Loading summary
Transcript144 lines
- [00:04]
John Podhoretz
Hope for the best, expect the worst.
- [00:11]
Seth Mandel
Some preach and pain Some die of thirst the way of knowing which way it's going. Hope for the best, Expect the worst.
- [00:22]
John Podhoretz
Hope for the best.
- [00:25]
Seth Mandel
Welcome to the Commentary magazine daily podcast. Today is Tuesday, March 18, 2025. I'm John Pod Horiz, the editor of Commentary magazine. With me, as always, executive editor Abe Greenwald. Hi, Abe.
- [00:36]
John Podhoretz
Hi, John.
- [00:37]
Seth Mandel
Senior editor Seth Mandel. Hi, Seth.
- [00:39]
Christine Rosen
Hi, John.
- [00:40]
Seth Mandel
Social commentary columnist Christine Rosen. Hi, Christine.
- [00:43]
Abe Greenwald
Hi, John.
- [00:43]
Seth Mandel
And joining us today, Commentary contributing editor and all around, Puba at the foundation for Defense of Democracies, host of its morning meeting. And taking time this morning before he sends out his morning meeting to the world on YouTube. And also to join us to explain what's been going on in the last 12 hours, our friend Jonathan Schanzer. Hi, Jonathan.
- [01:05]
Jonathan Schanzer
Hey, Jon.
- [01:06]
Seth Mandel
So explain to us what's been going on for the last 12 hours.
- [01:09]
Jonathan Schanzer
Well, we have now actually a joint US and Israeli attack on the Iranian axis. I think that's probably the easiest way to sum it up. You've got the Israelis striking Hamas. It's long overdue. I think the Israelis have actually shown remarkable restraint before going back and hitting Hamas, because the phase one of the ceasefire ended several weeks ago. We were in what the Israelis were calling, and it's so Israeli to say this, we were in phase 1.5 where they were trying to kind of split the difference.
- [01:40]
Seth Mandel
Oh, phase 1.5. I don't know. You know.
- [01:46]
Jonathan Schanzer
Yeah, phase.
- [01:47]
Seth Mandel
It's not really a phase, it's part of a phase.
- [01:50]
Jonathan Schanzer
That's very good. Thank you. So, yeah, we were, you know, sort of watching this sort of in between kind of scenario. The Israelis, I think, were showing a lot of restraint. And of course, over the weekend, Donald Trump orders the attacks on the Houthis to finally free the Red Sea of the terror that the Houthis had been imposing upon anyone trying to ship things into Europe or traverse the Suez Canal. I think Bibi got a sense that, hey, well, if Donald Trump has, you know, started taking it to the Iranian axis, maybe the Israelis should do so as well. But if you think about it right now, with the Houthis, at least theoretically getting weaker, there will be no proxy right now that poses a significant threat to Israel or the west. Out of those seven fronts that were open in the immediate aftermath of October 7th, none of them look particularly strong right now. The one front that I think we probably should watch and we should probably talk about at some point is Judea and Samaria, the West Bank. That's the one area that I think still poses something of a threat to Israel just because of proximity, but in terms of the overall strength of the proxies, weak and getting weaker. And I think Israel at this point feels a bit more unencumbered in Gaza because the vast majority of the hostages, and especially those not men of fighting age, not men who are enlisted, they've all been released. So there's less pressure on the Israelis and they can operate I think more freely right now in Gaza. And that's what we're seeing.
- [03:36]
Seth Mandel
According to Israel, they believe that there are 59 hostages living and dead still in Gaza, but 21 of them are alive. The majority are, are dead. And the effort is being made to return their bodies for proper burial. 21 is a whole lot smaller than 251, which is what the number was on the day after October 7th. Clearly when the ceasefire, this, the, the six week ceasefire ended, I think on March 1st or something like when that ended, that 30 hostages, more had been released during that period with 275,000 Palestinian soldiers, okay, it's like 500 Palestinian soldiers, whatever, being released by Israel as part of that deal. Ceasefire ends, the demand is made for the hostages to be released. And Hamas says no. Hamas says no, Hamas says no. Steve Witkoff goes and negotiates. And as we know, some of us here got very angry at the tone and tenor of the way that he was negotiating. And, and this guy Adam Borer, who is now, I guess is now out of the picture saying, oh, it's time to see reason, you guys. There's, there's, there's a lot of, we have a lot of hope. The Qataris are just wonderful and they're going to help us. But they made two different specific proposals that Hamas rejected. And remember, basically there is no negotiation here. Israel stops the war. I mean, doesn't Israel, Israel stops the, what Israel wanted to continue the ceasefire was for the hostages to be released. So we're basically talking about kidnapped or a kidnapper negotiating and saying no and a kidnapper saying no and a kidnapper saying no. And the Trump administration gave it a shot, gave it basically two weeks. And then over the weekend, Steve Wyckoff is like, you know, it looks good bombing people. You know what? Hamas should look and see what we're doing in to the Houthis in Yemen and get really scared because that seems to be the only way to deal with these people. And there has been an interesting congruence in the language being used by the White House and by Foreign Minister Ginon Sar. And the. Excuse me. And the. The Foreign Minister Katz. Hold on. Defense Minister Saar and Foreign Minister Katz and Caroline Levitt. Did I get it wrong?
- [06:09]
Jonathan Schanzer
Other way?
- [06:10]
Seth Mandel
Sorry. Okay.
- [06:11]
Jonathan Schanzer
Yeah, but I got you.
- [06:12]
Seth Mandel
Cats and Saar.
- [06:13]
Jonathan Schanzer
Right.
- [06:16]
Seth Mandel
Witkoff, Caroline Levitt, the White House spokesman, and Trump. And what they are all saying is hell. Yeah, we are unleashing hell. You will know you are at the gates of hell. You will know hell as you have never known it before. So we not only have clearly coordination between the White House and Israel, but we have what you might call apocalyptic coordination between the White House and Israel in that the language that is being used is you let those people go, or it is the last night of Passover for you people.
- [06:59]
Jonathan Schanzer
Yeah, And I think that is the message. And I think that, look, I don't know how tightly coordinated this is between Trump and Bibi, but we do know that they have had lots of conversations. Ron Dermer, Bibi's Minister of Strategic affairs, has been kind of a regular here in the US Spending time in Mar a Lago and engaging regularly with Trump's team. I think that Trump has, I think, reached a moment where he understands that all of this, that the Iranians have coordinated needs. It needs to stop. I think probably the most important thing that has gone mostly unnoticed in our media is the direct threat that Donald Trump issued to Iran itself, saying that if, you know, any attack occurs at the hands of the Houthis, then Iran will be held responsible. You know, I think right now we could be watching an end game of sorts where Trump is finally ridding the region of the Iranian axis, hitting, you know, the Houthis, which really, they were the strongest, most active proxy over the last, let's say, two months or so. You know, Hezbollah is kind of flatlined. The Assad regime collapsed. Obviously, the. What's actually really interesting is the Iraqi front, where Shiite militias are active there. It's been very quiet, but basically, I think, you know, Trump has made the decision that it's time to clean house and to restore some order. And Netanyahu's, you know, realizing this is the moment to do it as well. Maybe he was done.
- [08:43]
Seth Mandel
It's important to note that some reservists have been called up. That means that would mean a ground invasion. The ground invasion did not begin. People thought that perhaps this phase of the war would begin on the ground and not from the air, in part because of things said by the new chief of staff of the Israeli of the idf, Zamir. This could be yet another pause in other words, the bombing is really the last chance. They're going in, they're bombing, and then they're gonna say, today, let the hostages out. We will stop the bombing.
- [09:24]
Jonathan Schanzer
Yeah.
- [09:26]
Seth Mandel
According to Hamas, four leading figures in Hamas were killed last night in the airstrikes. Me. Just give. Hold on, where's. I have their names here so that I'll mention them so that they can go straight to hell in case the devil is listening. Issam Al Dalis, the head of the Government Administrative Committee. Ahmad Al Khatta, Director General of Hamas's Justice Ministry. I didn't know if you knew there was a Justice Ministry. I think that means that's the body that cuts people's legs off if they talk to the Israelis. Mahmoud Abu Wafta, Director General of Hamas Interior Ministry, and Bahad Abu Sultan, head of Hamas's domestic security agency. So those are four major leaders of. Whatever. Major at all.
- [10:11]
Christine Rosen
Those are all. Those are all Senate confirmed positions. They'll be open for who knows how long.
- [10:18]
Jonathan Schanzer
Okay, but honestly, I think we need to understand something here what they're calling major at this point. These were inconsequential people before the war. I think they're probably still inconsequential people now. Look, what. What they're hitting right now, this is. This is not serious stuff. I mean, what they're doing is they're taking out whatever the remaining infrastructure is, and they can do so from the air, at least for now. During this phase, you may see, you know, troops reintroduced into Gaza that will not be popular in Israel. The idea is, why sacrifice one more soldier when you can do a lot of destruction from the air? I think what's actually most important right now, guys, is that Israel can start hitting the tunnels more freely that they were holding off because they were afraid of hitting civilians that were being held, the hostages that were being held in these tunnels. My understanding right now is that the Israelis feel less encumbered, significantly less encumbered after phase one of the hostage release. Right. And John, you mentioned that there's 21. I've heard it actually could be less. It could be 19, it could be 18. And again, all men have enlisted age. That doesn't mean that everybody's going to be happy about striking these tunnels or hitting this infrastructure, but they're far less inhibited right now, and that I think that this is setting the tone. And Hamas is now understanding that Israel feeling less encumbered to hit the underground infrastructure means that they're far more vulnerable and that they may not get out of this in one piece, whereas before, that was kind of their trump card. Right. They could play that knowing that the Israelis were going to be much more careful. So right now, you're looking at it in Israel, that's uninhibited. A Trump administration that appears unleashed, Iran being threatened again. I am beginning to see something of an end game, that after a year and a half of the Biden administration allowing this stuff to continue, restraining Israel not going in and striking the Houthis, not holding Iran to account, all of this now seems to be coming together in a cohesive way. And God forbid I'm going to say that this looks like a strategy in trying to end the war. That's sort of what this looks like right now, maybe even more than sort of.
- [12:35]
Seth Mandel
I want to just share with you what it is that Bibi is up against inside Israel and whether or not some of this is going to boomerang in a way that it has not. The, the, the, the moral, emotional force in Israel that has held Israel back internally. The hostage families and the rhetoric that was being deployed last night by the most public of the hostage family spokesmen is so incendiary and so much directed not at Hamas for holding the hostages, but at Netanyahu in a deeply personal way that I think there's something invalidating about it, that, that, that is relatively new. So Yehuda Cohen, whose son Nimrod is still being held, said last night, as we feared, Netanyahu, in order to preserve his coalition and strengthen his rule, launched an attack on Hamas and Gaza not to bring back the hostages, but to bring Ben GVIR back into the government. That's Itamar Ben gvir, the far right minister whose party left the government when the ceasefire, the first phase of the ceasefire was put into place. He prefers to sacrifice the remaining hostages for the sake of his corrupt rule, added Cohen. Okay, he will waste millions of shekels to protect his son in Miami, but won't lift a finger or take any risk to save my son Nimrod, who has been in the tunnels of Gaza for 17 months. All right, So I only bring this up to say that, of course, one's heart breaks for Yehuda Cohen and the torments, the unspeakable torments of the last 516 days for him. But for him to say that Bibi Netanyahu is acting solely out of an interest in preserving his own regime and his son gets to live in Miami while my son is in the tunnels, this is a moral inversion that people have. I Think vast numbers of Israelis have allowed the hostage families to speak without criticism, because everybody feels like that it is as though that were my child could have. Could be there. But I don't think that you can look at the last three weeks or the last seven weeks or the fact that basically the war was suspended in January and say that Bibi Netanyahu is only doing things to preserve himself in power and doesn't care about the hostages. If he didn't care about the hostages, he would have finished the war in January when. When Trump gave him the go ahead to finish the war in January.
- [15:24]
Jonathan Schanzer
Yeah, look, I fully agree. I will say that the hostages in general, the hostage families, have outsized influence because of their suffering, because of the trauma of the country. They are the symbols of this trauma. There's no question about it. And they have a platform and they use it. But I think we can. I think there's some nuance here that we can unpack. Even in Israel, if you can believe it, there was no doubt in my mind that Bibi was going back to war. There was never an intention to go to phase two. And I can tell you, when I spoke to some senior Israeli officials back in January, my last visit there, that was exactly what the authors of this deal, that's what they had in mind. There was never going to be a phase two. The idea was they were always going to go back in. They had to finish the job, primarily because they knew that, number one, if they got to phase two, they would have to acknowledge that the war was going to end and that Hamas was going to stay in power. And that was antithetical to the war aims of the Israeli government. And I think the vast majority of the Israeli people.
- [16:29]
Seth Mandel
We should explain that phase two called for a full Israeli pullout.
- [16:34]
Jonathan Schanzer
Correct.
- [16:34]
Seth Mandel
From the negotiations. They said was release all, release the hostages by the end of phase one. We come up with a strategy in phase two to get all the other hostages out in exchange for which Israel will pull out of Gaza.
- [16:47]
Jonathan Schanzer
So entirely Right. And that was unacceptable to Bibi.
- [16:51]
Seth Mandel
It was particularly unacceptable to Bibi because Hamas wasn't playing, Was. Wasn't playing plane to release the hostages.
- [16:58]
Jonathan Schanzer
So, but then, you know, there are two war aims, and these were aims that were, you know, declared by Benny Gantz and Yoav Gallant and other people, you know, I mean, the entire Israeli sort of, let's call it the center of the spectrum. Right. They all were saying that there were two war aims. One is to get back all the hostages and two to defeat Hamas and I believe that those two war aims were maybe at odds with one another from the very beginning, but, okay, that's what they ended up laying out for the Israeli people. And there was no way that anyone was going to see the defeat of Hamas if the Israelis withdrew. So that's part of it. The other part of it is that, yes, if Bibi decided to end the war before destroying Hamas, yeah, his coalition would fall apart. And of course, he doesn't want that. But I don't think that everything hinges on that right now. I think the Israelis have made a calculated decision that Hamas is not going to release additional hostages without Israel having to make sacrifices that it cannot bear. And this is the natural consequence and the fact that we've got a green light from Trump after Bibi did exactly what Trump asked him to do, which is to hold off and allow for Wycoff to try to do the work that was necessary to bring about a soft landing to this war. It's not happening. I do think, John, you suggest one thing that is probably true. The Israelis will give Hamas a taste of what is to come, which is going to be brutal bombardment and possibly a ground invasion, and that may change Hamas's mind. And with a little bit of additional pressure on the Qataris and maybe the Egyptians and the Iranians, maybe everybody agrees that it's time to drink from the poison chalice, as they say in Iran, and finally end this thing. And not in a way that makes the Iranians or their proxies satisfied. That's, I think, the hope. I'm not holding my breath for that outcome. I think, if you ask me, this could be a somewhat grim end to the war, where the Israelis slowly but surely grind down Hamas while the US Grinds down the Houthis. That also will not be fun to watch. Yemen is not a lovely place under the best of circumstances, but these are the fronts that need to be fought. And then comes the big question. What does the US And Israel do about the Iranian regime, which is still on the precipice of getting a nuclear weapon? What do they do right now while the skies are still naked? There is no defense right now that the Iranians can put up if the US And Israel decide to go in and finally destroy that existential threat? So, again, I see an end game potentially coming here. I'm glad to see it. I don't love what it means for the hostages, the remaining hostages, those 19, 20, 21 hostages that are still Al. It's not lovely to see, but you've got to understand that Bibi has strategic decisions to make on behalf of a nation of 10 million people, not the 60 or so hostage families that have this platform in Israel.
- [20:03]
Seth Mandel
This war has taken 16, 17 months because of the hostages, Correct? It only because of the hostan. And it. This, you know, forever stalemate is not sustainable. And he'll have to take the hits from the hostage families. He's taken hits anyway. And the Israeli. Countless Israeli lives that will be saved by not releasing further prisoners, in theory and in not, and in ending the war conclusively, with Israel having destroyed one of its enemies root to branch will have consequences, untold positive consequences for Israelis not even yet born in the fact that they will not face death from Hamas or a reconstituted Hamas.
- [21:01]
Jonathan Schanzer
That is true. I think if things go in the right direction, and I think there's every indication right now that that's where we're heading. I think it's a. A smart, calculated risk by Bibi working with Trump. He's allowed the stars to align and he's got the top cover to be able to do this. He's got the weapons to be able to do it. I think that's positive. I'll just say this before I jump. I think that, you know, we need to be obviously careful for the surprises that can occur in war. Right. Unintended consequences are forever the problem. You go in with one plan, right? Plan looks great until you make contact with the enemy. I think Israel needs to be very careful right now. The Iranian axis has had six weeks to prepare for a surprise, or more than one surprise. Again, right now, it looks like Israel is in control along with the US But I'm watching right now for the next. Over the next couple of days to see whether the Iranians pull out some kind of a surprise. I think the Israelis will be ready for it, but, you know, it's still fluid.
- [22:08]
Seth Mandel
Okay, so thank you so much, Jonathan Schanzer. When you jump, I will. I will let it load. Leave your window open, and then when it says fully uploaded, you'll do so. Thanks again.
- [22:18]
Jonathan Schanzer
Okay, guys, take care.
- [22:21]
Unknown
Hey, everybody. Look who doesn't love the good things in life. Even though I enjoy a little luxury, doesn't mean I can always afford it. Not with three private school and college tuitions. Then I discovered quince. Quince is my go to for luxury essentials at affordable prices. People know this, by the way, because they come up to me on the street, if they recognize me from the podcast, and say, is that a quint sweater? And I'm like, yeah, it is. And I'm also wearing a Quint puffer jacket. I'm wearing a Quince shirt. I'm wearing all kinds of quince materials. Ever since Quince started advertising, I have become a fanatical Quince customer. It offers a range of high quality items at prices within reach, like 100% Mongolian cashmere sweaters from 50 bucks washable silk tops and dresses, organic cotton sweaters and 14 karat gold jewelry. The best part, all Quince Items are priced 50 to 80% less than similar brands. By partnering directly with top factories, Quince cuts out the cost of the middleman and passes the savings on to us. And Quince only works with factories that use safe, ethical and responsible manufacturing practices and premium fabrics and finishes. So give yourself the luxury you deserve with quince. Go to quince.com commentary for free shipping on your order and 365 day returns. That's Q-U-I-N C E.com commentary to get free shipping and 365 day returns. Quints.com commentary.
- [24:00]
Seth Mandel
So the other detail, interesting detail to talk about how America is responding to this, these, this renewed aggression, let's say, is the announcement yesterday that the Justice Department was opening a special task force on October 7th seeking the use of international law to find Those responsible for October 7th who are still alive and abroad in the world and using the powers of the Justice Department and our security forces or whatever to find them, to arrest them, to detain them. Which is an interesting kind of play on Israel's actions after the Munich massacre when basically it hunted down and killed every single person who had held Israelis hostage in Munich on September 5th. This again shows a kind of level of engagement. This is important, by the way, because of course, Americans were held hostage by Hamas. This is not America doing Israel's bidding. This is America saying, okay, you know, there's still one American hostage in there. There were eight, I think during the, during the course of the war. You don't get to do that and get off scot free. We're going to pursue you the way the Israelis are going to pursue you too. So I think that's an interesting development to have happened on the same day that Israel decided to basically, and not.
- [25:41]
Abe Greenwald
Something that would likely have occurred under a Kamala Harris administration. I mean, the cultural amnesia of, particularly on the left about the fact that Americans were being held hostage this entire time that Americans were killed in October 7th has astonished me. Having been a kid in the 70s when Iran took American hostages, just the fact that that was not part. A steady part of the narrative. Any time we saw people donning their keffiyehs on college campuses or in city streets, that that choice strikes me as being both strategic and necessary and not something a Democratic party in its current state could ever have mustered.
- [26:20]
Seth Mandel
Well, the reason that we didn't have a national movement to identify America with the hostages and to get to sort of go back to the yellow ribbons around the old oak tree, which was the very peculiar national sort of mood in 1980, about how we would all express support for hostages based on a song about a guy who had just gotten out of prison. So there was always a kind of weirdly distasteful fact that we were analogizing these people kidnapped by the Iranians to somebody who had just done his time in prison and was worried that his girlfriend would have moved on without him. Okay.
- [27:07]
Abe Greenwald
But as a seven year old, I had no understanding that that's what the song was about. It was just a catchy tune. And every time I heard it or saw a yellow ribbon, I knew exactly what that meant, even as a child.
- [27:15]
Seth Mandel
That's my point. And the reason that that didn't happen is that the Democratic Party did not want it to happen. Biden didn't want it, didn't want the pressure that it would present and promote. And Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer, fresh from having. Didn't make a big deal out of it, of course. Schumer, we just heard, has a book coming out called Antisemitism in America. A warning canceled his book tour, which was set to start yesterday, claiming security concerns, meaning, oh, no, someone's going to come and you know, it's too dangerous for him to go around talking about anti Semitism in America.
- [27:56]
John Podhoretz
Wait, but I thought.
- [27:56]
Seth Mandel
He's a coward. Go ahead.
- [27:58]
John Podhoretz
Oh, but I thought it was because people were. He was fearing the people who were mad at him for going along with the Republican budget pill.
- [28:07]
Seth Mandel
The phrase is security concerns.
- [28:09]
Jonathan Schanzer
Right?
- [28:09]
Seth Mandel
Right. You know what's good for book sales? Controversy. Security concerns. You think it would hurt his book sales if he showed up, you know, at the Baltimore JCC and there was a. There was like. There was people outside yelling and screaming and saying they hated him. That would be good for him. That would be good for his. But he doesn't like it because he wants to maintain his viability within a Democratic party that is no longer. That no longer feels itself to be a bulwark against anti Semitism in any way, shape or form. He misjudged by writing the book. Book comes out at a particularly bad time. The thing, the point I want to make that everybody should understand is that he could absolutely have done this stupid book tour and he chose not to in order to graspingly save himself from his own, you know, the depredations of his own left wing. So, so important is getting out his message of anti Semitism to people that he was willing to cancel his book tour and let this book languish in obscurity in order to save his political hide.
- [29:16]
Abe Greenwald
So he should just be like we see in D list authors who just happily do every podcast. Podcasts are the future of book promotion. He can just do podcast podcasts. I know he's not. You're right. Well, like I'm on here.
- [29:27]
Christine Rosen
Talk about this invitation. Chuck.
- [29:31]
Seth Mandel
Oh yeah, yeah, come on our podcast.
- [29:33]
Abe Greenwald
Oh, I would love to, I would love to talk to him. And whoever wrote the book, whoever his ghostwriter was, I would love to have that person on to discuss the content of the book.
- [29:43]
Seth Mandel
Right, yes. You know the great George Will line, when Jim Wright, the Speaker of the House, was caught figuring out how to get around the, the, the rule about how much money you could make on freelance as a senator in speaking fees by getting people to buy his book. So he had a book, he published a book called Reflections of a Speaker. And instead of getting speaking fee, you would go somewhere and they would buy 10,000 copies of his book or something like that. And George Will said, I have not read this book because in general I do not read books that its author hasn't read. So that's, you know, I don't know whether Chuck Schumer or not has read this. This book or not. Apparently it's very self involved. So he may well from, from what I gather from my friend who has read it. So maybe he did write it or at least dictated it or he said to chatgpt write a book on antisemitism with as many self referential anecdotes as you possibly can. Anyway, I just think it's a moment to say that Chuck Schumer, whose lack of bravery in confronting anti Semitism in his own party and in America is a, is an ongoing national scandal. For somebody who also wants to claim the false mantle of being the highest ranking Jewish official in American history. I don't know where anybody thinks that, that being the Senate Majority leader is a ranked position. It means that 52 people voted you into something. There are governors across the United states. Josh Shapiro, J.B. pritzker, help me out. There's like four or five Jewish governors who got way more vote, you know, who, who actually are chief executives and sort of outrank the Senate majority leader who has official position in anything. So he's been walking around claiming to be the highest ranking Jewish official and he is a coward and a fraud. And I can't wait to see what the book scan numbers are on anti Semitism. A warning. And particularly, have we heard him say anything in support of Israel since last night? Of course not. Will we hear him say anything in support of Israel's efforts in Gaza to today? Of course not. Will he do anything but keep his head down and sort of cling on to his job by his fingernails? Of course not.
- [32:06]
John Podhoretz
Well, he might criticize Israel for this.
- [32:09]
Seth Mandel
Well, that's true. That would be, that would, that, that would be, that would be relatively revelatory.
- [32:15]
Christine Rosen
He did that, you know, last year and, and, and that, that won him no credit. Also, remember when he said Bibi should step down?
- [32:22]
John Podhoretz
Oh, yeah.
- [32:23]
Christine Rosen
That, that didn't win him any, any, any favor on the left.
- [32:26]
Seth Mandel
Yeah, it's very effective, too. What a moment for Chuck Schumer to come out on Biden's behalf and say Bibi should step down, give Kamala Harris cover only to hear the belly laughs and guffaws of everybody in, in who knows how power works in a democracy. All right, so, Seth, one interesting detail is that the Hamas health ministry is on the job. It's on the job. Right now. We are getting updates counts since the fighting began 12 hours ago. Like clockwork. Somebody noticed that every half an hour they're adding 50 bodies to the death count. It's sort of like they set an algorithm where they, they preset their tweets to add 50, 50 bodies an hour. I heard, of course, our favorite Matt's and my favorite hate. Listen up front, up first, the NPR morning podcast with their correspondent in Gaza saying that he was standing in the hospital and he could smell the blood. He could smell the blood from the bodies and the gunpowder, the blood and the gunpowder mixed together. Apparently not. Not that anybody would be using purple language and reporting on, you know, that he could smell the blood. So that's clearly we're going to get some really balanced, dispassionate war reporting.
- [33:56]
Christine Rosen
Yeah, well, you know, the two, the two major feats of the wars of the past few years are the Ukrainian subway system, the trains kept running during the war, and the Hamas health ministry kept up and running at full speed during the war. Those are the two indestructible, you know, bureaucracies. But, yeah, I mean, you know, we said these, that we knew it was going to happen, but in the interim when there was a certain amount of quiet, there was a ceasefire agreement. Then There was ceasefire 1.5. As you were saying earlier, there was a period where the guns had mostly fallen silent. And during that period, we had read report after report about how these numbers were essentially made up throughout the war. And then there were times throughout the ceasefire where Hamas basically admitted all those things too. Right. Hamas said Israel dropped a certain number of, of a certain type of bomb that would have killed way more people than Hamas said it would, even more than Hamas said it did, which was Hamas's way of accidentally admitting that Israel was using its powerful bombs on areas that had already been evacuated of people. And then Hamas. We saw footage of Hamas fighters emerging from the humanitarian zone where Israel had urged Gazans, civilians to go to. And there was, you know, a controversy there because there was a strike that took out a Hamas, a high ranking Hamas official. And there was a fight over the fact that it was in technically a humanitarian zone. And it's not a humanitarian zone, it's a Hamas zone when it takes out a Hamas leader. But they basically came out and said, and then eventually they admitted that that Hamas official was killed at the time and place where Israel said they had killed him months earlier. So nobody went back, by the way, and added an editor's note to the stories about, you know, Israel claims without evidence that they had taken, that the target of the strike was so and so. But we had watched in the past few weeks, we actually had watched Hamas just sort of give up the game. I mean, they came out from hospitals in uniforms. Turns out they have uniforms. We didn't know that. We've never seen that before. But it turns out they have uniforms for peacetime so that they can police the public. But they just kind of dropped any pretense of all of the way they had been manipulating reporters all along. And we sort of watched. It was kind of like watching the cast take a bow at the end of a show and you know, and watching like the AP in New York Times three roses at them, you know, at the stage. But the show wasn't over, was the intermission. And then they went back, oops, they took off their costumes and they, and they, and they washed off the paint off their faces. And so now we're just doing this again and everybody looks that much more ridiculous. But I think it's important to keep pointing it out that, yes, they can't possibly be counting the Numbers that they say they have, and they, you know, all of these things that were true before are true again. And people should watch very carefully at how these things are phrased, because there isn't really a Hamas health industry anywhere. There's a guy who calls the ap, you know, none of these things exist, in other words.
- [37:30]
Seth Mandel
But, you know, just to follow up on that point, the, you know, they've given the game away. The language that they've been using since the. Since the. Over the last 12 hours is one move and this guy gets it. Like, they are basically now talking like somebody who is at a bank and has taken the bank manager and has, you know, and has the bank manager, you know, you know, with his arm around the neck with a gun at his forehead saying, you better let me out of here or this guy is going to get it. Like, they are not making any bones about the fact that Israel has now signed the death warrant for the hostages because we're going to kill the hostages, as opposed to sort of like, oh, we need to stop this, because we're so. We're suffering with our 3,000 calories of food a day that you're importing that we're also stealing. And, you know, oh, we're starving here. Even though you can see marketplaces all over the place that are open and selling goods openly. Once the ceasefire came into place, the.
- [38:34]
John Podhoretz
More desperate they are, the less the sort of. The PR aspect of the war matters. You know, it's becoming strictly a matter of the organization's survival.
- [38:48]
Seth Mandel
Yeah, I mean, so, you know, and the usual suspects are out. You know, the Irish Prime Minister, the Tawwesi, whatever the hell that word is that we're supposed to use, you know, said, Israel must stop. And the EU aid coordinator said, the ceasefire must. We must return to the ceasefire. There is no ceasefire. The only reason there was a ceasefire is that Israel cease firing. The ceasefire, the terms of the ceasefire were over, you know, 18 days ago. And so saying we must return to the ceasefire is like saying we must. There. There is no ceasefire. Israel is just not firing, and now it's firing. So, of course, the usual suspects are going to be out saying genocide and citing these numbers and all of that. And the Israelis basically have the United States behind them and they're not going to care. And that is, I think, where Christine's point here about running backwards to November and where we would be in the United States, in Israel, in the Middle east and all of that had Kamala Harris won the presidency. I can't. It's I'm not even sure I know how to run the game. Since November, we were. We have heard from Michael Herzog, the ambassador to Israel, that the Biden administration was lying to the American people consistently and throughout the year and month after October 7th about the arms that were being shipped to Israel, that in fact, we were withholding arms, that we were lying about withholding arms, and that the administration was lying then, not only lying to the American people, but to Congress, to whom it was lying in its reports on what was going on with already authorized military aid that Congress had appropriated. So that's where they were before they. Before they lost, had they won. You know, I think we would be talking about cutoffs. It's entirely plausible that the Democratic Party, in its current condition, that the voices that want a cutoff of military assistance would be kind of loud and would be kind of on the march and would be saying, no, I'm sorry, Israel, you are really going it alone. You can't hit the Houthis. You can't hit Iran. You can't hit anybody. We need an end to the war and the suffering in Gaza now, and I'm sure there are.
- [41:42]
Christine Rosen
And we wouldn't be hitting the Houthis.
- [41:45]
Seth Mandel
Well, we certainly wouldn't be. No.
- [41:47]
Abe Greenwald
They took away the terrorist designation.
- [41:50]
Christine Rosen
That's exactly right. Yeah, good point.
- [41:51]
Seth Mandel
We might hit him. You know, we hit him a little bit here and there. Just, Just. Just enough to say we hit him.
- [41:57]
John Podhoretz
And by the way, there would be. There wouldn't be the whole Trump apparatus of the crackdown on the campuses. There would be the opposite right now. Right. With it. With a renewed Israeli campaign. Would all. It would all launch again. Yeah.
- [42:12]
Seth Mandel
I want to talk a little bit about the politics of the last 72, 96 hours and, you know, other stuff. Oh, my God. You know what? I've been sitting here talking into my microphone, which is not attached to the computer, so I'm actually on the. This is ridiculous. This is like one of these things. Look, see, it's not attached. You on YouTube. I'm, like, talking right into it. Like Walter Winchell fake mic. Sorry about that, everybody. Okay, so anyhow, this is.
- [42:43]
Christine Rosen
This is, like the reason Kramer has a. A talk show. Kramer has a. Oh, he has the Merv Griffin. That's right.
- [42:50]
Seth Mandel
Yeah. Okay, well, this is a reason why you should go to YouTube because you can see our blooper reel. Maybe we'll make a blooper reel at the end of the year of ridiculous moments.
- [42:59]
Abe Greenwald
It's like a half hour show okay.
- [43:02]
Seth Mandel
Anyway, now I've totally forgotten what it. Oh, yeah, okay. So we, of course, have Mahmoud Khalil's. The controversy over Mahmoud Khalil and, and his getting hearing or not getting a hearing. Was the arrest by ICE legitimate or not legitimate? Because he's a green card holder? What is the administration going to argue? It's being briefed all over the place. I guess we're not going to hear much more until next week, it appears. But of course, then we have. So that's one issue relating to Trump's promises to crack down on certain types of behavior. And then we have the real controversy yesterday, which was the hearing in Judge Boasberg's courtroom over the deportation on these three planes of the accused members of Trend de Aragua. And I'm of two major minds about this, which is that people that I trust, including our friend Adam WHITE and Andy McCarthy, very much, in taking this strictly from a legal perspective, are looking at what happened and saying the administration, like, played way fast and loose here. Like, the arguments that it's making in this court, in this courtroom, are bad. They're really, you know, it should be the default position of the Justice Department that it obeys judicial findings and rulings. And they're, they're, they're claiming that they did, but there's very strong evidence that they didn't. And they're. Now, they're just playing for an appeals court or whatever. And, and so, and Annie McCarthy's piece of national Review sort of gave me real pause. And then I saw Scott Jennings, the, you know, sort of the lone warrior on. In the mainstream media on behalf of Trump and the right, on cnn, saying they're doing it again. Congratulations, Democrats, you are going with an 8020 issue. You're going on the 20 side of an 8020 issue, which is you really think the American people care about the niceties when what Trump has done is flown 230 suspected terrorists out of the country and into El Salvador who were, you know, like, murdering people and taking over these housing complexes from Madison Avenue in Manhattan to, like, suburban, you know, Denver. I don't. Is this really where you want to be politically? So I think the legal and the political here are on a. On an interesting populist collision course, which is that it's possible that liberals and people, you know, have the better of the legal arguments here and that Trump and the Republicans are going to have the way better of the political arguments. Because what with Mahmoud Khalil, in the end, what you have is people defending somebody who supports A terrorist group that kidnapped eight Americans that is still holding an American hostage is in this country under false pretenses based on what he said on his green card form and various other things.
- [46:15]
Abe Greenwald
So this, this, this does bother me because this is what is the difference between perhaps conservatives and MAGA populists. The process is in place for a reason and it's, it's in place in part to protect everyone, not just your, you know, enemies. Making a legal argument. This is where the Trump administration's effort to be very Silicon Valley, like move fast and break things is, is long term disastrous because it wouldn't have been that hard to do this correctly. A lot of these people who they are trying to deport, it's clearly legal to get, get them out of the country. But the reason we have a process is so that we don't do this at the whim of, of, you know, a powerful executive or because somebody is holding views that we might dislike but that aren't actually, you know, held by terrorist groups or they're not providing material support. So in that sense, it's really frustrating. It's the same, and this is a very tiny anecdote, but it's the same way that Trump bulldozed his way into the Kennedy center yesterday, had taken over the board and is saying all kinds of things that are just patently false about how the Kennedy center honors works, for example. And you know, how they're going to do this and that. He doesn't care about the facts, but his administration should, if they actually want to achieve this long term kind of radical reform which many of us share. And his vision of needing in institutions like the FBI and certainly at Justice. But every time they make a simple mistake, mistake, it exacerbates their ability to see the revolution through or to even see the reforms through. Because, look, Cash Patel is doing interesting things. Restructuring reporting at the, at the FBI, something that's long overdue and that will make it a more seamless and efficient agency for lots of reasons. It's not political. Those are the sorts of things they should be doing. And they have to dot their I's and cross their T's, and they won't because they don't care. And politically they win either way. But long term, all of this stuff gets rolled back. Whoever becomes president next, well, might be Vance, but whoever leads next is going to face the legal ramifications of this sloppy behavior.
- [48:23]
John Podhoretz
It's also, you know, occurred to me because the administration cuts corners and does these things sloppily. I hope to God that everyone who's ending up in that horrid Salvadoran prison is in fact a member of the gang.
- [48:42]
Seth Mandel
Well, that's what Andy McCarthy and Adam White both say is like, okay, so if you did not, like, take him into a courtroom, how do you know that just because a guy has a certain tattoo that he's a member of trend? I mean, he could just have a tattoo that looks like a trend, the Aragua tattoo, and then you really do have a. A massive injustice. So I'm just talking about the politics versus the legalities. I do think that at times when there are conflicts in the United States over, I would say law and order or crime, crime and punishment, and the questions of constitutional niceties. And I don't mean nice. I mean, that sounds, that sounds dismissive to say constitutional niceties. So niceties is not the word I should be using. But in moments of crisis, when people cut corners around the question of whether all the I's and the T's are being dotted and crossed, when there seems to be, you know, like an emergency, it is. The haste in action is supported by the public. The repentance in leisure takes decades to flow back and then have blowback causes. My favorite example of this would be that, you know, when Rudy Giuliani came in and completely revolutionized the way that crime and punishment was handled in New York City, civil libertarians screamed and yelled and black activists screamed and yelled and all that. And then there was 20 years of, you know, incredible social peace. But over time, the idea that too many people were being frisked, stopped and frisked without, with only the cops saying, oh, that guy looks bad to me, ended up with a wholesale reversal of the stop and frame risk policy, which was the beginning of the end of the low crime period in New York City and the return of social disorder and decay over the last.
- [50:57]
Abe Greenwald
Well, but that, and that tracks with something that I think the Trump team doesn't seem to realize or care about, and that's that we are now rapidly becoming a low trust society. In a high trust society, we will give the benefit of the doubt to those in authority when there is a crisis, when, whether it's crime, whether it's immigration, but we're not really a high trust society any longer. We're quite low trust, both about our institutions and about each other. So Trump is behaving as if and says often like, trust, trust me, I'm figuring this out. I'm going to, I'm going to do this. I'm going to do that, but we don't trust him. And so when these little mistakes happen over and over in lots of different areas, that erodes whatever tiny little band of trust he had earned in winning reelection. And it just, I think it's, I think it's problematic.
- [51:41]
Seth Mandel
The question is, who doesn't trust him? Because I think that he could, you know, come out and prove that he was the risen Christ and 47% of Democrats would still disapprove of him. So he has the trust of the people that he has the trust of, and that's enough for him. The question is whether that trust erodes over time. Clearly it could. I mean, they're very civil libertarian when it comes to January 6th, but they're not very civil libertarian when it comes to the rights of trend. Right, or anyone who might be considered part of trend. Aragua. We're again at the point at which efforts at intellectual consistency or trying to.
- [52:23]
Abe Greenwald
Make sure that that's consistent. One is a group of citizens and one's a group of people who, many of whom came across the border illegally who aren't citizens. That's consistent.
- [52:33]
Seth Mandel
But in other words, the idea being that you're innocent until proven guilty unless you're an illegal alien. It's a complicated point. That he has the trust of the people that he thinks he's ever gonna have the trust of. It's like what he said in the speech before Congress. It's like nothing I can say will make you, any of you people, clap and I'm now gonna prove it. Hey, look, here's a 13 year old brain cancer survivor that I'm giving a Secret Service badge too.
- [53:01]
Abe Greenwald
Okay? But this clapping like this goes to Abe's point though. That's when he lets the troll overtake what he should be doing, which is actually trying to build some trust even among his own base by being, by saying, I'm doing this because it's best for you and also we're going to do it right this time. Because half of his. Half of what he rolled back into the White House arguing which was correct, which was that the Biden administration was just a mess, like nothing worked. They kept saying one thing, doing another, or they kept trying these crazy schemes that, you know, redounded badly for the economy or for the border. He came in saying, I'm going to fix it all. If you're going to fix it. You can't just slap a, you know, peeling band aid that's been floating on the surface of the hotel pool over this like, you know, sorry, oh God. That was a terrible metaphor. No, but you can't do that. You actually need to stitch up the wound and cleanse it and, like, move on.
- [53:51]
Seth Mandel
I think that's an excellent metaphor.
- [53:55]
Jonathan Schanzer
Right?
- [53:55]
Seth Mandel
That was amazing.
- [53:57]
Christine Rosen
I also think that, like, you know, this is, this is like he's not running for election again. And we've said throughout that we're going to see what he looks like when he doesn't need anybody's votes ever again. And I don't know if he cares about any of this. We don't know. He may, but he really may not. He may not care who trusts him and who doesn't trust him. I mean, I think this is the sort of, you know, Trump unleashed that people were warning about, which is that there's nothing really tethering him to the system at all because he doesn't need to go back to the system and ask permission to be in office again. And he's never really shown any interest in what his institutional wreckage means for the Republican Party as a party. Right. So obviously, I think he wants Vance. He'd prefer Vance succeed and not fail. He'd prefer Vance be elected after him instead of not be elected. But I think it stops there, right? I mean, I think it's like a preference thing, but I don't think that he is thinking long term about, you know, what this means for the Republican Party. And so he's kind of out there doing the Harry Reid, like, daring the other side, like, you know, how are you getting, getting rid of, we're going to get rid of the filibuster and McConnell saying, you, you're going to regret doing that. Right? Because we, that we have the same abilities and the same rights as you do, and we'll use that, too. And so now he's sort of daring, it feels like he's sort of daring the Democrats to, you know, take any of these precedents and go forward with them when they're in power and not really thinking about what that means for the Republican coalition because for him, he's the coalition. And also because, as you say, while there's nothing he can do to make Democrats, many Democrats clap, there's really nothing he can do to earn the booze, the Bronx cheer from his own base. I think he feels that everything is pretty much set in place again.
- [56:11]
Seth Mandel
I think it's very hard in moments of crisis and people feel like there's a border crisis and an immigration crisis and a terrorism crisis to say you really want the law to be respected and preserved and protected to the highest possible degree, because that's for you. That's to protect you in case something unjust or untoward happens toward you. You need all of those protections. That.
- [56:38]
Abe Greenwald
No, but he could. But he could say, the law has been flouted by the previous administration for four years. We are going to respect it. And here's what that means.
- [56:46]
Seth Mandel
Enforcement in crisis. People say, I'm not a terrorist. I'm never going to talk about nothing to fear, nothing to hide positively about Hamas. I'm not blocking, I'm not having a protest and blocking the paths at Barnard College. And I'm not a member of a crime gang. Making them associate the notion that their rights need to be protected in protecting the rights of the people who find themselves in this dragnet. It's not about them. It's about protecting their rights. It's a very hard leap for people.
- [57:24]
Abe Greenwald
To make, but it's not protecting the rights of the people who he's trying to deport. It's respected, respecting the process, the legal process. Process is a very different argument to make over rights. I think you're correct about the right stuff, but I don't think. I think he could make an argument about process. And the whole point is that that's again, in stark opposition to what the Biden administration did, to the idea of process, which is throw it out the window and throw open the border.
- [57:49]
Seth Mandel
But I think he's, he's in a stronger position because people don't make the leap between enforcing the rules, the rule of law, and their own, the administration of their own lives, the steady administration of their own.
- [58:12]
Abe Greenwald
Well, that's a serious mistake because our country's grounded in the rule of law, not in.
- [58:17]
Seth Mandel
Yeah, but it's too abstract because what they say is, those guys, they're all, they're all criminals, and I'm not a criminal. And so, you know, I, maybe I should care about their rights, but I really don't. I'm never, I'm never going to be in that situation. And they're wrong. I mean, they probably aren't. But the thing is that if you run roughshod over, over rights, then, yeah, you get caught in. The cop pulls you over and needs to make a quota and says you have drugs in your car and, and it also. And lies. And then, you know, you, you, you have been a participant in a world that says that people are guilty until proven innocent. And then you're the one who needs the rule to be that you're innocent until proven guilty. But that's a Hard leap for a lot of people to make because they're very literal minded and they're not. I'm not in trend or agua, so I don't care how trend Naragua is taken out of the country. I'm just glad they're taken out of the country.
- [59:20]
John Podhoretz
But, and also, when an administration doesn't do things by the book, it sets a precedent for administrations of both parties. It lowers the bar. I mean, I think a lot of Trump can get away with a lot now in part because Biden's administration ran roughshod over the law and did so many things the wrong way. That gave Trump a lot of room.
- [59:52]
Seth Mandel
Yeah. And Obama gave Trump room in the first term.
- [59:56]
John Podhoretz
That's right.
- [59:57]
Seth Mandel
With the pen and the phone.
- [59:58]
Christine Rosen
And I also think that Trump thinks he's the guy who was guilty until proven proven innocent and now he's on the other side. And so that argument doesn't have purchase with him personally.
- [60:11]
Seth Mandel
He does rather than here, you know.
- [60:14]
Christine Rosen
One day you'll be falsely accused of something and put in the courtroom. The timeline for him is the opposite. He believes that he was guilty until proven innocent and set up over and over again. And now he's on the other side and he thinks this is the Democrats comeuppance. This was you guys, you know, from Trump's perspective, you guys didn't think about setting the precedent of, you know, you thought I was trend dog or whatever it is, you know, and you put, and you tried to put me on a plane.
- [60:44]
Seth Mandel
But he's got interesting psychologies. Of course, the famous joke is that a liberal is a conservative who's been arrested. Right. So suddenly a liberal wants all of the rights and, you know, the conservative gets arrested and then he needs rule of law and innocent free speech rights and, you know, all legal niceties followed and all that. Trump has gone the other way. Trump, you know, feels that he was unjustly treated and what he wants to do in response is unjustly.
- [61:15]
Abe Greenwald
And he was, he, he actually was unjustly treated. So he's not wrong about that.
- [61:20]
Seth Mandel
Say, what happened to me shouldn't happen to anybody else ever again. He's like, no, no, no, no, no. The shoe is now other. The shoes on the other foot, baby.
- [61:28]
Abe Greenwald
This is why temperament matters when you choose your leaders.
- [61:32]
Seth Mandel
Correct. Okay. So, Christine, you wanted to.
- [61:38]
Abe Greenwald
I have, I have a kind of. Well, I'm going to make a recommendation because I have a lot of optimism about what I'm going to recommend. But there's only been one episode. But I Like, I like this guy's work. So this is John Mulaney's new Netflix called Everybody's Live. It's a weekly variety show and it's weird and wonderful. Like Mulaney, I mean, it's extremely quirky. It's not going to be everybody's cup of tea. His first episode aired last week. His sidekick, the kind of Ed McMahon character, is Richard Kind, who is amazing. Love Richard Kind. So it, you know, they were, they're working out the kinks. But he did this when he did a limited series for Netflix last summer called Everybody's in LA or Everybody Live in la. So it's still set in la, the similar set and whatnot. Similar setup. But it's just such a refreshing departure from what late night TV has become, which is this, this celebrity industrial complex of, you know, interviewing the starlet who's got a new movie out and the predictable band and the monologue that really sometimes lands but often is too politicized or boring. So he's mixing it up. So I appreciate that aspect of it. He's also kind of a nerd, I think, because there's, there's this wonderful. The best sketch of that first show was a Willy Loman focus group. So it's all these people who've played.
- [62:54]
Seth Mandel
Willy Loman being focus group people play Willy Loman. Including Christopher Lloyd. Yes.
- [62:59]
Abe Greenwald
I mean, like serious actors.
- [63:01]
Seth Mandel
A 14 year old girl. Like Contra Costa. Yeah.
- [63:06]
Abe Greenwald
No, I mean, again, but like, that's weird. Yeah, the weird part of it.
- [63:10]
Christine Rosen
So.
- [63:10]
Abe Greenwald
And you know, then he has a musical. Yes.
- [63:14]
Seth Mandel
So asking the Willy Loman focus group questions like, do you think that there are two genders and stuff like. No, it's just, it's so weird asking in the voice of Willy Loman from Death of the Salesman how he feels about various current political.
- [63:29]
Abe Greenwald
And then they all end by like doing the famous final speech, you know, the famous speech all together in unison. I mean, it's, it's so bizarre, but it some. I mean, I found it funny, so it's a particular kind of humor. I really want to see the show succeed though, because it's. Because it is quirky and unusual and new and you don't see that a lot on late night. And so. And I think he is one of the best comedians working right now just in terms of like stand up and whatnot. So I'm going to recommend it. If I'm wrong, you can punish me for it because I've only seen the one episode to watch the. It's on Wednesday nights 10 if you're on the East Coast Live at 10:10pm.
- [64:06]
Seth Mandel
Yeah, but you can watch it on Netflix at any time, right?
- [64:11]
Abe Greenwald
You can go and watch.
- [64:12]
Seth Mandel
But I.
- [64:12]
Abe Greenwald
So I'm recommending Mulaney's Everybody's Live.
- [64:15]
Seth Mandel
But it is basically an episode of Johnny Carson. Yeah, well, there are hints of Carson. Yes. Yeah, because Jimmy Fallon, Jimmy Kimmel, Stephen Colbert, everybody else, they moved away from the format of really the couch, three guests on the couch. The comedy bits with the side, they're not quite structured like that anymore. This has this bizarre throwback quality. He had like a financial advisor on as one of the panelists.
- [64:50]
Abe Greenwald
The theme was loaning money. Yeah, yeah.
- [64:53]
Seth Mandel
Loading money. I also like this sketch he did where. Where Kind says he's given him a telescope as a present on the set. And they look through that. He looks through the telescope finder and every apartment that he looks at, there's some guy sneaking up behind another guy, smashing him over the head with a lamp. It's like. Anyway, it is, it is only Craig Ferguson.
- [65:22]
Christine Rosen
Craig Ferguson was the last to really do it, right? I mean, he was the last to really do a traditional late night show where it was just about being quirky and making people laugh and, and all that sort of thing. And he, and he had, you know, he would have the guests, but he. I think it also depends on the guest.
- [65:37]
Seth Mandel
But he.
- [65:37]
Christine Rosen
That was the last time there was like an earnest, like one. One thing I like about what John Mulaney does these days is he has a really good sense of humor about himself and you didn't feel like, you know, they used to say about David Letterman near the end of his show that, you know, when the host of a party doesn't look like they're having fun anymore, probably the guests aren't either. And Ferguson was like the last guy who, like everybody seemed to really have a lot of fun at the party until literally until it was over.
- [66:08]
Seth Mandel
Gotta say, though, for some reason on Facebook, I don't know why I get served up by the algorithm. These bits and pieces of the Craig for Craig Ferguson show, which was on at 12:30 on CBS I think until like 2019 or something like that, and. And somebody is serving up Craig Ferguson clips. And for some reason the AI loves.
- [66:32]
Abe Greenwald
Craig, I guess, right?
- [66:34]
Seth Mandel
I don't know. Anyway, and here's the weirdness of it, which is that all the clips are Craig Ferguson with a beautiful, beautiful young starlet, star of a CW show, One Tree Hill, or, you know, something like that. She comes out, she's in a short dress or something like that. And the entire show is. The entire clip of four minutes is Craig Ferguson ogling her and making incredibly dirty and inappropriate double entendre jokes about her in a way that it feels like could have been 1961. And the fact that it was like just 10 years ago and how Me Too happened, and no one will ever speak this way again to a young woman on a talk show, it is, it's kind of jaw dropping in as a.
- [67:31]
Christine Rosen
It is in a way, because he got out just in time.
- [67:33]
Seth Mandel
Yeah, he.
- [67:34]
Christine Rosen
He isn't a figure from the past, as you say. He got, he literally got out as the, you know, it was like as the meteor was hitting the ocean and the wave was coming.
- [67:43]
Abe Greenwald
Mulaney needs to have the hot young actors come sit on his couch and he can reverse the equation.
- [67:48]
Seth Mandel
Right. Again. So the show you just look up, John Mulaney on Netflix called Everybody's Live.
- [67:56]
Abe Greenwald
And it's on Everybody's Live.
- [67:57]
Seth Mandel
Right? He did, he did say that they called the. Last year, they called it Everybody's in la. And then they did focus. Netflix did focus groups and discovered people hate la. So we had to take LA out of the name.
- [68:12]
Abe Greenwald
They're all too beautiful there. They're just too beautiful.
- [68:14]
Seth Mandel
Okay.
- [68:15]
Abe Greenwald
Some of them are funny.
- [68:16]
Seth Mandel
Yes. So we'll be back tomorrow for Seth, Christine and Abe. And thanks to John Chanzer for his insights and wisdom. I'm John Podpora. It's Keep the Camel Burning Sa.