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Jared and Nick discuss the utter destruction of political norms as he is forced to endure heckling from the likes of Marjorie Taylor Green during his state of the union address. They also examine Sarah Huckabee Sanders' response, as well as Tucker Carlson.
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I gotta tell you, everybody, I am overjoyed to be here with my good buddy who I've missed terribly, Nick Halisman.
How we doing, man?
I am so glad to be back.
It's been too long without you, and we have a lot of things to talk about.
We have a lot.
I will say, before we get into covering the State of the Union, as well as Trump and DeSantis taking the gloves off, Nick, I'm glad we survived the Chinese balloon apocalypse.
It just really made me take You know, take a long, hard look at my life, realize what's important, you know, what isn't, starting to move away from those things, starting to just really put things into perspective, you know what I mean?
I don't know.
I mean, is it kind of like what I did, which was listen to Nina's 99 Lift Balloons over and over again for a day?
I think that's exactly what it was.
And there was a lot of finding myself.
There was a lot of really getting, you know, up in arms over this and like becoming like an American nationalist.
I listened to Hulk Hogan's theme, Real American, over and over again.
I got very pumped up for the next Cold War.
Oh, yeah.
You know what?
The next Cold War could be a really good title of something.
Yes, I'm looking forward to it.
The next Cold War sounds fantastic.
Meanwhile, here we are in the Weekender Edition.
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We're going to be doing... Nick, we didn't even talk about this before we started recording.
We need to do a live show here soon.
Oh, yeah.
Let's do it.
We need to hang out with people.
So we'll have a date for that when we come back on Tuesday.
Meantime, patreon.com slash McCraig podcast.
But everybody knows what we're here for.
We're here for the big enchilada.
It's the biggest political event of the world.
I will tell you, I was in Washington, D.C.
the morning of the State of the Union, Nick, and I got more than my fair share of the D.C.
atmosphere.
Which is a lot of people in a lot of suits looking at their cell phones, playing with their lanyards.
There was a lot of talk around town about what the State of the Union was going to be.
A lot of threading, Nick, about whether or not the State of the Union was going to be strong, which is the question on everybody's mind at this point.
I mean, yeah, strong is an interesting word.
Um, yes.
I thought it went well, by the way, didn't you?
Uh, wait, are we talking about the actual speech?
Yeah, the actual speech.
Um, you know, I'll say this.
It's not going to go down in history as one of the greatest states of the Union.
You know, I think Joe Biden, well, you know, obviously we'll get into this.
I think that the highlights of this were the realization that Joe Biden feels a lot more comfortable fighting with people and dealing with hecklers than he does delivering a speech.
And I think in turn, it also reminds us of what the state of our politics is now and how this is the new norm.
Like, you know, there isn't any decorum anymore.
Like that's that's gone out the window.
I mean, by the way, in England, that's how they do it, right?
They heckle and they do all sorts of interesting things.
So maybe they're doing it right.
I don't know.
But I think ultimately it's got to be a bad look.
For the middle ground of America when they see Marjorie Taylor Greene and the like, you know, heckling and whatnot.
I think it's a bad thing for them, wouldn't you say?
I think that it looks really bad.
It looks really ugly.
Of course, England has the tradition of the Prime Minister's questions in which the Prime Minister is harangued.
And, you know, by the way, a good time.
I enjoy watching the Prime Minister.
I have no idea what they're saying most of the time or what they're getting after, but it's an enjoyable spectacle.
In this case, I mean, I thought I thought there were a lot of things that happened here, and of course we'll get more in-depth into this, but there were a lot of strange deals that took place.
Of course, George Santos was front and center.
He wanted the camera right on him.
Mitt Romney and him shared some words.
Romney got in his face, called him a sick puppy, and told him he needed to leave Congress, and Santos just kind of looked at him.
Of course, we had a lot going into this speech.
Joe Biden, I believe, had an approval rating hovering, between who you listen to, between 41 and 43 percent going into this speech.
The knives have been out, Nick, for Kamala Harris over the past couple of weeks.
It has been a lot.
It was a very, and by the way, Kevin McCarthy had absolutely no control over his party and his members of the house.
It was a really surreal event, and you're right, it was not a good look.
Yeah, it's interesting because, you know, the thing about heckling and how, you know, stand-up comics have to deal with that, and they have, you know, fantastic ways of just shutting that all down.
I don't think that Biden did so well on that.
In fact, maybe we should listen to a little bit about how it played out, and we can analyze how he ultimately behaved.
Yeah, let's go ahead and listen to it, and then we'll do a sort of a reset on exactly what happened in this thing, where it might have worked, where it might not have worked, but this was definitely the highlight of it coming out of the speech.
Some of my Republican friends want to take the economy hostage.
I get it.
Unless I agree to their economic plans.
All of you at home should know what those plans are.
Instead of making the wealthy pay their fair share, some Republicans want Medicare and Social Security to sunset.
I'm not saying it's the majority.
Let me give you anybody who doubts it.
Contact my office.
I'll give you a copy.
I'll give you a copy of the proposal.
That means Congress doesn't vote.
I'm glad to see you.
I tell you, I enjoy conversion.
You know, it means if Congress doesn't keep the programs the way they are, they go away.
Other Republicans say, I'm not saying it's the majority of you.
I don't even think it's even a significant one.
But it's being proposed by individuals.
I'm blatantly not naming them, but it's being proposed by some of you.
Look, folks, the idea is that we're not going to be moved into being threatened to fall on the dead if we don't respond.
Yeah, that's the whole scene, of course, of Biden, and he needed to do this.
One of the things that we had heard, Nick, over the last week or so is that Kevin McCarthy had basically gone to him to discuss their visions of how to handle the debt ceiling.
McCarthy did his McCarthy thing, which is whoever he's in the room with, he'll tell them what they want to hear so he can survive.
And he more or less begged Biden not to call out extremist MAGA Republicans or whatever.
And, you know, this ended up in the speech to point out exactly what's happening.
It is controlling the narrative about what's going to happen over the fate of the debt ceiling.
And by the way, we all know that the Republicans want to go after Social Security and Medicare.
That is the truth.
And their reaction, of course, was a piece of political theater.
Right.
Well, it was planned.
They knew that.
They were all ready to go with this one.
And because I think that maybe they even had the speech before he said it.
So they knew that was going to happen.
There are the receipts.
Right, Jared?
Like, if someone is skeptical on the right would be listening to this right now and probably yelling liar at you as well.
We have receipts, I think, right?
It's very clear.
Guys like Rick Scott have written it down, right?
They've even put it in paper that they want to, I mean, maybe they want to sort of argue that they didn't want to sunset those things completely, but we know that they want to severely cut them because they can't stand the thought of anybody You know, I guess benefiting from anything that the government might have to offer.
That's sort of what that mindset is, right?
Yeah, they've wanted to kill Social Security since the moment that it existed.
Period.
I mean, that's been one of the main components of the Republican Party.
They never wanted to say it.
They never wanted to admit it.
But meanwhile, they were cutting around the edges and every now and then flirting with it.
Which, by the way, you know, we had Mike Pence coming out, who still, by the way, Is paying millions of dollars to strategists to tell him that he's going to be the next president of the United States of America?
And what did he unveil?
And by the way, Nick, is there any one more mainstream Republican in terms of the party and the old apparatus than Mike Pence?
I don't want to.
You know what?
Remember, I'm angry when we have to talk about him, right?
I don't want to talk about him either, but this what we're getting ready here for Mike Pence, by the way, and we can talk about Rick Scott getting, you know, going wild and throwing a plan out there that nobody wanted him to or whatever.
That's fine.
What we're getting ready to hear Mike Pence put out there is not just going to become Republican orthodoxy.
This is another one of those things that has been scrubbed within an inch of its life by the Republican Party, its donors, and all of the institutes and think tanks.
You've got to hear this.
Because for all the talk on Capitol Hill about we've got to cut domestic spending, we've got to cut discretionary spending, men and women, 70 percent of what we spend at the national level is on entitlements.
And the truth is, we've got to have a conversation.
I was a part of it when George W. Bush proposed social security reform in 2005.
The time has come for us to have the kind of leadership that says to everyone that's got hair the same color as me, nothing's going to change for you.
But to give younger Americans better choices.
That would also be better for the country.
I think is an idea whose time has come.
I think it's absolutely essential that we generate leadership in this country that'll be straight with the American people.
That will take us off this trajectory of massive debt that we're piling on the backs of those grandchildren and says there's a way back.
There are modest reforms in entitlements that can be done without disadvantaging anybody at the point of the need.
And actually, I think I think the day could come when we could we could replace the new deal with a better deal.
Literally give younger Americans the ability to take a portion of their Social Security withholdings and put that into a private savings account.
Wait a minute.
How is it a private savings account if the government's overseeing it?
Well, Nick, because we're going to hand it over to the professionals.
The government's going to hand it over to the stockbrokers and the financiers.
And here's the good thing about... And by the way, Nick, this is... Man, Mike Pence is so good at this, even though he has all the charisma of, like, a migraine on a Friday.
Like, this literally...
Like him saying, don't worry, if you're on social security right now, I won't do anything for you.
That's their entire base almost at this point.
They've had to wait for their base to get on social security to say that you'll keep it.
And here's the thing, Nick, they're going to throw it into the stock market.
Well, luckily the stock market is just stable and nothing ever happens to it and it never ever melts down, right?
That could never possibly happen.
Right and then by the way over time it continues to go up but you're going to have four years worth of people who have no money at all and then you might have four years where oh great they're doing better than ever right that's would be the result and then you have people dying in destitution because of it.
You're going to be selling pencils on a street corner.
Yeah but you know what I take from that you know I don't even I'm glad that you laid down the analysis because all I got from that Was, I worry about Mike Pence.
I worry because he's really going to get upset when he discovers how unpopular and how horrible he is at this running thing.
He's not going to get 2% of the vote.
And I wonder if that's going to be devastating to him.
He's not going to be able to walk outside anymore.
I think it's going to be really hard for him, but luckily the checks that he's handing over to these strategists, they will have been cashed at that point.
That's the important part here.
But I gotta tell you, this is the kind of shit, Mike Pence rolling this out ahead of the debt ceiling fight, this is exactly what the Republican Party wants Mike Pence for.
You know, it's like they want him out there to hand out to the people the most unpopular idea imaginable, right?
And he'll go out there and he'll start saying it.
He'll start the conversation.
And by the way, what do they call the conversation about Social Security?
It's the third rail of American politics.
And they're saying, hey, Mike, don't worry.
The third rail is completely safe.
Go jump on it and we'll jump on your shoulders.
This is the kind of stuff that we're going to hear about as the debt ceiling thing starts to take over and as the pressures start mounting.
It's going to be this, it's going to be work requirements for Medicare, it's going to be work requirements possibly for Social Security, which by the way just means making people who can't work Work.
That's what it is every single time.
And Biden, by the way, was completely within the realm of responsibility to point out what was going to happen.
And what does it do?
It leads to all these people absolutely losing their shit.
Marjorie Taylor Greene, this idiot, by the way, this idiot.
And let's hear what good old Marjorie had to say.
And we need to talk about what she's doing in the Republican Party at this point and what it means for the GOP.
Well, I thought it was pretty impressive that the president would enter the people's house and try to lie to the American people about the economy, the border, and even ignore the fact that he allowed the Chinese spy balloon to spy on America.
But when he continued the lie accusing Republicans of preparing to cut Social Security and Medicare, we couldn't take it.
So I, along with my colleagues, were calling him out.
I think I was just the loudest one because I stood up and screamed liar.
And the reason why I did that, Sean, is because they have used my image and my name as leading the effort in that.
When we have not had one single meeting in the GOP conference talking about cutting Social Security and Medicare Joe Biden is a liar.
I represent the American people and I was honored to be able to call him the liar that he is in the people's house and not allow him to get away with it.
That's disgusting.
Yeah.
Nick, do you notice, because, and here's the thing, I want to be very clear about this, I do not like sitting around and commenting on, like, female politicians, what they're wearing, how they're presenting themselves, or whatever, unless it can actually give us some insight into what is going on in terms of a party and its dynamics.
Marjorie Taylor Greene has become almost the center of the line of the Republican Party.
Like, she is changing her entire presentation.
She's being welcomed onto Sean Hannity.
She's basically the right-hand man for Kevin McCarthy.
Her going out and screaming this at the State of the Union and then going into primetime Fox is a signal that this is what they expect.
They're fine with it.
There's nothing wrong with this.
This isn't extremist behavior anymore.
It has become almost dead center of the Republican Party.
Yeah.
Oh, and by the way, we can't see it because this is the audio, but you know, the way she was dressed, she is changed her image.
She's got pearls or whatever that necklace is.
And she's got makeup on more and she's got her hair, you know, she is clearly thinking that she will be picked as the vice presidential nominee for Trump.
And she needs to freshen up the look to get enough attention from him.
That's another one of those things.
Her and Mike Pence are going to be very upset in a couple of years when they realize how this is all going to play out despite their hopes and dreams.
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