Did George H.W. Bush sexually harass actresses? And why is Mark Halperin in the news? And also, why was the left actually cheering in abortion yesterday? Not just saying it was okay, but cheering it openly? Plus, we re going to talk about the divisions inside the Republican Party. Are Steve Bannon and Donald Trump really in charge of the GOP now?
00:00:25.000So many interesting things to talk about today.
00:00:26.000It's not often that we get a news cycle as interesting as this one, and we will talk about all of them.
00:00:31.000But first, I want to say thank you to our sponsors over at Birch Gold.
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00:01:42.000Let me give you the information, and then I'll explain my perspective on this.
00:01:46.000So basically, this week there was an actress named Heather Lynn.
00:01:48.000She was most famously on Turn, where she played Abigail, and she accused former President George H.W.
00:01:53.000Bush of sexual harassment in 2014, when Bush was 91 and already in a wheelchair.
00:01:57.000Bush apologized through his spokesman on Wednesday morning, saying that President Bush would never intentionally cause anyone distress, and he sincerely apologizes if his attempted humor offended Ms.
00:02:30.000So, Deadspin, of course, doing the hard yeomanly work of reporting, found out that the dirty joke that Lynn referred to in her statement went something like this.
00:02:38.000Apparently, a tipster passed word about the Heather Lynn incident to Deadspin.
00:02:42.000We were told that Bush had, during a photo op, groped her and told her that his favorite magician was David Coppifield, while fondling her.
00:04:22.000If it's okay, it's only okay because he was, you know, in the throes of dementia, right?
00:04:26.000If you want to say that he's not responsible for his actions, then that's something I buy.
00:04:30.000But this idea that it's not some form of sexual harassment for him to do that, I don't buy if he is doing this out of his own free will and volition and there's no mental attitude.
00:04:39.000And I will give you the case in point, bringing back our old campaign shoe, right?
00:04:44.000I used to have a shoe on the desk or put it on the other foot.
00:05:03.000But people who are making light of this, I don't think that it's something that ought to be completely made light of or dismissed out of hand.
00:05:08.000People are saying that Heather Lynch should be ashamed for even saying anything about it.
00:05:11.000I just don't, again, I'm really more torn on this than I think a lot of other people are.
00:05:16.000Okay, and maybe that's an unpopular point of view, but frankly, I don't really care.
00:05:19.000I think it's inappropriate for guys to grab girls behind and shout cop a feel, whether they're 23 or 93, if they are in control of their actions.
00:05:25.000And just because you've done some good things in your life doesn't mean everything becomes good.
00:05:29.000This is one of my chief complaints about how people gauge human beings.
00:05:40.000Overall, the judgment can be that a person's good, and the person can still do some dumb things, or still do some bad things.
00:05:47.000In any case, this is case in point of sexual harassment number one from today's news.
00:05:53.000Case in point number two is one that the left will immediately say is not sexual harassment in any way, and that's because the person at issue is Ellen DeGeneres, and Ellen DeGeneres is a famous and well-beloved Hollywood lesbian.
00:06:02.000So, the reason that that is relevant, her sexuality, is because Ellen DeGeneres tweeted this out yesterday.
00:06:32.000Now let me just suggest, if any man tweeted out this exact photo, this exact photo, if Ellen's head were Harvey Weinstein's head, we would be talking about how this was more evidence of sexual harassment in Hollywood.
00:06:45.000Ellen DeGeneres is a very, very powerful host.
00:06:47.000And the fact that Katy Perry seems to be smiling here is not
00:06:52.000I mean there are plenty of pictures where Harvey Weinstein is posing with smiling women who he sexually harassed or sexually assaulted.
00:06:58.000The fact is that there's a double standard with how we treat these situations and as I've been now saying for weeks, we need some sort of singular standard as to what constitutes appropriate behavior and what does not.
00:07:08.000Ellen DeGeneres is a lesbian which means that this is
00:07:10.000You know, her acting upon objects of her sexual desire.
00:07:13.000If a man did the same thing, we would be saying, this is totally inappropriate, how dare he?
00:07:18.000And it doesn't matter that Katy Perry's smiling, it just shows how toxic masculinity has infused everyone.
00:07:24.000The whole point here is the double standard.
00:07:26.000And the double standard applies everywhere.
00:07:28.000It just was essentially fired from NBC News.
00:07:31.000He said he resigned or took time off to spend more time with his genitals.
00:07:36.000But in any case, Mark Halperin, the accusations are that he allegedly sexually assaulted up to five women, sexually harassed or assaulted up to five women, that he would push them up against the wall, grope them, press his genitals against them.
00:07:48.000This is Mark Halperin, the guy who wrote Game Change, very famous reporter, he's on NBC News every day, has talked about sexual assault in the most
00:07:55.000In the most indignant of terms, sexual assault is horrible, sexual harassment is horrible, and then meanwhile in the back room he's grabbing the interns apparently.
00:08:04.000This goes to show you also, not only do we have a double standard with regard to people we like, we have a double standard with regard to ourselves.
00:08:10.000The stuff that we do, human beings have a unique capacity to do this.
00:08:14.000We can engage in many of the sins that we condemn other people for, and the mark of a good human being is that you think enough about this to think whether, in fact, you are upholding the standard that you seek to promulgate, that you're upholding the standard that you seek to push.
00:08:26.000If you're not doing that, then we all need to do better, and I think we can all do better on these scores.
00:08:31.000But the reason I'm pointing out these three differing scenarios, the HW, the Ellen DeGeneres, and the Mark Halperin situations, is because these double standards have been in place for a very long time, and we need to decide as a society what sort of behavior we are willing to accept.
00:09:01.000We need to make some actual separations here.
00:09:04.000Instead, what I feel like this has devolved into is now we're just, as usual, conversations in America devolve into, who's the victim today?
00:09:12.000And then we all come out and say, it's terrible that person was victimized.
00:09:15.000And then we set no standard by which we can determine whether someone is a victim or not until they proclaim themselves a victim, at which point we say they're a victim.
00:09:22.000Right, so if we had found out the H.W.
00:09:24.000Bush-Heather Lynde thing just through a third-party source, not through Heather Lynde, then we would have had to decide as a society, is this something okay or not?
00:09:31.000She declared that she was offended, therefore it was bad.
00:09:33.000If she had declared that she was not offended, then it would have been fine.
00:09:36.000Action is not subjective when it comes to societal standards.
00:09:58.000I want to talk a little bit about another story that's pretty devastating out of the state of Texas yesterday.
00:10:04.000And then I want to get into what I really want to talk about today at length, which is the split inside the Republican Party.
00:10:09.000But first, I want to say thank you to our sponsors over at Da Vinci.
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00:11:58.000ruled that a 17-year-old illegal immigrant could abort her baby in the United States without going through the hoops that Texas law requires.
00:12:09.000The 17-year-old girl jumped the border while she was pregnant and then decided to obtain an abortion.
00:12:13.000Under Texas law, minors have to receive parental consent or a judicial waiver for an abortion, and Texas bans abortion after week 20.
00:12:20.000So the clock was sort of ticking here.
00:12:22.000She wanted to get an abortion before week 20 so that it would be legal, even though, you know, she jumped the border illegally.
00:12:26.000And while the young woman ended up receiving a judicial waiver, she then had to schedule a sonogram and a consultation with a doctor, which is also under Texas law.
00:12:33.000They say you have to actually look at what the baby is before you kill the baby so that you are not abiding by the mythology that this is just a cluster of cells.
00:12:41.000I mean, this is what a 16-week-old baby looks like.
00:12:43.000Okay, when we talk about she aborted a 16-week-old baby yesterday, this is what a 16-week-old baby looks like.
00:13:17.000They could send her back to her home country, or she could find a sponsor, you know, she could find somebody who's willing to take her in, that would then be her legal guardian, the legal guardian would give permission, and then she'd be good to go.
00:13:27.000But the idea the Texas law would have to change because she's an illegal immigrant, that's something Texas wasn't willing to do.
00:14:00.000The part of this that's really horrifying is not just, you know, a girl having an abortion at 16 weeks, which is inherently horrifying from any view that places the sanctity of human life at the center.
00:14:10.000It's horrifying the way that some people on the left responded.
00:15:02.000as an abortion haven should be something of which we are deeply ashamed.
00:15:06.000And the idea that you come to the United States and therefore you have a right to an abortion, and even if you're here illegally, is pretty astonishing to me and should be astonishing, I think, to a lot of other folks.
00:15:17.000Now I want to get to the topic that has preoccupied me this morning.
00:15:21.000There's an article over the Daily Beast that I find quite fascinating about the future of the Republican Party in the aftermath of Jeff Flake, in the aftermath of Bob Corker, in the aftermath of all of these people who are leaving the Republican Party or retiring or suggesting that it's the end of the Republican Party and all the rest of it.
00:15:40.000One of the theories that has been out there is that Steve Bannon and Donald Trump are now solely in charge of the Republican Party, and that these people cannot be stopped.
00:15:52.000So Sam Stein, Asawin Soobsang, I think that's how it's pronounced, and Lachlan Markey have an article today out of the Daily Beast, and it says, Establishment Republicans agree.
00:16:40.000He has a shallow, catchy message that appeals to marginally educated fanatics and the like.
00:16:45.000And the idea here is that Bannon is now the force inside the Republican Party.
00:16:49.000That if you oppose Trump, you cannot survive on anything.
00:16:52.000Not just you oppose him generally, you oppose him on any issue, you will not survive and Bannon will lead the charge.
00:16:58.000So I'm trying to break down this theory because I'm trying to see what exactly is true and what is not here.
00:17:05.000Number one, there seems to be an idea out here that philosophical Bannonism and philosophical Trumpism are on the rise.
00:17:10.000This is the nationalist populist movement we've heard so much about that says that we have to close all our borders and we can't engage in trade anymore and that immigrants are not welcome here anymore and that we ought to spend enormous amounts of money on public works projects and all of this, right?
00:17:23.000This is the nationalist populist sort of far-right European movement and this is what's on the rise in the United States, we are told.
00:17:33.000The reason I don't see the evidence of that is there's a poll that's out today from Pew Research Center, and they do a political typology looking at fishers on the right.
00:17:45.000And they break down conservatives into several different groups.
00:17:49.000They're core conservatives, country-first conservatives, market-skeptic Republicans, and new-era enterprisers.
00:17:57.000So core conservatives are basically described as people
00:18:01.000Who believe that the future of the country is bright and that involvement in global economy is good because it provides the U.S.
00:18:07.000with new markets and opportunities for growth.
00:18:10.000And they believe that immigration is generally good because it's providing more people for the economy to work with.
00:18:15.000And they believe that the government has already done enough on environmental regulations.
00:18:19.000And they believe that the United States has basically achieved racial parity, at least in terms of law.
00:18:23.000You know, this is sort of the core conservative message.
00:18:25.000That by far represents the largest share of politically engaged Republicans.
00:18:30.00043% of politically engaged Republicans are core conservatives.
00:18:54.000So this would be the nationalist populist group.
00:18:56.000It's a much smaller segment of the base, according to Pew Research, a much smaller segment of the base.
00:19:01.000Then there's the market skeptic Republicans, and these are people who say banks and financial institutions have a positive effect on the way things are going in the country.
00:19:10.000So these would be, these are, rather, sorry,
00:19:22.000And then finally you have the new era enterprisers, who are sort of open borders, open trade.
00:19:27.000And they say everything is great, but they also want more regulations of the environment.
00:19:30.000This would basically be the Jeff Flake wing of the party.
00:19:31.000So when you break it down, what you see is that by far the largest group, by far the largest group, are people who are the core conservatives.
00:19:40.00043% of all politically engaged Republicans.
00:19:43.000And then a much smaller percentage are market-skeptic Republicans, who would be the nationalist populists and country-first conservatives, and then the new-era enterprisers.
00:19:52.000If the idea was that President Trump was going to be the guy who ushered in a new era of philosophy, or that Bannonism was on the rise, there's not much to actually suggest that's true.
00:20:04.000There's really not much to suggest that's true.
00:20:06.000Instead, what it looks like is that core conservatives still are the moving force inside the party, and core conservatives, along with the New Era enterprisers, along with Jeff Flake, would represent 59% of the Republican Party.
00:21:05.000What this suggests is that Bannonism and Trumpism are not a philosophy driving the Republican Party.
00:21:09.000This is why I objected to Jeff Flake's analysis yesterday, in which Jeff Flake suggested that it's hard for a pro-free markets, pro-immigration Republican to get elected.
00:21:25.000Okay, so, maybe if it's not the Bannonism as a philosophy or Trumpism as a philosophy driving the future of the Republicans, it's Trump or Bannon themselves.
00:21:35.000The reason I disagree is because Trump went to war on behalf of Luther Strange in Alabama, and Luther Strange lost.
00:21:41.000Steve Bannon tried to take credit for Luther Strange losing, but the fact is Luther Strange was going to lose anyway because Roy Moore was the outsider, and Roy Moore was way more well-known than Steve Bannon was in Alabama.
00:21:50.000Steve Bannon is an afterthought in Alabama.
00:21:52.000And the fact is that Steve Bannon's Breitbart didn't even back Roy Moore in the original primary in Alabama.
00:21:58.000They backed Mo Brooks, who finished third.
00:22:00.000So this idea that Bannon has some sort of outsized influence as a human being, like as a person, like he's the leader of a movement, it's not true.
00:22:06.000He has a lot of money from the Mercers behind him, but he's not somebody who's actually leading the movement.
00:22:10.000He's not somebody who's actually crafting the movement around him, and he is the great leader.
00:22:15.000Again, there's not a lot of evidence to back any of this.
00:22:17.000There's not a lot of evidence to back any of this.
00:22:25.000I'll explain in just a second, but first I want to say thank you to our sponsors over at blinds.com.
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00:23:41.000Okay, so, if it's not that Trumpism and Bannonism are dominant in a sentence, if it's not that Trump himself is the moving force in the Republican Party, or Bannon isn't the moving force in the Republican Party, then what exactly is going on?
00:23:53.000Why are Trump and Bannon important figures?
00:24:14.000That he was more intent on earning strange new respect from the left than he was on actually fighting for conservative principles.
00:24:21.000This is why the right is a lot more tolerant of Ben Sasse, who's very anti-Trump, than it is of Jeff Flake.
00:24:26.000Sasse is widely perceived as somebody who's actually conservative, because he is.
00:24:29.000He has the third most conservative voting record in the United States Senate.
00:24:32.000But we're willing to overlook, you know, a lot of his anti-Trump rhetoric, at least Trump supporters are, because he is very conservative and because he's shown that he's willing to fight the left.
00:24:42.000If you're willing to fight the left, then you can fight Trump too when Trump does something wrong.
00:24:46.000But if you're not willing to fight the left and it seems like all of your criticism is reserved for Trump, people assume bad motivations.
00:24:52.000And I think not entirely without cause.
00:26:13.000The elephant in the room has always been anger.
00:26:14.000Some of that time it's been directed in proper directions against Obamacare, against stimulus packages, against establishment Republicans who are weak.
00:26:21.000But some of the time, the person who has hopped up atop the elephant is leading the anger elephant in the wrong direction.
00:26:27.000And the anger elephant is basically willing to go wherever there is the most anger.
00:26:32.000I wrote a piece this morning based on a George R. R. Martin short story.
00:26:36.000This George R. R. Martin short story, which I really like, it was a short story called The Monkey Treatment.
00:26:43.000And the monkey treatment is about this guy named Kenny Dorchester, this obese, fat guy, and he wants to get skinny, and one day in a restaurant he runs into a guy he used to go to basically a Jen and Craig program with named Henry Maroney.
00:26:55.000And Henry Maroney is looking skinny, he's looking a little bit gaunt, but it looks like he's lost a ton of weight.
00:27:00.000And so, Kenny Dorchester asks Henry Maroney, where'd you do this?
00:27:03.000He says, well, there's this place where you can get the monkey treatment.
00:27:06.000And so, Kenny goes there, and the monkey treatment is exactly what it sounds like.
00:27:13.000It turns out it's an invisible monkey.
00:27:14.000It's literally a monkey that jumps on your back, and then whenever you try to eat something, it grabs the food out of your hand and eats it.
00:27:22.000And over the course of the story, the monkey continues to grow bigger and bigger.
00:27:48.000The reason that I cite this story is because I think that's sort of what the anger monkey has become on the right.
00:27:54.000I've said for many years that I think one of the problems with anger is that anger has to be properly directed.
00:27:59.000Righteous indignation is a useful thing.
00:28:01.000And righteous indignation is something worthwhile.
00:28:03.000Andrew Breitbart wrote a book by that name.
00:28:05.000Being indignant, being angry because something has angered you is worthwhile, if it has a specific target.
00:28:10.000But what is not worthwhile, what is not useful, is this misdirected anger at anything and everything, and whoever seems the angriest, whoever projects anger the best, becomes your ally.
00:28:37.000If Bannon goes up against the Anger Elephant, the Anger Elephant wins, which is exactly what happened in Alabama.
00:28:41.000If Bannon goes up against the Anger Elephant, the Anger Elephant wins.
00:28:44.000Bannon does have a gift, and so does Trump, for channeling the Anger Elephant, but they are not in charge of the Anger Elephant any more than the rider is in charge of the elephant if the elephant really wants to buck him.
00:28:53.000The biggest problem for conservative Republicans who oppose Trump is that they have to acknowledge that a lot of the anger is justified and then they have to channel that anger in positive directions.
00:29:02.000They can't just say all anger is wrong because that's not true and they can't just say all anger is right because that's not true either.
00:29:08.000They have to say some anger is right and some anger is wrong and here's how I propose channeling our outrage and here's why the outrage is justified.
00:29:14.000The outrage is justified when you're talking about things against which it's justified.
00:29:18.000It is not justified just as a generalized sense of grievance.
00:29:22.000And if we don't realize that, then the anger is going to take over the party and destroy the party.
00:29:25.000The anger is going to reduce conservatism.
00:29:28.000This is how Republicans treated anger.
00:29:30.000In 2009, we felt like the Republican Party was fat, it was morbidly obese, it was lazy, it didn't fight, and so we took the anger monkey and we put it right on the back of the obese Republican Party.
00:29:41.000And the anger monkey immediately started eating all of the goods.
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00:31:50.000So with all this said about the anger monkey, what is the proper angle to take with regard to President Trump?
00:31:55.000The proper angle to take with regard to President Trump is exactly the same angle that I've used with every other president, and that I used for Trump during the campaign.
00:32:02.000It is the good Trump, bad Trump model.
00:32:03.000When Trump does bad things, you criticize him heartily.
00:32:06.000And when he does good things, you praise him heartily.
00:32:09.000But I'll tell you two things that you don't do.
00:32:11.000You don't do the everything Trump has ever done is bad, because that's not true, because that's not how human beings work.
00:32:16.000And you don't do the everyone should just shut up and ignore what Trump is doing, because that's not right either.
00:32:20.000When Trump does something wrong, then he should be hit for it.
00:32:22.000So here are the two things you should not do.
00:32:24.000The first is Jeff Flake basically saying, despairing of the party, I can't win a primary because I'm too anti-Trump, because I am too glorious, too wonderful.
00:32:31.000The reason Jeff Flake can't win a primary is because he's perceived as an establishment squish because he moved to the left upon being elected to the Senate and then he spent the rest of his time bashing Trump without ever once lifting a finger against the left.
00:32:42.000And so people perceived him as a squish but that's not the way he's gonna play it.
00:32:45.000Well the bottom line is if I were to run a campaign that I could be proud of
00:32:49.000And where I didn't have to cozy up to the president and his positions or his behavior, I could not win in a Republican primary.
00:33:19.000He was really unpopular upon being elected.
00:33:21.000So that's just not factually accurate.
00:33:22.000But this idea that the Republican Party has to be thrown under the bus in order to save Trump, that's something Trump wants you to believe and it's something Jeff Flake wants you to believe.
00:35:01.000And if you're willing to do that, I think you win a primary.
00:35:03.000But if you are more concerned with tearing down Trump personally than you are with fighting bad stuff wherever you see it, whether it's the left or Trump, then I think that it's going to be hard for you to buy credibility in a Republican primary.
00:35:14.000Okay, so, in other news, an FEC complaint has now been filed against the Hillary Clinton campaign.
00:35:22.000The DNC and Hillary Clinton's campaign violated campaign finance laws by failing to accurately disclose payments related to the so-called Trump dossier, the nonpartisan campaign legal center said in a complaint filed today with the Federal Election Commission.
00:35:34.000According to recent reports in the media, Mark Elias, who also serves as the Clinton campaign lawyer, paid OPPO research firm Fusion GPS to produce the dossier, which exposed alleged connections between Trump and the Russian government.
00:35:44.000It also contained salacious allegations about Trump's personal escapades.
00:35:48.000There are a couple issues that still have to be resolved, as I said yesterday, about the Trump dossier in order for Hillary and her team to have done anything deeply wrong.
00:35:55.000Number one, you can pay for OPPO research.
00:35:58.000Number one, you can pay for OPPO research.
00:36:11.000Did Hillary Clinton or people on her team know that Christopher Steele was being funneled information by members of the Russian government?
00:36:17.000The dossier itself contains all of this, okay?
00:36:23.000So this does raise questions as to whether Christopher Steele was basically acting as go-between for Russian intel that was trying to dig up dirt on Trump and then pass it through the election system in an attempt to screw up the election system.
00:36:48.000If Hillary knew that was the case, then it looks a lot more like the Donald Trump Jr.
00:36:53.000situation was, somebody emailed him, said, I have a lawyer from the Russian government who wants to talk to you because Russia wants to help, and Trump Jr.
00:36:58.000says, sounds great, maybe they have OPPO.
00:37:01.000And it turns out the OPPO didn't pass hands, nothing may have come of it, but it showed Trump Jr.'
00:37:06.000's willingness to work with members, people who are close to the Russian government in order to do this.
00:37:11.000It is possible that's what happened here if Christopher Steele was working with the Russian government to come up with this information.
00:37:17.000We don't know that, and we don't know that Hillary Clinton knew that was true, even if she knew the dossier existed.
00:37:22.000So those are questions that still have to be answered, but the idea that there was some sort of collusion on the other side going on is not as implausible as it was four days ago.
00:37:39.000They didn't know what to say, so they made up the whole Russia hoax.
00:37:44.000Now it's turning out that the hoax has turned around, and you look at what's happened with Russia, and you look at the uranium deal, and you look at the fake dossier, so that's all turned around.
00:37:56.000Okay, so one of the big questions here is whether it discredits the entire dossier, that some of these allegations that were in the dossier were false, or whether some of the allegations were true.
00:38:04.000The reason that's important is because the FBI investigation is at least in part predicated on some of the allegations inside the Steele dossier.
00:38:10.000Apparently some of them have actually been confirmed, meetings between Trump officials and Russian sources, for example.
00:38:19.000The idea that Trump, there was tape of Trump hiring prostitutes to pee on a bed that Obama and his wife slept on in Moscow or something.
00:38:26.000But even people on the left are beginning to recognize that this is a problem for Hillary Clinton.
00:38:31.000A New York Times reporter named Nick Confessori, he said yesterday, openly, that this situation looks sort of like the reverse of the Trump Jr.
00:39:10.000Companies and trade associations pay them for this research.
00:39:13.000Sometimes campaigns perform this kind of research on their own.
00:39:17.000I've gotten plenty of research documents from the RNC under President Trump, and I've gotten research documents from the DNC under Tom Perez.
00:39:25.000Right, so the only question of separation, people are trying to say that it's exactly like the Trump Jr.
00:39:41.000If all those parties knew, then you can actually make the case that there was some sort of collusion going on with the Russian government.
00:39:46.000If you can't, then you're saying that without any basis in evidence.
00:39:48.000So all I'm suggesting is that we be objective about how we view the situation, what the evidence says, and what the evidence does not.
00:39:54.000Where Trump is on more solid ground is where he continues to rip on Hillary Clinton and the Obama DOJ and FBI for allowing the uranium sale to Rosatom in 2010.
00:40:06.000This was, of course, the scandal in which Hillary Clinton was the head of the State Department, the State Department gave the green light.
00:40:11.000Here's Trump going off on that yesterday.
00:40:27.000Well, I think the uranium sale to Russia and the way it was done, so underhanded, with tremendous amounts of money being passed, I actually think that's Watergate modern age.
00:40:42.000I don't really like the Watergate comparison, generally, because there is actual evidence and hard proof, but it's not great stuff.
00:40:50.000Now, it is also worth noting that everyone's hands look a little bit dirty here.
00:40:53.000There's a story out today that Trump's data guru from Cambridge Analytica was reaching out actively to the WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange.
00:41:01.000WikiLeaks is largely assumed to be a Russian cutout for help in locating and publicizing 33,000 missing emails from Hillary's private server.
00:41:08.000Again, this demonstrates willingness by Trump officials to reach out to people connected with Russia for information.
00:41:16.000The question is going to be how much of it broke the law and how much of it amounts to actual collusion with a foreign government that has interests that are opposite to those of the United States.
00:41:24.000Okay, time for some things I like, things I hate, and then a very brief, big idea.
00:41:36.000I was rereading an essay that my father showed me yesterday from Commentary magazine, I'm trying to remember the author of the essay, on Anna Karenina.
00:42:07.000And it is, I loved it then, I love it now.
00:42:11.000Levin, who is one of the main characters of the book, he's sort of a secondary character in a certain sense, because Anna Karenina's kind of love triangle with her husband and Vronsky is the main part of the book, but Levin and his falling in love with the Marion Kitty presents the other part of the book.
00:42:28.000Discovery of why life is, at the end of the book, is one of the great uplifting passages in all of world literature.
00:42:34.000Tolstoy is always more uplifting than Dostoevsky.
00:42:37.000Dostoevsky is much more about looking at the fact that all of us are fallen creatures and can fall, and Tolstoy is about the fact that all of us have the possibility for uplift.
00:42:47.000And there's sort of two sides of the same coin in that sense.
00:42:50.000Tolstoy was a very conservative guy in certain ways, and when you read his books, which are largely about
00:43:26.000Okay, time for some things that I hate.
00:43:32.000So the thing I hate today is the use of Ivy League College to associate, to dismiss everything.
00:43:38.000So yesterday, President Trump was being, you know, it was suggested that he was uncivil, that he was unkind and uncivil.
00:43:45.000And so President Trump responded this way.
00:44:05.000I'm pretty sure that Trump creates his own image.
00:44:08.000I mean, he's one of the most gifted image makers in the history of American life.
00:44:12.000But the idea, this in and of itself demonstrates a certain lack of class.
00:44:17.000If you think civility is connected to intelligence, you know nothing either about civility or intelligence.
00:44:22.000Really, if you think civility, class, decency, these things are connected to intelligence, let me introduce you to all the people that I went to school with.
00:44:28.000Okay, there are a lot of people who I went to school with with very high IQs.
00:44:31.000I went to a junior high magnet school where you had to have an IQ above, you know, quote-unquote genius level IQ.
00:44:37.000They gave you a basic IQ test to get into this magnet school.
00:44:40.000And I was at the very low end of getting in.
00:44:42.000And so there were people there with IQs of 180.
00:44:44.000There were people there with IQs of 170.
00:44:47.000And I remember thinking, half these people are going to end up in prison.
00:44:53.000And sure enough, it turns out that some of them are actually in prison.
00:44:56.000I can name a couple of them off the top of my head.
00:44:58.000The reason being that intelligence and decency are not always aligned.
00:45:02.000And so for Trump to respond to a question about civility and decency by saying, I went to an Ivy League college, is pretty ridiculous.
00:45:07.000Also, by the way, intelligent people don't have to go around on a daily basis expressing that they are very smart people.
00:45:13.000That's just not something that they have to do generally.
00:45:15.000I know because I hang out with a lot of very intelligent people all the time.
00:46:30.000The big idea today, very quickly, people have been using the term trickle-down economics a lot in the media recently.
00:46:36.000That's because of the tax cuts that have been proposed, the idea that people at the top of the spectrum are going to get
00:46:41.000A lot more of their money back than people at the bottom of the spectrum, which makes sense, because they're paying a lot more of their money into the government.
00:46:46.000And they say, this is trickle-down economics.
00:47:25.000But that $800 is not going to create an iPhone.
00:47:28.000Apple, getting its money back, is going to create an iPhone.
00:47:32.000And the reason for that is because excess capital means investment in new products.
00:47:36.000And the greater the concentration of excess capital, the greater the possibility of that.
00:47:42.000You know, the idea is not to transfer wealth from the poor to the rich, or from the rich to the poor.
00:47:48.000The point is that everybody should be able to invest in the products they see fit, but the products that require the most research and the most time and expenditure are the ones that are going to change the most lives.
00:47:55.000And so the idea that trickle-down economics is about some rich guy spending on a yacht, that's not really the suggestion.
00:48:01.000The suggestion instead is that rich people, having more of their own money back, are likely to put it into a bank which will lend it out to other business projects, or they're more likely to invest it in up-and-coming business projects because they don't have to put dinner