Transcript

Requiem · John’s Newsletter

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[music]
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SPEAKER_00: Good morning, everyone, and welcome to the Trump Revolution as we try to make sense
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SPEAKER_00: of the goings-on in America to a nervous world.
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SPEAKER_00: And this one is just entitled Requiem as we sift through the damage
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SPEAKER_00: of a once-in-a-generation political shellacking.
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SPEAKER_00: Again, the system worked.
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SPEAKER_00: If you fight a war of choice after promising not to fight stupid wars,
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SPEAKER_00: and that war goes badly, and that leads to an energy shock,
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SPEAKER_00: and you're already grappling with affordability issues, and you ignore your base,
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SPEAKER_00: which pays in higher gas prices for this inevitably, You will be punished,
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SPEAKER_00: as you should be in a Jeffersonian system.
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SPEAKER_00: There are going to be people now who are going to try to make this complicated.
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SPEAKER_00: If you remember, when we started talking about the Iran war,
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SPEAKER_00: there were guys on our site, Acolytes of Ferguson, I think.
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SPEAKER_00: Who for a while were trying to tell us and hijack the site.
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SPEAKER_00: I wasn't worried because I knew we'd win.
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SPEAKER_00: I have faith in our community and I have faith in free speech.
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SPEAKER_00: And I knew I was right and I knew they were wrong.
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SPEAKER_00: But they were telling us that Trump was playing 6D chess and this was
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SPEAKER_00: so much more complicated than we could understand.
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SPEAKER_00: They were arguing for Macbeth and not for Hamlet.
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SPEAKER_00: And more and more, Occam's Razor does explain things.
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SPEAKER_00: Simple, elegant answers explain things.
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SPEAKER_00: This one is incredibly simple.
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SPEAKER_00: The president went against one of the key tenets of Trumpism.
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SPEAKER_00: He fought a stupid war of choice.
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SPEAKER_00: He listened to the neocons and Bibi Netanyahu.
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SPEAKER_00: He felt he had the hot hand after Venezuela and could do anything in a classic Greek way.
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SPEAKER_00: And hubris was met now with nemesis and now we are into requiem.
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SPEAKER_00: This is very, very clear.
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SPEAKER_00: Every fact fit that pattern.
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SPEAKER_00: So now people will try to make this complicated.
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SPEAKER_00: It really wasn't about affordability, not keeping faith with the base,
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SPEAKER_00: and the terrible cost of the Iran war, which led to this energy shock.
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SPEAKER_00: When anyone with a brain the size of the P who's ever played a war game...
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SPEAKER_00: The first thing you do while you're rearranging your sock drawer in your head is
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SPEAKER_00: that you figure out what you need to do to make it work for closing the street
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SPEAKER_00: of her moves before you make any other more serious moves.
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SPEAKER_00: And everybody alive knew that.
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SPEAKER_00: And indeed, they did tell the president that he ignored them.
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SPEAKER_00: And we see the result now, an unfinished war, nine months in,
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SPEAKER_00: total misunderstanding and disrespect for the base who have paid the price
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SPEAKER_00: and now they have paid him back.
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SPEAKER_00: The system worked.
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SPEAKER_00: But let me give you some idea of the extent of the damage here in the Requiem.
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SPEAKER_00: This is a once in a generation shellacking.
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SPEAKER_00: This is a country screaming out, for God's sake, stop.
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SPEAKER_00: For God's sake, stop.
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SPEAKER_00: And he didn't.
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SPEAKER_00: He didn't at all.
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SPEAKER_00: And boy, does it show.
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SPEAKER_00: And they want him to.
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SPEAKER_00: And let's not make this complicated.
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SPEAKER_00: When the system worked perfectly, the consequences of this are simple.
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SPEAKER_00: The reason people are going to make it complicated,
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SPEAKER_00: like the Ferguson people on our site,
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SPEAKER_00: is that they want to absolve themselves of responsibility
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SPEAKER_00: for their horrendous analytical calls.
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SPEAKER_00: And we must see this time that doesn't happen
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SPEAKER_00: because this election resembles nothing so much as the election of 2006
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SPEAKER_00: when the Iraq war finally caught up with George W.
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SPEAKER_00: Bush, one of our worst presidents ever.
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SPEAKER_00: This is a guy who bungled Iraq, bungled Afghanistan, and bungled the financial crisis.
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SPEAKER_00: I mean, he's bottom three.
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SPEAKER_00: He's down there with James Buchanan and people like that.
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SPEAKER_00: And Simply put, they paid the price and Rumsfeld finally had to go.
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SPEAKER_00: Ironically, the most sympathetic of the neocon bunch, the most questioning of that,
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SPEAKER_00: he's the one who went.
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SPEAKER_00: But the reality is simple.
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SPEAKER_00: There was a democratic requiem for what went on.
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SPEAKER_00: And hubris led to nemesis led to the requiem.
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SPEAKER_00: And that's what this resembles more than anything else.
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SPEAKER_00: That time, by the way, it has not been since 2006
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SPEAKER_00: that the minority party flipped control of both chambers on a single night.
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SPEAKER_00: So again, the analogy historically fits perfectly.
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SPEAKER_00: Our secret sauce is working perfectly.
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SPEAKER_00: Again, the people trying to do game theory are telling us Trump's playing 6D chess.
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SPEAKER_00: He's not playing checkers very well.
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SPEAKER_00: That's what happened here.
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SPEAKER_00: Simple answers are best.
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SPEAKER_00: We can see that this is indeed what happened.
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SPEAKER_00: Exit polling made it clear that foreign policy mattered to the extent
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SPEAKER_00: that affordability was the number one issue.
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SPEAKER_00: The Iran war was about third, along with corruption, interestingly.
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SPEAKER_00: But affordability in the economy, always number one.
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SPEAKER_00: But people did see the link between what happened in Iran and the skyrocketing energy prices.
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SPEAKER_00: They did see that link, that clear link.
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SPEAKER_00: And this really led to him losing, Trump losing, and his party losing moderates.
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SPEAKER_00: Trump said, you know, think of me as being on the ballot.
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SPEAKER_00: I mean, that's catastrophic.
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SPEAKER_00: When exit polling shows his approval rating is still trending downward down
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SPEAKER_00: to about 37, 38%, maybe 38, let's give him.
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SPEAKER_00: And anything below 40, you are a huge drag on what you're doing.
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SPEAKER_00: And that indeed is what was happening here.
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SPEAKER_00: And let's not make it more complicated than that, because that's what's going on.
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SPEAKER_00: That's absolutely what's going on here.
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SPEAKER_00: So the exit polling would back this up.
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SPEAKER_00: You see in the exit polling, quite amazingly,
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SPEAKER_00: 62% of voters in exit polling said the war in Iran was not being waged well.
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SPEAKER_00: Anything over 60, we share with the community.
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SPEAKER_00: So this is, as we would put it, a significant number.
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SPEAKER_00: And of those 62, 74% said it was a major factor in their vote.
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SPEAKER_00: And again, this can be seen largely because it's a major factor because it has to do
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SPEAKER_00: with affordability and the cost.
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SPEAKER_00: Energy shock that accompanied the war after being told it would be
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SPEAKER_00: over in 14 seconds and of course it wasn't.
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SPEAKER_00: And this of course, it wasn't.
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SPEAKER_00: In this tracks a Pew survey of October on Pew polls are
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SPEAKER_00: among the best 65 % disapproved of the way the Iran war was being won
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SPEAKER_00: And he didn't listen.
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SPEAKER_00: And when you don't listen, the people will remind you in a Jeffersonian fashion
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SPEAKER_00: in our country that they are indeed the boss.
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SPEAKER_00: So how bad was this?
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SPEAKER_00: Remember, we set out parameters.
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SPEAKER_00: And anything north of 240 seats in the House was a cataclysmic win.
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SPEAKER_00: Well, the Democrats are between 250 and 260, probably on the north end of that.
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SPEAKER_00: So this number exceeds any expectation and the metric and bar we set.
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SPEAKER_00: Yesterday, likewise, we said, you know, if they're getting 53, 54 in the Senate,
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SPEAKER_00: it's an incredible night.
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SPEAKER_00: Well, it's been better than that.
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SPEAKER_00: They're going to end up at somewhere around 55 or even 56.
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SPEAKER_00: Amazingly, Mississippi, a state we haven't mentioned at all, is too close to call.
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SPEAKER_00: Within a couple hundred votes, probably they're going to have to recount,
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SPEAKER_00: within a couple hundred votes after 97% being counted,
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SPEAKER_00: a Democrat is within striking distance of winning Mississippi.
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SPEAKER_00: That's how bad the night was.
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SPEAKER_00: I mean, that sums it up beautifully.
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SPEAKER_00: Kansas went.
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SPEAKER_00: Which hasn't happened since FDR in 1932, almost 100 years.
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SPEAKER_00: Iowa went.
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SPEAKER_00: Graham, that horrible human being, Lindsey Graham, escaped all this by dying.
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SPEAKER_00: But his sister paid the price by somehow losing in South Carolina.
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SPEAKER_00: More expected.
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SPEAKER_00: North Carolina fell though Cooper won by almost 20 points which is eye -opening.
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SPEAKER_00: Alaska Peltola is being punished
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SPEAKER_00: to some extent for her shenanigans in Alaska
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SPEAKER_00: that might just be for Sullivan it's too close to call
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SPEAKER_00: yet but Sullivan might just eke that out.
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SPEAKER_00: Susan Collins who survived everything didn't survive Trump in the Iran war.
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SPEAKER_00: She actually lost to Guy who married his cousin El Saeed got over the line beating
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SPEAKER_00: that neocon Mike Rogers, paying the price,
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SPEAKER_00: and it's just as bad as possible.
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SPEAKER_00: And now the requiem begins, and we must be very clear not to,
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SPEAKER_00: as happened after 2006, to fall for the complexity argument that's merely designed
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SPEAKER_00: to keep the neocons from paying the price.
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SPEAKER_00: And already Mark Levin, my least favorite human being, is saying things like, well,
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SPEAKER_00: it's not my fault.
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SPEAKER_00: It wasn't because of the war.
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SPEAKER_00: There were other factors.
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SPEAKER_00: You can't blame this on me.
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SPEAKER_00: Of course we can blame it on him.
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SPEAKER_00: We absolutely must blame it on him. That's the point.
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SPEAKER_00: He's trying to evade responsibility.
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SPEAKER_00: You're going to hear the neocons don't really exist.
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SPEAKER_00: I hear this ridiculous argument.
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SPEAKER_00: Trust me, after what happened to me in Iraq and what's happening now, they very much do exist.
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SPEAKER_00: It's like saying a vampire.
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SPEAKER_00: We must see that they pay
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SPEAKER_00: a price because only in healthy republics is a price paid.
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SPEAKER_00: We didn't pay a price after Iraq.
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SPEAKER_00: Nothing happened to any of these guys.
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SPEAKER_00: Max Boot worked for the Washington Post for a while,
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SPEAKER_00: and Applebaum went on to win a Pulitzer Prize for discovering that Stalin was
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SPEAKER_00: a bad guy, and nothing absolutely happened to her.
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SPEAKER_00: There's been no professional shaming and naming of these people.
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SPEAKER_00: They've suffered no consequences whatever in many cases.
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SPEAKER_00: Kagan was the emeritus writer in the Washington Post.
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SPEAKER_00: What more can you say?
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SPEAKER_00: Nothing happened to them after all that they did.
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SPEAKER_00: We cannot let that happen again.
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SPEAKER_00: That would be the end.
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SPEAKER_00: The neocons must never be allowed within a mile of power ever again.
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SPEAKER_00: They must be named and shamed and kept out of any circle of moving forward.
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SPEAKER_00: Now is the time.
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SPEAKER_00: This was simple.
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SPEAKER_00: This was caused by neoconservative overreach of fighting a war of choice in the Middle East.
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SPEAKER_00: Incredibly, like an idiotic child,
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SPEAKER_00: we stuck our tongue back on the stove after having done this already
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SPEAKER_00: and seen what happened in both Afghanistan and Iraq.
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SPEAKER_00: Quite incredible.
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SPEAKER_00: Even more incredible, though, would be to let them get away with it again.
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SPEAKER_00: They must be chased from the corridors of power in some sort of hawkish form.
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SPEAKER_00: Some of them will remain at the edges of the Republican coalition,
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SPEAKER_00: but they must now a minority that must never again be within hallways of power.
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SPEAKER_00: This must never happen again.
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SPEAKER_00: The American people have wisely and rightly spoken.
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SPEAKER_00: And it is up to us in the party And us who called this correctly,
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SPEAKER_00: and we're 12 for 12 now, guys.
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SPEAKER_00: And I just want to shout out to the staff again.
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SPEAKER_00: What a wonderful job we've done.
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SPEAKER_00: I'm so proud of you.
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SPEAKER_00: So proud of you.
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SPEAKER_00: And we have seen this war.
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SPEAKER_00: We have seen the politics.
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SPEAKER_00: We have seen the fusion of the two right every step of the way.
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SPEAKER_00: We must now build on that analytical correctness and certitude
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SPEAKER_00: to keep these poisonous people away from power and not let them slither away only
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SPEAKER_00: to come back and bedevil both the republic and the world again.
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SPEAKER_00: We must live in a republic of virtue and merit if we're going to make this disaster count.
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SPEAKER_00: The message the American people It was given loud,
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SPEAKER_00: and clearly it is up to all of us who help make the decisions for the country
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SPEAKER_00: to actually listen to our people in a Jeffersonian way.
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SPEAKER_00: I, for one, wouldn't have it any other way.
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SPEAKER_00: Hope you enjoyed our series on the election.
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SPEAKER_00: So glad to have gotten it right,
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SPEAKER_00: but we must draw the clear lessons that are right in front of our nose
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SPEAKER_00: and then critically, in a classical Greek way, apply proxies,
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SPEAKER_00: the unity of thought and action.
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SPEAKER_00: We must act on them and expel the neoconservatives everywhere from the corridors
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SPEAKER_00: of power now and forever.
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SPEAKER_00: Take care, everybody, and see you soon.