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This week’s raucous episode, recorded well after conventional happy hour ends, ranged from Biden’s dementia to the failed Dobbs leak investigation, to Kevin McCarthy’s (relatively) good week, the post hockey ergo propter hockey fallacy, bidding good riddance to one of the premier COVID cultists, a defense of cat-calling (even when it’s done to our Lucretia), and then . . . a big fat argument about Ukraine.
The vigorous disagreements among our three barkeeps on this subject were flying fast and hard, and did we settle the issue? No, we did not!
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It’s not Kamala.
https://twitter.com/bennyjohnson/status/1616621558117851137?s=61&t=zgJz0oCmRQJMHrL18c-DPw
Between that and Kerry calling the attendees “extraterrestrials,” satire is defeated.
Or maybe Kerry actually blurted out the truth that Mulder and Scully always told us was “out there.” For certain they are all lizard people. No wonder they want us to eat bugs.
Great show!
@stevenhayward has brought up Harrison Bergeron a few times now, interestingly enough it was John Marini who first recommended I read this. Remarkably prescient.
I always enjoy the Clean Water At needling that @johnyoo performs haha, but on a serious note, what is the likelihood that here or on Powerline U. we can go over these massive historic administrative state policies, break them down, highlight their effects/overreach, and (most importantly) propose any solutions (like repeal, modification, restriction) to them?
Thanks again!
We have in mind doing that subject at some point. And if you think John groans at the Clean Air Act, just wait till you hear him whine about the Administrative Procedure Act!
Looking forward to that.
Zelenskyy has already said that it is going to take at least 2 trillion dollars to rebuild Ukraine after this war is over . Guess where that money is coming from? Punitive Treaty of Versailles -like damages forcing Russia? Think again . NATO? Well the 2 gents that Lucretia tolerates admitted that “NATO” means the US. Who follows Putin ? How about those SS-18s in the Urals ? Those are fully operational , modernized in fact . As long as Russia possesses them it is a dangerous game of “Russian” roulette that is being played here by the war-for-profit gang . And how about the callous disregard for life being displayed by proponents of protracted war ? Get Z to the table .
Steve, your problem is that you’re not diversifying.
https://twitter.com/realdailywire/status/1616615964971261961?s=61&t=hvDOiphhExACW3fTgq6i1A
I definitely support Ukraine—because, to me, national sovereignty is as important to freedom as free speech. But I also get why so many Americans are against it. And I fear that, for all our treasure spent, the Ukrainians will eventually turn against us after we sell them down the river of negotiation and they end up in the same spot as on February 23, 2022, except that their country has been totally destroyed—all after Biden, lying in line with every breath he utters, told the world in March 2022: “For God’s sake [Putin] cannot remain in power.” On a moral level, I find it hard to square the destruction of an entire country, much of the world’s breadbasket, and the deaths of thousands of Ukrainian and Russian soldiers with the U.S. hope of destroying Russia’s military capabilities, as if they can’t be rebuilt.
Megyn Kelly recently had historian Sean McMeekin on her podcast. Talking about World War I, McMeekin posed the possibility that had the U.S. not entered the war, the belligerents on the Eastern Front might have been forced to negotiate an end to what had become a stalemate, meaning no Versailles Treaty and perhaps no impetus for World War II. I’m not saying he’s right, but it’s worth pondering, especially given the potential for bad unintended consequences of every battle we finance but do not fight.
Funniest exchange ever (paraphrasing):
Steve: Be careful, you might get reported to the Title IX Officer.
International Woman of Mystery: I AM the Title IX Officer.
For as smart as John is when it comes to the constitution, he has absolutely zero imagination when it comes to Russia and Putin. Like so many members of Conservative, Inc. John is stuck in the Cold War mentality of the 80s and the Reagan era. There’s absolutely zero evidence that Putin is a Marxist. Lucretia is absolutely correct.
A Russian defeat in Ukraine is the only hope for democracy — in Russia, as well as Ukraine. It was, after all, the humiliation of the Argentine military junta in the Falklands War that led to the restoration of democracy in Argentina.
Admittedly, the Democratic Party’s long record of betraying American allies (for immediate domestic political advantage) is a cause for concern.
And we already see the “corruption scam” being deployed against Ukraine. This is the scam that helped trick Harry Truman into abandoning our allies against Japan, the Chinese Nationalists; even as Stalin forwarded American munitions to the Chinese Communists (who mostly sat out the war with Japan).
If Ukraine were really selling weapons on the black market, then the Ukrainian countryside wouldn’t be littered with burnt out Russian tanks.
And if Ukraine had not been coerced by the Clinton Administration and others to hand over its nuclear weapons – to Russia! – then this war would never have happened.
My European Diplomatic History prof told us, in 1974, that “Russia is a dangerous country, because of its long history, because of its location, and because of the nature of its leadership.” The leftist students of that time at a major Big 10 university scoffed because they had no issue with Communism- but I would remind Boethius that the statement says nothing about Marx. Putin does tend to emulate Stalin, however.
And Hitler: Concerned about Russia’s low birth rate, he’s grabbing people from occupied Ukrainian territory and shipping them north. Which is a war crime; but then, Putin has committed so many, one more hardly makes a difference.
Russia, originally called Muscovy, has been an expansionist state for 700 years, pushing all the way to the ocean in the North and East, and now resuming its push to the West (where Ukraine is the gateway to the rest of Europe) and South (where it can take advantage of Biden’s abandonment of Afghanistan).
Indeed, Russia is so much a threat to all of Europe that, after 70 years, Sweden and Finland are giving up their treasured neutrality and joining NATO. They don’t dare wait: they have to do it while the Russian military is tied up in Ukraine. Otherwise Putin would treat their joining NATO as an act of war, and attack preemptively.
If Putin is not a Marxist, that’s of great interest to the Russian people, because it means that, while he will murder thousands of Russians to eliminate any potential threat to his power, he probably won’t murder millions to implement Marx’s crackpot ideas.
Nor will he intentionally strangle the Russian economy by socializing it: his corrupt gangster economy is bad, but not quite as bad as socialism.
On the other hand, we on the outside are beginning to learn that, whatever name it puts on, Russian imperialism is Russian imperialism is Russian imperialism. In retrospect, it’s obvious that the “anti-imperialist” Lenin sent out armies to crush independence movements and recreate the exact borders of the Russian Empire: successfully in Ukraine, unsuccessfully in Poland; etc.
Except I’m pretty sure it was John Yoo who played straight man for Lucretia in that joke, not Steve Hayward.
Constitutional interpretation; political history; analysis of global geopolitical conflicts where millions of lives are at stake is all well and good, but giving credit where credit is due for the excellent comedy that is delivered on the Three Whiskey Happy Hour is paramount.
In re the Potemkin search for the Dobbs opinion leaker, I object to the implication that
* resentment on the part of conservative Justices whose lives have literally been threatened as a consequence of the leak
is not worthy of consideration, or even worthy of comparison to
* resentment on the part of liberal justices to a proper investigation of a devastatingly damaging breach of trust and explicit breach of professional ethics.
I get the impression that Lucretia doesn’t spend a lot of time keeping up on the state of the conflict, so let me recommend some sources:
The Institute for the Study of War (understandingwar.org)
TVP World (Polish public TV in English)
Front-line war reporting by Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty.
Ukrainians presenting ongoing analysis of battle maps, including how foreign weapons systems are helping: e.g., commercial pilot Denys Davydov
For analysis of the Russian regime: political philosopher Vlad Vexler, an Isaiah Berlin scholar raised in Russia and living in England.