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Oct. 6, 2018 - Real Coffe - Scott Adams
13:03
Episode 249 Scott Adams: The Kavanaugh Future
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Hey Joanne.
Hey Dave.
Come on in here. Come in here and grab your coffee.
I'm a little late this morning.
Not moving too quickly.
Today will not be my favorite day, but I didn't want to miss a moment with you.
Oh, we have a thousand people and now it's time for the simultaneous sip.
Grab your beverage, your mug, your cup, your chalice.
Lift it to your lips.
That's good. So I woke up this morning to the most unusual tweet from Eric Weinstein and he was retweeting Brett Weinstein and then Jordan Peterson retweeted Eric.
Yeah. But all of them seemed to share an opinion that was a bit mind-blowing and the opinion was, Jordan Peterson stated it, that he believed that Kavanaugh should take the job And then resign.
For the stability of the country, I guess.
For the credibility of the courts.
For the good of society.
Now, I don't think I've ever disagreed with an opinion as strongly as I disagree with that one.
It feels like exactly the wrong thing to do.
Like almost insanely the wrong thing to do.
To the point where I wasn't sure it was really Jordan Peterson saying it or was really Eric saying it.
So I had to make sure it wasn't a counterfeit, first of all.
And apparently it's not.
And then Peterson softened his position in a subsequent tweet and he said he's not certain it's a good idea.
But, you know, worth thinking about, I guess.
And I thought to myself, what exactly is the argument for that?
How do you develop an argument for the position that Kavanaugh should take the job and resign for the stability, the credibility of the court and the stability of the system?
And man, he backpedaled a little bit, but not all the way.
He just acknowledged that he's not certain.
But the fact that that's even in conversation, It strikes me without hearing a fully developed argument.
And when I retweeted it, I added this thought.
And by the way, this is a good caution for all of you.
The people that we're talking about, you know, Eric Brett, Jordan Peterson, the Weinsteins, these are really smart people.
And they have lots of credibility in terms of talking about big issues.
So when any of them are on the same side, and one of the things Eric said is that all of the thoughtful people are on the same side.
I've never heard anybody say it until this morning.
I guess I don't hang around with thoughtful people, which is, I guess that's my shocker for the morning.
But I can't see any argument made for that.
But I also haven't seen it fully developed, so I'm going to I'm going to allow that I could be surprised because they are people who have surprising arguments that are sometimes surprisingly good.
So I'm going to leave it like that.
But my current thinking is there's just no way that's a good idea.
As many people said in the tweets, that whoever was picked after Kavanaugh is going to vote exactly the same way.
The whole point of the Supreme Court, at least the way it's drifted, is that you make the decisions in advance.
So the Supreme Court is no longer a body which gets together and makes decisions.
I suppose it used to be.
Maybe it never was.
But when you have a clear majority of either the liberals or the conservatives, the decision is made Pretty much in the nomination and confirmation phase.
So we don't know what the specific cases will be, but I can tell you in advance how they're going to be decided.
If you have a conservative court, Probably conservatives who understand the legal process are gonna know exactly how the court's gonna go on just about all of the questions.
We might get a surprise.
The court might have some rogue elements.
It's possible, but it's not very likely.
So the idea that the Supreme Court could improve its credibility By embracing the concept of guilty until proven innocent is such a head spinner to me that I can't wrap my head around it.
It seems to me that the most credible thing the Supreme Court could do would be to follow the laws of the United States and follow the Constitution and be true to the principles upon which they have sworn to uphold.
And certainly the not blaming people for things that can't be proven and are not even likely to be true, that would not be consistent with their mission.
So if you take these facts, whoever gets nominated instead of Kavanaugh in the imaginary scenario where he quits, and I don't see any chance of that happening, by the way, but in that imaginary scenario, There would just be another conservative and another fight.
It would be a waste of time.
A total waste of time. And given that we know that the court will vote conservative, that's the whole point.
The whole point of, you know, the people who elected Trump Was to get this judge and you get this judge or this kind of judge exactly because you know how he will vote or she will vote.
You know ahead of time.
That's the whole point. So if you can say that we already had a credible court and this one thing is going to put a taint on it, I would say, well, you're not really paying attention.
We don't have a credible court.
We have either a conservative court or we have a liberal court.
That's all we can have.
We only have those two choices.
Nobody gave us the option of the credible court.
Now if you want a credible court, you nominate to deadlock them.
So if you want the court to be credible, nominate either a conservative or a liberal to balance it out so that they're always deadlocked.
Now if you can give me an opinion from the Supreme Court Where they're completely deadlocked in terms of conservative and liberal and still one of them, doesn't matter which one, still one of them changes sides to get a decision.
I would say that could be credible.
In fact, I've suggested that if I became president, which isn't going to happen, that's what I would say about the Supreme Court.
That I would stop having a conservative Supreme Court or a liberal Supreme Court.
I would attempt to deadlock them so that they couldn't make any decisions.
Now, that would put a lot of power in the lower courts.
But if the Supreme Court wanted to change that, somebody's going to have to switch sides.
All right.
I'm just looking at your comments.
uh Now, CNN's having a tough time today.
So here's the top headline on CNN's website.
Now when I say the top headline, I mean the one that's at the top and to the left, because those are the important headlines.
So whatever's left and top are the things that are concentrating on as the news of the day.
And this is CNN. Trump is on a winning streak.
Trump is on a winning streak.
And let me tell you the worst anti-Trump thing on this page.
This is CNN, and here's the worst thing they say about Trump today on their page.
Melania's hat evokes colonialist comparison.
That's it. That's the worst thing they had to say about Trump, is that Melania's in Africa doing the work of The Angels, you know, visiting poor places in Africa.
And here's the best that CNN can come up with this week.
The only thing that Trump is getting wrong is he sent his wife over there with the wrong hat.
It evokes colonialist comparison.
She's from Slovenia.
She's from Slovenia.
Did they colonize a lot of Africa?
I don't remember that in my history.
Yes, Kavanaugh has not been confirmed.
I suppose if there ever was going to be a surprise, this would be it, right?
So this is a weird world in which it would be difficult.
Well, it would be hard to imagine that people aren't at least considering doing something wild at the confirmation vote, but we'll see.
We'll see, as the President likes to say.
I'd like to put in a plug for Rand Paul, my second favorite politician, I think.
So Rand Paul apparently is one of the sponsors or the sponsor of the opioid treatment bill.
So there's a big bill that must be on the president's desk by now for battling opioids.
And he gets a lot of credit for that.
My book, as you know, this afternoon I will be reading a eulogy at the funeral of my stepson who died this week from opioid, we think, overdose and probably fentanyl.
We're still waiting for confirmation, but it seems likely.
And Once again, I've been telling you for a while that Rand Paul is one of the few adults in Congress.
And I haven't loved everything he's ever said.
Sometimes he can get a little technical.
Sometimes he's not...
I would say he's not inspirational.
His persuasion game needs a lot of work.
He tends to be more science-based, more logic-based, more rational.
It sure helps for making laws, though.
So, if you're going to make a law, Rand Paul's a pretty strong choice because he's got a lot of qualities that Congress sorely needs.
You need more people like Rand Paul who can understand the technical parts.
He's willing to think out of the box.
He's not going to take the party line just because it's the party line.
He's a real leader. So, he's grown on me.
I can't say I always had this feeling.
It seemed to me that earlier in his career he was looking for his voice.
And it feels like he's found it now.
He's found his stride.
You bought Tucker Carlson's book.
So I'm hearing good things about Tucker Carlson's book.
I do plan to read it.
One of the reviews that you hear about Tucker's book is they always start with how good the writing is.
So, you know, I'm halfway sold just by hearing that.
So if the writing's that good, it's probably worth taking a look at.
I probably will. Thank you for your thoughts and prayers.
We will survive.
And I'm going to sign off now because I have a lot to do this morning, as you can imagine.
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