colonial pipeline thing best best job posting of the week uh was colonial asking for somebody to head up their cybersecurity division, their digital security division. Was that real? I believe it was. And it's not a surprise.

I mean, what an HR nightmare to find out that you've got to do that. Who's going to walk into that job? Expectations are going to be pretty high. Yeah, HR issues, they can just kill you if you're running a business. Wrongful termination suits, minimum wage requirements, labor regulations, all those regulations. And HR managers, you know, salaries are not cheap. The average costs $70,000 a year.

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Go to Bambi.com slash Ricochet right now to schedule your free HR audit. That's Bambi.com slash Ricochet right now to schedule your free HR audit. That's Bambi.com slash Ricochet spelled B-A-M to the B-E-E.com slash Ricochet. And we thank Bambi for sponsoring this, the Ricochet podcast. Elliot Abrams has given the last four and a half decades of his remarkable life to American foreign policy, first in the Reagan administration, then you served on the NSC staff in the George W. Bush administration, correct, Elliot? Right. He is the man who helped, a man who helped to win the Cold War, and he has throughout this

period, I have always found, in everything he's written and said, made things clearer, particularly with regard to Israel and the Middle East. Elliot, thank you for joining us. For that matter, you know what? Thanks for more than four decades of what you've done. For today, what is happening if you open the newspaper and say, wait a minute, rockets are flying from Gaza toward Israel. Israel is attempting to defend itself and being blamed by everyone. This feels like something from a decade ago. Put places into context. And can you say, you're no fan of Donald Trump, but what's the net net of the trump administration is israel in a better place after the agreements that that emerge so what but but first why is what's

happening today why does this seem like something that we could have read in the newspaper 10 years ago uh well the short first of all thank you for the kind words peter the short answer to your question is it seems like it because it could have occurred, and it did occur. That is to say, a decision on the part of Hamas to start a war. In this case, I think the proximate cause is actually the cancellation of the Palestinian elections. The Palestinian Authority President, Mahmoud Abbas, called elections for this summer, starting May 22nd, 10 days from now.

And Hamas was going to do pretty well. I mean, there were plenty of opinion polls, and they would have gotten, you know, a third of the seats in the Palestinian legislature, which could have been terrific for them, but some right in the heart of the political system, and something more. The way the law is written, if you're elected to the Palestinian Authority legislature, you were automatically given a seat in the PLO's kind of legislature.

Hamas has been trying to get into the PLO for decades and hasn't been able to. This would be a big achievement. Abbas can read the polls as well as anybody else can, so he canceled the elections. What did Hamas do? Hamas did not sit there and say, okay, well, you know, too bad. It would have been nice to be more influential. They saw an opportunity here with a little bit of the trouble in Jerusalem, which is a combination of Jerusalem Day for the Israelis, Ramadan for the Arabs, a couple of court cases, eviction cases in Jerusalem that would really not have

meant anything much to anybody if it weren't this context. And Hamas decided to do a massive attack on Israel. Now, again, there have been previous rounds. There was a previous round under Obama. There was one under Bush. This is bigger in the sense that Hamas has shot, at this point, over 2,000 rockets and missiles into Israel and further into Israel than in previous rounds. These aren't mortars, you know, that are sort of hopping across the border. Elliot, could I just ask for a little elucidation right there?

Rockets being fired on Israel. Anybody who lives where I live, which is Silicon Valley, you know that sooner or later, even Hamas is going to start getting better rockets. The lethality of these things is going to increase. Against that, we're reading about the Iron Dome that Israel has deployed. And of course, they're making technological advances. Just for a layman, is this event more dangerous for Israel or are things under control from the military point of view? From the military point of view, they're under control. The Iron Dome is supposed to get 90 plus percent of the rockets that are coming in. It is. It is. It's in the low 90s now. So it has not been, you know, swarmed and overcome by Hamas rockets that are fired 100 a time or something like that.

Iron Dome is working fine. And the Hamas rockets are not particularly accurate either. They're really weapons of terror. Anyway, they're not meant to be all that accurate. They have more and better missiles now for one reason, Iran. There has been stuff smuggled in from Iran, and there's been technology transfers. So most of these things are actually made in Gaza. And one of the things the Israelis are doing now is trying to hit the factories, if you will, the warehouses, so that this has to stop and can't then resume, you know, six months later.

That's on the military side. The part of this that is more dangerous is the gap now between Israeli Jews and Israeli Arabs that has grown up in this week, because this is this intercommunal violence we had not seen in previous rounds. That is a gain, frankly, for Hamas. And when this violence ends, and my own guess is it ends after the weekend, the Israelis really are going to have to turn to that question of why Arab Israelis are willing to go into the street. The Arab population of Israel, that is, Israeli citizens who are Arab, is between 20 and 30 percent? What is it? It's 20 percent.

I mean, it's 20 percent. But you're talking about one in five citizens. It's a little bit over 20. It's about two million people. It's significant one of the things we have to remark on though is okay two million israeli arabs one percent is 20 000 one percent are not demonstrating and committing violence one tenth of one percent is 2 000 that's a little bit closer maybe it's two-tenths of a percent so one should not say oh you know israeli arabs are all out in the street they have grievances one of the things that's

striking about what hamas is doing just go back to that you know they don't say a word about gaza they don't have grievances about gaza they're not saying um we need more water know, we need more petroleum. This is ostensibly, theoretically, according to their propaganda about saving Jerusalem from the Jews. That's their line. It does make it a little bit harder to get a kind of agreement to stop the violence, because if Hamas is saying uh okay we want um more water and more gasoline delivered to Gaza you know you can compromise on that um on Jerusalem you really cannot do that kind of compromise I'm sorry Elliot Rob and James want to come in but I have if I may so as a result of the various agreements that emerged during the trump administration you can tell us what degree of credit should be given to the trump administration but

for sure they emerged during the trump administration saudi arabia is not going to be challenging israel from came from star trek of course have had a peace agreement since the uh camp david accords they're out there's only one problem now. Again, I'm asking this as a layman whose understanding of all this is quite crude. It's Iran. At a minimum, it's clarified the problem and narrowed it. The problem is Iran. Is that correct? It's basically correct. I mean, you asked about the Trump record. I think the Trump record on this is terrific, because he stood with an ally, Israel, and he deciphered something that previous presidents hadn't, which is that, went to the Ottoman Sultan. Theodor Herzl went to Sultan Abdulhamid in 1901 and said, you know, it would be good for you if there was a Jewish entity here. He rejected it, and the Arabs have rejected Israel and the Jews, you know, then in 1917, 1948.

He used to keep going, but not now. Now the Arab states look around at the successors to the Ottomans, Turkey. They look around at the Persians, Iran. They look around at the Jews in Israel and they say, we want the Jews. That's our ally. Those are the people we feel more safe and more comfortable with. So you have this alliance that Trump understood. Historically, that's just a staggering development, isn't it? It is. It is. Of course, it's great for the Arab states. It's great for Israel.

And it is great for us. Because we have the problem of trying to be friends with these Arab countries and Israel while they were at each other's throats. Now they're more or less allied. It makes it an awful lot easier for us one of the things that drove them into this alliance of course is iran as you said which is the main problem rob james oh hey elliot it's rob long thank you for joining us so to peter sort of took my iranian uh little thing but i do want to talk about a a little bit. So the great clarification under the Trump Middle East successes has been to eliminate the usual suspects and to concentrate our attention on the true malevolent actor in the region who has money and power and resources iran so so starting monday morning or next monday morning after the violence

what should the american position be towards iran because right now it seems like the american position is to erase the past four years, to go back to the Iran deal, to restart that. I think that's right. That seems incredibly naive to me. Am I missing a bigger picture? No, I agree with you. I mean, I think it's a very foolish policy. We're going back to the Obama policy when they talked about sharing.

You know, the Saudis are going to learn to share the region with Iran. And we've got to think about security structures that include Iran. Remember, this is a regime that's been saying death to America daily for 40 years and death to Israel. This is a hostile, dangerous regime trying to build a nuclear weapon uh and and i think you know the i have to say i think the biden approach to the iran negotiation cannot possibly work it cannot work my my obsession with the middle east and with sort of the – I mean, it's just – it's diabolically complicated, right? So on the one hand, you see the most recent violence seems to be at least partly inspired by an internet-signed political warfare within Hamas and the region. Another part, it may be 0%, but at least there isn't also uh you know what was it a week from now

netanyahu has to form a government he's been trying to form a government so in in this sort of particular political chaos as things arise and then there is also this sort of image for me of all my friends from you know the gulf states and from saudi arabia and i have several they would shrug and say we're not the problem it's iran is it a brilliant diabolical jiu-jitsu move of those gulf states and saudi arabia to back out of the fight so that the bully can be exposed because now it's much more obvious to americans or some americans that it's iran that's the problem iran should be the focus iran should be vilified and shunned and isolated and punished and sanctioned i mean in a three-dimensional chess that i think people in that region like to play or like to convince themselves they're playing this seems like a pretty pretty shrewd move you know i don't i

don't think they're trying to be i don't think they're trying to play three-dimensional chess i think okay so it's not a spy novel that's how i always think of it as a spy novel but i guess it's not okay yeah and remember three-dimensional chess didn't come from that region came from further i think it's basically look um we there's a hostile regime here it's really dangerous they want to get rid of all of us meaning they want to overthrow all the arab monarchies so from the point of view of say the, the Emirates, Saudi Arabia, a very dangerous regime, they want to know where we are. And they knew it under President Trump, actually. They knew we were on their side, very much on their side.

We understood what Iran was doing. Now they're hedging a little. You've seen the reports of Saudi Arabia secretly talking to Iran. Why is that? Because they're not sure where we're going nuclear weapon. It does not stop it. It really lays it out. The sunsets are coming one year after another. So they're wondering, well, what, you know, what are you Americans going to do to stop an Iranian nuclear weapon? And they think that if the answer is we're not going to do anything, then again israel is the one who's going to right right um now how do you how do you bundle all of this in the context of the american media definition or narrative of what's happening here which is occup brutal occupying force which is uh outspends and outmans and outguns it's you know ragtag renegade upstarts

um killing civilians um once more bloodshed from a powerful regime uh that should not be supported by american foreign policy i mean if i'm the iranians that's certainly a story i'm paying to get passed around yeah you don't have to pay much to get that story in a lot of the american mass media right um uh you know it's sort of the basic version of the uh of the new york times and this is what round 10 that we've seen this and hamas is smart they start with this huge barrage and they know that the israel Israelis are going to hit back. But they've just got to hold on a few days because immediately, you know, the UN starts saying, stop it, stop it.

And the Europe, I shouldn't say immediately, it takes two or three days. I think the Israelis, frankly, have got just this weekend to do as much damage to Hamas as they can. You know, it's Friday prayers, Muslim side actually now almost over into Saturday. Then it's the Jewish Sabbath. Then the United States weekend. I think by next week, the Israelis are going to start hearing, frankly, from Biden administration officials, this has to stop. This has to stop. This has to stop. You already had at yesterday's State Department press briefing, the CNN reporter said to the State Department spokesman, don't you think Israel is using disproportionate amounts of force?

This disproportionate stuff happens every single round. A proportionate response would be to lob 2,000 missiles without any guidance device into the populated centers of Gaza. Mr. Abrams, Peter Robinson has left and sends his best. I'm James Latlix here in Minneapolis with the last question. We can wrap up here and maybe go long term. Short term, we're always talking about the clashes. Medium term, we have the Abraham Accords, which are reshaping the neighborhood. But let me ask you a left field go long term short term we're always talking about the clashes medium term we have the abraham accords which are reshaping the neighborhood but let me ask you a left field thing long term how much is the the leviathan strike the big gas oil field that israel is helping to

develop how does that change the politics of the region and is indeed there's some you want to go rob long 3d chess is not russia saying we have a huge supplier competitor coming online let's go and give money to iran which will help take out this competitor to us yeah the leviathan and and other finds are a very very big deal for israel um first of all they're self-sufficient now in energy don't have to worry about finding a cellar. Secondly, it's given them a basis to cooperate with Greece, Cyprus, Egypt on exploring these resources in the Mediterranean. It's given them a resource to give to Jordan, natural gas. It's given them, in essence, unlimited energy for something that's really, really important in that region, desalination. You know, it used to be that the great issue that everybody was fighting over was water.

Well, if you've got enough energy, you do not have a water shortage. So it's been a real game changer. I think the Russians are actually on fairly good terms with the Israelis. They're trying most of all today to get and keep bases in Syria. I mean, this goes back to Catherine the Great, right? They want something in the men. They've got it. They've got an air base and they've got a naval base in Syria. That, I think, is their main goal, to maintain those, Putin's to maintain those. I don't think they're all that pro-Iran and Syria. They're pro-Russia and Syria. The Russians want to maintain Syria as what it was during the Cold War, basically a Russian ally,

not an Iranian ally, not obviously Western, a Russian ally. So they're sitting pretty right now. Well, we look forward to having you in a year when all of this will be settled and the Middle East will be sorted out for good. So that'll be great. Elliot Abrams, thanks so much for joining us. I look forward to that day, too. It's been great. As they say.

Bye-bye. Inshallah. Well, Peter Robinson did indeed have to leave. Peter Robinson is getting his second jab. Now, Rob, you had your second jab. Were you a Pfizer or a Moderna guy? I did. Were you a Pfizer guy? I got a Pfizer. I don't know. I don. Were you a Pfizer guy? I got a Pfizer. I don't know.

I don't think you can choose, but I just got Pfizer. No. Yeah, so did I. The first one kind of made me a little tired, but I was tired anyway. The second one, pretty much zero effect. I was supposed to, because I've had, as you know, I'm a COVID recoverer, or sufferer. Really? Are you now? You had COVID?

I did, in Decembercember how do you feel about donald trump right i was supposed to um uh you're supposed to when you have your first jab if you've had it you're supposed to it's supposed to hit you really hard if you've had covid but i didn't really have any effect on me apparently my mom it actually really did it made her sick for almost two days um but you know i felt i felt nothing after the second one i had my arm was sore where a piece of metal had been jabbed into it but i took that to be normal and then my shoulders were sort of sore and i had to ask myself my shoulders are did i do something to cause this well no did i did i feel some did i fill some pails with rocks and put those on the

ends of a pole and go up and down the stairs training like rocky for that one last comeback shot and i had hadn't done that recently so i figured that it was ascribed to that but in the end i didn't get ill which is sort of a disappointment because i was kind of looking forward to just taking to bed for maybe eight hours or so i'm convinced that one of my relatives um well my brother i should say when he got covid roughly around the same time wait wait wait wait you you correctly interrupted my segue and now you're backing away from correctly oh yeah no i correctly interrupted it but i assumed you weren't doing it so then i just thought i would i would actually participate in a conversation which is sort of what this is supposed to be

that was a segue that was marching down the street with a with a brass the 88ombones playing. And I thought I interrupted it, but you kept going to it. So I assume that maybe you were. That's because you interrupted it. I think it's a balance issue. I think if I interrupt it, I kind of expect you to get right to it. And if you don't get right to it, you've missed that interruption. That's kind of what I feel like. That's me throwing you off and faking you off.

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I know is, is usually the case often when we have the time, it is not. Timing was great, but it seemed to overload the potentiators there. As we say in the radio biz, well, I like supposed to the week.

So many good ones this week. I actually wanted to nominate something that I put up, not because I put it up, but because the comments were just so great. But then, you know, it's kind of cheating. So I chose My Shakespeare Confession by Mark Alexander. I said, okay, I admit it. I'm a Shakespeare heretic. Well, 95% anyway. I know, I know some of you are already shaking your heads, thinking I'm going to start talking cryptograms and conspiracies and such nonsense. I'm used to it. I stumbled into being a heretic almost 35 years ago, and there's always a significant contingent of head shakers when the subject comes up. That's okay.

I'm not really interested in convincing anyone. I just find it fascinating. That's all. And then on he goes to discuss the Shakespearean controversy. Now, do I find the controversy itself interesting? I do not. I think that Shakespeare wrote his plays, and I think it's sort of maybe perhaps a failure of imagination to say

that the Stratford man would not be able, through fiction, to conjure the worlds that he did, that somehow he had to be a nobleman. But that's for smarter minds than mine. What I liked is just the fact that the people in Ricochet, who just a second ago were talking about COVID and epidemiology and politics and Donald Trump and going forward and the rest of it, pivot without effort to talk about Shakespeare and the Shakespeare controversy for 30, 35 following posts or so. So a lot of fun. And it's a reminder that Ricochet is more than just talking about the issues of the day. It's also about talking things that go back centuries, literally so in this case. Rob, are you a a stratford heretic are you a uh edward man are you a kit marlo man what who do you think um i don't think it's christopher marlo we we have

his writing so they don't seem that doesn't seem similar to me i mean i i guess i just assume i mean i it's sort of what's interesting about this post of course is that people still care about it though there's this writer there's a person who wrote these plays who has captured the human imagination for half a millennium and that's pretty good uh you know something to be um you know just applauded to me the all the plays feel to me like a very a genius writing with a deadline and when you got a deadline you sometimes do your very best work and it seems like in many cases he did his he was very good with words very good with puns some of them are horrible and some of them are just really not that good uh but uh it is but he wrote more masterpieces i think than anybody and he did so because he was a genius on a deadline and that i mean there's nothing like

it's nothing like having people having already bought tickets to your play and payroll to be met and an audience demanding and competition breathing down your back and repertory actors demanding better and smarter soliloquies to make you do your best work it's not as if you know king lear would run for six months i mean you'd have guys showing up the day after king lear and saying what's the play today right it's not as if, you know, King Lear would run for six months. I mean, you'd have guys showing up the day after King Lear and saying, what's the play today? Right. It's like going to the movie theater. I mean,

in the old days of the movie theater, when you look at the ads of downtown Minneapolis, there's just dozens and dozens of theaters and dozens and dozens of studio products. It wasn't an awful lot like that in those days too. People wanted something new and they wanted it. Now there's an interesting radio show. I heard the other day.

I think it was, may have been Shakespeare's birthday, which was recently, which recreated the controversy by interviewing Shakespeare himself. And then after he described what he went through, all the pretenders that the historians have posited came forth and started arguing with him. And it was fun in many ways because it was a who's who of radio voices of the day. One of them, I think it was Kit Marlowe, was played by Hans Conrad, who people of my generation remember as a particularly hysterical voice in the Rocky and Bullwinkle cartoons. And then at the end of it comes William Conrad

as Dick Burbage, of all people. Somehow don't see portly mustachioed Conrad as Dick Burbage, but there it was. Anyway, that was the post of the day, because it was. Go to regchet.com, sign up, and maybe use that promo code. Should I use the promo code? You can cut it out if I don't. It's Ricochet.com slash radio, I believe, gets you three free months, and that'll show you what

the member feed is all about. A couple more things before we go, one of which is going to be a commercial. Apparently, we have vaccine hesitancy, Rob. I know you and i have had it and of course are just just preening with virtue because of it but in some places well ohio governor mike deweyne is using federal aid to start a million dollar lottery to incentivize covet vaccinations i i've seen them use beer i've seen them use donuts i I've seen them use donuts. I've never seen them use the poor odds of a lottery. But they say that if the innumeracy of lottery winners applies, that perhaps it'll get people to go in. I think it's a good job. I don't care.

Yeah, I'm torn. Part of me believes that I don't care. If you don't want to get it, don't get it. And if you get sick, tough toenails, as we say. I know that as a vaccinated as a vaccinated person i can't give it to you and you can't give it to me so i'm i'm i've taken care of my own little plot of land here um so i don't really care one way or the other it is interesting that the very people who believe that uh who who are worried about the odds of taking the vaccine and the odds of getting sick

will of course they would be enticed by the even worse odds of winning that million dollars um because there are they clearly have a problem with probability statistics but that's okay too because every now and then i pass the the bodega here and it says the mega millions or whatever it is powerball is like 400 million dollars i mean i i got a buck what's what's the harm so i play that game too um in general i kind of feel like i'm less interested in the vaccine and whether people getting vaccine and more interested in the um uh sanity after this sort of neurotic culture-wide freak out about this disease returning to sanity taking the masks off opening up the schools

opening up store opening things up and starting again, and maybe spending some time. I would love to. We ricochet. We can't afford it because we don't have enough members, but I would love to find some way to host or create or produce a long-form podcast serial, 10, 12, 20 episodes maybe, on the TikTok of all the mistakes we made what we should do different the lies that we were told the why we were told those lies uh and the reckoning that's to come that's what i would like so i'm i'm lessened i'm as far as i'm concerned we got the vaccine get it if you want to get it don't get it if you don't want to get it it doesn't really matter anymore what matters more is that we sort of write down all the stupid things we did as a culture and never do them again and the people who continually

even now advocate a whole host of stupid over-the-top completely useless precautions lockdowns which are total failures those people should be held accountable at the ballot box and turned out like the pry as they should be. How about people who, you know, not only wear a mask outdoors, but wear a mask when they're barbecuing outdoors by themselves? Or in the car. I see people wearing masks in the car. They're in the car alone and they're wearing a mask. It's insanity.

That was a segue, Rob. Yeah, right. Oh, so I might even like you know uh barbecue what what would they be barbecued barbecued you you got me off my game now i don't know now because like i i can only interrupt in a very specific way you're not even looking at the run down well that was A whole point. No, people barbecuing outside, you may be one of those people who wants to do it, and you may be itching for the outdoors. Ah, it's barbecue season, so it's time to get ready for some summer cookouts. Ah, if only there was a way. Here's where you come in, Rob. If only there was a way to skip the hassle and have great selections and enjoy it for a

great price. But of course there's not. There's a Rob where interrupting would say, there isn't such a thing. Yeah, yeah. Well, you know, you've got to take me when I give you. You can't. I don't interrupt. I'm not an interrupting robot. Well, actually,

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I, too, Rob, would like to see that 10-part series. And I fear that everything that we learn would be forgotten because the number of people who I think got rewired by all this is just remarkable. to trust the science and believe the CDC, who then all of a sudden had to turn around when the CDC said, take your masks off. I'm not sure what their end game is, what they want. Is it that they just simply have been so reconditioned to believe that every human being is an element of contagion, that they can't visually process the sight of a naked face without having some sort of connection? I mean, honestly, so. I mean, I can't, two weeks after my vaccine, I mean, the two weeks to the minute I am taking that mask off, I could practically, I suppose, take it off now, but I want to do the safe thing and follow the

science. But with the first time that I walk with my naked face through my building and get into an elevator, I mean, it's going to be joyous. And I mean, for some people, that thought is mortifying. And for others, it's absolutely joyous. And there's not a lot of room in which those places where those people can meet. Most people I see walking around on the street in New York City are walking around without masks um and then you go into some stores you put the mask on because they ask you to my ups store which i go to you know once a day almost i have to wear one other places not so much yeah um i i of the my my friend the novelist walter kern um uh tweeted something yesterday.

Is he a friend of yours? Yeah, he lives in your neck of the woods somewhere. Yeah, give him my warmest personal regards. I follow him on Twitter. Yeah, yeah, on Twitter. So he watched, I guess, Rachel Maddow, and he quoted her. And Rachel Maddow said, wow, you have to do CDC guidelines, which, of course, came out about 30 minutes before it was too late, before everybody said to hell with it, did it anyway um to take off your mask if you've been vaccinated indoors as well uh he reached out so i have to rewire my brain and his response was something i'm going to butcher something well if

you're if you're not a row automatic robot taking orders from a remote facility you don't need to rewire your brain and if you do need to if you are that then you're going to have to wait because our our service representatives are currently occupied with other customers and i just thought it was a good idea because there are people for whom yes i automatically followed robotically followed those directions and now i've gotten a new set of directives and the language is i mean so fantastically unironically orwellian that you really have to ask yourself what was this all about and it was all about i think a neurotic need on the part of many many americans unfortunately on the left and on the right

to have some kind of apocalyptic crisis and they're just not happy unless there's an apocalyptic crisis going on and i just find that bizarre well it was the best part of apocalyptic right it was the best kind of apocalyptic crisis in that it really wasn't i mean nobody really wanted for the store shelves to be empty for a year if not more nobody wanted society to collapse but we got we got a taste of all these things that we've been seeing and reading and on the movies and the books and the rest of it but yeah but it still was it still was unless you were personally affected by somebody who was suffering, it was still a bit remote, but it was all pervasive.

It was a script, and it was a thrilling script, and it gave you all kinds of new ways to order your life. If you had no ritual and routine before, all of a sudden you had form and you had shape. I mean, that's all incredibly obvious. So yes, I will love to see what the, I i mean i'm willing to grant them some margin of error because they were making up as they went along but when it became apparent when it became apparent that people were not getting it by touching doorknobs and jamming their fingers up their noses when they weren't getting it by passing on the streets that was mostly this subset of people in these locations in this

that then we should have been adjusting ourselves a year ago and the idea that we went into a rolling fortnights of lockdown after lockdown which some countries are still doing strikes me right as a murder of cities in many cases when combined especially with the violence that we had but now i think it's all getting better and i would get back to other things you know like uh drastic inflation and oil shortages and uh increasing consumer prices. I've been shopping at the grocery store lately and watching this stuff tick up and feeling like I got to cash an industrial bond to get a steak again, which is why I'm going to go to ButcherBox as soon as we're done. Hey, and we are done.

By the way, if you go to Apple and give us five stars, that's not enough. Inflation means you should give us six stars. Eight. Not six stars for the moment. So if you don't see the six-star option, get out a pen and draw that extra star on your computer screen. It will be tallied, I promise. And we also would like to invite you to listen to the best of Ricochet. You probably can't hear every podcast we do, but we've called some of the better moments. Put them into a show. It's available across the country on Radio America. Check your local listings, as we like to say. We've been brought to you by Bambi, by Bowling Branch,

and by ButcherBox, which is an awful lot of Bs, but they're the best Bs in the business. Support them for supporting us, and support us by joining Ricochet, if you haven't already. On behalf of Peter Robinson, I'm James Lalix. Thanks for listening. Rob, we'll see you next week. Next week. Cause baby, now we got bad blood. You know, it used to be mad love. So take a look what you've done. Cause baby, now we got bad blood. Hey!

Now we got problems. And I don't think we can solve them. You made a really deep cut. And baby, now we got bad blood. got blood Did you have to do this? I was thinking that you could be trusted Did you have to ruin what was shining? Now it's all rusted Did you have to hit me where I'm weak?

Baby I couldn't breathe And rub it in so deep Salt in the wound like you're laughing right at me Oh, it's so sad to think about the good times You and I Cause baby, now we got bad blood You know it used to be mad love So take a look what you've done

Cause baby now we got bad blood Now we got problems And I don't think we can solve them You made a really deep cut And baby now we got bad blood Did you think we'd be fine? Still got scars on my back from your knife So don't think it's in the past

These kind of wounds, they last and they last Now did you think it all through? All these things will catch up to you And time can heal, but this won't So if you're coming my way, just don't Oh, it's so sad to think about the good times You and I Cause baby, now we got bad blood You know it used to be mad love

So take a look what you've done Cause baby, now we got head blood Now we got problems And I don't think we can solve them You made a really deep cut And baby now we got head blood Band-aids don't fix bullet holes You'll say sorry just for show

If you live like that, you live with ghosts. Ricochet. Join the conversation. Band-Aids don't fix bullet holes. You say sorry just for show. If you live like that, you live with ghosts. If you love like that, blood runs out. Cause baby, love we got bad blood

You know it used to be bad love So take a look what you've done Cause baby, now we got bad blood Now we got problems And I don't think we can solve them You made a really bad cause And baby, now we got bad blood Now we And baby now we got bad blood Now we got bad blood