Absolute Power
Episode Stats
Words per Minute
134.36217
Summary
The Supreme Court rules that the President can't be prosecuted for war crimes that occurred during his tenure, including the drone strike that killed an American citizen. What does this mean for the future of drone strikes and the use of drones by the U.S. government?
Transcript
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The president can't really be prosecuted for war crimes or disasters that occurred during
00:00:16.720
So I think it was about 10 years ago or a little bit longer, Barack Obama, with a drone,
00:00:41.260
It's one thing for the government to, say, execute someone who's been convicted of murder.
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It's another thing for them to preemptively eliminate an American citizen who might threaten
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And I think a lot of conservative terror warriors didn't really know how to handle this issue.
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It was like hate everything Obama does or, you know, bombastic self-righteous defense of
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I mean, it's a or, you know, the terrorists, the terrorists must die.
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George W. Bush, he could have been prosecuted for knowingly lying to the American public or
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having Colin Powell knowingly lie to the UN and prosecuting this war.
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Was there such massive graft in the funding of the occupation that we could have even gone
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And the moment that in 2006, when the Democrats retook Congress, we're not going to do that.
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So there's a sort of, I guess you could call it a gentleman's agreement, but you could also
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call it an absolute power of the president in the realm of foreign policy that he's not
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going to be prosecuted for things that he does for use of the military.
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He's the commander in chief for any sort of vigorous action, emergency power, a state of
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What if COVID was much, much worse and we were dying, you know, at a clip of 40 percent?
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It was like some horrible, what is it, legionnaire's outbreak.
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And the president just sent the Marines into every American city in hazmat suits and they
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were shooting on sight anyone who didn't comply with the lockdown order.
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And if anyone gets bit by the zombie, you've got to kill him immediately before he bites someone
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And there is, I think even these kind of vague self-righteous claims of like, no one's above
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I understand what they're saying or the people have the power, not the president.
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But these strike me as just kind of words, words, words.
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The government can kidnap you and put you in prison.
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And it does have ways of justifying that, like the legal system.
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But the most important thing about that is that it can.
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And I don't think the government is going to randomly drone strike, you know, dissident
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I don't think it's going to do that on a wide scale.
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And certainly in geopolitics, the president is exceptional.
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And, you know, you could barely be upset about this decision.
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But if you're just claiming, like saying things like the people have the power or no one's
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above the law, you're just using words, basically.
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Words that have very little connection to reality.
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What does that mean that the people have the power?
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So as Joe Biden said in his response to the decision, what does that actually mean?
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It's at most a kind of justification for the government, or it's just kind of frivolous,
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Yeah, I think that's Biden's knee-jerk instinct to preserve legitimacy in the institution.
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I mean, every single politician will say this, certainly, including Trump, especially
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Well, see, on that point, what I think this Supreme Court ruling does is it brings an added
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level of honesty to the image of the president.
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And that, yeah, you actually can do stuff like that, you know?
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I don't know what your thoughts are, but don't you think it's accurate to say that at the end
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of the day, the buck really stops with the military?
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This is an interesting question that I've asked before.
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So, in legislation, for instance, Congress initiates legislation.
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I think a lot of people think that the president writes the law.
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That veto can be overridden by, what is it, two-thirds support in the House?
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I forgot the number, but an overwhelming majority of legislatures.
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The Supreme Court can override both on domestic legislation and, obviously, on legal cases.
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I mean, you could have a situation where the Congress creates legislation, the president
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vetoes it, Congress overwhelmingly passes it, and five years later, the Supreme Court dismisses
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So, you could make a very strong case that the Supreme Court is sovereign.
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So, here, we're looking at it from a Schmittian point of view, not this kind of like three,
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you know, limited government and, you know, checks and balances or whatever.
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And, of course, the government is limited in some way.
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It's almost like redundant to say these things.
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Again, this is all just happy talk, just words, words, words from people, how they describe
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Who will ultimately say no to something or say yes to something?
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You could strongly argue that the Supreme Court is sovereign in that sense.
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And that does kind of, I don't know, it is a little bit disturbing that these lawyers, and
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they're not just lawyers, they're kind of political lawyers, you know, in effect, not necessarily
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in the way that it was defined initially in the Constitution.
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But, you know, to be a Supreme Court justice, you aren't just a lawyer, you're not even just
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a legal scholar, you're also a kind of political person, you know, let's be honest here.
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So the fact that nine of them are sovereign is a little bit disconcerting.
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Like, do we live ultimately at the end of the day under a judicial tyranny?
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Now, in terms of the president having war powers, I mean, the Congress has the power of the purse,
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but the Congress is supposed to declare war, but we all know that certainly, well, across
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And interestingly, Truman declared the Korean War on the basis of justification of the United
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So many, which is fascinating, that I don't think has been done, like a major war, there's
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been other kind of peacekeeping stuff that's happened.
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But the Congress is ultimately going to fund these things, Congress is ultimately going
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The president acts, and I think this happened in the Nixon administration, if there's like
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a 48-hour emergency, the president can simply act.
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But, and I understand, I support that, I understand it, it obviously can be abused, but the notion
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that, you know, Russia bombs Hawaii, I mean, this is obviously ridiculous, but the notion
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that they do that on a Saturday, and so you have to, like, well, we got to wait till Congress
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is back in session on Tuesday, they got, you know, Mondays, holidays, we got to wait, guys,
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we can't fire a bullet until, you know, we get this legally settled.
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So I ultimately support these things, even though this can obviously be abused.
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And the problem with Trump is that, you know, like, what he is going to claim, and I imagine
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this is going to succeed, is that this creating false slates of electors is going to be
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an official act, and any sort of communication, or most of the communication he has, because
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it's a little bit ambiguous, like you could appeal, and blah, blah, blah, most of the communications
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he had with Mike Pence, who was the kind of fulcrum of the Stop the Steal attempt to overturn
00:12:04.680
the election, the fake elector schemes, all that kind of stuff is going to be an official
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And I do think he's going to get away with this.
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He got slammed in New York State, but I'm not, I don't think he's going to get hit again
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He's using, well, this is the ultimate end of it.
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Like, we assume noble motives, and yes, could this be abused?
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You know, if I just use some ridiculous scenario of Russia invading Hawaii or something, you
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know, could, you know, we expect a president just to be, he's awakened at 3 a.m., they give
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him a shot of espresso, and he just goes into the war room and is like, fire back, you know,
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And that's the kind of noble image we have in our mind of why a president should be absolute
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We'll get Congress on board on Tuesday once they get back from their 4th of July holiday,
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But the fact is, stop the steal demonstrates this, you know, Donald Trump was clearly attempting
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Now, I agree, just to be totally fair here, I agree with many of the, like, substantial
00:13:55.720
I don't think it was stolen, these, you know, they were moving boxes around in Arizona, that's
00:14:06.840
But I agree with the notion that it just got out of hand with doing all of these mail-in
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ballots and ballot harvesting and just having the election be for, like, a month or two months.
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Maybe I'm just merely a conservative, and I think that 90% to 95% of the election should
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You know, if you're like an international businessman or a military man, you might, you should be
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You shouldn't just do that, just because it's easier or something.
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I think also the stop the steal notion and the elector notion was originating from below.
00:15:02.980
It was a kind of, I mean, stop the steal was actually a website purchased in 2016 by Roger
00:15:07.980
So this was all, and it came out, you know, we have Ali Akbar, Nick Fuentes, and Alex
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Jones being the vanguard of that movement before it got adopted by mainstream people.
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This is not like a, I shouldn't say real, it's very real.
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This is not a noble act by the president to protect the people or the country.
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Um, so I don't, I have a hard time taking it seriously, but he's going to seemingly get
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away with it because we assume that the president is going to be a good man who has the authority
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to act in an absolute manner, in a totally legally immune manner, in an exceptional manner
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If he's simply doing this crap on behalf of himself, it, it, I understand where you're
00:16:05.220
just like, why are we allowing him to do these shenanigans?
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Uh, importantly, I've spoken for 40 minutes, so I, I've kind of gotten some ideas out there,
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Um, yeah, so, um, we're in this situation where, um, I think, uh, it's not a dissenting
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voice within the generals where they view, uh, Donald Trump as a national security threat.
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So, uh, and now you have this Supreme court ruling and now, uh, aren't the generals going
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to look at this and think, well, wait a minute, uh, he was operating with impunity before what's
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going to happen now, you know, and, and he's, he's had all this talk of basically disbanding
00:17:04.480
Uh, he's kind of implied it strongly with his boards on NATO and all that.
00:17:09.120
Well, he's implied it now, whether he'll do it now, remember at the end of his administration,
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he appointed McGregor as I forgot what he was, national security advisor or something
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who sent out a memo basically saying, we're removing military bases abroad.
00:17:23.980
We're dismantling things through a combination of just, you know, active foot dragging, actively
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ignoring the situation and, and through just like laziness of, you know, we're ready to
00:17:38.320
go home for Christmas, nothing happened, but there, there is a, an example of this guy is
00:17:52.500
Now he didn't do that during his presidency proper.
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And maybe it was, he was just appointing these like, you know, Kremlin backed right wing retards
00:18:04.220
who were doing this crap, but whatever it's, it, it, like he, he popped the cherry on that.
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And, uh, you know, I, I think of the military men, they would look at that and just be like,
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yikes, but again, they didn't support the coup, the coup.
00:18:22.680
If we want to call it that, I mean, maybe a coup is better than insurrection, but it was
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a sort of insurrection is like, Oh, let's just define those things as like an insurrection
00:18:36.120
Uh, there was a legal theory developed by the Claremont Institute and John Eastman of
00:18:46.080
There was also just a sort of insurrection quality to J six and this, in the sense that
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Look, I will, I'll agree with the conservative rejoinder to what I just said, which is that
00:19:00.500
Yeah, it was both of them didn't have a chance to actually take power.
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Both of them were spazzing out of people who were self-righteous and deeply emotional, but
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that again, that doesn't mean it's not a threat to civil order and a threat to political order.
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So it was kind of J six was kind of both and the military quite notably was not involved.
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There was interesting little shenanigans going on with Flynn's brother.
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I mean, that is fascinating, but you know, the, the overwhelming reality of the situation
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is that the military did not mark, you know, you had right-wing QAnon retards march into
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You didn't have soldiers march into the Capitol and shoot anyone who didn't comply.
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And that is the fundamental reason why it didn't succeed.
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But then to, then to claim, I mean, this is what I get from every conservative.
00:20:03.700
I argue with this is, is that like, like, I mean, the analogy I would use is that, you
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know, if I robbed a bank and I pointed a gun at a bank teller, but I was wearing a clown
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outfit and like honking a horn and driving a like little mini car or something, but I
00:20:21.220
still said, give me the fucking money in the vault.
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You know, when I was, when I were arrested, I could be like, what are you talking about?
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Like just because you're bad at criming doesn't mean you're not criming, you know?
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I mean, see, this is a kind of male type divide, right?
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Like there, there's this martial male type that'll exert power nakedly and openly and honestly.
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This was kind of a sneaky way, you know, not exactly.
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It was a weird female suffering from borderline personality disorder.
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Like, like I'm taking over this shit kind of thing.
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Well, hey, as long as we're breaking the glass ceiling, right?