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Co-hosts Jared Yates Sexton and Nick Hauselman discuss the House vote to begin the Impeachment Inquiry and why the Republicans are doing it despite no evidence. They then delve into an article by George Packer about the shift of working class people to the Republican party. They finish on a report that reveals organized retail theft was really just a myth.
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I don't know how everybody else is faring out there.
I don't know how Nick Hausman's faring.
How is Nick Hausman faring?
I thought you almost said it's been weak, instead of it's been a week.
That's fine.
If that is a way to express a longer, more difficult week, it has been weak.
Yeah.
Weak is, I feel a little weak today, actually.
I think we all do, Nick.
I think we all do.
It's the gravity pull of the holidays, which by the way, Happy Hanukkah to everybody celebrating.
Also, on top of that, it's the holidays.
Mercury is in retrograde.
I looked.
I checked.
I needed to make sure what was happening out in the cosmic architecture.
Maybe it would help explain things.
On top of that, we're sufficiently in silly season, political-wise.
It's a lot, Nick.
We're getting ready to... We're entering... Actually, we're not entering.
We're busting through into what will probably be one of the more dysfunctional and dangerous years of our lives.
Oh, absolutely.
And you know, I don't feel bad about it.
I feel almost okay about it because every year around Thanksgiving, I go into some weird algorithmic depression funk.
It's something weird.
I have to explore it.
Maybe we'll do a whole show about it later.
And I always come out of it like around now because I really enjoy Christmas.
I like the music.
The music really just kind of makes me, changes my mood in a way that intrinsically that I enjoy.
So maybe it's because a bunch of Jews are the ones who wrote all the great Christmas songs.
I don't know, but either way, it really, I connect with it in a way that with fond memories sense memory, I don't know what it is.
And so I'm feeling like a little bit happier heading into the holiday season.
Well, I, you know, I'm going to save my, I had a recent revelation about Rudolph the red-nosed reindeer, the song and how it's affected my thinking about narratives and Christmas and all I'm gonna save that for our later episode.
Our mailbag episode.
That seems like a good time to share that story.
A reminder everybody...
We're going to take a little bit of time off for the holidays, but we're not going to leave you high and dry.
Like, immediately, let's just admit it, Nick, after we're done recording The Weekender today, we're going to take a break, we're going to grab another beverage, and then we're going to talk about Eyes Wide Shut to do one of our patented movie dives.
That's going to come out next week.
As everything is going on, meanwhile, we're also going to do a big double-stuffed mega mailbag edition of the Muckrake Podcast.
We need your help for that.
We've already gotten questions, and they are really, really good.
We need more questions.
So, either email us at muckrakepodcast at gmail.com.
You can go to patreon.com... patreon.com slash muckrakepodcast.
There we go.
That's where you can find all the links also to our Speakpipe, where you can leave us voicemails, and we'll go ahead and do that, and we'll just go through it all.
I'll also tell people about the revelations that I've had about Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer.
But a reminder, patreon.com slash muckrakepodcast to support the show, keep us growing, and keep this crazy train rolling!
I'm not going to be able to wait until then to hear about Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer.
I guess I'll have to.
I'll give you a free preview of the analysis that I've had, which is the popularity of the song Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer has made Rudolph the main character in the reindeer Christmas world for me, which has devalued the other characters.
And it's really, once I realized it, I've been doing a lot of thinking about how I think about Christmas.
That's what we'll talk about.
Right.
So you prefer like the seven doors who seem to be all have equality there.
I don't know.
That's the thing.
It's much like when you start learning about American history and you realize how many people have been whitewashed and moved away and you don't actually know the real story.
I feel like I have a little bit of introspection and also exploring to do.
Yeah.
Well, I'll be happy to join you on that one.
Well, that is wonderful.
Everybody keeps supporting the show.
Patreon.com slash McCraig Podcast.
Send in your questions.
We need them for this episode.
We're really, really excited.
But Nick, it is that time of year.
You know, there's a little bit of a crisp in the air.
There's a little bit of joy on people's faces.
Everyone's walking down the streets.
They're singing songs.
They're exchanging pleasantries to everybody they've met.
That didn't rhyme.
Everyone they meet.
That's right, everybody!
The GOP has officially confirmed and formalized the impeachment query against Joe Biden by a vote of 221 to 212.
The GOP has formalized the impeachment inquiry, and we are going down the road that you and I have been... Nick, I think we predicted this before Joe Biden had even won the election.
I think this actually goes back probably into 2020, early, early 2020, that you and I said, if he gets elected, he's probably eventually going to be impeached as a matter of process.
Absolutely, we said this.
Everything that they did, everything they say about Joe Biden is almost all just a direct reflection of what was said about Trump, right?
It's literally that kind of politics, which I don't think we've really seen as much.
Retaliation politics, we'll call it.
And this is a little bit of a new thing for us, at least in my memory of the recent, you know, political history.
And so it just makes it kind of disgusting.
It's like, you know, you're only saying this because you, we all knew we said this about Trump, but at least with Trump, there was like evidence for his impeachment stuff, right?
There was evidence they could bring.
You're not really supposed to get this far in that, in the process of which they are dipping their toe into without evidence, right?
And they still haven't found evidence.
They still have these Republicans coming out publicly and saying, we don't see any evidence, you know, but it seems bad.
It seems weird.
So we should continue going.
It's really outrageous.
Well, yeah, and Nick, in order to just, if people want to hear the Republicans actually saying this, because we're not, this is the thing sometimes that drives me nuts.
I'll listen to a podcast or something and someone's like, they're out there saying this!
And like, people are, you know, you don't necessarily get the context.
If people haven't heard this shit, they should, they should hear this shit.
Ready?
- Here we go. - This is just the inquiry.
It's no different than asking for a subpoena. - But except that it does seem to me impeachment's a bigger deal.
No, I mean, do you think it's unfair for me to say, boy, impeachment's a really big state.
It's a big investigation.
It's not just like a sort of like, well, you know, let's see what's out there.
When you're talking about impeaching the president United States, I would think you need some credible evidence to start.
And it feels to me like thus far, there is nothing credible linking Joe Biden to illegality or wrongdoing.
I wholeheartedly agree with you.
I mean, I think that the evidence needs to be produced that people can make that determination whether it's there or whether it's not.
And again, allegations are everywhere, but facts are stubborn things.
And we need to get to the facts to figure out where they're at.
And at the end of the day, I'm sure they're going to continue down this road.
The other point that you bring up that I think is very important is that impeachment is abused.
The process has been abused.
It's meant to take out mentally deficient folks, somebody who's lost their mind while they're in office, or somebody who's Santos-like, where they're committing crimes while they're in office.
I don't see that yet, but the opportunity for the operative committees to gather the information and present it in an orderly fashion so people can make rational decisions is what I base my decision on.
That was Ohio Representative Dave Joyce, who is considered a moderate Republican, who is against impeachment inquiry.
That was him on Dan Abrams' NewsNation show.
Nick, I didn't know that everybody who has got fired from a major network ends up at NewsNation.
Speaking of Christmas, it's the Island of Misfit Toys.
It's incredible.
But Dave Joyce simply saying there, which is incredible, saying that impeachment has been abused.
This is supposed to be used in serious situations.
But yet, meanwhile, I haven't seen anything that even remotely looks like it should be impeached.
That's an incredible display of some mind Olympics, is what I'll say.
Yeah, absolutely.
It's a gold medal performance in the mental gymnastics routine.
Cats off!
On the balance beam.
And so again, this is now, they don't care because Trump was impeached, Biden must be impeached.
We told you, I mean, like, if you're going to do it to us, we're just going to do it to you.
We have to remember, like, there was a whistleblower that had, you know, that had evidence against Trump on the first one, right?
And that was trying, and they desperately tried to cover that up in the typical political, you know, subterfuge.
And then obviously we knew what happened.
Second one, there was the evidence.
They keep admitting it.
They keep, you know, saying what they did.
So, you know, listen, if there's anything that they did wrong, if somehow Joe Biden, while out of office, took a lot of money and then controlled the government while he was doing that, then please, you know, find some way to punish him for doing it.
Hold on real fast before you move forward, because we do need to state that that is the official stance of the Muckrake podcast.
The amazing thing that you just said that just brings this whole thing together.
is if Joe Biden committed crimes and in the midst of all of this they keep accusing him of committing crimes while he wasn't in office and then also controlling the government while not president to help those crimes that That, I don't know.
I just lost the ability to taste salt.
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