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After several weeks of different combos for different reasons, The Big Three® are reunited and bring a power hitting show with them. First up, we talk southern cooking (Rob is hosting from Oxford, Mississippi, site of this year’s Southern Foodways Symposium — and please, it’s a serious symposium — not “an excuse to eat fried chicken…”). Then, the hosts debate impeachment and the White House strategy for defeating it. We shift gears and welcome Daniel Krauthammer on the occasion of the paperback debut of The Point of It All, the book he edited for his late father in the months before Charles passed away. Then, the great Victor Davis Hanson (partially great because his podcast The Classicist is available on the Ricochet Audio Network and partially great because his best selling book, The Case For Trump is the definitive resource in these troubled times). The segment is a how-to guide on defending the President in the sure to be turbulent next few months. Finally, what is the best Halloween candy? Our hosts weigh in (heh) on this vitally important topic. Leave your picks in the comments, please.
Note: we did not get to the Long Poll in the show this week, but we did post a new one. Please take it.
Music from this week’s show: I Want Candy – The Strangeloves.
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Oh, @ejhill, what have you done? 🤣
There are many wonderful things for people who love history to see in Boston, but Ben Franklin is buried in Philadelphia. Did I hear the wrong grave?
I agree with every jot and tittle of VDH’s critique of the deep state and MSM, but our focus on being anti-anti-Trump is going to hurt conservatism in kind, if not in degree, the way that trendy American anti-anti-communism hurt the people of Cuba. Trump’s character cannot be summed up as a few sexual peccadilloes, the man has been a straight out crook, embezzler, and fraud his entire life. If our legal system and bankruptcy courts treated the top .01 percent the way they treat the bottom 99 percent Trump would have closed out his working life as a bag boy in a supermarket, paying off a billion dollar judgment for restitution at $15 a month. The Kurds that trusted us are only the first to suffer for his failings, if we have five more years of his “leadership” without guardrails this country will be in a bad, bad place.
How do you think he stays out of the papers?
VDH probably makes the best possible argument for Trump. It’s a shoddy argument.
If I remember rightly, Rob is a Southerner. He’s not from the Deep South, but he was born below the Mason-Dixon Line.
Sorry, as with “How Soon Is Now,” I prefer the newer version, in this case by Bow Wow Wow. (Hey that rhymes!)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JoXVYSV4Xcs
I know it well. The “new” version is 30+ years old and my feeling is that it’s been way overexposed having been used in countless tv shows, commercials, and movies (including many really annoying trailers).
The original is almost never heard and my hunch is most people don’t even know that the Bow Wow Wow version is a cover. So perhaps we’ve given The Strangeloves (what a great name for a band…) a little dap.
The original also has the added advantage that it’s sung by a guy to a girl. Fits our show better.
No, my mistake. It’s his family. I assumed it was Ben, based on the prominence of the obelisk. Common error, I suspect; perhaps it serves now as a general cenotaph for Ben.
And I agree it’s a mess, with no ideological focus anymore – we’re not talking ideas, but bracing for the counter-counter arguments to the anti-anti-anti-Trump factions, and so on.
I am uninterested (now) in Trump’s behavior as a businessman prior to his election, because I assume everyone in the realm of East-Coast real estate games the system. VDH’s point about ethical personal behavior during the occupancy of the Oval Office seems a valid one, and Trump seems to have behaved, inasmuch as there are no leaks about bringing gal pals in the side door. The most important thing would seem to be whether conservative ideas have been advanced in practice – whether we would be happier with someone who made the ideas seem attractive but did little to employ them, or someone who fouled the nest while enabling the advancement of conservative ideas through judicial appointments.
The most attractive, charismatic, well-modulated GOP president would still be opposed by the media, because he would be insufficiently enthusiastic about abortion, racial and gender identity politics, and the forcible redistribution of property. The “conservative” brand would be excoriated for the usual reasons.
Really? No room in the whole podcast for a little “Please Come To Boston?”
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eCOn9NiSgfs
In honor of @jameslileks
Not just to A girl. A particular girl, named Candy. But even back when that version first came out, people who heard the song probably had no idea.
If, after three years in office, the Kurds are “only the first to suffer for [Trump’s] failings” (emphasis mine), then that makes Trump an above-average President.
Here’s Jeffrey Toobin of CNN, a rabid Trump hater:
Do you think there’s an enormous desire for our troops to be over in Syria for years more? To be in Afghanistan for almost 20 years? I think the president may have his finger on the pulse. I don’t know if it’s in the national security interest, but I don’t see this as a political negative for the president at all.
https://www.foxnews.com/media/cnn-toobin-trump-syria-withdrawal
N.B.: That the rich are invulnerable to the legal system is merely left-wing boilerplate. In one of Michael Moore’s books, he uses Jeffrey Skilling of Enron as an example of a rich white guy who can get away with everything. Except that, after the book was published, Skilling was sentenced to 24 years, and served 12, which is longer than most murderers.
The Kurds have so many political strains and are so geographically dispersed, it’s hard to understand what is going on. Some of them are clearly a threat to Turkey.
I’ve come to the conclusion that the main thing is the West makes foreign-policy mistakes and then they feedback on each other like crazy. This has been going on for 100 years. This is exactly why we can’t let China be the hegemon. You want to be the most powerful so you can survive after everyone is mad at you for messing everything up.
The whole NATO charter should have been overhauled after the Soviet Union fell. (The fact that so many Republicans don’t get what a menace supranational political structures are drives me crazy.)
Instead of Gulf War 2, Bush should have just build a freeway from Tehran to south Lebanon.
Peter seems to have forgotten what happened between Charles Krauthammer and Bill O’Reilly on election night.
Krauthammer, the man who coined “Bush derangement syndrome“, was experiencing Trump derangement syndrome. When O’Reilly commented that the panhandle vote would give Trump Florida, Krauthammer Kept denying it.
This isn’t very significant, but I thought one of the cooler things Charles did was research the Washington Redskins name issue really well. I forget where he came down on it, but it was really thoughtful.
They have got to force the FBI to use tape recorders instead of 302s. Harvey Silvergate has a hilarious story about this.
Everything in life works on precedent. If you make the determination that Trump is “not worth saving” because you find him personally loathsome, you reward those that have undermined the electoral process and the peaceful exchange of power. But more importantly you help create “the new normal” that lets them go after the next person in the same way – a person you just might really like.
Either you believe that the National Security agencies should be apolitical or you don’t. There’s no Trumpian exclusion.
My bad, maybe we should start with the chumps like Ann Coulter who thought he was serious about immigration, then watched him allow the E-Verify system be eviscerated.
TDS is going too far; but clearly Krauthammer was still in the grip of the conventional wisdom that Trump “couldn’t win”.
As I recall, surveys of Native Americans showed that they didn’t find the name offensive.
I recall reading that one of the first things new officers in Iraq were shown was a map of the current political boundaries of the Middle East, then they were shown the “real” map with the Sykes-Picot lines removed and everything falls into place as to ethnicities and tribal affiliations. The Kurds are actually a pretty coherent nationality, granted riven with political factions, and deserve their own state thousands of times more than the Palestinians.
Yep.
Krauthammer’s point was it clearly had positive and negative connotations in different eras and locations. It wasn’t clearly pejorative.
Let’s see……I was always a sucker for Snickers, and Zagnut, and remember Chunky (with raisins – you can still get these at Cracker Barrel), then there’s Almond Joy……and Heath Bars – I have the dental work to match….
James, have you had Carol widman’s chocolate covered potatoe chips? Made in Fargo ND.
OMG. More addicting than street grade crack.
I’ve reviewed the comments, and no one has yet expressed appreciation for the pithy comment that Rob made about beef and pork, which was funny. I also think that pork is great, and here in Japan it isn’t the other white meat. Many Asian countries have great dishes involving pork, and it’s fatty pork. Yum!
Hard pass. Awful song.
Trump is more serious about immigration than any President in generations, and has taken endless grief for it, but let’s not give him any credit for that!
Trump is an instinctive demagogue and knows aspects of this issue inflame passions more than any other. The fact that he does not do effective things that would ameliorate the problem says volumes about how much he really cares about a conservative philosophy.
No worries. I’m being horribly pedantic. The experience at Faneuil Hall sounds marvelous. I started thinking about how I could do the same thing in a classroom.
If you ever go to Philly, however, you can throw a penny on the very well preserved grave of the patriarch. They think this is because of Franklin’s philosophy that “a penny saved is a penny earned.” They collect all those pennies, and these then account for thousands of dollars each year that help with the cemetery’s upkeep.