In this episode of Coffee with Scott Adams, host Scott Adams talks about the latest episode of the impeachment process, and why he thinks it's one of the most ridiculous things we've ever seen on the political spectrum.
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00:03:29.000But otherwise, you know, making the Constitution, they did a great job creating.
00:03:33.000Well, they were also, you know, sexist misogynists, you know.
00:03:38.000But if you don't count the slave owning and the sexism, the racism, if you don't count that, they did a really good job making a Constitution.
00:03:48.000Well, they also discriminated against poor people.
00:03:50.000They weren't going to let them vote unless they had property.
00:03:53.000So there were racists, elite, sexists who largely raped their own slaves.
00:04:01.000But if you don't count that, they were pretty good at making constitutions.
00:04:11.000And as you're watching this impeachment process, it makes you think that this was the part that they were too tired to finish.
00:04:19.000Have you ever worked on a project where, you know, you've been working, working, you spend days, you're up late, you're working weekends, and you're almost done.
00:04:28.000And you've almost done a perfect job on whatever it is, your project, but there's just this one thing left over you got to take care of, it's a loose end, and you don't give it your best effort.
00:04:42.000You get everything, most of the stuff right, but there's just some little trailing, you know, little details that you don't give it your best effort.
00:04:52.000And it seems to me that what we're watching in this so-called impeachment process is not their best effort.
00:05:01.000I don't know for sure, but I think by the time they designed the impeachment clauses, they had already been drinking, perhaps.
00:05:11.000Because who designed a process where the Chief Justice of the United States sits in front of the public, now on television, but in front of the public before,
00:05:22.000and is forced to read whatever ridiculous bullshit the two sides of the political spectrum decide to hand him on a little piece of paper?
00:05:37.000That is the worst plan I've ever heard.
00:05:40.000Now, I think maybe the Senate actually came up with a specific version of it, but the Constitution allowed the Senate to kind of do whatever they wanted.
00:05:51.000And what are we all arguing about if we're talking about impeachment?
00:06:00.000We're talking about, you know, can the Senate be badgered into requiring witnesses or is that just the House's job?
00:06:09.000How about the framers of the Constitution do a little less raping of slaves and put a little more effort into that impeachment part of the Constitution?
00:06:39.000And so, therefore, if it's the same word, then all of the things that apply to the other word in a different context, a criminal context, well, doesn't that apply?
00:11:31.000The media's tone drastically shifted yesterday morning as it looked increasingly like the Senate Republicans would hold the line and block any witnesses from testifying.
00:11:41.000The mood on MSNBC was practically funereal.
00:11:54.000Now, generally, as a writer, I have a rule as a writer that if you use a word, a vocabulary word, that you can reasonably know your entire audience won't understand, don't use that word.
00:12:10.000So, generally speaking, don't use a word that your readers are unlikely to know.
00:16:22.000So do you remember my prediction yesterday morning?
00:16:27.000Possibly one of my most accurate predictions.
00:16:31.000And I said that the entire day yesterday would be spent with the anti-Trump media willfully misinterpreting what Alan Dershowitz had said at the impeachment proceedings the day before.
00:17:45.000I mean, I don't know who initiated the interview, whether it was CNN or Dershowitz may have pinged him and said, you know, you've been saying stuff about me.
00:18:23.000And I'm paraphrasing, of course, but he basically said you're completely misinterpreting it.
00:18:29.000What do you think Wolf Blitzer did when the person who knows the most about what's inside Alan Dershowitz head, which happens to be Alan Dershowitz?
00:18:41.000He's the one who knows the most about what he said and what he thinks.
00:18:44.000He goes on their show and tells them their news reporting is completely wrong on really the biggest story of the day.
00:18:51.000And he shows them why in unambiguous certain terms, things they could check.
00:18:57.000They could just go back to the tape and say, oh, yeah, that's right.
00:19:00.000When you look at the full context, it's obvious.
00:25:36.000The funniest weird thing, I talked about this yesterday, but there's a new wrinkle to it.
00:25:41.000So we'd heard the story that Rand Paul had submitted a question that Chief Justice Roberts would have to read in front of the Senate.
00:25:51.000And in it, he allegedly, according to the news coverage, not according to me, but according to the news coverage,
00:26:01.000the question would have revealed the name of the whistleblower.
00:26:05.000Now, here's the clever part that I didn't know yesterday.
00:26:08.000Rand Paul's question had the name of two individuals in it, but did not, in the body of the question, it did not refer to them as whistleblowers.
00:26:18.000It was simply a question about their involvement and whether they had some involvement that was relevant.
00:26:24.000Now, Chief Justice Roberts looks at it and says the presiding officer declines to read this question without explanation.
00:26:35.000Now, of course, most people knew it was because it would give away the name of the whistleblower.
00:26:40.000But here's what was so clever. The question did not accuse anybody of being a whistleblower.
00:26:47.000It simply used the name of somebody that the press has, you know, in social media mostly, has continuously reported as being probably the whistleblower.
00:26:56.000So, the news reports this, the same news that refuses to give the name of the whistleblower for ethical, maybe legal reasons, I don't know, but moral, ethical, you know, what's good for the country reasons.
00:27:11.000They don't name them because they want whistleblowers to remain private.
00:27:14.000But, in reporting the story the way they did, by saying, we're not going to talk about the names in this thing because we don't want to reveal the whistleblower, they revealed the whistleblower.
00:27:29.000There wasn't, there was, there's no way around it.
00:27:32.000If they said, you can't say this name that I'm not going to say in public, you can't say this name because it would reveal the whistleblower, and then everybody says, what name?
00:27:42.000And then they look at the name, and they say, I can't say this name in public because that would reveal the whistleblower.
00:27:49.000Didn't you just tell me the whistleblower in public?
00:27:54.000I mean, sure, I had to connect two dots, but you gave me both of the dots.
00:28:02.000I didn't even have to look for the second dot.
00:28:05.000Dot one, what did Rand Paul's question say?
00:28:08.000There it is, here it is, here's a dot, hold on to this dot, let's see if we can find another one.
00:28:13.000Dot number two, the Chief Justice didn't want to read it because the name on there was the whistleblower.
00:28:55.000In this impeachment process, we keep hearing this claim that our intelligence sources have been saying that Russia is behind the rumor that Ukraine meddled in the 2016 election.
00:29:10.000Now, since I don't know enough of the details here, and I know that Politico reported at least four times that there was some alleged Ukraine interference in the election in 2016, was Politico reporting based on what our intelligence sources said?
00:29:33.000Or did our intelligence sources not know what Politico said?
00:30:25.000Now, Politico could be right and they could be wrong.
00:30:29.000But there's something there that makes you say, well, I'd like to know more about that.
00:30:34.000Whether they're right or wrong, it's enough to look into it.
00:30:38.000One of the good questions that came from I think Ted Cruz was was one of the questioners asked, why is it so different that the Hillary Clinton campaign can use foreign interference with a steel steel dossier?
00:30:54.000What makes that different than somebody getting some foreign interference from Ukraine in the process of investigating something that was worth investigating?
00:31:29.000If the United States interfered with an election in France, do you think France would say, what, the United States interfered with our election?
00:32:02.000So I would say I would not trust our intelligence forces to say that Russia is the only reason that people are looking at Ukraine for interference.
00:32:13.000They might have boosted that signal, but I can't imagine it's the only one.
00:32:17.000Have all of you seen Joe Lockhart appear on CNN yet and talk crazy talk?
00:32:25.000I think he was going full Hitler on Dershowitz, I guess.
00:32:30.000And there's some things you can't stop noticing.
00:32:36.000What is wrong with Joe Lockhart's eyes?
00:32:45.000Like, you look at him, and before he even talks, you say, well, whatever comes out of that mouth, if that mouth is connected to those eyes, that's going to be some serious crazy talk coming out of that hole.
00:32:59.000And I ask myself, all right, who else in the public political sphere has crazy eyes?
00:33:06.000You know, Adam Schiff, of course, Cory Booker, some would say, AOC, some would say.
00:33:12.000And then I think to myself, are there any Republicans who have crazy eyes?
00:33:34.000I'm totally open to the, I'm open to the possibility that this is just anecdotal nonsense, coincidence, confirmation bias, something like that.
00:33:46.000Oh, somebody, I see some other mentions here, Michael Moore and Elizabeth Warren, Ilan Omar.
00:33:54.000Now, I don't think any of them have crazy eyes.
00:35:23.000If, um, if we don't do anything and he gets lucky, you know, doesn't close the airport and he gets lucky.
00:35:31.000And there's, you know, little or no problem in this country.
00:35:33.000Just people get sick, but they recover.
00:35:35.000If that's the worst that happens, well, then he got lucky.
00:35:37.000But would you, would you make a policy based on having to get lucky?
00:35:45.000Cause I think that would be mostly luck.
00:35:47.000Cause nobody is smart enough to know what's going to happen.
00:35:50.000You'd have to be lucky that it didn't turn into a big thing.
00:35:53.000So, but what if it goes the other way?
00:35:55.000Suppose, uh, suppose a number of people get infected in this country and some of them die.
00:36:00.000How many people in this country would have to die from the Corona virus?
00:36:05.000Before you would say that it's a gigantic error by the president.
00:36:12.000I mean, just the biggest error probably is of his presidency.
00:36:17.000How many I'm thinking 10, but I also think somebody's job needs to be to explain the cost benefit to us.
00:36:27.000Uh, you know, when, when we have a war or something, you often see the estimates, at least by the,
00:36:33.000sometimes by the military, sometimes by the, you know, the pundits or whatever.
00:36:37.000And we say, okay, we're going to, we can have a war or a military action.
00:36:42.000We think the risk to our troops is X, you know, we might lose this many.
00:36:46.000There's always an implied, we'll try to get this benefit, but it's going to cost us this much in lives.
00:36:51.000And, and be aware that every big decision the government makes ends up, you know, killing somebody or saving somebody.
00:37:00.000You know, if the government says bicycles are legal, people die on bicycles.
00:37:06.000If somebody, if the government says, yeah, you can have a swimming pool in your backyard, somebody is going to drown in a swimming pool.
00:37:13.000So when the government makes, makes decisions or even decides not to make a decision, which is the same thing, almost anything big has an implication that people die.
00:37:24.000So the coronavirus would be no difference.
00:37:45.000Don't you understand that the regular virus, you know, the normal flu is infecting way more people, like tens of thousands of people in this country alone, or billions?
00:37:57.000And that a bunch of people die from that.
00:38:00.000It's usually people with degraded systems, et cetera.
00:38:04.000So Scott, don't you see that this coronavirus is not such a big deal because our just plain old regular virus is just killing lots of people.
00:38:13.000And it's way more than this tiny little coronavirus.
00:39:41.000You could make a big difference in the coronavirus by stopping flights from one country and checking passports from people who may have, you know, tried to do a circuitous route.
00:39:54.000You could at least tell that they came from China.
00:39:59.000That's completely different than a flu that we don't have a better way to stop than whatever we're already doing.
00:40:06.000They're just, it's apples and oranges.
00:40:08.000You can't compare it to car crashes, alcohol, cigarettes.
00:41:41.000And I ask you whose job it is in the government to explain to us, the people, the cost-benefit analysis.
00:41:50.000Because that's missing, and that is complete governmental incompetence and malfeasance, in my opinion.
00:42:00.000The lack of that explanation guarantees that the explanation is corrupt.
00:42:09.000Let me just say that as clearly as I can.
00:42:12.000The only reasonable assumption you could make about why our government does not have whatever representative,
00:42:19.000it might be Health and Human Services, but whoever's sort of the lead person on this,
00:42:24.000the only way you can explain that they have not come out and said,
00:42:28.000we've considered closing the airports for flights from China, but here's the cost-benefit.
00:42:33.000We think if we keep them open, we might have zero to ten deaths in this country.
00:42:40.000And on the other side, if we close them, we think that that might have an economic impact of whatever,
00:42:49.000and that economic impact also translates into people living and dying.
00:42:54.000Because we know that as the economy goes up and down, the people who are sort of on the margin
00:42:59.000can move from being in a lot of trouble to not being in a lot of trouble with a small move.
00:43:04.000So if you have a big impact on the economy from one of your government decisions, it could end up killing people.
00:43:11.000But if you don't stand in front of the United States public and say, here's what we're weighing.
00:43:19.000We don't know if this would kill people. We think it would be a low number.
00:43:23.000But we don't know if this would kill people either. We think this could be a low number.
00:43:27.000So the reason that we're going with this is that we think the risk management makes more sense.
00:43:32.000We can get to the best result through this path, and here's why.
00:43:36.000Now, if my government explains that to me, and even if I disagreed, I would say, okay, well, at least it's not corrupt.
00:43:46.000It could be wrong, because risk management is about playing the odds.
00:43:51.000You can correctly play the odds and still be wrong.
00:43:55.000And that's not a crime. That's just bad luck.
00:43:58.000But if your government does not stand in front of you and say in public, here's why we're doing this.
00:44:06.000The alternative was this. Here's the cost benefit as best we can estimate it.
00:44:11.000Short of that, you have to assume corrupt, something corrupt.
00:44:17.000Either there's somebody with money who is influencing somebody.
00:44:21.000There's somebody who has, I don't know, political, financial, some kind of interest that is conflicting with your interests.
00:44:29.000So your interests and mine are being put at a lower priority than somebody's profit.
00:44:38.000Now, I don't know that, but that is the reasonable assumption, because we've gone so long without the obvious thing happening, which is somebody explaining what the reasoning is.
00:44:49.000In fact, I just saw Trump being interviewed by, I guess it was Fox News, and he was asked about it.
00:44:57.000And he just gave general statements about we're working with China and other countries and we're working hard and stuff like that.
00:45:04.000And I thought, that's not good enough.
00:45:06.000That's, you know, that is not a performance I want from my president.
00:45:12.000Now, if the president said we're looking hard at closing the airports and we're working out the cost benefit analysis, we'll tell you tomorrow.
00:45:21.000I would say, OK, OK, that's on the right track.
00:45:24.000You know, it looks that's that's what I would do.
00:45:37.000So I think President Trump has to explain that.
00:45:40.000And and if people start dying in this country while the airports are still open to China, I, you know, I'm not sure I'm going to be OK with that.
00:45:52.000Well, I'm not going to be OK with that.
00:45:55.000I tweeted today a weird little story in which scientists have created the first living robots.
00:46:07.000They've they figured out how to take unrelated cells and sort of just stick them together.
00:46:13.000And I guess cells like to stick together so you can take unrelated cells and just put them together and they stay.
00:46:20.000And then they start acting independently because there are different kinds of cells and one cell will be, you know, trying to move and another one won't be trying to move or whatever.
00:46:29.000But if they they use supercomputers to figure out the nature of all these different kinds of cells and then they they rapidly simulate all the combinations of how you can put cells together.
00:46:40.000And they can actually put cells together that can move, you know, under a microscope so they can connect them together in such a way that the the computer accurately determined it would move forward or move in a circle.
00:46:55.000So they're actually programming robots out of living cells that have different characteristics and they can put them together.
00:47:05.000Now, I don't know where that ends up, because at some point it might it might achieve consciousness or something like it, something like free will.
00:47:16.000You know, you know, that's an illusion, but there could be a computer, you know, robot version of that.
00:47:21.000So that's coming down the line at you in the weird story, some element of Antifa.
00:47:31.000And I don't know what it takes to be an Antifa besides just saying you are are planning some kind of police subway fair protest in New York City.
00:47:42.000And it has something to do with they don't like paying two dollars and seventy five cents for the subway.
00:47:47.000So it's going to be some kind of a mass, I don't know, civil disobedience about paying the paying the fares.
00:47:55.000And I'm thinking to myself, has has Antifa, have they drifted from, hey, I like what they're saying, because they're saying bad things about they're saying bad things about bad people.
00:48:08.000So I like them. You know, they're they're against the racists.
00:48:11.000So so that's OK, even if they do some bad stuff, at least they're against the racists.
00:48:16.000But it seems that Antifa being an organization which and by the way, if you ever want to create an organization that's guaranteed to fail, one way to do it is to let anybody join.
00:48:34.000If you create an organization that lets anybody join sooner or later, your organization is going to be filled with psychos.
00:48:41.000Right. And they're going to be running the show.
00:48:44.000So Antifa being their preference for not having a central control.
00:48:49.000You know, they don't like the government in general.
00:48:51.000They don't like any kind of government.
00:48:53.000So, of course, their organization is sort of independent people doing independent things without a central control.
00:48:59.000And what do you get instead of fighting the good fight for, I don't know, social equality or or whatever they might like?
00:49:09.000Now they have an Antifa planning to to protest paying money for services.
00:49:46.000Probably nobody in Antifa has a history degree.
00:49:50.000Because I don't think they know what the alternative is to a world in which people don't pay for services that other people had to pay to create to provide.
00:50:03.000I don't think they've thought this through is all I'm saying.