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On this episode of The Big Show® we take you back to last night’s 74th Annual Alfred E. Smith Memorial Foundation Dinner where Rob offers a first hand report. The guest of honor was former Defense Secretary (and Marine Corps legend) James Mattis and, of course, the main topic in the hall was the current situation in Syria with Turkey and the Kurds. (The General’s full remarks can be watched on the Fox News Facebook page.)
Then it’s off to the City by the Bay with Heather Mac Donald, where she recounts buying fentanyl on the streets and how a great American city has fallen hostage to its homeless population.
To wrap things we cover the current state of the 2020 race for the White House, including Elizabeth Warren’s “zinger” on gay marriage.
Music from this week’s show: I Left My Heart in San Francisco by (Who else?) Tony Bennett.
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I wish Gary would be willing to put money on that, but even if he did, it wouldn’t matter, it wouldn’t hold up in court, because the Insanity Defense would be the obvious out.
Easily solved. Impeach Klobuchar Now!!!
Say it, don’t spray it, man.
Klobuchar-Buttigieg? That’s that five stages of grief thing, right?
Klobuchar? Bittigieg! Buttigieg! Klobuchar?
Klobugieg Buttichar?
Klobubuttigrieguchar?
Buttiklobucharigieg?
i love heather mac donald
funny, smart, insightful, erudite and fearless
Or ….
Gesundheit!
MacDonald brought up some very interesting points about SF, however, it’s important to be facts-based when dealing with drug hysteria. After all, the pre-2010 belief that all street drugs will kill you has really dulled the response to fentanyl, the first drug to truly deliver on the hype.
For reference, a Quora post from the ground has some data that shows evidence that MacDonald did not actually buy 2 grams of fentanyl.
https://www.quora.com/How-much-is-a-gram-of-fentanyl
I’m saying that while it’s likely that you can buy fent at the SF airport, I’m skeptical that MacDonald actually got anything of note. If she did, then it’s more likely that for $16 she received one or two doses of fentanyl in a pill (like a Percocet), not 2 million doses.
She can test the pill by crushing it, dissolving it in water, and using fentanyl test strips you can buy on Amazon. If she wants to be more investigative, she can order other test kits and test accordingly to see what else it was cut with.
It’s generally not a defense against illegal drug possession that you didn’t know it was real, especially if she is going on the podcast and claiming it to be real. So she wouldn’t likely to be putting herself into a worse legal position by testing the substance herself and disposing of the whole mess as soon as she’s done.
@rufusrjones It seems you were the only one who got what I was trying to get at.
I got it, but some of your specific points were wrong. I agree with the overall premise.
Our track record on bold, war related initiatives leaves much to be desired. Then the problems just feedback on themselves. It started 100 years ago. Somehow the cycle has to get interdicted.
I just heard that prior to World War II the president of Haiti wanted to accept 40,000 Jewish refugees and FDR quashed it. Can you imagine having one well functioning country for once in that area? Wouldn’t that be nice?
The state department started to Korean War and the Gulf War I. Everything is like that.
-Trump is known as a guy who goes by feel, this is a contrast to counterbalance the narrative of a White House in chaos due to erratic decision making. It gives Warren the appearance that she’s studied issues and come up with tempered solutions
-If she wins and the Senate does not implement her plans, she can run against that in the midterms
-If any get passed and as all of these things go, it does not work according to plan, they can use the “unexpectedly” label for failures, much like the Obama administration did in the media. It’s not the fault of the plans or the planners, it’s the fault of unforseen external forces that nobody could have seen coming (Narrator: everyone saw it coming)
I remember reading in the National Interest, some years ago, that the President of Haiti wanted to accept 100,000 Jewish refugees. (FDR also prevented the US Virgin Islands from accepting refugees.)
It’s fun to daydream: the University of Haiti would have been one of the premier educational institutions of the Western Hemisphere.
But what actually happened was that the FDR administration shipped German Jews to Nazi Germany, as “enemy aliens”!
And let us never forget: FDR was a Democrat!
It’s irrelevant whether Democrat’s would hypothetically do better. President Pence would do better than any of them.
Yet somehow Trump would not be even more easily recognized as even more severely “tainted” and unfit?
1) He alone chose to enable ethnic cleansing.
2) He has tried and will try to defend that choice, further proving his lack of judgment or fitness for holding that power.
Which is more appropriately called “Unilateral Disarmament”? For a team to replace their lead pitcher once he begins to hand over home runs to the other side? Or for a team to unilaterally decide they will never make use of the arm of their relief pitcher?
How is it “disarmament” to decide against staking 2020 hopes on someone who is both guilty of enabling ethnic cleansing and lacks the soundness of mind and judgment to realize that it was a bad decision? His defensive, rationalizing tweeting will prove the Democrat attacks are correct. He won’t be able to admit he shouldn’t have opened the door to Islamist ethnic cleansing.
It’s too complicated to get into here, especially with Ricochet’s word limit at least for “podcast” members such as myself. But just for one example, I would argue that Obama’s withdrawal from Iraq also invited ethnic cleansing. So again, it’s “unilateral disarmament” to remove Trump for that but not Obama. Obama also undid missile defense plans for allies in Europe, something Trump hasn’t done. That ethnic cleansing – or whatever – hasn’t happened YET, but if what Trump did is impeachable, again, why not that? Do you forgive that because that was part of the left’s “Plans” in general and Obama’s “Plans” in particular?
Those kinds of moves, along with Obama wanting to limit domestic oil and gas production and hence not make it feasible for us to export, serves to push some European countries into making energy deals with Russia. Trump has done just the opposite, and US energy exports can help to make European allies less dependent on Russia for energy.
And Pence might not even get a chance to be “interim” president if the Dems push impeachment/removal out towards Election Day.
Heather McDonald got really close to saying that races differ in IQ…so close I thought she was going to break out into race realism and that was interesting. She stopped just short saying academic achievement. But races do differ by IQ and it is a reality we must deal with at least intellectually in discussions about the relative violence levels and relative levels of achievement. I don’t think it matters as much as some say, the effect is dwarfed by the fatherlessness of the inner city and poor white communities.
The proper way to think about the lefts and their causes is that Christian America has been conquered and we are an occupied people, and like many occupied people we are subject to humiliation to keep us in line. Why do my children learn in public schools in a right leaning state that everything their parents believe is bad, that feminism is liberation, that homosexuality is the best perspective, that socialism (100 million and counting) is the true path. To humiliate us. Why take some of our children and against our wishes teach them they might have different gender and then force us to comply with the state. Its all to humiliate Christian America and it is working as planned.
And the (other*) awful effects of liberal “help.”
*other because fatherlessness is also largely related to liberalism.
No one has defended Obama’s terrible decisions. I pointed out repeatedly that McCarthy did in fact advocate for making the case to impeach Obama. But Obama is irrelevant to my question to you because Obama is not running in 2020.
The question you haven’t addressed is how it avoids “disarmament” to insist on going into the 2020 election with a candidate who has demonstrated for all to see that he is unfit to hold the power of the office. He enabled the Islamists to begin their desired program of ethnic cleansing. It did begin. That their execution hasn’t succeeded “YET” is irrelevant. The issue is the fitness of Trump’s judgment as President.
I know you don’t prefer that the Democrats would win in 2020. So it makes no sense that you would consider it “disarmament” to avoid giving Democrats the gift advantage of facing a Republican candidate that opened the door for Islamist ethnic cleansing against all council on an impulse.
Democrats will make sure every movable swing vote knows about his failing poor judgment. Trump will then defend himself and call his choice great, perfect, and thereby prove to those swing voters he can’t tell the difference between good judgment and terrible judgment. He will surely prove their point for them. Helping Democrats win is being “better armed” than having someone else lead the ticket?
Jonah Goldberg says that kind of thing a lot too, it’s basically a non sequitur.
I don’t see any GOP primary-challenger winning even if there was one, or Pence winning if Trump were removed or just resigned. If a sufficient number of voters can’t get it through their skulls that Trump is better than any of the Democrats, well I guess they deserve what they’ll get.
These would be non sequiturs. “I believe Obama merited impeachment. It was wrong that he wasn’t impeached. Therefore, …
a) …Trump doesn’t merit impeachment.
b) …though Trump merits impeachment, it’s not wrong to not impeach him.
c) …because the Democrats did wrong, the Republicans should do wrong too.
d) …even if Trump’s failing judgment shows he is unfit for office, it is smarter to hand Democrats the gift of an easy campaign target who will prove to all his lack of judgment by defending his terrible judgment.
That consolation(?) (“they deserve what they’ll get”) justifies refusing to make way for a better candidate who would not have Trump’s liabilities? Trump’s backstab impulse decision to enable Turkey (supporter and trainer of Islamists) to eliminate our allies against ISIS is widely recognized as deplorable maladministration. No other Republican did that. Only Trump, and he will defend it.
And swing voters cannot tell the difference between Trump and any other Republican who can see it was a terrible decision?
@ericb — I posted this on another string, but it’s also relevant here. The speaker is rabidly Trump-hating CNN correspondent Jeffrey Toobin:
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
It may also be worth noting that, avid as the Democrats are in pursuit of impeachment, they do not see the pullback of a few troops in Syria as grounds.
Actually none of those is a non sequitur. A non sequitur would be more like “Trump is guilty, therefore the moon is made of green cheese.”
Fine, remove Trump and replace him with some other Republican who will lose because of “the GOP scandal”, and the voters will deserve that too.
I don’t expect it will be made grounds. But a strongly bipartisan House rebuked Trump’s terrible decision. Watch and see whether Democrats use it to attack candidate Trump’s judgment.
Toobin is mistaken. Previously Trump exceeded my expectations. No other Trump action as President comes close to this one for undermining my willingness to entrust the power of the office to his failing judgment.
Toobin focused on whether Americans want to stay. But Trump hasn’t left Afghanistan (the actual unending war) and is staying by the Syrian oil fields. He only abandoned the “sand” that the Islamists wanted to bomb.
Allies against ISIS live on that “sand” — allies building a multiethnic society with minority participation, freedom of religion, and rights for women. It is a unique island within a sea of Islamist authoritarianism. All those who are Christians have brothers and sisters living there.
Trump could have negotiated for our organized departure in conjunction with securing a stable future for that young beacon and model for liberty within a federated Syria. Instead, on an impulse, defying counsel, he abruptly relocated troops just enough to let Islamists attack. Liberty was thrown to the wolves.
Fox news is reporting that since 2014, we have spent $25 billion on that strip of land in Syria.
That’s over 5 years. Even that combined total is under 0.7% of a single year’s budget. Per year it is under 0.2%.
Result: The defeat of the Islamic State, with its commitment to practicing and exporting jihad and submission to Sharia. In its place is an indigenous multiethnic, multi-religious cooperative society built upon valuing religious freedom (even to convert from Islam!) and women’s rights.
A bargain worth every single penny…
…provided we don’t throw the gain away and reinvigorate ISIS through the reckless undermining of the fighters who did the heavy lifting of fighting and detaining ISIS.
Meanwhile jihadist supporter Turkey is using groups like the Syrian Free Army, which it has funded and trained, which is full of al-Qaeda militants, and which includes at least 40 identified former ISIS fighters.
Is there any doubt at all about which of these two very different understandings of Islam we should prefer to grow strong and spread in the world?
…