Episode 891: Iran War 2.0

The Iran War begins again and what happened to Ro Khanna on the West Bank. We'll discuss all this and more. On this edition of the editors, I'm Rich Lowry, and I'm joined, as always by the right, Honorable Charles C.W. Cook, the good neighbor, Noah Rothman, and the Sage of Authenticity Woods. Jim Stacey Garrity, you are, of course, listening to a National Review podcast or sponsors this episode, our ExpressVPN at Vare. More about both of them in due course. For some reason, you're not already following us on a streaming service, by the way. You can find us everywhere from Spotify to Apple Podcast. If you like what you hear here, please forget. I said anything. So Jim Stacey Garrity, we got a war again with Iran, the MOU, turns out to have been a complete sham. I thought, you know, large parts of it were kind of a sham or unrealistic going in, but it turns out in its entirety is basically a sham. It was supposed to be a trade in its essence of lifting our blockade for the Iranians reopening the strait, just as they did. With the first ceasefire, the Iranians never truly reopened the strait. Their idea of reopening the strait is that they control the strait of Hormuz. The shipping is going to go through their preferred channel, the one they control, so eventually they can charge tolls and they can assert their control over this very important strategic asset. We have a different understanding of what they're supposed to be doing. Shots have been fired for a while now. We were talking about it last episode. Now Trump says the MOU is totally off. The blockade is being reinstated. The waivers for the Iranian selling oil. We're not doing that either. And there's been a more intense exchange of fire. Trump actually says, in all caps, we're now the guardian of the strait. And we're going to charge our own tolls, by the way. What do you make of it? So I could spend some time gloating that the MOU turned out to be a POS and no one should have put any faith in it and the Iranians had broken every treaty they'd ever signed so there was no reason to expect this. Hey, do you remember when like this was going to be a big feather in the cap of JD Vance and a bunch of JD Vance associates were telling people, ah, you know, he is really going to be the big political beneficiary of all this. People are going to credit him for ending an unpopular war and all that stuff. Yeah, it hasn't really shooken out that way. And so, yes, really the MOU really seemed to have just turned out to have been an intermission. But for the war, a half-time, you could say, depending on how long this continues to go on. As much as it's hard to feel good about the return of strikes and counter-strikes in the Persian Gulf, I prefer this to the ludicrous happy talk that the Iranians were our partners in peace. and that we were about to usher in this golden era of understanding and ignoring all the ways that Iran was breaking it. And we are still left with the core challenge of this, which is that the reason a lot of oil tankers, liquid natural gas tankers, which is the sort of thing you don't want to see explosions on, and cargo ships and stuff like that, the reason they don't want to go through the Strait of Hormuz to the broader Persian Gulf is because...

They keep getting shot at and they keep getting hit by drones and stuff like that. Now, undoubtedly, during the bombing campaign, we did a bunch of damage to the Iranian missile program. Different people will give you different estimates of how much they've been able to rebuild during the ceasefire. But, you know, there's certainly some amount that's been rebuilt. But I think the bigger problem is that it's the drones, the Shihed drones, which are fairly cheap to make, fairly easy to make. And your choices of targets in the Persian Gulf are pretty plentiful. You know, you've got the slow-moving ships, you got the port facilities, you got the refineries and liquid natural gas facilities. Like, there's no shortage of things that the Iranians can hit that are either, you know, stationary targets or slow-moving targets that are fair. You launch enough drones. Sooner later, one of them is going to hit one, and then the ships don't want to sail there. And then everybody's kind of, you know, you end up shutting down one of these refineries or liquid natural gas facilities or stuff like that. So that's the core of the problem. The question is, how much can we do damage to the Iranian drone stockpiles and supply? And right now, it sounds like these are kind of a little bit of fairly small scale tit for tat, although I guess by the time people hear this, maybe it will have escalated. You know, I just kind of had this feel like we, a disarmed Iran is really the only one that we can find, that will be reasonably safe for ships to travel through here. And until the ships start traveling through there, you're not going to have anything resembling stability in world energy markets. So I prefer this to ignoring what the Iranians were doing and pretending that they weren't shooting at ships. But this is still a thorny problem and not necessarily an improvement upon the status quo before the war. Yeah, so no, Trump has been all over the map on this, according to all the reliable support reporting. Prior to the war, he said, don't worry, they're not going to close or effectively closed the straight of her moves. Then when they closed it or effectively closed, it's like, it's not closed. And it's like, oh, we don't really care that it is closed. Oh, someone else is going to open it. No, we're actually, we're going to open it up. Never mind. We're not. We're abandoning this operation in 24 hours. Hey, wait, the MOU opened the straight of four moves. And now we're going to undertake military action. to reopen it by force supposedly. Well, your description of the problem that the president is confronting identifies what the final linchpin of this campaign is, which is the Strait of Hormuz. We're barely even talking about the nuclear program. The president was probed by Hugh Hewitt the other day about one of these remaining sites, a fairly deep bunker by the name of Peckax Mountain, which could have the capacity to shield development programs beneath it, including cascading centrifuges for the enrichment of uranium. None of that's confirmed, and it's the last remaining. a site that hasn't been hit in relations to his nuclear program, but it's an afterthought. Everybody's just talking about the straight because the straight is the only unresolved issue from Operation Epic Fury. I see some good stuff here. I really do.

Not only did we not do the whole 60 days or even close to it in the MOU, much less extend it indefinitely. As the MOU allowed and many anticipated in the slink away scenario, it would have given up far too much ground. Right now, the United States is striking military targets primarily in southern Iran, but not only in southern Iran. Just hit some deeper stuff, infrastructure, deeper inside the country. 300 strikes over the course of as many days. That's approximately approaching about one-third of the sortie tempo that typified Operation Epic Fury according to the Institute for the Study of War. And what we haven't seen is interesting. We have not seen efforts to execute a kind of apocalyptic retaliation that many anticipated Iran would attempt if hostilities resumed, no strikes on Israel, very few strikes on the Gulf states, all of them focused exclusively on U.S. bases. And we're hitting things that still suggest to me that we're in the signaling phase. We're negotiating through other means. It's not really a return to full-scale war, but the energy market's stabilized over the ceasefire. And they're not spiking yet in ways that we saw at the outset of Operation Epic Fury. They will, however, continue to rise. And the best thing in my view is that Iran attempted to blame rogue IRGC commanders for some of these strikes. on ships. I said, don't worry about that, you know, let's just keep on talking. And we were having none of it, which is great. You know, everybody wants to worry about the end game, and we should. And Jim already described the limits to the end game in which we eliminate their capacity to wage war. So the only alternative is to attempt to eliminate their ability to wage war in terms of will, their will to wage war. And there are really two ways to go about that. You can just return to a full-scale regime change campaign, pummel them, hit their bridges, hit the power plants, execute all the internal subterfuge operations that we had described, green light the Israeli campaign internally in the country, or apply all the necessary force to the straight. blockade it, escort the ships, force all hostile assets out of the area, strike their staging grounds, and just take the ability to throttle traffic away from the Iranians. It may never be a safe transit, as Jim described. But if the situation prevails, the situation that prevails in the Strait is similar to what prevails in the Horn of Africa or the Strait of Malacca, it's something commercial interests, insurance interests can price in. It will not be a quick campaign. It will raise the cost of energy for the foreseeable future. And then we get back to the game of chicken, who blinks first. You know, Trump already demonstrated where his pain threshold is. We all know it. If Iran wants to, it can try very hard to get back there, and it may succeed.

But if the president still believes that he can get a quiet midterm election out of these people, he's not going to get it. We don't know if he's abandoned that delusion yet. And the pressure may be on him to return to, to retreat into the notion that is retailed to him, I think, by some very credulous people in his orbit, that Iran can be pacified just long enough for you to get a political victory out of this. I hope he's given up on stuff like that. It doesn't seem like he has, especially since he does imbecilic things, like threaten to replace the tolling on the strait with his own tolling. It's so much like Greenland to me, where this bullying just makes it harder for Gulf states to support a cause that is in their manifest interests. They would do so at the risk of justifying and excusing even assaults on their dignity and their honor and their sovereignty. This administration just doesn't seem to know that politics happens in other countries, too. But we should note that this situation has been really hard on Iran, too. I don't think losing those waivers was part of the strategy. I think they were calibrating their attacks in the effort to preserve the notion that they could control the strait while at the same time string the United States along. And when we lost those waivers to sell oil on the open market for U.S. dollars right into the Iranian treasury, that was something the Iranian regime needed. And it would be a mistake to think that this is a monolithic enterprise that doesn't have different views on whether it's necessary to engage with the United States or keep fighting it. The restart of this war and Iran restarted this war, there's no arguing around that. That's something they're going to have to justify internally. And there will be a lot of divisions around that. Likewise, missiles have been kind of slow to a trickle. As Jim said, no attacks on Israel. Very few attacks in the Gulf states. Why? Are they, is the ROI on that lower than it used to be? Do we intercept them or interdict them when they're fired? Have we degraded more of their capacity than we know about? maybe Iran just wants to return to the table. A lot of the signaling suggests that Iran is in a tougher place than I think a lot of the Western commentary is willing to admit. So the only question is how much staying power do we have? And we know that Trump could blink because he's blinked before. But as we've said so many times, if he wanted to capitulate and walk away, he's had every opportunity to do so. And he just won't do it. And really, honestly, if we were to restore traffic to the straight, in a way that Iran could not arrest, even if it wanted to, it establishes a precedent that is durable. Midnight Hammer is a durable precedent. No future president is going to want to preside over the breakout nuclear capacity of the Iranian regime. And if you have the capacity to just mow the lawn and keep that at bay, I think future presidents, Republican and Democratic will do that. And as long as the straight is something that you can control and it's no longer this. This, you know,

emergency break glass that Iran can return to. And every time they do so, it diminishes the utility of this because capital is flying to the lowest, the path of least resistance. It's going to root around the straight. The longer this pertains, the less value Iran gets from keeping the straight closed. So there's a lot of competing pressures here, and it's just a matter of who blinks first. And we all anticipate Trump will because he has, but maybe he won't. And if he doesn't, there's still a pathway to something that looks objectively like victory in this war. So, Charlie, if you put this together with the campaign against the Houthis, which was very inconclusive and didn't really free up the Red Sea, shipping has not returned to its pre-conflict level there, with potentially losing the Strait of Hormuz to the Iranians. This would be the worst blood of freedom of navigation since World War. Two, I mean, it's just, again, I've used this phrase before. It's a national embarrassment. It's a humiliation. So I think it's good that Trump wants to reopen the straight and is talking in those terms. I'm just skeptical whether he actually has the appetite for applying the levels of force that would be necessary to do it. And whether, as Noah alludes to, whether he'll actually have the staying power to do it. I hope he does. But a couple other things here. One, just his exploitative view of foreign policy. It goes back to 2015 and 2016, where you're saying that the big problem with the Iraq wars, we didn't keep the oil. So that the administration has been saying it's illegal under international law for the Iranians to toll. But now we're going to toll instead, according to the president, is completely absurd. And I think a non-starter, it's something he'll talk about, but we're not actually. going to do. It'd be a good thing if we had enough control of the straight that we could actually toll, but we wouldn't actually toll push comes to shove. And then there's the cynical interpretation of this on and off approach to the war. You turn it off a little bit, so you reset that 60-day timeline for the war powers resolution, and you totally cut Congress out of this, which has been cut out from the beginning and has been a key constraint in terms of how Trump has waged the war, because he knows it doesn't have political... support. So it's harder now to go back to a full-scale conflict, especially given how many times he said we're on the verge of this brilliant deal. In fact, the MOU was supposed to be this brilliant deal that was going to solve all our problems. Well, I would say that I'm feeling pretty comfortable sitting in the same position as I have sat in now for months with two presumptions undergirding my view of this, the first being that Trump is stuck and is therefore likely to flit between two positions, neither of which will bring a resolution, those positions being that he is scared of the domestic consequences of this war. And that he is, as Noah correctly points out, sufficiently hawkish as to render walking away unlikely. The second presumption is that the MOU was not especially interesting because it wasn't worth the paper it was written on. I'm pretty sure when we discusses, that's what I said, that if Trump wanted to go back to...

full-scale war, he could and would. That's what's happened. The domestic side of this continues to appall me, as I've said before, the original sin here, not just strategically, but constitutionally, was that Trump neither consulted Congress, nor if he believed that to be unnecessary, sold this to the public. Now we see him playing progressive style word games. He apparently doesn't need Congress's permission to continue hostilities because the war stopped and then started again. He's on day one now. The 60-day timer has reset. That's purely unacceptable. That is... an end run around our constitutional system and the statute. And Congress should not accept it. Yeah, based entirely in semantics. It is a semantic case that comports neither with the letter nor the spirit of the law and that allows the president to trespass on functions the Constitution accords to Congress. It's a disgrace. It's not a unique disgrace, although he's more brazen about it than most president, but it's a disgrace nevertheless. And so I feel as if I'm a broken record here, this situation strikes me as being intractable. Trump can't commit the blood and treasure, and it would require both necessary. to emphatically win, and he can't, for whatever reason, walk away. So he sits in the middle, and he lies about it. His rhetoric is completely inconsistent. I don't think this is, of course, different than what is the right thing to do, that the public is going to be impressed by this. I don't think it's salvageable. I think he might get away with it by accident if the economy improves, if gas prices come down. But I don't think he can win this. I don't think he can win this domestically, and I don't think he can win this internationally. I think this is going to, perhaps not peter out, but just wind on until... something intervenes. He is no longer president or... Just a kind of low intensity or medium level intensity, conflict over the straight and kind of... Yeah, now of course... Not a lot or not as much as it was prior to the war and kind of grinds on. Think about wars in which both sides are fully committed. World War I. The American Civil War. The war... between Russia and Ukraine. They always take longer than we think they're going to. Now take a war in which one side is vacillating and the other is impotent, but has a card in its pocket that serves to overcome some of that impotence. This could go on for years. We could have a low-level fight with Iran here for years.

So I haven't changed my analysis. I don't think there is any agreement here that can possibly resolve this. I don't think there is any action that Trump can take and retain the support of his party in the country that can resolve this. I certainly don't think the Iranians can resolve this because they are weaker than they were. So they are, as was said in the House of Commons. in that famous Norway debate, adamant for drift. So, no, what's your, do you think that's a possibility or are you just dismissive of that? I'm not dismissive of that. A low-level conflict in the strait is probably the likeliest outcome. That would be just terrible for Iran. Conditions here do not lend themselves well to a forever war. Again, capital is already flying out of the Strait of Hormuz. There is so much effort to invest in rerouting. petrochemicals and oil out of the strait. And that is Iran's primary source of revenue. It's linchpin in the region. Its source of strategic leverage over its neighbors and us, to say nothing of Europe and Asia. And the more that degrades, the less influence the Iranian regime has. The less influence the Iranian regime has, the more opportunity the Iranian people have to take back their liberty. I don't think that's great for Iran, certainly not for the IRGC. And while it may not be the definitive period on this sentence in which we can claim unalloyed victory, It's very hard to think of a war in the modern age in which we could find that kind of moment in which determinative victory has achieved and everyone acknowledges as much. But an ongoing conflict like this that restores America's role as chief guarantor of free maritime navigation on this high seas, I don't think that Donald Trump's threat to impose tolls is genuine or real, even though that even saying as much is really stupid and undermines his own position makes his life more difficult. I don't think that's going to be in the offing. And a resolution of this conflict in which we've degraded Iran's capacity to project power across its borders, basically eliminated its indigenous nuclear program, and then to retaking control of the straight, I think it would be hard to argue with the straight face, so we lost that one. Yeah, if we retake control of the straight, but if it's a grinding conflict that goes on, we haven't retaking control of the straight, or it continues to be contested in a way we never would have imagined when we went in in as a much worse situation than we went in. So it's hard to see how that... how that would be, how that would constitute a win. Well, it would be contested in much, as I said before, you know, there's a lot of choke points around the world that are not safe to navigate, but we price that in and they are navigable as a result. And if that is the future in which the straight of horse, that's held out for the straight of Hormuz, would it be optimal? Would it, no? Would it be better? However, however, would I trade that for having degraded Iran's capacity to develop a nuclear weapon and use its missiles to defend itself as it develops a nuclear weapon? Yeah, I would make that trade off. The next question to you, sorry, Charlie, were you going to say something? No, I just, I guess we're going around in circles. But again, I would propose that.

That was not, partly because there was no debate, proposed as a necessary trade-off. The opposite, in fact, was proposed. We were going to free the Iranian people, destroy the regime, get rid of their nuclear ambitions, and retain all other elements of the status quo ante. And now we're told, and I don't reject that on the merits case out of hand, But now we're told, well, the trade-off here was that we would get rid of the Iranian nuclear regime, which incidentally happened mostly with Operation Midnight Hammer, long before we entered the Second War. And the consequence of that is the permanent closure at worst, inconvenience at best, of the Strait of Hormuz. I think that's exactly why you have to have a debate, why you want to hear from more than one person, why you don't leave these matters in the hands of the presidency alone. Because that's a substantial change to the world arrangement. And it was never debated. There's nothing about that that I would argue. I've routinely said that the president is an unreliable narrator here, and that's really not great. But it's also not 100% true. And I hear this bandied about often that we executed all the strikes we were ever going to execute on the nuclear program in Midnight Hammer. It's not true. We hit Aton's, we hit Forto, we hit Isfahan during Operation Epic Fury. I imagine what we were hitting is pretty critical nuclear infrastructure. So, extra question to you. First, Jim Stacey Garrity, the apparent dissolution of the MOU is a major blow to Vice President JD Vance, yes or no? It's a significant blow. I think, you know, by the time Republicans start voting in presidential primaries or the 2028 general election, this will be pretty far in the rearview mirror and people will have forgotten about it, but I don't think. If JD Vance has primary rivals, they may well show clips of him talking about what a great deal he had negotiated with the Iranians in this great peaceful future we'd had. So it'll hurt him. It's not good. No. Can you repeat the question one more time? Sorry. Is the dissolution of the MOU a blow, a major blow to JD Vance? Yeah, it's a blow. I don't know how major it'll be. A lot of things are going to happen between now and 2028 that will probably overshadow this really maladroit performance on his part. And he shouldn't have gone out as far as he did over his skis and defense. of the Iranian regime and its behavioral change, the character change that he insists it underwent during Epic Fury. It obviously did not. And that will come back to haunt him, but I just don't know how serious it will be. Far be it from me to defend JD Vance, but I think this is entirely contingent upon how the adventure in Iran is seen in the sense that if...

The question is, is JD Vance competent, then video of him promising all sorts of things that didn't come to fruition could hurt. But if the question is, how do we get a Republican nominee who does not succumb to the temptation to meddle in the Middle East? That's not my characterization. I'm assuming there will be a faction within the party that wants that. then seeing JD Vance clearly uncomfortable with the actions of the Trump administration and trying to find a way out of it could help him, at least help him secure that lane in a primary. So I think that this question has to be subordinated to how Trump's foreign policy is by that point viewed. Yeah, I agree with that. I think it's a glancing blow. I think he created hostages to fortune by saying these ridiculous things about how wonderful it was to deal with these people become much, much more reasonable, which was never going to prove out. At the end of the day, he cut this deal because Trump wanted him to cut this deal. And we waged this war because Trump wanted to wage this war. And we had a difficult path to finding a way out because of how Trump waged it. So none of this is ultimately on JD Vance. And I agree with Charlie. He was the one person, according to the reporting, who in the final meeting of Trump's aid said, sir, don't do this. I don't think this is a good idea. But I'll support you if you do it. So if the war is ultimately seen as a mistake, I think that's to. to JD's advances advantage because he would, he can say that this kind of thing I want to steer clear of in the future. With that, let's hear from our first sponsor of this episode, ExpressVPN. Charlie, over to you. Indeed. ExpressVPN. Have you ever heard of a data broker? They're the middlemen collecting and selling all those digital footprints you leave online. They can stitch together detailed profiles which include your browsing history, online searches and location data. The data broker then sells your profile off to a company who delivers you a really targeted ad. No biggie, right? Well... you might be surprised to learn that these same data brokers are also selling your information to the Department of Homeland Security and the IRS. And I, for one, don't want the tax man showing up at my door because of some search I did on my phone. So to mask my digital footprints, I protect myself with ExpressVPN. It's extremely easy to use. Just install it on your devices. Your... computer, your phone, even your Apple TV. Now it has one big button in the center that you press and it will hide your unique IP address which can refill information about your location and thereby stop data brokers or anyone else, hackers as well, from tracking you with ExpressVPN, your IP address is hidden with the touch of a button.

Every time you connect to an unencrypted network, cafe, hotel, airport, et cetera, your data is not secure. And this is how to stop that. Good news is ExpressVPN is now at the lowest price ever. Plan started just 3.49 a month. That's only 12 cents a day, which allows ExpressVPN to encrypt 100% of your network. traffic. I use ExpressVPN on all my devices whenever I travel. If you want to as well, you can secure your online data today by visiting ExpressVPN.com slash editors. That's EXP-R-E-S-V-S-V-P-N.com slash editors. And if you do, you can find out how you get up to four extra months. Thanks so much, Charlie. So, Noah, big controversy. Ro Khanna detained. on a West Bank trip by Israeli settlers. It used to be to get cred on the left. You had to do kind of the Al Sharpton thing or Jesse Jackson thing and get arrested at a civil rights or so-called civil rights protest. Lately, we've seen getting roughed up by ice, you know, pushed by iced or tear gas by ice outside an ice facility during a protest. That gives you a lot of credibility. But Ro Khanna went further, went to the Palestinian... territories and supposedly got detained by settlers at gunpoint. Now, it's emerged since the Akana's initial version of the story. He went into a restricted area or an area that had recently been restricted at least. So someplace he wasn't really supposed to go or people would wonder why you were there if you showed up there. He didn't coordinate this visit with the Israeli government. confusion initially about what was going on and the IDF shows up and waits for the police to show up because they need to resolve this kind of situation and then he goes he goes on his way but this is supposedly a sign of how we need to significantly downgrade relations with the Israeli government Tucker Carlson says this kind of thing that should cause a or could cause a revolution in America what they make of it Well, I make of it that all of these people are allowing the wish to father the thought. And it's a really perverse wish. What he alleged, Ro Khanna alleges, is that he took the snap tour of a Palestinian-controlled area of the West Bank when, as you said, he was stopped by armed men, Israeli civilians who harassed and threatened him. And when the IDF arrived to resolve the situation, they, in his words, blocked the road and were, quote, siding with the settlers against Americans. There's evidence, as you said, since emerged, not just from the IDF, but his own entourage. That's not really how it went down, that Israeli defense forces pretty much dispatched the menace at the scene rather quickly, reopened what was a block road. You said there was some confusion, and there is some confusion even today over whether this was a military restricted area had previously been, was recently lifted, might have contributed to the confusion, all of which could have been resolved in advance, had Ro Khanna coordinated with the Israeli government.

via the U.S. Embassy. The U.S. Embassy says they talked to Ro Khanna, asked him to go elsewhere. They say it was ignored. Ro Khanna says, our ambassador is lying, quote, unquote. We did inform him. He's since been on a Twitter thread rampage, which is one of the signs, by the way, of terminal attention hunger. when you start arguing with people on the internet. He accused Haviv Redeggir. He was a really sensible, knowledgeable Israeli watcher with a long history of excoriating settler violence of lying about the whole ordeal, saying that he has to pander to Israeli governments. He's just making enemies kind of, enemies left and right. And I think his reaction to this whole situation demonstrates something pretty perverse, that he wanted something bad to happen, that he wanted it to be worse than it really was. And he's retailing a narrative that indicates it was worse than it really was. You know, the West Bank is always on a knife's edge, but it seems very much like he wants to push it over. And everybody involved in this episode is just a player, a prop in Ro Khanna's little morality play. He's very ham-fisted and maladroit with it, but I guarantee you some other ambitious Democrat is probably going to do the same thing. Show up unannounced in the West Bank in order to foment an international incident, if only to galvanize their support among the progressive left. And I should add, by the way, if you're a left winger and your biggest concern is the security policy in the West Bank, you're enthralled to a luxury belief. Israel is not a pocketbook issue. It barely even relates to domestic politics unless you really overreed American foreign aid and defense spending. It is a fixation of a select few who are very loud and very influential in democratic politics and who seem to get... who seemed to enjoy nothing more than engaging in nostalgic reenactments of Cold War era socialist politics. And that's who Ro Khanna's appealing to because he wants to run for president. He's said as much. And this is going to be his pathway to victory. I don't understand. His theory of the case here, I don't think that constituents that he's appealing to is big enough to create that kind of groundswell for him, but he seems to, and he's willing to make a lot of enemies and do a lot of damage to America's allies and its national standing in the process. It is really a grotesque display in every element. So Charlie, another thing here is just because you're stopped by someone who is armed doesn't mean that you're stopped and held at gunpoint. And this is kind of the badlands here where people are going to be armed because they have to be armed to protect themselves. It's a little bit like...

I'm sure this analogy doesn't hold in all sorts of ways. But, you know, being in tombstone and, you know, Wyatt Earp stops you to ask some questions. You're like, oh, my God, I stopped a gun point because, of course, he's going to have a gun. So a lot of people there are armed, but Ro Khanna exaggerated to create a distorted picture for his own ends. I think what irritates me the most about Ro Khanna in particular, but more broadly the politicians who do this, is that... They seem to think that we can't see what they're doing. This is not purely a left-wing phenomenon. There are Republicans who behave like this as well. But in recent years, we've seen quite a lot of this on the left. The politician will try to go to some restricted area. be turned away and they'll say, look at the Trump administration attacking a sitting congressman. Ro Khanna did this because he wants to run for president. He wasn't even particularly subtle about that. He had to get into his statements on the matter, a long-shot presidential candidate, which came out of nowhere. And he immediately said, in the tone of a bad actor, wow, this is the sort of thing that really has made me wonder if I should run for president. And he thinks we can't see it. This was staged. That isn't to say it didn't happen. The video is not AI. But he went to that area with that tour guide so that he could put out a press release about the inevitable consequences of going to that area with this tour guide. So that when he comes back home... He can bolster his bona fides as the guy who hates Israel and then say, hmm, perhaps I should run for president. And he thinks we can't see it. It's so insulting. If he wants to be the guy who doesn't like Israel, then just be that guy. But don't play two-bit tricks on the assumption that we can't see. what you're doing. So, Jim Gary, this is Sam Ro Khanna. A lot of people were posting on X about this last couple days who was reaching out to a bunch of people who wanted to brand himself as the moderate Silicon Valley Democrat not too long ago and has gone in a completely different direction. He is the wealthiest guy you're going to find denouncing the Epstein class. Megadittos to everything Noah and Charlie just said to use a classic phrase. But I just want to observe, you know, the implosion of the Graham Platner campaign like the Hindenburg. Yes, I am making deliberate German Nazi references. The first one was most damage was Graham Platner, of course. But next to that, the two people who were most damaged, certainly the two in Congress, were one. Arizona Senator Ruben Gallego, in part because he had been best buddies with Eric Swalwell and who had endorsed Graham Platner because he's a fighter. Little do we know that the kind of fighting he was doing was against his ex-girlfriends.

So Gallego looks bad, but the guy who really looked bad was Ro Khanna, who had gone out and done a fundraiser for him after the Lindsay Fifeld physical abuse allegations. Now, by the way, Ro Khanna is going on interviews and saying, you know, we need to dig deeper. We need to look harder for signs of trouble. What are you talking about? You were the guy who is insisting. This guy's fine. And I think Ro Khanna, for all of his shamelessness, kind of recognize that, like, Being the biggest advocate for Graham Platner is not going to be a great brand to have if you want to run for president. Oh, by the way, if you have to tell people that you're funny, you're not funny. If you have to tell people that you're charming and charismatic, you're not really that charming and charismatic. And if you have to tell people that you're a real presidential candidate, you're not a real presidential candidate. So here, Conant felt this desperate need to change the narrative about himself. He needed to have something. And lo and behold, he goes to Israel and has exactly the kind of experience that would, you know, a thrill and excite and outrage every pro-Palestinian de facto pro-Hamas vehemently anti-Israel type. The other thing is just comment that I found fascinating guys. He said that he had never, the first time in life he felt conscious of being brown. Now, first of all, I don't know if you've seen a lot of Israelis, but one, Jackie Mason used to joke the first time you saw the IDF marching. He thought they were Puerto Ricans. Israelis themselves, you know, they come in all kinds of huge shapes and colors, but they're not uniformly white. And this, we see this continuing desire, like in the Coates book, this desire to shoehorn. Israeli-Palestinian relations into the post-Civil War, the American South, right? This idea of white oppression of colored people. Secondly, if this really is the first time Ro Khanna has felt conscious of being brown. Well, that's fantastic about America, isn't it? It means he's never experienced racism. It means he's never experienced any sense of feeling inferior or different or treated worse because of the color of his skin. So I will welcome his salute to American racial harmony, but I'm sure it was entirely unintentional, but that's kind of an example of how ham-handed Ro Khanna is as he goes about these things. No, Charlie really put his finger on it. There's a shamelessness. There's an obviousness. There's a, you can see the strings. You can see the stage directions. And so I don't think it's going to be terribly convincing to anyone, but it also demonstrates what Ro Khanna thinks he has to do to have a chance of the 28 Democratic presidential primary. So let me stick with you, Jim Stacey Garrity then, for the exit question. We're going to double barrel it. Who would you rather be in terms of sheer? Electoral chances in the Democratic primary in 2008, Ro Khanna or Rahm Emanuel? Um, Rom. I mean, it's not, you know, like they're both long shots. But I, first of all, I think the Ro Khanna, if he tries to run as the vehemently anti-Israel progressive type.

playing to the DSA crowd. This could be a very crowded lane. A lot of people trying to do the same thing. And I kind of, that's, that is a real path to Christian Gillibrandism, where the people who you think are there for your rally really just want to get some ranch dressing. So I, I don't think. Rom, look, Ron will have the quasi-centrist lane to himself. Maybe Josh Shapiro. I don't know. We'll see. Like, so like, I, and I think Rom also. brings to the table some real experience, whether it's White House Chief of Staff, whether it's Mayor of Chicago. He's actually run things, which I find more appealing. I don't know if Democratic primary voters as a whole find more appealing, but I think that stands out more in what's probably going to be a very crowded field. Noah, you'd rather be Ro Khanna or Rom? It's a pretty tough one. I think I'd probably rather be Ro Khanna. If he is even going to run for the presidency, he's going to have a tough time of it for a variety of reasons. I don't think those establishment credentials help him with primary voters. It seems based on their... present level of agitation that it would actually hurt them. And he's kind of, you know, he's doing his best to fit the mold, but he's kind of strikes me as a suitor approaching a potential spouse that he loves in theory, but really wants to change before they really ink this deal. And I just don't think, I think that comes off. And I don't think that's what primary voters want to hear. They want to hear that they're right in every regard and ratify their delusions. And they don't have to change. In fact, it's everybody else who has to change. So I just think it's a tough road to hoe. Sure. I don't think I would want to be either. I think they're both doomed. I suppose if you push me, I would rather be wrong purely because, as has been said, he's likely to have that lane. I'm a bit skeptical of the lane argument, but let's keep it here. To himself. Whereas Ro Khanna is going to be running against all manner of other crazy progressives, and he's going to have the dual disadvantage of being extremely rich, which will be used against him, and being... transparent and not especially charismatic. So I suppose I'd rather be Rahm Emanuel, but I don't want to give the impression that I think either of them has a chance because I don't. Yeah, I agree with that. I'd rather be Ram just because it is a slightly different brand. But the idea, you know, your credentials, that you're the former mayor, you're mayor of Chicago like seven years ago. It's just... is not going to happen. And kind of, as someone said, the problem he has, there are going to be so many woke candidates in this race who are better known than he is. He's a little known congressman. And congressmen generally don't have a happy time in presidential politics. So I would rather be wrong, but it's a close call. Speaking of members of Congress, second barrel to you first, Jim Stacey Garrity, would rather be.

Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez or Gavin Newsom? There was a time not that long ago where it did look like Gavin Newsom had the easiest path. He's going to have a ton of money, a ton of name recognition. Progressives loved his fighter persona. He was imitating that. So I think I'll stick with him. I still think that Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez. her appearance of the Munich Security Conference was like living down to every negative stereotype that it wasn't just that she didn't have much of an answer when asked if China invades Taiwan what should the U.S. do? She really came across as if she'd never thought about it before. And she offered, you know, Kamala Harris-esque word salad as an answer. So, you know, to quote Jeff Blahar, you know, Gavin Newsom always looks like he's finally found a way to destroy Robocop once and for all. He's got real weaknesses, but I do think he starts out with a lot of institutional advantages, primarily money, name ID, things like that. Yeah, he looks a little bit little. Now, he mentioned like the villain from Terminator 2 as well, that a guy is often in the police uniform. Robert Patrick. No, he looks like every villain from every 80s and 90s movie, basically. No. Yeah, Gavin Newsom, for the reasons that Jim mentioned, the foremost being that he will have a ton of fundraising to be able to draw from. And Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez will generate most of her funds from small dollar donors who are very excited about her. But who knows how long they'll be excited about her when the stakes are much higher than they have been for her throughout her entire political career. She is an embarrassment. She regularly embarrasses herself and her constituents when she talks. She's gotten better. But not much. As Jim said, that summit happened this year, I think, if not late last year. It really wasn't that long ago. And her base is a very activist contingent that is overrepresented online. But we have few indications that they are overrepresented in the key primary states. After Iowa, after New Hampshire, North Carolina, Nevada, Super Tuesday, a lot of those states are dominated by middle of the road Democratic voters who are by no means DSA types. And I have yet to see her craft a narrative that would appeal to those constituents. Sure. I can't believe you guys. are unable to see that Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez is just engaging in strategic ambiguity. And the fact that you're confused by what she said proves that she would be a master diplomat if elevated to the presidency. No, I'd rather be Gavin Newsom. I think he has many problems and challenges ahead of him. But Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez has a lot of charisma.

And she's going to tap into where a lot of the energy is in the Democratic Party. But unless the Democratic Party's primary system has fundamentally changed since the last couple of times around, she's going to hit a wall in areas that prefer moderates or people they believe present as moderates. And Gavin Newsom will benefit from that even when he runs. Yeah, I agree with all that. I think Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez will have a, assuming she runs, will have some moments and be leading in some polls at various points like Bernie did in his two runs, but I still would give Gavin Newsom. more of a chance to actually win the nomination. With that, let's go to our second sponsor this episode. Bear Watch is we spent a lot of time this year talking about terrorists where there's still actually possible to make things in America. Well, our sponsor today. is putting that question to the test. Vera was founded in Los Angeles back in 2016 with a simple but very ambitious mission to revive the American watch industry. Cut to today, Vera is proud to be the largest independent watch assembler in the United States, building watches in California, Arizona, Rhode Island, and Alabama, as well as manufacturing leather straps in Illinois. and Florida. All of us here at the editors have been wearing our very watches for a while now, and I can tell you firsthand that they're truly amazing. I actually don't have my VAR watch on right at the moment. It's in my pocket. I've kind of been on the run this morning and haven't had time to put it on, but I will, I promise, right after we conclude this episode. But it's a wonderful product. Get comments about it all the time. Some editors, listeners, just wondering if it's a Vary Watch, which, of course, it is. Other people just commenting on how great. It looks, and it's a pleasure not to have to look at your phone all the time when you want to see what time it is. And once you get used to wearing a watch again, if you were like me and hadn't worn one for a while, you see the advantages of it. And again, these are truly wonderful products that all of us here. Truly enjoy. Vera makes some of the most durable well-belt watches on the market. They use top-grade luxury materials. They all come with a waterproof warranty, and they've earned over 10,000 five-star reviews. What's more, Vera's classic analog approach to timekeeping is not only sophisticated and refined. It's also a welcome departure for people who are tired of getting pinged on their smart watches all day. If you want to support American craftsmanship and own a watch that's both rugged and refined, check out there. You can find them at Verawatches.com. That's V-A-E-R watches. So, Charlie Shocking News over the weekend, Lindsey Graham.

And a heart attack Saturday night passes away only, this is a tribute to our society and modern health and medicine, only 71 years old and a credible advocate for everything. He believed most fundamentally in the goodness and efficacy of American power and the importance of our alliances and the importance of supporting embattled allies like Israel. in Ukraine. He was constantly moving the needle on things that were important to him. This can sound kind of sliding or disparaging. I don't mean it that way at all, but he truly enjoyed the game. He was always looking for the maneuver or deal that would advance the ball for something he believed in. This ultimately was behind his accommodation of Donald Trump. He just figured, well, he's going to be president. He's the major power in the party. I'm going to become friends with him, and I'm going to influence him the best I can. And he actually did make some a difference on important things because of that relationship, very strong pro-lifer constitutionalists. Some people critical of him for voting for Democratic nominees, but no one was a more stalwart defender of embattled Republican nominees. Most famously, Brett Kavanaugh, where Graham's impassioned. performance at the hearing there, kind of help turn the tide or at least turn the mood in that confirmation battle. What do you make of it? Well, I've been really quite confused by some of the purest P-U-R-I-T responses to Graham's death that I have seen. The criticism of Graham seems to be that having opposed the nomination of Donald Trump in 2015, and indeed warned Republicans against choosing him, that Graham subsequently went on to work closely with him. And I don't understand this. I've written many, many times about how annoying I find it when writers, myself included, are criticized for evaluating President Trump for what President Trump does, rather than just screeching constantly. And the argument that I've advanced, I believe with every fiber of my being, is that... Outside of a primary election or the general election that follows it, it's imperative that writers, commentators, analysts, deal with reality as it is. And the reality as it is, whether one likes it or not. Indeed, whether one thinks it is the worst or the best thing that has ever happened in history or not. is that Donald Trump is the President of the United States. That is a fact. Twice now, Donald Trump has been inaugurated and handed the powers of Article 2. Lindsey Graham was a senator. He was one of a hundred members of the upper chamber in our legislature. He was said there many times.

by the people of South Carolina. And before that, he was sent to the house. Lindsey Graham's job was to agitate on behalf of the causes in which Lindsey Graham believed and, or depending on the circumstance, we don't need to get to Burke, the causes that the people of South Carolina favored. To have responded to the election of Donald Trump, and this incidentally applies the same to anyone. Whether you think Trump is different or not, doesn't matter. This applies to the election of Barack Obama or Joe Biden or whoever the next guy is. To have responded to the election of Donald Trump by saying, I will take a stance of permanent revolution. against this president would have been to abdicate his responsibility and his role. Graham didn't do that. And I don't think that's grounds for criticism. I think that that was Graham executing the trust that had been placed in him. If you look at what he achieved, it endorses. his decision. Graham had a great role to play within the two Trump presidencies in the realm of foreign policy, in legislation on the Judiciary Committee. Graham believed in ideas. Now, they weren't all the same as the ideas I believe in, but that doesn't matter. So when people say, well, of course, Graham disgraced himself by trying to stay relevant. Graham disgraced himself by trying to stay at the center of the action. I think that they completely misunderstand how... not just legislators, but Americans are supposed to exist within our system. We have a constitutional order underpinned by democracy within our republic to avoid war. And that means that unless you are going to stage a revolution or unless there are the votes for an impeachment, you accept the election of people you dislike. You accept... Power being exercised by people you dislike. Lindsey Graham accepted that Trump was president and then set about trying to get as much of what he could out of that fact. I'm dwelling on this because to malign the guy for doing that. It's not only unfair. It's wrong. It's... It's indicative of a politics that is fundamentally nihilistic that believes that the proper role of a senator or a citizen, even when a president is truly awful, is to stick their fingers in their ears and go, la, la, la, la, and talk about nothing other than the president's flaws or about getting rid of them. And I don't understand it. So I think in many ways,

Lindsey Graham was not only defensible, but admirable. He was also somebody who, and this is rare at the moment, unfortunately in our politics, took his role as a legislator, as a member of the legislative branch pretty seriously. Lindsey Graham took his role on the Judiciary Committee seriously. That led him, with one exception, to vote for... all of the nominees that were put before him. That's not what I would do, but I don't think that you could accuse him of being frivolous or agnostic. And that famous outburst in 2018 was not driven by partisanship or by a particular love of Brett Kavanaugh, but was driven by, I think, a real contempt. for those who had, in Graham's view, undermined an institution that he took seriously. Because he hadn't done that to justices Sotomayor or Elena Kagan. He thought that the Senate was a meaningful and virtuous institution. And he was upset at the gamesmanship that he saw. Cory Booker. of all people, issued a statement about Graham. The gist of which was that Graham took his role as a legislator, writing legislation, working on the law with people on right and left seriously. And of course, Graham was most famous for his foreign policy views. and he's stuck with them. He may have been friendly with Donald Trump. He may have ingratiated himself to Donald Trump, but he didn't do so by altering his views, most famously on Ukraine. He was a staunch defender of Ukraine. I think that's the sort of person that we want in our politics. So I'm not in every respect to Lindsey Graham conservative. But I'm really irritated by this notion that to try to advance your ideas and those of your constituents by working with a president about whom you have reservations or worse is a slight on your character rather than an example of you doing your job. Yeah, so further to that, Jim, I think there are broadly two choices traditional Republicans could make with regard to Trump. One is kind of they against him and your terrible fate and end your career, see your career end. And some people have made that choice. I think honorable people have made that choice. Or you could do what Lindsay did, which pretty much figure... Well, if I go away in South Carolina, someone will take my place. Well, that person who takes my place will that person be better than I am with regard to the issues I care about and advance them more than I can? And he believed the answer was no. Now, surely he just loved the job and like getting reelected the way most people did. But his calculation in that regard that he could actually move the ball better than someone else for his issues was absolutely true in his case.

I wrote my morning jolt Monday entitled Lindsey Graham has the last laugh. And I think that's a good way of looking at how Lindsey Graham greeted the Trump era that he did not welcome in 2016. You think back to Trump's 2016 traditional Republican rivals. Did any of them ever have more influence on Trump than Graham did? Marco Rubio is Secretary of State. You could probably put him in that conversation. Rick Perry was Energy Secretary in the first term. Beyond that, most of these folks, and I think really highly have a bunch of them, but most of them either left politics or became really marginalized in the Republican Party, except for Lindsey Graham. And it's kind of this fascinating. sense that, you know, I, by way, Charlie just gave a tour to force. The only point that I would kind of add to that is that I was struck by how much Lindsey Graham got mocked. uh the tone of sneering i remember before bill mar went through his um his recent political transformation he said something like you know hit him with your purse lindsay or something like that uh Lindsey Graham never got married nobody ever talked about girlfriends led to a lot of rumors uh his memoir he talked about having girlfriends you know but in the end he kept his private life private and all of his enemies seemed to think that that meant it was fair game and they could make up all kinds of stuff about him. But look, you know, Lindsey Graham is short. You know, it feels so weird to use past tense with him. He was short. He was slight. He kind of had this boyish energy for, you know, deep into his Senate career. And everybody kind of enjoyed, you know, he's a sidekick. You know, he's McCain's sidekick. He's, you know, Trump's, you know, suck up and all that stuff. And yeah, so, like, oh, he's this, you know, left. He's a man of the Reaganite past, right? He doesn't, you know. And yeah, here we are. It's the middle of 2026. The America first president, who a lot of people feared was going to be kind of isolationist, kept selling arms to Ukraine. Put Nicholas Maduro in jail. Marco Rubio is the viceroyer of Venezuela, so to speak. Bomb the heck out of the Iranians throughout the year and we're on it again. This human government is begging to not get invaded. And, you know, the defense appropriation spill is going to be at least $1.1 billion. It might be $1.5 billion. Lindsey Graham won a heck of a lot of fights. He won a heck of a lot more fights than he lost. So for this guy who was supposedly this loser, this sidekick, this joke. He kept getting his way. He kept figuring out how to get what he wanted, how to get the best deal available.

from the people he had to work with. So, you know, everybody sneered at him, and yet he did the job the way it's supposed to be done and advanced the ball for his causes on front after front. And so I think maybe the, you know, one of the lessons of this is that maybe it's an advantage if everybody's always underestimating you. Yeah. No, Jim referred to kind of figuring out the way ahead. And Dan McLaughlin made this point in a post about, Graham, it was predictable where he'd want to go on an issue, but it was totally unpredictable how he was going to figure out to try to get there, because whatever the most conventional path was, Graham usually invested in zigging or zagging some other way along the path that getting to his ultimate goal. Yeah, that's a good way to put it efficacious as an old school lawmaker within that chamber. And the whole name of that game is establishing relationships and finding out ways to preserve relationships amid impossible dynamism, the impossible dynamism of the American political dynamic. I can't really add much to what Charlie... And Jim have said, I can only add my appreciation for what Lindsey Graham was instrumental in engineering as that really deft operator type. He was, as has been said, an indefatigable supporter of the U.S. Israel Alliance. He also authored landmark legislation, supported it as well through shepherded it into law, committing the United States to recognize that the Palestinian Authority. contributes financial and material support for terrorism. He was also a key figure in driving the normalization of relations between Israel and the Middle East Sunni states. And those two things are coupled for decades. There was a sclerotic consensus among foreign policy professionals who maintained that you couldn't have regional peace unless you solved the Palestinian issue first. What gave us the Abraham Accords was a reversal of that. theory in which you dealt with the Palestinian issue last. And it turned out that was what worked. And that was one of the ideas to which Graham was beholden. He also was instrumental, according to Congressman Michael McCall, in compelling the president to abandon his hostility to Ukraine. Some of the time pops up here and there, but the policies that he even very recently endorsed. like allowing Ukraine to build indigenous Patriot Interceptors was his baby. He also apparently championed NATO to a degree and our relationship with the NATO allies to such a degree that I persuaded Trump not to go to full-scale war with the Atlantic Alliance. You know, this is a garden that needed to be tended on a very regular basis. And he tended it. And I wonder who's going to pick up that mantle in his absence. And lastly, As you mentioned at the outset, you know, one of his finest moments is the defense of Brett Kavanaugh during the confirmation hearings. I went back and I revisited that moment a little bit for a piece on the corner after he passed away this weekend. I had written about it for Commentary Magazine at the time. And it was gratuitous, the degree to which...

The political professionals, commentators, even elected officials in that time on the Democratic side of the aisle and their allies, thought it was just peachy keen to smear and slander this guy in nakedly bigoted and misandrist terms. Jennifer Palmary, Rebecca Triester, Maureen Dowd, Jonathan Capehart. Erica Smith, Charles Pierce, Bryce Covert, Michael Matthew Dowd, Maisie Hirono, on and on and on. All of them described the reaction that Brett Kavanaugh had to being smeared as a rapist without any supporting evidence, nothing that would hold up in a court, much less get to, you know, past a pretrial hearing. That they just, this was the bleat of a white man who is raging over the threat to his perceived privilege. You know, it went on and on and on like that, just reducing this guy to his accidents of birth. And this was 2018. This was not long after Donald Trump's ascension to the head of the Republican Party. And there were still some pretty bruised egos and wounded feelings about that. And I really think that moment helped paper over a lot of the divisions that persisted from 2016. and created, you know, the predicate for the kind of Republican Party that is uniformly aligned behind Donald Trump that we see today. You know, for whatever you think of that moment, Lindsey Graham repaired a lot of internal divisions. Even though he gets consistently attacked by the people who are, you know, most defensive of the president's position, he did a lot more to shore up his support internally within the party than I think he gets credit for. So Charlie, I ask the question to you first, a non-secular, X a question. How much are you looking forward to seeing the new movie The Odyssey? Oh, I love Christopher Nolan and assume it will be excellent, and I will go as soon as I can. So what was your scale? I didn't put a number on. Okay, I was just check. Because sometimes you say between 2.5 and 8.3. And you say it's logarithmic. Yeah, I'm lax on this episode. I'm very much looking forward to seeing it. Jim Gary, we have it very much on the board. 8.3. Wow. Okay, semi-seriously, though, I can't watch it until my younger son returns from summer camp, which will be like, you know, not until the end of the month. And considering how quickly people, films leave theaters. But, like, I've reached the point where, like, you know, Christopher Nolan's The Phone Book will be an epic no matter what it is. Noah. I can't wait to see it on an airplane a year from now. I know we'll just never make it to the theaters to see an adult film like this. My kids have no interest in this. So it's just not going to happen. So I'm just disabusing myself with the notion that I get to see this in time to actually have a timely reaction to it. But I can't wait to see it eventually.

I'm looking forward to it, and expect to see it in the theater. With that, let's hit a few other things before we go. Jim Stacey Garrity, you met Pastor Ezra Jin. Yes, the event was off the record, so I'm not going to say much beyond that I got a chance to meet him. He's an utterly inspiring figure, as is his wife, as is his daughter, and his son-in-law, Bill Drexel, who works at the Hudson Institute. He was on my India trip, and as I were a little item in the corner. You hear a lot about political prisoners. When you know the family, it hits much closer to home. And for those of us who cover China or any other authoritarian regime, when somebody gets arrested under, you know, sketchy, dubious circumstances, it usually is a very long wait. It's a terrible ordeal, and we don't get to write about a lot of happy ending. So it was just such a wonderful chance to see a happy ending to a circumstance like this. And, you know, one of the best nights I've had in quite some time. No, you went to a patriotic event at the local YMCA. Yeah, I'd never been before situated on a very big property, which is why they were able to have 5,000 people roughly at this event. It's like a big fireworks. This neighborhood gathering for you guys. Well, they took forever to get in there. I didn't know how this is like a hundred. It's a full county event. The entire county probably shows up at this thing. And, you know, they have big fireworks at the end of it. So it's probably what lured all these people into it. But it was otherwise. Pretty cerebral. There was a reading of the declaration with people in costume and... It was followed by some orchestral classical music that was really very well done for this full-scale orchestra. And it would have been entirely a cerebral experience if we didn't do a lot of tailgating in advance and during, which is what made it quite a lot of fun. But yeah, it was a very enjoyable thing. And I didn't even know they did this until now, and I think I'll probably be going back next year. So I take it this is a post-July 4th. Yes, it was after July 4th. I like the local community post-July 4th events. Alexandria, Virginia, from that neck of the woods, has one every year. I'm gone in a while, but used to love to go. I kind of sense that there's more post-July 4th events this year that have that July 4th patriotic flavor to it, which I didn't anticipate because I've been kind of downbeat on the whole 250 thing. I thought it really wasn't getting the attention that 76 got. But, you know, there's at least that. Try. Well, I've been very up on thunderstorms many times on this podcast. But I want to completely reverse myself because at the moment, whenever I try and do anything, we get a thunderstorm. It's almost become comical. It's like some sort of 40s cartoon or something. I work and work and then I say, all right, at 4.30s, play tennis for an hour. The second I get there, I see lightning in the distance. I decide I'll go for a walk and I'm six feet outside of my house and little cloud comes over my head, just my head and deposits water on me. Or I think, well, you know, it's a nice day when it cools down a bit. I'll go for a swim.

No, no, no. In comes the thunderstorms. So I'm generally, I do retain my general pro thunderstorm view, but at the moment, they just seem to be timing themselves to upset me. To the point at which, Rich, I actually looked up the other day whether it was dangerous to have a shower during a thunderstorm. And apparently you have a one in half a million chance of being... You know, it's funny. I looked this up just the other day. Yeah. So the idea is it can strike on the ground somewhere nearby and then the plumbing will. Well, if you have metal pipes, yeah, which are often used in homes for grounding things and then the lightning will come up through them and then down the water and kill you. And now I did look this up and it's funny because a lot of US government websites say don't do it. It's horribly dangerous. But then if you actually start looking into it, the statistical likelihood is much lower. But I was just thinking, given how unlucky I've been in trying to do any sort of exercise, I would be the guy who got struck by lightning in the shower. Just sit on the couch. Just sit it out. Right. Just do nothing during the thunderstorms. So I like mini golf. I never became a golfer, but a pretty good mini golfer. You know, a two. par hole i'm generally pretty good on and i went recently to an above average mini golf place it was a little bit misleading because this kind of a de facto advertisement that has huge waterfall in the front of the place which happens to be the 18th and last hole you're like oh my gosh this place looks amazing and it was still pretty good interesting holes but was not quite as fantastic as we've been led to to believed by that huge waterfall still had a good time. With that, it's time for our editor's picks, Jim Stacey Garrity. What's your pick? You know, I could have gone with any one of the many well-written tributes to the late Lindsey Graham, but I'm going to go with Dan McLaughlin's, the last interesting man in Washington. I think it kind of captures a point about, he describes, you know, Lindsey Graham as being Faulknery and character, mischievous, impish wit. And I think it just kind of observes the degree to which Lindsey Graham was just not cookie cutter in any way, shape, or form. Maybe it was his background, maybe just the way he was shaped, his JAG experience. Anyway, we all wrote good stuff about Lindsey Graham, but I think Dan really nailed an important quality of his. So good job, Dan. No, Rothman, what's your pick? Senator Lamar Alexander on our pages today. The Senate doesn't need a change in rules. It needs a change in behavior. I think he put his finger on the problem that the nuke the filibuster types are kind of getting at. And it's it's not that the Senate has minority protections. It's Yuval Levin's lament that no party perceives itself as a majority party. They don't even try to amass the kind of political power that would be necessary to overcome a filibuster. And that involves winning elections in mass. And winning elections in mass requires a big coalition of voters that's kind of messy and kind of icky if you're a purist. It all comes back to winning. And those that...

Don't think they can do that beat up on the filibuster, but it's a proxy for the real problem, which is crippling political insecurity. I'm going to pick Noah's piece. The left goes after Marco Rubio. I missed this. I assume that this is happening because people are scared that Marco Rubio is going to be president. But Noah has detected the start of the anti-Marco Rubio soft pieces in the press. I noticed in about 2014-15 that there was this nascent attempt to make Hillary Clinton cool. which never worked. While Noah is seeing the flags going up in trying to make Marco Rubio uncool, or worse even, apparently it's really terrible for him to like 1990s rap music. It's disqualifying. So this is a good and interesting piece. I hadn't detected this, but I think Noah's onto something. So Jim took my pick, that Dan McLaughlin post, that was truly terrific. So that's it for us. You've been listening to National View Podcasts, and your rebroadcast, retransmission, or account of this game without the express written consent of National News magazine is strictly prohibited. This podcast has been produced by the incomparable Sarah Shuddy, who makes it sound better than we deserve. Thank you, Charlie, thank you, Jim, thank you, Noah, thanks to ExpressVPN and Vair. And thanks especially to all of you for listening to the editors. We'll see you next time.