The Ricochet Podcast - The Letter

Episode Date: March 12, 2015

This week, we peruse Hillary’s email, National Review’s Charles C.W. Cooke on his new book The Conservatarian Manifesto (are you a Conservatarian? Take the quiz here), Law Talk’s John Yoo on Cotton’s letter, and the controversy behind Claire Berlinkski’s new profile pic. Music from this week’s episode: The Letter by The Boxtops The opening sequence for the Ricochet Podcast was composed and... Source

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No, it's 252. I know the weeks seem to blend together, but some things make them stand out. And some things like, well, our sponsor, which makes every morning stand out with its perfect, perfect way to shave. Listen, if you can make for me a compelling argument why you should pay more for an inferior razor that you have to go get, I'm willing to hear it. In the meantime, there's Harry's Shave, and there's Harry's Shave at harrys.com. We have a coupon code for you. Yes, we do, and we'll give it to you a little bit later in the show. We're also brought to you by this entity, which is Ricochet itself. And if Rob Long were here, he'd tell you about it. But Rob is off swanning around somewhere in some place with bad Wi-Fi.

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And you get the daily shot as well. Spread the word. Join the site, Ricochet.com. As I said, Rob's gone. Peter, I thought Peter was going to be under the weather, but he has rallied well. Troy Sinek is taking his place. Gentlemen, welcome to the Ricochet podcast. Hillary, who wants to go first?

Oh, Troy, go ahead. Okay. I'll take on the Hillary thing because here's what I think is interesting about this, which is that for the past – I don't know, a year, however long we've been talking about Hillary Clinton as a potential presidential candidate, there have been a handful of factors that a lot of us on the right and a lot of our critics on the left keep flagging, which is that she's too old. She's yesterday's news. She's not a campaigner. Yada, yada, yada.

There's four or five things you keep hearing. Those will do. Those will do. Those will do. If Hillary Clinton were to win the presidency in 2016, a child who was born on the day that her husband left office would be eligible to apply for a driver's license on the day she was sworn in. A lot of time has passed, and I think a lot of people have probably forgotten about the fact that this is how life operates with them. And just in the past few weeks, you've seen it with the emails. You've seen it with the stories of the Clinton Foundation taking all this money from foreign sources, even this kind of silly story one of which is the times have changed. I mean when Bill was president, one of the reasons I think that we were somewhat willing to indulge this was because he was presiding over sort of this weird parenthetical in American life between the end of the Cold War and the start of 9-11. It was pretty peaceful.

It was pretty prosperous and we all heard the excuse a million times during the impeachment saga. Who cares what the president is doing in his private time as long as the market is still up? The dynamic is probably going to be a little bit different when you've got ISIS, when you've got the economy still listing, when you've got Vladimir Putin, when you've got all these issues. I don't think we're going to be that indulgent. And the second thing is that she just does not have Bill Clinton's skill set. I mean we sort of – after the initial few years of the Clinton administration, we kind of reached this weird and unhealthy equilibrium in American life where we all kind of accepted that Bill Clinton was sort of a national Eddie Haskell.

And we all knew that he was lying to us. But darn it, that was kind of part of his charm. And she doesn't have that. Are you in Tennessee right now? Yes, I am. OK. It all helps. I mean the southerness of it all fits.

Go ahead. Anyway, no, that's – I mean and that's my take on it. I mean she just – she doesn't have the charm to get out of these things. Bill Clinton could talk his way out of a capital murder charge. She probably couldn't talk her way out of a speeding ticket. And so this stuff is going to be harder for her. Couldn't agree more. Done.

Well, speaking of weird – I'm sorry, Peter. Were you going to say something or – No, I was – all those things that Troy began with, what I was so struck by when I was monkeying around with our blessed system here trying to post that 27-second video on – which Troy finally posted for me on Ricochet. I saw that same video over and over again and I couldn't stand it anymore as I was trying to figure out how to post it. So I turned off the sound at least. And of course, that's the first thing they tell you in an advertising – or in the old days when advertising was so much – so heavily concentrated on television. Turn off the sound. See if the ad sells without any sound. Mike Deaver used to say of Ronald Reagan, whatever he's saying, just look at him. And Deaver used to say, babies, look at that face and smile.

And turn off the sound. And what you get with Hillary Clinton is an unhappy, unattractive, tired. Oh, my goodness. She is a negative life force. I am telling you, that thing lasts 27 seconds. But if you watch it, it takes at least two minutes out of your own life. Well, she's like the Wicked Witch of the West without the joie de vivre. Exactly. That's that actually.

So Troy said Bill Clinton had the charm, the joie de vivre. She is joyless. She is just joyless. That woman will not be president of the United States. And what I have to say just delights me is the Democrats are starting to realize this. And she is lying atop that party like a mattress. They have no idea how to get out from under her, but it is dawning on them that this will not work. And you know my response? Tee hee hee hee hee. Well, everybody – I love this because the story comes up.

Troy said it. Everybody said it. That Bill, he was just a charming rogue. That's why we get – I mean it's as if we have to somehow excuse the appearance and the persistence of this pestilential figure simply because he's charming and we like being charmed. I think the continued reign of Bill Clinton in the media itself is apparently complacent and compliant in letting a presidential character's husband get off the hook for being on a plane that goes to Sex Island. I don't understand that at all.

And when everybody says, well, of course, of course, Bill Clinton was on that plane going to the place with all the 15 and 16 year old hookers imported from Venezuela and Central Europe. What do you I mean, of course, it's Bill Clinton. For heaven's sakes, yes, it is, but isn't that part of the problem here, that he's getting a pass because he is Bill Clinton? What are you going to do?

I love the fact that the portrait of him has that shadow draped over his nether regions. I think that's perfect, that after he's desiccated bones in a box, still there will be an image of him on the wall over his nether regions. I think that's perfect. That after he's desiccated bones in a box, still there will be an image of him on the wall that reminds everybody. And there's nothing that he can do about it. Anyway.

I gather, James, that his charms are lost on you. I understand them, but I'm not one of those people who delights in being charmed by a rogue. This isn't Nathan Broadway coming down the street in some Guys and Dolls music where we're going to be charmed by what is his lovable rogueness. No, I'm sorry. This is real life from a guy with power

who wants to take your money away and give it to somebody else. James, even your most glancing pop references are devastating. You said Sex Island, and of course I immediately pictured Ricardo Montalban with a cheap toupee and the gold chains around his neck. And that little man saying, the plane, the plane, the plane. Oh, goodness. Exactly. And yet, can you imagine?

Nobody asks Hillary about this. She has a press conference in this in the UN, which is great because that just reminds us that she believes that, of course, these international institutions should have primacy over our own pathetic little sense of sovereignty. And stands there and she does a horrible job. But you're right. This is something a little different than before because not only does she lack the tools to charm everybody as – I mean Billinton is steak hillary clinton is a dry salad we all get that she doesn't have the ability to charm us but she's also lying to the press and the press at some point feels a little bit of but after all we've done for you and this is how you treat us all right so they're going to subpoena and the ap is going to try to get the info that they can now here's my question to you guys.

Do you think – first of all, nobody believes her. Nobody believes her except for the viewership of the Ed Schultz Show. But is there anything do you think that can be found from the server or has her crack team zeroed that drive out and replaced it with nothing but anodyne requests for recipe and yoga positions? Troy? Well, I don't know the technical specifications on stuff like this. Here's my general impulse though where anything concerning the Clintons comes up. To the extent that they've been able to destroy anything that was in the slightest bit damaging to her, they've done it.

I mean there's a long track record of this. I don't think that they have suddenly found religion after 25 years in public life and it seems like the way this is played out that they are – they're probably in a situation where if it's not there, you don't know it's not there. I mean it just seems like the chain of possession here was so sort of attenuated that we're never going to know. Probably. That's my guess. Well, for sure, whatever they have done to destroy anything that reflects poorly on her, they will by now have done. They will have done super deletes. They will have done super encryption, smashed heart.

They will have done everything they could. However, if you were a Democrat, would you not be thinking of some rich Democrat? Let's say there was a story on Drudge the other day about Norman Lear. Norman Lear, who must be worth a billion dollars now, very rich, very liberal, very Hollywood. And Norman Lear is quietly, not so quietly that Drudge couldn't detect it, phoning his friends in Hollywood and saying, we need somebody new. What about Elizabeth Warren? So if you're in that crowd, are you not thinking to yourself, hmm, they may have crushed her hard drive, pulverized it and scattered the powder on Long Island Sound. But what about all the counterparties to those emails? Isn't it the case that maybe something bad is going to come out at any

moment, at any moment? And this is, I mean, this is just adds to their unease, the sense that somehow the Clintons who used to be at least competent now don't know what they're doing. Oh, my. As I said, I repeat my response. Tee hee hee hee hee. Yes, but the scariest part of this, for example, is if the dog that didn't bark, to use the Sherlockian reference, what if down the road there's absolutely no release whatsoever of all the stuff that Russia has because they want Hillary because she's another one that

they can roll. And so if nothing ever comes out to sink her, it will tell me that the enemies of the United States view her as a pliable person. And perhaps they can use these things later. But you're right. There are other people who have the results of those emails. There are other people who have copies. What I love though is that the generation that supposedly is the most technologically savvy, these millennials, these ones who are going to remake the world with all their hipster instincts, are now tied to a party

that is obligated to enshrine and uplift by throwing her into one of those, you know, those things that they use in a helicopter to pluck people out of the water. This sodden old bitty is going to be elevated to the position of the presidency. And they're looking at their future. This is what their party believes is the future,

and it's somebody who is self-described so technologically incompetent that she cannot operate two accounts on one phone. I'm looking at my phone right now, and there's so many things that I can do with it. I mean it's this computational miracle the likes of which exceeds the power of the machines that took us to the moon. And with just a few little pokes of my finger, I go to Harry's dot com. And right there on my phone, I can summon to my house blades that shave my face. You get the feeling that Hillary would be stabbing her Blackberry and wondering where exactly is the part of this here that gets the Venus razors, the ones with the emollient

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It's a little trashy. We could stand somebody who's got one of them posh accents. So let's get a guy from across the pond with the name of a book. Charlie. Charlie Cook. Charles C.W. Cook. Which distinguishes him from Charles C.C. Cook, which distinguishes him from Charles C.C. Cook, which would be four C's, far too many. Sounds like some sort of 30s Roosevelt era program, actually. He's a writer at National Review, graduate of the University of Oxford, and he

studied modern history and politics. His work has focused especially on Anglo-American history, British liberty, free speech, the Second Amendment, and American exceptionalism. And I can personally attest that he is a marvelous chap. His new book is The Conservatarian Manifesto. And as much as we'd like to talk about it, sorry, we're running the show. Go buy it. It's important. I know we'll get to it, Charles. But first, I want to ask you in the Telegraph or the Independent or the something or other, not the mail, but a legitimate news source, there was a story yesterday about a British – the head of British policing apparently telling citizens and businesses that they all should install closed-circuit televisions in their homes and places of employment so that we can better catch criminals. Is this – it's crazy, but is this indicative of what is being imposed on Britain or what a supine Britain believes it must accept? Well, I have two reactions to that. I have to say I haven't read that story. The first one is that there are so many closed circuit television

cameras in England already. I don't know how anybody would notice. If you go outside, you are filmed. I believe I read that Britain has twice the number of cameras within its small island than does the United States in total. It is a surveillance culture. I would make is it's interesting that he wishes all Britons to get cameras to protect themselves from violence and criminal behavior, but not say a knife or a firearm. Well, right. I mean, a pointed stick would be absolute madness. The next thing you know, you're having riots in the street. Well, you know, perhaps it's because that's interesting, more cameras than anybody else. And yet, however, does – is England a place now that feels safer because of an Orwellian surveillance routine that's been draped upon them? anger over what Britain has become that you think eventually will have, well, a positive outlook? Or is it going to erupt in yabos who actually take to the streets and do the Mosley bit?

No, no, it's not. There's a lurking, seething anger in me, but I don't live there anymore. I am continually irritated by the British reaction to threats. It was believed that you can control violence by banning handguns. Knife crime rose. Now it's believed that you can control knife crime if you melt all of the knives down or pass laws governing them to the extent that if one goes to the supermarket and buys a standard kitchen knife, world, from criminals, and even from other parts of the state. And I don't see a great resistance to that in Britain from any of the supposedly right-leaning or liberty-leaning political parties. Charlie, speaking of right-leaning political parties, Troy Sinek, let's talk about the book for a minute, The Conservatarian Manifesto. So if I tell somebody I'm a conservatarian and I get the response, OK, so you're one of these people who's – so you're fiscally conservative and you're socially liberal. Is that too facile a shorthand for what you're talking about in the book? It is, yes, because the social issues chapter is not so much

arguing that republicans and conservatives should become social liberals, but that firstly, social issues is a poor term in and of itself because those we put under the umbrella are different from one another, electorally and philosophically. Gay marriage, for example, is a question of which of civil society's institutions and developments will the state recognize. The drug war is a question of what role the government has in regulating commerce. Drugs may be illicit, but they are commerce. One grows them, one possesses them, one sells them, one ingests them. And abortion is the question of when life begins and whether an unborn child is alive and what protections it should expect from the state and from society at large. So the first thing I wanted

to do in the book, and I hope I did effectively, was to point out that electorally these are different issues. Abortion, for example, is a lot less popular than gay marriage and marijuana legalization among the young, and it's moving in the other direction. But also that there are ways in which Americans who disagree with each other on these questions can coexist without descending into despair. So it's not a facile argument that, well, Republicans and conservatives just need to become social liberals. I may be asking you to speculate a little bit, but what do you attribute that change in abortion to? It is – in public opinion on abortion, it is interesting that that does seem to be moving actually more in kind of the traditional Republican direction.

Yes, it's a difficult question this. My instinct is that it's the product of technology. I think the arrival of 3D ultrasounds and the existence of technology that makes premature babies viable, to use a horrible word, far, far earlier than was the case 20, 30 years ago, is making something of a difference. We've all seen that great photograph of the little hand emerging from the mother's womb during surgery and clasping on to the doctor. Now, 60 years ago, that was not informing the debate over abortion. And it's worth saying that abortion is not uniformly unpopular. The first trimester still enjoys majority support, not by a great deal, but there is majority support for legal abortion within the first trimester. But that after that, it drops dramatically. You're talking, I think, 27% for the second trimester and in the tens for the third trimester. That strikes me as

being most likely the product of education and technology and information we just didn't used to have. So if we asked a casual observer of contemporary politics to name someone who sort of fit into a conservative libertarian hybrid model, it seems to me that one of the first names they might reach for is Rand Paul. How well does he conform with your idea of what a conservatarian should look like? I think Rand Paul is the name I would settle on as well. He's certainly closest. But at the risk of sounding coy, this is a movement that has come from the bottom up. The very nature of the conservative-libertarian hybrid, which is steeped in a greater respect for federalism

and local control and freedom of conscience, by its nature, it's not going to be imposed top-down by a president. Now, of course, America would need a president who respected the ideas, because the nature of the American Constitution is such that if the federal government really does want to ride roughshod over the rest of the country, and over the powers of the states, it can do. But my thesis here is less that we will elect a Congress and a president, even a Supreme Court, that enforces a structure more appealing to conservatives, and more that because the country is changing, it's becoming more ideologically diverse,

the need for localism and for a live and let live political structure, which America has built into its constitution if it would views are very, very similar to yours and two, I worked in the George W. Bush administration. So pour yourself a drink and try to work that out. The question though, how much damage did the Bush administration do to the coherence of the idea that republicans are the party of limited government? I think a great deal and much of it by choice. It's often pointed out, I think fairly, that George W. Bush did not want to be a wartime president. He ran on a promise of a humble foreign policy, and then 9-11 happened.

Well, then he shouldn't have put the bombs in the World Trade Center. But when Bush was not fighting the war, indeed before the war came along, the Republican Party had full control of Washington, D.C. and made some poor decisions. In the early years, no child left behind was passed, and so was the Medicare Part D expansion. That was a choice. Time and time again, the federalist rhetoric that we hear from the right was ignored. Now, I don't expect the conservative movement to change overnight. My book is a long-term project. But I do see some hopeful signs in that as many people, as many, the left reacted badly to the Bush administration,

as we know, and they love to taunt conservatives with it. Well, you say you're in favor of X, but then you did Y. You say you're in favor of A, but then you did B. But as many conservatives reacted badly to it as well. And so we do have some voices now, not just within the movement, but within the Senate, within the House of Representatives, and certainly on the radio and in magazines that point this out just as caustically and just as vehemently as would progressives. So I do think it did a great deal of damage, but it is good to see that so much of the retaliation against those years has come from within those who were disappointed by it from a position of love and not just of disdain. Right. Well, we have to take back the language as well. I mean, from the very beginning,

compassionate conservative indicated that it was a revised and better version of conservatism itself which was of course cruel and even no child left behind suggests that the alternative is to leave hundreds of thousands of children by the roadside uh and so we have you know words like conservatarianism i'm sorry you know right that conservatarianism here's the difficulty there charles there may be too many syllables actually here for it to work. That's the problem. I mean the other thing, your book is red. Your book is very red. And I wish that we could begin by starting to just insist that we are blue and that red is the color of collectivism and belongs to the other side and they're welcome to have it.

Just start showing up and putting blue on everything that we do. It may be... Well, I don't disagree with you. One of the reasons it's red, of course, is because the Communist Manifesto is red in the colors associated with it. And so it's a little bit of a joke. But I agree. In every other country, the Conservative Party seem to be blue. We might also do something to worry about folks like Lindsey Graham, who yesterday said something quite interesting. He was talking about what he would do to restore military funding, and he said he would literally use the military to keep Congress in session if I had to, which brings to mind the idea of the President of the United States commanding the troops to surround the Capitol and keep everyone from going back

to Capitol Hill houses to shower. It's preposterous, and we have to extirpate people like this from the party and, as Charles said, get back as much as possible to the local level. Charles, we wish you well with the book. We read you, of course, constantly at The Corner and in National Review itself. And we'll hear you on the Mad Dogs and Englishmen podcast as well. Everybody go out and buy The Conservatarian Manifesto by Charles

C.W. Cook. Thank you for being on the podcast today, sir. We'll see you on the ship. Absolutely. Thank you for having me. And Peter, I believe you're there, or Troy? Was it Troy who went off to get coffee? Troy dropped Was it Troy who went off to get coffee? Troy dropped a note that he went off to get coffee.

How extremely annoying because I wanted to ask him how much damage he thought the George W. Bush administration had done and how complicit he feels. I've returned just in time to answer that question, Peter. Go, go. With a full cup of coffee. Go. Peter Robinson Go, go. things that came out of the Bush administration that people tend to forget about. I mean one of the things that I am constantly trying to remind people of is that the Bush administration was pretty aggressive in its second term, for instance, about trying to reform Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac because they saw what was coming. Now, we didn't accomplish that. So it wasn't – my point is it wasn't a total wash, but there were a lot of things on the domestic side, the stuff that Charlie mentioned, whether it was No Child Left Behind or the Medicare expansion. I basically agree with those criticisms.

Trevor Burrus, Jr.: Troy, let me ask you – we're going to get to John Yoo and return from 10 years ago to today in just a moment. But here's the way I myself have tended to understand the George W. Bush administration and I wonder if you do as well. George W. Bush felt that he had – that what was most important, overwhelmingly most important was forove and others in the White House, that to do that, he had to say to Congress, go ahead, just do what you want, spend what you want. If that's the price of giving me the freedom that I need and the material that I need and the defense budgets that I need to defend the nation, go ahead. And that was very crudely speaking the calculation that he made. Is that correct? I think that's essentially true.

I mean, I wasn't – I didn't have access to those kinds of discussions about legislative strategy. I can tell you that anytime that I was privy to a conversation about priorities, the national security part, the war in Iraq, the war in Afghanistan, those were priorities one through 250. And everything else was so far down the line. The other thing too, and I've mentioned this before in conversations that we've had at Ricochet, is that President Bush, who I came to respect and admire a great deal more after I worked for him than I did outside of the administration. So I don't say this is coming from any sort of personal animus.

President Bush was somebody who did not really understand the conservative movement and the example that I always – the example that I always use for this is that there was – I can't remember the policy now but we were involved in a conversation. I was in a group that was in a meeting at the Oval Office at some point. The president was doing something that had to do with expanding government. And somebody raised the objection that the conservative base is not going to be happy about this. The president just kind of snarled and he said, you know what? The conservative base – I thought we settled all this when I beat Gary Bauer. And if you think Gary Bauer is representative – yeah. So that kind of tells you where the mindset was at. It wasn't an act of contempt the way that people frame that sometimes. It was just kind of a basic sort of misunderstanding. Right. Just a quick counterpoint. I once asked Bill

Buckley – this is way back during the Reagan years. I said to Bill, what do you and the president talk about when you're alone together or when you talk on the phone? Because they did talk on the phone and they were often – they'd make a point of – Bill would stop by and see the president. And Bill said, well, you know, to tell you the truth, it's mostly social. We just chat about people we know. He said it's almost never ideological. It almost never has anything to do with policy and here's why. Because it turns out Ronald Reagan has always read the latest issue of National Review so thoroughly there's nothing to discuss. That's the difference.

OK. On to John Yoo. Actually, before we go to John, there's something you should know and that's Troy, who's with us today, is one of the editors, if not the editor, of the Ricochet Daily Shot. Why don't you pull a Rob here and quickly interject yourself into everybody's consciousness and tell them why they should patronize your product. You should stop by Ricochet. Go to the top right-hand corner of the page and sign up for The Daily Shot because let's be honest. I mean those of us especially who work in this world, there are thousands of these digests that you can get every morning and they're all more or less the same.

You're going to get the same eight or nine stories broken down the same eight or nine ways. It's all – it's a pretty high-fiber diet. They're not enjoyable to read. And so we've done something a little bit different at Ricochet. One of the great things about Ricochet, we actually found a writer who was a member with us for years. And every day he puts together the daily shot, which is just a quick daily roundup. It's sort of a cheat sheet.

It doesn't go into any great depth. It's just enough basically for you to bluff your way through cocktail parties. But it is done with a sense of humor and a sense of wit and it gives you a great cross-section of what's been going on in the news and what's been going on at Ricochet. So you should stop by the site, top right-hand corner, sign up for the daily shot. It's totally free and you won't regret it. And delightful to read too. Laden with pop culture references here and there, although I'm still waiting for somebody to bring up a Logan's Run reference about Cotton's letter and what the 47 senators may or may not have done. But why listen to me when we can talk about what the senators did with John Yoo? Who knows what he's talking about? Welcome back to the podcast, sir.

So Tom Cotton's letter, good idea, bad idea, your thoughts? Well, I think it's a good idea in the sense that it states only what the Constitution permits, that there's different kinds of international agreements. If the president wants to make a binding long-term agreement with Iran, then he has to send it to the Senate as a treaty where you have to get two-thirds Senate vote, or he can send it to be passed as a statute, which you're going to need to lift sanctions for the long term. If he does it as a sole executive agreement where it's just the president on his own, no Senate, no Congress, then it doesn't bind anyone but President Obama himself. In fact, President Obama could terminate it, not to mention the next president. As a matter of foreign policy, that's another question entirely because on the one hand,

you don't want to have our country speaking in multiple voices abroad. On the other hand, this should lead to a better deal. It's just like going to the car salesman and trying to buy a used car, and you're always negotiating a price with the salesman, who's President Obama in this case, who has to go check with the manager, who's the Senate. And as we all know, when we bargain for cars, that usually leads to the customer getting a raw deal. Okay, John, Peter here. So you approve of this letter both on the law and on the policy. And I intend to prove that you're wrong on both. By quoting to you first, the Secretary of State, John Kerry, who testifying before,

oh, who cares what he was testifying before, some group in Congress, some committee. Anyway, he was testifying yesterday and he said that whereas formal treaties require ratification by two-thirds of the Senate, quote, the vast majority of international arrangements and agreements do not. And around the world today, I'm continuing to quote the Secretary of State, around the world today, we have all kinds of executive agreements that we deal with. This is from protecting troops in Afghanistan to, quote, any number of non-controversial, broadly supported foreign policy goals, close quote. So you see, John, we could barely function as a great power if you didn't permit presidents

to enter into executive agreements. And if Congress and the whole foreign policy establishment didn't say, yeah, OK, a president has entered into an executive agreement. We better abide by that. Oh, I hate to say this, but for once, I agree with John Kerry and worse yet, Peter Robinson. Hold on, because I actually disagree with John Kerry. And if you're now agreeing with him, my head is about to explode.

Go ahead. Go ahead. But I agree that presidents can make these kinds of short-term agreements, but they don't last long-term in the sense that a next president could pull out of it without any consequences because these sole executive agreements usually are – they usually exist in two cases. One, for insignificant things like what kind of, what side of the road do you drive on, on the base and off the base, things like that. And then the other thing they exist for is to carry out big, important agreements. So we got a lot of sole executive agreements just putting to effect the NATO agreements, but all of those stem from either a treaty or the president's power to conduct foreign relations and as commander in chief.

So one way to think about the constitutionality of a sole executive agreement is that it's just the president promising to another country how he or maybe someday she intend to promise or commit to use their own presidential power. So they can't commit the Senate. They can't commit Congress. They can only commit the office of the president. And so no president can bind any future president to their decisions. So just like the next president can issue an executive order on day one, repealing President Obama's decisions not to carry out immigration deportations, the next president on day one can say, I'm not going to carry out any of President Obama's

sole executive agreements. In fact, if I were a Republican candidate for president, I don't see why you don't say that now. You just say, on my first day in office, I promise that I will terminate any agreement with Iran. Okay. I'll tell you. So I want to get back to the – I want to jam the New York Times down your throat.

And then I want to get and then I want to jam down your throat. The very good conservative, sprightly writer and faithful ricochet contributor, Tommy DeSino, who agrees with John Kerry and the New Yorker. That's to come. First, though, here's my little interpretation of the importance of the Tom Cotton letter. You just said, I don't see why Republican candidates for president don't right now say they'd repeat. vague presumption that if President Obama came up with a deal of some kind that is a matter of fact, if not of law, it would be binding. And for a Republican to say he intended to re-examine it, let alone to repudiate it, would be pretty tricky. And the journalists, all of Washington,

was assuming without examining it unreflectively, that Barack Obama was attempting to cut a deal that would put in motion something that would in fact bind the United States. And Tom Cotton and his 46 colleagues who signed this letter said nothing doing. They joined the constitutional issue. They made it clear that if this is a solemn matter, if the agreement, I'm quoting the, I'm actually, I'm anticipating what I'm trying to jam down your throat here. Here's the New York Times editorial. The letter was a blatant, dangerous effort to undercut the president on a grave national security issue by communicating directly with a foreign government. If it's a grave national security issue, he directly with a foreign government. If it's a

grave national security issue, he'd better bring it before the Senate. And that issue has now, that nearly half the Senate has said, that's it. This is not binding. And we're going to say so right now, clarifies matters enormously and makes it much easier for a Republican candidate to come out and say, I'm with those guys. I intend to re-examine any agreement and if necessary to repudiate it. There's nothing wrong with the Senate or senators making their views known on foreign policy. I'll just give you one example that I don't think anyone disagrees with is President Clinton wanted us to enter, I think, into a terrible idea, which was the Kyoto Accords to reduce global warming.

And the Senate voted, I think it was 99 to 0 to say that we're never going to ratify – I'm sorry, give advice and consent to that agreement. And the thing was effectively dead. While the negotiations were still going on. And another example would be the – President Clinton signed the International Criminal Court Treaty to create this global criminal court to punish wrongdoers in wartime. And the Senate passed something called the American Servicemen's Protection Act, which said if any Americans ever handed over to the ICC, the president is authorized to invade the jail and take them back by force. One of the great laws in American history. But the other thing I'll just point out is Senator Cotton, all he really did was, all he functionally did was he put a copy of the Constitution

in an envelope, sent it to the mullahs and said, you know, with my best regards, Tom Cotton. Or you could say all he did was he kind of took the Constitution and just cut out Article two section to the constitution about the treaty power and since he's writing with iran and they're good at hostage notes cutting little things out of documents of the little words and pasting them onto a piece of paper might get their attention better tommy decino this is he put up this comment on your post yesterday your post is tom letters Tom Cotton's letter is completely correct.

Here's Tommy DeSino. Who cares if his letter is legally correct? From a negotiating standpoint, it's so counterproductive, I'll call it stupid for what it is. You worked for George Bush, John Yoo. Imagine if a Democrat senator called Putin during arms negotiations and said, listen, Vlad, George is being a little crafty here. Make sure you pin him down at X, Y, and Z so you don't lose the benefit of your bargain later on. The Senate's role here is to vote on a treaty after it's brought to them, not to be in the negotiating room, and certainly not to undermine the position of the president during the negotiations. Goodness.

Why? How did that get past the Ricochet Code of Conduct? Listen – I don't think Senec is doing his job policing all the comments. Tommy, Tommy, there are a lot of people on Ricochet who agree with Tommy. Yes. So there are two points. In other words, that's a view on our that saying the Senate is making its views known on its own policy actually hurts our position. Actually, there's this guy named Thomas Schelling who won the Nobel Prize in economics about how you bargain in arms control and international affairs. And one of the points he made is that actually having a kind of veto back at home actually

makes your bargaining position stronger because you know that Iran has to not just satisfy President Obama now. He has to satisfy the United States Senate. So if I was Iran, I might say, oh, those American devils. They've actually been sending their flunky Obama to negotiate whereas the real power is the Senate and they're not going to go for what Obama is offering. So that's one thing. The second thing is, again, I don't think that the Senate here has actually tried to influence the negotiations in the sense that they've said, oh, I demand that you accept this provision, Iran, or I demand that you accept that provision. Again, what is the difference between this and Senator Cotton giving a speech on the floor saying exactly the same thing or writing a letter to – I guess Peter's new favorite paper of record, the New York Times, or sending a letter to President Obama?

He could make a public statement saying 47 senators agree that – and I think they're just stating constitutional law. They're not saying – they're not negotiating on the fine points of the deal. They're just saying anything Senator – President Obama signs that's a sole executive agreement does not last into the next presidential administration. That's just like saying there's a United States Senate where there's two senators elected from every state. I don't think he's tried to interfere into the – and just one last point from my own practical experience serving in the Bush administration is we came up with this exact issue when President Bush negotiated what's called the Moscow Treaty with our buddy Putin to reduce nuclear arsenals. And there was some talk in the State Department then of doing that as an executive agreement. And Senator Biden, who was the chair of the Foreign Relations Committee at the time, and Senator Helms both said that that treaty has to go to the United States Senate or it would

be no good. And John Bolton and I advised the White House that it should go to the Senate because every arms control agreement of any weight goes to the Senate. If it was good enough for President Bush, I think it should be good enough for President Obama in this case. So there. Yeah. So there. Troy and James are clawing. You should see the notes they're sending, right?

They want in. The heck with them. I'm not done yet. So here's – let me put my psychological reading to you, John, and you tell me if you think I'm reading the situation correctly. because what the Tom Cotton letter has done is put its finger on two exposed nerves that hadn't been touched yet. One is, you know, fellas, you have less than two years to go. And I, Tom Cotton, and a lot of my colleagues

are going to be here long after we watch the back of you leave this town. It's happened. You're short timers. And they do not like to hear that. It's painful for them to hear. And the other exposed nerve is, guess what? There is a new, more assertive generation in the Senate. And we intend to be just that, assertive. And this, I think, is what drives them craziest of all. Whereas Ted Cruz, they had handled. Ted Cruz, they had portrayed as a crazy man. Much as I admire Ted,

frankly, much as I like Ted Cruz, when the filibuster over the government shutdown, my judgment is that was an overreach. Tom Cotton, the idea that the New York Daily News, Mort Zuckerman, real estate billionaire who owns the New York Daily News, had his editors refer to the 47 signatories of that letter as traitors on the front page of the New York Daily News. Let me tell you about Tom Cotton. This supposed traitor served two tours of combat duty, one in Iraq and one in Afghanistan, and won a bronze star. He is a graduate of Harvard Law School who knows something about the Constitution. In other words, they cannot cruise Tom Cotton, and they cannot cruise the 46 other colleagues who signed that letter. The box is open. These bright, energetic, patriotic members of the United States Senate are coming out of it at what's left of the Obama administration.

Well, now maybe I'm getting a little carried away there. But psychologically, don't you think that's what's going on? These guys are saying, oh, we're losing it. I take it you're not quoting the New York Times editorial anymore? No. Well, the New York Times did point out the Dear Comandante letter that was sent during the Nicaraguan days. And at least I'm sure that the Tom Cotton letter did not refer to – it used phrases

such as inshallah or PBUH referring to the iranian leadership i guess the the tone was perhaps different john john i have a question for you this is troy senek we know each other um actually i have two questions for you where's richard one oh you got lucky today my friend this is all you um actually let me ask you this one It seems like if you're going to make the argument that Tom Cotton and the rest of the Republicans in the Senate are undercutting the president, you have to suppose that they are conveying information to Tehran, which Tehran didn't have. And it seems to me that Iran would have known this all along and that this in fact is the point because the other supposition there is that Iran is actually trying to work for some sort of lasting peace or lasting agreement. But isn't in reality the whole point here if you're Tehran to play for time, at which point who gives a damn what the senate thinks? You just need to get this couple of years out of the president. I agree. I'm not so convinced by people who think, oh my god, the letter actually will change the way Iran approaches the question at all. Iran has I'm sure a lot of people on retainer. They can hire

lawyers who can – American-trained lawyers who can read the constitution and tell them what it means. So they – I'm sure that they know that the united states senate is important in any kind of significant agreement just like the league of nations treaty right the president wilson staked his whole administration and the end of world war ii on the treaty of versailles and the senate killed it i can't believe the people over in iran wouldn't know that but i think what it does do is – there's two things. It sends a shot over the bound domestic politics. But it also – there's an international law angle. And there is one thing I think that we haven't talked about that the Obama administration and the Iranians could do, although I don't think it will work in the end, is they could then – they can now take this agreement.

And it's not binding international law. I think Senator Kerry said that and the letter – the cotton letter provoked that, so that's already one positive thing it did. But now they can go to the United Nations Security Council, I suppose, and they could say, look, make this into a United Nations Security Council resolution. And those are binding under international law. And so it could become the framework for a UN deal where, again, President Obama and Secretary of State Kerry say, oh, well, that is binding. That's more permanent, although that doesn't bind the Congress either. And the Congress and future presidents can always pull us out of Security Council resolutions too. John, this is the first time I've been happy about what the press has done to your personal reputation because now that you have floated this idea, now that it's John Yoo's proposal,

they'll never be able to do it. Hey, the Obama administration does lots of stuff that I advised the president to do. Look at all those drones they've got flying over the Middle East and all the electronic intercepts. They just don't give me all the credit that I fully deserve. Hey, so John, would it have been better if – as best I can tell, what irks people on our side – irks may be the wrong – I don't mean to demean tommy de seno and the many people on ricochet who agree with him but the view that the senate has in that that it has i guess what's going on is our people so correctly so revere the constitution that they view this as an intrusion or disrespect for the due separation of powers.

Our guys, good though they may be and good though their intention is, are intruding on the due and correct powers of the presidency. Yes. So I think there's something they're unhappy about also. This recalled to me for some conservatives when Senator Clinton and Senator Obama attacked General Petraeus during Senate hearings. I mean you could say, OK, the Senate, it's undermining the president and taking diplomatic relations. If you really want to talk about the Senate undermining the president, it's while we're in war with troops in the field and you have senators in hearings calling our commanders in the field liars and saying we're going to lose the war and we ought to pull out, that's far more undermining. But look, that's also in the Senate's prerogatives.

I mean, the Senate, you know, the senators are allowed to say whatever they want on foreign policy. You know, I'm a, you know, I think I'm pretty strong as anyone is on the president's foreign affairs power, but that doesn't mean that the Congress or the Senate isn't allowed to perform its constitutional rules. Would it have been better? Would it have been better if that letter remained unchanged except in one regard? It was addressed not to the leaders of Iran, but it was addressed to dear Mr. President,

an open letter to the president of the United States. What would have been better is if – and they should still do this as Senator Cotton introduced it as a resolution on the floor of the Senate. Got it. I think at the heart of this is just dismay that the United States president is negotiating with an apocalyptic death cult that just happens to have a better PR arm than ISIS. These are people who have been rather conspicuous in their devotion to the destruction of greater and little Satans for some time now. This isn't the Soviet Union, which is thinking perhaps we can carve out spheres of influence and live in an uneasy coexistence on this globe. These are guys who want us to go away.

And the idea that we believe that they're going to sign something that doesn't give them the bomb is just extraordinary. No, the Iranians, yeah, the Iranians are like the person who shows up in the car dealership and they just sit down, cross their arms and they just don't say anything. And we, the car salesmen, just keep offering them more and more options, lower and lower prices. Right. What is it going to take for me to get you into this car? Right. And so Barack Obama is pacing outside, banging back a Newport saying, all right, all right.

Throw in the floor mats if that's what it takes. And the floor mats in this case are the bomb in eight years instead of ten. John, thanks. No, sir. No, go on. I'll just say if you think about it from theanian perspective they've been acting utterly rationally they've been driving a great deal for them they've done had to do nothing and they know this goes to peter's earlier point yeah they know that obama wants a deal any deal before he leaves office and they're

they could they could do absolutely nothing and they'll and obama still give them stuff so just so i could call it a deal. Hey, John, it's been lovely talking to you. But would you please – you and Troy, go record another Law Talk please. It's been a while. I happen to know this. I have my iPod set to download those things automatically. You know, we've got this.

Peter has turned into a fanboy, John. He's going to ask you to sign something before you get off. So there's another guy on the show and a foreign person whose command of English isn't so great described to me Richard having listened to him on the podcast as, quote unquote, the talking machine. Would that make you the answering machine? It's like, what's that? Machina hablando. Tune in next week. El señor, el máquina hablando. Oh, I like that for Richard.

So subscribe to the podcast for more international language lessons with John and Richard. And we'll see you in the feed and we'll see you on the site. And Tommy is still, I hope Tommy's happy now because he was making some noise in the post about, hey, I thought we were supposed to be able to talk to the guys who write these things. Where's you? Where's you? So thank you, you. We'll talk to you later. See you on the site.

We flushed him out. Take care, John. Thank you. Have a no-grab. Exactly. What other site exactly goes out of its way to accommodate its paying members like this? Nothing but Ricochet. And what other site other than Ricochet would you take a break from discussing the trials of the world for everybody to lookism and sexism that burbles at the dark heart of the conservative movement. Or you could say we all love Claire and Claire is just one of those characters who commands your attention whenever she does something. There's not a post that Claire doesn't write that isn't like grabbing a hold of a Roman candle with a sparkler in the other hand.

And she did a post about changing her profile picture. Controversy erupted. Did you guys check out this post? I did. The thing that I was struck by was precisely what you're identifying, James, which is Claire has a remarkable gift, which is to be able to write about any – she did like 1,600 words on changing her profile picture that has somehow managed to generate I think over 100 comments at this point.

She is amazing. You have to – you kind of get sucked in as you're reading the whole essay, which by the way, for the benefit of the audience and for the benefit of Peter, I should mention that Claire just put it up and just let the conversation roll out. There are some people whose names I won't mention who are co-founders of Ricochet who have gotten in the habit lately of putting up posts and then sending messages around to the editors, making bets that they can get beyond a certain amount of comments and they will force other people to buy them cocktails if they can break the triple digits i won't name anyone exactly no it was but it was absolutely pathetic the post i

put up on tom cotton stopped at 98 so i went i went in i went in i knew you would check and now i'm confessing i don't know why i'm checking i added three myself so that's got 101 and Scott bought me a martini. So there, it worked. You got 122 comments on your post that just said, is she telling the truth about Hillary, not about Claire. Claire says in her post something that is very instructive to people who want to be

good writers. She gives a very helpful hint that she survives mostly on a diet of cigarettes, sugar and coffee. Yeah, me too. And that will help. So go look at the post. Claire in her Proustian severe new phase.

May I please just – I mean the pro – No, Peter, you may not. One paragraph. Just a brief – this is what? Four sentences. Who else? Who else? Nobody else.

I think my new look of severity and concern suits our political age. Fine. She's talking about her new photograph. Now watch where it goes. I'm afraid that if you want the old Claire back, that is John Walker's department. For those of you keen to look back in time, consult this thread. She links to John Walker's Saturday Night Science. The state-of-the-art way to do it, I am reliably informed, requires a definition of time based upon an electron shell transition in the cesium-133 atom, open parens. That's only one

way, of course. When I look back in time, I do it the conservative way. I consult my well-worn copy of the history of the Peloponnesian War. I have had it surgically stapled to my left ankle. On the right ankle is Boswell's Life of Johnson, close parens. Otherwise, I don't look back. Nothing but a pillar of salt that way, I am told. Cesium-133, Thucydides, Boswell, and the Bible. You know what? You know what? It's unbelievable. Every couple of years, there's the story that gets written about how journalism is going to be the next industry to get automated.

How you can just pop this stuff into a computer and then it's going to be indistinguishable from actually having – being written by a flesh and blood human. Claire Berlinski gives the lie to that notion in that post forever and for always. There are only – There's no machine. Yes. There are only two people whose stream of consciousness I trust completely. Don't edit it.

Just let it flow. One is Claire Berlinski and the other is, of course, James Lilacs. Bless your heart. Because at the Bleat, that's pretty much what I do. I sit down at the end of the night. I have no idea where I'm going. My daughter wants to be a writer. I've always taught her, if you're stuck on what you want

to write, just start writing. That's what you do. Once you oil the machine, something will happen. She mentioned Boswell's Life of Johnson. I have in my possession here Boswell's diaries because he also wrote his own little diaries. And they're fascinating books because he's dismayed that he went to the hookers again. He swears he's not going to drink as much as he does before. And he's a young man and he's in the shadow of a great man.

And they're fascinating reads. I can't ever get rid of these books. Now, I've been going through sort of a downsizing project to just eliminate stuff because I've got – Why? You live in a vast house. You should still be accumulating. Leave that to your daughter when you're done. I want to relieve her of that 40 years. I should be so lucky.

50, 60. Claire notes on her own little post there that the actuarial tables give her 37 years. Well, that would be great. Yes and no. I'm not exactly sure that I want to live to the ripe old creaky age where you're popping into the hospital every fortnight for congestive heart failure. But anyway, one of the reasons that I want to do this is I want a little bit more spare and uncluttered existence. I hate, for example, looking at a shelf full of books and remembering that I had read them and very little else.

Oh, yes. It's mortifying. I mean I have this wonderful shelf of black-spined penguin books from college, all the classics. I read them all. I'll be damned if I know what's in them. So the Boswell, you can dip in and dip out and get a little bit of amusement there. So I keep that.

And I also keep it because it's part of formative years of college. But I advise everybody to ruthlessly winnow lest you become the slave of the books that mock you from their towered shelves. The other thing that I did, and we'll probably end here, but I want to see if you guys have the same problem, is the curse of the modern digital age is that you can have everything. You can have everything within seconds of getting it. And so consequently, you have everything and you can't find anything. I had an iTunes library that had 68 gigabytes of music, just huge amounts of stuff that I've been adding over the years. And when I would look through it and sort it by time and date, I could see when I would have

an enthusiasm for a style or suddenly my fancy would catch this particular vogue of music or era and I would get as much as I could and put it in the library and I don't want any of it. Because when you turn on your iPod and you hit the shuffle and you start moving around, your finger clicks 20, 30 times to go past the stuff that you're telling yourself that you want to get to the one thing that you did. And I realized I can probably boil all of my music, including my classical favorites, down to about 18 gigabytes, which is one out of every four songs kept. So I threw everything away, tossed it all out,

and added it back one by one. It is more instructive to see what you add than what you take away. What you feel is worthy now of being put back in as opposed to just saying, I can't delete that. I might need that at some point. So here's my exit question to you guys.

Do you find yourselves with this wonderful world of electronic media and this vast storage capacity that we have, do you find yourself ever thinking that actually it was kind of easier when you had a milk crate full of LPs that you took from place to place and you didn't really have to worry about having 4,732 record albums that you'll never listen to again. Even though they're incorporeal, I feel as though they weigh on me. That is precisely why I have been experimenting over the last six, seven, eight months. I forgot exactly when I started with the premium membership, 10 bucks a month of Spotify, which by the way, is twice as much as, as, as Ricochet. Ricochet is a deal of the premium membership of Spotify because every so often for reasons I don't understand because the controls, the preferences are simply beyond me. Every so often it just erases everything I've downloaded and says you've've violated this, or you've got it on too many devices, for some reason. And I have to go back and click on the ones that I really like.

And even then, I know that I will not be burdening future generations with my purchases, because if I miss my $10 payment for a single month, it will all just, poof, evaporate. And I believe, James, yet for some reason, as you've been talking today, flashes of old television shows. Again, it's your pop culture references, but I can just see the opening sequence. I can't even remember the name of the show, but it's David Carradine, and there's a... Kung Fu.

Yes, yes, yes. And he's saying, Aghlasaba. It is far more instructive what you add back than what you take away? Oh, God. That's right. Glasshopper was exactly the way that was portrayed in mainstream culture.

As David Carradine, noted man of Asian extraction, wandered around the West dealing with racists. Interesting. Interesting. Well, yes. Little, little Zen lessons for us all there. See what Troy makes of your wisdom. No, I'm sorry. I'm still trying to struggle with the Mickey Rooney quality of Peter's impersonation. And, and in the comments, in the comments, folks,

if you can name why he mentioned mickey rooney doing a bad asian accents we uh we will we will applaud you and then if you can if you see how can i and then if you can bring it somehow to a series of kansas murders on a farmhouse then the whole pop cultural link will be complete no now that one i could follow i can follow andy mickey rooney of course in the back but, whoa, whoa. Yeah. Don't – Oh, yes. Of course. Got it. Got it. Got it. So wait a minute. Let's commit the Blue Yeti. There will be a prize of some kind. There will be a prize to the first person in the comments who can link from my bad impersonation of the guy who opened Kung Fu to Mickey Rooney to a farmhouse in Kansas.

There you go. There you go. Troy, you were going to say – Three months of Ricochet or something like that. Scott will figure it out. I entirely agree with James and I'll tell you why. I am actually – I'm sitting in my office right now, which has this lovely bookshelf that's built into it full from one side to the other. I've always had a lot of books and the nice thing – well, I shouldn't say the nice thing. The disciplining thing about that is that that becomes self-limiting, especially if you, as I do, have a tendency to move every couple of years because after a certain point, when your library grows beyond a certain size, people are no longer willing to help you move.

And that imposes a certain amount of discipline on what you choose to purchase. Now, to be honest with you guys, I have not probably purchased a hardback book, maybe a couple exceptions, probably 18 months. I do all of it digitally. But what James was saying is precisely right. When you have all the volume available to you at a significant discount relative to what they used to cost, it's pretty easy to become indiscriminate in what you're picking up. And you've sort of attenuated the connection between the premium you pay for something and the effort you have to put in to consume it. And I think James is entirely right. And I think it's true actually even in media where you don't pay.

I mean how many of us who have DVRs have it full of 90 percent stuff that we will never watch because you can't binge on all this stuff. Right. That's my wife and child who subscribe to shows and then there's 40 episodes of Gravity Falls. The other thing is though is that for personal archiving reasons, I have – I mean I've collected everything that I've written. I've gone back. I've digitized and scanned as much as I possibly can. I have everything sorted into folders and the folders contain what I wrote, the videos that I did, the music that I wrote and the podcasts for example.

Now, here I have now these wonderful folders, this great information with these podcasts, for example, but because they're on a disc, I don't trust them. Whoa, whoa, whoa. My voice is part of the Lilacs archives? Yes. Yes, Peter, it is. Yours and Rob's and Troy's and everybody else's. That's right.

They are. You are inextricably woven into the annual accumulation of personal information. But I don't trust that these things will survive, so I have to back them up five different ways. Then I have to throw them up into the cloud too in the hopes that the cloud will save me in case everything else does. It was easier in college to have a bookshelf, a piece of particle board sitting on cinder blocks where you had your Boswell and you had your, your Burgess and you had your other friend, but you're right, Troy, as you go on, as you accumulate, nobody wants to help you move. So ideally I would like, even though I've surrounded by wonderful picture books, a lot of which I actually wrote and these marvelous pieces on architecture that are just gorgeous. I would love to just live in a spare white room

with my two computer screens and a nice old antique radio and a microphone and have everything, everything, be wintered down to this perfect little one terabyte flash drive that I could pluck and pick out and put in my pocket and run because I got to get out of town

because the damned Iranians nuked St. Paul and the fallout is heading this way. Ah, but that's 10, 15 years from now. We should probably wrap her up here. I got to remind you folks that the podcast was brought to you by The Daily Shot, which is quite a neat feat since The Daily Shot is Ricochet. It's sort of auto bringing itself to you via itself. But go there. Troy will be happy because he edits it and the people who write it.

Can we give their names or is that just kind of a secret? Fred Cole. Ricochet member Fred Cole. That's what I thought. Fred Cole. And Fred Cole writes, we'll be happy if you read it as well. It's free. Go to Ricochet.

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Just to counterbalance the glass hopper. Yes. Could I hear your Irish brogue, please, James? My Irish brogue. Myish brogue please james my irish brogue my irish brogue irish it's you know i i listened to the i listen have you got one go in there i listen to the i listen to bbc and every other hour at the top they have some they have an irish announcer and she says you're listening to the world service service and there's been a moider from the sarvas so that's his i i can't i can't do it boy oh all right that's done it's a wrap we'll see you in the comments everybody to ricochet 2.0

next week troy go record a new law talk fast i'm on it peter all right boys next week see you fellas All right, boys. Next week. See you, fellas. Give me a ticket for an airplane. Ain't got time to take a fast train. Lonely days are gone. I'm going home. My baby sister wrote me a letter. I don't care how much money I got to spend. Got to get back to my baby again. Lonely days are gone, I'm going home.

My baby used to wrote me a letter. When she wrote me a letter, said she couldn't live without me no more. Listen, mister, can't you see I got to get back to my baby once I'm home. Anyway, yeah, give me a ticket for an airplane. Ain't got time to take a fast train. Don't let days are gone, I'm not going home. My baby used to look me a little. When she wrote me a letter, said she couldn't live without me no more

Listen, mister, can't you see I got to get back to my baby once and more Anyway, yeah, could really take it for an aeroplane Ain't got time to take a fast train Lonely days are gone. I'm not going home. My baby needs to prepare a letter. My baby needs to prepare a letter.

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