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May 5, 2019 - Real Coffe - Scott Adams
01:01:58
Episode 519 Scott Adams: 85% of CNN’s Political Coverage, Deserving Sports
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Hey everybody, come on in.
Happy Sunday! Yes, Chris, I believe that was you who reminded me it was time for me to do Coffee with Scott Adams, and so here I am.
I wasn't watching the clock.
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and So, something very funny happened in my life yesterday.
My Twitter life, not my real life.
You know, my artificial life on Twitter.
So, in response to, I guess it was Anna Navarro, Well, there's so many stories about this one tweet.
Let me just focus on one thing.
So I made a provocative claim in a tweet in which I said that 85% of CNN's political coverage, remember the words political coverage, was hoaxes and fake news.
So I'm going to say that again because my exact words are going to matter to this story.
I tweeted that 85% of CNN's political coverage was hoaxes and fake news.
Now, how do you think that was greeted by the many thousands of people who read that tweet and don't think that CNN has fake news?
Well, I can't tell you how many people tweeted back at me sarcastically And let me ask my friend Dale to come tell you what people said about my estimate that 85% of the political coverage was fake news and hoaxes.
They said something like this.
Oh! You're just making up statistics!
Show me your sources. Can you point me to a source?
That says that 85% of CNN's news is fake.
Can you, Scott, point me to a source?
Scene. Now, do you see what I did there?
Did you notice that what Dale said, can you point me to a source that says 85% of CNN's news is fake?
That's not what I said.
What I said was 85% of their political coverage was fake.
So a few fun things happened.
For some reason, a large number of Democrats were cognitively blind to the words political coverage.
And they would say to me,"'Can you show me a source that says 85% of CNN's news is fake?' To which I said, cheekily, because I thought it would be funny, I didn't say that.
Why did I say I didn't say it?
Because I didn't. Now, I did say 85% of the political coverage was fake news and hoaxes.
So then people started yelling at me online because it's so obvious that I did say that.
And they would tweet my tweet That said 85% of their political coverage is hoaxes and fakes.
They would show their own question that changed political coverage to CNN's news.
And they would say, I'm going to save this tweet.
I took a screenshot.
You liar.
You can see it right here how wrong you are.
And I would recommend to them Because it was funnier than explaining what they were doing wrong.
I would ask them in my tweets to find somebody who could read to explain the difference in those sentences to them.
And they would just get angrier.
My God, can't you see?
You liar! You liar!
These two sentences are exactly the same.
This one that says these words and this one that has different words are exactly the same.
They actually couldn't tell.
Two simple sentences that were different.
They couldn't tell.
Now, I believe that these are people who are educated, sufficiently educated, that if you gave them a test on a quiz or something, they'd be able to tell that those sentences are different and they mean different things.
But in the political context, they were cognitively blind to the sentence.
Yeah, literally they were looking at it and they couldn't see some of the words.
You know, their perception was just erasing those words.
So that was the first thing that was fun.
And I, of course, enjoyed letting them twist and yell at me because they were doing it in public and they were doing it in such a crazy way.
So eventually some Trump supporters who could read Came in and set them straight, which just happened a few minutes ago.
So that's funny. But the other funny thing is the number of people who asked me for my source.
I sent a tweet that says 85% of CNN's political coverage is hoaxes and fake news.
And you have to see my Twitter feed just to see how many people came in and said, oh yeah?
I'm not sure that number is real.
I'm not sure you have a source for that.
So, the first funny part is the confirmation that people can't tell the difference between real news and fake news.
Obviously, I made that number up.
I don't know how more obvious it could be that I just made the number up.
And the number of people who challenged me to support that number, it just makes your head spin.
What is wrong with these people?
How is that not obvious that I just made it up?
But it gets better. So instead of just saying, okay, I just made it up, or instead of, you know, playing it in, I don't know, any one of the different ways I could play it, I decided to give them my source.
So, I replied to all the people who were asking for my source.
I pasted in, I said, well, this could get you started, or words to that effect.
This should get you started, and I pasted in a link to my own blog post about the fine people hoax.
Now, I know you're all smart enough to know that linking to my own blog post about just one hoax is really not an answer to show me your source for the 85% fake news.
It's not really responsive, but it puts the critic in the awkward position of either reading this lengthy blog post I wrote, which is pretty long, And learning that their entire worldview has been wrong, because if you just read that one thing, you're going to have some questions about CNN. So, even though it wasn't an answer to the question, I found it hilarious.
And what it did was, it opened up this little portal, where probably for the first time, people who were, you know, CNN watchers, were seeing reality.
For the first time. And people got really quiet when I sent it to them.
Now, a lot of them wouldn't read it.
They'd say, that's your own blog post.
That's not a source. And then I would say, but the blog post points to the sources for the blog post.
And it's those sources you can go check yourself.
So I ended up red-pilling all these critics who came in to mock me for not having a source, which of course I don't have.
But it caused them to be exposed to some thoughts that should have probably dismantled their worldview if they read it.
Now, many of you who have read that blog post, you know that I talk about what I call the hoax funnel, where they start with the big claim, and then when you debunk it, they just go to smaller and smaller claims until they get to the bottom of the funnel and they're just asking questions like, well, but how do you explain this then?
And how can you explain this?
And of course, those questions have easy answers.
But on Twitter, somebody gave me an assist to put a really good ending on the funnel.
Because when people get all the way down the funnel, I'm noticing that they're starting to do what Al Sharpton did, which is to say, there are no good people who could be in favor of keeping the Confederate statues.
Except that a Reuters poll showed that 44% of African Americans would like to keep the statues.
I'm just going to let that sit there for a while.
So, after I've taken people down the hoax funnel, the very last fact, which I added as an update, Is a screenshot showing that 44% of African Americans are okay with keeping the Confederate statues.
And by the way, I don't know if that 44% number is accurate, but I'm sure it's more than 20%.
You know, probably.
I can't believe it would be so inaccurate that at least 20% don't have that opinion.
And so it puts the critic in the position of saying that the African American community, 44% of them, are not fine people.
Which is racist.
Which I am enjoying pointing out.
So, they double 44% to 88%.
I don't know what that means. But the point is that I had great fun revealing a little bit of truth to some people who apparently haven't seen what truth looks like.
Now, I also, for some of those people, I responded that my statistic for the 85% of their coverage was based on, I said, just Google Russia collusion Add that to the 25th Amendment hoax, which CNN had been selling us for months, for a while.
And then I showed my blog post about the fine people hoax, which also, toward the end, it includes a whole bunch of other hoaxes.
So there's a lot of hoaxes.
But then I wondered, has anybody created the CNN fact check?
Because there's a fact check for the president, But is there a fact check for CNN? Has anybody done that?
Because I would be quite curious if somebody could compile the list of CNN lies, because wouldn't it be handy that every time somebody says the president lied, that we could just send them a screenshot of a huge list of all the things that CNN said about the president, which we now know to be lies.
It would be very interesting.
We should just... And I'm not saying there would be 10,000 of them.
But maybe...
But what you could do is maybe put...
Here's how the list would be funny.
A list of CNN news that turned out not to be right.
And next to it, a Google search that included plus CNN, so CNN had to be in the story, and then plus whatever the term was.
So whatever the search term was that most represents that piece of news, such as Mueller report or whatever.
And then how many hits it gets that were from CNN. Pretty much all of those were fake.
So that would be interesting.
It, of course, would not be scientific.
It would not be directly comparable to anything the president says.
But it would certainly close the conversation.
All right. Yang's MO is bribing people with their own money to vote for him.
That's a funny spin.
I think what that refers to is Andrew Yang running for president who's talking about giving people a universal basic income.
Now the universal basic income means Somebody's paying for it.
So he might be the first candidate who figured out that he can bribe the public with the public's own money.
Now, it's coming from different people, because the rich would be paying for the universal basic income of the poor.
But why is he the first person to think of that?
I suppose other people have said, let's raise your taxes and distribute the income.
So I guess they've all said that.
So I revised my statement.
He's not the first person to do that.
Just the first person to do it that way.
All right, let's talk about something else.
So I saw a tweet today from Claire Lehman.
She's a founding editor of Quillette.
So the website Quillette.
And she tweeted this morning about transgender athletes.
She said, the issue is simple.
In sport, the women's category is a protected division.
Men's sport is basically an open division.
No one's saying that anyone should be excluded from the open category.
Just that women and girls deserve to have a category that they can win in.
So this is her closing argument, is just that women and girls deserve, this is the key word, they deserve to have a category that they can win in.
To which I replied in my tweet, nobody deserves anything.
If your argument Is this somebody deserves something?
That's not a reason.
Nobody deserves anything.
You've abandoned all reason if you're relying on somebody deserving something.
Now, of course, my critic said, well, are you saying that you don't deserve to get paid for making Dilbert?
To which I say, no, I don't deserve it.
It's just that the capitalist system allows me to get paid for it.
That's it. I don't deserve a single penny I get.
I work within a system that presents me money, and if it did not present me money for doing my work, I wouldn't work.
Now, I earned it, meaning that within the capitalist system, I created a product and I sold it.
But I didn't deserve it.
Nobody deserves anything.
If you're trying to win an argument by putting in the word deserve, that's like putting in the word fair, which also can't really be defined because everybody has a different subjective impression of what would be fair in any given situation.
So... Then other people were arguing with me, they'd say, yes, but if you let the women, you know, if the women don't compete, blah, blah, blah, blah.
Now, what was the argument?
There was some other argument that it would ruin sports or something.
Or, no, somebody else said that the purpose of sports is to determine who is the best.
That was another argument I heard today on Twitter, that the purpose of sports is to figure out who's the best.
And if you add the transgenders in with the women's leagues, you would not have achieved your purpose of finding out who's the best at the sport.
To which I say, that's not the purpose of sports.
Sports don't have a purpose.
I mean, not that purpose. Who in the world thinks that the purpose of sports is to find out who's the best?
Do I need...
I mean, there are lots of reasons that people play sports, and those reasons are probably there's some biological...
There's probably something built into us about competition, about symbolic battle, about status.
There's probably all this biological stuff built into us.
I would say that if you were a scientist, the better way to say what is the purpose of sports, it's probably that we can't help it.
I don't think it has a purpose.
I don't think we can help it.
I think if you erased human beings' memory of sports so that suddenly none of us ever knew what a sport even was, we would just invent it again.
Because we would have symbolic battles that would eventually evolve to have rules, and we wouldn't want to hurt each other because we're in the same tribe or whatever.
And eventually it would just turn into sports again because we're biologically...
Somehow, we seem to be very highly designed to want to compete, to want to figure out who has the best DNA and that sort of thing.
But I certainly would not say there's any holy, like, moral benefit to sports.
Now, it is unambiguously clear that if you take 100 people and you put them in sports, I guarantee you, That 5 or 10 of that 100 people are going to have a really good experience, which might last them and help them for the rest of their life.
5 or 10 out of the 100.
The other 95, 90 to 95 people, lost.
So their experience of sports were reinforcing that they're bad at stuff that seems important to other people.
So I think that sitting on the bench, which might have been half of those hundred people, I think they learned that they were forced to do something that they didn't want to do and didn't have interest and didn't have aptitude just to humiliate them so that other people could have a better life.
So let me put it this way.
If you take a hundred people and you put them in sports, the purpose of 95 of those people is to help the other people have a better life.
To help the 5% of the people who were born through no effort on their own part, tall, fast, good reactions, good athletes.
They had good genes and they were lucky enough to be in maybe a family situation where they had some support.
And the other 95 people who didn't have that good luck get to participate in honoring the people who were lucky at their expense.
Sports I don't want to use an analogy, but sports is a deeply horrible thing for everybody but the few people who are the heroes and the winners.
Other people get disabled for life.
People get terrible injuries.
They have lots of problems.
But I'm not going to argue that it isn't fun.
It's totally fun, and exercise is good, but sports are not always the most effective way to exercise.
Anyway, so that's my point.
Sports, as I said before, sports in its regular form is a giant pile of manure.
Adding a little extra manure to a giant pile of manure doesn't make it not manure.
It's just more manure. So the transgender issue, I argue, if you're arguing about fairness or who deserves anything or the purposes for winning, none of those are real.
We just make up a bunch of rules because we're biologically, apparently, we have some kind of imperative that's just built into us that we want to do that sort of thing and that people enjoy it and it allows people to rise to the top on the backs of all the people who are not good at sports.
All right. So, I would say, if you were going to summarize it, the purpose of sports is losing and giving up things to other people who are lucky.
It's about transferring resources, honor, and social status to people who are already lucky, because they were born to be good in sports.
It's the worst thing in the world.
Alright. It's not the worst thing in the world.
I might have exaggerated it.
Let's talk about something else.
Let's talk about nuclear energy.
I believe that the zeitgeist has decided that nuclear energy is going to be a much bigger part of our conversation.
Now, some of it, I think, is just in the air and has something to do with climate change being a topic, etc.
Now, of course, there's Mark Schneider, who's been doing an amazing job Promoting clean, safe nuclear energy, Generation 4 in particular.
There's Mike Schellenberger, who is doing a great job writing articles and promoting.
He's more about Generation 3, but still very safe.
But Mark and I were playing with some analogies this morning, some ways to describe Why it is that Chernobyl is in people's minds as what nuclear power is, and how do you get them off that?
And so we were playing with a few ideas, and I thought I would just throw them out for a little A-B testing live.
I think Mark is still on this periscope, so Mark, you can watch this in real time.
So the framing that we were...
We were going for, is that first pointing out that Chernobyl was designed before computers.
Now when you hear that, and you say, if somebody says, hey, nuclear power is dangerous, what about Chernobyl?
If the first thing you say is, Chernobyl was designed before computers, it's 60s technology.
All right? If you go beyond that, you're probably going further than you need to, because nobody in the world is going to hear that something was designed before computers in the 60s, and they're not going to say, okay, that's my model for understanding 2019.
People will pretty much abandon that being a good comparison as soon as you say, it's before computers.
Before computers!
But then the second part of that was, let me trot this out.
So Chernobyl, I think, would be Generation 1, I guess, would be what you would call it.
So, you know, the early versions.
But if you're trying to say, what does Generation 3 and also Generation 4, which is starting to come online, what do those look like in terms of safety?
And the... The image that we're playing with, and I want to test this out, is that Generation 3 would be like an egg surrounded by a hundred miles thick bubble wrap.
So that's how to think of Generation 3.
Yes, there's an egg, but it's covered by a hundred miles of bubble wrap.
Generation 4 It's like that, except you replace the egg with a steel ball bearing.
So even if all the bubble wrap fell off, 100 miles of bubble wrap, just ball bearing would fall on the ground.
Nothing would break. So that's just a mental image.
Just testing that out.
If you have any feedback on that, let me know.
Because remember, the public...
isn't in a position to understand the technology.
So, as soon as you say, well, you know, one of them uses this kind of active blah-blah-blah, cooling, blah-blah-blah, nobody can even hear that.
It just means nothing.
But if you give them these three points to think on, Chernobyl was before computers, the 60s.
Of course they had some problems.
Generation 3 is an egg with 100 miles of bubble wrap, and Generation 4 is still 100 miles of bubble wrap, but instead of an egg, it's a ball bearing, even if all the bubble wrap disappeared tomorrow.
Pink, the ball bearing would just fall on the ground, nothing breaks.
Alright, so we'll try to think about that for a little while, see if that means anything.
Somebody says, you mean to say before computers were applied to the design of nuclear reactors?
Yes, that is exactly what I mean.
Yes, I know that technically computers were designed, yeah, designed, yeah.
I know, I know, I know.
Computers were designed before the 60s.
But they were not in use the way that we understand it.
Now, if you're just trying to explain it to a citizen, Saying that the 60s is before computers is close enough, but your technical correction is absolutely accurate.
There were technically computers long before then.
Chernobyl was designed by vodka-soaked Soviets.
I was trying to work out an analogy to say that Chernobyl was like three drunks juggling hand grenades.
But then I thought, oh, that still sounds dangerous.
So you don't want people to think in terms of accidents.
You don't want them to think in terms of danger.
So that's why the bubble wrap and egg imagery works a little better because those are just such safe, comfortable things.
Bubble wrap, egg.
All right. The other topic I wanted to talk about was, does anybody know who invented the phrase Trump derangement syndrome?
Does anybody know who came up with that?
I was wondering who was the inventor of that.
My understanding is that it's based on, probably based on, there was a Bush derangement syndrome before that and there might have been other derangement syndromes.
But I'm wondering, because I remember coming up with Trump hysteria.
So I think I used hysteria first.
Yeah, you know, a lot of people are probably going to credit that to me, and I was an early adopter, but I think I was using a, yeah, there was Bush derangement syndrome before, and then somebody made the connection and put Trump in there.
But I don't know who said it first.
Somebody's saying, Krauheimer?
Anyway, if anybody can figure out who said that first.
Rush Lombella, Stefan Molnou.
All right, well, we don't know. It'd be interesting to know who came up with that.
Somebody says Adam Curry, Dr.
Phil. I think people are probably crediting me for it unfairly.
Now, I do think it might have been more than one person, because since we already, there was already, you know, in the universe, there had been Bush derangement syndrome.
It seems likely, seems likely, That more than one person came up with it independently, but maybe we only heard from one of them first.
So it may not be a clean situation where there was just one author of that.
But I don't, I personally do not claim, I don't claim that I created it.
I think I was using hysteria instead of derangement first, but I'm not positive.
Alright, so while we're talking about this stuff, 430 rockets were fired from Gaza at Israel.
There have been several deaths, a number of injuries, and Israel has struck back targets in Gaza.
And they usually say that they're attacking, you know, Hamas, weapons depots, and military assets and stuff, but who knows how accurate that is.
But they also, apparently they attacked a training compound and command center located inside a mosque.
So Israel took out a mosque.
Now, if you look for the news about this, it's sort of this little sidebar.
It's not even on the main news page.
There's like this, you know, there's the news.
And then a little sidebar, there's like, you know, a cat fell in a well, and a woman thinks that she's, you know, Jesus, and Israel's attacking Hamas.
You know, it's all the lesser news on the little sidebar.
And I thought to myself, have we ever been in a situation where people cared less about Gaza and the Palestinians and Hamas and that whole situation over there.
It feels to me like Israel is just pounding some people that nobody supports anymore except Iran, and most of the Middle East is against Iran.
So, yeah, every time we talk about Peace in the Middle East, even if you imagine it's not possible, which is always a good hypothesis, I don't know that the problem looks the way it used to look.
Because now it just seems like Israel just mows the lawn, this military term.
It's not like a problem that's threatening that Israel won't be there tomorrow.
They just have to occasionally go and mow the lawn.
So, it's probably a reasonably good indication that maybe a Middle East peace deal is possible.
The minimum requirement for Middle East peace is that Iran becomes, let's say, a nation that the others can work with.
Let's put it that way. I don't know how that happens, but it would be nice to give them a chance to do that.
Alright. Sharia, somebody says, Sharia law is practiced in America.
Why is this not concerning to all?
Probably the reason that lots of things are not concerning, because it's small.
There can't be too much Sharia law happening in this country.
Now, I want to run by you a provocative thought about immigration.
Um, You hear people saying, hey, open up the borders, let everybody come in, and then you hear other people say, close up those borders and only let people in who have some kind of merit.
Those are the two main positions.
But I was wondering about this.
Let's take Guatemala.
So, Guatemalans are streaming north because of economic conditions.
We have the most booming economy of all time.
Well, it depends who you compare it to, but our economy is booming.
We probably need more workers.
Ideally, we'd like the most qualified one, but there are so many jobs that are farming and manual labor.
We probably just need a lot of workers.
Everybody agrees with that.
It's a question of how many we need.
At the same time, Guatemala's economic problems, how much would they change if the number of able-bodied workers was reduced by half?
In other words, if the Guatemalans streamed into the United States at such a rate that anyone who remained in Guatemala had a good chance of getting a job, doesn't it solve two problems?
Now, keep in mind, before you get triggered by this question, keep in mind I'm in favor of strong borders and merit-based, and I am not in favor of unlimited people just screaming across the border, even though our economy can employ a lot of them.
I'm not in favor of it.
I'm just asking the question, is it a self-solving problem?
In other words, there would certainly be cost, there would be crime coming to the country, all of the bad parts that we know of, we know of, right?
But wouldn't it also be a problem that solves itself?
In other words, if you just didn't do anything, a number of people would move from Guatemala to the United States.
It would cause a certain burden, an expense, etc.
But we would also employ them.
And over time, they would become integrated into the productive world and be additive.
Maybe not day one, but eventually immigration becomes additive.
If you reduce the number of able workers in an economy in Guatemala that didn't have enough jobs, doesn't the wage for the people who remain start to get better?
Don't the people who remain all have jobs and they don't have to take care of their relative anymore because their relative went to the United States?
So the question is, I don't know if anybody's making this argument, but it feels like you could almost ignore the problem.
I'm not suggesting that.
This is just an intellectual experiment.
If you ignored the problem, you would absolutely be doing something that would hurt some members of the United States.
Crime, losing jobs, competing for jobs, all the usual things you know about.
So I'm not suggesting it, because the United States does get an option of doing what's good for the United States Even if it's not so good for some other country that would like to come here.
And I'm totally in favor of being selfish, you know, up to some point, and that's a good point.
But I'm just asking the question.
If we ignored it, which I don't recommend for all the reasons I just said, wouldn't it solve itself?
Just basic economics of supply and demand?
I don't know the answer to that question, but it feels like you would over time.
Anyway, don't be too afraid of that question.
You don't have to worry about anybody taking that seriously.
All right. I think I've talked about the main things I want to talk about.
Have you noticed that the news...
Oh, yeah.
So the news is pretty much all...
Word news about, hey, somebody used a word or a sentence in a way we don't like, and then they take that out of context and they change it until something that they can make news out of.
And the latest one is this William Barr stuff.
And I hadn't really looked at the details, but Andrew McCarthy did this great article in National Review that I think I may have tweeted it or I just read it, I can't remember.
But he talks about the fact that the anti-Trumpers are saying Barr lied because when he was asked if he knew what Mueller's team wanted, he said no.
But then it's also a fact that he had talked to Barr and he knew what Barr wanted.
And so when he answered, he was answering about the team, and he didn't know what Mueller's team wanted, but he did know what Mueller himself wanted, who he's known for 30 years, and talked to all the time.
So it seems that Barr correctly answered the question with no conflict whatsoever, and it is being reported, of course, as that he lied to Congress and needs to go to jail.
They actually want Bill Barr to go to jail over fake news.
Literally, they just interpreted his clear sentence to mean something else and decided he should go to jail because CNN can't read.
That's actually happening.
There's actually a conversation in the country as to whether the Attorney General should go to jail because CNN can't read.
I mean, I don't think I'm oversimplifying that.
Am I?
All right.
I don't know.
I'm reading a comment here about Hunter Biden, which is so horrible that I'm not going to repeat it, but I might have laughed about it.
It's pretty horrible, though.
One of the things that the world doesn't understand, or maybe we pretend we don't understand it when we're talking in public, but everybody understands it personally.
There are things that I laugh at in my private conversations.
Let's say if Christine and I are just hanging around, and nobody else is listening, or it's just me and one friend.
In a private, private conversation, I will laugh at things because they're terrible.
It's because they're so over-the-top Crazy, terrible.
And I don't mean death.
I'm not talking about actual death or something like that.
But just concepts that you couldn't say in public.
Things that would be too terrible to say out loud.
Things that would be so wrong-headed, so mean, so uncaring, so lacking of empathy, that you would never say these things in public.
But in private, they're really funny.
As long as nobody's getting hurt.
You know, there are things that you would say to one person that you know is fine with it that would be so horrible, you would never want somebody to hear it who could be, you know, hurt by the idea.
They might feel insulted.
But let's not pretend that it's not funny in private.
I think you can laugh at things that are horrible in private and still be a good person.
You know, what you do in the outer world, how you treat other people, that's just a different conversation.
I like to treat other people as well as I can.
I mean, I try really hard to treat people well, unless they're trolls who are coming after me, of course.
And then it's game on.
Yeah.
Example is that he came, he saw, he died.
That's a good example. Yeah, so that's Hillary Clinton talking about the Libyan Muammar Gaddafi.
So she joked about him in public.
He came, he saw, he died.
Now, that's the sort of thing, depending who you're talking to, that might have been hilarious privately.
But when you say that in public, man, that's bad.
That is so bad.
I would argue that maybe even, not maybe, but definitely, President Trump's quip about McCain.
I prefer people who didn't get caught.
I'm sorry, that's hilarious.
In private. In private.
That is actually a good joke.
In fact, it's the same joke that Chris Rock used in his stage performance.
He used exactly the same joke about John McCain.
So we know it's a joke, and we know it's funny because Chris Rock knows what's funny, but the fact that Trump said it in public First of all, it makes me like Trump more, not less, because it was provocative, it was funny, it was pretty clever, it changed the frame, but it didn't work.
You know, I think you'd have to agree that even though I thought it was funny that Trump said it in public, it was a mistake.
I'm not the guy who's going to say that every single thing Trump does works or that he should have done it.
That was a pretty clear example of a joke that didn't land and didn't get him the result he wanted.
It was just a mistake. But in private, pretty darn funny.
Publicly, inappropriate.
All right. I've got nothing else to say.
Oh, I do have one other thing to say.
I've been saving this, but I think I'm ready to talk about it.
As we're watching the Russia collusion investigations with an S that never end, we've developed two views of the world, two movies.
And I wonder if they're both wrong.
One version of the movie is that there were these fine people in law enforcement who were just doing their job.
They were just doing their job.
And, of course, they were looking into Russian collusion because there were enough Russian contacts that it was a perfectly reasonable thing to do.
Now, within this movie, You have to explain what did Strzok mean when he was texting Lisa Page and when they were talking about the insurance policy.
Well, the obvious way to explain what that meant is that all of these people were just doing their job.
They had reason to suspect there might be some Russian problem, collusion-wise.
And the insurance policy would mean what I told you way before we knew even what Lisa Page said about it.
I told you it probably means, in context, that they were actually worried there was Russian collusion.
And the insurance policy was that if Trump gets elected, which they thought was very unlikely, And if there's some Russia collusion, which they also thought was unlikely, because remember, Strzok said there's no there there.
He thought he wouldn't find anything.
But if you put those two facts that they thought Trump wouldn't win, but they thought that there might be some Russian collusion there if he did win, the insurance policy was to make sure they had an investigation that could spot that early.
So that's one movie. So one movie, everybody was just doing their job.
They had real things to worry about.
There were real Russia connections.
They were engaged in Trump derangement syndrome, meaning that they did hate him.
They did wish he hadn't become president.
And they certainly were not biased in his favor, but they're just doing their job.
Now, within that movie, we'll get to...
To mis-sued.
Then the other movie is that it was all a big plot.
Everybody was in on it. They were trying to overthrow the government, and they got caught.
And then they're all going to go to jail once the IGE and Bill Barr get done with them.
Now, I'm going to suggest that there's something, maybe a hybrid of those two, that the world is not ready to see.
So in other words, it could be that the reason that the good people in the FBI, according to this movie, I'm not calling them good or bad.
So this is not my personal judgment.
I'm just describing the movie.
So in the movie, people like Strzok and Page and McCabe were doing their job.
But could it be that there was the Clinton campaign working with at least one person, Or maybe a few to insert this Steele dossier into the system because people were smart enough to know it would cause a chain reaction, which would cause the people who were not in on the conspiracy to have to work on it.
So, It's entirely possible that there was one or two or maybe some small number of people who actually were conspirators who were trying to get this Steele dossier into the system, which would open them up to look into all things Trump, just hoping they'd find something, whether it was Russian, whether it was something else, they'd find something.
I think that's the most probable explanation.
I expect that there were a few people trying to do some weaselly things, but that those people may have been driven almost as much by Trump derangement syndrome as by the fact that they supported Hillary.
Or to put it another way, there may have been people who were supporting Hillary who didn't really care about Hillary.
Some of them thought they probably would get jobs or would do better if she was elected.
But I'll bet there are some people who weren't so much pro-Hillary as they were, my God, we've got to stop this monster because I watch CNN. If I watch CNN, I'm going to think that Trump is a monster and that I, as a good patriot, should find a way to stop it.
I suspect it's going to come out that way.
I suspect that you might find some bad behavior at the top, and the people who are directly involved with the Steele dossier, they've got some things to answer.
But I don't know that they had meetings.
In other words, I would be very surprised, I would be very surprised if Rod Rosenstein is ever accused by the IG or any legal process of for being in on a coup attempt.
So let me draw the line there.
I don't believe Rod Rosenstein will ever be credibly accused of being in on some kind of a plot.
I think it's unlikely that Strzok and Page will be credibly found, after we know everything that we can know, that they were actually part of a plot I think they didn't like the president.
I think they were biased against him.
That was a big problem.
But everybody in the country was biased one way or the other.
There was nobody working for the FBI who didn't have an extreme bias one way or the other.
So you couldn't really hire somebody without a bias.
But when you get up to, yeah, when you get to Bruce and Nellie Orr, then I start to have some questions.
But they could also be explained by just earning money.
Nellie Orr had a job.
It could be nothing more than she was just doing her job in the way that she thought would make the most money and make her bosses the happiest.
It could be nothing else.
But you start to ask questions at about that level.
Then when you get to Clapper and Brennan, well, then things start looking a little different.
It's not as obvious to me.
That Brennan and Clapper didn't know the full story the whole time.
It's not obvious to me that Brennan and Clapper really believe Trump is the thing that will destroy the world, or if they just preferred Hillary Clinton because it was good for them.
So that's where things could be different.
So for those of you who believe That it was a conspiracy all the way from Brennan, Clapper, through Comey, Rosenstein, you know, McCabe, Strzok, Page.
For those of you, Nellie or Bruce, or for those of you who think all of that was an organized plot, ask yourself if you think they actually were colluding with each other.
In other words, were they actually meeting?
And talking about what to do?
Well, some of them, yes.
You know, it seems clear that some of them were talking.
But were they all, or did they all just know what to do?
Comey asked an interesting question.
He said, if, Comey said, and remember the hoax funnel?
You start at the top with a statement of a fact, and then when it's debunked, you end up at the bottom of the hoax funnel by just asking questions that have easy answers.
This is Comey. Comey said, if we were out to harm Trump, why wouldn't I have leaked, or somebody have leaked, that we were investigating this Russia stuff before the election?
Because apparently they were.
When they did talk about Hillary Clinton's investigation, which some say hurt her, I doubt it, but some say hurt her in the election, and they also had an investigation about Trump, but they didn't mention that one, and they didn't leak it.
So Comey says, how can you say that we were out to get Trump when we could have so easily damaged him?
Is there only one way to answer that question?
Is the only answer that they weren't trying to get Trump?
Is that the only way you can explain that they didn't leak that?
No, it's not.
The best explanation for why they didn't leak it is that they didn't think he'd get elected.
And then it wouldn't matter.
Remember, nobody thought he would get elected.
They didn't need to leak it.
Because they were going to get the same outcome whether they leaked it or not.
And why would you take on the extra risk of a leak?
You wouldn't need the extra risk of a leak.
Now somebody says as an insurance policy, for Strzok and Page, just doing their job as it was assigned to them would be the insurance policy.
So they weren't breaking any laws in just doing their job.
If Comey and Company had leaked, they would be breaking the law.
And they would break the law To change nothing.
Because in their mind, Trump was still probably not going to win.
And then, of course, the Hillary situation was something we already knew about.
So he was just updating something we knew because it was already out there.
So you can't really compare those two situations.
Hillary was already out there.
Trump thing was not known by anybody.
Leaking that would have been a pretty big crime.
And certainly would have affected the election.
Somebody says, what do I think was Obama's involvement?
Well, I would be super surprised if Obama was in on some kind of a plot on a detailed level.
Because I tend not to believe that about Obama.
The top person in general.
But was Obama involved in decisions which, if we knew exactly what they were and what he knew, we would be distressed by that?
Probably yes.
Did he know that there was such a thing as the Steele dossier and that it was full of lies and that it was being inserted?
Did he know that the FISA system was being gamed a little bit?
Did he know one of those things?
Probably not. Probably not.
The slaughter meter is at 100%, maybe higher.
Somebody just asked me in the comments.
The slaughter meter being, if nothing changed, and of course things do change, but if nothing changed between now and Election Day, Trump would win, running away.
Now, Joe Biden, his lead in the polls against his rivals in the Democrat Party, is growing.
He was at like 38% or something.
He's completely dominating.
What are the chances that Biden can beat Trump?
I think it's zero. I would say that Biden would be the least likely to beat Trump of maybe all 16 competitors.
So the problem is that he doesn't bring with him a natural group that he can lock in.
So the beauty of something like Cory Booker, Kamala Harris, or even Buttigieg is that they can lock in a voting group and get something like 95% of them.
Buttigieg would get 95% of gays, don't you think?
He'd just lock them in.
But he might not get the black vote.
Kamala would get The woman vote, pretty much dominant woman vote, and probably the black vote.
So it seems to me that she could just show up and she would be as competitive as Hillary was, which was nearly enough.
Whereas Biden, I don't think the black vote is going to come out for Biden.
Do you? I don't think the gay vote necessarily comes out for Biden.
Maybe. If the only other choice is something they don't like.
And Biden is the human gaffe machine, and he does seem sort of sleepy compared to Trump.
The match-up is just terrible.
If you're going to match up with Trump, here's sort of match-up math.
If you want to match up with Trump, you don't put against him A weak version of Trump.
Biden is just what you end up with if you take away all of Trump's best assets.
Biden's not as funny.
He doesn't have the energy. Biden doesn't have four years experience of being president.
So interestingly, Trump is more experienced at being president and will be twice as experienced by election day.
And Biden makes the same mistakes that are attributed to Trump.
So Biden will say things that sound sketchy and racist.
He touches people in a way they shouldn't touch, which completely takes the grab-them-by-the-whatever thing away.
Biden is just the worst matchup.
And I think Democrats are going to figure it out.
Now, of course, it's never good to make a prediction that assumes Democrats figure things out.
But I think maybe the pundits will help them.
You know, maybe it will become obvious.
I think the race I would most enjoy is Biden versus Trump, because it would be fun.
I mean, that would be just plain fun, watching that happen.
Whereas if you took somebody like Cory Booker or like Kamala, Kamala's, I think, the stronger choice, that's a problem.
Because she's not a weak version of Trump.
She's just a whole different product.
And now you've got a real decision.
So she would lock in the black vote, the woman vote, just automatically, just by showing up.
Then all she has to do is not make a mistake, and she's already in Hillary Clinton territory.
I think Biden, the odds of Biden self-destructing are probably 75%, and then another 25% that it won't be self-destruction, it will be Trump destroying him.
So, anyway.
That's where we are now. The slaughter meter is at over 100% because there's nobody who could beat Trump who's in the race, not with this economy, not with anything that's going on.
Now, I do think, and I'm going to say this as clearly as possible, If on Election Day, Trump doesn't have something that looks like at least a serious proposal for health care, whether you like it or don't like it, that's a lesser question.
But if he doesn't have one, he doesn't deserve to get re-elected.
I shouldn't use the word deserve.
If he doesn't have a health care plan, even I wouldn't be able to support him.
And, you know, I've been supporting this president for a long time.
But if he shows up without a health care plan, that's a, you didn't show up for class.
Now, I think you will.
I think there will be something, you know, that looks like at least the framework of, yeah, I shouldn't have used the word deserve, but it will at least be a framework of, That you can say yes or no to.
If we don't have that, then I would say he's not running for president.
He's on the ballot, but there's only one candidate.
So I'd probably be at least tempted to support the candidate who had a real plan for one of the biggest issues.
I doubt I would change sides, but I don't think I could give a full-throated support To Trump's re-election, unless there's something that looks like a healthcare framework that he's pushing.
All right. That's enough for now.
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