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May 2, 2019 - Real Coffe - Scott Adams
08:36
Episode 514 Scott Adams: My Hot Take on Barr
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I'm going to be simultaneously sipping my coffee while the rest of you get in here.
If you have a beverage, you could join me.
Here comes the first one.
There will be more, because we're sipping and talking.
We're chatting and imbibing at the same time.
And I wanted to come to you before everybody uses up all the good Bob Barr talking points.
I think there's a little bit of territory that hasn't been chewed up and digested yet, and so I wanted to jump in.
And why is the traffic so low?
Is something going on right now that I don't know about?
I'm looking at the number of people coming online, and it's startlingly low.
I wonder if I have an option turned off.
Maybe I had an option for tweeting this that got turned off.
All right. Here's my take on Barr's situation.
So, as I understand it...
So, first of all, let me say this.
I think the news, the press, at least the TV cable news...
Kind of did a bad job on this story because I watched it and it felt like the story was changing the facts, not just the spin, but it felt like the facts were changing as I watched it.
Did you have that experience?
That it seemed like at first we thought that that Mueller was only concerned about how the media was spinning the story, but maybe that's not true.
Didn't it feel like Didn't it feel like the story wasn't clear?
And I'm not sure it still is.
So I would say it was an unusually bad job by the media in terms of giving us the facts.
But it was a fog of war, and I suppose we'll get the real story from Mueller.
But I want to give you my take on this one thing.
I believe the allegation now has, as it's clarified a little bit, there's a little less fog of war.
It seems to be that the real complaint from Mueller, and again, we have to wait for Mueller because you can't believe anything these days, but it seems like he may have complained that Barr's summary was not sufficiently complete and therefore could leave a misleading impression.
Okay. And apparently, Mueller offered some kind of summary of his own.
Now, here's the thing that I don't hear anybody saying that is the only thing that matters, sort of the only frame on this that makes it all make sense.
And that is that there's no such thing as data without spin in 2019.
Not in any kind of a political sense.
There's no such thing as just give us the facts.
It's not an option.
It can't be done.
No matter what you do will unintentionally create a first impression.
There isn't any way to avoid that.
The only thing you can do Sometimes, is decide who goes first.
And whoever goes first is going to have a huge advantage in shaping the narrative.
But there is no situation where a narrative doesn't get formed.
You only have narratives.
That's it. So if Barr had not put his own narrative on it, which we may understand and we don't know yet, but it looks like, might have been different in at least some way than what Mueller would have done.
Well, we need to hear from Mueller to really get the full flavor of it, not just his letter.
And so, I do have a question as to why Barr, we now have the letter, so we know exactly what Mueller was complaining about.
I haven't seen that, but it doesn't matter to my point.
My point is that somebody had to spin it, and somebody had to go first.
It would have been irresponsible For Bob Barr to not create a narrative.
Because even if he tried not to, that would be the narrative.
If Bob Barr had gone out of his way to just say, I'm just going to say the fact, or I'm not sure there was any way to create a summary that wasn't also a narrative, it was probably impossible.
So Barr...
Could either make a narrative that was, let's say, defendant friendly, or a narrative that would be seen as defendant unfriendly.
In this world, you would prefer that the person found not guilty, or at least no evidence of guilt that is sufficient to indict.
You want that person to be treated with a presumption of innocence.
And if there's going to be a narrative, the very best person Given all the choices, because the other choices are the illegitimate media creates the narrative.
That's no good. Or the Democrats create the narrative?
Well, that's not going to be something you could trust.
Or the president himself creates the narrative?
Well, that's no good.
Or the president's people create the narrative?
That's terrible. Or the senators who don't have all the information create the narrative?
Well, that's no good. Or the pundits create the narrative?
That's bad. Social media creates the first narrative?
That's a disaster.
You only have bad choices.
There weren't any good choices.
So let's stop imagining there was some good choice where it was possible to summarize this incredibly big body of work and have the summary not lean toward one narrative or another.
That's not a thing.
You can't do that.
There's no lawyer who's good enough to thread that needle.
So... Under the situation that a narrative shall be formed, and it will not be necessarily the facts, it'll be a narrative.
That's the world we live in.
That's the way we understand our world.
It's the way we remember things.
It's the way we give importance to things.
The bare facts were never going to be the thing.
It was always going to be the narrative that somebody put on top.
So who gets to do it?
Well, I would argue that...
There's an attorney general who was recently confirmed by the Congress, who is doing his work in public.
He's showing his work.
It took a few weeks, so there's a timing question.
But he did always say he's going to show the work.
He told you why there was a delay.
It was a good reason.
You're handling the redactions responsibly.
And so he was completely transparent.
So given this, somebody has to create the narrative.
Do you want CNN to do it?
Do you want one of the elected politicians on either side to do it?
Do you want the president to do it?
These are all bad choices.
But Bob Barr, at least, did we lose you?
I lost the comments here for a moment, so I can't tell if anybody can actually hear me anymore.
But at the very least, Bob Barr is a public servant.
He was recently approved by Congress, confirmed, and he was leaning...
He created a narrative that leaned friendly toward the person who was not going to be indicted.
That is exactly what you want.
If you could tell me that that's the worst system, it's going to be hard to make that argument.
And if you could tell me that the narrative...
Should not lean toward the person who is not going to be indicted after a great investigation.
I would say I'd rather live in a world where the narrative does move in that direction.
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