The Ricochet Podcast - Taken For A Ride

Episode Date: January 30, 2014

Direct link to MP3 file This week, Troy Senik sits in for Peter Robinson as we bat around the big wrap up of last weekend, and SOTU…yawn. First up, The New York Time’s Ross Douthat talks conservative reform and more imperfect unions. Then, Washington Free Beacon’s Matt Continetti drops in for a fascinating chat about on Love In The Time of Obama. Also, does it matter that Hillary hasn’t driven a... Source

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Decencies apply. See OnPost.com. Activate program. I can hear you. And the people who knocked these buildings down will hear all of us soon. Mr. Gorbachev, tear down this wall. It's the Ricochet Podcast with Rob Long and Troy Seneck sitting in for Peter Robinson. I'm James Lilacs and today we have Matthew Connernetti from the Washington Free Beacon and Ross Douthat from the New York Times.

Are we going to talk about the State of the Union? Well, we have a mic and we're going to use it. Let's have ourselves a podcast. Hey, didn't we just do one of these? Well, here we are doing it again. Welcome, folks. It's the Ricochet Podcast, number 201. This one's brought to you by Encounter Books, and this week's pick is a Glenn Reynolds classic,

The New School of the Information Age Will Save American Education From Itself. And by classic, I don't mean it's a rerun. I mean it's brand new and already instantly famous. For 10% off this or any of the title, use the coupon code RICOSHAY at your checkout. And we're brought to you by Audible.com, the leading provider of spoken audio information and entertainment on the web. Listen for audiobooks whenever, wherever, however you want.

And if you go to audiblepodcast.com slash ricochet, you will get yourself a free audiobook and a 30-day trial. Peter Robinson, I believe, is gone from this earth. Rob Long is down with a cold but here. I'm here. And Troy Sinek is sitting in. And so, yes, we all got colds. Is that how it worked?

I know that I'm sort of peculiarly attired and sort of swaddled myself. So the 200 podcast was just one big viral swap. Well, you have an excuse too, James, because you had, what, an 85 degree temperature? What was your temperature

differential going back from Los Angeles to Minnesota? It was indeed about 71 to 75 degrees. Oh, that's crazy. I mean, it was 66 when I got on the airplane and when I got back to Minnesota. You know how you walk through the jetway and if you're in a warm climate, sometimes you can feel just the wonderfulness that's outside coming into the jetway. Here, it's like these stabbing fingers would go through the cracks of the jetway reminding you that you're back in the place of 20 below. It was not.

Everybody looked at you funny like like why did you come back yes well it's the people who get off the plane wearing shorts that i really feel sorry for i knew james was going to have the the bends when we were at dinner after the event on sunday night in california and it's what 9 30 at night it's still probably about 67 degrees on the west side of los angeles and james is checking his phone to see if his daughter's school is going to be canceled the next day because of snow. That's right. That's right.

But on the other hand, you know, I am able to actually track the progress of the globe through its peregrinations around the earth. You know, I feel the change of the seasons of the year, the accumulation of time. I'm not living in this wonderful dial tone that you guys are. But I got to note, somebody said that at Rob's house that actually no matter what time of year it is because of its proximity to the ocean, that it has that nice, wonderful, cool California feel. So when the breeze comes in from the ocean, Rob, do you like the way it rustles the toilet paper back and forth and you hear the – Wow. Wow.

We had to go there first. Yeah. Well, there was an issue. But that issue, we're putting it past us. I have a – Tissue issue they would have called it if it was a sitcom. Wow. We had to go there first. Yeah, well, there was an issue, but that issue, we're putting it past us. Tissue issue, they would have called it if it was a sitcom, yes. I always say that I write jokes for a living. That's how I make my living. So I like to know what I know is funny, and I know what's not funny. That's how I do it.

It was actually a great event, though, I have to say. The live show, meeting everybody, we have 300 plus people there. We had a bunch of people who were not members. So I would take advantage – I'd like to take a moment to say this. You are listening to the Ricochet podcast. If you are a member of Ricochet, we are really pleased that you are joining us today on the podcast. If you are a member of Ricochet and you were there on Sunday night, it was great to see you and we'd love to meet you. If you were not a member on Sunday and you became a member, welcome.

We want to say welcome to new members. It's great to have you. It was a great post this week by a new member saying, hey, listen, I just want you all to know I am not a great writer. I just write from my own experience. I'm like, well, that's what a great writer is. So congratulations, you're a great writer. So we're really thrilled when people join and we're really thrilled when they join in the conversation and we're really thrilled when they sign up. A special thanks to JT, who, as I

understand it, is in the chat right now. It's his first podcast. He's a new member. And we hope very soon that Ricochet gets to the point where making such personal shout-outs is absolutely possible, that we have to run them by like the credits of the gaffers in a big movie. But for now, hey, JT, thanks. Welcome on board. Yes.

And then I would like to say to people who are listening to the Ricochet podcast who are not members of Ricochet, please go to Ricochet.com and check it out. We had a great event on Sunday night. We're going to have more of these events all the time. We are trying to build a vibrant network of center-right Americans, voters across the country, link them together in a conversation that is civil and witty and nice and polite but nonetheless meaningful to connect them to each other, to our contributors, contributors and members having a conversation together. Look, conservatives spend a lot of time in cars listening to people talk at them. That's what we do. That's kind of our MO. No offense to the Rush Limbaughs of the world.

They do a great job. They're wonderful people. But that's what we do. We sit, we listen. And then we sit, we watch Fox News. We sit, we listen. Ricochet is really a place for conversation so that we can have a two-way dialogue. And I think that is what this country needs.

You can also find out things, for example, if you'd been at the 200th event, you would have found Dennis Prager's theory of fluid sexuality, which we have just sort of reinforced here by referring to JT as a male. Sorry, JT is female. And we have been informed of these things. But see how quickly Ricochet can turn on a dime when the culture demands a correction. Now, the culture as we know it today is having a lot of fun absorbing the wonderfulness that was the State of the Union address. Are they? We all read Kevin Williamson's Philippic Against It, with which we can all agree it's a bloated, useless event. But Troy, I'm going to go to you and ask you, what could we take away from it and what's the most terrifying thing that you heard that makes you fear for the future of the republic? Well, my own judgment on this, having worked on State of the Union speeches before,

I posted this on Ricochet yesterday. In my judgment, they are utterly useless exercises for the most part. And I would tell you that you can't take anything away from this precisely because of the nature of the speech because you get 45 minutes on everything. Last night's speech – I didn't watch it. I read the transcript afterward because it takes about a fourth of the time. Last night's speech touched on everything from childhood obesity to madmen and the idea that you're going to have you know some big takeaway from that first of all i mean i think it actually gets to a problem in the modern presidency which i think that president obama is the worst offender of this but he's certainly not the first one to do this which is that as media has expanded as we've gotten into

the 24-hour news cycle as we've gotten into all of these different platforms. Presidents interpret that as a need to be everywhere all the time opining on everything, which I think sets up the inevitable disappointment when they can't accomplish everything. It's not really the way presidencies work. You get two or three things per term. So when you get this grab bag for 45 minutes, there were probably three dozen different policy proposals last night out of which you will see movement on one or two in the course of a year. So I think it all feeds into this bloated sort of cult-like notion of the presidency that we've developed in recent years and the reality of it is I think presidents would actually be better served by hanging out – hanging back rather a little bit more.

I mean it's not a coincidence that Obama's numbers tend to go up when he goes away. You talk about one or two big things. You pick your spots, and first of all, it has the advantage of giving you a sharper message. But second of all, I think it's got the benefit of calibr because it's like he's elevated or – I'm not elevated. I guess he's brought it down to the insult, to the throwing shade quality where you watch it to see what mean thing he's going to say to Republicans or to the Supreme Court or to whomever he identifies as his antagonist that year. And the agenda part of it is completely irrelevant. The idea that he's going to use his mighty pen is – we all know that's not going to happen. We all know it's not going to happen in any meaningful way. But we all – the problem with this president is that he's so weak at this point that he has to act like this and be propped up by his acolytes in the media, which makes it so strange. You really are watching an empty suit, a huff and puff, and then people afterwards going through the motions pretending like that matters when in fact even if – even where he populated, he'd still be a lame duck president with – facing a very blistering midterm with an incredibly unpopular agenda and a mess of a domestic agenda – a mess of – this kind of complicit nodding to turn this – what should have been an embarrassing speech into something meaningful when we know, as you said, Troy, deep down it doesn't mean anything.

It's strange. It's a strange thing. It's like it's the same thing what's going to happen when Hillary Clinton runs and we all have to pretend that Hillary and Bill Clinton are married because we don't want to embarrass them. You know what I mean? It's really the same attitude where we now have to participate in this lie because we don't want to be rude to – I mean we, meaning the media. We don't want to be rude to our sort of leaders. Oh, let me step in and try. I don't mean we.

I mean them. You know what I mean. Well, I would love today for one of those fact checkers, those Pinocchio bestowers to take a look at the president's assertion, which has been made a million times before. That it's still now at this day and age after all the progress and permitted by law to get 77 cents for every dollar that men make. It's nonsense, but we're going to hear it and you're going to hear it again when Hillary runs. You know what that's also indicative of? I think this is a very balesome trend in politics generally but especially on the left. We've all heard the explanation of that from the conservative side, which is that an awful lot of that – in fact, the vast majority of the difference there has to do

with different choices that women make. You take yourself out of the labor force at some point to have kids, things like – or they value having fewer hours at work so they can spend more time with family. The left especially constantly acts as if there is no social outcome that is not determined entirely by public policy. They completely remove the idea that some of this is a reflection of individual choices. I mean it's the same thing when we talk about income inequality and when we talk about poverty and you have to – when you go into the statistics, Charles Murray has made the point over and over again.

You could cut a check to every American to take them over the poverty level at a huge discount versus what we're paying for the welfare state. But let's say you did that. In a year's time, I mean who knows how many, but probably a majority of those people are going to be poor again because a lot of poverty comes down to personal decisions. There are certain things that are just beyond the kin of the state to influence in a way that's going to change anything and that kind of language about the income inequality or about the pay differential

between men and women just entirely elides that. Oh, Troy, you know, your patriarchal, phallocentric mansplaining here is just precious. That is what is on my business card, yeah. If only you realize that the reason that women make these choices, that some choose to stay home or some choose to take time off the workplace, is because society has trained them to do so and values that and prizes that and privileges that, dare I say, among the other things that they ought to be doing. You know, if the government provided daycare from the moment the child was squalling under the womb, then women would realize that the office is the environment in which they want to work and they'd be perfectly happy handing off their tots to the state at the earliest possible opportunity. Of course, now as it is, we just have to hand over our kids when they're five years old. I know the president wants universal pre-care, but at least five years old,

we've got them in our bosom before the state wrenches them away and takes them to kindergarten and begins the whole wonderful process of educating them out of everything you tried to teach them in the name of some egalitarian spirit. Well, the problem is, is that those schools that we send our kids to are failing and they're failing all over the country. And when the president talks about how we need to spend more on K through 12 so the disadvantaged can do better in college. No, it's not college tuition prices that's keeping them from succeeding. It's the nature of what they get or don't get in the educational system now. How do we fix that?

Turn to Glenn Reynolds. Turn to Encounter because their new book, The New School, How the Information Age Will Save American Education from Itself, is yours to read cheaply and you will be – you'll be learned. You'll be schooled. You'll be taught stuff after this. In this book, Glenn Reynolds, whom you may know as the Instapon, it explains how parents, students, and educators can and must reclaim and remake American education through technology, as Newt Gingrich would probably proudly say. Already, Reynolds explains many Americans are abandoning traditional education for new models and they're going to charter schools and private schools and online education with over 1.8 million K-12 students already. Now, for 15% off this book, which is great. I've read it.

Go to encounter books.com and use the coupon code ricochet at checkout. We thank our friends as ever at encounter books for sponsoring the ricochet podcast and for bringing us guys like the Len Reynolds. We also would like to bring you somebody else you've heard of, you know, and if we're lucky, he actually was talking with Dennis Prager last night, which puts him amongst the family of Ricochet folks who have recently basked in the

wise presence of Dennis. Ross, Ross Douthat joined the New York Times as an op-ed columnist in April of 2009. Before that, he was senior editor at Atlantic and a blogger for theatlantic.com. His most recent book is Bad Religion, How We Became a Nation of heretics, and we welcome him to the Ricochet podcast. Oh, thank you. Thank you for having me. So you're broken up over Pete Seeger's demise. We understand that. But explain for us why, of course, you think he was one of the greatest cultural voices to emerge from American culture in the last 150 years. years? Pain to silence. That's exactly the question I was expecting.

It's funny, when I heard the news, I was actually hanging a painting with a hammer. I had a hammer in my hand. So it was a resonant moment. Hey, Ross, it's Rob Long in Los Angeles. How are you? Hey, Ross, it's Rob Long in Los Angeles.

How are you? Thanks for joining us. Hey, Rob. How are you? Good. So I just want to talk about two things. I mean, we were just talking about the State of the Union last night and what a weird kind of kabuki event it is these days. That, you know, the president gives a giant list

that nobody really pays any attention to it. The agenda kind of evaporates. Nobody – it really doesn't matter. This president seems to use it simply as a moment to score points against his opponents because he feels like that's where he does best when he – sort of on the attack for Republicans. And everybody seems to want to sort of do away with it. Can a president – do you think any president can say, you know what, I'm not doing one this year? Is that possible politically? I think it would have to be a president in a sort of supreme political position.

So a president sort of coasting on 65 percent approval ratings or something. And, of course, a president in a supreme political position probably wouldn't see the point of doing away with it to begin with. But the reason, from the point of view of the White House, however much of a kabuki show it is, it's a chance, a rare chance in a totally fragmented culture to go on a bunch of television channels and have a long stretch of, you know,

essentially free air time to talk. You know, I mean, the point is, it's the president at his most presidential, being applauded, being feted, and the ratings, while, you know, they're not great ratings, they're not the ratings that you'd want for a hit television show, but still, a lot of people watch the State of the Union. And if you look at the responses to some of the laundry list proposals, you know, he'll say we should raise the minimum wage, and the people watching will say, yeah, we should raise the minimum wage. Now, I don't think that he particularly effectively exploited that opportunity last night.

I think there are just deep limits, especially at this stage in his presidency, to what he can do. But it's still a win in general for the president to do it. So they're going to continue doing it. All right. Did you watch it? Do you think it was among – you think it was – We've now seen this guy do it a bunch of times. I'm not going to tell you that I watched every minute of it because that would be dishonest, and I believe

in telling the truth at all times. I was in an event myself last night, so I did be sort of the Washington watch after the event. I watched highlights, headlines, etc. But watch, you know, highlights, headlines, et cetera. But no, I mean, look, there's...

President Obama is effectively a lame duck president who is most, you know, who, to the extent that he can do anything, he's going to be doing it through executive order. To the extent that he has any hope of passing anything major, it will happen only if the Republican Party decides to pass an immigration bill by pretending they aren't passing one that President Obama supports. So it doesn't actually help him to talk about immigration. And so all that's left is just sort of trying to show to the American

people that he's concerned and he's on the job and so on. And I think it was a speech that maybe accomplished some of that, but not a particularly significant moment in our politics. I don't feel bad about having missed it live. That's an extremely polite way to say it. When a journalist says, I don't feel bad about missing it, that's a very polite way to say no big deal. So we had a big ricochet event on Sunday night. We were there with hundreds of staunch center-right and conservative types, including Dennis Prager, who I know you saw last night or recently. I was with Dennis instead of watching President Obama. Well, that's good.

I feel I was a winner there. Good choice. And I was struck when I was wandering around the crowd how hopeful everybody is about the midterms and how hopeful they are about 16. Because they think that we have – they think we have an agenda, right? That's what they want. We have a real agenda now. And you wrote recently about – that we have right now a plausible right-of-center agenda on domestic policy anyway. We'll just stick with that, which you're calling reform conservatism.

But you're not that hopeful that the Republican Party is with us on that. Could you explain that for a minute? What are the components of that? I'll be honest. I'm pretty pessimistic by nature, and I feel like I've spent the last, I guess, well, pretty much the entirety of the Obama era writing pieces about how the Republican Party doesn't actually have an agenda. But I have to say that, you know, there is actually possibly some kind of light at the end of the tunnel for

the party right now. And just since I wrote that piece, a group of Republican senators came out with a health care alternative to Obamacare that is, frankly, far better than just about anything that anyone not named Paul Ryan in the House or Senate has proposed in the last five or six years. So I think you've I don't think the party as a whole is necessarily united behind behind a sort of clear agenda. But I think what you're seeing now is what the party needed several years ago, which is sort of real policy entrepreneurship from a lot of different figures, from Mike Lee, the senator from Utah, to Marco Rubio, to this cluster of senators who rallied around this health care alternative, to Paul Ryan himself. So it's not just Ryan as a one-man band. And that's a big change, and it's potentially a big deal.

Do you see that as the benefits of a power vacuum where you have kind of this party that's had its head chopped off two presidential cycles in a row that now kind of where if you're a younger politician, younger Republican politician, you really feel like you can make your bones doing something? Or is it just the natural swing back from a very progressive president initiating policies that people are at the very least uneasy about? I think that it's three things. First, I think it's exactly as you said.

There has been generational turnover in the party, and a lot of the people sort of trying to step into entrepreneurial roles are people who were elected in 2010. I mean, I think between the three of them, Mike Lee, Rand Paul, and Marco Rubio are responsible for a huge proportion of the attempted policy innovation in the party in the last year or so. So you have that change of the guard. Then you have, I think, a sense that wasn't there before 2012 that, okay, actually just being opposed to an unpopular president isn't enough. And I think, you know, during the entire 2012 primary campaign, you know, it was basically an idea-free zone in the party, except for Herman Cain and 999, which the less said the better. And there was a reason for that, and the reason was that Republicans assumed

that because Obama was unpopular, because the economy was lousy, and because they had won big in the midterms, that they were just going to cruise to victory on just a, you know, anyone but Obama platform. And that turned out not to be the case. So now you have a slowly a sort of reckoning with that reality. And a reckoning with the fact that even though Americans, you know, were unhappy with Obama in 2012, they also remembered how the Bush presidency ended and, you know, weren't going to hand the whole government back to Republicans unless Republicans had something new to say. And then I think the third factor is just how the government shutdown worked out for the party last fall. a sort of palpable sense among Republican politicians that that was sort of, you know, that was that was sort of giving giving, you know, just sort of straightforward, just say

no opposition one last try. And it blew up in Republican faces and they got nothing out of it and their poll numbers cratered. And so now you have people who are involved in the shutdown, like like Mike Lee, actually leading the charge on some real issues and some real proposals. And all of this is good. It's good news.

It's good news for Republicans and conservatives, and it's good news for the country because you need the opposition party to actually propose an alternative agenda on taxes, health care, and so on. Ross, this is Troy Sinek. I want to ask you about something you did recently which struck me as an extremely honest thing to do, also an extremely unusual thing to do for somebody in your position, which is that you actually wrote in your column in The Times a piece on the – I think the three biggest things that you had gotten wrong over the last year. What was the thinking behind doing that?

I mean this is always the critique of columnists is there's never any accountability measures. Walk us through your motivation for doing that. Well, part of it is every columnist needs some sort of end-of-the-year gimmick. You're writing columns during the Christmas holidays. Not a lot is going on, and it's good to have something that doesn't just depend on the news that you can turn to every year. And my colleague, David Brooks, you know, gives out awards to the best magazine at the end of the year. And since he does that, I can't do that. But I've noticed other, I think especially writers who sort of come of age with the Internet,

Dave Weigel at Slate being one, do this kind of annual inventory of predictions. And I think it's a very useful intellectual exercise. It's good for readers to see, you know, where you've gone astray. And I'm someone who doesn't, I don't make that many predictions as a general policy because I know I'm bad at them. So, you know, you had,

you had to, I actually had to comb through a little bit to find, to find clear cases where I, where I'd gotten things wrong. And, and also often you get things wrong and that becomes more apparent sort of further on in hindsight. I feel like if I went back three years, I would find more things I was just wrong about, but you can't really do that. You can't say, here's something I got wrong in 2011. I don't think anybody would care. But I think it's a really healthy exercise overall. studies have shown is that professional pundits who theoretically have jobs because of their expertise are often, you know, no better than anybody else at predicting what's going to happen

in politics. And I don't know if this would help me personally get better, but I think just sort of acknowledging that reality is a useful thing for people in my line of work. Well, Ross, let's go forward to what we're all going to get wrong in 2014. You have a piece in the Grey Lady, and I really wish I hadn't said that, in the Sunday Review, More Imperfect Unions, which is a fascinating look at the whole marriage issue. And you talk about the ways in which marriage can be promoted, the way conservatives should speak about what marriage does as far as reducing income inequality. You have one line here that did make me wonder. You talk about the necessity of honesty on both sides, what conservatives have to realize that some of the policies they've championed may have led to the decline of marriage.

And you also say that liberals should concede something as well. And do you ever, ever in a million years think it possible that some of these bedrock concepts on the left are going to be reexamined and trotted out and refreshed for the 21st century when these are philosophical foundation pieces of the left? I mean... Let me give you a specific example. One of my roles as a socially conservative columnist for a newspaper with perhaps a somewhat liberal readership is to sort of prod at some of these, what I think you rightly described as sort of bedrock liberal principles on social issues.

And the short answer is, in the short term, no. I think that it is much harder for contemporary liberalism to give ground on social issues than it is on economic issues. I think on economic issues, you know, the party, the Democratic Party, swings between the left and the center, but it does swing towards the center sometimes. You have the example of parts of the Clinton era. You have the example of economically moderate centrist Democrats and liberals who are not full spectrum social liberals on, you know, abortion being the leading issue, but the whole range, the whole range of social issues. And I think, so I think it's just, it's just very, very hard to imagine because the identity of post-70s liberalism is bound up in social issues more than economic issues. I think that's the big

change on the left that happens in basically in the McGovern era, in the Democratic Party, is a shift from a focus on economic justice to a focus on sort of social justice organized around identity politics. And that shift is still with with us and it just informs and dominates debates about issues issues like abortion same-sex marriage and so on right on most of those issues there's a fence among liberals that and I think often an accurate sense that they have gained ground that this is where they've won victories and that even if they've lost some economic battles in the Reagan era, the country has moved in their direction on social issues. So that makes it even harder to say, well, the country has moved in our direction,

but maybe it shouldn't have. Maybe that was a mistake. So, yeah, I'm not expecting to actually extract any concessions on, say, the idea that, you know, unrestricted access to abortion, that's an American family. I'm not confident that liberals are going to concede that to me anytime soon. I get that. I do. The line actually that I picked out from this that struck is you said, I don't see a readiness among liberals to make any concession of their own beyond the minimal acknowledgement that all things being equal, two parents are often better than one. I don't even see that because to say that is to say, A, that old societal structures had some benefit and that's dangerous when you want to remake everything for the future.

And two, it's the old woman without a man is like a fish without a bicycle. Why? By saying the two parents are better, we are disadvantaging and unprivileging those brave Wendy Davises everywhere who put on their pink running shoes to strike out on their own. I mean, that's – I think absolutely they're – but I do think there's an actual divide among liberals i think there are liberals who would say exactly what you've just said and you know say that defending the two-parent family is just you know heteronormativity and and patriarchy and so on but then i do think there are a lot of liberals who especially when debates about inequality and social mobility come up right say we'll sort of look at you know just you just look at the data and they'll say, well, sort of look at, you know, you just look at the data and they'll say, okay, there is obviously a correlation between growing up in a single parent home or having your parents divorced and having a tough time,

you know, getting ahead later in life. And this is especially true for boys, incidentally, which is sort of, which is interesting. And they'll, they'll make that concession, But then they'll say, but the answer is just, you know, just economic redistribution to healthy families and so on. So there, I think there's a division, again, between the kind of, you know, the left-wing position is all family structures are equal. And the center-left position is two-parent families are generally better and we should generally be supportive of them but not to the point of going back to the way things were before the sexual revolution. I mean I think that's probably exactly how they feel about it. I have another question on the other side of that um do you ever i mean this is more of a you know do you ever worry ross that you're going native you know what i mean like that's what everybody says i'm the conservative writing

for new york times you're just gonna we're gonna watch ross go soft he's gonna move to the center and in a minute you know in another couple another year, another year, he'll be a Rhino. Do you ever, do you ever, does it bug you when people say that? Does it, did you ever, did you monitor it yourself? Does that ever enter into your, your thinking or your writing? I think about it this way. I think that as in my job, there's a tightrope that you walk and you can fall off on one side by just as you say going native and

essentially just being the you know the conservative who makes liberals feel good about themselves because oh we read a conservative and you don't want to be that guy but you also don't want to be the guy who you know is just sort of shaking his fist at his readership and is just there to piss them off, to be pissed off in return. So there has to be, the trick is to sort of manage a level of engagement that doesn't just end up sort of accommodating yourself. And, you know, from my own perspective, I came to the Times as someone who had not a funny mix of views. I actually think it's a pretty common mix of views, but a mix of views that isn't, you know, isn't always well represented in punditry, which is that, you know, I'm a social conservative with sort of economically, you know, I think most people would say I have more economically moderate views in the sort of spectrum from, you know, in the spectrum of conservatism, I'm not at the libertarian end on economics. I support, you know, some forms of redistribution, some kind of welfare state and so on.

And so that mix means that, you know, it's just the case that when I write about economics, I'm probably a little more congenial to liberal readers. And when I write about social issues, I'm often a little more congenial to liberal readers. And when I write about social issues, I'm often very uncongenial. And I'm aware, you know, I'm just aware of that. I'm aware of that reality. And, and it just, but it means that, you know, whether I, it depends on what I, I am a squishy moderate on some economic issues. Oh, no, don't, uh, no, uh, no apologies necessary with me. So am I. Um, I, so, so my last question really has anyone in the New York times surprised you? You don't give us any names by saying, you know, I, you convinced me. Um, well, yeah, in fact, in fact, I just, I just got a call from Andy Rosenthal, my boss,

and he said that I convinced him this weekend, and from now on... What? It's a big moment in American journalism. The Times is going to be to the right of the journal on social issues from now on going forward. No, probably not. No, I don't think... You don't have those,

I mean, I don't have those kinds of conversations with my colleagues. I think what happens in these kind of debates is just, it's more that, you know, there's engagement. And sometimes I'll write a column and someone who I work with, or, you know, someone I don't work with

who's more liberal will say, oh, that was a really interesting point you made. And sometimes I'll write a column and they won't. So, but it's not, I think it's a total illusion for any columnist, right or left, to imagine that any specific piece they write is going to change people, change anyone's mind immediately. And it's more that, you know, any kind of argument is, it's iterative, right? It's something where you read somebody for a while and at a certain point, you either, if you disagree with them, you either tune them out. I think you can't read someone you disagree with forever without eventually tuning them out. Or you sort of, maybe you can see that in some places they have a point. And with, you know,

whatever, whatever my colleagues, you know, think or don't think that's, that's the goal. That's, that's the goal of writing for an audience that you don't agree with, to make them slowly but surely concede some ground to you on some issues. And I'm sure that would be true of a liberal writing for a conservative audience as well. Well, Ross is somebody who is also on the right, who works in a large newsroom. I can tell you that their attitude toward us is the same as Arnold

Schwarzenegger in commando. When he says to the guy, I like you, Sully, I'm going to kill you last. That's a, that's pretty much how we are. There we are. The one, the one little toy llama in the intellectual petting zoo that they regard with amusement. Listen, we've got to let you go, and we thank you very much. Give our regards to the New York Times, and we hope to have you on the podcast again soon

where we can talk about all the things you got right in 2014 as well as the things we just didn't see coming. Thank you very much, Ross. Thanks, Ross. I'm going to go turn on my Pete Seeger record and hang out. Rhino. Yes. Well, you know, Pete Seeger, of course, himself had that hammer. But he was always saying that if he indeed did have a hammer, there were things that he would have done.

He would have hammered out justice and freedom in the morning and the evening. I'm not sure what he did in the afternoon. Perhaps he rested. But I wondered if that hammer that he would have used to hammer out freedom would have hammered Woody Guthrie's guitar because if you remember, Woody Guthrie had a sticker on his guitar that said this machine kills fascists, which I always found amusing. No, it didn't. It was a guitar. It didn't do anything of the sort and it could be broken by a hammer of somebody who also wanted to kill fascists. In either case, both the hammer and the guitar were useless against fascists. But in both cases, those guys were perfectly okay with fascists if they happened

to be allied with the Soviet Union because they were card-carrying, order-following, good old American commies. And there's not a single word in the big, huge obituary in the newspaper today that uses the word communist. Whereas, of course, if you had a singer who later got himself a career as that twinkly-eyed, beloved American icon, and he was a Nazi for a long time, I think that might have figured prominently. But of course, it's okay to have been a communist back then. It's understandable given the context to have been that. And really, it's a form of misguided idealism

that really had the best of America at heart. Nonsense. Drivel, twaddle. I think it ought to be in the very first paragraph of these things when somebody passes to say that he allied themselves with the most murderous ideology to bestride the planet in the 20th century. And as a matter of fact, if I ever had the opportunity to sit down with Mr. Seeger in the last days, and I understand that he made some noises about, yeah, I did kind of get Joe wrong. What was your first clue, pal? Sit him down and read him the entire Gulag Archipelago, you know, all three thick volumes of it. And if you don't want to read it because you frankly would be out of voice and weeping

after 20, 30, 40 chapters, why not just hand them the Audible version? That's right. If you go to audible.com on Amazon, you can get all three volumes of the Gulag Archipelago. Now, the first one would be free, but you'll be signing up for that free 30-day trial and you're going to be so hooked on it and so fascinated by what Solzhenitsyn reveals about Soviet society, the things that you thought about, feared, and really have no idea until you steep yourself in the immensity that is this work. You can begin there at Audible. Now, all you have to do is enter the coupon code RICOCHET and you get 15% off. No, that's that other guy. These guys – oh, these guys just give you the free 30-day trial.

That's right. So that's my pick this week, audible.com. Audiblepodcast.com slash ricochet is where you get your free trial. Now, gentlemen, before we scamper off to our next guest, any books that you've been reading that you would like people to go to Audible and search for? Because if you don't find that one, and you probably will, you'll find something else very close to it just as good. I've been reading all of the Donald Westlake Dortmunder novels, which are great.

They're not all on Audible, but a lot of them. They're funny. They're great. They're terrific. If you're not familiar with them, get familiar with them. They're terrific. Okay. Troy, quickly because we have a guest.

I just recommend since we were spending time with Dennis Prager on Sunday night, you can find Dennis' book Still the Best Hope on Audible, which I actually listened to originally on Audible instead of reading it. And it's – as you'd expect from Dennis, it's cogent and entrenched and it's a great listen. So Still the Best Hope from Audible.com. Jack Dandy. Well, I have not had the chance to look but I'm sure if it's not there, it will be soon. Great books like The K Street Gang, The Rise and Fall of the Republican Machine, or The Persecution of Sarah Palin, How the Elite Media Tried to Bring Down a Rising Star. For that matter, any text by Matthew Continetti, editor-in-chief of the Washington Free Beacon and formerly the opinion editor of the Weekly Standard, where he remains a contributing editor. Great voice, great writer. Happy to have him back in the podcast.

Good day, Mr. C. How are you? And where are you at this moment? I am well. I'm here at Free Beacon headquarters in Washington, D.C. And we're recovering from the State of the Union night, you know, slowly digging ourselves out of it. Was it, was it, was the excitement, hey Matt, it's Rob Long in L.A., was the excitement just too much?

It was too much to handle, Rob. Do you guys all watch it together? You know, in past years we have. We have a war room here at the Free Beacon where we monitor all types of the media. I invite you guys to check it out. We have 16 HD TVs going on at any given time, and that's where we rip video and things like that. So during the election year with debates and convention speeches, we were all here kind of in our command center situation room. But last night, we knew what to expect. So there wasn't much. It does seem it does seem funny.

We were talking earlier, but it seems like this is kind of even even the reporters whose job it is to watch like, well, I'll catch up with it tomorrow. Someone will someone will give me the highlights. It's really what did he say insulting about the Republicans? Did he did he call anybody out? And we already know what the agenda is because it's this lame duck agenda. Do you believe that – I mean, you know, I've got to ask this because I've got to ask this the day after the State of the Union, everybody we have on. Any of it matter?

No. And I think if you look back in the record, the State of the Union addresses never really moved the needle. And, of course, I think one of the lessons that this president has brought home to me anyway is the limits of speech-making by presidents and the limits of the bully pulpit. Because you'll see Obama over the last six years again and again has said, well, you know, the situation is screwed up. My approval ratings are sinking. I'm going to give a speech, and it will turn everything around. And again and again and again, he's done that, and things haven't turned around.

And so I don't anticipate this speech in particular changing things for him. I will say I was struck by, I agree totally with most mainstream reporters. So separating them out from the fanboys on MSNBC. The mainstream reporters were very, I think, kind of nonplussed by the speech. But what struck me was I thought Obama, his delivery was actually one of the better deliveries of recent times. He actually seemed energetic,

and that story at the end was quite moving. And so it was a very energetic delivery. But since the material was so small ball, and so kind of petty, and just really kind of superfluous to the main concerns of the public, as we see in polls, that the speech had this weird quality and i think that will contribute to it not having any real effect on the needle right hey so um matt last week you uh put a had a piece in the in the free beacon which i linked to but i think we'll also link to it here again on the podcast uh post about this piece i mean it was it was really kind of interesting because it was kind of a takedown and it was kind of – it was a very, very funny, witty sort of trenchant takedown of a piece by Jake Weisberg

who is the editor of Slate and he wrote a profile in Vogue of the Washington, D.C., the sort of it couple of the moment, Sam Kass, who sort of is the White House chef or was Obama's chef and now helps Michelle Obama the way – rather than talking about income equality, it's like access equality or connections inequality that we have. people or whose parents are friends with people end up in the circles of power, end up with shows on MSNBC, end up in the White House, end up just being taken care of for their entire lives, not necessarily because they're not – despite they may be talented, but that that is a more insidious thing culturally and for the American people and the American sort of future than any – than the fact that we have very rich people and very poor people. Am I paraphrasing it correctly or what am I missing? I think it's perfect. I think it's a perfect paraphrase. I was just so amazed by this piece in Vogue magazine written by Jacob Weisberg because of its kind of naive quality of this piece. Weisberg was going on just

sharing all of these details about the lives of Alex Wagner and Sam Kass, two people, no one knows who these people are, but if you're a Washington insider like me, you know who they are and you've been following their careers. He talks about how when they started going out on a date, Sam Kass picked up the phone and called his friend, who just happens to be an owner of the Washington Nationals Ball Club. The Nationals opened up Nats Park, which is a beautiful stadium, just so that Sam Kass and his girlfriend could play catch by themselves. Weisberg wrote this just so matter-of-factly, as though this happens to everybody.

I really thought, well, what is going on here? And I think it did reveal this piece, how social inequality is actually really the major factor in America today, as opposed to the income inequality, which is simply, as I've written before in The Free Beacon, it's just the in issue at the moment. So I want to follow up on that because Mickey Kaus, our friend Mickey Kaus, who's my neighbor and our resident – I don't know what you call him. He's not a Democrat, that's for sure. But a resident confused conservative, unaware that he's a conservative.

He always harps on that. His point is that social inequality is much more – is in fact dangerous, sort of tin ear in this piece that at no point was anybody embarrassed by the aristocratic connections of everyone. It's as if they were – it really had a very Marie Antoinette quality to it. I really mean that in the historical figure being utterly and totally clueless about the real lives of real Americans. Yes, and you're absolutely right to point out Mickey Kaus. As I've told Mickey many times, reading the end of Equality, his book from the early 1990s in college, I read it in college, and it is one of the most important books I've read in my life,

and certainly in the way that I view politics. So I think Mickey's dead on, and he, in fact, had a great op-ed in the Wall Street Journal earlier this week on this issue. You know, it's absolutely true. Some people have pointed out, well, Matt, they say all societies have ruling classes, all societies have aristocracies, and of course I say, yes, that's right. And ours is not immune. And my problem is, what makes our aristocracy unique is their total lack of self-awareness. Most other aristocracies, if you say like the aristocracy of the British Empire, right,

they were very much aware of the class structure. And they were very much, they had a sense of kind of duty well this is you know this is our status in life and so they're simple their ways to behave and we have the duties towards not only people but also toward the world our place in the world well that is completely missing in ours ours today is is much more they're very much focused on the perceived privileges of their ideological enemies, which are mainly just rich white guys. Right, the cokes. But everyone else is somehow in this utopian la-la land.

Well, of course, by being a Democrat, by being a liberal, that is your – that's your free pass. That means you're a good person. That's your social work. That's what people who vote liberally and are progressive believe, that means you're a good person. That's your social work. That's what people who vote liberally and are progressive believe, that I'm a social – my social work and my contribution to the betterment of societies, I've elected a democratic congressman. Well, right. It's posturing becomes your full-time job to have the proper aspect. And that's what

struck me about the piece, Matt, is that these people don't produce. They're very busy. They don't make anything. We're not talking about a Go year a bessemer a carnegie right we're talking about people who create arrange words to move money around to take freedoms from some and give a little bit of property to others these are not people who are building anything other than a greater edifice of federal control that's true i mean yeah i'm sorry to break in. I think that's true for a large part of the type of people that I'm talking about. I will say, though, that there are, that this type, I call them the caste, right? And I've often made people say, or I've responded to people by saying, membership in the caste is not how much money you make or even what job you

hold. It's what opinions you have. And there are plenty of people who do make things. I mean, look at Jeff Immelt, right? I mean, head of GE. I mean, he makes things. He makes them in Brazil because he's part of this cast of people who are completely, have no sense of connection to America. Or, you know, I mean, it's completely, oh, well, as long as I mouth the right platitudes on same-sex marriage, abortion, women's rights, and climate change, I can do whatever I want. And we find that again and again, whether they're in industry or on Wall Street or in the culture business. So I have a question.

And this is more about politics because we want to sort of move off. And I know Troy's got one more question. So I mean, I don't mean specifically to sort of, you know, stump for this one candidate, but one of the things that Scott Walker of Wisconsin has been overheard to wonder as he thinks about running for president is, is America ready? Is America willing to vote for him, a president who didn't go to college, didn't finish. After – let's see. So we have from – we have Eureka College in 1980, and then we have Eureka, Yale, Georgetown, Yale, Yale Harvard Business School, and then Columbia, Harvard.

We do have this aristocracy of East – whether you're on the right or the left, aristocracy of East Coast Ivy League colleges. Do you think America's ready to vote for somebody who doesn't have a pedigree like that? Well, I will say this. One of the few things that Chris Matthews has ever said that made sense to me is from about 30 years ago, he said, Americans always correct for the failures of their previous president. So when we elect a president, we're always looking at the failures of the one that we have at the moment. And I think that is actually generally true in as much as any of these kind of cliches about politics are true. And so you could say, well, right, with Obama,

what is the one thing everyone talks about, right or left And so you could say, well, right with Obama, what is the one thing everyone talks about right or left? It's his professorial attitude, the sense that he is an ambassador from the academy, from Hyde Park to the American people, right? And so maybe then we would want to correct for that by having someone who has not graduated from college. I will say, I think, and it would be fascinating to see how the left attacks Walker for that. But when you have a record like Walker does, assuming he's reelected, I think that will trump biography. Matt, Troy Sinek, to exactly the point that Rob was just making about the credentialing

of a lot of these folks and about the next generation of figures that we're going to see have a national presence from the GOP. The Republican response to the State of the Union last night was delivered by a graduate of Pensacola Christian College in the University of Washington, Kathy McMorris Rogers. This is always set up as the platform that could take somebody to the next level, and it doesn't always work, as Bobby Jindal learned. What did you make of her after seeing that? Is this somebody that's going to be more prominent for the party going forward? Well, I loved her speech. The big, I think, attack on Kathy McMorris' response was that it lacked substance. Well, how much substance can you have in a 10-minute speech after the entire American people is exhausted or already asleep by the 65-minute address by the president,

the most powerful man in the world? So I loved her speech. I thought she was attractive. She was warm. She was optimistic. She was understanding. Down to earth. I just went off on Twitter. The second bourbon

helped there. I thought it was just fantastic, probably the best response to a State of the Union of the Obama era, and other people have echoed that opinion. The reason, Troy, I think that was the case, that it was so successful successful was precisely because none of these national ambitions have been tied to Kathy McMorris. Right. Usually with the past ones with, Oh, Bobby Jindal, here's the next big thing.

Bob McDonald, here's the next big thing. Paul Ryan, Marco Rubio. And so these kinds of hyping of it kind of sets them up for it to not meet expectations here with McMorris Rogers. You had someone who, you know, people who know her as I do and have covered her i have always been impressed but really

not someone who has had much of a spotlight on her i do think it will raise her profile i don't know people are chatting about the talk already i don't know if that will be the case um people tend to stay away from the house in presidential politics. But nonetheless, I look – I would make her – her job is official responder to State of the Unions for the – thank God we only have two more remaining from this president. But let's just give them to Kathy McMorris Rogers. We don't have to worry about anything. I think that's a really good idea actually. I mean if you – it feels to me like if you punish yourself by watching the State of the Unions or States of the Union I suppose, then at the very least you should be able to turn off the response of the State of the Union. I mean the whole idea of it is just so – I mean it is like watching a car race, right? You're looking for an accident i can't work that you know at one thing that struck me about the state of the

union it's the state of the union as we know it is a product of technology product of television and politics yes and the impact of television on presidential politics and one thing that we've seen in the responses to the state of the union of everyone in the mother had gave a state of the Union response. And why is that? Well, it's because of changing technology and the Internet.

And I wonder whether, and you're beginning to see Todd Purdom, a big fixture in the Washington establishment, journalist, husband of D.D. Myers. He wrote a piece in Politico saying, maybe it's time we give up the State of the Union. I wonder, as we become more of an internet-based society, as the internet and the stream replaces television as our medium of communication, I wonder whether we won't just kind of see this wither away, of this, you know, ridiculous annual ritual where, you know, everybody troops in and the president comes down and gives the hugs and then bores America to death for an hour and a half. All right.

We'll just make it short enough to drown in a bathtub. I'm sorry. That's eliminationist talk. Matt, we'll let you get back to the orgy of well-bred slugs that is the DC culture and we expect to read your trenchant remarks on the same in all your various venues. Thanks for being with us today and we'll see you a little later. Thank you, guys. Thank you, Matt. Thank you, Matt.

Yep. Yes, well, indeed, State of the Union. You know, the strange thing is that the president can't say, I've got a pen and I'm going to use it. And he's not even going into Seeger mode saying if he had a pen. There's no conditions here. He has a pen and he is going to use it. And there's thunderous applause, of course, from the Democrats.

This was the point at which I thought all of the geeks on the internet who remember their Star Wars well will go back to Star Wars. I believe it's two or three where Natalie Portman makes those trenchant observations which really veiled references to the Bush years where the Emperor Palpatine is assuming control and she says, this is how democracy dies, to thunderous applause. I'm waiting for George Lucas to revise his remarks about the Bush years and maybe infuse the next three Star Wars movies with an anti-authoritarian eye towards the assumption of executive powers by the president. Do you think that's going to happen or do you think that they're just going to say, boy, this is crazy?

No, it will happen. I think it's going to happen. I think it's really going to happen. I mean, no, look, it's OK. One side uses – when another side is popular, the opposition always says you're a demagogue and we're going to hell in a handbasket. And then when it flips and one side is popular, the popular side says, see, the people love us. You're out of step. These are rhetorical things we always say. I don't know. I guess I would say I suspect there will be a long piece or one of those brave – in quotation marks – piece in the New York Times Magazine or Atlantic, probably the march after Obama leaves office in which one – a main big fat reporter says, you know, we might have gone too easy on him.

That's right. That's right. They always keep it holstered until it doesn't matter. But they have to do it at some point because it's a face – that's exactly right. It'll be a race to do it because whoever writes that piece will then be elevated in the eyes of his colleagues. Wow. You're so great. A truth teller. But it'll be a race, right? Because they'll all want to have it said.

Maybe the smart one will have it done in the December Vanity Fair. Have it back in his pocket. Yeah, exactly. Before the inauguration of the next president. Mitt was really a nice guy and a decent man. And we went too easy on obama it's unfair to mitt what what was done to him you can read that stuff now i think if you google enough well that's the that's the net the movie that everyone's uh not getting on netflix because

it's too depressing to actually conceive well here's the thing that my favorite story of the last week was not the president droning on or not learning about the president's television picks as i think matt had a piece about i couldn't care less i'm so profoundly dis uninterested in nearly everything that has to do with this man from the sound of his voice to his cultural predilections but it was the tale from hillary that she actually hasn't driven a car in 18 years now of course george w bush was completely out of touch or jj george h., I think, when he expressed astonishment at a grocery scanner, a story that's completely misrepresented. Completely false.

Yeah, utterly false. And just as Mitt Romney having some epiphany at a convenience store over the way they did, that again was shown that he'd lived in this isolated upper stratum of the atmosphere that doesn't deign to mix with mortals. Hillary has been driven around for two decades, doesn't even probably know where the key goes or where the gas cap is. What do you think this – do you think this will play? Do you think that this will be one of those things that they use to zing her with come the moment of her inevitable ascension? They may. I don't know. I mean I always find that stuff to be a little disingenuous. I mean, she's been in public life for a long time. She was then a secretary of state. The fact that she hasn't driven is not a big deal. Look, she's in the ether. She's been in the ether.

Had she driven, it would be a completely contrived event that she did just so she could answer this question. Oh, really? Really? Like Ronald Reagan going to the ranch and getting in the pickup to go out and get some brush and string some wire? Yeah. Well, OK. Yes. Hillary Clinton's not a rancher, OK? She lives in Chappaqua.

So a lot of that is sort of silly. She's a secretary of state. I mean, there are a lot of things to criticize her for, but the sort of naive, the sort of, well, you're out of touch. She's out of touch for a bazillion reasons, and not having driven as secretary of state is not one of them. I don't think Condoleezza Rice had driven when she was secretary of state either. But that's not why she shouldn't be president. I think all that kind of gotcha stuff is just a lot of noise.

Well, I'm glad you're fair about this, Rob, and I assume that the other side will holster their weaponry. No, I don't think so. Just because they do it doesn't make it right, doesn't make it smart. I'm not talking about whether or not it's right or whether or not it's smart. I'm talking about actually getting down on the Atwater level sometimes. Even Lee Atwater wouldn't bother to do that. Even Lee Atwater wouldn't go. That's Tinker Toy stuff.

You want to go after Hillary Clinton, go after stuff that she really did, that really has some teeth to it. Or stuff that she didn't. I mean, Hugh Hewitt was talking with Lanny Davis the other day and trying to figure out exactly what Hillary Clinton had done in secretary of state that was so wonderful. One of the things that he said was restoring America's reputation, and he said that she was one of the most beloved women on the planet. Okay, fine. We can talk about all of her myriad accomplishments. But I think also, if every single Republican who comes down the pike is going to be treated as some weird, patriarchal, uptight, sexless guy who has no idea what's going on in America today, what people actually live. And I am perfectly willing

and hopeful that somebody says that this woman has spent the last 30 years in this little isolated atmosphere and is disconnected from the american experience as anybody else which is why if we put up somebody who actually has been not in politics for the last three or four decades professionally and has a little retail american you know uh then we have an advantage and we ought to press it. And I have no problem with picking up the lack of the grocery store, the lack of the car, the lack of any experience that people can relate to. I have no problem whatsoever with somebody making hate with that. I'm not sure that's going to – I mean it's hypothetical. I'm not sure that's going to resonate. There's so many juicier, fatter, as it were, targets on Hillary Clinton.

Troy, what do you – The fake outrage that she hasn't driven a car in the past couple of years. I'm not saying it's outrage. It's not outrage. It's just who she is. If we got a guy who actually can say, yes, I know what it's like to go to the grocery store and you got your choice between zero, 1 percent, 2 percent, buttermilk, fat, and here's the price. I know what it is.

I know the difference between the stuff you get at the Cub and the creamery stuff. There's a 30-cent difference and let me tell you why. It's because there's dairy supports and I'm against them here and so on. I mean somebody who can actually connect with – You'd actually really do well in New Hampshire by the way. Who can connect on that level? Troy, what do you think? Do you think we have a –

I think that you can – I think you can hit her on these grounds. But I agree with Rob that the car is not – first of all, the car story, the thing that kind of cracked me up about the car story is that it's clearly being undersold because the date that she's referring to is back in the second term of the Clinton administration. I mean she might have done a loop around the ellipse, but she was in the middle of being first lady. She's first lady of Arkansas. She probably has not driven a car since about 1978. But to Rob's point, that's part and parcel of the job that she's had or the job her husband has had. But this line of attack is effective. Just not using that example. The thing I would always go back to with Hillary and this is sort of one step removed from Obamacare.

But this is the kind of thing that you drill down on with her. There's that famous quote from the early years of the Clinton administration when they were pushing Hillarycare. And there were complaints being lodged about the cost that this was going to impose on business and the cost it was going to impose on individual consumers. And she said coldly and icily, as is her want, I can't be responsible for every undercapitalized business in America. That is the kind of out of touch, detached from the basic sort of pocketbook accounting ledger calculations that every American has to make except for people like her who are living off the taxpayers or at this point, the speaking fees that she's getting as a result of traipsing around the world for four years to no useful purpose, best I can tell. I mean the thing that's sort of interesting about her tenure as secretary of state is John Kerry seems to me though definitely more ineffectual in the job, a little more engaged. I mean Kerry actually seems to be trying to spin five or six different plates at a time. Now, they're all going to break, but for her, it just seemed to be a matter of accumulating miles.

That was the only statistic they ever – that was the only selling point for her ever was how many miles she traveled. That's true, and also give this to John Kerry. He's a moron because he's being humiliated around the world. People are making – people are essentially making a fool out of him. Hillary Clinton – but at least he's in there. He's in there swinging. He could actually say I'm doing something, whereas Hillary Clinton was too smart for that. She made sure she didn't do anything at any time and so therefore had no embarrassments except one, one big one, one big black spot that Benghazi, which just simply refuses to go away and won't go away and won't go away in the – probably will go away in the primaries. But I suspect that if there's an ugly primary, it will come back. Benghazi will come back.

We don't know yet who's going to runs against Hillary, I mean, probably Joe Biden, but if there's a third and that third person really wants to run a populist, a populist progressive Democrat is going to run and will probably use Benghazi. You think so? I don't. Well, I mean, I would love for Biden to say, I remember Benghazi. I was wandering around the White House knocking on doors, looking for Hillary. Hey, what are you guys up to? She wasn't anywhere to be found. You know, i found her down in the kitchen with some ice cream saying i just can't deal today uh you know i i'd love that but for a populist to hit her on that would

have to uh a populist would have to say then that america should have responded with military force and used armaments against people of a desk of a dusky nature which according to the populist creed of course is all nothing but imperialism and racism. That's sort of the way I feel about it too. I kind of wonder given the ideological makeup of the Democratic Party, she could conceivably get out of a primary not having to have dealt with that in any serious way, which could be interesting because then you have her exposed on a – in a general election because I don't know. Joe Lieberman was the last of the Scoop Jackson Democrats. I don't know who the guy is who's running to her right on that in a Democratic primary. No, no. I think it will be a progressive – it will be a progressive challenger, don't you think?

Well, I think it would be. I mean I think that's the logical positioning would be for the Elizabeth Warrens of the world. But I don't think the Elizabeth Warrens of the world would call her on that issue because I don't know what the alternative is. If you're Elizabeth Warren, if you're Bernie Sanders, what did you want from her in that situation? Run, Bernie, run. Yes, it will be from somebody who says he's from the Democratic wing of the Democratic Party and they'll play Pete Seeger songs and everybody will bow their head on it. I'm setting up a Kickstarter for the campaign documentary of Bernie Sanders, Rod. I want to be there. Me too. But remember, Willie Horton, the famous attack ad that – speaking of Lee Atwater, the oppo ad that Lee Atwater ran in the George H.W. Bush campaign against Mike Dukakis to such great effect. Willie Horton was opposition research on Mike Dukakis that surfaced in the primary, the Democratic primary raised by Dukakis' primary

challenger, Senator Al Gore. Exactly. And that's not generally known. Why is that? Could it be possibly because there was a compliant media apparatus that would underscore the point that they wanted to make, which is what I mean about Benghazi. By the time 2016 rolls around, it is going to be synonymous with people who worry about fluoride and the attack on the liberty.

It's going to be a kook signifier. To merely say Benghazi is to say that you're – it's the right-wing version of trutherism, birtherism. It's going to be that. It's simply going to be a sign that you're not a serious person because she's answered that and she's asked a good question that nobody could possibly respond to. What difference at this point does it make? I defy

either of you to come up with a good answer to her question. Well, see, I'm waiting. Luckily, I don't have to because there's some very highly paid media advisors who will come up with something. I mean who knows? I mean it'll – that's – look, this part of the – there is a fun part to American politics and this is it. Yes. Well, as long as we don't get a stumble-tongued, grinning dullard who keeps walking into walls and stepping on rakes, a la Sideshow Bob in the Great Simpsons episode.

I'll be a happy man. But that's a ways away. And in between now and then, we've got just a couple more years of this stuff. But we'll be there. A hundred more podcasts? I was just going to say, a hundred more podcasts means that we're now working our way toward number 300, although we hope to have one of these live gigs betwixt now and then, because the last one was just grand.

And if you're not a member of Ricochet, as Rob is keen to tell you, you ought to go over there and participate so you can, A, get advance notice of these things, and B, be part of the community when you show up and look around at all the people you've been posting with. So this podcast, number 201, has been brought to you as ever by Audible.com. And if you use the coupon code ricochet to check out well go to audiblepodcast.com slash ricochet and find out exactly what you get hint free trial also brought to you by encounter books you can get glenn reynolds the instapundits new school how information age will save american education from itself and of course we got a coupon code for you as well what could it it be? Oh gosh, I don't know. How about Ricochet? Put that

on the checkout and get 50% off the list price. So Rob, thanks. Troy, great job for sitting in for Peter. I don't know where he is. Did he just fall off the earth or something? Well, if you saw the socks that he was wearing on Sunday in Los Angeles, my guess is that he is carving something over and over again in a dead language into the wall of an asylum right now. Yeah. Well, I have something that I'm going to post later today which will come as a shock to everybody. Now, we're all on planes recently. You've all sat through that tedious in-flight video, right, where they show you what to do?

Right. Well, Delta has got a new one out. And Deltas are actually pretty funny. And this one is all set in the 1980s. The clothes, the cultural references, the dance style, everything is all set in the 1980s. The clothes, the cultural references, the dance style, everything is straight out of the 80s.

And there's a guy in there who looks exactly like Peter Robinson must have looked in 1984. It's startling. I'm going to post that

and actually pose the question as to whether or not Peter is a time traveler. Uh-oh. Because after he left us on stage, I think he got into his machine, went back to 1983. Right. He knew the Berlin Wall was

going to come down. That's why he wrote that sheet. That's exactly right, Peter. Oh, yeah, Rob. Well, there's my post. Alright, great job. Thanks for listening, everybody. Rob, Peter, we'll see you down the road, and everybody else, we'll see you in the comments at Ricochet.com. Thanks, fellas. See you guys.

Thanks, fellas. danger hammer out a warning not the hammer out love between my brothers and my sisters and all over this land if I had a song I mean a bell I'd tinkle in the morning if I had a bell you understand

tinkle in the evening time all over this land and if I'd have been, you know what I'm saying? Tingle in the evening time, you know what I'm saying? All over this land, look, I'd tinkle out that danger. I'd tinkle out a warning and I'd tinkle out love between my brothers and my sisters. Lord, over this land. Now, if I had a song

I'd sing it in the morning, yeah Sing it in the evening All over this land And I'd sing out danger Sing out a warning I'd sing out love Between my brothers and my sisters And all over this land

Yeah Ricochet Join the conversation Yeah Oh yeah Join the conversation. Hammer in the morning, hammer in the evening time, all over this land. Look what I do. I'm the hammer of danger, hammer of the morning, yeah. I'm the hammer of love between my brothers and my sisters, and all over this land look i've got a hammer

i've got a bell yeah and i've got a song to sing all over this land let me tell you what it is it's the hammer of justice a bell of freedom, yeah. It's a song about love between my brothers and my sisters. And all over this land. Yeah. Lord have mercy. Yeah. Yeah.

Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah! Yeah! Yeah! Yeah! Yeah! Yeah! I wonder what everybody clap for me tonight. What do you want me to do? Put your hands together and clap for me. That's right.

Make me feel good. Yeah! Yeah! Yeah! Lord have me. Now that gets it. Yeah! Yeah!

I wonder do you feel like singing? We'll just sing it. Yeah! Yeah! Yeah! Yeah! Yeah! Yeah! Yeah! Yeah! Yeah, Lord have me Now that gets it Yeah, oh Yeah I wonder, do you feel like singing?

Would you sing with me? Can we have one of those who can manage? Look, I want everybody Everybody try this If I had a hammer Everybody If I had a hammer Here we go, come on

If I had a hammer I'd hammer, come on If I had a hammer I'd hammer in the morning I'd hammer in the morning Hammer in the evening I'd hammer in the heat All over this land All over this land I'd hammer out danger

I'd hammer out danger A warning I'd hammer out a morning love I'd hammer out love Between my brothers and my sisters Where? Where? Out the hammer, out of love. Out the hammer, out of love. Between my brothers and my sisters. Well, well, you got it. Now keep it, don't lose it.