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John Yoo is over in Korea this week, where he says he is "lecturing," but we know he's really just arranging to smuggle back a ton of tariff-free Korean barbecue sauce. So in his absence Steve and Lucretia attempted to hold a live taping streamed on YouTube (in Steve's case, accompanied by Bad Rock rye whisky that "Pizza Bob" supplied directly to him this week), but we missed a technical step in the preparation process and couldn't get it to work. But we have posted the video anyway on our all-new 3WHH Podcast YouTube Channel. And we'll aim to get the livestream option working by next week.
In anything case, we did have a small audience join us live on the Zoom webinar, and we fielded a number of listener and reader questions, culminating in a long discussion of good books about the American Founding, to get a jump on the semiquincentennial (250th) anniversary of the Declaration of Independence coming up next July. Steve went with four short books: Edmund Morgan's classic Birth of the Republic, 1763-1789; Martin Diamond's The Founding of the Democratic Republic (hard to find alas); Gordon Wood's The American Revolution: A History (which is both much shorter and better than his famous Creation of the American Republic); and Larry Arnn's The Founders' Key: The Divine and Natural Connection Between the Declaration and the Constitution and What We Risk by Losing It.
Lucretia offered up her oral history of how the founding ought to be understood and more importantly taught to students, before settling on a challenging new book. Edward Erler's Prophetic Statesmanship: Harry Jaffa, Abraham Lincoln, and the Gettysburg Address, which doesn't sound like it's about the American Founding, but actually is. And we had a few other stray books to include, which is likely more than our questioner wanted. In any case, much more to come as we draw near to the 250th July 4 next year.
'Lucretia'
Steve Hayward
Discussion (5)
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Enjoyable episode, as always. I watched it "live" -- Lucretia working without a net -- and all seemed to go smoothly (though my laptop temporarily crashed just as you were wrapping up, so I don't know if there were any scandalous utterances in the final moments. Thank you for listing the books here. Lots of intriguing titles.
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It’s nice to have an episode without John. He doesn't understand anything about foreign policy. Nixon split China off from the Soviet Union. Neocons like John have driven them together. John exulted in the last episode over Russian casualties. A weakened Russia is more dependent on China. We need to split Russia off from China which is a much more dangerous adversary. John is our Jim Cramer…
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John's POV is the extra ingredient in the sauce here. It's obviously different without him there, but to label him a Cramer is cruel and unusual punishment.
You'd be hard-pressed to claim that the USSR and China were big ol' buddies until Nixon inserted his nose. Collaborators, sure, but Nixon didn't create ethnic and sociological differences because Kissinger wandered into Beijing. Us trying to pry open these societies that kill tens of millions of their own people, and trying to make sense of where political alignments can occur and what we'd have to push back on with whatever tools are available, sounds like full-time employment at the State Department, where you're never held accountable for outcomes. I can't keep straight who's responsible for splintering or reconstruction of these so-called alliances, across time, but I am confident we (the West) are always a day late and a dollar short in catching up to what really happened, and why.
Sort of a long way of saying I missed John's contributions, but I'm sure South Korea is better off for his visit.
CONTRIBUTOR
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With respect to the filibuster, I have a hard time believing it's significant. One point y'all passed by is that a two-thirds majority is required to break a filibuster right now. The hope, I guess, is that a thin majority party will be less likely to make changes to get short-term gains, because if that's all they wanted they could break a filibuster without changing the rules.
Here's my problem with that, and really every discussion about the filibuster, among other things. Suppose you're a bank manager. You're hiring a known safecracker to guard your vault. What rules do you write for him so as to guard your money? The answer is, it really doesn't matter. If he's willing to rob you he's not going to worry about breaking your rules. Put whatever rules in place in the Senate, I'm not going to be surprised when the senators find a workaround.
Also,
MORE CLEAN AIR ACT CONTENT!!
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Repeal the 17th Amendment.