The Ricochet Podcast - Potty Talk

Episode Date: September 15, 2023

As the lines that used to distinguish the political and legal are blurring, and the sense that the country is swirling down the drain, it's nice to at least have good company. Rob and Peter chat with Andy McCarthy to discuss the 'impeachment inquiry' into the Biden Family's influence peddling and the administration's apparent obstruction.And if you're in need of a good cheering up, you can hear about swell innovations in toilet seating. Maybe political chaos will be good for Capitalism!?

I'd like to talk a little bit about toilet seats. Ask not what your country can do for you. Ask what you can do for your country. Read my lips. Today, I am directing our House Committee to open a formal impeachment inquiry into President Joe Biden. I'm going to put him in a... committee to open a formal impeachment inquiry into President Joe Biden. Welcome to the Rick Shave Podcast number 658. I'm Rob Long, joined by Peter Robinson.

Our guest today is the great Andy McCarthy. I agree. Let's have ourselves a podcast. You'll never get bored with winning. We never get bored. Hello and welcome to the Rick Shave Podcast podcast this is episode number 658 which unbelievable unbelievable you're just making that up i'm just making it up i don't know if i'm making it up but i'm certainly reading it uh i am rob long coming from new york city and with me uh as pretty much as usual but for for at least 500 consistent of 658 is Peter Robinson in Palo Alto. Peter, how are you? I'm fine. I'm fine. I was a little better until I heard the numbers. 658. 658. One per week. Yeah. That implies that we've been at this for a while. Yeah. You'd think that we'd be rich but uh no such luck

um we are usually joined by uh james lilacs who sort of just runs the show here uh he's off this week which means unfortunately i am gonna do that stuff uh i'm already sure that i'm gonna be bad at it um and um we have a guest today a old friend one of you know can we just get this out now so we don't have to get it out when he's here sure um really one of the great american writers andy mccarthy wait i'm sorry i just had a a i just had kind of a brain aneurysm yes you did you're confusing andy mccarthy with andy ferguson exactly because i kept thinking andy ferguson who is a great writer i mean andy mccarthy's great writer too but i was just for some i don't know why i did that that's uh that's not a good

sign i don't know um 658 uh i can um i could probably mentally deteriorate even more and still be more mentally alert than the current and perhaps next president united states this is joe biden's america after all right right actually come to think of it come to think of it i hope he gets re-elected because you know the benefit of joe biden and me, Rob, he gives us cover. That's true. That's what Jeb Bush said that on a podcast we had him on. This is a while ago. He said, like, he's like, I'm 60 something years old.

I go to Washington, D.C. and I'm like, I'm like a young guy. Exactly. Like that. All right. So, Andy McCarthy, we have a lot to talk about because apparently there have been some indictments in the news. But meanwhile, before we get going, and of course, we want to thank our sponsors today, ZBiotics and Shopify. We'll get to those later. You have a topic you want to talk about? Yes, I do have a topic I want to discuss.

And I want to discuss it. You want to raise, I should say? I would like to. Nicely put. Nicely put. You know where this is going. There are some who stick up for the defenseless. I stick up for the unmentionable. I rise, Mr. Chairman, to speak in praise of toilet seats. And here is why. We had to replace one here.

I live in an older house, and the toilet seat cracked. And we went to the hardware store and bought a replacement, cheap replacement, just a typical toilet seat. And do you know what has happened? Do you know what the latest marvel of free markets? It is now standard, even on a cheap, cheap toilet seat, that they lower themselves slowly. Somehow or other, some engineers somewhere they don't slam down anymore. And so, I've sort of been noticing this in restrooms across America. This is capitalism, as Milton Friedman used to teach us, is the benefit of living in a free

market society is the hundreds and thousands and the compounding of small improvements that make our lives just a little bit better. And I raised five children, three of them males, and the slamming of toilet seats used to be one of the banes of my existence. Yeah. Now, the kids are older, but they'll be back for Christmas, and this time there will be no slamming. And so, Mr. Chairman, in honor of Milton Friedman, of 200 years as a mostly free market, I bring to your attention toilet seats. I'm done.

That's right. Although, I have to say, it took him a while, right? I mean, I don't really mean that as a kind of prism of capitalism, but it does seem to me that every now and then, I mean, we all notice this every now and then. I mean, there's an old joke, right? Two economists were walking down the street, and one of them looks down and says, hey, look, there's a $20 bill on the sidewalk.

And the other doesn't even look down and says, can't be, someone would have picked it up by now. Right, right. So sometimes you're like thinking like, you know, I bet you there were like 50 people, maybe 100 people. I'm just being conservative estimate here, who before the guy invented the toilet seat that doesn't slam, thought, you know what we need? We need a toilet seat that doesn't slam. That's what I should do. I should do that.

Well, but you know what? If there was there was any someone's got to have tried it already and i think it's not just capitalism but it's a certain kind of uh entrepreneurial risk taker that says i i even if they did it they did it wrong and i can do it better you know sometimes like you notice that there's a business somewhere you didn't even know there's a business there um i mean you know you look at starbucks right there's no reason why at no point did anybody really say you know i just i drink this stuff but i don't like it there should be a coffee shop in every corner in america nobody ever said that no one ever said that. And yet, he just made a better cup of coffee and charged you more for it.

Right? I mean, like, I'm so old. I remember when the best cup of coffee you could get on the road was at McDonald's. Right. Right. I would go into the office in the morning at my first job, and I would have gone through the drive-thru to get a cup. Big, big thing of McDonald's coffee. People would say, oh, man, McDonald's coffee.

I love that coffee. And that was before Starbucks, I suppose. So, anyway. I don't know. The other example, Paul Romer, the economist Paul Romer, whom I knew. We were friends when he was here at Stanford. He's gone off to, I think he was the chief economist at the World Bank. He's a big-time economist.

And the insight that made him famous was that there was always, I'm putting it very crudely, he put it mathematically, as best I understood it, what it came down to was this, there was always room for innovation. Always room for innovation. And the great example, this isn't Paul's example, but this is my example. Wheels have existed for what? 5,000 years? And suitcases have existed since at least the middle of the 19th century. But it wasn't until sometime in the 1980s when somebody said wait wheels suitcases wheels suitcases i know i'll put wheels on suitcases right and it made everybody's life better all of all of us okay that's a very good point because it did i think but then you had but then someone now you're going to find the dark cloud and the silver inside. But even that was half done. What do you mean? Somebody put wheels, two wheels, two sets of wheels on one side of the suitcase.

So you can kind of lean it and drag it with the wheels. And then someone else said, wait a minute, we're going to put two on. We might as well put four on. And that made airports so much more pleasant for everyone. So I don't know. I guess what I mean is that there's like, I guess what urban developers or urban theorists call infill, right? There's always this idea that you've got to go out and find something on the edge, right? Move out of the city to the suburbs, then move out of the suburbs to the exurbs keep moving out and then there's people say well wait a minute you could do

infill by making the city itself nicer there's opportunities where we don't look for opportunities so i guess that what i that's what i would say about that your your uh your um ode to capitalism i would say i would add to it only you have to have also an ode to a society that rewards and encourages risk yes used to be an old statistic i know we have to get around here but i used to be an old statistic about the when when forbes is a real magazine the forbes 400 like the 400 it was 400 right i think it was 400 yeah yeah the 400 richest people in america and i think it's malcolm forbes jr who i once heard say that the the best thing about that list to him was that uh 30 every year of the names were new turned over exactly and that 30 weren't there anymore and he said that's how you can said, we'll know that we have a really healthy system when it's 80-20.

Right. Well, it's been another wonderful podcast, Rob. Boy, we really do need James to keep it moving. So we do, we have Andy McCarthy coming. Meanwhile, before we go, before we jump to him, a couple of non-Andy McCarthy-ish topics. Mitt Romney retiring. And there's a whole lot of speculation about that. I'm like, well, he could do this or that or the other. But I take him at his word.

He is 76. He is rich. He's clearly out of step with the Republican Party. He doesn't really want to run again and then be a senator when he's 82. I think every single 76-year-old in government should follow Mitt Romney into a splendid and peaceful retirement. I will also say this. If I look like Mitt Romney at 76, when I'm 76, I mean, I don't know. I mean, I'm sitting here drinking a cup of coffee, and I'm going to have a couple glasses of wine tonight, and I'm thinking like, man, maybe the Mormons got something. The Mormons have a lot, I think. Okay, now, am I allowed to sound peevish about Mitt Romney? Sure.

Because I read the profile in The Atlantic, which apparently was this teaser article about a biography of him that's going to be coming out next year written by McKay Coppins. McKay Coppins? McKay Coppins, I'm not sure how he pronounces his first name. Yeah. Beautifully written. And he said that he and Mitt Romney have been spending time together for two years. And here's what emerges. Mitt Romney has spent two years telling McKay Coppins how he, Mitt Romney, is a far better human being than the 99 other members of the United States Senate. It is so sanctimonious that it just sort of took my breath away.

When you recall, as Michael Brendan Doherty recalled on National Review the other day, that Mitt Romney, for reasons of pure opportunism, became pro-choice when he ran for governor of Massachusetts, and then became pro-life when he ran for president of the United States. What I recall, because this irked me in particular, given my early jobs in my life in the White House, was that when he ran for senator, he lost that election. But before he ran for governor, he ran for the Senate in Massachusetts, and he couldn't say enough bad things about Reagan and Bush. I'm not Reagan and I'm not Bush, he said in a debate with Teddy Kennedy. And then, of course, when he was running for president,

he couldn't say enough good things about Ronald Reagan and George Bush. None of this makes Mitt Romney a bad man. He has a wonderful family. He was a huge success in business. What it makes him is a working politician. And the idea that he somehow achieved some kind of purity... of course, I can understand his position on Trump. But the way in this one profile, he dissed his fellow members of the Senate, working politicians, including Mitch McConnell. You could put Mitch McConnell's accomplishments in the Senate, Mitt Romney, partly, I think, because he adopted this stance of such sanctimoniousness. Mitt Romney has accomplished nothing in the United States Senate. And Mitch McConnell has accomplishment after accomplishment after accomplishment, including the current composition of the Supreme Court. So, it was time for that good and remarkable man to go home some time ago, in my humble opinion.

Now, I don't like sounding peevish. Really? Because you're really good at it. Why, thank you. I don't disagree with any of that. I will only say this. You don't? I thought you would. Well, no, no. i mean i i i i defend toilet seats i thought you would defend mit romney i think that the general decline in i think that often people accurately diagnose a problem or diagnose a disease that they themselves

have right his argument about the republican party now that it doesn't really stand for much and doesn't really do anything and is kind of fake um and a lot of uh you know kabuki kind of outrage um i think it's absolutely true i mean to me the the the symbol of the republican party today is Josh Hawley shaking his fist in solidarity with the protesters on January 6th on his way into the Senate and then running like a terrified, terrified cat, you know, an hour later. That, to me, is emblematic of the Republican Party. A lot of talk. A lot of talk. A lot of talk. And

no action. Or no conviction, put it that way. So I think he's right. I'm not comparing them, contrasting them negatively to the Democratic Party, which is sort of specialized in this kind of behavior for as long as I've been alive. I'm just, everything seems to be

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and for reminding me what I'm going to have to do at 6 o'clock tonight. I shouldn't be so proud of that, but I am. Our next guest, our only guest today, thank God, Andy McCarthy. We've known Andy a long time. He's an old friend of this podcast.

He's a senior fellow at the National Review Institute, NRI, contributing editor there, as well as Fox News. He is here to explain all the latest stuff going on in politics and criminal law, which which by the way are now the same thing andy welcome where are you wait you're downstairs in your own house aren't you i am and i am in uh bucolic new jersey that's right and you've got but you're doing a kind of oprah winfrey stand-up mic there oh yeah i i i can never make this work and i keep like knocking it over whenever i try to put it someplace because i'm just okay i'm a mess sorry guys i need the z biotic that's evidently that's clearly the problem here um okay so we got a bunch of things to talk about but let's first talk about impeachment um so well when when when democrats impeach president trump everybody said when nancy

pelosi said did it everybody said you didn't even have a vote you didn't even have a vote uh you just opened the inquiry you didn't have a vote she said i don't need a vote and then when uh ken mccarthy opened a impeachment inquiry some people said you didn't even have a vote why don't you have a vote and he said i don't need a vote um who's right the speaker of the house either one or the people complaining either one well it really depends rob on what they want to accomplish if you want to actually have an impeachment committee where you not only designate it under the House rules, but importantly, you establish the jurisdiction for the committee and the scope of what it's allowed to investigate and what a conservative subpoena is on, then you need a vote. And in point of fact, when Nancy Pelosi did not have a vote in 2019, the Trump administration, the people like Kevin McCarthy not only went nuts over that,

the Trump Justice Department under Attorney General Barr ended up issuing office illegal legal counsel guidance to say that the probe as long as it wasn't supported by a vote in congress was illegitimate and therefore the administration didn't need to comply with its subpoenas now you know you have to remember i think always with impeachment that it's a political process, not a legal one. So, for example, the OLC in the Trump Justice Department could take that position. But when the Democrat-controlled House impeached Trump, the second article of impeachment was for failure to comply with the subpoenas. The complication there is that about six or seven weeks after Pelosi unilaterally authorized the inquiry without a vote, they took a vote. So eventually they did take a vote.

But I do think that this move to have an impeachment inquiry or to actually change the name on the door because it's basically the same inquiry it was the day before. But now they're going to call it an impeachment inquiry. chairman Jamie Comer and the Oversight Committee issued a subpoena to some component of the Biden administration, and they didn't comply with the subpoena, that would have been a lawful Oversight Committee subpoena, and the defiance of it could be an article of impeachment down the road. Now, by having this exercise where you call it an impeachment inquiry, but you don't vote for it, they're giving the Biden administration the out to claim that the investigation is not legitimate. And just giving them another reason not to comply. Kim Strassel has it exactly backwards in today's Wall Street Journal. Kim said, in effect, would have been better to have a vote, yes, but the Speaker doesn't have the votes. He only has

a majority of four, and there are going to be more than four Republicans who get queasy about this. But still, designating this an impeachment inquiry gives Comer greater legal, I beg your pardon, I can't quote her, but the idea was that it gives Comer's subpoenas greater weight, and that's just wrong? I think it gives them greater political weight, Peter. It doesn't give them greater legal weight. Now, let's just put aside the trappings of an impeachment inquiry. Today, just like last week the oversight committee still the oversight committee same with ways and means same with the justice department they have the same legal jurisdiction to issue subpoenas they did you know they do now that they did

before there was a designated or labeled impeachment inquiry so I wouldn't want to suggest that this is a big deal because they have sweeping jurisdiction in those committees. Yeah. And I think what Kim is, the point that Kim is making, I think, is the same point I heard. Well, I've heard a number of people say that we, you know, now we have some oomph in our subpoenas. What they're saying is publicly you look worse if you defy something that's called an impeachment inquiry subpoena. Maybe that's true. On the other hand, I was on a program sometime today right before or right after Nancy Mace, who's on the Oversight Committee.

And she said, you know, now that we're an impeachment committee, our subpoenas have broader jurisdiction and we can really go after this stuff. And I don't see that at all. I just don't think that's true. By the way, let the record show, I start talking this way whenever you're on, Andy. Let the record show that although it's not quite 1230 back east in New Jersey, this very day, Counselor McCarthy has already appeared on so many shows that he can't remember quite when or quite what or who the host was or who the other guests were. It's all a jumble already and the man hasn't even had lunch yet. Hey, so Andy, what,

further on impeachment, then we have to get to Trump because we just have to, I'm afraid. It's sort of mandatory. We are of an age, the three of us, and I remember being taught when I was a kid about the impeachment of Andrew Johnson just after the Civil War. I don't remember whether any teacher ever used these words, but I remember having the feeling that that would never happen again, that it was part of the upheaval of the Civil War. It was an extraordinary and singular moment in the life of the nation. And then impeachment proceedings began against Richard Nixon. And this, again, I don't remember, I remember watching it, but what I remember, what stands out in my mind is how shocked my parents

were that a president of the United States was being impeached. It was just in our little home in Vestal, New York, upstate New York, ordinary middle America, it was a shocking event. And now we've had Bill Clinton, Donald Trump twice, Joe Biden. I mean, I just want to hear, is the whole procedure, clearly this overuses the procedure, but is it also debasing the Constitution? Is it't very important. Madison thought that the impeachment clause was indispensable in terms of the ability of Congress to respond to potential ruinous abuse of power by this very powerful executive branch that they were creating. And look, I have the same memory that you do. I you know running home uh from someplace i'd probably school i don't maybe it was the summertime but i remember running home to

watch alexander butterfield testify and shocked the country by saying that nixon had these tapes right um so but but i i actually think you guys both of you in your coming at this your own way are better suited to no no from your own experience i mean okay um but but i think you're better suited to address this than i am because my my belief for what it's worth is that um this media age that we are in has changed a lot of things and impeachment is just one of them like for example peter i'm sure that speeches get written differently today oh for sure than they used to uh and rob just like the the messaging that goes into conveying a political right campaign or initiative or whatever is vastly different today

than it used to. And what I'm afraid of is that impeachment, having been now cheapened into something kind of like censure, is just another arsenal in our political theater. I mean, everybody knows that Biden is never, ever going to be impeached. And in point of fact, the Republicans don't want to impeach him because then we get President Harris. So, you know, even if they could, they wouldn't. But this just seems to be a media strategy driven by mainly the pro-Trump Republicans in the House because they and Trump would like to have a parallel political trial proceeding going on Capitol Hill while Trump is undergoing all these other, you know, criminal trials in the justice system. I get all, but come in, Rob, to, well, no, I don't want to invite him to come in because

he always disagrees with me, but. Oh, no, I don't want to invite him to come in because he always disagrees with me, but the politics of that I get. And it's sort of cheap and tawdry, but it does, yeah, that seems to be what the moment demands and maybe, okay. But within this, there is, I think, I'm putting this to you as a question, something substantive and important taking place. And I who thought, watching him on Fox News, that James Comer, the chairman of the committee that's conducting these investigations, I thought at first he was a pure showman. But that committee has uncovered important and real information about Hunter Biden, his father's participating in telephone calls, that the Burisma that Joe Biden had tried to, the White House had tried

to portray Joe Biden as vice president, his participation in the effort to get the prosecutor in Ukraine removed. they were saying all the Europeans wanted that because the prosecutor himself was back crooked. Turns out that's just not so. The Europeans didn't, they weren't involved. All right. All of this has come out of sort of old fashioned, almost Peter Rodino style, good staff work, tough chairman, a certain relentlessness. So there is something honorable and important taking place, or am I wrong about that? No, I think you're not only right, I think it's also the only game in town. Too much of what we now want in the way of political accountability

has been basically delegated to the prosecutors at this point. And I think the framers would have thought it was laughable that prosecutors who are executive branch subordinate officials could

possibly keep the executive branch in check, and the president in particular so in this particular instance we have a prosecutor for the biden justice department because they wouldn't get a real special counsel a real independent person and he dawdled for the five years that he's had this case and pursuing hunter just to not only hunter but the but the broader family corruption investigation and all of the uh a lot of the stuff that you just alluded to peter that happened in 2014 2015 and 2016 those are the most important years because those were the years that joe biden was vice president and when they were trading on his influence as a criminal justice matter

all that stuff is gone now because he waited weiss waited until the statute of limitations has run and so far as we saw yesterday the only thing he's brought is the one thing he could bring that Joe Biden is not implicated in Hunter's bad behavior. So that's the gun charge. Yeah. But I think that his job, he's called a prosecutor, but basically his job here is to disappear the case against the president. And if you don't, if Comer doesn't make the case, then no one's making it. This is one of those, I have a question that's an Andy question. And here's why it's an Andy question. You grew up in New Jersey.

You know something about politics where elbows get thrown. I keep trying to talk you into running for governor, and I still think it's not too late. But that's another matter. You know politics in the raw. You were a United States attorney in New York, in Manhattan. You tried terrorists. You tried people who wanted to blow up Americans and kill civilians. You have seen life, politics, and the legal system in the raw. Does what has taken place in the Biden Justice Department, excuse me, the other piece I want to give background to is that a number

of points over the years, I have seen even Andy McCarthy, not a cynic, but a realist, I have seen even Andy McCarthy shocked. You knew, or I don't know that you knew him deeply personally, but you knew Jim Comey, for example. And there was a moment when Jim Comey was first coming to our attention, what is that, six or seven years ago now, when you said, no, no, I think he's a good guy, he's an honorable guy, and Jim Comey shocked you, the behavior of the FBI shocked you, is what's happening in the Biden Department of Justice, or what has happened, shocking even to Andy McCarthy, or do you look at that and say, nah, that's the way it happens?

Well, it is the way it happens, but it's atrocious i i the only reason i fight on the word shock peter is i'm beyond shocking now for some of the reasons that you've described and i you know look i've been 180 degrees wrong about some of this stuff i mean i you know i when people first suggested to me that the FBI might have taken uncorroborated opposition research and basically thrown a caption on it and brought it to the FISA court to get surveillance warrants, I said, you know, you guys are going to end up looking like the tinfoil hat crowd at the end of this because what we're going to learn is that the fbi did what the fbi always does which is it may have taken some opposition research but it scrubbed it for the three or four things it needed to make probable cause it would have done its own investigation on it and by the time it got to the fisa court it would no longer be a dossier. It would be FBI evidence that they had run down. And it turned out that they did exactly what I said could never, ever happen.

And the reason I said it could never, ever happen is this came out of an argument that we had during the Clinton Justice Department about the thing that became known as the wall, where they put in these procedures where the law enforcement side couldn't cooperate with the intelligence side. And I made the argument in-house at the time that that was an irresponsibly dangerous policy to have, because if you had a criminal who was a rational actor, it would be much easier, or a rogue agent who was a rational actor, it would be much easier to make up evidence to sustain a criminal case than to make up a national security angle and go by FISA because there were so many rungs of supervision and sign-off on FISA would it'd be too easy to get caught no one would abuse pfizer that way and what happened they ended up doing precisely what i said would never ever happen so yeah i've been you know there's a lot of things that have happened in the

last 10 years that are not the justice department that i remember uh and i'm not trying to be i so idealistic about it that nothing bad ever happened in the Justice Department. Yeah, bad things happen. It's a human institution. But the politicization of it and the blatancy of the politicization of it, I mean, when you have Democratic prosecutors indicting Trump four times times and i'm not here to carry a brief for trump uh i actually think the mar-a-lago case is a pretty strong case and and he should get convicted on it but you know these especially this is the biden justice department bringing these cases and it's elected progressives who happen to hold district attorney's offices in in states

throughout the country who are now incentivized to use their prosecutorial power against their political enemies i don't really think they even care how the cases come out i think they're not using their power to actually enforce criminal law i mean they got a lot of free time these da's not putting you know shoplifters behind bars right what are you gonna do you got all the office supplies computers and stuff you gotta get to prosecute somebody as civilization disintegrates you really want to be with rob long he'll find a way to get a laugh out of every catastrophe i got a question though um two questions really one is um just a just a

strategy question is it possible that a few months from now maybe six months maybe a year from now that you will be saying you know the best thing that happened to Joe Biden is that Hunter Biden was indicted and maybe convicted on that gun charge. So here's my problem with that. I guess you're

skeptical of my theory. But I'm skeptical, not as a political analyst or a lawyer, no. As a human being, what I try to wrestle with is if this were one of my sons, this would never happen. I would use, if I had the power of pardon, I would never allow one of my sons to be put through this ringer. Now, it would be a gross abuse of power, and the only honorable thing after doing that would be to resign and step aside. um but i just you know what the best thing for joe biden politically i don't you know the fact that he's allowing his son at least to this point uh to be indicted um so that they can run around and beat their chests and say see we prosecuted the president's son without fear or favor i don't think they can actually make that argument credibly because the stuff that really matters

which is the the foreign corruption stuff the the millions of dollars that came into the family coffers that has gone unaddressed and the prosecutor they assigned to it to my mind willfully sabotage the case so i don't think they're going to be able to make a very convincing argument that biden you know let the justice department run independently and they just prosecuted his son like he was every like any other defendant because it's obviously not true yeah but i guess what i mean is that here's my think my theory that he's going to get indicted for something right and so stonewalling and having hunter biden walk free is a is just a bad look right because there's just so much stuff on him um in the same way that i kind of think i could be wrong that the impeach impeaching joe biden kind of helps him in a way right because the

whole argument is you're singling out one family and one guy and you're making it trying to like all these liberals are attacking Trump. And now the conservatives are attacking Biden. It feels to me like the bigger mess helps the incumbent. Is that right? Well, I think you're you're right on. You're right to this extent. When Peter before was alluding to the Nixon impeachment and how shocking it was, at that point in time, it was shocking, right? And therefore, the fact that Nixon was about the impeachments we've seen, I want to put the January 6 impeachment in a different category because it's so sui generis coming up, you know, when Trump was virtually out of office. So it's hard to make an assessment of how that helped or hurt him. I think ultimately we'll be able to make that assessment.

It's going to hurt him, but we'll see how that plays out. But I think it helped Clinton to be impeached and but i think it helped clinton to be impeached and it didn't hurt trump at all to be impeached over ukraine in fact the ukraine was such a nothing burger that the democrats didn't even run on it in 2020 they barely mentioned it so i think there's a lot there's a lot to be said for the idea that there's a certain sympathy factor that, well, maybe it's tribal. I don't know. But there's a certain rally around our guy effect that happens here, regardless of the merits of the case. Can I give an answer, though?

Hey, Mr. President, how come your son and the laptop and all of your son seems to be getting away scot-free? And then Mr. President says, you kidding me? He's on trial right now for a gun charge that could put him in prison for, you know, 10 years, whatever, 30 years, some giant number. I don't think he's getting on scot-free. OK, let's, you know, hey, how come the you know, you went after Trump for all this stuff and nobody went after Biden? Are you kidding me? There's a House inquiry, impeachment inquiry open right now i mean in a way we this is kind of the cesspool that we're in right where we don't ever we don't talk about things like

trade with you know asia and the american defense or the border we talk about is i'm gonna hire a guy to put you behind bars just like bolivia i think that's all right and he's got the media at his the wind at his back which a republican wouldn't so those as you laid them out because i've been watching this stuff closely for a few years i wasn't impressed by the arguments but i think most people will be you know most people are not going to be as informed about this stuff as we are. They're not going to know all the things that haven't been prosecuted and have been left on the table. Right. So... The counter argument seems to me... I'm just going to mention this and I may be wrong, and then I'd like to ask a bigger

question of Andy, and I know rob is going to push back on the bigger question anyway the counter argument to me seems to be that for an ordinary voter you say well trump's a crook and biden used to be able to i like biden because at least he seemed like a decent person now he's a crook too. In other words, it removes one of the strongest points in Biden's favor, which was that he was at least a decent person. And Biden risks, Biden not risks, he's going to lose that. Anyway, I may be wrong about that, but it seems to me that if you've got two dirty candidates, what's the choice? So, here's the larger question. The case for Trump, for supporting Trump, and I want to note that first time around when 17 candidates were running in six years ago, I guess it was now,

six and a half years ago, Donald Trump was my 17th choice. I have hoped and hoped and hoped that Ron DeSantis would catch fire and replace Trump. In other words, I'm still a Republican, I'm still a conservative, and I'm still casting about for alternatives to Trump. However, the case for Trump is coming into focus and the case runs as follows. He is a loud mouth and a braggart. He showed very bad judgment and worse on January 6th. But he, even he, at his worst, engaged in no assault on our institutions that even begins to equal the corruption that the of Justice is obviously corrupt. When a prosecutor, two-bit prosecutor in New York, with his case in Atlanta, every case except the Mar-a-Lago case, are obviously political.

How dare they? They are moving us in this great country into banana republic territory. Now the press, the press has been totally corrupted. The press is saying there's no evidence that Biden, there's better evidence against Joe Biden today than there ever was in the Russian dossier case. The corruption of the FBI, all of this corruption, and I as an ordinary, and in the Mar-a-Lago case, they've got him. Okay, he broke the law by sticking a pile of documents in his bathtub. But here's what Hillary Clinton did. She put classified material on a private server. Every person I've talked to who knows anything about intelligence takes it for granted that the Chinese, the Russians, and probably the Israelis all hacked that server,

and all that information went to foreign intelligence. Donald Trump stuck stuff in a bathtub. There's no evidence at all that any intel that he misused ended up in foreign hands. And furthermore, the Justice Department didn't need to, the raid, they didn't need to do that. I grant that it was illegal. They've got a case. But it's a small bore case by comparison with the corruption that has been taking place in the democratic side and in particular by comparison with hillary clinton so as an ordinary voter what can i do to push to say this is outrageous i'd like to i'd like to be able to support ron desantis but it's not doesn't seem to be working. I still have hopes for Nikki Haley, but it may come down to Donald Trump. And he is, as much as he has sinned, he is still more sinned

against than sinning. That's the case. Andy? Andy Well, I mean, it's the best case for him. It doesn't resonate with me just because I've already made up my mind that I thought he should have been convicted in the impeachment trial and disqualified. In the January 6th impeachment, the second impeachment trial. Right. But I don't know how you support somebody who you say should have been disqualified from ever running for for president again and i guess just to be hard-headed about this peter yeah um i've taken the position trump can't win and i

even though i i see uh what biden's problems are i think this is a dynamic situation where they're actually the democrats are getting exactly what they want which is um he looks like he could win now right um so to be clear mitt romney was ahead of obama in 2011 true true and the plan here for the democrats has always been use the indictments to rile up the base so that they cling to trump and then when the audience during the election is not the republican primary electorate but the general electorate that's when you have the trials and the hearings and all the really bad stuff comes out and they they dump stuff on him like no one's ever seen before and the backdrop for that is he won by a miracle in 2016 in a two-person race with 46 percent as the incumbent he couldn't get 47 in 2020 um i'd be stunned if he

gets 44 um i think bill clinton was elected with 43 well but they had to be they had to be perot i mean they had no no that's true you're right like if you if you get a third a credible third party threat you're right all bets are off. But if it's a Trump-Biden election, which is what your hypothetical is, I just don't see how he can win. I don't see how he can win. I don't think the Republicans are making an effective case that he can't win because they're tiptoeing around it. The only one who's not tiptoeing around it is Christie, and Christie can't win. So, I don't know what to say about that, you know. Pete So, how do we conduct our lives as we watch this? I mean, I remember the Dole campaign,

and it was just this slow-motion catastrophe. It felt to me like watching a redwood fall in slow motion. Everybody knew this. So, how do we conduct our lives as journalists, as citizens in this weird, Biden's going to be their nominee, Trump is going to be our nominee, it looks unavoidable, nobody wants this to happen how do we conduct our lives as journalists and human beings and americans in this weird circumstance you know judge bork used to tell this story about um i don't know if he's in a faculty lounge but watching Watching the Clarence Thomas and Anita Hill hearings, and Irving Kristol is there and is about to hand him a martini. And he says, how's it going? And Fork says to him, it's the end of civilization.

And Kristol hands him the martini and says, well, it'll take a long time and it's still possible to live well i think i think that's the answer unfortunately um you know i i think there's a lot of ruin in the system here's on a serious note yeah what has always bothered me about the january 6th commentary particularly from democrats and this whole narrative about how our Constitution was hanged by a thread and our democracy was almost... The hero of the day on January 6th is the Constitution. It was never in any doubt. It was never in any danger. There was never any doubt that Biden was going to be...

Yeah, I agree. That's always one of my problems with the january 6th you know the overreaction is you know we have a constitution it's not capture the flag it's not like well if you can get to that gavel then that person gets to be president it's not how it works but um what i what i found dismaying about january 6th actually really wasn't trump i mean i've always I felt that Trump was emotionally and mentally unstable and therefore unfit to be president. I thought this in 2016

and I think I am right in that. What was surprising to me is that ordinary traditional conservative intellectuals came up with some utterly, utterly idiotic scheme by which the vice president of the United States

could do something that day where if vice president al gore had done that in 2001 or if kamala harris does it in 2025 they will their heads will explode right so you know uh if if vice president kamala harris decides that she kind of on in retrospect after reading the claremont review she kind of, in retrospect, after reading the Claremont Review, she kind of agrees with their position about what the vice president can do. What are they going to do now? So a lot of this is just everybody took a stupid pill at some point. when the wheels came off the bus and people decided that George W. Bush, though wrong about the Iraq invasion,

utterly wrong, was somehow evil and destroying the Constitution, threatening the Constitution, and almost anything we did about him to him was justified. I mean, they did that with Reagan, too. So, you you know there was

only one side of the bus the wheels came off and then now the wheels come off on the other side too the republicans are the same thing i guess here's my sort of larger i mean i don't want to be existential about it because i is it possible that these things go in waves. And if you look in American history, you see lots of, lots of dirt and dirty politics and name calling, and you see a lot of chaos, right? It, it wasn't the stately progression of,

uh, of bearded gentlemen who had been educated in the Judeo Christian Western tradition. And then all of a sudden, you know, it all went nuts around whatever. Um, isn't it possible that people if the people decide they don't want to take this anymore they don't want the the the cretinization of american society and politics to go forward or isn't it possible that just people will get tired of this or the people involved will get tired of this or am i just fantasizing well i i

think it's possible but i do think that um making it a new routine or a new norm yes yes the incumbent side uses the criminal justice system against the other side changes the dynamic it's it's a it's an evolution or a devolution of of the process that you've been talking about and i don't if that becomes a norm i don't know what's left of the country and i don't i don't mean to i don't want to sound hysterical but i really think that if you don't have a perception based on a reality that the laws are even-handedly enforced then i i fear for what happens to us well i guess i guess what i'm asking to you is this should we just say you know what we're going to bring back dueling i mean i'm almost half serious right because that is south you know almost exactly 200 years ago that seemed to be how

i mean how many presidents were involved directly in a duel i mean i mean andrew jackson carried a bullet in his body all his life from a duel right yeah he killed me he waited for the other man to fire took the bullet and then killed him right that's one tough hombre but that was also considered kind of ungentlemanly at that yes yeah but i don't know who would win in the duel i mean i would love to see the duel well while andy while andy is thinking about the duel i have a slightly subversive but on the other hand kind of a and here's what's happening here. I see kids at Stanford, the bright kids take a look at politics and say, I want nothing to do with that. I'm going into business. This could be good for the economy, Rob.

Well, yes. I mean, it could be. I mean, it is also possible that we took certainly the chief executive in this country and and we have made it an imperial position over time where they play hill to the chief wherever he walks you know down the street and there's a motorcade and uh and people in government do seem to be um grandees the way they wouldn't have been before i i don't know this for a fact because i couldn't get a glimpse of her but i walked out of my house monday and suddenly there was a there were like black suvs on the street and there were little flashing lights and they closed the street off and then there's somebody

at one of the houses there and he stood up he stood out and some old lady who looked like nancy pelosi i don't know if it's nancy pelosi but it could have been and she goes up and she greets this person and it's like kind of a present new schools across the street so i don't know who's i don't know this is the kind of fancy neighborhood people in these houses right and and it looked like and i thought of course the former speaker of the house gets a motorcade yeah maybe it's time for everybody to be taking down a pig. Andy, what do you think? I know you've got to run. I think I'm just too... I'm too worried about

the point of the exploitation of law enforcement. Maybe it's because I'm too close to it. If you don't have a system where people think that, you know, you get a fair shake out of the justice system and where it becomes a regular thing where the attorney general is expected to exploit the power, you know, the administration expected to use the law enforcement and intelligence apparatus against the other side, we're done. We're just ruined.

On that happy note. On that happy note. Well, Andy, thank you for joining us. Please, can you come back later and give us some good news? I'll work on that. I'm going to work on your timing. I'll work on my dueling skills. Bring back dueling. That's what I say.

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that has made it easier to get into that business. So it's your job to bring us out on that. I know, I know. On a happy note, I don't have that. On a happy note. Except I think that I'm right. I think these things tend to burn themselves out. I think that we know on a happy note i don't i don't have a happy note except i think that i'm right i think these things tend to burn themselves out i think that we go through a little crazy every now and then it's american it's this american style and that we uh people decide they turn and the great thing about the public turning is it turns faster than anybody

at the top can predict before you know it you're uh shouting to empty theaters um you remember in american history it was a lot of talk about uh father coughlin father coughlin yes yes yes the fire brand priest on the radio was considered an early kind of demagogue and very dangerous peter he's a very dangerous radio personality uh and he was very conservative i note that his uh most uh biggest years i think most popular years coincided with the new deal and the socialization of a huge portion of american economy i'm not sure father coughlin had any of the power people ascribed in right right that's a contrarian view that you can take issue with at a later date. Cause we got to wrap.

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Peter, this has been a lot of fun. Peter T. Leeson It has been fun. I don't quite know why, because here we are watching everything slide south, so to speak, but it has been fun. I feel watching one of those YouTube videos of some tidal wave sweeping over some island in the Pacific, but still, as long as we're watching from a distance and swirling, uh, have olives in our martinis, what could be,

what, why, why wouldn't it be fun? Things have a way of working out. That's my, that's my lame optimism. Everything kind of gets sorted out in the end. The benefit of,

of a Yale education. Next week, Rob. Next week. Take care. Ricochet. Join the conversation.