Remember When
S1: If you follow me on Twitter at PEOC a.m., I will not follow the gist at Slate just.
S2: It’s Tuesday, November 24th, twenty twenty from Slate, it’s the gist. I’m Mike Pesca. Today, President Trump made his first public comments about members of his legal team arguing for him in public.
S3: Rudy Giuliani and Sydney Powell, these two magnificent Gobbler’s were selected from the official presidential flock of 30 turkeys.
S2: I kid, I kid. That was the turkey pardon. Trump so does love the turkey pardon and the handing out of pens after assigning. That’s a big thing. Also, Air Force One stuff. It’s a really a strong argument for separating the head of state from the head of government. But really the strongest argument is separating Trump from both jobs. But in all fairness, Trump’s Turkey pardons, they’ve been fine. They haven’t shattered Turkey pardon norms, nor has he found loopholes in the turkey, pardoning legislation as written that he sought to twist to his advantage. Foreign businesses were steered to any of the turkeys involved. And this is important.
S4: The turkeys were full time turkeys, not just interim turkeys, but there was and perhaps you’ve noticed this so much else of the Trump administration in which he acted less nobly, less presidentially. Oh, I’m sure you remember. And we’ll remember for a while to come. The big ones, Charlottesville, kids in cages, even the tax cuts. But here on the gist, what we really want to do is mark our history and keep alive the memories of the deeds, the statements, the attitudes of President Trump and his coterie. We will hearken back now to the truly appalling or the most egregious, but the routinely incompetent, the anodyne, ridiculous, the nexus between the quotidian and the cringe worthy. I’ve been keeping a list is a little note to self that I call. Hey, remember when in an effort to not forget and keep alive the tales and stories of this overmatch, shiftless and deeply, deeply stupid administration, I’ve rebranded it, gussying it up a bit. And today that just presents the debut edition of Remembrances of Things Trump. The year was twenty, seventeen, it was four months into the Trump administration and Trump had invited Chinese Chairman JI to Mar a Lago, where they engaged in a dinner that was later defined as insecure, a security risk and improper. But Trump was keen to demonstrate his power to JI. So after he had authorized a strike on Syria with 59 missiles, he told this to his visitor. But there was one detail that he made sure to include in his description of relaying the information to JI that reverberates to this day.
S5: Sitting at the table, we had finished dinner. We’re now having dessert and we had the most beautiful piece of chocolate cake that you’ve ever seen. And President Xi was enjoying it. And I was given the message from the generals that the ships are locked and loaded. What do you do? And we made a determination to do so. The missiles were on the way. And I said, Mr. President, let me explain something to you. This is during dessert. We’ve just fired fifty nine missiles, all of which hit, by the way. Unbelievable. From hundreds of miles away, all of which hit unmanned. It’s so incredible. It’s brilliant. It’s genius. So what happens is I said we’ve just launched fifty nine missiles heading to Iraq. We’re headed to Syria. Yes, heading toward Syria.
S4: And I want you to know that no, this missiles, chemical weapons, air strikes, a beautiful no sorry, the most beautiful piece of chocolate cake. That’s the important part. It was apparently a cake to dampen Mr. Duncan Hines eyes if they weren’t already at full moistness consistent with a proper chocolate cake. Trump reported that chairman approved of the measure. You know, given Syrian presidents Assad’s horribleness, Trump said the meeting was a diplomatic and apparently culinary success. Trump’s adviser, Sebastian Gorka, crowed about the strong message the missile strikes sent, quote, diplomacy, words, treaties. They mean nothing there is in force to back it up with just one strike. That message was sent to all the people. And one year and three days later, the Syrians once more used chemical weapons on rebel fighters and civilians. This time, a multinational task force struck back, according to The Washington Post, reporting on that round of strikes, quote, Despite claims by President Trump that the operation was an enormous success, it is being interpreted in Syria as a win for Assad because the limited scope of the strikes suggested that Western powers do not intend to challenge his rule. Also, no cake was served in the commemoration of those particular airstrikes. And this has been remembrances of things on the show today of guns and grandmas when choices to see family play out on the pages of The New York Times. But first, he is a conservative thinker. He is an adviser to Republican candidates. He is a man trying to reclaim and reaffirm conservatism as a fundamental principle of the Republican Party. Are Republicans listening? Some are. So what’s the idea? Yuval Levin joins me next.
S2: On Election Day or depending when you saw it, election night in The New York Times, which once had a great op ed section and still has an op ed section, Yuval Levin wrote an article called Either Trump or Biden Will Win. True, though, that remains to be seen. But our deepest problems will remain for politics to function, we need to act at the local personal level. It’s in peace with what Levin has been arguing for many years. Levin is a scholar at AEI, is the editor of National Affairs. And I have to say, I saw a reference to him in The New York Times as advising Republicans in this moment about setting their policy agenda Uvalde. Welcome back to The Gist. Thanks very much for having me. So you’re a conservative and you acknowledge I think I read in Politico you did a reckoning of the Trump years and you acknowledge that one thing he said was true, which is that it’s the Republican Party, not the Conservative Party. And for too long, conservatives kind of thought of themselves as so intertwined with the DNA of Republicanism that they didn’t have to question it. But Trump shows that that’s not true. So now that Trump is, let’s hope, shuffling off the stage, what does conservatism, when it looks at itself, what are the challenges about what it has to say to America and to the Republican Party?
S6: Well, yeah, I think one of the lessons of this period for conservatives is to remember that we are a faction within a coalition, that a political party is unavoidably a coalition. The Democratic Party has always been, I think, a little better at understanding itself explicitly as a coalition. And Republicans have tended to think that we actually kind of all share a set of views, that there’s a kind of general economic libertarianism combined with a broadly stated social conservatism, together with the kind of anti leftism and a belief in the private economy. And that’s the Republican Party. I think it makes more sense to think of the Republican Party as consisting of discrete factions that emphasize these different things, and that among those factions and very powerful among them lately is a populist faction that actually speaks to a lot of the core voters of the party, much more powerfully than conservatism. And conservatives have to think about what it is we’re asking of the party and what it is. We’re offering it in a different way in light of Trump, in light of Trump’s rise in 2016. But I think unavoidably, also in light of the four years that have followed. And so that leaves conservatives asking, what do we have to offer and what do we want in return? I think that’s really the question for the coming years. And a lot of that has to be laid out in terms of policy, which just hasn’t been how the Republican Party has been talking with itself for these last four years. So there’s a lot of work to do.
S1: So I’m sure what you want, what conservatives want is for there are policy ideas to be adopted and what they really want is for their policy ideas to be adopted, not just snuck in, but to actually be embraced by the masses of America. And if not that, at least the masses of the party. So do you look at the populist part of Republicanism, as in keeping with some conservative ideas, or do you look at it more like, as you know, in opposition or standing to the side of conservative ideas? But you could find a way to convince the people who are most motivated by populists or populism to go along with your ideas or to maybe not reject your ideas.
S6: It’s a great question and a challenging question. I think the answer is yes. That is it is both of those things. And it depends on how we understand what populism emphasizes to the extent that we understand populism in terms of what it is against, and especially to the extent that it is against the establishment or America’s core institutions, then it’s clearly in some tension with conservatism. Conservatism in a free society exists to defend core institutions and to stand up for what they do and for what they offer and for the need to preserve and conserve them. At the same time, though, that means, especially in our kind of free society, that conservatism is resistant to the notion of technocratic elite rule, that it is skeptical of of of expertise at some level, and that it wants to sustain the traditions of our society. That means that there’s a lot of common ground between populism and conservatism. And it makes sense that there is a populism of the right. That is, there’s a populism that is anti left and right. I think that’s the best way to understand Trump’s kind of populism, is that it is anti left. Conservatives are certainly anti left, but we also have a positive agenda, something we actually want to to achieve. And that’s not always in line with what populists are after. So there’s a tension here. And I think that where where the right becomes anti institutional, where it allows itself to become hostile to America’s core institutions, which is certainly happened in some important ways in. For the last four years, then I think conservatives have to resist that and push back against it and anti institutional right becomes alienated, becomes dispossessed and becomes, I think, hysterical and fearful about the fate of our society comes to argue that we are at the edge of an abyss and the left is about to destroy everything. I tend to think that all of that is just not true and that what the right can offer instead is a reason to recommit to our core institutions, to constitutionalism, to federalism, to civil society that can address some of the problems that populists are worried about. But it’s not fundamentally populist. I mean, that tension is very real.
S1: So what you’re arguing for is the elite institutions that I don’t know, let’s just use shorthand are maybe more conservative elite institutions like, say, police departments. You see the natural fit with the Republican Party, but elite institutions that certainly skew more liberal like the Academy and the press. Well, it’s a ripe target. And maybe you don’t go as far as, you know, the hordes of Trump supporters in your loathing and hatred of them. But someone like you, most conservatives have a suspicion of those institutions. But what I see happening is that there’s no regulator, there’s no limit to the suspicion as expressed by Trump in the populace. So you don’t only get you know, The New York Times goes too far or Oberlin College is gender studies department is ridiculous. You get a wholesale assault on truth and facts and knowledge. It’s a very it seems like it seems hard.
S6: I think the key to drawing some of these distinctions is to insist on being clear about what we’re for and not just what we’re against. So that when you think about the academy, there’s a case to be made for the need for four healthy universities in a free society, even elite universities, that they should exist in order to advance the search for truth by teaching and learning, which I think the right and left would agree about at that level of generality and then argue about whether that’s happening in today’s elite universities and the ways in which maybe it’s not happening, but in defense of an ideal of the academy, rather than just in opposition to the very notion of the academy, which I think is where the right too often is gone. You could say the same thing about journalism. There’s clearly a need to distinguish truth from falsehood and there’s a need to report the news. And there is a need for professionalism in in journalism. But there are also ways in which that becomes corrupted and needs to be pushed back against if we forget what we’re for. And we only see these institutions as arenas that the left is using to dominate society, then we become incapable of drawing distinctions and of knowing where to stop and where to start. And I think that’s happened. That simply has happened on the right and a lot of ways. So that to me, a recovery involves the case for these institutions. Why do we need them? What do they do for us? And and that can allow us to see where they might be corrupted by the people who now run them, but without losing sight of what purpose they serve in a society like ours. And I think that’s something that conservatism can offer today’s populace. Right. And without which that populist right really finds itself in a place where it is fundamentally hostile to American life, which certainly can’t be a conservative attitude.
S1: It’s harder to get millions of people passionately behind you when your message is something like, you know, universities have a place to or, you know, there is some news we can agree on versus Fox News sucks. CNN sucks. It seems like one lends itself to huge outpourings of passions and movements. And the other one is, you know, I’m sympathetic to it’s how I think thinking works, but it’s so nuanced. It’s harder to really have momentum behind it.
S6: There’s no doubt that’s true. And the kind of argument I’m making is much easier for me to make than it is for someone who has to run for office. No question about it. I do think, though, that the same logic should apply to those politicians. That is, they should think about the institutions they themselves are part of in the same way. What’s actually the role of a senator or a governor is the role of a senator or governor just to to whip up people, or is it to advance some kind of governing agenda? And I do think that in advancing some kind of governing agenda, they stand a better chance of appealing to larger swaths of voters. If they just think that they that they appeal to those voters by being against the things those voters hate, then certainly there’s no limiting principle on that. Then you’re just against. And all you can really offer in politics is, is opposition to the other party. We’ve reached a point where our party is both kind of think this way. Each of our parties basically thinks the other one is the country’s biggest problem. And that means there isn’t much room for thinking about what to do with political power, which generally involves pushing some kind of bargaining and common. To advance legislative agenda, that’s not really how either party now is accustomed to thinking, and I think a recovery, an institution minded recovery of what our politics is for would actually involve the same kind of logic is trying to think about, well, what’s the academy for? What is journalism for?
S1: Now, you said that both parties view each other, as, you know, so problematic that we can’t really advance as a society. I will channel Democrats. I will reveal I’m a registered Democrat. Can’t the case be more plausibly made in one direction than the other? If Republicans look at Democrats as a party you can’t work with? I tend to think they’re thinking of, you know, members of the squad or maybe Bernie. But what Democrats, Khanjar, is Donald Trump who took over the party and essentially made it in his image and maybe still. So that’s my question to you. Isn’t it more fair to for Democrats to think of Republicans really as a huge problem and some people that are hard to work with?
S6: I do think that’s fair. But, you know, even beyond the politicians, if you think about the party’s voters and activists in both cases, I think it’s it remains true that to an extraordinary degree, both parties each basically treats the other as the problem. If you ask a committed Democrat to tell you why they voted for Joe Biden without mentioning Donald Trump, I think that person would have some trouble. And similarly, for Republicans to talk about what they’re for without getting to talk about the left and WOAK ism and the rest of it, they’d have some real trouble.
S1: Yeah, there’s negative partisanship.
S6: Yeah. But and, you know, in a way, what you describe is actually a bigger problem for the Democrats because Donald Trump is going away. I mean, he may not know that, but he has lost the election and he is going away. The Democrats activist base and its younger politicians are not going away. So I think the challenge for the Democrats in thinking about how to put before the country their most appealing face and not the face that has turned off voters may be a bigger challenge in the in the medium term than than the Republicans challenge where the problem has been. Donald Trump and he’s lost the election.
S1: Yeah, I’ll again reveal that I’m a Democrat, so that may color this response. But, you know, I would say that, OK, Trump’s going away. Let’s hope that happens. Then the next biggest challenge is Mitch McConnell. And it’s not insignificant. Which brings me to my question. Is it the case that Democrats want to do these big sweeping things and need to have a legislature to doesn’t block it and Republicans or conservatives essentially want to conserve? Large plank of their agenda is to do away with regulations. So blocking progress is much more in keeping with the conservative ambition than the progressive ambition.
S6: Well, I think there’s some truth to that. But if you think about what did Republicans want out of the Trump years, I think they wanted a whole variety of things that they did not get. They wanted changes in immigration laws. They wanted to repeal Obamacare. They wanted, I think, much more done in terms of religious liberty and even deregulation. They weren’t able to do that in part because of the chaos around Trump, in part because of their own attitude toward politics and toward legislating, in part because of Democrats, of course. And so I do think both parties have an agenda. But it’s certainly true that the Democrats policy agenda is more sweeping and broader and would require large legislative majorities that this election at least didn’t give them.
S1: What do you make of this period that we’re in now where Trump is not admitting defeat and many prominent Republicans are giving? Well, Ben Sasse pretty much laid into him, but many prominent Republicans are not calling him out for that. Will this hurt the party and the future of the conservative, the conservative movement of communicating ideas?
S6: Yeah, I mean, look, I think it’s hard to say if it’ll hurt the party in the long term, but I think it is evidence of a kind of corrosion of the party’s internal political culture. The idea that everybody thinks that that Trump himself and his voters are somehow just too sensitive to be able to be disturbed here. And you can’t just say, look, the election’s over, you lost the election, it happens. And nobody feels like they can just say that to their voters. They’re wary about saying President elect Biden, when it’s perfectly clear how the election is gone. I think that reflects very poorly on the politicians involved. I guess I suspect the party won’t really pay a long term price for that. But I think that it’s indicative of a problem that isn’t going away, a sense of who the party’s voters are and what they want, that is going to distort the way that Republican politicians approach their jobs for some time to come. And, you know, it just speaks poorly of them. I mean, I just think they need to be better than this. It’s it’s that simple.
S1: Yuval Levin is a scholar. At AEI, he is the author of A Time to Build from family and Community to Congress and the Campus How Recommitting to our Institutions Can Revive the American Dream. Uvalde. Thanks so much. Thank you very much.
S2: And now the spiel, two weeks ago, Jared Polis, the governor of Colorado, spoke to his state about travel and family gatherings during Thanksgiving, he urged caution, spoke about efforts to combat the coronavirus and illustrated in a vivid metaphor why it’s crucial to heed precautions. The more likely it is that you’re not bringing a loaded pistol for grandma’s head, like I said, vivid, so vivid that it’s not just the lead quote in this particular piece of journalism, but in a takeout section of The New York Times in which their tech columnist, Farhad Manjoo, grappled with the question of how to spend Thanksgiving using qualitative and quantitative reasoning, Manjoo demonstrated that his small covid circle was actually bigger than he thought, and yours and mine could be two. He discussed his efforts as an amateur contact tracer and brought to light details that brought home how truly isolated we all are, even if we think we’re playing it safe. But then his essay turned to the personal. As I said, it was framed as an exercise in the Manju family and a personal decision. So here’s how he wrote about what should be, I would say, the prudent choice to spend Thanksgiving in quarantine, quote, but I can’t do it even after I’ve mapped my bubble. The question of whether or not to go still feels in the end like a gut call ruled more by emotion than empirical data. So I acknowledge it was a qualitative and quantitative exercise. And Farhod did examine the risks. He learned about the risks and then he announced he was taking the risk, which to me is not the decision I would make. I can prove it. Thanksgiving at the Pascoe’s will be four of us in a home that we’ve barely left. From a public health perspective, it’s also not the decision you really want most people to make. But I’ll tell you what kind of decision it is. It’s a human decision. I took the article to say that even if Farhad Manjoo, Teche Times columnist who did all the research, still wants to visit his parents, then that stands for millions of choices made by millions of people throughout the country. And it’s not just that they’re all ignorant or in denial or callous, but they all and I could prove this. They’re all human. Many readers disagreed with that assessment on Twitter, yanno. Twitter Farhod was alleged to have been, quote, a terrible person, a murderer, a disgrace to journalism, mind blowing, dangerous, a reprehensible, selfish prick and quote, actually evil. And that was just by the in-laws who he wasn’t visiting. I joke it was by readers, many, many readers, several of them journalists. They seem to be echoing gov policies, warnings from that same grandma and the gun pressor not to play Russian roulette over over Thanksgiving.
S3: You wouldn’t do it with a gun and you shouldn’t do it with a virus within Slate.
S4: The Farhad Manjoo column was cause of a, let us say, spirited conversation, which broke out and broke down between those who thought that this was the conclusion a columnist came to, and therefore the columnist should write it down and maybe argue it. So maybe you could identify or disagree with it, i.e. what happened. But there were those who also thought it was Farhad Manjoo issuing a death sentence to some people. And then me give you some background to some people at Slate, mostly older members who may have worked with him when he was at Slate. Farhad Manjoo is a beloved colleague to newer Slate employees. He is a murderer. One keystroke at a time. To be fair, there is a strain of Slate staffer whose orientation isn’t leftist versus liberal or socialist versus progressive. They’re just simply Antine, New York Times. That is their orientation. And the fact that this was published in The New York Times took on extra salience as if the paper that wasn’t able to stop Trump or stop Collins or stop Amazon from leaving Queens or stop Rudy Giuliani from beating David Dinkins or stop Michael Bloomberg from beating Mark Green or get either Klobuchar or Warren or both, maybe at the same time the Democratic nomination, as if that paper was able to kill people at a word. This mistakes, I believe, the power of a columnist’s thoughts to penetrate a reader’s mind and wrestle the reader’s own free will to the ground.
S2: But it also mistakes risk the mass traveling through airports to indoor settings where unmasked people will not be distancing this Thanksgiving. That will certainly cost lives, but it’s very hard to connect any one event to a transmission of the virus. We want it in a way to be easier. We on it not to happen, but it’s much more clear and in a way satisfying to us when there is a one to one correlation. People act recklessly and public people get coronavirus. What do you expect? We look at the terribly irresponsible behavior at the Lake of the Ozarks and we just expect it to be a super spreader event. But that was not we can’t believe the state of Wisconsin allowed in-person voting during their primary. And much was made about the few dozen voters who participated that day and did get covid. But as I pointed out on the show, to perhaps a tedious degree, it’s very hard to directly link transmission. And furthermore, it’s not the case that a spike among in-person voting was bigger than the spike among the state as a whole in the name of consistency or accuracy. I have pointed out times that the media has, I thought, gone too far with pointing a finger. Like when Trump’s rallies were called super spreader events, I got pushback from listeners who would point to a few known cases of Koven being transmitted at a Trump rally. Rallies were stupid. They weren’t great. People shouldn’t have gone if they wanted to avoid covid, but they weren’t. Technically speaking, there’s no real definition, but I don’t think they’re what an epidemiologist would call a super spreader event. None of them were some people who went died, but maybe they would have died anyway. Maybe they would have gotten the virus anyway. Maybe the virus was spreading in counties next to Trump rallies and counties far away from Trump rallies at the exact same time that they were spreading in Trump rallies. I looked at all the numbers. I presented it on a show, just not as clear a correlation, not as clear a cause and effect as may be satisfying. Then again, and this is what’s extra confounding. A few of these events really are like that biker rally in Sturgis. It really seems to have been exactly what we warned about and worried about the super spreader. It won’t change anyone’s mind to point out that there is an attraction to mass shaming, as what people did to Farhod after his column, because there’s a counterargument at the ready, which is that, well, when you engage in irresponsibility, it should be ashamed. I actually think of the action a few hours drive to visit grandparents outside as not so dire as to deserve the shaming. Perhaps you look at it differently. I think at some point we’re talking about facts and not interpretations. And I think that perhaps this event is not as dangerous as you may think it is. If you are so up in arms about Farad’s column and think he’s a terrible person and actually evil.
S4: But I also say that driving the vitriol is this the fact that we might intellectually know that Farhad Manjoo is a person, but really to almost all of us, he’s a character. I mean, if you know a person from columns and tweets, it’s not exactly real. They’re a representation of the real. And it’s impossible to have the kind of forbearance and understanding with a character as you would a person. I know Farhod. He’s a person to me. So when I think of him, he’s different from when you think of him. Maybe if you don’t know him, if you just a guy who writes for The New York Times, even if you’ve liked his writing over the years. I know and I say all this for another reason. It also has to do with Slate, a colleague at Slate, a colleague known to many who are arguing most adamantly against Farhod choice. This colleague made the same choice. He went to visit family for Thanksgiving because this person is also a human and he knew it was risky.
S2: But for a variety of human reasons, he wanted to do Thanksgiving with his family. There was no vitriol towards him. There was no shaming because this was a real person who we think about and hopefully one day will again interact with in person. And we have more forgiveness for him with a column. This character, there’s no reason there’s no benefits to having this forgiveness. Who are we demonstrating this forgiveness to? You know, there’s the outlet that we have to interact with. Farhod is public. It’s Twitter. And this would lend itself to, I would say, outsized instances of condemnation as opposed to. Yeah, I get it, man. There’s even an aspect to the argument. The New York Times should never have published this that acknowledges that the important thing isn’t that a real person went through these thoughts and had these thoughts. It’s emphasizing that the important thing is that the institution should not publish these thoughts and that the projection of the person which starts off as a real person but becomes this intermediated thing, that projection should not be allowed to influence others. So a column like Farhod can never work for the audience that is most inclined to come down on them hard, because what he really is, is a real person writing from a human perspective, asking for a humane interpretation, admitting his perhaps flawed but human reasoning. But the interpretation wipes away the humanity and attacks the institution. That’s fine. It happens. I understand. I could think of other examples where that would be the right response. You know, I’m a columnist and I write a column called Why I Own an AR 15 and insist on keeping it loaded and unlocked within reach of my five year old. Yes, I’d be appalled. My column should not be written or unprotected. Sex is a human impulse despite my STDs. Yeah, that one’s really inappropriate, even if a human wrote it. But if someone told you, you know, I’ve been quarantining this whole time, there was one time a few months ago when me and the kids got in a car and we drove a few hours and we saw my parents outside in the yard. And then we came back and we made sure to get a test beforehand and quarantine afterwards. Someone told that to you, someone that you’d know. Do you think you’d lose your mind? I mean, if they told it to you personally, you probably. But what if they set it in public, maybe you’d be angrier. But I also think if the word Thanksgiving were attached to that decision that I just described, it would be more triggering. Still, we all take risks. And this Farhod risk, it’s one I would advise against, but if taken, it should be mitigated. Colorado Governor Jared Polis actually agrees with that. In that gun to grandma’s head quote that I played, he wasn’t actually fully saying do not go. He was saying be as safe as you can if you do go. Here is the fuller version of that quote.
S3: The more family members that make that decision to self quarantine, the more likely it is that you’re not bringing a loaded pistol for grandma’s head.
S2: And by the way, it’s not actually or anything close to the risk of a gun trained on grandma. It’s not even aiming a bow and arrow at your bubbe. It’s balancing risks. But also, I would think I would hope acknowledging life and the stakes of the Corona pandemic are high, but not so high that we should rethink the philosophy that when another person makes a choice that we don’t agree with, compassion is usually more useful than condemnation. And that’s it for Today Show, Margaret Kelly produces the gist, she wanted to brand remembrances of things Trump with the alternative translation of that Marcel Proust work in search of lost time with Baradi. Laurie Galata produced the gist today. She suggested for that segment, Dumb Man Does Dumb Stuff, a Donald Trump retrospective. Alicia Montgomery is executive producer of Slate podcasts, which is why she very much wants us to recall the time he called Thailand Thailand. But I don’t know if that rises past the level of garden variety doping is the gist. Oh, and for the record, today’s pardoning went like this. The turkey named Corn was officially pardoned. His associate, Cobh, got off with time served. And Roger Cohen will get an afternoon time slot on the Sinclair Broadcast Network, Perugia, Peru. And thanks for listening.
