The Commentary Magazine Podcast

The Gripes of Rothman

Noah Rothman makes another surprise guest appearance on the podcast he founded back in 2015! It's Day Two of a conversation about the fallout from the presidential debate, which garnered a colossal audience and therefore demands a discussion about whether Donald Trump can afford not to debate a second or even third time after his loss on Tuesday. Give a listen.

Broadcast on:: 12 Sep 2024
Audio Format:: other

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Schedule an appointment with one of Cordell and Cordell's Charleston area attorneys. 1180 Sam Rittenberg Boulevard, Sweet 200, Charleston, South Carolina, 29407. Rick Julius, licensed in Pennsylvania only, Cordell Cordell.com. Welcome to the commentary magazine daily podcast. Today is Thursday, September 12th, 2024. I am John Pothworth, the editor of commentary magazine reminding you that in just 64 days, I believe we will be hosting the 13th, 14th. I can't remember what the count is annual commentary roast with Natan Sharansky as the roasty, the greatest living Jewish hero. How can you roast the greatest living Jewish hero? You're going to have to come and find out. And that how to come to the commentary roast by going to commentary.org/roast. We are filling up. So if this is something that is of interest to you, you need to arrange it now, particularly if you're coming in from out of town. So that is commentary.org/roast and if you come, you will meet today's panel, an exciting panel today, unexpected twists and turns. Of course, as always, executive editor, a Greenwald High Abe, I like the, of course, I'm not the exciting part. You bring your own excitement with you wherever you go. Yes. Okay. And of course, fresh from every other podcast in America, media commentary columnist Christine Rosen, author of the new book, The Extinction of Experience, you can hear her talk about it on Jonah Goldberg's podcast. You can hear her talk about it upcoming on many other podcasts, our own Christine Rosen. Hi, Christine. Hi, John. And special surprise guest commentary podcast founder, the man with whom there would be no commentary podcast, the man who important me to start the commentary podcast. And the man who was on the podcast until I was at the middle of last year for its first eight years of existence, national review, senior writer, Noah Rothman, hi, Noah. Hi, John, bringing the excitement. We went through 2016 together. We went through 2020 together. We have the most important event of the presidential election so far, the actual election that's going to happen, we already had a more important event than the presidential election that didn't happen in June, since that event led to the presidential election that was supposed to happen not happening. But we've just had the, of course, the debate. We had our emergency podcast talk about the debate. You were on the national review podcast yesterday to talk about the debate. We have some new pieces of data that actually I think will incline us to continue talking about it, the main one being that it had an astoundingly large audience, 67 million people watched the debate on 14 different simulcast networks or something like that, making this outside of sports, the most watched event on television in 10 years? It may be after the streaming numbers are insane, do you see the streaming numbers? No, I didn't see the streaming numbers. Like 7.4 million across Hulu, Disney plus and ABC owned apps, another 2.3 million on Fox's apps and so on and so on. Okay, so we're the most near 80 million ever. Yeah, so I think there was a debate, I think back when there was only linear television and all of that, and they would simulcast the debates on all three networks, if I remember correctly. I think the Carter, excuse me, the Reagan-Mondale debate got 90 million viewers in a country that was much smaller, but I mean, you literally don't have any common events like this at all outside of the Super Bowl. This will be the second, is there already, I think the second most watched thing in America this year, aside from the Super Bowl? And therefore, there are going to be more of them, right? We had the whole, we ended our podcast on the conquest of whether or not there would be more. We got it exactly backward though, it turns out, because even whether we thought there would be, wouldn't be, the idea was that it would be in Kamala's hands. It would be up to her because Trump would want one and she would either rest, you know, on her performance and try to hide again or try to capitalize on it. But so far, it seems to have fallen at the other way. Okay, so she's ready, her campus said, "Yeah, sure." And Trump's not sure. Well, so Christine, on our Zoom here, you shook your head at the notion that there would be another debate. Yeah, no, I think Trump doesn't want another debate. Yeah, I think this showed his lack of discipline and the fact that so many people saw it. He also never likes to admit error. He came out of that debate saying, "This is the best debate I've ever had." You know, his team is, which is now including people who are probably encouraging an alternative reality bubble around to people like Laura Loomer, traveling with him, probably told him he was fantastic and that he hit all the marks and all those very online Republicans who support him are now really enthusiastic about him. I don't see any benefit for him believing them, but he probably will. He doesn't, you know, all the stories we're seeing coming out of it is, you know, we've got to let Trump be Trump. Well, he was Trump and everyone saw it. He should do another debate, but it would only be useful for him if he could exercise himself to discipline. Okay, let me just make the quick case that there has to be another debate or two or three. I don't care whether Trump wants to or doesn't want to or not. He will never again, from here until November, have an audience attend the size of the size of this audience and therefore he will never be able to revise or extend his remarks and do something about the impression that was left. He can walk around saying that he thought he had the best debate ever and he can say that the online polls said that weren't fair or something like that. Two thirds of the people who watched the debate from what we can tell thought that she wanted he lost. He can't recover that ground without a comparable event where he can try to overcome that first impression. Otherwise, this is the thing that people are going to remember from this election. Well, we don't know if he's lost ground at all. We don't know. That's correct. Okay. So this always happens where you watch these events, you have your first impression. It's a pretty well supported impression, which is that Trump did badly. And then input start showing up and you start second guessing yourself and overthinking things and saying, well, you know, there was the dials and the independence on the dials. They actually, they kind of tracked with Republicans when Trump was talking here and there and then you had the snap poll where CNN Reuters, they're talking undecided voters. They don't see him all that influenced by events. So maybe Trump didn't lose any ground at all. I guarantee you that's what is in his ear today. You know, don't listen to the pundits. They don't know what they're talking about. You did great. Okay. You're Donald Trump and somebody says 80 million people watched you in that debate. And it's September, it was September 10th and the election is November 5th. And every rally, every thing, every appearance on Fox and Friends on the phone, every moment you sit with Hannity at some, you know, ginned up town hall, all of that, that's all well and good. But when you add up all of those things together, they're not going to add up to the single audience size that watched on September 10th. And maybe it'll lose ground. Maybe this. Maybe that first of all, he loves. It would be weird if he didn't lose ground. Right. Now, let's say he doesn't even so, even so, he loves an audience, he loves being on TV. And I find it now science fictional to think that we're just going to, that it's, we're just going to leave it here. Christine, you're saying he would need enough self knowledge to know that we need better for him not to do it. And that's the self knowledge he doesn't have. Right. But he could be tricked into it, not tricked. But his advisors could say, do exactly what you just said and said, you'll never have, you need a big audience. The people want to hear from you again, it's a, I mean, it's a massive crowd size. I mean, narcissistic math is almost as bad as commentary magazine podcast math like it's not, it's not real math. I am. So I got a 630 on my math SAT. So I am not going to sit here and take this from you. As a humanities person, I say, great. I don't know what those numbers mean, but he, I mean, he could be maneuvered into it, I think. But a lot of what we don't know is, I mean, he, when he, when he speaks on truth social or, or whatnot, are we here at these leaks from his campaign that, that end up getting laundered into the New York Times story the next day? I think he's declaring what he really feels. I think he thought he had a great night. And if he doesn't want to hear about that, he can still be maneuvered into more debates. I think it'd be good for the American people to have more debates. I'm not against that. We have a vice presidential debate coming up before that, but I will, I do think he should insist on different moderators, a different approach. Maybe maybe they do have more of a town hall thing. I would like to see them mix it up in, in under different circumstances and what we saw with the first Biden debate and now with the Harris debate. But you know, by the way, sorry, I just want to say, if he thinks that he had a good debate, then he will not have anything resembling discipline next time. I mean, if he thought this word for him. If JD Vance has a good debate, he'll probably want to have another debate. That's a really good point. That is a very, that is a very interesting or he'll fire JD Vance. Remember like on the apprentice, on the apprentice, if you watch the apprentice, he had this great co co star like he had this, this woman, Carolyn, who was his like number two on the apprentice. And she was great and everybody loved her. So he fired her because she was getting too much praise. So even though she was like a popular feature of a popular television show and you don't like, you know, like, you don't get rid of Fonzie because, you know, I was going to say fan away. No way. No way. Okay. Anyway. But let's, let's dig down a little bit. So I'm saying there will be at least another debate, if not two, and that there will be a debate in which they, they try to shake up the format. It will be a town hall, something like that. Classic three debate format, right, is you have the first debate on domestic affairs. You have the second debate, either on foreign policy or it's some kind of a town hall. And then the third debate is on foreign affairs. Now, maybe they'll just sort of default to that as a kind of general matter. And one of the reasons this debate, I think, went was so odd is that they were bouncing. There was no consistency to the approach that the moderators were taking aside from whether or not the moderators were biased or all that they start here. They go there. They're on abortion. Suddenly they're on Ukraine. Then they're back to Israel. They go off to talk about January 6th. They're like, I have all these, we have all these little things we need to mention because otherwise maybe no one will ask them about this ever again. And I think we have to fact check him because he lies so much and, you know, we don't seem to have to fact check her because we work for her. Well, however you want to slice it. Okay. So, but let's, let's, let's game out the thing that Noah said about whether people overthink or don't overthink or think in longer terms than, Oh my God, what just happened in front of me last night because the first debate we came out and we're like, Oh my God, what just happened? And that was the thing, right? It was like, okay, something major needs to happen here because things, this is not good or I'm going to add a theory and Seth, I have to give credit to Seth Mandel not here today, laid this out on our emergency podcast a little bit. And then I was thinking about it more in terms of a couple of the other issues. So Trump didn't win any exchange. He seemed crazy, couldn't understand what he was saying, all of that. But two different things he did, which is that he hammered, right? He hammered and hammered and he said, she's against fracking, she's against fracking, she's against fracking, she's against fracking, really in the last third of the debate. She said, I'm not against fracking. I signed the, I was the tie breaking vote on the inflation reduction act that had allowed for more fracking. That is not true. That is not what was in the inflation reduction act, the inflation featured offshore oil leases for oil exploitation, which is a thing. But that is not fracking. Fracking is hydraulic fracturing of coal based oil underground in America, the positive American continent. Liquid natural gas. Right, exactly. Okay. So that is that what offshore oil drilling is. Okay. So, but so she said, I'm for oil or something like that. And he said, she's against fracking, she's against fracking, she's against fracking. Why does this matter? Well, okay. So if neural linguistic programming, this idea that if you say something enough times that yammer into somebody's head, it kind of gets planted there, even though they don't pay attention, 200,000 jobs or something like that in Pennsylvania, depending on fracking. It is the state that is going to decide the election still, unless somehow everything goes haywire this week, because the debate was so lopsided for Harris that she charges into big leads in North Carolina and Georgia and then upends the map. But if that's not the case, Pennsylvania remains the bellwether state or not even the bellwether, it is the state that will be decide the election. More jobs in Pennsylvania depend on fracking than in any other state. And if enough people who are in that industry or ancillary to the industry, not just working it, but like have the stores and the towns where people are fracking and all of that get it into their heads because of the way Trump did this, that I better worry about Kamala Harris and fracking. This is my livelihood. This is like, this is it. Like this is the one issue. I care about inflation, I care about this, but I mean, this is me, this is me and my family and all of that. I don't know. Maybe that'll, maybe that'll sink in over time. Maybe that sunk in on Tuesday night. Seth suggested that was the case and the more I thought about it yesterday, the more I thought maybe he's on to something because if you're a radio host in Harrisburg or radio host, you know, in Redding or something and you just play those tapes clips over and over or they do it on the podcast, the right wing bro podcast that people out there listen to. I don't know. No, what's your, maybe my assumption is that if you are that close to the ground and that close to the industry, you're already very hypersensitive to what the administration does to that industry. So when Joe Biden got into office, he imposed a fracking ban on federal lands. And then last year, a functionally put a halt to American liquid natural gas exports by putting this moratorium on the construction of these new terminals. And you're probably aware of that and you probably resent it. And if you don't resent it or don't know about it, I'm not sure you have that much of attachment to an industry, you would need that case made for you in more parochial terms, like how this affects your wallet. And nobody in the press is going to do that. Harris campaign is going to do that. I don't think the Trump campaign is capable of doing that. So on the margins, maybe, but as a broad mobilizing message, it would require more discipline, I think, from Republicans. But the opening is there. So that's right. So, but again, I think this again gets to the point of the size of this audience because you're saying they need it needs ancillary attention and I'm saying the ancillary attention is now like pipsqueak compared to what happened on, you know, on Monday night or whatever night that was even up Tuesday night, I guess. And so if he did it, if he hammered it, enough people heard it and it's an earworm. And this is a state that is a one-point race, 40,000 people win that state for one or the other of them. And she made this weird point of saying, you're being very insulting to the 800,000 Polish people who live in Pennsylvania. Can I talk about NATO? Was she talking about NATO? Yeah. She's talking about Ukraine. I'm not aware that Americans of Polish origin are particularly obsessed and consumed with the glories of NATO. I love NATO. I don't really think that one can really focus in on the Polish NATO connection. But no, but her point was about being chummy with Putin and protecting Putin. Right. I understand that. You know, this is like, this is a little Polish American. We Jews hate, we Jews hate the Zars and hate Russia because of the treatment of our people by the Zars and Russia. Polish Americans are here a very long time. And I don't know how much connection they have to Poland's relations with Putin's Russia. I think that was a bit of a stretch. Maybe I'm wrong. The polling data suggests this was a, this was a place she did it for some reason. Okay. Can I ask you one more? Just one more beat on the fracking question. Are you, because I want to make sure, are you saying that she was saying, I'm, I'm not against fracking. I'm not against fracking over and over again so that people would believe she's not against fracking. Even though Trump said she's against fracking. Okay. But then she said, I, I've never, I, that is not true. I signed this and that. But if you go to her policy proposal and search for fracking, it doesn't appear. So you're saying she's trying to fool voters in Pennsylvania to think she's not a radical. No. I just want. Really? Right. And I thought she was so, you know, she wasn't disingenuous at all, all the things. That's, that's where actually either the moderators should have done this job. Or in fact, it was Trump's job to say, where in your recent policy platform does it say you will allow fracking? I mean, that's the, it doesn't, I was very clear in 2020 that Joe Biden supports fracking. I mean, that's not what she said, but that's effectively what happened. People don't expect gaslighting from a female candidate in some way. So like there's a sense in which she, she'll say things, she'll assert things that aren't true, but she keeps insisting on them. And this is one of them. Okay. I just wanted to clarify. Okay. If that's right. If you're right, then what I'm saying will not be if. No, let's talk about Pennsylvania for a little bit because I've been doing a fair amount of research into the ground game there. Um, Jack Jake Tapper after the debate asked Governor Josh Shapiro indirectly because the mics weren't working. Where should the campaign focus, the Harris campaign? Should it focus on driving up the numbers? It obviously wants to drive up numbers in the tea, big red tea in the state on the one side. You have dark blue Pittsburgh. The other side, you have dark blue Philadelphia. And should they focus on driving up the numbers in Pittsburgh, white working class voters, where they're sending Joe Biden of all people to shore up Kamala Harris's deficits with that demographic? Or should they focus on the collar counties? Around suburban Philadelphia. And Josh Shapiro says, well, you got to get every vote. And then spent the remainder of the time talking about the collar counties. This makes sense to me and it makes sense to me in regards to the granular data that Kamala Harris let slip in that debate stage with those Polish Americans because they've been diving into the, um, geo TV operation. There was a very interesting piece in the Guardian by Hugo Lowell, who zoomed into the state and zoomed in on the Trump administration, Trump campaigns efforts there. And they're behind the eight ball, according to him, RNC. When the Trump can't family took over the RNC, they threw out the plan, right? The plan was to have all these field offices, all these staffers, and they just are starting from scratch. So right now they have 50 staffers in Pennsylvania, the Trump campaign to Kamala Harris's 375 in Pennsylvania alone. They are not doing, they're doing exactly what Mitt Romney did in 2012. They're outsourcing voter contacts to packs, um, they count, which, and Romney's voter contacts counted voter contacts is like leaving and flyer on a door as opposed to multiple face-to-face conversations with prospective voters, low propensity voters. That's, this feels like a campaign that's data heavy, the Harris campaign, and the Trump campaign doesn't. It's, it's sort of weighing in it. And that makes all the difference, obviously, in one point race. I would not be surprised if Kamala Harris said invoked the Polish-American diaspora in Pennsylvania for a very good reason. Quite sure they have data that suggests that another crucial demographics are critical to winning a state that'll go one way or the other by 50,000 votes. Look, you are absolutely right. That's why I brought this up is that it was a weird thing to do. You were talking, I mean, it's probably the first time in American political history that somebody has mentioned the Polish vote in Pennsylvania in a national election. I mean, you know, the classically, by the way, the Polish vote, if you were going to, if you were going to go in for a Polish vote, talk, you would do it in Chicago, where there are a mill, there were a million people in Polish origin. And that, that would be a place you would go just in one city, you know, that's where the pope went in 1979. Milwaukee. Milwaukee. But it was striking, it was a striking moment of really. And so you go, well, there's got to be a reason that it happened. And yeah, they are taking Pennsylvania, the Democrats are taking Pennsylvania, and they are chopping it up into tiny little bits and trying to figure out where they can ring the vote out that they need. Because until this week, we're going to be able to get the vote out. Because until this week, this was the one state that you could argue her arrival in the race had had no net positive effect. The polling in Pennsylvania from when Biden was there to when Trump was there, maybe she closed the gap up a little bit. But Trump in most of the polling did not lose ground in Pennsylvania whatsoever after Biden's departure. And it seems sticky. It seems like his vote in Pennsylvania is sticky and she's got to do something. She's got to gin up voters who might not otherwise have voted. And so if the state is up for grabs. And she thinks there's a way to play this game. Assuming that the Trump campaign hasn't lost its mind the way it feels like it's lost its mind a little bit with what it did to screw up the get out the vote effort at the RNC. They also have some sense of the granularity of the vote, but that Trump but that their big play is rural Pennsylvania voters overwhelmingly either know people or are personally involved in or get their livelihoods from or dependent on the livelihoods of others from fracking, which is a 15 year old industry. I just want to remind people we keep talking about how well. Oh my God, Silicon Valley came out of nowhere and it's so incredible this new industry there's changing America. There was no fracking in the United States until 2007. It is now 2024. I'm an exporter of oil, because this technology became mature almost instantly. Tens if not hundreds of billions of dollars of massive infrastructure investments have gone into making it possible not only to pull it out of the ground but to get it into pipelines to flow it down to the Gulf of Mexico to get it out on ships. It's an astonishing development that is like the most one of the most under covered industrial stories in world history, the complete creation of a gigantic industry. And Pennsylvania is at the heart of it. I mean it's not the only state that's at the heart of the Dakotas or at the heart of it Colorado's in the heart of it but Pennsylvania is the key here. I'm just saying he could just spend two months talking about fracking off of what he did last maybe. Maybe it's an earworm maybe got the got the bug in the ear and that it was a less unsuccessful debate than we think as we were judging it on performance. And general questions of fitness and that way debate was great for her. I think unambiguously great for her like she passed the she's not Biden she's not senile she's not this and did she look credible as a president. I guess so. The bar was the bar was low for that but I but a lot of swing voters that were pulled you know I Sarah Longwell did a sort of instant poll and voters and wrote it up for the Atlantic. They did that is one of the things that they were quite positive about with her performance and I think that's that's generally just because she didn't word salad a lot of her answers and she's. Yeah, she was clear she wasn't nervous she looked more she was more in command of herself and her emotions and her message than he was and therefore if this game if this kabuki shadow game of how you do in a debate is how you're going to judge whether somebody can be president which of course is ridiculous it's the worst possible way to judge how something's going to be president because what matters is what they talk about when you're not looking at them. Not what they talk about you are looking at them. She she cleared the bar very effectively second issue I want to bring up. Is immigration which of course he went crazy on and Noah you said that night you said I'm the. That is podcast yesterday you know once he went into their eating dogs. You know the whole debate was then you know that's it debates about moments and he said they're eating dogs pity the people who tuned in at just that moment I know two of them and they said I just instantly turned it off I don't know what was happening. Well tell you what though. Okay that's where I want to go let's go to I'll tell you what though go I still think that's true but the analysis was predicated on the assumption that most voters didn't see it. And most voters would only see clips of the event and that was obviously the poll that was what you were going to see tomorrow morning on the morning shows when you're you know getting the kids ready and heading out. I don't know if my analysis holds if the audience is as large as it could be if we're talking about 70 80 million people who saw the entire debate. They might come away with a much more fulsome impression of what they saw on that stage now that doesn't necessarily mean that they're going to come away with the impression that Trump was good. I would be surprised if they did. But they probably saw more than just the clip which is the highlight clip I mean in in 10 years from now we will remember this debate if we remember it at all as that they're eating pets debate. Yeah you know it's funny I have during the debate or at right after liberal friends of mine Democratic supporting friends of mine who are you know they're not news junkies. Um, text being said, God he was so all this crazy stuff he was saying what was this stuff about and it wasn't about the dogs. What is this stuff about Kamala supporting taxpayer transgender surgery for illegals. I said that's a hundred percent true. Right. They thought that was the crazy thing. Okay, so that was point number three, and I want to come back to that, but I do want to talk about the dogs and immigration. So watch out. I was like, Oh my God, he's so crazy. This is so crazy. It's absolutely crazy. And now I'm going to play trail making and go with the let's assume the American people are stupid and they they're stupid and they get what they get what they get and they're going to get it good and hard. He's one of the two leading issues in the election, both those issues inclined toward Trump or very much are in Trump's camp, right? That's inflation the economy and immigration. And he went with the most ridiculous aspect of the everything is out of control with immigration and they let it go out of control. I had it under control. They let it go out of control, which is the largest message. And it's like, why would you go there? And then again, thinking about it during the day and going with the mank in the American people are stupid argument, crystallizing the discomfort of Americans with runaway problems at the border, for most of whom they are distant, but they're nervous, like if they don't live in a border state or they don't live in a major city where suddenly there's a big influx of migrants, those major cities are all going to vote democratic. So as a matter of course, the 10 major cities in the country are the reliable base of the democratic party. So the fact that in my neighborhood, there are 100 people standing right industriously cutting up melon and selling it on a street corner or something like that. They're not lying around and being gangs and stuff like that, but it's a change in the streetscape. It's very, very evident, but so that's where most of it's happening and then it's happening in the border states, okay. But if you want to crystallize American discomfort with the changes in society that are being wrought by the fact that 10 to 20 million people have come in in the last four years and you're Trump and you don't care whether it's true or not and you're kind of like a purple, you know, you go, you go very purple and very melodramatic with all of your stuff. Getting it into people's heads that people are coming into this country and they're out of control and they're kidnapping dogs and eating them, just pull back a little bit and let me just tell you a quick story and then we can go to the discussion. I have friends. They live in Northern Westchester County. They have two little doxons. This is a dog story. This is what people are like when they have dog story and there were stories that maybe apocryphal and maybe real that there was a point at which hawks were flying around in Northern Westchester County, swooping down on backyards, grabbing little dogs in their talons and flying away with them to eat them. I'm not, this is a real thing that people talk about in Northern Westchester County here in New York State and my friends don't let their dogs go outside the house unless they're on a leash. They have a couple of acres. It's beautiful that dogs could run around in their yard. They won't let them because they're afraid of the hawks that could come and eat their doxons. Multiply them by a couple million people in the United States and say there are these people. They just came into this country four years ago. They're hungry. They're poor. They don't have any food and they come from a different culture and they're taking our dogs. Now call me crazy, say that I'm an idiot, say that I'm being unfair to the American people. Maybe that's sticky. In other words, maybe you need some kind of weird objective correlative or metaphor for what it is that's going on that the country that has changed the country because of unrestrained illegal immigration, you're on mute, Christine. It's fear based and it works because it's fear based but it starts the story at the point where the context that comes before would totally undermine the fear and that's that Springfield and other Rust Belt towns that had dwindling populations were actively seeking foreigners who would come and live and work in their towns to revive the town because people were moving away. Industries were dying. They needed workers. If you start the story there and then you say, this is going on, we're fearful of these groups ability to assimilate, then you're actually having a longstanding historical debate in the United States about how we assimilate people who come to this country and want to live here. That's boring and that doesn't get people out of their house to vote. I do think in that sense as a fear based get out the vote strategy on the right, of course it works. The problem is it's just it's wrong. It's factually wrong but it's also historically and culturally a debate that we can have on its own terms that's useful and appropriate and the point about I think that it coming up in the Harris and Trump discussion is that neither one of them is capable of having that debate as our leading candidates for office. Right. I'm sorry. You're very noble. I'm just saying that's a very noble reading of what I just said which is I just said that the major presidential candidate of the Republican party is going around retailing a ridiculous story about how immigrants are eating dogs. And then I'm trying to ask because maybe that's not dumb. Maybe he did something that has his weird if you look at the pun, animal cunning that it's sticky. It's going to get in people's heads and that there are enough lunatics in the country we're going to go. I can't vote for her. She's for people coming in here and eating my dog. Now maybe again, I think it's people watched. Okay. I'm sorry. I think it's simpler than that. I think he thinks Haitians are eating people's pants. I mean, I do. I think it's sticky in his head. I think the second he heard the story, he was like, but yeah, it must be true. And if and if he said he saw it on TV, right, I'm sure it's got to be true. Whenever he considers TV saw it on some screen and I'm I'm if he had heard the corrections on it and the the the the bunkings of it, I'm sure he said, well, you can't trust them. Of course, they're not going to tell you the real story. I believe I'm I'm sure they're eating the the pets. I mean, as a normative matter, we should all object to something that's not true, being retailed by presidential candidate. I stipulate it. I get it. I get it. I object. But so so they so let's did win Tim walls is retailing the notion that JD Vance for indicated a couch was true, but it had the feel of something they wanted to promote and it kind of got sticky and maybe it made you a little queasy and uncomfortable with the guy. And that was valuable, right? But was it has it has it manifested in any material benefit for this campaign and does it 25 has so yeah, so here we go. So does that Trump line the cats and dogs thing does that have some kind of psychological triggering effect where you're subconsciously now associating kind of xenophobic narratives with these these immigrant yes, okay, very with these immigrants, does that counteract the fact that people are very discomforted by and frustrated by and tired of Donald Trump's all consuming personality and the kind of things that when he was president would dominate a news cycle for two, three, four days and we're just exhausting. Does that animate more voters than it subtracts from his column, right? I am only trying in this. I don't know if there's a conversation about this conversation to see whether you can see any upside to Trump's performance on Tuesday night and this is so far what I've come up with. So that the dog thing might work and that yelling about fracking might work. Okay. That just you had good moments. He did. I don't remember if you guys discussed it on my studies podcast, but late in the game when he realized he had to play both moderator and debater and he turned to Kamala Harris and tried to get her on the record on late term abortion and she kind of weaseled her way out of it and this is this is something that hits her hard on her biggest advantage in this election. People don't like late term abortions. Even people who are pro-choice don't like late term abortions and she would not get on the record on that one and the moderator lied for her the moderator lied on her behalf. But Donald Trump cannot articulate what the issue is. It is not that they're slaughtering children. It is that. They weren't executing babies. That's not right. And he doesn't understand it. He doesn't understand that they're withholding care to children who are born a viable in a late term abortion process. He can't articulate that. He doesn't get it. He's not a good proponent of your values people. If you're still waiting for him to be the guy who's going to be advancing your values with care and concern, he's not the guy. But he did put her on the hot spot and it could have some legs. I think she failed at her primary objective. I wrote it yesterday in National Review, a primary objective was to make herself more known, better known to the public, which is why she said the word plan 870 times in 90 minutes just to talk about neuro-linguistic programming, just to let you know if she has a plan. You don't have to know what the plan is. She's got a plan. And to distance herself from the Biden administration, sufficient to create enough distance to satisfy people who don't like the Biden administration without alienating Democrats who do. She didn't do either. Not effectively. Itty is Ryan C. Krez here. People always say it's good to unwind, but that's easier said than done. The exception, Chumba Casino, they actually make it easier done than said, or at least the same. Chumba Casino is an online social casino with hundreds of casino style games like slots and blackjack, play for fun, play for free, for your chance to redeem some serious prizes. Sign up now and collect your free welcome bonus at ChumbaCasino.com. That's your answer by Chumba Casino. No purchase necessary. VGW Group, void where prohibited by law, 18 plus terms and conditions apply. So we are closed today, by the way, we are closing our October issue of commentary. We want to talk a little bit about the piece that Christine has in the issue, but a piece that Matt Connetty also not here today has in the issue points out that she needed to define herself as separate from Biden. And so she said, I'm not Joe, but look at me. I'm not Joe Biden, right? She said that to him. And then she's running on Joe Biden's record. She actually did not separate herself from Biden. She did not say, here's one way I'm going to do something differently. We've had some disagreements inside the councils of power that I have, you know, I have expressed my views. He's incredibly respectful, but you know, he went another way. I'm going to go this way. She never. Trump did that with fans on a board, like in a way, he said JD has his opinions and I have mine or something like that. So in effect, she needs separate herself from Biden and she did not do that. And again, assuming that everything she did was purposeful because she was very well around, she clearly thinks that Biden defines the Democrats, that if she does that, she's going to do that in a sister soldiery way, like she's going to have to sort of move to his right. And she doesn't want to move to his right because she needs every Democratic left of center vote. Well, see, I actually think she's not entirely separating from Biden because she's so far to the left, she is one of the most progressive by judging by her voting record, one of the most progressive Democrats in the party. She actually needs to stay closer to Biden. There's a reason he was the choice in the primary bar to the center. And so she can't say that because she, you know, her, a lot of her support comes from that far left. She doesn't want to be seen by those moderate swing independent voters as too extreme. And that's one way to do it without saying it out loud. And I think that's it's a it's a tough needle to thread. So you're saying for her, just to be on the Biden record is the sister soldier moment for the left, she is, yeah, that that says that's as controversial as she's willing to get. Yeah. Right. I think that's a very interesting way of looking at it. Now you, Christine, have written a piece, which we call the the Kamala cookbook, which is about the absolute refusal of the press to write about how she secured this nomination in three and a half seconds with no controversy whatsoever or not a single person and a party of 40 million members standing up and saying, you know what, I would actually like to run for this office now that he is standing down. I, I think I have something to contribute and maybe we shouldn't just be rushing into her, but that was completely made impossible. One, you know, one guy in Minnesota ran against Biden saying he was too old day, but he'd go back and say, you know, maybe we should give Dean Phillips a second look because he was the one guy willing to say what no one else was willing to say. So how does that fact that you write about in this really wonderful piece, which will be up on our website tomorrow, how does that comport with our general complaints about the moderation? Would you say? I think we could probably put them together into a narrative. Well, so two things. I think the narrative everybody just wants to accept is that, well, of course, she's the obvious choice and she did get votes because she ran as a vice president and they voted for a ticket and, and she then also gets the piles and piles of cash that have already been raised for this, for this campaign. Yes, that's a, that's a practical check mark, but what people don't understand about Harris is that the, the, the protective bubble around which I think Jill Biden, Hunter Biden, the very, very close Biden aides have kept him included, included keeping press out and away from him. She benefited from that as vice president. She actively cultivated personal relationships with a lot of the Washington press course. She would invite them over to the vice president's mansion. She'd have them for, you know, drinks in the garden and she, she, and this is, I would say in the last year and a half, two years, she, last year and a half, she did this because she also was not super friendly with the, with the White House press corps at the beginning and, and, you know, there were a lot of leaks from her obviously constant turn of disgruntled staff members. So she has been cultivating these people and that, that helped her with her, with her bloodless coup or whatever you want to call it. And the press wanted to tell a story that would still ultimately protect Joe Biden's reputation in the democratic party. So that became Nancy Pelosi has saved us from ourselves and we should, oh, she's so tough. And look, she's, she's at the end of her career anyway. So there's no harm in kind of turning her into the mafia enforcer. Everyone avoided asking what was Harris doing? There were these vague reports of she's making lots of calls. She feels she has to earn this nomination. No, something else went down very swiftly, which suggests she had plans in place for some time in the event. And we know she knew this event was likely because she's the one who works closely, supposedly with Biden and saw him. She's the one with the constitutional power to have him begin the process of removing him from office. She knew she must have been making plans. I don't think we'll ever hear that story in the near future, but that's a story the American people should have a no at some point because it's interesting politically. There are a lot of ambitious people in the Democratic party who would like to have had an open primary Gavin Newsom among them. The fact that it didn't happen and it all happened quickly isn't just, oh, well, okay, it's they're scared of Trump. That's part of it. Oh, it's about money. That's part of it. There's a third part there that I think think we're missing and it has to do with the role of the press. Well, I mean, also, you know, it's worth mentioning the press never delved into what I think we all thought was a potentially scandalous aspect of Kamala's role in the administration, which is when did you know, Vice President, that Joe Biden was having real cognitive issues and was a liability. What did you do about it and for how long did you do it and who else did it and never came up, she has never said that she thought that he should step down and she has not said that he had cognitive issues. She has never given an opening for that. The last time she spoke about it, she defended him against the Robert her. I can't prosecute him because no jury will convict a dribbling senile, amiable old man who can't even remember the year that his son died. Well, Dan, she was like, this is outrageous. How dare you, blah, blah, blah. But to be fair to her, she hasn't stepped off that. There hasn't been any movement. All we know is that he called her and said, I'm not running and she said, are you okay? All I wanted to know was whether he was okay. So she hasn't provided that, I don't know what you would call it, that accelerates to the story. Noah, you and I, I think, are among the people who are least concerned about the role of the moderators, which set everybody's hair on fire. I'm just saying that on the right, this idea that, you know, this was an Abe said that he thought that this might have been the most important aspect of the debate when we did our podcast on Tuesday night, this, you know, tilting toward the, tilting toward the Harris and fact-checking Trump and all that. Are you, where are you feeling again, after 36 hours, how are you feeling about the moderation question? So the moderation was terrible. This is a source of profound consternation. Me and my fellow conservative colleagues, because there's a debate over just how egregious the moderation was. And I feel like we're talking past one another, because we all agree that the fact-checking live was a bad idea. They bungled it because they fact-checked in the wrong direction. They only fact-checked Donald Trump and not Kamala Harris, although they let plenty of Donald Trump, you know, misstatements and fabrication slide, nevertheless, when they dove in, it was to back Kamala Harris. So why we're talking past one another is not because we disagree that the moderation was awful and that the question selection was awful. We're all on the same page. What we disagree on is the degree to which that bias is surmountable is something that a deft, adroit campaigner can turn against the moderators. And this is something I've been saying for quite some time. I feel like because this is the third consecutive Trump nomination, a lot of Republicans forget what it's like to have a capable, cogent, disciplined representative of their interests on that stage. Donald Trump did not make anything of that the moderator's behavior. Maybe he was flustered, maybe he was in his own head. Who knows? But he did not turn the tables on the moderator as many competent, capable Republicans have done it. You know, and I was saying on the podcast yesterday that I kind of fell a little bit in January of 2012 for newtmentum when he made the moderators into a player in the game, which makes them very, very uncomfortable because the press never, ever wants to be the primary actor in the drama. They want to play in the sandbox, but then, you know, ascend to 30,000 feet and assume this omniscient third-person role when it suits them. But Newt Gingrich turns the table, Mitt Romney turns the tables. You know, everybody remembers him being on kind of the back foot in the second debate in 2012 with Candy Crowley, and Candy Crowley intervened more than once on Barack Obama's behalf. But Mitt Romney got down on the mattresses with Candy Crowley in ways that Donald Trump does not. Donald Trump is not capable. He does not have the dexterity to think on his feet in that moment and to make media bias into a factor in whatever the exposition is he's in the middle of, and he could have easily done it there. What are you going to fact check her at any point, moderators? What kind of a debate is this? All of a sudden he's the underdog. All of a sudden he's behind the eight ball, and he's being treated unfairly and persecuted in that is his wheelhouse, and that's why he needs an underbait. That's why he needs an underbait. But this is why. And this is why. And this is why. What do you think he'd do in the second debate? The second debate will be about the first debate. He'll talk for 20 minutes about how ABC was unfair to him. That's going to be the thing that gets him back on that debate stage. Maybe. But just to put a period on the point is that it's not as though media bias is new. It's not as though these rules are new. They're unfair. They stink. I don't like them. But this is a fact of nature, and it is a navigable one for people who understand the political environment. This is a political environment. Because it's not only navigable, but it is exploitable, and it can turn you. I mean, this was not a debate. George H.W. Bush arguably saved his presidential bid in 1988 when Bob Dole was charging at him by getting into a fight live on CBS evening news with Dan Rather. Dan Rather came at him and said people are calling you a wimp or something like that. And Bush went ballistic. And of course, the charge itself was insanely offensive. You're talking he was rather saying you're talking to a guy who had flown 58 combat missions in World War II, and it got shot down in shark infested waters where he had to tread water for eight hours, like how dare he. And that was actually a moment when the country then became acquainted with Bush's war record, which he was not in the habit of talking about because he basically objected to this line being thrown at him. Republicans skilled Republicans do what you're talking about, right? And even Trump does it, but he always did it inside the Republican context, meaning got mad at Megan Kelly in 2016, right? For saying people have called you with this and said you're a misogynist and all of that. And then he went on and said I hear she was basically having her period, right? That was who but who was that for? That was for the bro. He was again, we didn't know his communication strategy with this Republican base that we didn't know existed yet, but he was like, you know, she was so mean to mean to me because she was on, you know, she was on the rag basically is what he was saying. And we, my God, he's so disgusting. This is insane. And it wasn't at all. It's just that he was talking to people in a different language and he didn't know how to do what now he'll do it and maybe it'll be too late. But it is again, like, yeah, there's a kind of basic competency issue. And every Republican has this in their should have this if you're a Republican running for any office. And again, there's so much presidency presidential bias that when I make this point that people come back at me and say, well, Donald Trump was the only person since George W Bush to overcome this, that assumes that there are no down ballot races, that there are no other Republicans in the country who navigate media bias on the state, local and federal level. They do. It is something. It is a core competency that you must possess. As a Republican running for office. Tom Cotton is very good at it. Tom Cotton, the last few weeks has been doing this a masterclass in how to do this as a Republican. Right. But Tom Cotton is a combative, you know, tough, get you come at me, I'm going to come right back at you. And then there are other styles. There was Glenn Youngkin style, which is you're an extremist. And when he was like, me, look at me, I'm in my, I'm in my fleas. I have a fleas vest on. I mean, why look like a crazy person to you? What is Larry Hogan doing in Maryland right now? Larry Hogan, there is a tied Senate race in Maryland that ordinarily you would figure the Democrat would be up by 15 points. Now he was the popular Republican governor of Maryland and he's running for Senate. So he was going to do better than the generic Republican in that state. But you cannot take Larry Hogan and turn him into Donald Trump. He not only does he resist that they know him number one and number two, he knows how to play this game. He won as a Republican in a very Democratic state twice. So like there are ways and ways to do this that aren't just yelling at the moderator or talking about the way there are 10 different off the shelf, how to run as a Republican against a biased media thing. And it's not just that Trump is sort of in discipline. It's this total lack of respect he has for any kind of. It's like if you're a chess player and you don't go back and study a really great game. Like yeah, you're going to lose because the other guy was playing a study the other great games and knows the, you know, rapachini gambit or the stone so moved from 1832. And he thinks I can just get on a plane with Laura Loomer at six and get off the plane at eight. I can go on to that stage and do what I do and man people just love me. But he also, I think part of the issue is that Kamala Harris so effectively got under his skin that he was just focused on her. That was the thing that he just wanted to zing back at her. The moderators barely existed for him, which is why he should not want a second debate or any other debates for that matter. Okay. So it's not a great format for him. Okay. But we don't have the data. So if the race doesn't change, maybe he doesn't need a second debate. But do you want to go out, you know, it's like, do you want to go out on that? Do you want to go out on, you know, on the not right, never write again after the novel that you just wrote got the worst reviews of your career? Or, you know, the movie you made is the one that, you know, earned the lease at the box office forever. You want to like change the narrative, the narrative is you had a big debate and you blew it. And yet maybe he can lie to himself and say that he didn't, I guess, but that's exactly what he does. He's lying to himself about losing the last election. If you don't think you go, you ever go out, why would you think that you went out on a loan note? Okay. Let's talk about that for two seconds. We didn't talk about that on the, on the emergency podcast was when they said you said to, I can't remember who it was, Lex free, you said to somebody who's a radio show, he went on. Right. We lost by a whisper, right. Mergingly knowledge. You lost it. Right. And then he said, I was being facetious. Oh, God. Or something like that. I was being sarcastic. I was being sarcastic. Right. Now this, by the way, matters because it doesn't matter if he acknowledges that he doesn't think he won. If the J six case in front of Tonya Chutkin goes forward, if he acknowledges that he won, that can be used materially as evidence in the case on January six, because his, his, his argument is I freaks, I've writes a free speech. I believe I won the election and that they lost. And I'm allowed to say that and you can't tell me that I can't. But if they can prove that he thought that he lost and nonetheless did this anyway, then I don't quite know how this plays. But then he is sort of like the idea that he could have been involved in a conspiracy to overturn the results based on bad faith or whatever, then becomes a real thing. So at least he, his animal kind of saved himself from handing Jack Smith an important piece of data spoken in front of 80 million people, where he's like, yeah, okay, I lost this time. I'm going to win. Like, okay, thank you very much. Let's send you to jail. And maybe this is the last thing like he needs another debate. He needs to win this election. He needs to win this election because he is going to get sentenced in November. In New York City. I mean, the stakes, I always thought this was like a silly thing to like have as the major issue for why he would be running again. But I mean, the stakes are now existentially high for him. And his in discipline and losing this debate, if he has any self protective instincts whatsoever, he will not only want to more debates, but he will actually prepare for them because, okay, Christine, because we're not on video yet though, we will soon, we will soon be on YouTube. That's a soft announcement I'm making that the commentary podcast will be will be on YouTube in a couple of weeks. Who just gave you my, yeah, my common art sprout. Yeah. I thank you Noah. Okay. That's anyway. Anyway. So you can't see Christine making, making her face like a parent. Yes. Very calm. Yes. I don't think I just want to add Noah also had that skeptic space onto. I don't think he's capable at this stage of doing that. Now he might, you know, make a pretense of perhaps, you know, having some better and more succinct talking points, but particularly if it's a town hall, he'll assume he can feed off the crowd. He'll assume, you know, he's good. Actually, he's much better in those settings than he is in the setting he had in the first place. So I don't think he's a guy who prepared. We should just one more note on the Laura Loomer thing. What is she doing on his plane? What is she doing in his ear? That worries me. I mean, he is in his strange way, very, very vulnerable, it's not a, not a word people use with Trump, but he's quite vulnerable to the sorts of people, courtiers who whisper things in his ear, conspiracy theories that, that feed that ego. Right now is exactly the moment where he should be distancing himself from those people and surrounded by professionals. Did you read this on the four piece yesterday on this where you have the Republicans doing the whole, what, what the czar doesn't know what's happening in the countryside thing, the mad monk has mesmerized the little father. We must save him. He's under the spell of her wilds. This is all him guys. Yes. Okay. He wants, he wants someone to walk beside him, whispering in his ears. These are thou art mortal, Caesar, thou art immortal. I was thinking about this in relation to James Earl Jones, who of course, you know, sadly passed the other day and one of the seminal theater going experiences of my life was the first time I went to Shakespeare in the park in New York. And I saw James Earl Jones as King Lear and King Lear, of course, there's a dynamic in the play King Lear where King Lear has his fool, right, the kind of the person who is there to entertain him during the day when he gets bored, you know, it's like his private stand up comedian, the fool. And the thing about the fool is the fool is the only person in the camp in the, you know, camp followers of King Lear who can speak to, can speak the truth to him because he does it in riddles and jokes and things. And he basically says, you're a senile old fool. Why are you doing this? Why are you doing this to your daughter? Look, look what nature is doing to your kingdom because you have done such a terrible thing. What the hell is the matter with you? And Donald Trump does not have a fool. He does not have a person anywhere in his ambit who tells him the truth. You know, like not to again go into history, but like, you know, Carl Rove could tell George W. Bush the truth. Roger Ailes could tell George H.W. Bush the truth. I told the story a couple of weeks ago that Ailes had told me that when they'd finished the convention and when the summer was over in '88 and polls had to do caucus up in double digits and they had a big meeting and Barbara Bush said, I don't think we should go negative. We need to run a positive negative campaign. People don't like them and we need a negative campaign. And Ailes said to her, sure, Barbara, we can run a positive campaign. George is wonderful and I love him and he's the greatest vice president ever and a war hero and a noble guy and we can run a positive campaign and lose by seven points or we can run a tough hard campaign that defines Dukakis and makes him look like an idiot and makes us look like we're strong and then we can win the election. Which do you want? Do you want to win or do you want to lose? And I think probably the next two months really depend on the possibility that there is somebody and I don't know who that is in his camp because they're all a little including them. So wonderful Chris Lasavita and Susie Wiles. They're so wonderful. They're also a little Miss Suga. And that was at Corey Lewandowski that was totally Miss Suga. And so I don't know who that is who could tell him you need to buckle down for five days and do debate prep and do another debate and erase the impression of this debate and get put her on the back foot and start defining her. But if he doesn't have that then maybe structurally he can still win. Maybe the country she really is just too liberal existentially and the country is not going to go for her. The campaign should have like an office of the truth's advocate, like the devil's advocate during the canonization process. Right. Exactly. Yeah. Yeah. But of course he can't stand. Anyway. So this is all science. One of the funny things about the last day to me is how many conversations I've had with people who said he could have done this. He should have done that. There was this moment when he could have done this. What about that? He should have had the opening, the final thing he said should have been his opening statement. Why didn't he do that? Everybody on earth who even if you don't want him to win sort of just as a matter of performance. It's like if you see a bad, if you see someone miscast performing apart wrong, even if you don't, it's not really, you're like, you know what he could have done? He could have maybe if he wore a different costume or something like that, you know, it's just sort of like performance skill criticism. And I don't know, everybody I know had good, had advice for him. Well, it's because he missed everything. He missed every opportunity. Right. Right. So, so I just think it's amazing how much good advice I heard from him yesterday. And you know, from people from just regular fun, I mean, they're not exactly regular folks. You know what I mean? Like I heard really good advice. They can't not have it in Mar-a-Lago, like people are normal and they could, you know, but I don't know. So finally, finally we get to her and then the question is, did she do what she needed to do in this sense, which is she she won the debate against him. That's probably the number one thing. But she does have 56 or 55 days left to go. And she's still going to have to talk. And she said the same thing during the debate that she said to data bash and that she said in her convention speech on Israel, on Ukraine, on everything she is just, you know, candidates are supposed to be disciplined and say the same thing over and over again. But I mean, can this be it, is she going to really coast on these vapors? Assuming there's no more debates or even if there are. I mean, she might. I was reading a media piece yesterday and actually I have a heart. I've got to get out of here in a little bit, but I was reading a media piece yesterday and the campaign is going to focus on doing what Donald Trump is doing when Donald Trump is doing what Barack Obama did in 2012, which is these alternative media venues. And they're very focused on and you're going to see a lot of pieces in the coming days about how they're going to alternative media venues and the cord cutting era. This is how you reach their voters and what have you. And we get a big clue about what the electorate that Donald Trump wants to turn out in November looks like from his media appearances. It is, you know, these alternative podcasts that are not political that cater to young males. And that's that's the demo that they want to turn out and Harris is going to pop cultural venues that cater in particular to young single women. That's that's who they want to turn out. And maybe they both campaigns seem to think that they don't need the press anymore. And the big winner, I think the campaigns are making the right call there the media is an outdated vehicle for for reaching mass audiences these days, conventional media. Like they say the campaign with a quote that stuck out of me is that we don't need she doesn't need to do a 60 minutes interview. You know what? They're right. They're 100% right. I also think that from her debate performance, while she did well in all sorts of ways, nothing she said indicates that she's ready to take on questions in a granular way and actually tell the people where she is and why she's there. So she's she's definitely going back into her joy cocoon. Okay. Well, Noah, you said you got to go your your your off on a train. You're leaving on jet train. So enjoy your day, enjoy your night, enjoy your trip to Washington, DC, where some people will probably see you in a in a foreign policy debate this evening. And it's been great to have you back. And of course, this will be far from the last time. And you will be there on November 17th at the Shuransky roast as you are every year. So thanks so much for for being with us. Thank you. It's a pleasure. Okay, so I have a commentary recommends, but if you guys have one, I would let you trump me, so to speak. No, all right, I'm going with my commentary recommends then I'm reading a very interesting book about one of the three or four greatest American films and maybe one of the three or four greatest films ever made. It's called Making the Best Years of Our Lives by Allison McCor. And it is what it sounds like. It's about the making of the 1946 film, The Best Years of Our Lives directed by William Weiler, written by Robert E. Sherwood, winner of six or seven Academy Awards that year. And it is a I read a lot of these kinds of books. This is one of the best I've ever read because it goes into sort of remarkable granular detail about the lives of the people who made this movie, how they came to make it, what it was about World War II that made this a necessary and urgent project that you would not necessarily have thought people would have wanted to see and how it hit the country like a title wave. This years of our lives is a story of three servicemen coming back at the conclusion of the war to the same hometown. One of them is a middle is an upper bank president, bank vice president played by Frederick March who went in in his late thirties into service, has three kids. One of them is a sort of a teenager or about to be sort of like in her twenties. One of them is a soda jerk, worked at the local fountain at the Woolworths and is the one who rose to the highest level and became a sort of he was a lieutenant or a captain or something like that, really an important position in the military comes back and has to re once again go back to work as a working class guy in this somewhat demeaning job that he has with a slatterly wife who has clearly been stepping out in town while he was gone. And the third is a profoundly disabled guy who had his hands blown off in battle and has hooks for hands that has to come home to a loving girlfriend whom he desperately tries to push away because he thinks that he will only be a victim to her and that he doesn't want to saddle her with him and he doesn't want to feel disrespected by her and the drama of and then they all three get tangled up with each other. It's one of the most beautiful movies ever made. It has sequences in it that knock your socks off in particular a sequence where somebody where Frederick March goes to what's called an airplane graveyard and walks through where these decommissioned planes are and through the expression on his face. And the way he acts, you understand that he has been through an extraordinarily traumatic experience on, you know, as a pilot or as whatever he was, you know, fighting in this war without ever seeing them fight in the war. And we obviously have the same experience with Harold Russell, the actor who himself lost his hands, not in war, actually in an accident during a training exercise in the United States, but then became the sort of master at using his hooks for hands and had never acted before and not only won a supporting actor Oscar, but a special. They wanted to make sure he had an Oscar at the end of his experience. So they gave him a special Oscar and he won best supporting actor. And anyway, it's a it's an astonishing movie, but mostly what's interesting about it is it tells the story of the people who made it and William Wyler, who was the director, maybe the greatest of all Hollywood directors who had gone into the film corps in World War II to make documentaries for for the military along with John Ford and Frank Capra and others who made these amazing and he made one a particularly amazing one called Memphis Bell. That was Wyler's documentary. And in the course of his time, flying on the and he was fearless. He was a man, he was a sort of chubby, immigrant Jew in his mid 30s, climbing around these planes, flying at 30,000 feet where it was 50 degrees below zero on the plane with an oxygen with what was actually like a glass oxygen tube that he was sort of sucking air through and there were some explosions and he lost hearing in both of his ears. He went deaf and he came down to earth, the plane landed and he was deaf in both ears and then he recovered hearing in one ear but had lost the hearing in his other ear for the rest of his life. And he did not have a hundred percent hearing in his ear and and had to himself go through this rehabilitation and therefore this movie is as as a astoundingly heartfelt portrait of something that you would think at the end of this war, people would only have wanted good news, would only have wanted happy news, would only have wanted, you know, cheerful portraits of life as it came was coming back to to American life and this incredibly rich tapestry of this small city in the Midwest that you see and the experiences of these guys is just astounding and and and Alison McCourt tells it really beautifully in this book making the best years of our lives. So I strongly recommend this to anyone who even if you're not that interested in film history, it really is a kind of slice of American cultural and you know and and military history as well. So that is today's commentary recommends. Abe you must be a wiler guy. Yeah, and I love the movie I mean I adore the movie but like as with everything I read and see I forget 90% of it that two years after and I haven't I haven't seen best years of my lives in about 10, 15 years, so forget it. Good excuse to rewatch it though, that's a good yeah, it's just to rewatch it. I mean there are three or four there are three or four sequences in it that you know there is a there is a moment when Frederick March arrives home to his lavishly appointed upper middle-class apartment and opens the door and walks in and his children see him and he tells them to be quiet, silences them because he's come home a little early and because he wants his wife played by Myrtle Lloyd to see him, he wants to surprise her and then there is this moment where she sees him down a long hallway and it's filmed by this great cinematographer Greg Toland who is the famous deep focus cinematographer that is a guy who could get everything in one frame without anything losing focus and it's you know maybe the greatest shot in one of the two or three greatest moments in film history so it's right there I think it's on max for you to watch and this and watch it and then read Alison McCorrah's book because it is it is sensationally good okay so we will be back tomorrow was fantastic to have Noah back with us and nostalgia nostalgia for us to go through get another Trump election with Noah so you know what he didn't he didn't give us any of the greatest hits there was no briefly there was no incentive structure no solipsism no Soto Voche right solipsism what else and hit all those marks okay so well yes I said we'll be back tomorrow so for Abe and Christina and John Potter it's keep the candle burning. I'm Rick Julius a partner at Cordell and Cordell as a business owner in these uncertain economic times you struggle to guard your life's work against unexpected challenges but can it withstand the sudden disruption of a divorce when your hard earned work is at risk count on our experience at advocacy in handling these matters at Cordell and Cordell schedule an appointment with one of Cordell and Cordell's Charleston area attorneys 1100 Sam Rittenberg Boulevard sweet 200 Charleston South Carolina 29407 Rick Julius licensed in Pennsylvania only Cordell Cordell dot com I'm Rick Julius a partner at Cordell and Cordell as a business owner it's your job to anticipate constant market changes but what do you do in the event of a divorce years of hard work building a business are on the line this is not business as usual you need an experienced partner you can count on for help we're Cordell and Cordell schedule an appointment with one of Cordell and Cordell's Charleston area attorneys 1100 Sam Rittenberg Boulevard sweet 200 Charleston South Carolina 29407 Rick Julius licensed in Pennsylvania only Cordell Cordell dot com