James Smith and Robbie Bernstein dissect the Senate confirmation of Amy Coney Barrett, criticizing Democrats' "bush league" questioning tactics regarding her faith and gun ownership. They dismiss the Hunter Biden laptop scandal as minor corruption compared to broader political connections while attacking NBC for hosting Donald Trump. The hosts heavily critique Nancy Pelosi's refusal of President Biden's $1.8 trillion stimulus package during a Wolf Blitzer interview, labeling it a dishonest bailout for failed state policies rather than direct aid. Ultimately, they argue career politicians prioritize election strategy over immediate relief, fueling populist distrust in the establishment. [Automatically generated summary]
Transcriber: nvidia/parakeet-tdt-0.6b-v2, sat-12l-sm, and large-v3-turbo
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Real People vs Government Involvement00:12:17
Fill her up.
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We need to roll back the state.
We spy on all of our own citizens.
Our prisons are flooded with nonviolent drug offenders.
If you want to know who America's next enemy is, look at who we're funding right now.
Every single one of these problems are a result of government being way too big.
You're listening to part of the problem on the Gas Digital Network.
Here's your host, James Smith.
What's up, everybody?
Welcome to a brand new episode of Part of the Problem.
I am the most consistent motherfucker you know, the libertarian Tupac.
He is the king of the caulks, the slayer of COVID, AIDS, and Optimum, the fire.
Robbie Bernstein, how are you, my brother?
Doing well.
How are you, my friend?
Very good.
Very good.
Happy to be talking to you and happy to be talking to all of you fine people out there in the internet lands.
Okay, we are closing in on a big presidential election.
There's lots of stuff going on.
The big news of the last few days has been the Senate confirmation hearings of Amy Coney Barrett.
She's been taking a lot of questions.
And I don't know if you know, Rob, with no notes.
No notes whatsoever answering all these questions.
That's the big meme that's been shared on.
She seems remarkably qualified.
I mean, if you've ever met that genius in the back of the library that when you like last second, you got to write that paper, you have no idea.
And so you just ask them one question and they rattle it.
Like you just take down the bullet points real quick and there's your whole paper.
Now you just got to go write it up.
She's that.
She's that person.
She is, however, you might feel about her judicial record, she is very clearly an impressive person.
She's pulling random papers and she's like, oh, I think you're referencing the footnotes.
So let me explain what that footnote is and let me explain.
And it's over the head of all of these senators who try and take terms and use them in a marketing sense and not in a legal sense.
The best example of that was the Hawaiian lady who was going after, well, will you take in account real people?
And what she's really getting at, I might go off here.
Sorry, I don't want to take over.
Okay.
No, no, no, no.
So this was fascinating, but she basically says, well, of course, I'll take into account real people.
In order for it to get to the Supreme Court, it needs to include real people.
They're using the term real people differently.
She was using it in a technical legal sense that yes, it has to include real people.
The Hawaiian lady's trying to basically expound a view of law that it doesn't matter what the law is, if there's something that we feel is more important than the law, is that something that you would enforce?
Meaning that even if healthcare theoretically was against the Constitution, it's not.
But let's say healthcare was against the Constitution, but even though we can't get people to vote for it, we feel it's so important to have socialized medicine.
So would you then go ahead and enforce it even though that's not law?
That's really what she's trying to say.
You can't say that.
So you use this marketing phrase of, will you consider real people?
But then when you talk to someone who's a technical, brilliant legal mind, they go, well, of course I'll include real people.
It's a real person that brings it into the court.
And they're taking and like when you're trying to use these fictional marketing things that are using terms in a person.
Yeah, it's great.
It was a fascinating moment because the question was essentially, are you just going to think about what's constitutional?
Or are you going to think about how you can help people and how we think this is the better thing to do?
And that's a really like profoundly interesting point to make where you're basically saying like, well, but we don't really think the role of the Supreme Court is to determine whether laws that have been passed are constitutional.
Isn't it also to just think about like, but what isn't this going to be better?
Won't this help more people?
Which is the horrific outlook on power where there's two ways that you can enact a law.
You can convince people that it's in their best interest, which sometimes it isn't, or it can be like such an important, like, I don't know, such an important thing, like you can't murder people.
It doesn't matter what people want.
They can't decide that they're pro-murder.
We've like, there's some values.
People can't decide to take away my free speech because we've decided that that's too important.
But then you have the Democrats who are like, well, what happens when we want something that we can't convince people it's in their self-interest and it's not law?
If are you going to help me pass that?
That's really what they're trying to say.
Yeah.
Yeah.
The other thing, it's been remarkably calm.
That's because you can't catch this lady.
Well, part of it is that they've really got nothing.
They've got nothing on her.
The Democrats clearly made a concerted effort to not go after her religious faith at all, which I think was smart politics.
She's a lady with adopted Ethiopian child.
This is a leftist dream.
And she's the smartest.
Like she, I watch her.
And unlike every politician, you're like, shit, I kind of need to read more.
There's way smarter people than me.
That's what I'm asking.
You know, it's not just that, but one of the things that's been really eye-opening about watching some of these confirmation hearings is how much more she understands the law than anybody who's questioning her.
And it's really something to watch where you're kind of like, wow, these like sitting members of the Senate don't know anything.
They're asking really bush league questions.
And she's just like, wait, no, this is, you're misunderstanding what you're saying.
But like, it's, it's really something to see how little they understand it.
And in some ways, that does demonstrate the difference between elected officials and judges and how judges actually have to know a lot about the law.
That's not to say that they're all good.
A lot of laws are bad.
A lot of judges are bad.
But elected representatives, as they're known, they just have to know how to win votes.
They just have to know how to convince people to check a box for them.
So it's interesting to see how little some of them know.
And then it's also interesting for me going, well, I guess, how do I get to hear from these actual people who are informed more often?
Because so much of what I do is critiquing like idiot talk.
And so it's like that, it's just a circle of like, what are we really learning here?
They say something that's fucking retarded.
So I have to go, hey, I think that's fucking retarded.
And like, we're still in the swamp of just not learning anything because it's just, they say something dumb, I point it out for being dumb.
How do we get more of the people like this lady?
How do we hear from people like this more who actually have intelligent opinions, or at least like, even if you don't agree with them, you can kind of just see the structure of the way her brain works and you can learn something from that, like the thought structure.
Yeah.
One of the things I agree with you completely on all of that.
It's been now, I also should point out when I say it's been surprisingly civil that this part is usually not where the drama comes.
I did think it would be a little bit more dramatic just because we're, you know, the situation that we're in.
We're right about to go into a presidential election and, you know, their tempers are high right now.
But the original, the initial confirmation hearings, even with Kavanaugh, were not tense like they became later.
It was after that, then the scandal came out.
So it's possible that they'll try in the next week or something like that to drum up some stuff.
I think it's going to be very hard with this woman.
It just seems like, what exactly are you going to go?
Now, as I said before, they floated out when she was first nominated for the first week questions about her faith.
I think they saw how that played with the population and they pulled back on that.
I think it was smart politics on the Democrat side.
This country is still made up of a lot of Christians and to attack someone for their Christianity seems like a freedom.
Even if you're not a Christian, it's anti-freedom to attack someone else on the basis of their religion.
Well, the attacks have been, what they have been able to go at her for have been shockingly weak.
Well, basically, it's unbelievable.
It's a show and tell party of each Democratic senator coming in with the random picture of someone who has a horrible healthcare problem and just trying to market the idea that she's been single-handedly picked out to get rid of your health care.
And healthcare is more important than you voting on what kind of healthcare coverage we want, whether or not we want socialized medicine or whether or not it's in the law.
It's more important to understand that we, and even that's such a fictitious claim that people are better off under socialized medicine and that anyone trying to remove or not move us more towards a single payer socialized Medicare system is evil and causing random individuals that you can show up with the slide with to die.
Well, right.
And don't get it twisted.
I mean, it very clearly is like their position is that the more government involvement in healthcare, the better.
And you can couch this in whatever language you want, that we're making healthcare a right or whatever, you know, but like when it comes down to it to brass tacks, what they are for is more government involvement.
And one of the things that's truly amazing about this is that they're all going, oh my God, she would strike down Obamacare.
Now, there's not really much to base that on.
We don't know for sure that she'll strike down Obamacare.
We can wish, but I don't know that that's true.
But the thing that's fascinating is that pretty much every Democrat running for president with Joe Biden as one of the few exceptions was for striking down Obamacare.
It's just that they wanted to replace it with Medicare for all, which would don't all the Medicare for all programs would end Obamacare, every last one of them.
Okay.
The Bernie Sanders bill that Kamala Harris was on board with for a while before she took it back, before she went back to it, before she took it back.
What Elizabeth Warren was supporting, the same bill, what almost all of the Democrats were running on would ban private insurance.
That is overthrowing Obamacare.
Obamacare is a system where you can get private insurance through state exchanges.
So they were all fine with overthrowing Obamacare.
If it gave the government more involvement in healthcare, then it's not a problem.
But if it gets government out of the business of healthcare, then you're somehow evil.
But it's also just like, you know, repealing Obamacare is something that the Republicans were running on for basically the last decade, basically since Obamacare was passed.
Republicans have been running on repealing it.
They didn't do that.
And I mean, they took away some aspects of it under Trump, but they, you know, they never repealed and replaced as they were running on.
But so even if you're going to say she's for repealing Obamacare, it's not really an attack on whether you should confirm a judge.
It's just like she supports something we don't support.
Sexual Preference Attacks on Judges00:05:40
It's an astoundingly weak attack.
Like, yes, she was appointed by a Republican president.
She's probably not going to support what the Democrats want.
Like, why would that even be a controversy?
At one point, they got into the fact that she owns a gun and they were trying to suggest that like her owning a gun would, yeah, really, they were trying to suggest that her owning a gun would mean like, well, how could she, you know, judge on, you know, gun issues, Second Amendment issues, if she's a gun owner herself.
But of course, just as strong an argument, which isn't very strong, could be made for someone not owning a gun, you know, judging on a...
Also, you have a constitutional right to own a gun.
That would be like she spoke her mind.
How can she judge on free speech?
Yeah, it's the weakest thing I've ever heard.
Actually, not the weakest thing I've ever heard.
The best one was, I believe that same Hawaiian lady who you were talking about attacked her for using the term sexual preference.
You know, I tried watching, this really annoyed me because I saw that highlight.
And then I tried watching her whole half hour thing and I couldn't like, I must have made it 25 minutes and it must be the last five minutes because I couldn't find that full, that full moment.
But I'd love to hear you recap what it was because I couldn't find it.
There's really not that much to it.
It's that she said sexual preference in one of her comments.
She didn't say it in a controversial way or anything like that.
She just used the term sexual preference.
Well, she was trying to say that's an outdated term.
That's an outdated, offensive term that implies that it's a choice, that blah, blah, blah.
It's basically the N-word saying sexual preference now, which I, first of all, have never heard that that is an offensive term.
I mean, it's quite possible it is.
They play this game where they change terms constantly so that if you use the outdated one, you're now an evil person or whatever.
First off, I also always thought that sexual preference was a dumb term.
Ted Alexandra used to have a great joke about sexual preference.
Such a funny fucking joke.
I forgot about that.
Just remembered.
But Ted Alexandra is like one of the funniest comedians in the country.
He had some joke.
I don't want to like fucking butcher it, but the joke was basically like preference?
Is it really preference?
Like, he goes, I prefer direct flights, but I'll take a layover if that's all that's there.
He goes, but if my destination is vagina and I have to stock stuff off in Cockville, I'm not going to take that flight.
It's a fucking hilarious joke.
But yeah, so preference doesn't really cover it.
But this game, we're a term that everybody's been using that is a deemed politically correct term.
And then, oh, nope, sorry, we switched that.
And we never told anybody that that's not cool anymore.
And now you're a bad person for using it.
This is just, I don't know, it's pathetic.
It's like if sometimes, and I felt this way a lot about Donald Trump, but sometimes you can just look at what the attack is and then basically deduce from that that this person is doing very well.
Like if this is all you've got to attack them on, then probably there's nothing of substance there.
And this is, this is like an indication for that would be when they're attacking Mike Pence for mansplaining or making fun of the fly landing on his head.
It's like, oh, okay.
So translation, Kamala Harris did not land one blow on Mike Pence in that debate, because if she did, they'd be talking about that.
But yeah, anyway, the whole thing has been a kind of interesting circus.
I might be way wrong about this, but I seem to recall when they were grilling Kavanaugh, it was just about his character and the sex thing.
There were no, they had a full confirmation hearing before they were asking all the policy questions and that stuff.
They were doing that too.
Now, what she is doing, which they I think they usually do, is she's taking this thing where it's like, I'm not going to, you know, how I would judge these certain issues because that, you know, compromises her integrity or whatever, which I understand the argument too.
There's also a counter argument against that, but I understand the argument being like, if I have to deal with political pressure over how I'm going to rule on the court, that affects my like neutrality as a judge.
I think it makes sense to me because you're not supposed to be hired so that you go in and judge a certain way.
I think it's more that you have the criteria by which you can make these evaluations.
And so she's definitely displaying her expertise and her ability to make like a sound legal judgment.
Now, of course, the other thing, oh, but the other thing that I saw that on Twitter that they're trying to hit her on is that she like she stumbled a little bit when they asked her what the five freedoms that are protected in the First Amendment are.
I think she only remembered four and then drew a blank on the fifth, but it was just, it was very weak.
I mean, it was obviously something that she would that she knows and has probably, you know, had presented in front of her in court before.
But anyway, whatever.
I just didn't think any of them landed very efficiently.
But the big thing that Democrats, I guess the two big things, right, that Democrats are concerned about is the Affordable Care Act.
And the major one is the election is that they think that there's a chance, and there is a chance that this election will end up in the hands of the Supreme Court.
And that's kind of a dangerous game if there's more Republican appointed judges on the court than Democratic judges.
But this is the game.
And believe me, the Democrats would go for it if they were in the position to.
The Kamala Harris thing was great where she was like busting her balls about, I don't even understand what the question was, but yes or no.
Schumer Recusal Conflict of Interest00:03:08
I want to know yes or no.
Did you read this thing?
Yes or no?
Like really not even a good allegation, but just go yes or no.
And then, of course, CNN, everyone's highlighting like, oh, you know, Kamala grills.
Like about what?
Fine.
So she asked aggressive yes or no questions, but what was, I don't even know what she was trying to pin her for.
It's amazing how much how removed the corporate press is where they're like, yeah, we've had another moment of Kamala Harris being a bitch.
This is probably, this will probably get us into the White House.
All right.
Go with that.
Fine.
Go with that.
Best of luck.
I don't think this is going to work the way you want it to.
All right, guys, let's take a quick second.
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All right, let's get back into the show.
I did get a kick out of it, I tweeted at him, but I did get a kick out of Chuck Schumer made this big thing about how she should recuse herself if there's any decision involving the Affordable Care Act.
And I guess because she's been on record in some way of being against the Affordable Care Actor, I forget exactly the argument he was making, but he was making the argument that she has a conflict of interest and she should recuse herself when she's, you know, if a case regarding the Affordable Care Act were to come up.
And it really is just something to hear Chuck Schumer accuse somebody else of a conflict of interest is really just hard to even imagine.
Accusations of Corruption and Conflict00:10:43
Like, like, this is a guy who's over the years, I think he might be number one in the Senate, but he's up there with taking the most Wall Street money of any senator.
He's like one of Wall Street's favorite senators and then votes for the bank bailouts.
But you don't feel like there's no conflict of interest there when fucking Goldman Sachs gives you money to campaign for the Senate and then you vote for the taxpayers to bail them out.
That's not a conflict of interest, but somehow you're real concerned about conflicts of interest all of a sudden.
What would even be the conflict of interest if he had a prior right?
It's not like you've taken money.
If you've taken money to write a paper, she had some, she had some loose argument about it, but I mean, just the irony of him, the hypocrisy of him being the one against conflicts of interest was just you see Ted Cruz's half hour?
I saw not the entire thing, but I saw part of it.
I saw him when he went over Citizens Unit and that stuff.
So God bless podcasting because he's gotten a lot less cunty.
He used to really just come off like an evil villain.
And it was weird because people talked about how smart, like, I don't remember Ted Cruz, I guess, from the Tea Party movement.
I only know him from when he was participating in the Republican debates and he just came off intensely unlikable.
It seemed like he just ditched a lot of those fiscally conservative talking points and he just came off like a villain.
He really did.
And people were talking about that he's one of the most genius lawyers in the country, which I just didn't see that from him.
He just came off like a, like a, like a jerk more than anything else.
But that half hour, I mean, I got to like look into some of those cases and see if they see if his description of them are accurate.
And there's also something funny going on here that you can tell that the Republicans have lost a lot of power.
That their argument is not so much that they're not trying to impose their agenda on anybody.
Their thoughts are more towards, hey, shouldn't we have freedom here and more state rights?
That seems to be what more of their arguments are because they know that they can't possibly try to put their, like, in other words, they're in the weak corner where they're like, well, can't we just do our own thing while the Democrats are trying to impose on them?
You see what I'm saying?
Whereas, like, if the Republicans were way stronger, believe me, they'd be trying to, they would, if they had the power to, they would try and make it that you can't have abortions in your state.
They don't possibly have the power for that.
So they're just going with their argument of, hey, let us do what we want in our states.
But that the half hour where he's talking about these specific Supreme Court cases, I haven't felt this feeling in a while where you're like, man, America used to be fucking awesome.
Like there were ideas of like freedom and liberty.
There's some really good ideas here that they're trying to get rid of.
It was a good half hour.
I'll make sure I go back and watch the whole thing.
Yeah, no, Ted Cruz is no question.
He's a very, very smart guy.
He is intensely unlikable.
He's got a real problem.
Like, he in many ways owned that outsider position in the 2016 race because he was despised by everyone else in the Senate.
And even the Republicans who were dying for an outsider were like, well, we'll go with Trump.
This is just too, too much, even for us.
All right.
So the other story, which by the way, I didn't even mention when we were talking before the show, but I just spaced on this, but it's something that we need to address is the New York Post came out with a story that is seemingly another October surprise.
We should all like take a shot every time we say the word October surprise on this podcast or something.
But so they're claiming that I guess Giuliani and Bannon have somehow gotten their hold of Hunter Biden emails, which have, look, I don't know.
I'm sure this will all be vetted and we'll figure out exactly what's going on here.
But the claim is that they have emails between Hunter Biden and one of the Burissimo execs talking about how he set up a meeting with Joe Biden.
I won't believe it until they release the porn tape.
Until I can see that porn, I don't believe it.
Well, okay, fair enough.
That is a reasonable stance.
American people join me in saying so.
Yeah.
Well, I'll tell you, the one thing that made me go, oh, maybe there is something to this, is that Joe Biden had scheduled interviews with the press that he canceled today.
So that being true, it's like, if this is all bullshit, it would just seem like a weird move to not talk to the press.
And that seems more like they got to get their story straight and figure out what's going on.
This could potentially have some legs to it.
Joe Biden has denied that he knew anything about what his son was doing or what his father was.
No one's even ever said that he did.
No one said that.
Said what?
That he ever.
Yeah, that's right.
I forgot.
That's a great Biden claim.
He's just like, no one's even said, no one's ever said that I'm corrupt.
And there's just someone there like, you're corrupt.
You go, see, no one.
No one's ever said.
But so now he now put himself out there by saying he had no idea, he had no knowledge of this.
If it comes out that his son was setting up meetings with him and execs at this energy company, well, that makes you a liar and it really stinks, which the whole thing, you know, stinks of buying off access.
That's clearly what it is.
The funny thing is that as far as Washington, D.C. goes, this is really a very minor scandal.
This is something that everybody is involved in.
And this is part of the reason why the Senate and the Congress in general didn't push very hard to expose this because they all got a cousin or a kid or a nephew or somebody who's getting some great deal just because they're family members with a congressman, in this case, a vice president.
And so this is very run-of-the-mill Washington corruption, but it's to a country that's pretty pissed off at the swamp and the fact that he lied.
This could end up hurting him, but we'll see if he gets any traction or if he's forced to answer questions about it.
The other thing is that Joe Biden is so bad with tough questions.
Right.
Go ahead.
No, I was just going to say, is Bo's such a drug addict that he really just dropped off the laptop that included all this shit and just never picked it up.
He thought it was a pawn shop.
He didn't even remember it.
He thought he got like.
It does sound like classic Bo, doesn't it?
No, no, not Bo, Hunter.
Hunter.
Oh, my bad.
Bo's the hero.
Right.
Oh, he's the dead one?
How dare Classic Hunter?
I made the same mistake, but then I just turned it around on you.
Just go, oh, yeah, that totally was Bo.
I mean, Hunter, you idiot.
You're the idiot, not me for doing the exact same thing.
Anyway, we'll see.
We'll see how this all goes down.
My guess is that it's going to be something else that Trump will bring up a lot.
I don't know.
I don't know how much it's actually going to move the needle.
The latest thing that they've figured out is that instead of doing the second debate, which was canceled after the debate commission offered to do it virtually and Trump turned that down, is that they're going to have like dueling town hall type events.
NBC is going to host Donald Trump.
It's right now, hashtag boycott NBC is trending because they're furious that NBC would platform Donald Trump.
You cannot make up how dumb this is.
Isn't he the president?
Yeah, turns out he is.
You know, I remember getting criticized for platforming certain people who I've had on the podcast before, which I always, even in that context, thought was a very, very stupid criticism.
Particularly, I mean, it'd be one thing if there was someone with like some truly abhorrent views who was completely unknown and had 12 followers on Twitter.
And I was like, here, why don't you come on my show to express to everybody your views?
And then they're just like saying these like terrible things.
Then you'd be like, why are you even like giving this guy a platform to say these horrible things?
Okay.
I could maybe understand the argument there.
Still not necessarily sure I would agree with it.
It might be valuable to hear what somebody with really bad views has to say to, if nothing else, put some sunlight on sunlight being the best disinfectant or whatever.
However, I would, you know, I was never having people like that.
I was always having people who were, you know, had big platforms already.
So it's not like I'm giving them a platform.
The truth is that I'm the truth is that I'm having a conversation with somebody who already has a platform.
I apologize.
Fucking so goddamn annoying when it does that.
But so it didn't, it never seemed to me like that criticism made any sense.
If somebody is already pretty big, they already have a platform.
You might as well try to get their views out, give them some pushback, maybe have an interesting conversation, whatever.
The idea that you would be upset that NBC is platforming the sitting president of the United States a couple weeks before a presidential election is, I don't know.
I don't know what to say.
It just absolutely bonkers.
I've never heard anything so crazy in my life, but that is trending on Twitter right now.
It would be great if Trump actually did his live and then you could flip between the two channels and like Biden looks like he's asleep and then you go to Trump and it's just giant party, the balloons, the people cheering in the background.
It's like that almost that scene in college movies where they go to like the first party and it just sucks and they're like, fuck it.
We're going to go to that frat everyone told us not to go to.
Yeah, well, listen, there's that, that is actually, I think, you know, I know you say it somewhat in jest, but I think that's a big part of how Trump won in 2016.
That was a real aspect to it, that you would just kind of look at every Hillary Clinton rally and it was like this boring snooze fest.
And then you'd look at every Trump rally and it was a party.
It just seemed like the one you wanted to go to.
You're like, that's just more fun.
He's just sitting there doing the disco, you know?
Yeah.
Anyway, we'll see.
I'll tell you, the last town hall that Joe Biden did, I thought it was, I was, I couldn't believe how much they avoided even one difficult question.
I mean, they were, you know, they were asking him questions like, you know, how do you deal with Trump being such a bully?
Infinite CBD Product Promotion00:02:56
And like things like this.
It was outrageous.
And are you going to repaint or do you think you'll keep the Trump colors?
That might have been a harder question than some of the questions that were asked of Joe Biden.
But now they've got, you know, it's a little bit of a tough dance that the corporate press and Joe Biden have to have to do.
And this is always the case with the press's preferred candidates: is that you have to kind of, you know, but it's more so now than ever, but you have to balance, you have to kind of walk this tightrope between not transparently avoiding any tough questions and making it obvious that you're in the tank for this guy, and also not, you know, not asking him tough questions where he's going to look very bad.
So, you know, again, it's look, it's, it's, it would seem pretty obvious to me that if there were real journalists or real questions from informed voters coming, that he's going to get grilled on packing the Supreme Court and that he's going to get grilled on this latest scandal with Hunter.
But we'll see.
We'll see if any of that's interesting.
I only saw the headline.
I didn't actually hear him say this, but it seems like his newest strategy for packing the Supreme Court is just to say, I'm not a fan of doing that.
But if I get elected and I have to do it, even though I don't want to do it, you know, what am I supposed to do?
They already packed the Supreme Court with the public.
They already did it.
Yeah.
That's basically it: they're packing the court right now.
That is the new Democratic talking point, which is, I got to say, even for the American population, I think that's a pretty tough sell.
But who knows?
We'll see.
We'll see how it all goes down.
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Infuriating Spending Bill Debate00:15:51
Okay, so last episode, we played a clip of Jake Tapper being almost like a journalist with one of Biden's campaign advisors.
And this week, I wanted to play a clip that has been going viral between Wolf Blitzer and the Speaker of the House, Nancy Pelosi.
It's not often, it's really very rare that you get exchanges like this between Democrats and the corporate press.
And so I thought it was somewhat interesting that we've had two in the last week.
This one I found particularly interesting for a number of different reasons.
So let's get into that.
We'll pause it a bunch and break down some stuff because there's a lot here.
So here is Wolf Blitzer, the Situation Room with Wolf Blitzer with guest Nancy Pelosi.
As you know, there are Americans who are being evicted from their homes.
They can't pay the rent.
Many Americans are waiting in food lines for the first time in their lives.
Can you look them in the eye, Madam Speaker, and explain why you don't want to accept the president's latest stimulus offer?
Let me pause it right there because just off the bat, there's just something really fun and important that you got to point out here.
So the framework of this is, hey, there are starving people, and how come you're not helping out the starving people?
And you've just taken away Nancy Pelosi's biggest card, which is, hey, I'm on behalf of the hungry.
Like, that's what I'm supposed to do.
I'm supposed to be the one that points out to you that, wait, what about these hungry people?
So they just took away her like signature move, which is creating this framework of, hey, you're evil because you're not helping this hungry person.
Yeah.
Well, like Harry Brown, the late great Harry Brown libertarian hero, used to say, the government breaks your leg and then offers you a crutch.
And that is really just, it's such an accurate and powerful way to describe all of it.
But all that ends up being discussed is the crutch.
You know, like that's it's like, well, now let's debate on what type of crutch is the right type of crutch.
And it never really seems to come up like, but who broke this person's leg?
And so that's one of the things that, you know, particularly when it's in a week where the WHO, the World Health Organization, just not the band, the World Health Organization just basically did a reversal on lockdowns and are now saying lockdowns are not to be the primary tool of governments.
And there's a whole lot of data suggesting that this was unnecessary.
You'd think you would at least have to have somewhat of a discussion on what got us to this mess.
But of course, we just forget about that.
And we're just going to start.
You know, it's amazing how much you can skew people's perceptions when you narrow the discussion of what you're talking about.
So we're only going to talk about it in this little area right here.
And within this little area, there's already people out of work.
They're already suffering.
How do we get them help?
Obviously, there's no debate about whether we should spend a ton of money.
It's just why aren't you agreeing with their spending bill versus your spending bill?
So all of that is infuriating and also just, you know, interesting.
But anyway, so your point is well taken.
Let's keep listening.
Very much, Wolf.
And I hope you'll ask the same question of the Republicans about why they don't really want to meet the needs of the American people.
But let me say to those people, because all of my colleagues, we represent these people.
I have for over 30 years represented my constituents.
I know what their needs are.
I listen to them.
And their needs are not addressed in the president's proposal.
So when you say to me, why don't you accept theirs?
Why don't they accept ours?
Our legislation is there to do three things primarily, to honor our workers, honor our heroes, our health care workers, our police and fire first responders, our teachers, our transportation, sanitation, food workers, the people who make our lives work.
We couldn't be doing what we're doing without them.
Many of them have risked their lives to save lives, and now they will lose their jobs because they let the states go bankrupt.
Excuse me for interrupting.
Madam Speaker, they really need the money right now.
And even members of the president.
I have said that, but even members of your own caucus.
Even members of your own caucus, Madam Speaker, want to accept this deal.
$1.8 trillion.
Congressman Roe Connor.
But let me just quote Roe Conna, a man you know well.
I assume you admire him.
He's a Democrat and he just said this.
He said, people in need can't wait until February.
$1.8 trillion is significant and more than twice the Obama stimulus.
Make a deal, put the ball in McConnell court.
So what do you say to Rokana?
What I say to you is: I don't know why you're always an apologist.
And many of your colleagues apologists for the Republican position.
All right, let's just pause it right there.
Let's just pause it right there.
Okay.
This is fucking so amazing.
Like, first of all, this is what Nancy Pelosi can, like, you can tell.
She's just indignant that he would even be pressing her in this way.
He's barely pressing her.
He's quoting what some other left Democrats representatives said and being like, I don't know, this seems like a huge spending bill.
Wouldn't you be for this huge spending bill?
Why don't you just agree with this one?
And she's just appalled.
And then she's going to, with a straight face, call CNN Republican apologists.
Like, who could listen to?
Listen, if you're like some far left person and you call, you know, CNN is basically right wing to you or whatever, like, okay, but the Democrats are right wing to you too.
But you cannot watch CNN all day and tell me they're not kinder to the Democrats than they are to the Republicans.
Like, what person, what type of fucking like partisan would you have to be to actually think that CNN are Republican apologists?
They have most of the last four years weaving conspiracy webs about how Dom is a, you know, a puppet of Vladimir Putin or something like that.
Yeah.
But the other thing that that's just like, so it's fascinating to watch Nancy Pelosi is already sold by it's, and it's not even like he's really coming out and grilling her hard.
You know, he's just like asking very basic questions that I don't know seem fairly, if anything, pretty mild and tame to me.
But the other thing that's just so fucking bananas about all of this is that she's claiming that he's, you know, like repeating or he's an apologist for Republicans or repeating the Republican talking points, which, you know, what the guy said was that this bill is like twice as big as Obama's stimulus that the Republicans were so against.
You're talking about in a year where we've already spent more than we've ever spent before, more than any government's ever spent in the history of man, spending another $2 trillion, 1.8 to be exact.
And it does just make you wonder, like, how is there, how is there nobody?
Like, how, you know, like we were saying that the, the, you know, the focus is so narrowed in this conversation.
How is nobody saying like, man, this is a lot of money we're spending this this year?
Is this kind of a problem?
You know, there's like, it's almost, and I don't want to strawman like people who might disagree with libertarians or people who are skeptical about big government spending or stuff here, but you almost go to a point where you're like, I mean, I've seen some people who say things like, you know, oh, the debt, the debt doesn't matter.
It's all just artificial.
You know, we're borrowing the money from ourselves.
You know what I mean?
And stuff like this.
By the way, I mean, that's all bullshit.
Robert Murphy's done really, a really great job of just like taking that to the shredder.
But you almost want to like take it to a logical conclusion, like use some type of some reducto ad absurdum here and go like, okay, so why don't we just pass a $20 trillion spending bill?
Like, is there any limit?
Do you guys think there's any problem?
Like, why not $100 trillion?
Why, like, at this point, you're like, what level do I have to take this to where you would go, oh, yeah, there might be some problem with spending that much money.
That might be kind of an issue.
And it's like, okay, well, why are we not?
Why is this not at this point?
Another $2 trillion?
Another one?
And Donald Trump's whole thing is just make it bigger, make it bigger, make it golder, make it more tremendous.
What's so interesting about this interview so far is that they're both in agreement.
Hey, it's really important that we get money to people.
So they both agree on that.
His question is essentially, why is $1.8 trillion not enough?
And she refuses and panics when she's asked that question.
And the biggest thing that she's hiding, from what I understand, and this has become complicated because they've already passed some tremulous, some stimulus.
There's no word tremulous.
We should invent it.
Sounded cool when I said it.
It does sound cool.
Pretty cool.
Yeah, if a politician gets up there and says, we're going to get a tremulous plan going, what the fuck is that?
I'm with this guy.
Is bailouts for states, which is terrible.
They should not get a bailout.
We should expose the fact that they've been lying to people about things like pension plans and whatnot and exposing politicians for liars that they are.
They shouldn't get a bailout.
Yeah, no, yeah, 100%.
And that's kind of the whole game here is that Democrats are trying to backdoor in bailouts for blue states.
And it's absolutely disgusting, the idea that you have lived by these big government policies that you couldn't afford for so long.
And now your plan is to rob the states that haven't done that to bail you out.
And the thing that's so infuriating about it is that it's done in this secretive way.
And this is the reason why money printing is so much more outrageous than even taxation is.
Because at least with direct taxation, people know what you're doing.
Like this is clear.
Like, okay, here is where we're taking your money.
And you're aware that you see it on your check or you cut a check to the IRS.
But with money printing, they print a whole bunch of money.
In five, 10 years, prices have all gone up.
And then they can go, you know, have some argument about who's to blame for the prices going up.
And they'll blame like the speculators or something like that or whatever.
You know, some type of private sector actor will get blamed for why the prices are going up.
Or, you know, when the prices go up, then they just advocate, well, this is why the government needs to make it a right.
And so you can't, you know, all this shit.
But it's so fucking dishonest.
It's one thing if you go, okay, this state wants to have these policies and this state wants to have these policies.
But when they fail, then you rob the other state to pay them off for having it.
And they got all of the free stuff that they fucking spent the money on.
It's just infuriating.
Okay, let's go back to the interview.
That isn't what we're going to do.
And nobody's waiting till February.
I want this very much now because people need help now.
But it's no use giving them a false thing just because the president wants to put a check with his name on it in the mail that we should not be doing all we can to help people pay the rent, put food on the table, to enhance benefits, that they don't lose their jobs if they're state and local.
We're talking about the consequences of a pandemic, the symptoms of a problem that the president refuses to address.
But you know that is the coronavirus.
We know that there's a problem out there, but there are millions of Americans who have lost their jobs.
They can't pay the rent.
Their kids need the food.
That's right.
And that's what we're trying to get done.
$1.8 trillion.
And the president just tweeted, stimulus, go big or go home.
He wants even more.
Right now, so why not?
Why not work on a deal with him and don't let the perfect, as they say here in Washington, be the enemy of the good?
Well, I will not let the wrong be the enemy of the right.
What's wrong with $1.8 trillion?
Let's just pause.
How dare you?
You ask me a question four times.
This is like right out of Austin Powers, where it's like, if you ask me three times, people start to realize I can't respond to this.
I have to start telling the truth.
You're not allowed to do that to me.
We're supposed to be making propaganda here together.
I just love that Nancy Pelosi's 80-year-old idea of a snappy comeback to don't let the perfect be the enemy of the good was, well, how about don't let the bad be the enemy of the right or whatever.
That doesn't even make sense.
But it's really funny.
It's something to watch her get so flustered and Wolf Blitzer going like, but $1.8 trillion.
I mean, that seems great.
And there's no one even there who's kind of like, no, that doesn't seem great.
That doesn't seem like a great idea to spend another couple trillion dollars.
And in fact, if this was any other year, everyone would agree that this is insanity.
Like, that's the thing that's crazy is that, okay, listen, I understand and I'm actually pretty sympathetic to the argument that as much as I'm against lockdowns, once you have lockdowns, you need some type of aid package for people.
Like, I'm not against if the government is going to force people to stay in their homes, well, then, yeah, you kind of have to make sure they're fed in the same way that if you're going, like, I might be against, I don't know, people going to jail for smoking pot.
But if you were like, we're not, we're going to arrest them, throw them in a prison and not give them food.
I'd be like, what?
No, you have to give them food.
And if you're choosing between them being fed once they're in prison or not, it's like, yeah, don't, now you're killing them.
So yeah, like, again, it's, it's infuriating when you hear them talk about, well, we all know the cause of this is the virus.
And it's like, no, it's not.
It's the lockdowns.
Now, you can argue that that's justified, which is, I think, wrong, but still, that's what the cause of this is, not the virus.
Anyway, but so I, you know, I can kind of like get the argument.
Like, well, you got to, you got to give some type of temporary UBI or some type of like handouts to people once you've illegalized work.
Okay, fine.
But wouldn't you also go, okay, if any other year someone just proposed a $2 trillion spending bill, almost everyone, not just crazy libertarians like us, would be like, oh, this is fiscally reckless.
This is insane fiscal policy to just spend $2 trillion.
Like that's, this is bigger, as was pointed out, than any of the Obama stimuluses, way bigger than the Bush stimulus, but bigger than all that shit.
So just because there's a virus or there's lockdowns or any of this, it's still the same fiscal policy.
You might think that it's more necessary, but you would, you still have all the problems of like, we're spending this money that we can't afford to spend.
So you would think that would at least come up.
Like that would be part of the discussion, but no, no, no, it's not any of it.
It's just like, oh, we want to spend money.
We want to help people.
Why aren't you for this spending bill versus this spending bill?
And this in itself, even when it's completely on Nancy Pelosi's turf, she's flustered by just asking the question.
Anyway, let's keep playing.
Idea what the difference is between the spending that they have in their bill and that we have in our bill.
Playing the Expert Care Game00:14:34
Do you realize that they have come back and said all these things for child tax credits and earned income tax credits or helping people who have lost their jobs are eliminated in their bill?
Do you realize they pay no respect to the fact that child care is very important for people whose children cannot go to school because they're doing remote learning, and yet they minimize the need for child care, which is the threshold with which people, mothers and fathers can go to work if they have that.
Do you have any idea of how to short their concerns?
That's why it's so important right now.
Yesterday I spoke to Andrew Yang, who says the same thing.
It's not everything you want.
There's a lot there.
Honest to God, you really can't get over it because Andrew Yang, he's lovely.
Yo Con Rokana, he's lovely.
They are not negotiating this situation.
They have no idea of the particulars.
They have no idea of what the language is here.
I didn't come over here to have you.
So you're the apologist for the Obama.
Excuse me.
God forbid.
Madam Speaker, not an apologist.
I'm asking you serious questions because so many people are in the middle.
Right now, let me ask you this.
When was the last time you're going to be able to do that?
Let me respond to you.
Let me ask you: when was the last time, Madam Speaker?
When was the last time you spoke with the president about this?
I don't speak to the president.
Speaker, why is representative?
Why not call him and say, Mr. President, let's work out a deal.
It's not going to be everything you want, not going to be everything I want, but there are so many Americans right now who are in desperate need.
Let's make these questions.
I'd be amused.
If it weren't so sad, is how you all think that you know more about the suffering of the American people than those of us who are elected by them to represent them at that table.
It is unfortunate that we do not have shared values with this White House.
You pause it for one second.
You just got to point out the appeal to authority: how dare you question me?
How dare you?
I came in here, and how dare you even like, okay, if you know that much better than now, than us, why not inform us about what you're doing to help us out here?
No, if you're the expert, then that's exactly why we bring you onto the news to explain to us why we're not accepting 1.9 trillion.
This is your opportunity.
Apparently, 1.9 trillion doesn't work.
You're the expert.
Can you please explain to me why we're holding out for more?
How dare you question us as being the no, no, I'm saying you're the expert.
So why not give us the information?
But it really shows you how removed and like, you know, for a bunch of people who consider themselves public servants, it really comes down to it.
Like, they don't consider themselves public servants.
They are your wiser overlords.
I mean, she's like, how dare you tell me about what people need?
Excuse me.
I'm actually the elected representative.
You know, like, imagine if you just remove it from Nancy Pelosi CNN world.
I just said this to a real person.
You'd be like, nobody understands real people better than politicians, Democrat and Republican lawyers who knows real people better than us.
Like, what?
Anyone, almost anyone, throw a dart on a street.
You will hit someone who knows more about what people are going through than Nancy Pelosi does.
And she is just appalled that he could even give her pushback on this.
And she starts.
And I got to say, he does, you know, within this framework, which is kind of bullshit to begin with.
He does a decent job of just, you know, when she's like, well, you don't understand.
I mean, this didn't pay for daycare and this didn't pay for this and this didn't pay for that.
And he's like, yeah, yeah, no, I understand.
You didn't get everything you wanted, but why not agree to get this and then try to get the other stuff that you want?
You know, like, why not just go with this for now?
And she's just like, oh, and she's seething.
She's seething with anger.
Yeah.
Andrew Yang is lovely, but he has no idea.
I'm an expert and I'm supposed to come on here for you to praise me for my expertise and the fact that I'm going out to work for everyone who we're supposed to sell them on.
That it's Trump's fault.
And what she tried to say there, once again, I mean, she fucked up because she's 190 and she said Obama when she meant to say Trump, which is pretty funny.
Because, you know, I guess we're just talking about big stimulus spending.
So you just think Obama, but no, it's Trump now.
But what she tries to accuse is she makes the accusation that CNN is a Trump apologist.
You know, that this network is engaged in Trump apology.
And that is, I mean, I got to think for anyone, that's a real tough sell.
I got to say, what's about to happen, which is really funny, is she continues to claim she's the expert and then she can't get any of the numbers right.
So, okay, I guess we don't have the right expert on the job.
But also, her facial reaction really presents to me like somebody sold her out.
I don't know who really runs the show.
I really don't know who's behind, you know, who's that, who's the wizard behind the curtain.
I don't know, but I think she went in here with the understanding: hey, CNN, my team.
This is the talking points I got from my overlord.
We're blaming this thing on Trump and that Trump's being unreasonable, not getting the people what they want.
And it seems like she's going to leave this and go back to that overlord and be like, what the fuck just happened?
You guys just bitched me out.
I thought we're all on the same side here.
Why are is this the end of my run?
Why is this thing turning against me?
Yeah, well, here's how I see it, right?
Is that Nancy Pelosi?
She's been in Congress for something like 140 years.
And basically, the game has always been that we're the Democrats.
We're willing to give all of these things to people because we just care about people.
The Republicans don't care about people as much as us.
And then I can just go on, you know, on mainstream media and talk about how awful these Republicans are and how I'm, you know, the one who cares and wants to do all these things for people.
And right now she's playing politics very clearly.
And Nancy Pelosi isn't me or you.
She's not against spending another $2 trillion because she thinks they're, you know, that we're like, you know, putting our fucking children into debt and that it's immoral and going to destroy the country or something like that.
She doesn't want to pass another stimulus bill until after the election.
That's it.
She doesn't want to send checks out to people.
She doesn't want to make it so that by election day, people are more comfortable and they're getting checks that Trump's going to call Trump bucks again and, you know, be on there bragging about how he fucking signed this deal that's getting money out to people.
So they don't want to do that.
So they're playing politics, which is what all, you know, government is always about.
But now she's in the position of being called on it.
And so she's going on to CNN where the expectation is always that we'll just talk about what an awful person Trump is and how much I care about people, but it's all being turned on her.
And it's like, now Trump's the big spender, you know, which the CNN has been trained forever to think of as the good thing, even though it's fucking awful.
But you know what I mean?
Like that's their perspective now that like, well, this is great.
He's willing to spend all this money.
And Nancy Pelosi, how come you won't spend money to help people?
And she has no defense for this.
So she's just furious.
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All right, let's keep playing.
Their bill.
Why don't you talk about in their bill, a tax break for the wealthiest families in the country while they cut out the earned income tax credit for the poorest families in our country and the poorest children in our country?
That we have to fight with them to get them to address the coronavirus crisis because they have said it was a hoax, it was magical, it was a miracle, it was going to cure it.
It hasn't.
And that's why we find ourselves in this situation.
I feel very confident about the knowledge that I bring to this, but more importantly, the knowledge that my chairs, our chairs of jurisdiction, science-based, academically documented, institutionally suggested in terms of what the cost would be to do it and to do it that way.
And about, say, we talk about child care, yes.
We talk about safety in the workplace.
Safety in the workplace.
That's a very important issue, especially in the time of the pandemic.
So, what I say to those people is: we're going to get a deal.
And when we do, it will be retroactive.
It will be retroactive.
Here's what you wrote in a letter to House Democrats, Madam Speaker.
And I ask these questions only, as you know, so many millions of Americans are suffering from the public.
But you quote two people who know nothing about the agreement.
There is no agreement.
But what the suggestions are, is if there's some authority on the subject.
Please give equal weight to 12 to all of the chairmen on the committee who have written this bill.
But so many of your fellow Democrats in the House want a deal right now.
No, that isn't.
The problem solvers, they all want a deal right now.
And here's what they're complaining about because you wrote a letter to House Democrats and you said this.
Let me read a line from the letter you wrote.
The president only wants his name on a check to go out before election day and for the market to go up.
Is that what this is all about?
Not allow the president to take credit if there's a deal that will help millions of Americans right now?
He's not that important, but let me say this.
With all due respect, with all due respect, and you know, we've known each other a long time, you really don't know what you're talking about.
If the plural of anecdote is not data, yes, there's some people who said this or that.
Overwhelmingly, my caucus wants what is right for the American people.
Overwhelmingly, our chairman who wrote the bill, read their statements.
They all put out their own statements when they saw what the White House was proposing.
So do a service to the issue and have some level of respect for the people who have worked on these issues, written the bill to begin with.
Now, let's say.
All right, so pause it right there.
So this is to me what I just thought was so amazing about this interview.
It's just, how dare you?
How dare you question me?
Show some respect.
I am an authority.
I mean, these are the words coming out of Nancy Pelosi's mouth.
And what he did, what Wolf Blitzer did, was read her own words.
And this is actually what she said.
This is what she said.
And it's what I just said a minute ago.
He hit the nail right on the head.
He's saying all Donald Trump cares about is the market, is the stock market going up and sending out checks that he can say are Trump bucks.
Yeah, Donald Trump obviously is incentivized right now to want things to be as good as they can be on Election Day.
And she doesn't want to give that to him.
And what's her response to that immediately?
With all due respect, how dare you?
How dare you?
I'm an authority.
Like, that is really an amazing thing to hear.
She is acting like Wolf Blitzer has stepped wildly out of line.
This has been incredibly tame.
The only thing Wolf Blitzer has done is not kiss her ass through this.
The truth is, right?
He's asked her questions that should be softballs.
It's not like he's asked anything like really aggressive or hard-hitting.
It's just kind of like, well, why aren't you signing this?
Why not compromise on this and then get what you want later?
And she's not prepared for that because they're not used to dealing with tough questions.
I mean, if she thinks this is like an insult, man, she should hear how these guys talk about Trump all day long.
All right, let's keep playing a little bit more.
In terms of the numbers, I want people to do the math.
We had 3.4, which would meet the needs of the American people for a sustained period of time so that there was some certainty in what would happen.
The Republicans said, no, well, so we took it down a trillion dollars by cutting the time.
We took it down another $2 trillion, $200 trillion, $200, excuse me, $200 billion.
$200 billion down.
We came down to $2.2.
At the same time, since tomorrow will be five months since we passed the bill, at the same time, because there was no resolution, Mitch McConnell said, let's pause.
The virus didn't pause, and now we're at a place where we need more money.
We need more money for PPP, for our small businesses.
We need more money for our airlines.
We need more money for our schools.
So we have absorbed nearly a half a trillion dollars more of expenses still within the country.
I understand all of that, and I have only the greatest respect for it.
So do the math.
Madam Speaker, I have only the greatest respect for that.
Come down $1.8 trillion.
I just want to point out $1.8 trillion.
$1.8 trillion.
$1.8 trillion is a lot of money.
The American people need that money, ASAP, because they're suffering right now.
And I'm not saying it's perfect, but I'm saying that.
And you don't care how it's spent.
I don't care, of course, how it's spent.
Well, you don't even know how it's spent.
Why not talk to the president personally, call him up and say, Mr. President, let's get a deal tomorrow.
Look, let me say this.
The president has sent Mr. Mnuchin to negotiate.
Undermining FDA Confidence00:09:54
That's what we've done with other presidents.
This isn't unusual.
With President Bush, we did this quite a bit because that's how you negotiate.
And then you take it to the president.
Mr. Mnuchin, I think he has integrity representing his position.
May I finish, please?
But he has integrity representing his position, but his position has no integrity.
They do not share our values, have a little respect for the fact that we know something about these subjects.
And there's a big difference between Democrats and Republicans in whether they want to give a big tax cut to the wealthiest people in the country in their bill, in the CARES Act.
We tried to take it out in this bill.
Instead, they took out earned income tax credit, child tax credit, expanded health benefits, UI benefits to the extent that it was agreed to before.
So this is, I have every confidence and the arguments that we make because it's based on science and documentation.
Our chairs know their stuff.
They know what they're doing with all due respect to the kind of people you were referencing.
And I welcome their enthusiasm.
I welcome their interest.
I welcome their originality of their thinking.
But they should fuck them.
Shut the fuck up.
To meet the needs of the American people in a retroactive way so they're not at a total loss.
They are at a loss because the president has ignored the virus.
I wish you would spend time on the fact that if he had not ignored the virus, we wouldn't be in the position we're in.
But we are.
And what we are.
And let me say about that also.
Hope that I'm pleased that these pharmaceutical companies are taking the responsible position to halt and hopefully then resume because we want the public to have confidence in whatever therapies or whatever vaccines come along that they will take them.
And do people say, Well, I don't trust Trump on that.
If we trust the Food and Drug Administration for what they are doing, the scientists there who've been working 24-7 for 10 years.
I don't know if we've talked about this on part of the problem at all, but it is such an unbelievable democratic FDA regulation racket that the FDA came forward and said, unless we pause this, people are going to suspect otherwise.
There was nobody who said, wait a second, did the FDA take more time than usual to give this clearance?
Because if not, I don't trust it.
They fabricated this idea that maybe it should now, it could be.
I had a doctor on Run Your Mouth, really cool guy, actually a fan of our show.
So I trust the guy.
But he was saying that this is a little bit weird how quickly they pushed it through.
And so he was giving that perspective.
It seems to me like Trump was like, dude, just give me the drugs.
And if Trump's fine and it worked, yeah, then I'm just pretty sure that these drugs work.
But this idea that like we needed, they're trying to delay it till after the election so that Trump can't say, hey, we've got this thing and I've done my part and we're moving forward.
And then they've created this such backward scheme where they're like, people aren't going to have faith in it unless we delay it.
No one was questioning it until you said that maybe there's a reason to quite like you've created this idea that maybe there shouldn't be confidence in it on the basis that we want people to have.
It was like the same thing as when they said, we don't want to, they're undermining our democracy.
Well, no one was, no one was questioning the democracy until you said it could be undermined.
No one was questioning whether or not the FDA went through a good enough process here until you said that they needed to stall it so that people wouldn't, no one was going to question it.
What also, what just, you know, there's a couple of things about what we just watched that really jump out to me.
And one of them that just is so appalling is that you have these kind of secret government very, you know, like a secret government process where we don't know exactly what's going on.
They don't share all of the information with us.
And then Nancy Pelosi gets to turn around and say, how dare you question any of it?
You don't even know.
You don't even know what's going on.
I know.
So don't even question me.
And then turns around like, you have to trust us.
You have to trust the FDA.
You have to trust us.
And it's like, why?
Why would anyone trust someone who operates in secrecy?
And I got to say that you really see what a bitch Wolf Blitzer is in this segment because he's barely standing up to Nancy Pelosi.
She's flipping out.
Like he's like, they got to answer the same overlord.
Right.
He was nervous going into this.
He's like, do you really want me to bitch out Nancy on air?
Are you guys sure about this?
Are we sure that she's been weak?
He's not even bitching her out.
It's just she's taking it in this like, like he's committed some sin.
But when he goes, this is like what I hate about this whole goddamn system, which just drives me fucking crazy.
Is when she starts going, why don't you show a little bit of respect?
And Wolf Blitzer goes, Madam Speaker, I have the utmost respect for you.
And you're like, there it is.
There the whole thing is right there.
There's your fucking public servants who work for you, who are, you know, derive their power from the consent of the people or whatever bullshit, right?
Like we're the elected representatives.
And then the media who's supposed to watchdog them has to go, Madam Speaker, I have the utmost respect for you.
Like he shouldn't be calling her Madam Speaker.
He shouldn't be, you know, like pledging his respect for her.
He should be grilling her.
That's his job.
And her job is to fucking work for the rest of us, or at least that's how they sell it.
And whatever happened to the American people deserve transparency.
I've heard her say that before.
Sure.
Yeah.
But then at the same time, you have to just trust us because no one else knows.
It's like, oh, okay.
Well, that's how it works.
Okay, Madam Speaker.
How about like, like, my position isn't, Madam Speaker, I have the utmost respect for you.
I'm like, lady, I don't trust you.
That's how I would that's how I would respond.
Hey, weirdo, I don't believe a word you're saying.
All right, let's play a couple more minutes of this and then we're going to wrap up.
Excellent science.
The science should call the shot.
And when they do, we should all trust it.
And let's hope they get more treatments.
Let's hope they get a vaccine.
And, Madam Speaker, I certainly respect you, but I also respect Rokana.
I respect Andrew Yang.
I respect members of the Democrats who are members of the problem solvers.
They want a deal because so many people right now.
Well, the problem solvers, by the way, don't have any earned income tax credit or town tax credit in their proposal either.
But let's not go into it.
You evidently do not respect the chairman of the committees.
I respect the results.
I wish you would respect the knowledge that goes into meeting the needs of the American people.
But again, you've been on JAG defending the administration all this time with no knowledge of the difference between our two bills.
And I thank you for giving me the opportunity to say that to you in person.
Madam Speaker, these are incredibly difficult times right now.
And we'll leave it on that note.
Thank you so much for joining us.
I'm going to leave it on the vote that you are not right on this wolf.
And I hate to say that to you, but I feel confident about it.
And I feel confident about my colleagues.
And I feel confidence in my chairs.
It's not about me.
It's about millions of Americans who can't put food on the table, who can't pay the rent.
And we represent them.
These long food lines that we've seen.
I know you.
We know them.
I'm just saying.
We represent them and we know them.
As we say.
We know them.
We represent them.
Don't let the perfect be the enemy of the good, as they say.
It is nowhere near perfect.
Madam Speaker.
Always the case, but we're not even close to the good.
All right, let's see what happens because every day is critically, critically important.
All right, let's cancel it.
Let's close it right there.
So that's, you know, we represent them.
We know them.
First off, she's so flustered and frazzled that she took away her.
She's got a card with the, hey, these guys want to give food to the starving people.
And that's their card is for her to get up and go, we're trying to give food to the starving people.
So right at the beginning, he took away their power.
And this is what I was talking about with the, it's just a game of who farted.
That's what this is.
It's the same thing that they do.
It's the same exact thing that they do when they shut down the government and they try and pretend like the other side's being difficult.
This is the exact same thing.
This is the exact same game.
They're trying to make it seem like the other side is getting in the way of this deal being closed and you getting the thing that you need.
It's the other side's fault.
It is a, I don't know why I just found it kind of entertaining when he says again, don't let the perfect be the enemy of the good.
And she goes, this is far from perfect.
And you're like, yeah, that's the point of that saying.
That's what that means.
Quite, you know, literally, that's what the saying means.
Yes, it's not perfect.
By the way, I don't think it's perfect or good or any of that.
It's just funny that she got so offended there at Wolf Blitzer saying, hey, I have nothing but it's not as if Wolf Blitzer was disrespecting her.
He goes, I have nothing but respect for you.
I have respect for all these people.
I just also respect Andrew Yang and this other guy.
And like, I just respect everybody.
And I think a lot of them want to make a deal.
That's what he said.
That's the hard-hitting CNN, you know, journalism.
Okay.
So I respect all you guys.
Of course, you should have nothing but respect and admiration for all of the fucking criminals.
But then she just starts, she gets furious at that.
And at the end, she just repeats herself like four or five times.
We represent them.
And, you know, the funny thing is like, no, you fucking don't.
You don't.
Representing Criminals and Insurrection00:00:49
And that's why there's a populist insurrection going on in this country right now.
That's why Donald Trump is president.
That's why Bernie Sanders would be the fucking Democratic nominee if it wasn't for you guys rigging the system against him twice in a row.
That's why.
Because it turns out that career politicians like Nancy Pelosi actually don't represent people.
And the people are starting to wake up to that.
And they may not all be exactly on to the truth, but they know that you fucking crooks don't represent them for shit.