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Sept. 25, 2018 - Real Coffe - Scott Adams
27:32
Episode 233 Scott Adams: Kavanaugh’s Virgin Card and Trump’s Great Week
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Hey, it's me again with another Periscope.
Hello, Jacqueline.
Hello, Austin. Come on in here.
It's going to be the best periscope I've ever done this afternoon.
It's also the only periscope I'm going to do this afternoon, but I promise you it'll be just terrific.
Alright, we've got enough people in here.
I'm going to jump right into it.
Number one, what did I tell you this morning, if you were on the Periscope this morning, about the unconfirmed source about Rosenstein getting fired today?
I said, that's not dependable.
And sure enough, he was not fired today.
So keep a little mental running list of how many times the anonymous source...
It's just completely wrong.
The other news we have is that Brett Kavanaugh was interviewed by Martha McCallum today and asked about the allegations.
And you're wondering, how did he do?
How did he do?
Did he acquit himself well?
Did he dig himself in deeper?
Let me tell you.
Kavanaugh, the worst thing he could have done, he didn't do anything like that.
So the worst thing he could have done is to be aggressive and sort of alpha male and kind of come at it hard.
Some people are calling it sort of the Clarence Thomas effect where you have the booming voice and you declare vehemently your innocence.
Now we might still see that.
Some future time.
But instead, he went completely in the opposite direction.
So he said that he was a virgin in high school and for several years after.
Did not see that coming.
How did that affect things?
Well, It's gonna get him nominated, or it's gonna get him on the court.
I would say that the odds of him being kept off the court now are close to zero.
And the problem is that the entire allegations were built on the notion that he's this kind of guy.
And not only did he admit that he was a virgin during all those years and the years after, And I'm not making fun of him.
It's an excellent defense.
Because if the question is, is he that kind of a guy?
Or was he that kind of a guy?
You can't say for sure that a virgin wouldn't do bad things.
Nobody can say, he's a virgin, therefore he didn't do these things he's alleged to do.
That doesn't make sense. But if you try to figure out, is he that kind of person?
Well, that's a really good defense.
Secondly, am I wrong?
For those of you who saw it, did it seem like he was ready to cry?
Did you see that?
Toward the end, it looked like he almost couldn't speak, like he was ready to cry.
It was a sensitive moment, and again, I'm not making fun of him.
Imagine if you put anybody in that position, You know, with the effect it has on his family especially, it's going to be pretty upsetting.
But by being sensitive and being vulnerable, admitting he was a virgin during those years, which wasn't the cool thing to do, I think he's largely guaranteed that he's going to get on the court.
Now, I don't know that he played it that way because it was a good strategy.
It just might be who he is.
It's entirely possible that there are no layers here.
That there are no levels.
What I saw was somebody telling the truth about the virgin thing.
I don't think you made that up.
That's my assumption. But also being vulnerable as hell.
And it reminded me of something that is easy to forget.
And let's see if you had the same feeling.
We assume when we hear an allegation that something happened to the person making the allegation.
So we can assume that she may in fact, in fact probably, is a victim of something by somebody.
Or in some way life has dealt her a bad card.
So I think that part's true and we should have an appropriate amount of empathy for the accuser.
As we should for all people.
And I know that we've had some empathy for the judge, but since he's accused of a heinous thing, and he's an adult, and he's playing at the highest level, and frankly, he's a large white male, people don't really have the same kind of empathy for large...
I mean, tall...
White males in powerful positions.
It's just not an empathy situation in our current society.
But here's the thing. When you hear him with his wife, who is obviously distraught, talking about the impact they had on their three daughters.
Imagine. Three teenage daughters.
I think they're all teenagers. Imagine that.
And imagine the effect on the wife and the family.
I don't know if his parents are alive, but imagine those effects.
They are victims.
So while we certainly have a question to answer, which is, was Christine Ford a victim?
Then she'd still be a victim.
So is that true or false?
And that's a fair question.
But let's not forget that Then no matter what the answer to that is, Kavanaugh's wife and his three kids, they're victims right now.
They're still being abused.
Avenatti is abusing Kavanaugh's wife and children right now.
Right now. Let me say that again.
Avenatti... And others, but he seems to be like a primary person here, is abusing Kavanaugh's wife and children right now.
Right now. It's a crime that's not illegal, but it's a crime in action right now.
Let's not forget that.
There are some serious victims here.
Some in the past, and whatever effect that has into their future, can't ignore that, if that's the case.
But they're happening right now, the daughters and the wife.
Is it two daughters? Somebody say?
I don't know if that's the case.
Yeah, it might be two daughters.
Okay, thank you for the correction.
Fact-checking? Fact-checking says two daughters.
But anyway, the point is the same.
Now, so my net of this is that he probably handled this in the best possible way.
He reminded us that there are other victims, and these are victims right now.
Right now, they're victims.
And he was vulnerable, and he didn't act even slightly like the guy he's accused of being.
And you add that to the fact that there are no corroborating eyewitnesses.
And then the, let's say, the unusual behavior of the accuser.
Christine Ford's not wanting to drive, the delays, the, you know, even if there are perfectly good reasons for all those things, they're raising all kinds of flags.
The other thing that I haven't heard anybody say, so I'll just say it, right?
This is the sort of thing that responsible people on television aren't going to say, but since I know you're all thinking it, I'm just going to say what you're thinking.
People who go into the psychology field as a profession tend to have some issues they're working with.
Am I wrong? People who go into the psychology field to become professional psychologists and help other people.
Every case I've ever seen, you know, that I personally knew, they had some real issues in their own past that they were working through.
So I'm not saying that's the case with Christine Ford.
What I'm saying is that from the perspective of the public and the professionals who are making decisions about this, all of these little flags are starting to come up.
Boop, boop, boop.
None of them individually tells you anything.
It doesn't really mean anything that she didn't want to fly.
You know, if you were looking at that alone, it wouldn't mean anything.
It doesn't mean anything that her profession is psychology.
That doesn't mean she has problems.
But you start adding them together and it's this picture of something that's not quite right.
And you compare that to his defense and Unless Christine Ford comes over great in the interview, I think the decision's done.
But we'll see.
She could be very persuasive, but she's got a high bar because Judge Kavanaugh just set the bar.
And he set it very high.
Right. His version of events, Kavanaugh's, is sort of a gold standard at this point.
It's really good.
That doesn't mean he's right.
Doesn't mean he's telling the truth.
It doesn't mean she's lying.
But if you're just looking at the quality of the performance, if you will, man, he was good.
Very good. Now let me talk about Trump's great week.
I have claimed that this is Trump's best week ever in terms of persuasion.
Best week ever.
And people said to me, what do you mean?
How is this a good week? There's all this bad news and stuff.
And I'm going to conflate a few weeks here so it's more than one week.
Let's go to the whiteboard.
I'm going to give you the two-dimensional look and then the three-dimensional look.
So there are several things which have happened.
Those are on the top line.
Then I'm going to give you the two-dimensional view of them and then the three-dimensional view.
First there's Woodward's book, Fury.
What is the two-dimensional take on that?
It's a book by a credible writer and a credible researcher who says the president is impulsive and maybe a little crazy and a little angry and stuff.
But, was that anything new?
It's sort of what we always hear, and you always think there's a little hyperbole, and you ask yourself, why is it that everybody who talks to him in person doesn't see any of this?
I talked to him in person for long enough that if he were crazy, I kind of would have picked up on it, I think.
And it seems like nobody else is picking up on it either.
But the 3D take on this is that all of the accusations in the book were kind of baked in already.
Kind of everything you already knew.
But the thing that was surprising was the no collusion.
It's the part of the book that didn't include.
The best... The Watergate guy, the great researcher, has the best sources, really got the insider stuff.
And he said, couldn't find any Russia problem.
Does not mean that Mueller will find nothing.
So the lack of finding something doesn't mean there's nothing there.
Got to be clear about that.
But in terms of how it looks, in terms of persuasion, The bad parts are discounted and have already just flown away.
And the no-collusion part remains.
You're hearing a lot less about Russia this week, aren't you?
Then there's the Rosenstein story that was leaked to the New York Times in which allegedly Rosenstein considered the 25th Amendment.
Now, my take on that is that he probably did not consider it, although it might have come up.
And if it comes up, you're going to talk about it because it came up.
Oh, it's not Fury, it's Fear.
Is that it? Did I get the wrong name of the book?
Was it Fear?
Is that what it was? Alright, we're fact-checking as we go.
Anyway, so the Rosenstein story was about the 25th Amendment.
That sounds terrible, right?
When you hear that, oh my God, you know, somebody at that high level was talking about the 25th Amendment.
Well, first of all, it probably didn't happen.
Rosenstein's already denied that it happened in any serious way.
He was saying it was sarcastic.
And frankly, that sounds very believable to me.
But it works really well for Trump.
Because it confirms whatever suspicions you had about the deep state.
It confirms that people were working against them.
It makes it look like there was a coup in the White House among the anti-Trumpers, or at least in the administration.
And it's also good by Rod.
Because now the president can just easily fire him whenever he wants to.
So this is just the best thing that could have happened for the president, is that the deep state is shown to be real, or it looks real.
I'm not saying it is because of this conversation, which I think is fake news.
But the way it looks...
It's going to be good for the president because it makes the deep state look real and now he has a reason to get rid of Rod Rosenstein if he wants to, anytime he wants to.
Then of course the discussion about the Supreme Court ends up being all about Roe vs.
Wade. It's all about reproductive rights and women and Roe vs.
Wade. Now it's not all about that.
Because the Supreme Court handles lots of stuff.
But the way the news and the public and social media has kind of focused it, they made it kind of a women issue.
So the two-dimensional way to look at that is that the left are making a case that the GOP are bad to women, bad for women.
They're not the party that are going to be good for women, including nominations for the court.
So on the two-dimensional level, that's what it looks like.
But on the three-dimensional level, where you go a little bit deeper into what the persuasion, whether...
Hey, Eric! Whether the persuasion is...
Let me say this. On the persuasion level, focusing on women being the priority for the conversation kind of leaves some people out, doesn't it?
Do you remember any conversation about How anything could be good for black people?
Or how anything that's happening with the Supreme Court would be good for Hispanics?
On some level, they're going to notice that nobody's talking about them.
And I mean specifically their own team.
Their own team, the Democrats, have very consciously made this sort of a woman's issue.
Not saying they shouldn't.
I'm not saying that's a bad idea.
I'm just saying that if you're black or Hispanic, your group is not coming up a lot.
It seems to be forgotten.
That's not good. At the same time, President Trump is producing more jobs and a good economy and stuff like that, so he seems to be helping in his Republican-y way, which is try to help everybody, and it's good.
He tries to build a wall.
Ideally, that would be good for the folks who are competing for jobs.
Now let's take the Kavanaugh allegations specifically.
On the two-dimensional level, the top level, the question is, are they true or false?
So we're arguing about the weeds.
Is it true? Is it false?
But on the persuasion level, the accusers are unusually not credible.
Now, you start with the notion that when a woman makes an accusation, she should be taken seriously.
So in moment one, the moment the accusation happens, that's probably the highest level of credibility.
But as things go on, as we're talking about it, you don't get the corroboration.
You don't get any other information to back it up.
And the person making the allegations seems a little flaky.
That doesn't mean she is, it's just the way it's being portrayed.
And so the accusers are becoming less credible because this batch is going through a filter that is not really helping them.
And it looks like an overreach.
So I think there'll be some backlash.
Now if the accusers are not credible, To some big portion of the country.
Obviously they're very credible to some other portion.
And it looks like an overreach.
What group of citizens is going to be the most concerned about that?
The answer is men. Men.
So if you are a man, and or you are black or Hispanic, the Republican Party is making, or I'm sorry, the Democratic Party is making a great case for people who are not you.
So they're making men sort of the enemy and they're completely ignoring the black and Hispanic part of their base.
So that's all good for Trump because the enemy is, you know, Trump's enemy is doing poorly.
Then just North Korea, you know, the standard way to look at this in the mainstream media is that all these little hiccups and, you know, cancellations of meetings that we've seen, they're all evidence that we're being played.
We're being played! And once again, North Korea is going to fool us all.
But I think on the persuasion level, you can see that all the parties are getting each other pretty pregnant.
North and South Korea are marching in pretty briskly to make something work where they can work together.
So it seems to me that that's all going in the right direction as well.
Well, it's hard to criticize where they are at this point.
So you put it all together.
And let me ask you, what is an accusation about the president you have not heard this week?
What accusation have you not heard about the president?
He's a racist.
The whole racist thing requires a somewhat permanent refilling the hose So if you go a while without something that the media can define as racism, it sort of fades away.
Because you're not seeing new laws that are racist.
There's nothing happening that you could look at and say, that thing he did today, there's a racist thing.
There's just not enough happening.
So, because this is in the headline, it's sort of driven Russia out of the headlines.
There wasn't much there anyway.
It's sort of driven all the racist things out of the headline.
It wasn't much there anyway.
The economy is screaming.
North Korea is going well.
Russia doesn't seem to be a problem.
The president was just making friends with Poland recently.
I don't think Russia loves that.
The president got Russia to back down on their attack on Idlib, whatever that city is, in Syria.
That doesn't look like giving Putin everything he wants.
So we're seeing over and over again that the president is sort of having his way with Russia.
Now let's talk about the trade deals.
So the trade deals.
Full disclosure, I'm an investor in a startup.
Not my own startup, but something I invested in, which could go out of business because of the tariffs.
That was the news I just received today.
Now I'm not going to talk about the details, but there was a 25% tariff on their primary product.
So their cost to sell their product went up 25%.
Probably a crushing blow, depending on how long it lasts.
So those of you who say that I support the president because I'm gonna get rich, like fat cats like me, I'm doing it all wrong because I've only lost money in this whole deal since Trump announced.
But I feel good for the future.
But anyway, the trade agreements will probably work out in the long run.
We don't know how long it'll take.
So my point is, Things are going really well for President Trump this week.
It just doesn't seem like it because there's so much bad stuff out there and it's related to the administration indirectly.
Because anything that Kavanaugh gets accused of, people are going to say that somehow indicates the whole administration.
Alright, how many of you think I made my point?
That this was a great, great week for the President.
Maybe this is the best week.
Because I can't think of any week in which everything was going so well at the same time.
Persuasion-wise, anyway.
Kavanaugh must be confirmed though.
Well, I think he will be.
Let's talk about James Woods and his suspension on Twitter.
I was thinking that the reason that James Woods got banned on Twitter, is that the meme he sent around that indicated that some men were going to not vote because they wanted the women's vote to be worth more.
And the idea is that if anybody thought that was true, maybe they would join the movement and not vote, and then the Democrats would have fewer votes.
So there was some thought that even though James said, it's unlikely it's true, but you never know in this environment, I'm summarizing him or paraphrasing him, that it didn't eliminate the chance that it's true.
So the words he put around the meme indicated it might be true.
You know, probably not, but it might be.
So that was enough to get him banned.
So what are the two ways that he can get back on Twitter?
Well, I understand if he deletes the meme...
That they'll let him back on.
But I guess, I hear, I'm not sure this is true, but I think he might be holding tight to make a point.
Which would be clever, right?
It wouldn't be the worst thing.
Oh, somebody says he's back? I'll have to check on that.
But here's the point I was going to.
The other way to make James Wood's meme okay is to actually form an organization Of Democratic men who have agreed not to vote so that the women's vote can be more important.
Actually, if you wanted to make it look like it wasn't influencing, don't make it Democrat men, just make it men.
And you could hope that more people on the other side believe it than your side.
But in this case, it would be a real organization.
So I'm saying don't do it for humor.
Create an actual organization that is trying to convince men to not vote because men are the problem.
You know, there are a lot of people who think men are the problem, and so if people legitimately had a movement that said, look, men are the problem, don't vote, let women have a greater vote, it would probably work out well for Republicans.
But it would be funny and it would make James Wood's meme now accurate and therefore they would have to let him back on because he no longer would be passing around a false meme.
It would become true.
Somebody says this is stupid and they're right.
So that's not a real suggestion by the way.
It was just something I thought of that was funny.
Yeah, I'm not really recommending you do that, right?
That was just for fun. And alt, oh yeah, he's not back, right?
there's a parody of him that's back okay some are saying he made a new account with alt at the end of his name But people have been telling me authoritatively that that's not really him.
That's just somebody trying to get a lot of follows.
So don't assume that's him.
We're assuming that's going to be a parody account.
All right. I think I'm done for now.
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