I'm gonna I'm gonna be disciplined today, Steve, you'll be so proud of me.
Well, whiskey, come and take my pain, the moneys, my ry, oh whiskey.
Why think alone when you can drink it all in with Ricochet's Three Whiskey Happy Hour. Join your bartenders Steve Hayward, John You, and the international Woman of Mystery, Lucretia where they slapped it up and David, ain't you easy on the soul? I have got to give me and let that whiskey flow.
Well. Welcome everyone to this edition of the Three Whiskey Happy Hour, which is super extra special. I'm not really sure why, but every edition of the Three Whiskey Happy Hour is super extra special when the three of us are able to get together and pontificate about all the important things we know so much about and usually things we don't know very much about it at all, but we pretend to. So Welcome gentlemen to the Three Whiskey Happy Hour, my co hosts Steve Hayward and John You.
How are you today?
Well?
I am much relieved, you know, John, I was afraid that I kept from text messages all week. I thought Lucretia was in an extra grumpy mood, and she sounds positively abulliant here, So this is gonna be a good episode. No, you don't like being called a buliant. I've ruined the mood already.
They get out on.
Them, have it, John, You look like you're enjoying some views of something behind you in that beautiful place you're in.
I am in the last days of the Claremont Institute summer programs. They have week long programs, one for policy and journalist and I would say government officials called the Lincoln Fellowship, which was last week, and this week is the one for law students and lawyers and future law clirks called the Marshall Fellowship, which is coming to an end tomorrow and is our tradition. I take all the faculty and staff out to a gigantic Korean barbecue on
the last night. Oh yes, complete with you know, burning meat and very bad liquor called soju.
Oh what is it? What is the the provenance of soju? What is it made from?
Everything in Asia, in one way or other, is made out of rice. So I believe it is made out of rice. There are other weird Korean drinks which we don't show to the foreigners made out of other things which taste even worse. Soju is a thing you usually see them drinking on Korean melodramas on Netflix.
Well, you usually don't see any of those things because I've never watched the Korean melodrama on Netflix. But hey, oh oh for the Tisha Netflix.
Well, Lucretia is the mini series. Notice, squid Game would be a rom com. Yeah, okay, you have no idea what swig game. Squid Game is a game where you start with I think one hundred people who have to fight to the death and there's one person at the end. So, like I said, a Lucretia, yes to the.
Wow, Okay, maybe I have to watch it.
Taking everybody to Korean barbecue. I guess that's fitting revenge for you for having inflicted all your positivism on them in the course of things.
I'm I'm paying because I have. They should be taking me out for listening to two weeks of this natural law book business plus at the Claremont Institute, and I think we should. We got to upgrade our merchandise store because they were rolling out a new merchandise store and then be showing me all these hats, and some of that has to just say natural law on the front of them. You didn't get one, no, And then there's one that Lucretia. I've got for Lucretia says mass deportation.
Who's going to walk around town with a hat that says mass deportation?
Only with Krisia my town, you could do it. I probably wouldn't want to do it in Los Angeles.
But can I just mention one other thing while we're getting started? I do you know, I'm trying to modify the substack side. I finally figured out some of how it works. It's quite complicated really and limiting. But the other thing to be mentioned, and I will have a post on it sometime Friday is because this will be good for ratings. Sydney Sweeney's back in the news. I don't know if you guys saw this, but The New
Yorker has this. The New Yorker has this absolutely preposterous article by one of their radical black authors who hates white people, according to her sense deleted Twitter feed, about all the liberal creches about why the Sydney Sweeney thing has anchored in white supremacy and all the rest of that. So thank God for the New Yorker to keep this story alive and give it, shall we say, legs? That's all?
Okay, I'm already then, all right, well let's get going. Enough of you guys. I want to know your quick thoughts on the major issues of this last week, just so if people are listening to this a year from now, which I sometimes do and have been lately just for the fun of it, they know what's actually going on in the world. So the first thing is today, are
we are actually recording early? Even though you will see John drinking whiskey at ten o'clock in the morning in the picture that Steve's gonna post, maybe that the Alaska summit is going on today and we don't know how that's all going to turn out. But Steve had an analogy man piece about it yesterday or today in substack. If you are interested in finding out what exactly is the historical parallels between Reggaevic and Reggaevic and Alaska. I guess if it's cold in both places. I don't know
if we can go beyond that. But look, before you go, Steve, tell me John, what do you think is going to happen today? You pro Ukrainian War longo.
Yeah, I just saw the original Neokon. You mean, well, you know, first, I don't think summits are really very good ideas in general. The most the most effective ones, I think the ones where there's already an agreement that's been basically made, and then the people show up and
they are ceremonialize it, if that's a word. So you know, Reagan and Gorbachev getting together in Washington and Moscow as they were winding up the Cold War, signing things like the I n F Treaty, which actually the Soviets never really obeyed. But you look at other summits and they've
been pretty bad for the United States, you know. I think the most famous one was Kennedy Krishtchov and in Vienna, which historians think encouraged Krushchev to try to take advantage of the weak American president, lead to the Berlin Wall, which we allowed to go up without a shot, and then the Cuban Missile crisis, where the Soviets tried to actually place nuclear missiles in Cuba. And people sometimes point to the as Steve did, the Rekuevik summit between Reagan
and Gorbachev. I don't think that was a bad one. I mean, there wasn't There was no productive, positive agreement there, But that actually was a victory I think for the United States because we didn't give up anti ballistic missile programs. So I don't really see what's to be gained by having summits. Maybe it will get the peace process started in Ukraine. I don't really see how it could change it.
The facts on the ground are that the Russians are going to I think, keep the slice of eastern Ukraine that they've taken at the cost of over one million casualties, and the Russians could keep fighting this war of attrition, and we and the Europeans could keep paying and supporting the Ukrainians, and the Ukrainans could keep inflicting massive casualties on the Russians for inches and feet and not really
I think the results on the ground now. So if you want to have a ceasefire and eventually peace agreement, I think it's going to look like where the troops are roughly today, with some kind of North Korean armistice or face off. But I don't think having a summit between Trump and Putin is really going to change that.
Yeah, So, Jeohn, you mentioned the famous Krushchev JFK summit in nineteen sixty one, where even Kennedy knew because he said to people afterwards. It's on the record in multiple places that boy he ate me for lunch or something like that. He just brutalized me. I think Krushev realized that Kennedy was weak and experienced, et cetera. And you rightly say that open the door for not just the missiles in Cuba, but building the Berlin Wall and several
other things. Let us remember that Biden had a summit with Putin in twenty twenty one, and I'm guessing that Putin could tell right away what the rest of us became apparent ultimately to everybody, that there was no there there with Biden, that he was already decrepit in, weak and so forth. And Trump, I think is right to say that Putin would not have invaded Ukraine he'd been president. So I do think that, by the way, I think you know, the Reiki BC summit, the parallel. There's some differences,
but one parallel is the Reagan people. They pretty much knew or were pretty certain that this was going to be an ambush. I mean, remember the reason for it, put together in haste, kind of like this meeting put together. And by the way, Reagan people said, it's not a summit, it's just a quick meeting. Nancy didn't even go along with the president. And the idea was it was a
Gorbachev's idea, not Reagan's. That's because their negotiators were deadlocked, and and Garbagchov thought he'd be clever saying, let's meet together and break the deadlock and have the outline of agreement and make our guys go back to the table and work it out. And of course it was as we know in ambush. Reagan said no and got mad and walked out, and it was his finest moment. And actually, I think even Gorbachev recognized later that's when we won the Cold War. We didn't know it at the time.
And I won't go on further with all that, but I am hoping we're talking before the meeting's taking place, and most people will listen to this after it's over, and we may know something. I think we won't know for years. All that goes on behind closed doors, as we didn't know for years. What went on in detail between Reagan and Gorbig Job is actually fascinating, the whole the whole back and forth between them that came out later in the transcripts, But the listeners are going to
know what happened. But I am hoping that Trump will, in his own Trumpian way, emulate Reagan's performance at that summit, and that will represent progress in my mind, even though the media and everybody else will say no, okay, so yeah, the.
Best thing that can happen is nothing. Yeah, Steve, is what you're saying me too. The best thing I have is not don't give away the store, don't sell anything, don't agree to anything.
Yeah, it could be right, Yeah, and what is You don't think that Putin is prepared to give up anything?
Well, I think he might agree to Okay, we'll cease the air war, we'll cut back the missiles, bombings and things. They may be short of munitions. Anyway, I'm not sure that as much of a penalty for Putin because I think they need time to regroup and rearm and they'll continue to grind it out on the ground. So you know, that is an easy thing for him to give away.
Maybe would do you think Trump would never consider trying to get Zelensky to agree to giving up some territory.
I don't think that, but I think the terms of that are important. You know, we never recognized, even when we were allies of the Soviet Union in World War Two, we never recognized their conquest of the Baltic States, And I think that as a practical matter, we might say, Okay, the facts on the ground are like we did with Eastern Europe at the end of World War Two. The facts on the ground is there's the Russian army. They're in possession of this land. We're not going to contest that.
But we might also as a political matter, not recognize it. That has its defects, but I think something like that might be acceptable.
Okay, John, I agree. I don't think that the Russians are going to give back any of the land they have. Why would they, I think domestically, even though it's not a functioning democracy, I think it's that difficult for Putin after these kind of losses to return anything. At the same time, what is it that Putin wants a part of it is? I think Steve's right that he needs to rest and regroup I also think that Russia wants
access back to the world economy. Again. I think their economy must be suffering terribly, and even though it's a dictatorship, his elites are going to be extremely unhappy along with the people. So you could see why Putin would want a cease fire of some kind that would allow him to keep the land that he has, and we're not going to spend the resources to dislodge him from it. Not clear the Ukrainians even could at this point. I mean, it's much easier to fight that fight on the defensive
and inflict casualties. But we saw what happened when the Ukrainians tried to go on the offensive, right they didn't. They were unable to carry one out. So I think that's why you can see the terms of an agreement there. But I would also say Trump shouldn't try to negotiate right there in person, even though he thinks he's a great negotiator. It would be better to let the you know, the underlings do it.
Yeah, I think you in that sense you underestimate the dynamics of the personalities involved and how much won't get done by underlings if they don't. If both if both personages can't sort of claim the victory in the negotiations.
But I could be wrong about that. I do want to say one last thing about this and we'll move to the next topic, and that John, that is that even though you know you and I disagree about Ukraine's importance to our national security, one of the things that you've never done, which so many of both the people on the right and the left tend to do to try to shape the narrative, is to claim that you know, Ukraine is winning this war and Putin's on the run, and you know, on and on and on with just
this this really specious sort of evidence about Ukraine's victories over the course of the last three years. So I want to give you, I want to call out you for being an honest, original gangster.
Neye Khan, Well you wow.
I've never heard you pray Steve like that about anything once. Come on, I know what I'm saying, Steve. Steve doesn't get that kind of love.
Let's take a quick break and we'll come right back, and maybe I'll have a worse mood. All right, Let's talk about crime, guys. Is crime up? Is crime down? Are you afraid of getting mugged every time you go to your car, or only when you're in DC, New York, Los Angeles or Chicago.
Or when you're shopping at CBS and everything's locked up behind the counter. You know, Trump is genius. He's gotten Democrats to argue that crime is not a problem when and the statistics I think are even worse and more inaccurate than the job statistics, which have lately been such a fuss of the Bureau of Labor statistics. I mean, didn't DC dismiss a command recently or suspend a commander
recently for faking the statistics? And there's been suspicions this has been going on for a long time with the crime reports. But look, everybody you know sees these videos of shoplifting going on, They see the disorder on the streets. James Lynx was just telling me that on his block something like twenty five cars had their windows smashed in one night earlier.
Times because Lylax was walking out late at night.
That's why, right, Well, I mean my joke is, well, this is this is literally an example of what happens when you don't practice broken windows policing. Right, how much more direct can you get than that. I won't go through the whole argument here. I mean, we know what works in fighting crime and why the left abandoned it on purpose over the last ten to fifteen years. And as I say, I think people walk into any urban area, walk into CBS or a Walgreens, and everything's locked behind
the counter. Don't try telling people that what they're perceiving with their own eyes is wrong.
Yeah. What do you think, John about this the fact that some I think some tiny little progress is being made in demonstrating to the world. Think about Scarborough's confessions. Call it on MSNBC the other day where he said, yeah, ninety one percent of the black I think minority Americans want something done about crime. Crime does not affect the people in Washington, DC who have either most of them
taxpayer provided security. They live inside of gated communities in places with dormen that stop crime from coming into their homes. They you know, Trump doesn't care about crime from a personal point of view, Right, Well, I mean, nobody's going to break into his car and steal his radio, his sound system. And my point is they're trying very hard
to pretend that this is just racism. On Trump's part that it's because black people happen to be the mayors in all of those places that have the very worst crime, and so it's all about racism. But are people buying it, John, I guess is my question.
So first, the people who I think suffer the effects of inner city crime the most are the minority communities, and they're often the ones who want the stronger police presence. I remember this from one of Justice Thomas's opinions, because Chicago actually tried to pass a law with Chicago minds you in the I think in the nineties to make loitering something like a misdemeanor loitering on street corners because this is where a lot of drug activity happens, and
the Supreme Courts struck it down. And just as Thomas wrote, I think at dissent or concurrence, just laying out the facts of how much crime affects the people that the liberals purport to be helping. So I was on a TV about this question of the federalization of the police. There's a lot of different issues, but just to start with the crime issue. People in DC will say, you're hearing them say, now, crime is falling in DC, why
do you need to send in the troops. Essentially, crime is falling in a lot of our cities, but that's because they're comparing it to the pandemic statistics. When crime was already going back up before the pandemic, and then it shot way up during the pandemic because you basically told people they couldn't go outside for two years, and so a lot of people like went nuts, I think
during the pandemic. But if you look at the statistics compared to the pre pandemic, particularly is de pointed out during the period where and Republican mayors and governments are allowed to put tough on crime policies, in effect, crime is extremely high. So if you look at the DC murder statistics, yes they've come down since the pandemic, but if you compare it to ten years ago murder when I just eyebought the statistics, it looked like murder was
up about sixty percent. I mean, that should be unacceptable. So that's one second.
D before you go on really quick question on that specific point. There's a lot Steve talked about crime going unreported, and there's a lot of different reasons for that, not just all of them. Manipulated crime statistics the kinds of things that go unreported. Murder, it seems to me, is not one of those crimes that can be unreported. Is that correct? And that's why if you look at the murder rate as opposed to other kinds of violent crime, it's much more accurate. Is that true?
I think murder, I mean, I think the murder rate is the most reliable statistic because you have a dead body, and so even if it doesn't depend on like people's subjective opinions, right, like, you got a dead body, So I think it's I mean, they're always, you know, differences, But I think murder, I think gives you the best picture of what crime is like.
Can I add to that? But I'm well, first of all, I'm having the clearance rate is important on murders, and I'm not sure that stands. But I think clearance rates have fallen and that's very bad. So even if you have perfect statistics on murder rates, if they're not solving a large number of them, that's a bad sign for law enforcement. Second, I'm having flashbacks to the late great Mayor Marion Barry, who sometimes remember sometime in the late eighties
or who's a crack addict. Right, Sometimes in the late eighties or early nineties, he said this, He said, really, the crime rate in DC isn't that bad if you leave out all the murders.
Yeah, exact, which is actually true, right.
But I will add this only because it's a cultural relevant cultural commentary. Is the good old days. When Jay Leno had the United Tonight Show. His remark, which imagine if he said this today, he said, Mayor Berry is the person that puts the Columbia in the district of Columbia. That was one of his monologue jokes. This shows you what's happened to our late night shows, you Carson. Those guys skewered both sides equally, and that's what's missing today. But that's another subject.
Okay, can you let me just finish up one last point?
Interrupted?
Oh no, but the on the on the sorry, but on the on the first line is I just want to explain the difference in policing that occurred before because of before the pandemic even was that you know what Giuliani and people like that figured out what to do, was that you would use crime statistics to predict where crime was going to happen, so you would surge police officers to these It seems like common sense, but this
was considered a revolution. You would use uh these statistics to search police to these street corners, and then you were allowed to do what we call stop and frisk, which the Supreme Court is upheld, which means you don't have to have problem caused someone's committee crime to stop
them asking questions for some for weapons. A lot of these mayors that Steve's talking about overturned those policies around the end of the around the time of the first Obama administration, and we see it's just a cause and effect. Crimes starts surging, and it just started keeping and then it really exploded during the pandemic, and we haven't been able to bring crime rates back down because these mayors and city councils will not allow us to use these policies they know work.
So, Steve, I don't know if you remember. I think that we were actually on Ricochet, not on this podcast a few years back, and we had a guest who was talking about crime, and I won't remember. The one thing I remember from that was was the there was a map of Chicago, John and you know, talked about the huge crime rates of Chicago, but when you actually looked at the map, the crime was like ninety percent concentrated in and I'm going to say ten fifteen neighborhoods
of Chicago. And that's a going back to the point you made before I interrupted you, which is that crime affects those marginalized communities and so much more severely than it does So people in Chicago can say, yeah, crime is not a problem to me. I don't happen to live in those areas. Now, Washington, d C is a little bit different because most of Washington d C is a crime ridden.
Well, go ahead, Actually there's three there's three quadrants in Washington right, northwest, north southeast, south OFLK, and all the people with any money will live in the northwest part. All the white people live in northwest right, and the crime is in the other three districts.
By the way. Really, Oh sorry, see, I just want to make a quick point that I want you guys to come in on before we go to break, and that is that, you know, the big talk lately is Okay, if DC is such a problem, it's because home rule really doesn't work, and you've got to just make us
a state and that sort of thing. And I saw a proposal the other day that said, no, what we really need to do is preserve the original idea of a district of Columbia for the central government, but we need to confine it too the area that's encompassed by Congress, the Supreme Court, and the White House, and give everything else over to Maryland.
Yeah. Yeah, I'm for that.
Yeah, well, that's very and that's not far off from what the Liberals wanted to do, except they wanted to make all that remaining land a state, right back to Maryland. Will be done, Okay, go ahead, go ahead.
There is a heat map of crime in DC, and it does show that the northwest has very little. It's all concentrated in the other areas, kind of like Chicago, although it has crept in the northwest. I mean, you talked to Christine Rosen, who lives in a very nice place up in Upper Georgetown, and she talks about crime in her neighborhood quite a lot. The second thing, the person you're trying to remember, Linda is Lucretia is our
friend of mine. John's Rafael Monguel Manhattan Institute, and he is the go to guy in all things in these days.
Well, one last point about your point, Lucretia, which is interesting about this is the right now today the DC Attorney General that like they have one and the city right and the mayor filed lawsuit to prevent the takeover, and you know, and their arguments you can't federalize Washington, DC. And I was like, has no one read the constitution? It is all federal. The whole thing is a federal city. And you know, the mayor is on thief saying Trump
is invading the prerogatives of local government over police. And he's like, that can't happen to Washington. You are just a subset of the federal government. And here's it. So here's an interesting constitutional question because I Trump hasn't mentioned this as administration, as mentioned it you heard it here. First, I think Trump should fire the mayor and fire the chief of police and the attorney general and remove them
because they're parts of the executive branch. Right, how are they anymore free of removal than you know, all these NRB and SEC agencies. That would be a great constitutional test. If Trump just said, okay, you want to file suit, then I'm firing all of you because I'm the chief executive, and the laws must be faithfully executed. You know, the first place they should be faithful executed the district that
belongs to the federal government in the Constitution. I think this would be a great challenge to this idea of independent agencies.
I like it.
I like it, and it would restore criminal restore you know, criminal justice in the city.
Got it.
I like it too. And it would undermine the argument that's constantly being made about when he that he's just going to take over the whole country, right. It could it could create a little bit of distance. Okay, let's take a quick break, very quickly.
We'll be right back.
Welcome back, everyone. I'm going to drive my co hosts Steve and John crazy by m absolutely over the top discuss dismay, despicab how I find so despicable anybody these days who even claims to be affiliated in any way with Obama or Biden administrations. And I think they are treasonous, seditious, conspiracy conspiracists is at the right now, and I know that.
A couple of weeks ago, we discussed this briefly and John was like, there's nothing really there there, John, Let me first ask are you changing your mind yet?
Not really? I mean I don't see a big change in the facts we know. But that's because I've read the Durham Report pretty closely, and I think a lot of this is in the Durham Report. So I don't really feel there's a lot more. And then a lot of it has to do with whether you think so the primary or dispute I think is this that President Obama tasks the intelligence agencies after the election to figure out whether Russia tried to interfere in the election or
help Trump. Right, So I don't think that's actually an illegitimate thing for a president to want to know about. I mean, it's well within its constitutional power. So the question is, right is my I understand this, and this meeting is discussed in the Duram Report. But the question is this question of intention? Did they do it on purpose to try to screw over the Trump administration or was this actually a legitimate question for intelligence?
So can I reframe the question as you phrased it? It was not a question of whether Trump was whether Russia assisted Trump in becoming elected. That was not the question because they had already determined that Russia did in fact interfere in the election, but not to help either Trump or Hillary Clinton, but that they just interfered like we interfere in other people's elections, et cetera, et cetera. It was a an order, and there seems to be
more and more. If I'm not sure that you can get it all the way up to Obama, but you certainly can now with these released emails and so forth, pin on Clapper and Brennan that they wanted to create the intelligence that made it look as if Trump was helped by Russia, and they wanted to do everything illegal like leak parts of it and of the intelligence and so forth, made up intelligence, the Steele dossier and all of that purposefully to harm Trump in his first term.
And I think if you, if you present it like you presented it, whether the Russians interfered in the election, that's not what happened. It was already determined that they had. The question was, how, oh, can we prove that when they interfered in the election, they did so to help Trump, when in fact more evidence indicates that they did so to help Hillary. They knew about Hillary's financial problem, shall we say, her corruption and the fact that she's a
crazy old hag of a harpie. I mean, she's got mental issues, psychosis and physical issues, and they knew that and they hit it because they knew they could use it against her when she won. So there's lots of evidence to the contrary.
You left out Herodin in that. Yeah, it's one of my favorites. Look, I think I was gonna say you were a little unfair to John, but then he went and mumbled that there's not much here. I think what John said a week ago or two weeks ago was this doesn't really qualify as treason sedition maybe, but okay,
leave that aside, because that's yeah, leave that side. Look, I do think I think my reading of what's come out, and I haven't read at all, but is that the Russians are more interested in sowing chaos than necessarily favoring Hillary. And they succeeded at that, right, I mean, look what it did. And I do think that the big question is, and this is gonna be hard to get at, is
what was Obama's motive? I think they I think we now know better that intelligence concluded early on that there was no connection between the Trump campaign and the Russians, which you know the Democrats want. And I think this was contrived to hobble his presidency. And now are we going to get I mean, it's a practical thing. What's going to make this blow up? You need the equivalent
of John Dean. You need somebody from inside Obama or maybe the Biden administration to come forward in testimony one way or another and spill the beans, so to speak.
Well, that's what's come out this week. By the way, the whistleblower inside, a Democratic appointee intelligence person inside, has come out and spoken to several of these issues.
Well, I say, is a When I say as a practical matter, I mean, what is going to galvanize public opinion to the point where the public says, you know, this is intolerable. This is a greater scandal than Watergate. There need to be prosecutions. It took John Dene being televised at the hearings in the summer of seventy three for Watergate to turn upside down and turn decisively against
the Nixon although be it albeit slowly. I do think the last point on this is, you know Trump I mentioned in the article I wrote for Cimitas this week that very interesting interview Trump gave an April to The Spectator to Ben Dominich was the interviewer where he said, boy, I knew who politics in Washington was rough, but I had no idea on my first term how bad it is in retrospect. I think Trump knows he should have
fired Comy on day one. He should not have a point of Jeff's sessions as Attorney General of Sessions is going to give in to a special counsel and recuse himself. Uh And and that's uh. And I think it explains a lot of how.
Trump was about the Hillary decision not prosecuting Hillary. Do you differently if he knew what would have happen.
Well, I don't. I mean, I don't know if he could know. If the president shouldn't, I think probably not waiting to try and reopen that particular thing. But I think what he could have said to Comya is I'm sorry. He could have been nice about it and said, look, job, well done, but you're too compromised because of the whole Hillary mishandling and so forth, and and uh, look we
say it this way. I think one of the objects of that whole operation between election date and inauguration date was to force the appointment of a special Council, which, as John knows, absolutely hobbles a White House. It just distracts all kinds of time from staff and from the White House Council's office and so forth dominates the headlines. And you know, it took forever to get the Muller report finally out, and so, uh, where's going with all
that is? I think Trump too understands those things, and if he had to do it over again, I think it would have gone quite differently. He would have fought back right away about all of that and say the Steel Report this is. You can imagine how he would talk about it now, knowing what he knows. I mean that interview, as I mentioned, quite revealing, and Trump, having thought about it during four years out of office, has come back for his second term. I think a completely
transformed person. And it's why he's a more comfortable in his own skin and more effective and also much more aggressive in a certain way than he was in the first term.
Let me let me go back and like distinguish, I think who's liable for what? So my response was mostly about Obama I think Tulsa Gabbart has been irresponsible saying Obama committed to engaging creusing this conduct. And again, I think that's very different than John Ratcliffe, the head of the CIA, referring right Homey and Brennan now actually not Comy, just Brennan and Clopper for prosecution. That's so I think President bomba but just can't be That's what I mean.
He can't. I don't think he'd be prosecuted. He has immunity. He's acting in his official capacity, and he can say I would like this question investigated by the intelligence agencies. And right, maybe he was trying, Maybe he could have wanted to hobble the Trump administration. Presidents can do that if they feel like it in a lot of legitimate ways, using their authority. He doesn't have to hand over the government nicely to Trump. That's different than the liability of
Clapper and Brennan, who I wasn't really talking about. So there, I think that it's I think it's legitimate to open up an investigation. And what they're going to say, of course, is President Obama ordered us to look into what affected the Russians have? What were they trying to do. Was
Trump involved with them? We all know that's all untrue, now right, We all know that this was all the hoax and this was manufactured, you know, maybe one of the greatest dirty political tricks in presidential campaign history, which is part of the way, is not necessarily illegal.
But you've said it. I'm gonna play Steve for a moment. I'm gonna play analogy girl.
Sad day.
But remember what it was that Richard Nixon was prosecuted for or investigated for. Some people broke into Daniel Ellsberg's psychiatrist's office to get dirt on him so they could undermine his reputation. On the whole Pentagon papers thing, Democratic headquarters. Okay, all those those minor, minor things that I mean seriously but illegal minor things. But Richard Nixon didn't do them.
That's obstruction, is what you're talking. He was talking about your construction.
Justice and conspiracy and conspiracy.
How is this different?
I mean, I don't see how President Obama committed obstruction.
To the extent that all of those people all the way through never said a word that they were, that his people stopped investigations into Hillary Clinton, that his people uh that his people over zealously went after Trump. I mean, it's a short amount of time that it happens. I'll give you that. But I think that you could go back and say, insofar as he directed the intelligence community to find to manufacture.
A because he did not order that, that's an exact that's going too far.
We'll see. It seems that that reports of that meeting say that that's exactly what he did. I mean, the reports about what had happened with Russia, the intelligence reports were all ready extant. He wanted them changed, and he wanted anything that could be done to prove that, yes, they actually came in to help them.
So you would you so you think it would. A president can't say, Okay, the CIA are telling me this and the FBI telling me that. I feel it in my bones though that this there's more to it than that, So I want you to go back and look for more. President can't do that.
I think he absolutely could do that, But I don't think that's.
What That's what that's all that Obama does. You know, Facially, that's what it looked like he did Facially that Yeah, I mean, yeah, you're gonna yeah, but you're trying to say you know, but in his mind, he really had a different intention.
I think there's more evidence of to it than that.
But but let's take a quick That's why, I mean, that's why I say I don't see it.
Well, Steve has something to He's going to be much better at being analogy man than increase you could ever be an analogy girl.
So take aways I have so much it's more practice of this. Why do you even presume to contest the champion of this?
Right?
It's the sad thing is, I know you have superhero costumes that say this on them, and like you guys watched dists in some way and launch new super power.
Someday when when I get my my uh Tiffany inspired tinfoil hat, will get Steve his analogy man super hero costume.
Yeah.
The problem is, you know I made I did make one with a big A on it, and I weren't in the public and people, yeah, you know I was something like that, or you know, I was like trying to, you know, do some reenactment of the Thaniel Hawthorn or something. I don't know. Look, I mean, you know, if you go back to the Nixon impeachment, a lot needs to
be said about it. I'll just say one thing quickly, is one of the charges brought against him that was did not pass the Judiciary committee was abuse of power. H And also, I mean they had two or three different counts that related to abuse of power. One of them was about the budget, one of them was on war powers. And you know, the argument of Republicans then, which succeeded, was no, No, the standard for impeachment should be actual crimes, and that's why they're repaired to conspiracy
and instruction of justice. I think those charge I think those charges were wrong about Nixon's abuse of power, but those are much more like what Hamilton had in mind. And was it Federals fifty five about an inquest in the conduct of public men? Uh? And?
Uh?
So I think what happened to was it sixty five?
Right? Sorry?
Sixty five? Yeah? Okay? In any case, the point is is that it seems to me that the abuse of power standard is a political standard more so than a criminal standard. And for that, I think Obama and the people around him deserve the most searching scrutiny for it. And and you know, I'm not for retroactive impeachments, but there ought to be.
At least you can't impeach people who are out of office. But right right, I totally agree with you. I'm not saying that this shouldn't be investigated. I actually think congress would be the better form, because you just want to lay out what people did and the bad judgments or ulterior motives they had, even if they can't be criminally prosecuted. I think it's a mistake, you know, to say, oh, we can handle this by referring this to the Attorney
general for prosecution. That's actually setting the bar too high. You know, if Hillary Clinton executed this dirtiest of political tricks in campaign history, then lay it all out for the American people. You can't do that for the prosecution because you can't prosecute her for this, but you can certainly have a committee laid out and then.
Can I ask a question about that? Though? Let me ask. So we were discussing the John dene example and the Watergate hearings. I was fourteen at the time.
I watched them.
From beginning to end, and I wasn't even all that interested in politics at fourteen, like Steve was, you know, but after years of these these investigative committees that go nowhere in Congress, and I blame Republicans probably more for that than I do Democrats. You know, the Bengd hearings. We could go on and on how much attention would
be paid to congressional committees in the world. I'm not saying that the larger, more legal structure isn't still important, But from the point of view of public perception, have we just we've just turned them into a circus and people don't pay that much attention anymore, Am I wrong?
No?
Well, and it's harder for some of the conventional reasons, more media, shorter attention spans, the fact that we overtelevise. I mean, I'd be for going back to not televising the House and Senate, which I think have ruined the deliberative capacity of them. But look again, I think of
this in show business terms. And I've mentioned this before, although it's been a while, and it's also thirty years ago now, so maybe it's obsolete also, But you did have those hearings in the late nineties that have all unlikely people Senator Bill Roth of Delaware prosecuted or prosecutor ran about IRS abuses, and the moment that got on the front pages of the papers and on TV above the fold is when he had someone come in and testify,
an inside whistleblower from behind a screen. I think in one case, like voice Altering that it was great theater and great show business. One of my criticisms is that Republicans aren't good at that kind of theater. The hearing format is bad for that. They could bring in Cheney, Well, well, well, what you do is you do what the Watergate hearings are like, and what the Iran Contra hearings are like.
You bring in councils who do you know there and they're they're they're unable to do consistent twenty thirty minutes of questioning, and there you lay out a consistent argument and really pin people down. It's hard to make hearings work when each person gets five minutes, and the bad habit of senators and congressman is they want to speak for four and a half of those minutes, and that's a mistake. They should go right to question. That's why
John Kennedy is so great at this right. Why we see highlight reels of John Carey from Louisiana is that he's really good at this. Put him in charge of this, and I think you would get some results.
What do you think, John Well?
I think committee hearings and investigations are very effective. I mean you mentioned the Bengazi hearings, and they may have gotten everything Republicans wanted, but they should damage Hillary Clinton. And I remember that's where they had that clipper for getting exasperated and saying something like but they're all dead anyway, different right it really I think that really damaged her. And then you know from the other side that I got to think the Democrats have to think their January
sixth hearings were very effective. I mean they really skewered, you know, people on our side, and that that shows you how good they can be if our side were to conduct them well well.
And remember they hired a producer from ABC Television to organize those hearings because they understood that this was spectacle as much as it was serious investigation. I hate to put it that crudely, but that's how our modern world works. That's even harder now with our mass media Twitter environment.
So I just want to sort of end a segment by saying that my real concern and I told you guys that my ultimate point to this discussion, to get the point to get across, was the fact that Nixon had none of that ever come to light in Watergate.
Had it never come to light that there was a break in or any of that stuff, had there never been a deep throat, there would have been no The damage done to our republic was greater from the Watergate fiasco than if nothing had ever happened, because there was no inherent danger to the republic from the actions that
precipitated Watergate. The opposite I believe is true here. And what I mean by that is all of these things, and you've said it yourself, they're investigated by Durham to this and that they continue to be more or less ignored. But the damage that was done by Obama insisting that our intelligence communities be completely partisan, one sided, and targeting an opposition candidate and then actual president those that is unparalleled, unprecedented.
Even analogy man over there in his fancy red shirt, I don't think could come up with anything that even approaches the kind of perfidy and maliciousness and destruction that it does to our republic. Okay, analogy man challenge, Uh.
Yeah, Well a minor one. First of all, this is no ordinary red shirt. This is my antonin Scalia original shirts. Okay, wow, that's yeah. You don't have one of these, John, you should? No, Well, we'll have to get you one to go with your Claremont review books. Hat. Look, I think the intelligence community was just as hostile to Nixon as the one as the current intelligence community was to Trump. And that's a long story, still a lot of murky aspects of it, and I'll just leave it there.
Let's take a quick break and we'll come back and close out this show. Welcome back. The final segment of our show, we are going to offer, at the request of a reader. A listener who is both a former student of mine from a very long time ago, was involved in the DA's office in San Bernardino, and is now living his best life in Utah, asked us to talk about books because we've been promising to do that for I don't know, a month at least and never
get to it. So we're going to try to do at least a small portion today, maybe more next week. But the question that we're going to look at today is what book would you recommend to say, a young person or somebody who was a liberal and is getting more and more confused about what the left is doing
and is thinking about becoming a conservative. What book one book is all you get, Steve, What book would you recommend to that person that you think would help them understand the conservative movement, right wing politics, whatever you want to say.
Well, if you're going to start with me, well, Darning, here's only one book, because I've got three from Roger Scrutin, including his How to Be a Conservative, which is fun. It's not American, yeah, but you know what he writes about American. He got better and better partly under my influence. But one book, the one I like for sort of a neutral audience. It depends on the reader and what they want. But the one that I like and use with students with great effect is Thomas Soul's book A
Conflict Divisions the Ideological Origins of political struggles. I think it's not as complete as it ought to be, and I think that's defects, but I think it has some great for jew because it's you know, the basic theme was the basic difference between left and right is the left believes in the unconstrained vision based on the view that human nature is entirely plastic and changeable, and that power is good, whereas conservatives believe in a constrained vision,
constrained chiefly by human nature. And you know, Soul's writing I think is very accessible. He reminds me of Crowdhammer a little bit. I think he's the economics equivalent of Charles Crowdhammer. It's an old book, but still one of his favorites. By the way, what happened to books of Soul? Written forty Maybe he said that this is his favorite book, And so that's the one I'd recommend to someone first who is curious about why conservatives differ from the left.
Hey, John, I don't really have a modern book like Steve does, because I don't. I don't really read a lot of books about modern politics because we're like living through it. So I was going to say, read things
that were written before the printing press. So if I was like reading a book, like a book about like what makes you conservative, I would say, like, read like Plutarch's Lives or something, and you just see everything just cycles over and over again, and there's nothing new to this, Like, you know, this conservative liberal divide you see over and over again, that's one lesson I would take from something
like Plutarch. And then the other thing, you know is that you see how important humans and agency and individuals are, I think. But then I think the third thing is you kind of see you see life as a tragic and nasty, British and short and so when you read about agent history, you come away you see, yeah, there have been all these crazy people in the past who had utopian dreams and they always fail because you guys are like this, because human nature is somewhat immutable.
Oh really, that's a really good answer, John. It sort of leads to mine and Steve and I discussed this a little bit back and forth this past week. I would choose that this would not be the only book, but since I said the rules were one, I would choose Witness by Whittaker Chambers. I think it was Reagan Steve who said that that was, what did he say, the most important book he'd ever read, something along those lines.
The reason I say that is actually, uh, piggybacks on what both of you two said, and that is I think in Witness, John, what you get is that same sort of tragedy, that same one side of the ideological divide believes somehow that tragedy can be removed from human affairs, and you see the tragic consequences of that. So the book Witness is about UH, an American who becomes what would you say, UH, is it a.
But he is.
He succumbs to the Communist UH part of the American Communist Party's UH attempts to turn him, I guess you could say, and it becomes in many ways a true believer. But what happens is his human nature, and much of that, in my opinion, includes what happens when he actually finds a wife in the Communist Party and then they have a child. And the reaction of the Communist Party to this is, I mean, they're very They're worse than dismissive.
They almost want to see the whole family destroyed. And there's no support for his marriage, no support for his child, and he begins to see because of course, communist ideology says that the family is the ultimate capitalist horror because you know, you say my husband, my wife, my child, and you think of it in terms of possessions. This
is the communist view. So they want to destroy the family, and it is his humanity, not any sort of real political change of mind so much as his human elements that say, wow, this just doesn't make any sense anymore. And I think that there's no difference. This is where you and I might disagree, John, no difference between the
horror cores of communism and the modern progressives. What I sent Steve in this regard was an article about the Democratic Socialists of America had a convention where they know they endorsed Mindami, but they also endorse the idea of destroying the traditional family, because it is indeed the building
blocks of capitalism, as we would say. So I just think that all three of those come at the problem from a different way, and I think when it came down to it, you might want to recommend different things to different people, depending at least to start, but what you need to do is you need to you need to show in whatever book it is that, at least to some extent, the difference between conservatives and progressives in these days is the one believes in an unchanging, immutable
human nature and the other doesn't. And there are tragic consequences because of the latter. What do you think, guys? All right, that's not bad? All right, I'm gonna go to Babylon be's. I hope you guys have your part ready. I'm ready every week with mine. John still has the same old tired drink.
Your whiskeys, right, I have a second line to add.
Okay, good, so let me do mine really quick. Then JB. Pritzker joins police force in hopes of getting sandwich thrown at him.
Oh yeah, we didn't talk about that r J crew guy through. My only comment on that is that, of course that didn't work because if you're a subway now on the Philadelphian cheese steak, that would have been an actual weapon.
What's the charge assault with a deli weapon?
Yes?
Actually the funny thing is.
Anthony over the story.
Oh yeah, there's been some good ones. There's a there's a giff maybe going on on that I've seen on X a couple of times. Now. You guys have probably never seen those, uh the shooting shows, the gun shows on television, but they always end up shooting at like a rubber person or an actual pig, or they slice up an actual pig to see if a knife is sharp.
Oh okay, anyway, so it's this one and they they they it was a subway sandwich at one of those things, gelatin covered skeleton and the wholdy is just destroyed, and it talks about how this is a lethal subway sandwich. Anyway, but I'll remember that, John, No subway sandwich is Philly cheese steak sandwich.
Yeah.
Newsome vows to double California's violent crime if Trump doesn't stop cleaning up DC. It takes a minute, right, Yeah, crime is down in DC, shouts journalists currently being pummeled by a group of thugs. We didn't talk about this one, even though the three of us went back and forth on it a little bit last week. The judges in Pennsylvania and New Jersey, I believe, who are again suing
the little sisters of the poor. You know, of all of the people to pick on these these nuns who dedicate their life to caring for the elderly.
Poor and sick.
Right, not even the big sisters of the poor, but the big sisters.
Okay, so my league, excuse me, Uh sorry, I can't read anymore. Today federal court requires nuns to start worshiping Moloch, right, okay. Adam Schiff worried legal troubles will make it hard for him to afford his upcoming head reduction surgery.
I like that.
Back to DC puzzle, DC police chief asks reporters, what is this black and white car? That thing that goes you? Trump vows to drastically reduce the number of criminals in Washington by sending Congress home. Yeah, I'll end there, John. I can't wait to hear it.
Oh, always drink your whiskey meat. And Steve wanted me to say always add to your book buying budget, but I would just say the second line should just be buy more books.
Okay, yeah, always, Steve, we don't read.
I get so many of them piled up waiting.
For me to read them. And Steve, you're lying your your strange selection, your deep relationship with a What's the latest line in your love affair with Grock?
Okay, here's I use chat GBT for now, but I'll try. Here's the latest stanza through AI on the three Whiskey Happy Hour. It's short. They spar with glee, they sip with flair. They skewer the news with a libertine air from woksh homes to college despair, to clauses that vanish in textual glare there It is I like it.
That was pretty good. I know they're getting very deep.
I know. Anyway, well, gentlemen, have a wonderful week. Listeners, have a wonderful week. We'll see you next time.
Right bye bye, everybody. Ricochet join the conversation.