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Dec. 9, 2018 - Real Coffe - Scott Adams
51:21
Episode 330 Scott Adams: The Two Mueller Movies, With Delicious Coffee
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*cough* Ba da bum bum Joanne, you're so fast *cough* Mm-hmm.
Hey, Tyler. Hey, Jeremy.
Get in here. I think you know what time it is.
Hey, Finland. Finland in the house.
It's time for Coffee with Scott Adams.
That's me. You know who you are.
And if you're prepared, you already have your coffee.
It might be a different beverage, but I like coffee.
Join me if you will.
Grab your stein, your glass, your cup, your mug, your container of any kind, lift it to your lips, and enjoy the simultaneous sip.
All right, happy birthday to whoever's birthday that is.
Hi, hi. So, I've been trying to catch up with the news.
I'm out of town at the moment.
I'm up in Utah, 8,000 feet above sea level.
Took me a few days to get over the altitude sickness, but I'm back.
And as I'm reading all the stories, and I like to check CNN first, it seems to be it's going to be non-stop Mueller stories.
Mueller this and Cohen that and Manafort that and etc.
And it's fascinating, absolutely fascinating, to watch the two movies develop.
In one movie, let's say the one that President Trump He's writing and directing.
Mueller's filings so far show no evidence of any problematic crimes.
And so the president says, totally in the clear.
Well, he's not wrong in the sense that I haven't seen anything that would put him in much trouble.
But if you read the CNN version of the world, the separate movie, There's this weird thing happening that from my perspective, and of course I could be biased and probably am,
certainly am, but it seems to me that CNN keeps finding legal people who will write nonsense lists of things that are not crimes and are not going to be a big problem But if they have enough of them, they can create this story where it looks like there is.
So for example, if you read CNN, you'll read story after story today from people who have law degrees of one kind or another, who will say things like this.
Well, the president or somebody did something that wasn't a crime But it was very close to one you could imagine could be illegal if things like that were illegal.
So, for example, having conversations about a project in Russia when you're not president and you think you probably won't win and you're keeping your options open is not a crime.
But it feels like, sort of close to something, that if the situation were different, and some of the variables were, you know, opposite, such as he was president, or there was a quid pro quo, something like that, well, that would be a crime.
Now, nothing that he did or has been, the president did or has been accused of, is an actual crime.
Then we look at the payments for Stormy and McDougal.
Now, you could make an argument that if you use campaign money to do something like that, you've got some kind of a secret campaign reporting problem.
But there was also a perfectly good reason to do it.
For personal reasons.
In other words, just to keep his family out of the blowback.
And if you have a perfectly good personal reason to do something, but it also happens to be good for your campaign, I believe Alan Dershowitz would say, that's not illegal.
It's something that feels like it's sort of close to almost being legal if things were a little bit different than what they were.
Now, you say to yourself, oh sure, Scott, that's technically not illegal, and if it went to court, there's not much chance that the president would have any real jeopardy.
But if you add that thing that's not quite illegal to the other thing about the Russian project, which is also not illegal, you're starting to see a pattern of all these things that are not illegal and But together, they mean something that's a terrible jeopardy for the president.
And then, of course, there's Manafort's crimes, which had nothing to do with collusion or Trump.
But Manafort...
Committed real crimes, and he was on the team of the president for a few months.
So that's not exactly a crime of the president, but it's close to it in a way that makes you reminded of a crime that's almost illegal if some of the variables were different than the way we know they are.
And you can go right down the line from Flynn to, you know, everything else.
And there's a lot of stuff, but it all has exactly the same quality.
Well, that definitely would be a problem if it were a little bit different than what actually happened.
So when I read the CNN stories, honestly they look crazy.
Your brilliant discourse is proving the special counsel case, Pinhead.
So there's somebody here who thinks that what I said is proving the special counsel's case.
What is the special counsel's case?
Have you heard it?
The special counsel's case is that a whole bunch of people did things that were maybe illegal in their cases, and they were close to the president, But none of it actually implicates the president in a crime that would be, you know, important in any way.
So it's fascinating to watch what appears to be...
It's hard to tell.
It's hard to tell if the people writing these articles are just political hacks who are just taking a side and supporting their side.
You can't really tell if it's just that or they really believe what they're saying.
I actually can't tell.
And that's the thing about reading the opinion pieces on CNN. You read them and you don't really know if that's really their opinion.
Or if they're just taking a side and doing the best they can to advocate for their side.
It's really hard to sort that out.
Was it Howard Dean, who had been Nixon's lawyer who went to jail for some Watergate-related stuff?
I think Dean was saying...
What's his first name?
Is it John Dean?
John Dean was saying that...
Yeah, John Dean. Sorry, not Howard.
Howard is the funny screeching guy.
So John Dean, Nixon's ex-lawyer, is saying that Congress almost has to impeach the president at this point.
And I'm thinking to myself, do they?
Do they? Because they kind of have a choice, don't they?
Because impeachment is not a criminal process, and there's no chance that it will prevail.
In other words, there's no real chance that the Senate is going to let them remove the president.
So, does it make any sense to say that Congress really has no choice, they've got to start an impeachment process?
I don't think so, because Congress can make political decisions too.
They can decide that it's bad for politics, bad for the country.
I doubt that one will matter.
And then you also have to consider that John Dean is first of all a lawyer, and second of all went to jail.
How credible is he?
Let me tell you, if your lawyer goes to jail, you can't trust that lawyer.
Look at Cohen. Cohen's a lawyer.
Looks like he's going to go to jail.
Someday, if Cohen goes on CNN and gives you his legal opinion, What are you going to think about it?
Are you going to say, well, there's a credible guy because he's a lawyer and he went to jail.
So CNN is sort of scraping the bottom of the lawyer barrel, trying to find a lawyer who is willing to say something that agrees with their narrative.
All right. Should Trump pardon his children?
You know, if it ever came to a point where Trump needed to pardon anyone, and let's say you could imagine there were several pardons that he could give if he were to give pardons.
You know, anybody in his inner circle or whatever.
The funniest way to do that, and you're going to hate this, But just think about it.
Try to not react to your first thought when I give you this idea.
Somebody says pardon for what?
So here we have to imagine that somebody is He is accused of an actual crime who is part of Trump's circle that he cares about.
That could be Manafort. Maybe Manafort.
I kind of doubt it.
But let's say somebody finds something about a family member or something.
And he's going to do some...
And he's going to...
What's the word?
He's going to pardon some people.
The funniest thing he could do would be to pardon Hillary Clinton at the same time.
Think about it. Think about if the president had to pardon somebody in his circle, And it would be very unpopular.
The funniest thing he could do is pardon Hillary Clinton at the same time.
Because it would just totally screw up the criticisms.
It would turn it from, I'm just protecting my criminal friends.
That's how people would spin it.
And it would turn it into, let's get past this phase.
Let's all of us get past it.
And get on to the work of the country.
It would be pretty funny.
Somebody says, yeah, but he would not pardon her.
come on well I'm saying in the worst case scenario when he want if he wanted to give some pardons and it was going to be politically dangerous that'd be one way to do it Nancy Reiser you should let your husband shave his head If that sounds like a random statement, it's because one of the comments asked me to say that.
So Nancy, you know what to do now.
Scott, talk about Kelly quitting.
Yeah, you know, the story about Kelly quitting, and really all of the personnel stories, they all have the same quality, which is, if you weren't in the room with those people and you haven't talked to them personally, and you don't know them personally, you really don't know much about anything.
So I see your comment about doing a periscope on hypnosis.
I'll talk about that in a minute. So I don't have much to say about the John Kelly story, except that it has to be a really hard job.
And I can't imagine anybody wanting to do it for a long time.
Yeah, there was a...
The president did a funny tweet about Dick Blumenthal, who he has now apparently given him his forever name as the Dick.
So I think he just keeps getting funnier.
Anyway, I've been asked to talk about hypnosis in the context of addictions and using hypnosis to cure addiction.
And I will talk about that right now.
The bad news is hypnosis does not work for curing addiction.
And there's a reason for that, that is humorously obvious after you hear it.
Hypnosis typically only works for things that you're willing to do.
The people who are still smoking, still drinking, still doing drugs, They want to do those things.
The reason somebody takes a drink if they're alcoholic or smokes a cigarette if they're addicted to smoking is because they want a cigarette and they want a drink.
So hypnosis tends to be ineffective for people who don't want to change or don't want to move in the direction of the hypnosis.
So where hypnosis does work is where you have no mental blocks to it.
So in other words, if you said, I'd like you to be more relaxed when you fly, there's no part of you that wants to be afraid on a plane.
And so hypnosis could work for that.
But when it comes to quitting cigarettes or overeating or quitting opioids, all those things, all of those addictions have the same quality.
The reason people can't do it themselves is because they want those things.
They want the food, the alcohol, the cigarette.
They want them. They also want to not have them.
So they've got that balance there and the wanting to have him is a little stronger.
Hypnosis is marginally useful.
And when I say marginally, What I mean is that the success rate of hypnosis for curing addictions, whether it's eating or cigarettes or whatever else, is about the same as any other process.
So in other words, if you're using hypnosis to quit smoking or using some other program that's mental as opposed to physical and taking a pill, about a third of the people succeed.
Something like that. And the reason is that the people who succeed are the people who have decided to succeed.
The main variable in success, getting off of an addiction, the variable that matters, the only one that's predictable, is how badly they want it.
That's it. And it's not even a want.
It's more like deciding.
You know, when an alcoholic hits bottom, if they hit bottom and they can see that it's just horror and darkness at the bottom, people will sometimes, quite often actually, decide to live and decide that the addiction they don't want and when that decision is made they can use any variety of techniques and they're going to have better luck than if they had not made that decision what addicts want but it is impossible to have is a change of opinion or a change of preference.
And hypnosis isn't going to do that for you.
So hypnosis can help if you've already decided to quit and it's a real decision.
But if you're just kidding yourself and you're saying, I really like what I'm I like the drinks or the food or the cigarettes or anything else.
If you still really, really like those things, hypnosis isn't going to help you.
You've got to start hating those things for hypnosis to work.
In other words, if you're a drinker and you hit bottom, you can start to hate the alcohol.
And then maybe hypnosis or any other method would work.
So I guess my bottom line here is that hypnosis is not really a path for fixing addiction.
It's just one of the many tools that are likely to work if you've made the decision to quit.
Does your son-in-law...
I don't have a son-in-law.
Can hypnosis create an addict?
Can hypnosis create an addict?
Yes, but not so much in the way that you think.
You can't turn a non-addictive person into an addict with hypnosis if they don't want that to happen, and why would they want that to happen?
You could convince somebody that had a natural addiction, in other words, genetically they have addiction, you could convince them to take a drink if they didn't think there was any problem with it.
So in the unique situation where somebody didn't mind having a drink or didn't mind taking an opioid, which I guess would be a more rare situation, you could get people to do something that would cause them to become addicted.
But you're not really hypnotizing them to addiction.
You might be persuading them to take a drink and then maybe they have the genes for alcoholism.
So you get there indirectly.
The hypnosis pornographer...
I don't remember that was that a story in the news?
yeah hypnosis you can't hypnotize someone to do something something they have an internal objection to.
Somebody says, things going very badly for Trump.
In one movie, that's true.
In another movie, that is not true.
Let me test an idea with you.
And this is a brand new idea, so it might be bad, but I'll run it by you.
When the Constitution was created, it was created based on an understanding of the world being what it was at the time.
And, of course, they could not foresee the Internet and the modern technology that would come after.
And so I ask you, if the founders who created the Constitution were Had the internet, would they have written it the same way?
Would the Constitution of the United States look the same if it had been created in an age of the internet?
My thinking is no, that it wouldn't be, because they would take that into account.
And let me give you a situation where that sort of matters.
When we're talking about, let's say, healthcare, we start with the assumption that if there are healthcare laws, these laws will apply to every person in the United States.
That's your basic assumption, right?
Don't you assume that laws apply to all the citizens?
Now, I would argue that that was the only practical way you could have laws when the founders wrote the Constitution.
It's the only thing that made sense.
The law had to apply to everyone voluntarily, or everyone equally.
But, fast forward to today.
So we have the internet, and we have all kinds of digital resources, so that we can tell that you and I are different people, and I can tell what you're doing, what you've agreed to do.
You can tell what I'm doing and what I've agreed to do under a lot of situations.
Under our current situation, We could have two sets of laws.
For example, some people could opt in to universal health care.
They could sign a document that says, I agree to be part of universal health care in this country, but I also agree that only the people who have opted in We'll ever be on the hook for paying for it.
So even if it creates more debt, only the people who opted in will ever be responsible for that portion of the debt.
Now that's something we could do today because of computers and databases and the internet that could not have been done Could not have been contemplated in the day of the Constitution's development.
And so I say to you, why are we discussing universal healthcare versus a more market-based system and acting as if we have to pick one?
Because here's the thing.
We don't have to pick one.
We have the technology and very easily the capability to have both and the people who like one system can opt in and the people who don't like that system cannot and we could even have rules about you know under what conditions you can move over to the other side as long as you can keep track of stuff As long as you can track things and measure things and monitor things,
as long as I can know what voter paid how much in taxes, and these are all the things we can know because of technology.
We do not have to decide what the health care laws are for the country.
We can have two systems.
We could have three systems, as long as you have some kind of rules for how you move from one system to the other, and what it means to be in the system, what risks you're taking for what rewards.
Let me think of another example.
You'll love this one.
What if we had two sets of laws for gun ownership?
One set of people would say, I choose to make it illegal for me to own a gun.
And then they could live in a world in which they don't have guns.
And other people could, let's say, under the condition that they're members of the NRA. That's not the best example in the world, but let's just go with that.
They could say that if you want to own a gun...
You're also on the hook for some types of problems or taxes or law enforcement related to that.
So that people who are in favor of gun ownership could take on the extra cost that guns add to the system.
So, for example, there are lots of gun-related crimes.
We probably have the capability to assign a budget to how many crimes are gun-related.
And then the people who say, I would like to be in the group of people who have guns would be the only ones who would pay that extra tax.
Now, there's more to guns than just taxes and money.
It's about life and death.
But the point is, you could bifurcate the system and say that people who are against guns and have voluntarily signed something that says, I will never own a gun, would also never be on the hook to pay for any of the law enforcement or other costs of gun ownership.
They should be exempt from the downside of guns if they choose not to own them.
And then the people who want guns, maybe they pay for the cost of that freedom.
So that might not be the best idea.
But the larger point is that why do we act as though we have to have one set of laws for everyone?
Because we really don't.
That was a historical requirement that is obsolete because of the internet.
Now we can just opt into a program and live with those rules or not, and we can track all that stuff.
Somebody said, because in pluribus unum.
That doesn't mean anything.
I mean, it's Latin for something, but it doesn't really address the question.
What do you think about William Barr as Attorney General?
Don't know anything about him.
I'll let the people who know him weigh in on that.
Same principle could be applied to abortion.
Could it? The difference is that abortion is life and death, or at least it is to the people who are anti-abortion.
So that one's sort of a special case.
It would be hard to say that murder would be legal for people who opt into it.
So that would be tough.
How is it freedom if you have to pay?
Well, we all pay taxes.
So paying taxes based on your behaviors is now acceptable and normal.
Will Trump legalize marijuana federally before election?
It feels like if he hasn't done it already, I don't know what he's waiting for.
It seems like Congress needs to handle that, maybe not the President.
Scott, can you elaborate on why you don't drink?
Yes, I can. Alcohol is poison and the more you drink, the unhealthier you will be.
I do not believe the studies that say that the moderate drinkers live longer.
To me, the odds of that being true are close to zero.
What's probably true is that there's a correlation because if you said if you say for example you know your neighbor can have one drink and and stop well that's probably a neighbor who does not have an addictive personality and probably knows how to moderate you know dangerous behaviors in general and it just applies to drinking as well So I think there are too many things to correlate with somebody who could have an occasional single drink than to say the drink itself is what makes them healthier.
It's probably somebody who has the ability to have just one drink, probably has some social life, probably has the ability to not be addicted, they don't have the addiction gene.
So if you put all that together, I find it very unlikely that drinking alcohol in moderation is good for you.
I would say the odds of that are close to zero.
But the reason that I originally stopped drinking was that I developed a reaction to it that apparently some people have.
It's called a So it's like an allergic reaction.
In other words, it makes your head blow up with sinus problems and you can't breathe and stuff.
But it's not actually technically an allergic reaction because alcohol is not alive.
Cannabis kills brain cells, so you get dumb.
Um, um, I haven't noticed that.
Maybe I wouldn't notice because I've lost too many brain cells.
Isn't it a blood thinner?
And that can be good.
It seems unlikely that the negative elements of alcohol are overcompensated by any positives it might bring.
To me it just seems so unlikely.
I can't say it's impossible.
But it's unlikely. Yeah, somebody is saying that these sulfites are what causes the bad reaction.
So if I eat salad dressing or anything that has sulfites in it, and alcohol has sulfites in it, I have a serious allergic type reaction.
Aspirin is blood thinner, and the latest studies on taking an aspirin are that it is BS unless you have a known heart risk.
Yeah, and somebody's saying that booze companies pay for the studies.
I don't know that to be the case, but that's certainly the thing I would worry about.
Yeah, the baby aspirins apparently are not healthy or even a good risk unless you have doctor's orders and you have some kind of heart risk.
The other thing I learned when I stopped drinking is that I thought I had, how to put this, once I stopped drinking, and I was only a weekend drinker and I didn't get too crazy,
but I felt it was an important part of my social life, which it was, But I realized that a lot of my friends, my social friends were really just alcoholics.
And I'm talking about a lot of them.
So a lot of the people that I thought were just, hey, we like to get together and have a few drinks.
I didn't realize that they also had a few drinks, whether I was with them or not.
And that the social life around drinking is almost a cover for people who are functional alcoholics.
So I would say that a great deal of my social friends were functional alcoholics, meaning they held jobs and had families and stuff, but they would sort of disguise it with an active social life.
So you'd say, well, of course they drank every day this week.
They had friends over every day this week.
describing me and it hurts somebody says um yeah somebody else is talking about quitting drinking um I'm pretty sure that my brain works better.
Now that I don't drink.
Because even if I just had a couple of martinis on a Saturday night, Sunday wasn't a good day.
You could wake up and you knew your brain wasn't working as well as it should.
Once you stop drinking, you realize how stupid people are when they drink.
Yes. It is very difficult to be around people drinking now that I don't.
Everything that seemed fun and playful about it doesn't look that same way anymore.
And it happens sort of immediately.
The same with weed, somebody says.
All right.
How many of you, let me ask this.
How many of you are addicted to something?
And let's say that something is food, but only if you're overweight.
If you're addicted to food, but you have a good weight, that's not really, I wouldn't call that an addiction.
Yeah, what are your addictions?
How many of you are addicted to a drug and alcohol, cigarettes, food, vaping?
Pretty much everybody, right?
I'm not entirely sure that people can be non-addicted.
It feels as if addiction is a requirement of life.
And the best you can do is get yourself addicted to something that won't kill you.
So I'm addicted to coffee.
And I'm addicted to exercise.
And I'm addicted to periscopes.
I do it, you know.
I could give you reasons why I do this.
I could tell you, you know, how it helps my business and blah, blah, blah.
But primarily the reason I do this is that I really like it.
I'm addicted to it.
I get something out of it.
And so I'll make excuses for why I keep doing it.
Humans need addiction.
Yeah, the way I've said that is that I call it the pleasure unit theory.
The pleasure unit theory goes like this.
Humans need a certain amount of pleasure or else life isn't worth it.
If the only thing you did is avoid pain, it wouldn't be enough to make you want to stay alive.
Humans need a certain amount of pleasure to not kill themselves.
And so when I see somebody who's like say in poverty or they've got some Deep problems, and then they're also addicted to drugs.
To me it looks like a rational choice.
It's an unfortunate choice, but it's a rational choice, because if your life is terrible and you have no way to get pleasure through normal acceptable ways, but you can get pleasure from a drug, that might make you dead in a little while.
It's probably rational to do the drug because if you can't get any happiness from your life, you might as well have a shorter life and enjoy it while you can.
So I always have a lot of empathy for anyone who's addicted to anything because it means that they're not getting enough pleasure and they're finding a destructive way to do it.
So if this theory holds, it would also follow that it would be easier to stay off of any addictive things if your life was providing you lots of pleasure.
So let's say, for example, you had good relationships and you enjoy your job and you've got enough free time that you do your hobbies and your sports or whatever on the weekends and they're all great.
You would be a person who's getting lots of fun And lots of pleasure, and you're lucky because you're getting them in all these healthy ways.
To me, it seems that that person would be advantaged in getting off an addiction or not getting on one.
Now, of course, the genetic component is probably the biggest variable in all this, but within the people who have the addiction gene, it's still easier probably to quit.
If you have other good things going for you, they can give you some pleasure.
Have I ever talked about Kratom?
I haven't, but only because I don't feel I know enough about it.
When I try to read about Kratom, I see opinions on it that are so opposite.
You know, oh, it's the best thing ever.
It's dangerous. I can't sort that out.
It's hard to tell what is the truth there.
What about Stoicism?
I don't think it works.
For most people.
I think most people need a certain amount of pleasure in their life.
All right.
Does anybody have any other questions?
The news is amazingly boring because of all this Mueller stuff that doesn't quite mean anything.
Joe Rogan said he's using it.
He'd be a good source.
China threatens Canada with consequences over arrest of the Huawei executive.
Yeah, you could expect that China will push hard and everybody's pushing hard on this trade stuff.
It's just normal that China would push back and it's normal that Canada and the US would push back on their pushback.
I don't know what that law is. Will Hillary go to jail?
No. Talk about the uprising in Europe.
Yeah. You know, I'm starting to wonder...
If the only countries that will do well in the future are the countries that, for whatever reason, are immune to immigration.
Now, I realize that's a provocative thing to say, but I wonder if you were to fast forward, let's say, 50 years into the future, Would the island countries be the ones doing the best?
In other words, would Australia, New Zealand, Japan look like the ones with the best economies?
And this would include Switzerland and maybe Hungary, some countries that are hard-ass about immigration.
But it seems to me that the countries that are permissive with immigration, especially if they're permissive about illegal immigration, We'll eventually get enough people in the country that will change the character of the country, and probably not in a way that helps their economy immediately.
So let me put it this way.
When we talk about immigration being good, we're usually talking about a situation in which there are plenty of jobs, unskilled jobs, and there's plenty of space, and sort of the situation from the early days.
But today, When the number of unskilled jobs is limited, if you have unlimited people coming in and you have also social services that will support people whether they're working or not, you have a perfect storm situation in which you're pretty much committing national suicide if the rate of immigration goes from the productive level,
which is pretty large, I think that developed countries can absorb a lot of people.
But there's some level above which it all goes to hell.
So when you see the partisans saying that immigration is good or immigration is bad, whether you're talking legal or illegal, both sides are liars.
So anybody who says immigration, legal or illegal, is good is a liar, and anybody who says it's bad is a liar.
Because the truth is, it's great up to some level, and then it's bad above that level.
So you can't say it's good or bad.
The question is how much?
What's the rate? How much can you absorb without killing yourself?
So if you're talking about immigration being good or bad, you're just a liar.
So my guess is that Europe already has enough immigrants that they have enough political power to make sure that there will be more immigrants and that the flow will be fairly large.
So you might see, for example, Great Britain, you might see them do a little bit better than France.
But I would say France and Germany have some big challenges in the next 50 years.
Now, I suppose immigration is another situation in which you don't need to choose.
Because you could have some of the country being in favor of it, but they would have to pay the cost of it.
That probably would be less practical than the other ideas.
Forget about that one. Hello from Russia.
It's good to know Russia is listening to my periscopes.
I am not colluding.
Yeah, I saw some video of the protesters in France chanting, We want Trump.
It seems to me that a lot of Trump's policies are the kind that will look great in retrospect.
So a lot of what he's doing is unpopular at the moment, but it does feel like in 10 years everybody's going to say, you know, should have done a little bit more of what he was doing.
Oh, the We Want Trump Chanters were in London, somebody was saying.
Okay. His tweet on the Paris Climate Deal.
Is that something new?
Let me check the president's tweets for today.
Let's see what he's up to.
I don't know.
Leakin' James Comey must have set a record for who lied the most to Congress in one day.
Leakin' James Comey.
His Friday testimony was so untruthful.
This whole deal is a rigged fraud, headed up by dishonest people, who would do anything so that I could not become president.
They are now exposed.
And then his other tweet.
On 245 occasions, former FBI Director James Comey told House investigators he didn't know, didn't recall, or couldn't remember things when asked.
Blah, blah, blah. These are all boring Mueller things.
Boring, boring. Boring, boring.
Alright. I'm just looking at his tweets.
Alright, here's the Blumenthal tweet.
Okay, here's the tweet you were asking about, about the Paris Accord.
So this is Trump's tweet from 22 hours ago.
Very sad day and night in Paris.
Maybe it's time to end the ridiculous and extremely expensive Paris Agreement and return money back to the people in the form of lower taxes.
Boy, that's a popular thing to say.
The U.S. was way ahead of the curve on that, and the only major country where emissions went down last year.
That's pretty good. And then his Dick Blumenthal tweet.
Watched Da Nang Dick Blumenthal on television, spewing facts almost as accurate as his bravery in Vietnam.
Quote, parenthetically, which he never saw.
Apparently he lied about some Vietnam service.
As the bullets whizzed by Da Nang Dick's head as he was saving soldiers, left and right, he then woke up from his dream, screaming that he lied.
Next time I go to Vietnam, I will ask the Dick to travel with me.
I don't know how you can...
How can you dislike a president that calls his enemies dicks?
You know, anyway, the people who are not in on the joke will be horrified.
If you work at CNN, do you have to go to a training class to learn to look horrified by jokes?
You know, when you're reading the news, do you have to do it this way?
And then he said, the dick.
Ugh. You have to learn that face.
Alright. Trump has not visited a combat zone.
Obama did five times.
You know, I don't really care about that much.
Just don't care about it.
Yeah, I'm sure he has reasons.
You know, the thing with Trump is he's so obviously on the side of the military that I don't need to know that he needs to do too many stunts.
Visiting them isn't going to help that much.
Mattis asked him not to.
Well, we'll never know.
What are all the details there?
Why is Andrew McCarthy worried about Trump?
Well, there's a difference between being worried and predicting what's going to happen.
It's always okay to be worried.
Personally, I think that Trump is not in great danger.
That's my take based on what we know now.
If we learn something new later, I could revise my opinion.
But at the moment, I see nothing that the president should be terribly worried about.
But it's still a good thing that he fights back hard because of the public perception.
To find great danger, being removed from office or going to jail.
That would be great danger. A conservative federal prosecutor disagrees.
Well, I will change my mind when Alan Dershowitz changes his mind.
And so that's my bottom line.
If Alan Dershowitz says the president is in great legal trouble because of things we already know, then I'm going to change my mind pretty quickly.
But until he does...
He's still the best source on this stuff.
What do I think about the chief of staff he is considering?
I don't know much about him.
You're talking about Nick Ayers?
It's easy to imagine how the president would like Nick Ayers personally, because from what I read, they look like they would be personalities that would get along.
All right, I think I've said enough.
you.
It is time to go.
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