The Election Nobody Asked For

Whistling past the nursing home.

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27

Many polls are telling the same story: Americans don’t want either Joe Biden or Donald Trump for president. And yet a rematch seems all but inevitable. Mike Warren is joined by Steve, Jonah, and Chris Stirewalt to commune in despair. Plus:
-Pence’s overdue attack on populism
-Great white sharks with Hitler’s brain
-Eric Adams: migrant issue ‘will destroy New York City’
-9/11 anniversary and easy explanations

Show notes:
–CNN Polling on a Biden vs. Trump rematch
–You need to calm down, Democratic pollsters argue – Semafor
–Most Americans say Biden is too old – The Washington Post
–TMD: The Election Nobody Wants
–Kevin Williamson’s piece on Mike Pence

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Comments (27)
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  1. Renicksmith

    Best lineup in a long time. Great work. Add Williamson and it'll be perfect. Thanks very much!

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    The Bell Tower

    I just want to point out how annoyingly weak the right (even the real right, never mind the moron contingent) have become about defending the Iraq and Afghan wars.

    Hussein dead. Bin Laden dead. Zawahiri dead. ISIS and Al Quaed diminished. The Taliban might be gone too if Biden and Trump hadn’t unceremoniously removed us from Afghanistan.

    I know people didn’t like those wars but why is the right buying into this idiotic “endless wars” crap when basically the only real government expenditure with a legit ROI in this century are those wars? Our hesitation in defending these wars is partially fueling the hesitation with Ukraine.

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  3. MB

    Great conversation.

    When Mike Warren tried to be optimistic at the end.....and neither Jonah or Steve was buying it....I had only one thought.

    What would Sarah say? I'm guessing it would be something like, "Bless your heart"....but that seems more like a deep-south phrase rather than a Texas phrase. Not sure I know precisely what the Texas version of that sentiment would be.

    Thanks again. Hoping Sarah and family are doing well.

    Mike

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  4. Evan V

    For someone that writes and thinks about populism so often, Chris Stirewalt’s definition of populism is just bizarre. If any minority viewpoint objecting to the Trump leaders in the Republican Party is, by definition, populist, then Jonah’s Remnant and the whole Dispatch crew is radically populist. That definition defies logic and would mean that the word is completely meaningless.

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    Ben Connelly

    At first I didn’t get Jonah’s joke about forgetting who he’d had on the podcast this week. Well played.

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  6. BenP

    I tend to agree with most of what I hear on The Dispatch Podcast; the 9/11 commentary at the end of this one may be where I diverge the most. I remember similar arguments being made on previous podcasts shortly after Russia invaded Ukraine, and after Biden withdrew from Afghanistan.

    I object most strongly to the implication that opposition to the "war on terror" and the invasion of Iraq is inconsistent with support for funding and assisting Ukraine in their war with Russia. The Dispatch position seems to be "isn't it funny that liberal populists opposed US military policy and actions after 9/11 but now they support US military policy and actions in Ukraine, whereas conservatives populists did the opposite?" And my answer is no, there's no funniness or contradition or irony or any of that here. If anything, the seriousness of the war in Ukraine lays bare the unseriousness of the previous 22 years.

    Remember right after Russia invaded, and the big question was "can we assist Ukraine without triggering nuclear war?" We now know the answer was "yes", but at the time this was uncertain and scary. Which, to me, put everything else we had worried about since 9/11 in sharp perspective. For two decades we'd been told to be scared of terrorism. And then suddenly we're back to cold war fears about nuclear annihilation. Put mildly, nuclear annihilation is scarier than terrorism.

    If we're gonna do Iraq war vs. Ukraine war, there's the small matter of which country invaded which (clutch them pearls, y'all!). And the small matter of the factual status of the major justifications for our involvement (WMDs!!! And also kinda sorta 9/11 but don't say that out loud). And the whole "great powers" thing - Russia being a great power, Iraq not so much. And the small matter of alliances - Russia are allied with China, another expansionist state who could spark future military conflicts, whereas Iraq were allied with... honestly I forget.

    Most of the Dispatch editors miss this because they supported the US invasion of Iraq and they now support the US funding of Ukraine. And so they see what looks like an ideological inconsistency in those of us who currently support our funding of Ukraine but then opposed our invasion of Iraq. They're bucketing (sorry, had to) these positions as isolationism vs. interventionism, as though the debate is between "always get involved, no matter the circumstances" vs. "never get involved, no matter the circumstances" (I know the latter exist, but their numbers are few).

    The invasion of Iraq was stupid all along, and predicated on lies. We didn't have to do it. Sure, it could have gone better and if it had gone better it wouldn't be seen as a distaster today. But it's still fundamentally different from Ukraine. Ukraine were invaded by a giant expansionist state, who are allied with another giant expansionist state. The cases for invading Iraq and for supporting the defense of Ukraine are extremely different from one another. The fact that most of the Dispatch crew supported both doesn't change that.

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      Charley Warns

      "Different" in what exact way? For example, what's the moral difference between what Putin is doing to the Ukrainians and what Saddam Hussein did to the Kurds? Ukrainians are white people, of course ... there's that! ... but if the Kurds, Uyghurs, Afghans, etc., were white, would that make it different?

      "Kurdish people were systematically persecuted. The al-Anfal military campaign against Kurdistan in Northern Iraq between 1986 and 1989 is qualified by some European countries as genocide. 182 000 Kurds were estimated to have been deported, killed, disappeared in depopulation campaigns in Kurdish areas carried out by Baath party. A particularly well known incident was when the northern Kurdish village of Halabja was gassed with poison in 1988, killing 5 000 and wounding 10 000 Iraqi Kurds suspected of disloyalty to the regime."

      That's from, "https://euaa.europa.eu/country-guidance-iraq-2021/crimes-committed-during-regime-saddam-hussein" while the below is from https://abcnews.go.com/WNT/IraqCoverage/story?id=2761722&page=1:

      "Saddam Hussein was hanged for ordering the deaths of 148 Shiite men and boys in the village of Dujail after an assassination attempt there in 1982. But by the standards of his brutal rule, the Dujail killings were a relatively minor crime.The exact number of deaths attributable to Saddam Hussein may never be known, but estimates range as high as half a million. There is evidence of more than 250 mass graves dating to his rule."

      From "In Defense of the Iraq War," David French writes:

      "Moreover, it’s easy to forget that before Barack Obama’s terrible decision to withdraw in 2011, the Iraq War had been won. Saddam was gone, the follow-on insurgency had been wiped-out — reduced to a few hundred fighters scattered in a vast country — and American and Iraqi forces were masters of the battlefield. Joe Biden asserted that Americans would look at Iraq as “one of the great achievements of this administration.” But Obama withdrew too soon. He squandered American gains, opened the door to unrestrained factionalism, and left the fragile Iraqi nation vulnerable to renewed jihadist assault."

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      1. BenP

        I agree that there isn't a moral difference between Hussein murdering Kurds and Putin murdering Ukrainians. The relevant differences are:

        - There is no Kurdish state, but there is a Ukrainian state.
        - Putin wants to retake all the territory lost when the USSR collapsed; if he succeeds in Ukraine he moves on to the next one

        Letting Putin have Ukraine means signaling to every country with expansionist aspirations (e.g. China) that conquering their neighbors is worth a try. It tells those neighbors that the rest of the world won't back them up. It makes national borders weaker and invites more war.

        None if this means that Saddam didn't deserve what he got, or that lives of his victims were worth less than any others. If only we could go around giving all the world's tyrants their just deserts. The justification for defending other nations from their would-be conquerors is based on something fundamentally different.

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      2. Rawkki54

        And just who's the threat again? Iraq? Afghanistan? 🆁🆄🅢Ⓢ🄸Ⓐ?

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    Charley Warns

    This conversation reveals Mike Pence's mindset:

    Dan Quayle: "Mike, you have no flexibility on this. None. Zero. Forget it. Put it away."
    Mike Pence: "You don’t know the position I’m in."

    Pence figures himself to be unfairly put between a rock and a hard spot and is looking for (what comes across as) a slippery way out of it ... while Quayle is pointing out the obvious in that Pence is actually not in that spot at all as what-he-should-do is really clear! So it seems a bit disingenuous when Pence later says this as if he didn't really need that advice from Quayle after all:

    "IT GIVES ME NO PLEASURE TO SAY IT, BUT ON THAT FATEFUL DAY, THE AMERICAN PEOPLE DESERVE TO KNOW PRESIDENT TRUMP DEMANDED THAT I CHOOSE BETWEEN HIM AND THE CONSTITUTION. I CHOSE THE CONSTITUTION. AND I ALWAYS WILL."

    Pence is feigning defiance as those remarks only further clarify what a duplicitous character he is. Plus it raises this question: How can Pence not commit to not vote for Trump after expressing that?! It's clear that Pence is milking the only option he had. It's like putting "I open doors for little old ladies and women carrying babies" on your resume. As opposed to what?! His other option was to go down in history as Dracula's enabler. The fact is that he'd still be that (or Trump's lapdog) if the election went the other way.

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    Katenesvick

    Great pod, love the lineup.

    Wondering if Mike was there when Common came to Vandy's homecoming concert in 2006 and ranted about GWB and Katrina and racist conspiracy theories. Possibly the most acutely politically isolated I've ever felt, as I sat down arms folded in protest.

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      Michael Warren vertical-nib Author

      I was there, and I remember that.

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    2. Russell J

      I was in school then. Luckily my school wasn’t particularly political, although David French was fighting on behalf of our college Republicans President around that time. I might have been sitting as well. Pretty sure I would feel more politically isolated now if I showed up at the college Republicans wearing a Bush/Cheney shirt. David would have to defend my free speech.

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  9. William H.

    Once upon a time, both parties had elder statesmen who could have gone to President Biden and said, "Mr. President, you served your country well, but it is time to step down." Now, the parties have been weakened to such a point that there would be no institutional heft behind such a statement. It's also hard to imagine the group of Democratic Senators with enough gravitas to pull that off. John Fetterman? Cory Booker? Robert Menendez? Dianne "Weekend at Bernie's" Feinstein?

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    1. BenP

      Has the Democratic party been this weakened? I buy that the RNC has less control than they did pre-Trump, but was the DNC in that much more control 10 or 20 or 30 years ago? If Bill Clinton had taken on some incredibly damaging baggage in 2015, who would have been the one to get him to step aside even though he didn't want to?

      As far as getting Biden to step aside, if enough high-ranking dems really wanted it, I think they could do it. If Chuck Schumer and Amy Klobuchar and yeah - Booker and even Harris and even the Clintons all got together and said "time to make way for your successor", I think they'd win. It's like Biden's got that much garvitas on his end either, right?

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      Estoppel Enjoyer

      I think Dem leaders don’t say anything because they’re all worried about what happens without Biden. It’s the biggest wildcard. Literally no outcome would surprise me. You could see Harris run, and then most of the heavy-hitters (Booker, Whitmer, Newsom, Buttigieg) pass on the race because they think Harris can’t be beat, but then voters don’t really like her and so some rando no one’s ever heard of also runs and gets the nomination by accident. Who would that person be? The uncertainty is kind scary.

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    Young Riprock

    The people squeaking in puzzled laughter while Jonah made the Futurama reference was just great.

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    1. Eric S.

      I want a dvd commentary track that is Steve slowly losing his mind while watching the show.

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