The Ricochet Podcast - Taking The Fifth

Episode Date: May 24, 2013

Direct link to MP3 file This week on the one and only Ricochet Podcast, Peter is MIA, but Rob and James soldier on in style with guests AEI President Arthur Brooks (read his WSJ op-ed The GOP’s Hispanic Opening) and The Weekly Standard’s Mark Hemingway on the IRS scandal. Also, we ponder whether taking the fifth always implies guilt, and Lileks v. Buzzfeed. We bet they’re going to regret taking... Source

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And why you don't fix that. I thank you, Mr. Chairman. Sir, we're trying to make them better all the time. Thank you. Uh, this is nonsense. Mr. Gorbachev, tear down this wall. It's the Ricochet Podcast with Rob Long in L.A. and Peter Robinson in absentia. I'm James Lylex and our guests today are Arthur Brooks of the American Enterprise Institute and Ricochet's own and Weekly Standard's own Mark Hemingway.

Lots to discuss as you can well imagine. So let's have ourselves a podcast. There you go again. Yes, it's being called the greatest threat to American democracy in the last 30 years. I refer, of course, to the absence of Peter Robinson today on our podcast, and also to the burgeoning IRS and AP scandals which we will discuss in depth with everybody else including, of course, Rob Long, who's always there,

who's never, never absent. I never plead the fifth. That's the thing. Peter's taking the fifth. He's taking a Mickey. He's taking a many things. You know, I gotta think that anybody who finds themselves in a situation of standing before Congress or sitting is tempted to just take the fifth and just – so nothing they ever say comes back to haunt them.

But here's a woman who took the fifth and in doing so managed to screw up taking the fifth. Is that the pith you're getting? Well, I don't understand this. What's the downside of – I mean what's the upside of taking the fifth? I mean everybody who takes the fifth seems to me at some point or another gets it, right? Enron, the guys – it's like you can't quite take the fifth and get away with it in front of Congress. I don't think – does anybody ever really get in trouble if they go back to Congress and say, oh, yeah, I made a mistake. I said it was Tuesday. It was really Wednesday or whatever it is.

I mean I get it when you're deposed and you're under oath and you – I mean you're under oath with Congress. But I get when you're deposed and you lie and it's perjury and it's perjury with Congress too. But it seems to me that the downside of taking the fifth is worse than the downside of lying just a little bit. Right. If you go back to Congress and say, I'd like to revise and extend my remarks based on the fact that somebody with more credibility than me contradicted what I said. So I'd really like to get ahead of this large rock that is coming toward me like the boulder in the first Indiana Jones.

It's come to my attention that the truth is about to come out. So I'd like to. It's about to bite me in the arse with both of its large serrated lobster claws i if i may but when you get up there and you say i i to say i know that people say you look guilty when you take the fifth but i haven't done anything wrong and i'm gonna take the fifth yeah everybody just automatically assumes okay all right well then you're uh guilty guilty guilty what i love about all this is is the it's the – I mean this is what happens in all organizations in a way where the guy at the top is an arrogant SOB who thinks he can get away with everything and does get away with everything.

You're speaking of Peter? I don't think – I think this is – Yeah. And then everybody else, right? Everybody else thinks they're that guy. And, you know, let's be honest, if you're Barack Obama, you can't get away with it. He will get away with it. But that doesn't mean everybody else can get away with it.

And you can see how that culture kind of infected the whole enterprise. All those all those whatever the G-17s down there and the IRS who gave all that money to Obama, everybody – all the DOJ guys who have been waiting desperately for a progressive to be in the White House. And they all act like little mini Obamas running around. And you can just see it in their eyes and you can see it in their actions. And that's why I think it's so funny about this because they really don't think they did anything wrong. Right, oops. So you have Hollywood-style personal megalomania coupled with Chicago-style bare-knuckle politics.

Oh, that's just a wonderful, marvelous recipe. Yeah, but you know what happens here too? It happens in Hollywood all the time. You have to remind people's assistants that you're not the guy. You are not the president of the studio. You are the president of the studio's assistant. And that happens a lot.

You can see it. You can see assistants sort of suddenly getting the sort of trappings and swanning around with the arrogance of their boss's power. And you can see it with the other assistants having to take them down a peg. And I think that's exactly what happened here. And that's why they're so stunned. Right. Well, in Hollywood style, you had, of course, the old moguls of the movie-making days.

And I'm thinking that now that Gatsby has made a few dollars that perhaps they'll go to other Scott Fitzgerald books. If you would like to learn exactly how they're going to ruin F. Scott Fitzgerald's The Last Tycoon, you can listen to it on Audible.com for free. For free. And we're going to tell you a little bit more about that later. Internet's largest, greatest provider of audible content, audible.com. And we'll tell you about the free thing at the bottom of the hour. Uh, but no, indeed you, you have the culture that you spoke of there, but on the other hand, you have an, a rule based culture. And you, you would think that if there's any place that is staffed below decks with the most anal retentive types possible, it would be the IRS, right?

Why do these people go into this? Because they are absolutely anal retentive accountants with a mind for money and figures and details and rules and sticklers for the rules. And it turns out now if you go to Powerline, Powerline is talking about exactly what happens when you don't get some of these applications in on time. How many klaxons and bells and whistles go off? How many bonuses are suddenly put in jeopardy? And how many managers all of a sudden look at you and say, wait a minute, you haven't approved this in how many days? completely unraveled is the idea that there are a couple of rogue guys in cincinnati who looked at each other and said let's let's completely jeopardize our nice pensions by going after these people and taking so long that it gets our bosses attention who's with me right well that's that is true i mean there has been a cut i mean to be fair to the irs which is a hard thing to do but to be fair to them they have tried to institutionalize uh many, many years a kind of a bloodless, relentless, Terminator-style, emotionless machine of revenue collecting, right? That's right.

They have really tried to drain everything out of it, but it just goes to show you how pervasive big government liberalism is, how pervasive it is to be a member of a large government union and a large government entity. You will do and you will do nothing. You will do anything to continue it. So, yeah, right. Well, I bet you mentioned unions. I mean, the idea somehow that you assemble a public union that takes money from the taxpayer and uses it to perpetuate their own would somehow be in favor of the large syntactic or progressive state. But it turns out most of them did end up, if they made a political contribution, giving to the D side of the aisle.

The other question is, OK, so now you've got these, you have the IRS going after them. We'll get to the AP in a bit here with some other folks. But you also have this brouhaha over the fact that one of the most successful corporations in American history is not scooping out enough avoirdupois from its buttocks and handing it over to the Fed, who wants everything, of course. They want everything that Apple makes, but they can't. So they've got to haul up Tim Cook in front of Congress and say, why aren't you paying more taxes than you're legally supposed to pay?

Rob, how did you look at that? Well, I mean, it's sort of the same way, kind of like the AP thing. I mean, in a way, it's like everything quickly becomes a larger discussion when you talk about a company that everyone likes, right? I mean, imagine if Tim Cook, it's the same company, the same financials, the same balance sheet, the same P&L, the same everything, right? The same filings, the same tax return. But instead of making iPads and iPhones, they made little widgets that go into offshore. They made devices that sprayed oil on birds. Yeah, exactly right.

It would be a very different conversation, right? It would be a completely different conversation. And we wouldn't segue so quickly to, well, we got to do something about our corporate tax structure. And I kind of feel the same way about this AP – I mean the AP scandal. We'll call it a scandal because I don't – I mean don't these things – don't we need names for these things by now by the way? IRS gate and AP gate don't work for me. I hate the gate suffix. But like – I mean I confess.

I am not outraged by the AP thing. I know I'm supposed to be and I know I should be and I'm not saying that it was right for them to do it. But I'm just – I don't – Explain, Commissar. Explain. I know it was wrong to do and I know what they did to James Rosen and all that. I know it's wrong and bad and everything. But I just – I'm done with that.

I'm full of that. I'm busy with IRS outrage because – mostly because I'm so selfish. I'm more concerned about my money than anybody else's business, and I'm still mad about Benghazi. I'm full, right? I don't have any more room on the plate. But what I do love is that – Rob, outrage is not a zero-sum game. For me, it is.

The more you invest in your outrage, the more outrage you have to spread around. It's not a pie that's finite. I don't dynamic score my outrage. What I mean is that I'm kind of full of it now. So I appreciate it. But I do – from my distance, right, from my remove, I can see the outrage on the part of the very people who irritate me on the left-wing media as they review this AP stuff and try to gin up proper enthusiastic disdain for what happened to James Rosen. And it makes me kind of a little bit even more irritated with it because it's sort of like, oh, so that's bad. But we spent, what is it, nine months trying to figure out what had to happen to Benghazi and complete ignorance for 12 months on the IRS scandal. And suddenly when they're stupid in your emails, we wake

up to the fact that this is a rogue administration that feels it has exclusive dominion over the truth. So let me paraphrase this then in a way that's most unflattering to you. Well, I expect nothing less. But that's almost a mirror image of when the people on the left come around to realize that there might be something to Benghazi after all, and they're reacting with a bit of disdain because this was a Republican thing. The truth of what you should be irritated about should not be tainted by who initially was excited about it or disdainful of it. And I think that the AP thing matters for two reasons. One, because this is one of the first times we've seen in our lifetimes where you have the criminalization of news gathering.

As somebody in the business, vaguely, that really is a bad line to cross. Am I worried that it'll come across me? But no, this is not a precedent that I once set. And two, you know, well, okay, I know you hate the what if they did it, the hypocrisy thing, the argument, but it is a shining example. Okay. So we've got two things. We've got the administration doing a cross-line.

I have to say, just to be fair here, I think that I suspend, I will suspend what I would call Long's muzzle here. If you're not engaging in what if we did it, what would they do now, then you're not having any fun at all. At least two scandals that is the most fun about it is that everyone knows that if a Republican administration had done one-tenth of this stuff, that Washington would be crawling with special prosecutors and they'd be breaking into the soaps every five minutes. Right. Well, according to my – excuse me. According to my Twitter feed – oh, and I have a frog in my throat. Pardon me. According to my Twitter feed, the Bush administration did do this. They sick the IRS on absolutely everybody. Don't you know that? And the NSA spied on everybody. So actually the Obama administration deserves a pass.

Yeah, so it is okay. But, you know, I hear you with the news, guys. I get it. You're right. You are morally correct. You are intellectually correct. That's an unassailable point. I'm just speaking from the heart.

From the heart, I have to be honest. I don't really like journalists that much, so I don't really care. And I know that's wrong. That's Dana Milbank's point. Or when they came for the journalist, I said nothing for I'm not a journalist. But really, I got to hear them whine some more about stuff. That's all I do is whine. Well, Glenn Reynolds' point is we need protection for journalism, not necessarily journalists, because there is a difference. The establishment credentialed journalists are not necessarily the ones that you have great sympathy for. Dana Miliband's point was, well, you know, the left doesn't care about this

because it's Fox, and the right doesn't care because it's conservatives, because of the conservative disdain for the media. I think all that's a big mistake which you you want to realize again that bright flaming dividing line criminalizing criminalizing the act of news gathering i mean if you look at the if you look at this the um the indictment one of the things that they say about the fellow is this reporter used flattery flattery to get i know i love, I love that. Like an operative, like an intelligence operative. Right, his womanly ways, he cocked a hippie. This is James Rosen of Fox.

And the complaint reads in almost, it is one of the most disingenuous pieces of, I mean, the fact that an actual reporter, an actual federal DOJ employee wrote it, that person should be strung up, because it has got to be one of the least intelligent pieces of legal writing I've ever read, and I've read plenty, unfortunately. It's a piece of work. And probably next, just as well, and just as good, will be the justification for using a drone to shoot American citizens without any sort of judicial – Well, that's coming today.

Yeah. Well, we'll talk about that with perhaps Mr. Brooks. That's right, Arthur Brooks. We've got him right here. He's the president of the American Enterprise Institute and the author of The Road to Freedom, How to Win the Fight for Free Enterprise. And as we've mentioned before, he's our very favorite former French horn player, and we'll needle him about that later. Arthur, welcome back to the podcast.

How many of you guys got on this show? How many of you guys? How many former French? You on this show? How many of you guys? You're the seventh, actually, and the rest of them have comported themselves quite poorly. Yeah, actually, the problem is the other seven have pled the fifth. That's right. Not that they did anything wrong.

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I'm proud of my work as a French horn player, but I decline to answer any of your questions. All right, that's good. So when somebody takes the fifth, we were talking about this before, you naturally assume, of course, that they're just assuming their constitutional prerogatives and rights and that there's nothing to be inferred

from that decision, right? Well, yeah, except that it's the right to, that you have a constitutional right not to give testimony that's self-incriminating. What does incriminating mean? It means there's something that will incriminate you. I mean, isn't that sort of axiomatically a problem? That's why mob bosses do it, right?

Right. So, I mean, I'm not a lawyer, but I mean, come on. They must be, of course, I mean, I'm a French horn player, so what the heck do I know? Right. I think we're all going to be lawyers by the end of this. Well, so my question, I mean, it's Rob Long in L.A. I mean, I'm way over here on the other side of the coast where people say, you know, there's nothing here. There's nothing here. This is a lot of stuff.

This is Fox News. This is a lot of Fox News crazy stuff. It's all going to blow over. Don't worry. How bad is this? How bad is this collection of storms for this president? Well, it's pretty bad. I mean in Washington – I mean I talk to liberals and conservatives here in Washington. of storms for this president? Well, it's pretty bad.

I mean, in Washington, I mean, I talk to liberals and conservatives here in Washington, and liberals are sweating it. They want this to go away, not because anybody, especially loves President Obama. If you talk to Democrats in the House and the Senate,

they don't think he's so wonderful, partly because he won't talk to them. He's not been very nice to them. And you've got to have relationships to have people want to have your back. But it makes it really hard to move the liberal agenda forward, obviously, with these kinds of distractions. And not only these distractions for the right as well, they should be concerned about it. But, you know, the key thing is, you know, why this thing is going to get worse is just common sense. I mean, the stuff that's coming out right now that President Obama met in

the Oval Office the day before they opened the brief on the Tea Party groups with an IRS official, I mean, come on. I mean, that doesn't mean there's some sort of conspiracy, obviously. But I mean, how hard is it for us to imagine that he didn't complain about these groups that he thinks are subverting the law and the tax code. You know, and then, hey, the boss thinks that the Tea Party groups are no good. I mean, it's easy to imagine something like that, and that's the reason that there's suspicion around this stuff is really only going to grow. The reason that I don't believe, actually, that that meeting had any influence on later decisions to investigate the Tea Party

is that it assumes a level of efficiency and nimbleness in government that I've never exactly seen in my lifetime. But when you say this is a distraction, maybe this isn't a distraction at all for the Republicans because it crystallizes in one, well, a couple of brilliant examples, everything that conservatives have been saying for years about the growth of enormous government and the inevitable result of its impact on our freedoms. I mean, they'd be fools not to use this as the old crisis from which an opportunity should be taken, right? Sure.

Now, that's true enough. From a political perspective, this is nothing but good for the right, I guess. But as far as I'm concerned, here's the real threat. Republicans always have a tendency to want to become the apparatus, the blob themselves. I mean, the ultimate ambition of a lot, maybe most Republican politicians, is to become the party, the leaders of the party that administers the crony welfare state 5% more efficiently than the Democrats. And so this kind of example of the ruling party blowing itself up through corruption and incompetence, all it does is it gives an excuse for the other party not to reform. We're seeing the beginnings of wonderful reforms on the right that we should all be really enthusiastic about and cheering on.

I mean, they're saying, what did we do wrong? What's wrong with our message? What's wrong with our philosophy? How do we need to get guy like the three of us? That's one way to give us an opportunity to really serve. How dare you? How dare you call me outside, dear guy? Sorry.

I didn't mean it as an epithet. It just slipped out. I'm forgetting. So I've got a couple – before we get – I want to get to immigration in a second. But before we do, I just want to talk – just get into some nitty-gritty brass tacks here. Because I got a sense right now that when there's blood in the water, you can make some gains. So if there's blood in the water here, at least on two fronts, right, DOJ and the IRS. What should Republicans be scooping up right now?

I mean there's this temptation, as you put it, to sort of swan around and say, hey, we got Obama's popularity is down 2.5%. This is going to help us in the midterms or something amorphous like that. Or you could go and you could kind of clip the wings of the IRS in some way that's interesting, or you could make some actual practical progress on some Republican agenda item. What do you think? If you had three things you think that we could sort of ram through now that would be politically advantageous, what are those things? What could we get? Well, for one thing, we should be talking really seriously. When I say we, I guess I don't know what I mean by that. Well, I think what Republicans should be talking about right now is getting really serious about legislation that takes Obamacare authority away from the IRS. It's a wonderful opportunity to do that.

Are you kidding me? I mean, the woman who's in charge of this IRS scandal is now in charge of Obamacare. Are you insane? At very least, say, I don't know if there was some sort of conspiracy. I don't know if there's criminality. I don't know. But all we know is that there's a problem here, a big subversion of subverting the democratic process here, and we don't want the same agency to be taking over the American economy. At least let's decide on that and start making hay with that, because once that takes on a life of its own, it could be a big blow to the Obamacare system, and it could improve health care reform down the line.

So that's the biggest thing that I would talk about, not trying to blow up the IRS wholesale, because that's practically an impossible dream. I mean, I believe in tax reform as much or more than anybody else in America. But I also understand that the minority party that only holds one house saying, we're going to get rid of the IRS and use this as an excuse for wholesale tax reform is smoking dope. Yeah, it's too much. It's not going to happen. It's just going to look crazy, and Americans won't even understand it. But to say, actually, these guys are going to be in charge of your health care. How do you like that?

That's something to get real traction. So a big move to weaken Obamacare, and that would be an actual plus on our side. I think that's – I agree. I think that would be really important. Now, so right now, is the culture of Washington – when you go, you walk around and you go have lunch and stuff. I know you're – what is it? Russia always has the Georgetown cocktail parties. The lunches are unbelievable. It's like all lunches here all the time.

Yeah, that's right. Giant steaks and palm. Is everyone talking about this stuff or are there pockets of people trying to talk about other things? The reason I'm asking is because you wrote a great op-ed last week in the Wall Street Journal about immigration. Now, this is, I mean, I think probably maybe seven days before everything turned to the boil here on the AP, the DOJ scandal and the IRS scandal. But what's happened to immigration now as a topic?

Is this little break right now from the national attention, is this helpful? Does this give people kind of cover to maneuver in darkness for a while? Are we going to see progress on it, or is it dead for a while? Well, no, I think it's good. So it was, I mean, obviously all everything anybody was talking about was immigration. And immigration was a big deal with the Gang of Eight and the right. The left was saying the right is trying to figure out whether or not they're motivated by greed or racism. They have to decide.

It was kind of like, what, did you stop beating your wife? You're horrible. I mean, the conversation was really unproductive. And then the Heritage Foundation jumped in with their study that said it's going to cost us $6.3 trillion, and they called it amnesty. Anyway, it was just getting worse and worse and worse, the whole climate of debate. And then the IRS thing and the Benghazi thing took center stage, and that's really all anybody's talking about. I mean, the Senate passed that bill, and if you listen to NPR, which, you know, I know you guys secretly do. Don't deny it. They, you know, they would say, I mean, they report on,

the only reason they're reporting on the immigration bill at all is because there was an amendment on whether or not it would protect same-sex couples from different countries. That's the only reason it's news to NPR. That's right. Right? You know, they have their constituency. Everyone's got their audience, you know? I listen to NPR in case I'm ever called upon to imitate a tweet chestless neutral who speaks through his nose. Other than that.

So nobody's talking about it, and that's good because we can make real progress. When you're talking to legislators about this serious business about trying to get immigration reform, some sort of immigration reform that's kind of balanced compassion and fairness, which is the real balance that we're trying to strike here. It's better if people don't feel like they're in a cauldron of boiling oil, which doesn't lend to constructive compromise. But it feels to me like we hit the – we already hit the bone, right? We hit the granite bedrock there. The problem is you've got border security firsters of which i kind of

count myself almost as one i'm sort of on the mickey cow side and then after that i'm sort of i'm really willing to think and really willing to be a lot more uh i'm willing to be a lot more compromising but i but i i don't trust that that that component happening first. How do you thread that needle? That seems like the hard part, not the stuff that comes afterwards, but just how do you thread that needle? Well, the first thing to do is to remember exactly what the nature of the compromise is. So the black and white argument that we tend to have on this is neither side trusts each other. One side sort of ad hominem assumes the other wants completely open borders, and the other thinks that you want an electrified wall. Remember Herman

Kane talking about the wall? And he said he was helpfully going to put a sign on it that says, if you touch this, you'll be electrocuted and die, and he would write it in Spanish. I mean, it was just every liberal Democrat's paranoid fantasy about what we think, right? It was horrible. And there's a tendency on the right to throw these, to sling these ad hominem ideas back and forth a lot. And the first thing to remember when I'm, when I'm talking to Democrats and Republicans or conservatives that are on either side of this issue is let's think about what the terms of the compromise we're trying to achieve really, really are.

And the competing goals have to be fairness with respect to rule of law, fairness with respect to people who are already here in the United States and have run the traps legally, and compassion toward people who, frankly, only come here because they're trying to find some way to support their families. Those are both really laudable moral goals. And once we recognize on both sides of that case, then you can put together a system that says, yeah, I mean, what is a meaningful kind of border security? What is a meaningful type of system that makes sure that people can't hire illegal aliens. Hugh Hewitt has got a

pretty good way of thinking through it, and Michael Medved, and those guys disagree with each other, but they can come together on thinking through that algorithm. Right, I just think the question for most people, certainly people in California, that think about this stuff, and I'm probably misrepresenting Mickey's

point, but he tends to be the most immigration hawk, the loudest immigration hawk that's certainly on Ricochet is if you don't have measurable, enforceable border security first, you end up

having nothing, which is what we had before. So, having seen the movie before from the 86th Amnesty, people feel like, well, no, I want to make sure the borders are secure first, which seems to be fair. Yeah, no, I understand. Well, yeah, and that's the key. You said the word, it's fair. The guys who are talking more about the compassionate approach to immigration reform have to have respect for what other

people think is fair. I mean, if they actually don't take into consideration this other moral pillar of this entire debate, nothing's going to get done. And if you're going to talk about fairness, you actually have to have some sort of a system that makes it possible to hold a border secure. That's the truth of the matter. But it doesn't mean you have to do it because you're sneaking around

and trying not to let anybody in, which is the way that typically is being talked about, especially on the left. They just dine out on the left when we have these arguments, incidentally, and we play into it, typically. We don't need to do that.

Well, we got a question from the chat room. I know you got to go. I got one question for you. So does the compromise on the horizon, or at least the sort of republic, the emerging republic, although there's very deep divisions on that side, but does a possible compromise there, would that increase the level of legal immigration from Latin America and Mexico? I don't know. That's a good question. I don't know. I know it would increase the amount of legal immigration in high-skill groups, high-education, high-skill groups, particularly from South Asia, which would be really good for the United States, quite frankly.

I mean, it would be a good thing, and I think most people agree, even on the left, they agree that it would be fantastic if more people got their degrees in the United States would stay and create jobs and work here. I don't know what the numbers would be from lower-skilled immigration groups, from poorer immigration groups I should say. So what do you think the timetable is, the horizon here? When does this thing come back up? When do we suddenly remember, oh yeah, immigration? I mean it doesn't – It's going on right now. Yeah, but I mean – It's going on right now. Yeah, but I mean –

It's really happening right now, right? Right. What's the likelihood it's going to take – that something's going to move forward in the – or maybe your answer – that's your answer. I mean it seems to be hard to imagine something really serious is going to happen during this period of sort of long, hot summer, a lower-level Obama administration flax roasting alive. But maybe we can walk and chew gum at the same time. Yeah, I think that we can, and I think it actually is going on, and this is the good thing. So nobody's talking about anything except the IRS shutting down the Tea Party movement and Benghazi, et cetera, et cetera. But in the background, there's actually more.

As far as I can tell, there's more constructive work going on on immigration reform. Looking for reliable IT solutions for your business? At Innovate, we are the IT solutions people for businesses across Ireland. From network security to cloud productivity, we handle it all. Installing, managing, supporting and reporting on your entire IT and telecoms environment so you can focus on what really matters. Growing your business. Whether it's communications or security, Innovate has you covered.

Visit Innovate today. Innovate. The IT solutions people. I'm hoping is by the time people are really paying attention to it popularly, you're going to see less fighting on the right and a more reasonable compromise between the different polls. That's what I'm thinking. Now, the take that I've got on this thing is less about which side is right on that. I mean, I wrote a piece in the Wall Street Journal last week, and people interpreted it as I'm an open borders guy.

Well, yeah, maybe, maybe not. I may or may not be married to a Spanish-speaking immigrant. So I may or may not have strong opinions on the issue, but that's actually not my point. My point is I look at the data, and I see when I talk to conservatives, what they're really worried about is that if we have a lot more legal Latino immigrants in the United States, that Republicans are never going to win an election again. We're going to start losing Texas. And I'm looking at the data, and that's all wrong. That's just not right at all, because the weirdest thing about Latino voting patterns is that the eligible voters among Hispanics vote at much, much, much lower rates than

whites and blacks. So if you take just the eligible voting population of Hispanics, 50% voted in this last election, in the presidential election. You say, well, what's going on? When 80% of blacks and whites voted, 50% of Latinos voted. And then you say, okay, well, what if the guys were staying at home? If we turned them out like liberals want to do, would that make it impossible to win any election? And the answer is no, because they're more likely to be political conservatives than non-Hispanic whites. So what we're seeing is you've got two groups in the Latino population, the liberals who vote and the conservatives, the sleeping giants who stay home.

How do we know they're conservative? Because they say they are. And so if you look at the General Social Survey, and they tell you, are you eligible to vote? And they say yes. And did you vote? And they say no. And you say, how do you classify yourself with respect to churchgoing behavior, with respect to orientation toward work?

And how do you classify yourself politically? They're more likely to say that they are political conservatives than non-Hispanic whites. But something is making them stay home on election day. They don't relate to the Republican Party in a way that makes it palatable to be part of that movement. And that says that if the data are right, which, you know, General Social Survey, this is the University of Chicago, it's good stuff. That suggests that if there's more turnout among the Latino population, that's going to favor conservatives more than it's going to favor liberals. Well, maybe they're conservative in the sense that they want to conserve energy, not leave the House to go out and vote.

Let's end this all on a useless philosophical note. There's the old Russian proverb, of course, trust but verify, then imprison and execute. And in order for this to go forward, we all have to believe the best of the other side. You mentioned before how each side views the other, that they view the right as being xenophobic and hating brown people, et cetera. And we view them as wanting open borders. But really, when you look at it, the core of the conservative idea is not nativism. It is assimilation into an American identity. The core of the progressive idea seems to be the

dissolution of the notion of citizenship, the enshrinement of people as representatives of some national group that have to find themselves in this part of North America. Isn't it true, really, that the other side of this, when you get down to the core of their position, is about breaking down the definition of the American identity and the very notion of the importance of the classification of citizenship. Or am I just wrong? Am I just a xenophobic nativist like the rest of them? Well, you know, hey, man, you said it better than I can. But we could end on this note, but what the heck, you know, I'm the guest. So basically, I'll just be crassier than you about it. The left source of political power in America today is holding together the victim industrial complex.

A loose cobbling together of people for what they have in common is grievance against the mainstream, grievance against the establishment for a series of real or perceived slights over time. And when any one of these groups becomes emancipated effectively, that weakens the political power of the left. That's the reason that this idea of assimilation, of pride in one's country, of feeling part of a broader American identity, in a word, assimilation, is profoundly threatening to left-wing power, and it can't be permitted. That's what's going on here.

That's the reason that you've got to have Mexican-Americans feeling sort of aggrieved in the left-wing sensibility. And that's why it's so interesting that there is, in fact, a conservative sleeping giant in the Latino population. And if we start getting our act together on what that's all about, we could change the face of this thing. And on that note, on that uplifting and hopeful note, with giants slumbering about to be awoken to stamp out the scourge that bedevils the land,

we let you go for the moment, and of course we'll see you back at Ricochet and have you on the podcast ASAP. Thank you very much, Arthur Brooks. Welcome, and have a great day. Thanks, guys. Thank you, sir. You know, there's so many interesting Brooks out there. There's Arthur Brooks.

There's James L. Brooks, who is, as you probably know, Rob, from personal knowledge, is an absolute genius. There's Albert Brooks. There's also – there's a little thing called Spanglish, so let's sit down there on Jim Brooks. There's Albert Brooks, who actually dipped his toe into political theorizing. He wrote a book, I think America 2020 or something like that, which was about some future dystopian view of America. And I've never really wanted to spend the time to read it. But if somebody sat me down and put me in a car and said, I want you to listen to this, you can evaluate Albert Brooks as a fiction writer. I suppose I would and I suppose the only place that I could go get Mr. Brooks'

book would be at audible.com because I ain't going to buy it. Which is great because a 30-day free trial is what awaits you, Ricochetians, Ricochetois, at audible.com. 100,000 titles. You've got to find something in there you like. And also

the incredible WhisperSync technology. That's right, magically. Automagically, as the kids like to say. Syncs where you are on all of your devices. All of them. Well, not all of them. What does that mean, WhisperSync? Does syncing ever make any noise at all? Well,

you would like to think it did back in the days of Star Trek. In Star Trek, the computers were very noisy, and they had clacking relays. Yeah. But now we don't need audio cues. Machines don't make audio cues, which is why we provide them with them. So no, I don't think, Robert.

Everything whisper syncs. My iPhone whisper syncs, so yeah. Are you going to ask me about my audio pick? I will in a second, but you brought up an interesting point, that if something is a whisper sync, if that's literally the case, then you ought to be able to hear it if you pay very close attention in a quiet room. It's not silencing. A whisper sync is audible, as it were.

There was a show, a radio show back in the 50s, which ran for about 20 episodes, called The Whisperer. They're always trying to come up with some name, some little hook. This was a secret character who informed on the mob and had great power. He was an attorney or something. And he did so with a very distinctive whisper. I find the sound of people whispering to be unlistenable.

I cannot bear to hear the human voice whispering. There's even a commercial about software piracy. It begins like this. If you hear something. And it's... So what I'm telling you is that WhisperSync is a name, a trademark for a technology. Don't worry. If you hate whispering, you ain't going to hear it. What you're going to get is audible.com syncing all of your devices so you can put one down

and pick up another and keep on reading or listening to the story. So yes, Rob, that was all my way of getting myself out of this problem of naming a book. What's yours? Mine is American Gods by the – I don't know. What do you call him? A horror fantasy writer? Neil Gaiman. I'm not a fan of the genre as they say.

I don't really read any of this stuff but I think this book, American Gods, is really, really, really clever and has an incredibly interesting idea behind it. And the idea behind it is that all these people have come from all over to America, from all over the world for hundreds of years, and they brought with them their gods.

Thor and Odin and Legba and all the little, all the gods they worshipped in the old days. Legba. Legba. Yeah, Legba. Papa Legba. Yeah.

I haven't heard about – thought about Papa Legba. Oh, listen. I tried to write a whole show about Papa Legba. And then they got here and then they got sort of civilized and they got rational and they became Americans and they kind of gave up those gods. And those gods are kind of walking around, demigods really, and they're kind of walking around. And they're kind of homeless and bums and con men and they're just trying to get their power back. And it's really interesting.

It's sort of allegorical and interesting and funny and dark and savage at the same time. And that's great. It's just great. And I'm not a fan of the genre, as we say, but I think this is really good stuff. And it's WhisperSync ready. Interesting. Do you remember a little controversy after the Boston bombing in which a songwriter of some note on the internet came up with a poem expressing all kinds of mournful sympathy for what's his name?

For Tsarnaev or whatever. Yes. Sokar. You don't know how to do this. You don't know how to get to New York. You don't know how to drive this car. Yeah, because you ran over your brother. And she was excoriated left and right. Well, mostly on the right. That's Neil Gaiman's

wife. Really? Yes, Amanda Palmer. And they live around here. They live over in Menominee, Wisconsin. They don't, do they really? He's a local guy. He's a local guy. Can't hold against him. No, no, you can't. A lot of curious things happen

in Wisconsin. Ed Gein, for example, which reminds me, I had to pick up Robert Block's Psycho somewhere on Audible because I've never really read it. I've just seen the movie. And having recently seen a movie version of Alfred Hitchcock's Shooting of Psycho, which was Anthony Hopkins in a big fat suit essentially.

I'm keen to go back to the original source material because – Oh, the original is fantastic. The movie was awesome. The movie. Have you seen Hitchcock by any chance? No, no. I just didn't want to bring myself to see it. But I'll tell you, Psycho, the movie, there's a whole collection of those movies in the 50s and 60s that have a shrink at the end. Yes.

And you watch it now and the whole – you have to just kind of close your eyes or get up and turn the movie off because now we realize that those shrinks are just full of it. But back then, they were incredibly – that was when the scientists came in. They were in white lab coats practically trying to explain the mysteries of the human mind. No, you don't understand. And there's actually a wonderful – I keep forgetting the name of this movie. I got to – there's a wonderful old noir, really dark noir movie from the 50s set in San Francisco about a kind of a serial killer kind of rape. It's very dark set in San Francisco about a kind of a serial killer kind of rapist, very dark stuff in San Francisco.

It's not that cheerful, bright serial killer rapist stuff in San Francisco. Yeah, it's not with a jingly tune. And then there's a rooftop, and he's a sniper, and there's a rooftop great rooftop sequence where the cops are all on the roofs looking for him

and it is in fact all, not shot for shot, rooftop um uh great rooftop sequence where the cops are all on the roofs looking for him uh and it is in fact all not shot for shot but basically the the the the first version of dirty harry which is a great movie you know dirty harry's early 70s now this is in the 50s only 20 years apart barely 20 years apart 15 16 years apart but the difference of the movies they are night and day the cop in the 50s version is the one saying to the people, Louis, he's not, we got to get this animal. He's not an animal. He's a sick guy. We got to find him and help him. That's what the cop is saying in the 50s. Right. 16 years later, some of these other cultures suddenly realize that's not true.

And you have dirty Harry saying, we're going to get this animal. I know that it's a great difference. Spectacular difference. It's so interesting. You're absolutely, You're absolutely right. And what they did was there was the beginning of clinical psychology where medicine and treatments would cure Norman Bates. Everything. He has a mother complex. So let's put him in a bin, pith him with a railroad spike and give him Thorazine. It won't work out very well.

But on the other hand – give him Thorazine. It won't work out very well. But on the other hand... Speaking of Thorazine... I was just going to say, the idea that you can look at these relationships and figure out somebody's particular psychosis is absolute nonsense. I mean, for example, if a guy who wrote for the Weekly Standard and Ricochet was married to somebody who wrote for Ricochet, would you think that that would enter into their dynamic at all? No!

And to prove it, we got the podcast from the two of them. But here, right now, joining us in the second part of the show is Mark Hemingway, senior writer for the Weekly Standard and the better half of Ricochet's own Molly Hemingway. Welcome back to the podcast, Mark. Hello. Hey, Mark. How are you? I'm doing all right. Can you hear me okay? Yeah, we can hear you fine. It's Rob in L.A. It's James in Minneapolis. All right, so you're in D.C. Yeah. Am I?

And, you know, we just talked to Arthur Brooks, but I want some more. I want some more dirt. Am I sitting here? Am I bad? Am I a bad person? Because I am really, really enjoying. What's happening in Washington right now? I mean, I'm really it's like I kind of don't want to leave the house. I got work to do, but I kind of want to watch it all day. And just I just love watching these guys roasting alive. Does that make me a bad person? Scandal, Freuda, I guess. You know, I don't think it makes you a bad person, per se.

And I think it's a natural human tendency, although obviously, you know, reveling in the failure of others, you know, no matter how malicious, you know, is somewhat unseemly. But having said that, I don't know if you recall the original Rand Contra hearings. I mean, those were broadcast in network television, you know, in the afternoon. And I mean, that was a, you know, bona fide like soap opera for people. I mean, people really did tune in and follow those things obsessively and really enjoy those things. I mean, there's definitely an aspect to these things. And it's the same reason why Watergate is still talked about in hushed tones, you know, you know, to this day, because, you know, there's so many moving parts. It's like piecing together like a real life puzzle or mystery. And I don't think this is any different.

So I, you have a totally natural human tendency. And I particularly as a writer, I think your your your desire to like put all the pieces together in the narrative is pretty natural. Is this going to get really ugly and nasty? Please tell me it's going to get worse. You know, I definitely do think it's going to get worse. It's pretty obvious that the whole story isn't out there. And more than that, we're talking about the whole story isn't out there. And more than – Wait, wait. Just to be clear. We're talking about the IRS story, right? Obviously, we have to label these. Everything needs to be tagged, right?

IRS tag. It's going to get worse. Yeah. No. We're still learning out – I mean basically since the initial revelation of the IRS that, oh, sorry, whoops, we disproportionately targeted a few hundred groups. Well, that number of groups has ballooned to almost 500. You know, it was revealed that Lerner, uh, planted the question and then lied about planning the question. Uh, so there, there've been one thing after another, uh, in terms of, you know, drip, drip. Uh, um, and I, there's absolutely no reason to believe at this point

in time, considering how incompetent the response has been that they're telling the truth. So, I mean, I don't, I mean, I don't want you to futurize here i mean is this well let's just get i mean i just want to get so i want to get all the the the filth and grime on the irs thing out first before we talk about how to how to how to profit from it but is anyone go to jail um are they going to find out that someone said something to obama in the oval office i mean how how how much stink is there going to find out that someone said something to Obama in the Oval Office? I mean, how how how much stink is there going to be on Obama at the end of this? You know, that's a good question. So I don't know if you saw this, but like, yes. So on Tuesday, there was there was widely reported that Jonathan Capehart and Ezra Klein of The Washington Post and Josh Marshall talking points. We're seeing the West Wing for a meeting with the president.

Now, this White House is well known for coordinating with the media. And on top of this, this meeting came just a few hours after Lois Lerner had announced she was pleading the fifth before the House Oversight Committee. So that that that revelation pleading the fifth, you know, anytime anyone pleads the fifth, I mean, that just is, you know, scandal. And, you know, so it was pretty, it was impossible for the liberal press, which up until that point had been sustaining this ridiculous narrative that the scandal was overblown to continue with that. So we had this meeting and then the next morning within half an hour of each other, Ezra Klein and Josh Marshall both wrote pieces about how the federal bureaucracy is totally beyond anyone's control. And it's incredibly impossible for Obama to fire anyone in the federal bureaucracy. We really need to do something about civil service protections and yada, yada, yada.

Which is remarkable for no one. You're talking about pundits who have never failed to advocate for an activist bureaucracy, improving Americans lives are suddenly saying, gosh, this thing's way out of control the moment it threatens Obama. And, you know, so, you know, here we are. We have a situation where the president can order a drone strike on an American citizen anywhere in the world without a trial. And yet he can't fire any one of our two million federal bureaucrats. So, you know, I just don't if the White House's way of weaseling out of the scandal is to say, hey, what goes on in the federal bureaucracy is way out of the White House's control. I that is if that is their best argument and that's the argument they're pushing on people, you know, good luck with that. I mean, the stink isn't going to come back to you just by, you know, sheer incompetence. That seems like an argument against Obamacare, for one thing. Well, many other, like, gigantic federal projects we've undertaken, you know, including Doc Frank, including, you know, all sorts of comprehensive federal legislation, you know,

the, you know, sort of liberal ascendancy has been pushing. But more than that, though, I think the problem here and then the mistake that people keep making is, look, if your argument is that this was not an explicit political plot, that actually makes it much, much worse. You're saying the entire culture of the federal government is so ideologically compromised, they do not know where their good intentions begin. And, you know, malevolence they inflict on ordinary citizens begins. And that is almost, that is what happens in basically totalitarian governments. And that's really sort of terrifying, that these people don't realize that incompetence can be both political and just as malevolent as, you know, something that is well-intentioned.

Mark, here's a navel-gazing think tank type question masquerading as political insight. Here we have an example, a huge example here in the IRS and not just that, but all of the other organs of the government, true to vote, found themselves investigated by the IRS, OSHA, ATF, the FBI, almost as if there's some sort of interlocking mechanism of the Leviathan that comes to bear when they see somebody they don't like. The argument here that I think conservatives can make, first of all, we can make as much hay and shum the water in the short run as possible and And you look at 2014 and all those other good things. But there's another argument to be made here. You could say that the reason that the left has been so successful in shaping the culture over the last 30 years

is because they decided to do the long march through the institutions, through the schools, through the unions, through the government. Conservatives for years have been saying, we've got to take back these institutions. But when you look around the landscape, what do you see? You see the old media being assaulted by the new, which is much more nimbler and internet-based. You see education on the college level being taken apart by the possibility of online education, which blows up their whole model.

You see even the same thing going for secondary education with the K-12 state model being questioned by many people because of the expenditures. And now you see something like this where you say, it's not a question of us going in and reforming the IRS and making it much better at enforcing a 935,000 page code. It's a question of getting it down to five laws and one postcard, blowing up the, in other words, should the right be looking at institutions to blow up and dismantle and replace with new ideas that meet the 21st century? Is this something that the right is ideologically and logistically capable of doing now? That is a very good question in terms of the logistics and, you know, whether or not there's

enough ideological consensus on an agenda that would fix these things. But having, you know, but, you know, and, you know, setting aside that gigantic if, I think you've hit on sort of the crucial issue here, you know, if the White House and liberal columnists are suddenly saying, gosh, this federal bureaucracy is, you know, running away from us, well, then the response should clearly be an aggressive push to, you know, curb egregious civil service protections and start, and, you know, and here's another, you know, big problem here is that, you know, they're is that the IRS is going after Tea Party groups that have maybe a dozen members that want nonprofit status because they're afraid of

electioneering. Yet, how much money have government unions given to politics, even though it's an inherent conflict of interest to take taxpayer dollars collected by, yes, the IRS and then distributing them to federal workers who then turn around and lobby for, you know, higher salaries and, you know, jobs that, you know, where they can't be fired. So, yeah, I mean, I think you're absolutely right. the system and pushing for systemic reforms to get at the real rot, which in the long term will have a much more beneficial effect on our politics than, say, worrying about how this affects Obama over the next two election cycles. Yeah, OK. So, Mark, just to talk a little bit practically, what should we be going for right now?

We got him down, got a little blood in the water. What can we be going – We just talked to Arthur Brooks. His suggestion, which I think is a really good one is the first thing we got to do is yank Obamacare oversight away from them, from the IRS. That seems like, that seems like a very doable thing could probably accomplish in a week. It's not much argument, not much, not, not, not, not, not too, that doesn't seem like that'd be too politically difficult to do. What else should we get while we're here and we've got a little control? Well, I touched on this a little bit. But aside from the IRS-Obamacare connection, I think the other low-hanging fruit here is dealing with just the basic sort of size and scope of the federal government.

The size of the federal – the number of federal employees increased by something like 8 percent during the first two years of recession while Obama was basically in office, even as unemployment was hitting double digits. The average federal worker is compensated at I think $133,000 a year, and that includes a base salary that's $30,000 higher than the average private sector salary and a benefits package that's worth four times as much. You know, I don't think, you know, that a long, you know, Americans don't fundamentally like the IRS and they certainly don't fundamentally like, you know, federal employees. I think if you started like pointing out this egregious imbalance, it would really give the GOP an opportunity to make some actual laws that do curb the influence and size of the federal government, which is just as bad as, you know, the federal government is always sort of, you know, metastasized, you know, since the foundation of the republic. But people have no idea that the people that don't live in D.C. that like see the effects of this firsthand have no

idea how it's exploded even by those standards in the last decade or so. I mean, and this happened under Bush, too, and federal salaries skyrocketed under Bush. Right, right. So you have a Republican candidate then who comes out and says this, and immediately George Stephanopoulos in the debates will say, well, could you explain then why you want to take away birth control from Big Bird? And the entire Republican establishment can't figure out why they lost that particular issue. You're not going to be able to get, you're not going to get a good argument from that from anybody who is inside the mindset of Washington, D.C. You're going to have to go outside.

You're going to have to find a governor. Did I hear that Scott Walker was paying a trip to Iowa this week? Did you read that? You read my – yeah, no, that's absolutely right. You read my mind. And that was where I was going with this was Scott Walker. I mean, basically, everybody said this would be the death of Scott Walker. And well, I mean, people are not dumb. I mean, they see this happening at local level. It's no different for someone who's frustrated that they can't fire that terrible teacher at their local grade school than for people at the federal level, for taxpayers looking to Washington and wondering why they can't fire, you know, rogue IRS agents that are clearly out of control and abusing their power. It's exactly the same principle at work. And I think that the American people, this is

slowly dawning on them, you know, which is why, you know, there hasn't been the backlash against Scott Walker that everyone predicted. I mean, I think most Wisconsinites are generally accepting of the fact that the size of their state government was, you know, too big and too intrusive as a matter of reality that transcends, you know, the typical ideological divide. Whoa, whoa, whoa. I'm right next to Wisconsin, OK? I can hear the lamentations across the border. I see the Jodes and their beat up trucks coming over from Wisconsin. It's a nightmare.

No, actually, Walker's going to be able to point to some things that actually worked and say, can we do this on a national scale? And if he can take on Madison, which is the Berkeley. That's what I always think. Yeah, this guy can do that in a blue state. I don't mean he can do that in the country. I know precisely zero about Scott Walker's personal life or his other beliefs. But as far as I'm concerned, he is one of the chief heroes of the Republican Party right now. All right, so Mark, we've got to get a little dirt here on Molly before we let you go. But before we do, all right, so we've dealt with IRS. Now, am I – help me care about the AP scandal, DOJ stuff.

Is that going to get worse? Is that going to go away? Do I care about the AP scandal, DOJ stuff. Is that going to get worse? Is that going to go away? Do I care about that? I mean, I guess the James Rosen stuff I do care about because, you know, I mean, I appear on Fox News every now and then and I like him and I think what they did to him was wrong. But, you know, I mean, help me. Well, regardless of whether or not, you know,

regardless of whether we should be viewing the Associated Press as toadies for certain – It does feel to me – I mean the joke is, right, that they should be able to read their emails because in the same way that every employer should be able to read an employee's emails, right? Yeah. I mean I think that, again, there's a bit of scandal, Freuda, in that regard. But that said, it doesn't change the fact that this is, you know, a clear sort of violation of, you know, some bedrock American principles about the First Amendment and the importance of a free press that's free from government persecution. And further, if you drill down and look at the specific rationales for what they were doing, it's unclear whether it was warranted.

You know, I mean, I think the initial reports were something like, you know, it may have been up to 100 AP reporters that their emails looked into. I mean, there's no excuse for a dragnet of that size. And they certainly haven't explained it, you know, regardless of, you know, how crucial this leak supposedly was. And then you, for instance, look at the rationale for digging into Rosen's personal life or his family's phone numbers or whatever. And among the things cited in the warrant was that he was a flight risk. Now, here's a guy whose face is all over television and has a family in Washington and is a well-known, respected career guy. And the idea that Scott Rosen would be a flight risk is just utterly bananas. So, you know, again, the issue is

abuse of power, which is sort of a common narrative in all of these scandals to some extent. Right. So is that going to get worse? I mean obviously while I have a sort of political and philosophical interest in seeing the wings of the IRS clipped and seeing the federal bureaucracy thinned and seeing Obamacare moved, the jurisdiction of Obamacare moved from IRS somewhere else. I mean I also want to see Eric Holder roasted alive. Is that going to happen? I mean how good is this summer going to be for me I guess is what I'm trying to ask. Well, it could be very good. Although Eric Holder – I mean granted I'm not the oldest guy but I'm old enough. I've been around the block here. I have never seen anyone more Teflon than this guy.

I mean, the sheer number of scandals that have been emanating out of the Justice Department since he took over, you know, any one of these things scandal is certainly a part of this, is that it makes the press hostile to administration because they feel personally targeted. And that, in turn, affects their coverage of all the other scandals. So and, you know, again, that's there's the problem. You know, I normally we have a situation of three scandals converging on someone. You would see, you know, one scandal sort of overtake or swamp the other two. In this case, whilst maybe the IRS, you know, scandals getting more attention for a variety of reasons, the other scandals aren't going away in part because even though they're all totally unrelated to some extent. They all have narratives that sort of about things like government competence and government abuse that dovetail quite nicely with each other. So in this case, there's actually sort of a multiple. I, you know, I, you know, who knows

what, you know, you don't want to like make any predictions about what's going to happen with anything in Washington anymore. But I would say your odds of having a good summer are getting better by the minute. Oh, I'll make some predictions, man. Martial law. Everyone run it into FEMA camps. It's coming, man. I've told you for you. Yeah. Well, Holder, no, Teflon isn't the word. Kevlar is what the man's epidermis is comprised of. Right. You know, this is all great, Mark, and Rob, you're right. It's going to be an interesting summer, but we underestimate the secret weapon of the Obama administration,

and that is the amazing persuasive power, the sheer charisma of Jay Carney. I don't know what we're going to do, but that's something that might be addressed. That's why I brought you the last two questions for Mark. Jay Carney, is he going to stick around? I mean, how bad is this for him? I mean, you know, Obama's only got a couple of years left. Carney's not going to go back to Time magazine, right? You know, at this point in time, how much worse for Carney could it get?

I mean, he already has zero credibility. You know, anyone that knew him as a journalist basically has no respect for him. We now know that like the day Obama got elected, he was apparently fishing for a job in the White House, in part because, you know, the days of well-respected, high-paying journalism jobs at institutions like Time Magazine are numbered. You know, I can't imagine that, you know, Carney at this point in time is he might be eager to get out of the White House for various personal reasons, stress in terms of, you know, whatever else. But in terms of stress, in terms of whatever else. But in terms of the damage to his reputation, I mean, really?

At this point in time, he's such a farce. I can't imagine that he's doing anything other than looking for the right opportunity to feather his nest. Right. Okay, last question. Why is Valerie Jarrett's name not mentioned? Is she completely out of the loop here? Because it seems to me that that would be the – that's traditionally the person who's fingered as the problem, is the crony from back home who never understood anything, who has got no friends in D.C.

That's usually the person who's marched out of town. Well, I don't know. I mean, maybe maybe she has so much sway over the president. It seems like she does that anyone in the White House is afraid of crossing her at this point in time. But I would be very interested to see five, 10 years from now with the Obama administration, you know, past tense, what people say about her, because everyone acknowledges she's remarkably powerful, yet absolutely no one has been able to sort of elucidate what her particular role is other than she's really influential. So it at once makes her sound sinister, but at the same time, there's absolutely no evidence she is sinister other than to say that when we don't know why – what someone's doing, we just assume they're up to sinister motives and that's a a good, you know, axiom to fall back on in D.C. these days. So, you know, that's a good question. I would love to know what she's done on anything in this White House. And I don't think anyone

really does know. Well, there's Catherine Riehmler, who apparently is going to be the fall person that Rob was referring to earlier. She's the one who just screwed everything up. That's the one that they seem to be focusing their blame on. They're going to throw a few people out, and it's not going to satisfy anybody. I mean, there's bones to be made here in Washington, and anybody who's spent any time in the Washington press corps knows that at some point you realize, you know, hey, I could get a book out of this, and your own little self-interest advances.

Your partisan beliefs, which, of course, are kept private. That's what I love. Jay Carney was a reporter for Time magazine, utterly completely dispassionate, right? Objective as they come. And then something like this comes and you can just imagine these guys feeling like they're taking off their bra on a hot day. Ah, finally. I don't have to pretend anymore.

But we are stop. We've got to stop pretending that you guys are going to have a podcast anytime soon. Mark, we've given up. Unless there's one coming up with you and Molly for ricochet. Well, my wife has been, you know, saving the world from, uh, Kermit Gosnell for the last couple of months. So, um, uh, we will get on it soon. I promise it just, and things have been extraordinarily hectic. I've been buried in IRS stuff and, uh, um, she's been buried in, in various speaking engagements and things like that, but we will do it soon, I promise. On that note, we'll let you go and we'll see you back at the site.

Thanks, Mark. Thank you. Well, Rob, somehow we've managed to clamber up an hour's worth of podcasting. I think we did pretty well. Maybe Peter's superfluous at this point. I think he is. And I think I actually heard you say one last question. Which, in fact, was the last question.

I know. That's the thing. You have not learned at the feet of the master. That's my thing. That's my special take. Robin L.A. with one last question. We have a couple of other things that we could discuss right now. Of course, the public decapitation and disemboweling of a British soldier, which if you go over to FARC.com is being justified by a number of people. I stopped going to fark.com. There's also, you know,

FARC has been replaced by BuzzFeed as sort of the go-to place for silliness and inane commentary. And I had a little run-in with BuzzFeed this week. Really? Of all things, yeah. Yeah. It had to do with a part of my life

that has nothing to do with Ricochet or anything vaguely political or the newspaper. I don't believe that part of your life exists. Oh, it's the majority of. I had a website called The Gallery of Regrettable Food. As a matter of fact, I found myself

sitting in my car at the Mall of America parking lot yesterday in the rain having a 30-minute interview with somebody about that book 11 years after, 12 years after it was done. Funny book. Well, somebody in BuzzFeed decided to go back and get some old, wacky, retro-vintage recipes and pictures of ads and things and post them under 10 regrettable recipes you will never make. And I sigh because, you know, every once in a while somebody discovers these things. And there's always something that was from my site originally. And sure enough, there were some things.

And no credit given. That's the thing. I don't mind if somebody takes some of these graphics. But for heaven's sakes, a little hat tip, a little via. That's all we ask. And sure enough, there were some people in the BuzzFeed comments saying, you know, Lilacs does have a whole big site about that, which really made me, I love when utter strangers just pop up in these plagiarism threads and say, you know, you might want to look at this. So I tweeted about it a little bit, and sure enough, BuzzFeed Ben actually tweeted,

Ben Smith tweeted back that, you know, they'd put it up there before they got the attributions because they wanted to get it up in a hurry. And that's because that's the kind of breaking news that BuzzFeed is famous for, right? Ten recipes from the 50s. Can't wait to verify that one. Just slap her up. And so I had a little dust up and it was fun to go to that page to see if they'd corrected anything and how they corrected it incorrectly and to see that little line. Readers from Lylex.com are making this hot i just that's yeah it's it's such a silly it is

irritating though right i mean i gotta say i i know how that feels i mean it is irritating when you think come on dudes i mean it's not it's not acceptable to steal material. Well, don't you know they're not swiping anything. They're simply aggregating. That's all that they're doing. And, well, so it – but I have to go there every day because if you want to be – if you want to know exactly what the intellectual timber is, what items are popping up, you have to go there. I mean it's obligatory at this point, even though their credibility is Carney-esque. You have to go to see how they're dry. I made the mistake, maybe, of never watching Jon Stewart because I have no interest in watching that kind of television. But I almost kind of wish that I

had so that I understood exactly how he was shaping these things for the people who think that calling something truthy and, well, that's Colbert – and taking that ironic take on it. Now, do you watch Stewart? Is he beginning to express displeasure with the administration? No, I have not. I have not watched it. I hear he's – look, like everyone else, I think – like everybody on that side, I think their problem – from what I understand from the clips I've seen, right? What I understand is the anger comes from the incompetence about – the story is how could you give the Republicans this opening?

That's why the headlines in The New York Times, et cetera, are always about Republicans do this, Republicans do that, Republicans are making hay because that's – as far as I'm concerned, that's the story. terrible thing happen, American citizens being bugged, politically motivated audits and tax investigations. No. What's the story is Republicans are on the march. And so therefore his response is, well, how could Obama – how could the Obama administration let this happen? Because this is our worst – because this is the sort of thing that they say – It's all consequences, yeah.

This is the sort of thing that they say crazy conservatives complain about right and and here it is come to i mean we do we joke around this i don't want to say anything you know they're gonna give me an audit the ocean will be at my door and you know yeah guess what and that's what happens which validates you know the i mean it's almost like somebody coming up with a document at this point proving that alger hiss was using fluoride to change the American mental temperature to make it more amenable to communism. I mean if something like that came up, you would just have birchers dancing in the street and howling for bay. So yeah, well, here's the thing. We got to go.

But before we do, I have to remind you of this. You can of course go to Ricochet.com and chime in in the comments. I know everybody gets it out of their system in the chat room, but please, we'd love to hear your comments. We'd love to hear everybody applaud E.J. Hill for his magnificent work. We also need to remind people that if they have Turner Classic Movies and an AVR, that they perhaps should set it at some point to find the movie called well, it's the one that Rob was talking about where there's a sniper who's being pursued by police. Which one is that? The movie's called

The Sniper. Is that what it's called? I found it, yeah. Oh, yeah. Starring who? The star, well, here's the prices. A sniper kills young brunettes as the police attempt to grapple with the psychology of an unknown assailant. Right, right, right. Okay.

Adolphe Mongeau, 1952, long in the tooth, plays police lieutenant, get this, Frank Kafka. Right. That's great. Frank Kafka. Adolphe Mongeau is not the main guy. Who's the young? Well, there's a character, Arthur Franz, plays Eddie Miller, and I'm guessing Eddie Miller is probably the name of the guy who's doing the shooting. But here's the great thing.

Police Sergeant Joe Ferris is played by a forgotten and greatly underrated radio actor named Gerald Moore. Gerald Moore played Philip Marlowe on the radio for two or three years, and he was in a lot of shows, and he's a marvelous vocal actor. And so I've got to find this movie. As a matter of fact, by the next time we talk, I will have seen this movie and I will have posted

at lilacs.com on Monday screenshots about this as they attempt to grapple with what caused this guy to pick up a gun and start shooting brunettes. Maybe because he's stupid, evil, and sociopathic

and enjoys it. Possibly that. It's amazing. You're watching the rough draft, the 50s draft, the progressive era draft of Dirty Harry, which you're watching. It's amazing. Absolutely. And I will credit, of course, Rob Long.

Hat tip, Rob Long, via Rob Long and L.A. Oh, no. I'll tell you who it's – I'll tell you who's amazing. Richard Kiley's in it. Yes. Richard Kiley's in it, and he's the one who gives that great speech. He's Dr. James Kent. Yeah.

So there you go. So you too, I see, have gone to IMDb. I found it. Yeah, there it is. Everybody else. The Internet is a miraculous thing. You can't remember the name of the movie, but you got a of details and when a couple of keystrokes i not only summon it up i have it queued for downloading since we've been speaking beautiful wow there you go netflix

and thank you all for downloading and listening to this podcast it's brought to you as ever you know by audible.com go to audible.com well no heck audiblepodcast.com slash ricochet right you see that in words in the post. Go there. Get a book. There may be even something about the psychology in the 1950s that can help you understand exactly what people were thinking and why the movies got so stupid. And it's also brought to you by – And by.

And by Tiny Lies by James Lilacs. Tiny Lies by James Lilacs is a lot like – in many ways, part and parcel of your collection, a lot like the Gallery of Regrettable Food. It is, remember those old ads from the backs of newspapers and magazines and comic books promising all sorts of solutions and cures to your ills, both social and health and medical. They are annotated and preserved and lovingly archived and commented upon with the wit and wisdom of our own James Lilacs. Go to lilacs.com, L-I-L-E-K-S.com, where you can download the book for a buck and a quarter. That's a buck and a quarter, less than a penny a page.

Go to it. Strike a blow for free enterprise. Strike a blow for independent media, which is what we all need. It's a very funny book, and I know you will enjoy it. That's what I'm doing, blowing up the institutions like we were talking before, I have the patience for a short march, let alone a long one we'll leave you with this, Peter do you know if Rob, do you know

if Peter made bail I have no idea, but I don't know why he's a flight risk, I know he is alright, well maybe he'll be back with us next week thanks for listening folks, we'll see you at Ricochet and we'll see you down the road, thanks James, well, maybe he'll be back with us next week. Thanks for listening, folks. We'll see you at Ricochet, and we'll see you down the road. Thanks, James. See you next week. guitar solo Ricochet. Join the conversation. guitar solo Thank you.