This week Lucretia really takes it to Steve for his advanced case of DMLAS (Deficient Meat Loaf Awareness Syndrome—and we’re not talking the baked dish here), which surely must make the next edition of the DSM.

But from there we quickly pivot to a recap and demolition of the highlights of this week’s news, starting with Biden’s disastrous press conference, but moving quickly to the heart of the matter—that Biden’s errors stem from the luminous lightweights he listens to that have appealed to his narcissism. (Yes, we’re pointing at you, Jon Meacham! Meacham is reported to be the person who wrote Biden’s appalling lines about how everyone who doesn’t agree with him is Bull Connor.)

Both Steve and Lucretia get through three different whiskys each in this gala episode, recorded with a live audience on Zoom, celebrating the Biden-Harris administration’s worst week in office yet, though as the noted political analyst Homer Simpson might say, “their worst week—so far.”

It took Jimmy Carter three years to hit bottom in the summer of 1979, when even The New Republic declared that he had “packed it in” with his pathetic performance in the “malaise” speech. It’s only taken Biden one year to sink to Carter-levels of incompetence and public disapproval. At least he had a plausible Vice President, even if he was a bit dull (get it—Walter Mondull, as Rush used to call him). Mondale, by the way, considered resigning in July of 1979 he was so distraught at Carter’s collapse. Sadly we have no such hope that our current Vice President might consider the same step.

We open this first episode of the 3WHH of 2022 with the existential question: why is Lucretia so mean to Steve? Actually she has a really good reason, but you have to get all the way to the end for the reward—or is it a redemption? (Steve attempts to mellow Lucretia with a Snickers Bar of an op-ed in the middle, with some success.)

In any case, we try to offer some original and comparative perspective on the relentless leftist narrative about January 6, which somehow reminds Steve of . . . climate change. (You’ll just have to listen to learn the parallel, but it works!)

Today’s episode offers up our picks for losers and winners of the year. I won’t spill them here—you’ll just have to listen to find out—but they do fall within the obvious range, though Steve’s winner of the year provides the pivot for answering a listener question about energy. Plus we offer yet another new “Let’s Go Brandon” exit music tune—this one from ab ad hoc country group strangely named “FJB.” I wonder if those are the initials of the individual singing artists?

Today’s minicast takes in the observation of an unlikely source—Nate Silver—about how our politicized “public health” establishment worked assiduously to delay the approval of COVID vaccines last year until after the election so as to help defeat Trump, even though this delay might have cost many thousands of lives.

The historical record notes that George Washington used to include ample supplies of whisky to distribute to voters and campaign workers in the elections of the 1790s, so the subject of election integrity is perfect for this week’s one-off Whisky Shot casts.

Steve and Lucretia review what is gradually coming into sharper focus: the very targeted intervention of nearly $500 million from Mark Zuckerberg decisively swung the election to Joe Biden. Changes in voting rules because of COVID helped, but without the supercharged efforts funded by Zuckerberg through left-wing groups maximizing turnout in key Democratic urban strongholds it is more likely than not that Trump would have been re-elected.

The week after Christmas is the interregnum where we attempt to resume a more moderate level of eating and drinking before the football-anchored binge of New Year’s Eve, and so instead of one three-whisky podcast, Lucretia and I decided—for this week only—to do a short, daily single-shot whiskycast, focusing on just one topic for just 20 minutes or so. So you can binge-listen, even if you can’t binge-drink. We try to be equally intoxicating.

Today’s episode takes up an academic question raised by a listener about a stray comment of Steve’s about how the twain shall never meet between philosophy and political philosophy.

This special end-of-semester episode features Steve and Lucretia  reflecting on the latest academic hoax that Steve highlighted earlier in the week on Power Line (here and here), and which may have contributed to Higher Education Quarterly having to retract the fake article on how “right wing money” is supposedly pushing colleges and universities to the right and intimidating faculty and administrators. The study was so ludicrous that only a liberal (and apparently the academic “peer reviewers” who signed off on the article) could have believed it.

This opens up a wider window into the question of why leftists—especially on campus—are such miserable, unhappy, and intolerant people, and why they behave tyrannically, increasingly turning our campuses into Stasi-like institutions worthy of East Germany. (Just this week, Columbia University put out a video, posted below, calling on students and staff to “report” people who use incorrect pronouns because of the “harm” and threat to safety such unpure speech acts represent. Suggestion: Why don’t we simply just call everyone “comrade” and solve everything at once.) The answer requires taking seriously the nihilism of the modern left which cannot tolerate any disagreement or challenge to their position because it threatens their very being, while conventional or moderate liberals have been swept too far by the premises of supposedly progressivism to offer effective resistance to the extreme left. Warning: Expect cameo appearances from Harry Neumann and Harry Jaffa along the way!

Back in the sixties Ronald Reagan liked to quip, “A liberal’s idea of being tough on crime is giving longer suspended sentences.” Today’s liberals don’t even bother with lenient sentences; instead, in our current “defund the police, empty the prisons” mania, they don’t even bother charging many crimes or applying significant bail, as we saw in Wisconsin a few days ago.

This week Steve and Lucretia decided to go back to the classics on this issue: James Q. Wilson, Edward Banfield, Heather Mac Donald, and . . . Aristotle (because of course everything needs to go back to Aristotle whenever you can), though Lucretia offers a zesty side dish of modern social contract theory. (Short version: When it comes to crime, “Government—you had one job!”)

This week’s review of the news begins with the two huge stories that broke Friday—the acquittal of Kyle Rittenhouse (which is causing grief counselors for leftists to work overtime again), and the House passage of Biden’s so-called “Build Back Better” spendathon.  The latter story may seem like a Biden/Democrat triumph, but in fact a closer look shows that this may come to be seen as the week when the wobbly wheels of the Biden administration began to come off completely.

Lucretia and Steve review the whole scene, starting with the reaction to the Rittenhouse acquittal, but then moving to Steve’s theory about what the civil war inside the White House over Kamala Harris really means, and the warning signs all of this should be sending to Democrats. As Thomas Byrne Edsall advised in the New York Times, Democrats shouldn’t panic right now—they should be “going into shock.” (Ditto from Ruy Teixiera—another rare progressive who gets it.)

This week’s edition of the Three Whisky VERY Happy Hour revels in schadenfreude over the spectacle of the left freaking out over the election results on Tuesday. As political philosophers we try to go beyond the usual political punditry to get at the heart of the matter, explaining why the left’s dime-store Hegelian historicism (“the side of history”) that informs their moral smugness makes it necessary to charge that the only reason they lost was that Americans are irredeemably racist. Keep it up Dems: I’m sure you can lose even more votes next time with that line.

The episode is extra long, but there was so much to celebrate that even Lucretia’s normally coal-black soul was brighter than usual (“I only wore black once this week,” she admits). In addition to the election results, we also have some quick examinations of the latest COVID news, especially the madness of the employee vaccine mandate that is certain to backfire, the feeble results of the COP 26 climate hootenanny, some cautions about falling for a possible bait-and-switch in the Biden “Build Back Better” plan still bouncing around the House now that the “infrastructure” bill has passed (hint: it’s not about the spending—it’s about raising taxes), the final straw in cancel culture, and a few observations what special counsel Durham’s arrest of Igor Danchenko, who sounds like a minor character out of Rocky & Bullwinkle. And of course some new whisky reviews!