Will Saletan: Israel's 9/11

Welcome to the Bulwark Podcast. I'm Charlie Sykes.
It is October 9th, 2023, and once again, we find the world at war. These are the hard mornings, I think, to do programs like this, because the horror and the heartbreak is just so much.
I mean, watching the images coming out of Israel,

but also trying to get your head around what it means for the world. The attacks on 10-7 Israel were that nation's 9-11.
The shock, the horror, the elimination of any sort of complacency we had that the world was a comprehensible place. And as I wrote my morning shots this morning, 20 years ago, George W.
Bush talked about the axis of evil. And back then it was Iran, Iraq, and North Korea.
But today, this Monday, we have our own axis of evil. And it is Russia, it is Iran, and it is Hamas.
And to break it all down, including the way the zone is being flooded with disinformation and moral equivalency. We're joined, of course, by my colleague, Will Salatin.
Will, good morning. How are you? Good morning, Charlie.
I wish I had some cute sports talk for today, but with all this tragedy and death. No, real reality.
Yep. No, we might as well dive into it because there is so much.
I mean, I think the anticipation was that we would be talking about, hey, the chaos of the House of Representatives. And this is one of those reminders that, you know, there is a reason why it is a really bad idea to even think about shutting down the U.S.
government right now. It's a terrible idea to be playing political games with the U.S.
military. And what an awful time to be without a Speaker of the House of Representatives.
And by the way, those are like the least important things for us to talk about this morning. So where do you want to start here? Where do you want to start this vicious surprise attack by Hamas, which is going to lead to an absolutely righteous but terrible response from Israel? What do you think? I think Americans have trouble grappling with the magnitude of this because Israel is a much smaller country, obviously.
So we have about 35 times the population of Israel. And they have, as of this morning, reporting about 700 deaths.
Okay. So that would be, in American terms, that's about eight times the size of 9-11 in terms of proportional to their population.
And that's just the number of deaths. The nature of it is horrific.
Obviously, we into buildings they just had you know a thousand or so hamas they're called fighters they're not really fighters they're you know rapists and murderers they they went into homes they like they murdered people they went to as you saw and i think you reported a music festival that was supposed to be celebrating peace and love right yeah gun people down down. They went in there and just mowed people down.
Right. At least a hundred.
I've seen upwards of 200 reported. They dragged away children, old people, Holocaust survivors.
They targeted civilian populations. So it's a horrific attack, both in its quantity and in the nature of it.
And the way that they are taking videos of some of their worst atrocities, as if to celebrate them blowing up ambulances, you know, naked women in the backs of trucks, the bodies in the backs of trucks, the murder of children, the barbarity of it is overwhelming. But there's also the shock of the incredible failure of intelligence that allowed this to take place.
I mean, Israel has one of the most sophisticated intelligence operations in the world. I mean, so do we.
And yet Hamas pulled this off. And it doesn't detract anything from the barbarism to say that this was sophisticated.
It was a land, sea and air attack. They launched thousands of rockets.
Then they used bulldozers to break through the wall.

They had terrorists with hang gliders landing in securing territory that enabled them to move ahead. It appears to have been incredibly well planned and well orchestrated on a mass scale.
Is it too early to go into the how did this happen? How did this happen to a country that has such a sophisticated understanding of its enemy as Israel? All of the statements from public officials in Israel and the United States are, oh, let's not do second guessing of the intelligence right now. We need to focus on that.
I hear that. But you and I are not subject to that.
This was a massive intel. And it's, as you point out israel is supposed to be like the best country at intelligence the best right right and they have to be they're surrounded by enemies there's constantly plotting against them so it is shocking that they miss this this is i believe more than 2 000 rockets i'm not sure what the eventual number will be yeah the rocket parts by the way, are exactly what Israel tries to prevent from going into Gaza, right? There's a lot of screening of what goes in there.
And they have massive, first of all, they have electronic surveillance, they have human intelligence that was supposed to penetrate this. But to miss all of this, to miss all of the methods, the attack itself, the rocket parts, the hardware that went into this, just shocking, just a shocking failure.
And this Israeli government, part of me is saying, Charlie, let's not get into recriminations. We're a podcast.
We can do that. They had one job.
This was Benjamin Danyadu. This is Likud.
They have one job and it is security and they failed.

Did the incredible division in the country, the political division in the country over the judicial reform, was it a distraction? Did it actually degrade Israel's ability to anticipate and stop this? Do we have any idea? I mean, by the way, that's got to be a big question. Whenever the second guessing starts, that's got to be one of the central questions, don't you think? I don't think so.
In a situation like this, there's a lot of attribution of if only we had done this, if only this hadn't been the case. I don't believe any of that.
This attack was the 50th anniversary of the Yom Kippur War. Hamas planned this.
They've been building it for a long time. But what exactly precipitated it, imagine that the Saudis already had signed a deal with Israel.
There was already a recognition and all that treaty and all that. They would have done it anyway.
Absolutely. They did it when they could, and they did it on this anniversary.
There's two levels of, I think, intelligence failure here. One is the, how did they not see that they were assembling this attack? The missiles, the hang gliders, the fighters, all of that.
That's the sort of the hardware version of it. The software version of it is the larger intelligence failure, the really fundamental misunderstanding of Hamas and what Hamas was capable of doing and what Iran was capable of doing.
There's a lot of naivete. I think some belief that, well, Hamas may have been a terrorist organization, but they wouldn't do this.
Iran, we can actually negotiate with them. We can do and we're going to get to the whole Biden administration and the spin on that, the deal they just cut with Iran.
But it strikes me as kind of a fundamental misunderstanding of the nature, the nature of our existing axis of evil, I guess. What do you think? Some of the background for this was that Israel thought that Hamas was not going to do something like this because Israel was trying to be, look, Charlie, there's no way for us to talk about this topic without pissing off a bunch of people.
Yeah, fine. I'm down with that.
So for those of you who believe that what Israel is doing in Gaza is unjust and resistance is necessary and all that stuff, sorry.

But what I'm about to say, Israel was trying to be kinder, gentler with people in Gaza.

To be fair about the situation in Gaza, Gaza is a giant hostage situation in which a bunch of militant killers control a territory in which a lot of innocent people live.

And it's very difficult to get to one without accidentally hurting the other.

So one of the things that Israel had done, Israel had just recently allowed a lot more work permits for people in Gaza.

Because economic development, in theory, if you believe in helping the people of Gaza

and trying to encourage them to abandon militancy,

economic development and seeing that there's a better life for them in peace and in cooperation, that was part of the strategy. And so there were something like 15,000 work permits given out.
And the Israeli authorities apparently thought that Gaza was going to be quiet because of that. And that seems to have been a mistaken bet.
And so one of the tragedies coming out of this, Charlie, is that voices inside the Israeli government and in Israel in general, who believe that being nice to Palestinians doesn't work and that you can only show them the fist, those people have gained credibility as a result of this attack. I don't agree with those people, but they've gained credibility.
So just a little bit of background here. Israel withdrew from Gaza more than 15 years ago, right? Right.
But then the decision was made to allow Hamas to participate in the elections, and Hamas won those elections. So in retrospect, huge mistake, miscalculation, thinking that, hey, let's let Hamas act like a regular political party in government, and maybe they won't be bloodthirsty terrorists.
Yeah, and this is a constant frustration for anyone who deals with the issue of Palestine. You have constantly attempts to separate the extremists from the moderates, and very often the moderates just turn out to not be very moderate.
Yeah, like a Fatah, yeah. Shortly after this attack was underway, and it was clear that it was barbaric and awful.
I saw on CNN, supposedly moderate Palestinian politician, Mustafa Bagouti, was being interviewed. And Christiane Amanpour is trying to tee this guy up.
She's saying, of course, Hamas is your enemy. And he's like, no, no, Hamas isn't our enemy.
Israel's our enemy. And I'm like, this is the moderate? Let's dive into this whole Iran situation, because clearly it looks like Iran was funding, arming them.
Hamas saying that Iran was behind a big Wall Street Journal exclusive story this morning, talking about Iran being part of the planning of all of this. The Biden administration just cut a deal with Iran.
And of course, this is becoming now a partisan cudgel. A lot of disinformation, misinformation about the $6 billion in Iranian assets that were unfrozen.
Now, we'll talk about the fact check on that in a moment. But this has been seized on from a political point of view to score political points saying, I mean, there are people like Rick Scott and Tim Scott out there saying that the Biden administration funded this attack.
And I think they're referring to the Iranian money, but also the fact that we've been giving a lot of aid to Gaza as well. So let's sort through all of this.
Bad look for the Biden administration that cut a deal with Iran or for just a lot of totally disingenuous demagoguery by the Republican critics? Where do you come down, Will? Both. Why not both? Okay.
All right. Interesting.
It's not causally related, but it does look terrible. This is the way American politics is sorted out.
Republicans are the anti-Iran party, isolate Iran, right? And Democrats are the, you know, if we make nice with the moderates, we can somehow encourage positive developments. And then this happens, right? And just to be clear, we don't yet have solid intel, although everybody believes that Iran is behind this.
You don't get all those rockets in Gaza without Iran helping. I mean, Hamas is saying Iran did it, but for the sake of this assumption that Iran is deep in all of this.
Right.. Right.
I think we need to make it clear. This $6 billion itself did not finance it, okay? The money, because the money has not yet been released.
Now, the U.S. government says it's only for humanitarian use, but I mean, come on, let's not be naive.
Money is fungible. I give you $6 billion.
You have to spend it on your garden. You're also going to be able to be able to then be able to afford, you know, whatever you want to do.
But I guess to your point, though, this goes back to the the way Israel perhaps uncharacteristically, naively underestimated what Hamas was capable of. Even cutting a deal with Iran seems in retrospect to have been based on assumptions of their moderation or their restraint that have not aged well no no and charlie the six billion dollars was part of a deal to get out how many american hostages like five okay there's now at least 150 hostages i know just got taken and they're inside gaza they're in tunnels they're already apparently supposedly being killed in some of the airstrikes because they're human shields.
So we've multiplied by 30 at least the number of hostages and the 6 billion is out the door. That's why we once said we never negotiated with terrorists.
It's a bad look and it's a bad bet. And again, as in the situation in Gaza, the voices who say we need to be harder, we need to be tougher, we need to be more of

isolating of Iran have gained credibility with this. But by the way, Charlie, it would be so

much better for the people of Gaza if we had better intelligence linking this to Iran, like

clearly, because it would be so much better if the retaliation were focused on Iran.

But that's a wider war, though.

What are you asking for? Okay. Will, where are we going here? All right.
So there are ways to retaliate that are not necessarily about dropping bombs. Yeah.
What I'm really concerned about, Charlie, is we're going, and I don't want to jump ahead of the conversation, but there's going to be the carnage in Gaza like you would not believe. A lot.
And it is absolutely horrific and terrible that innocent people in Gaza are going to pay the price for this. I'm not necessarily saying that Israel is wrong to take a deterrent action.
But even if you believe that Hamas is responsible for what's happening in Gaza, it's terrible for the innocent people there. It is.
But here's also where there's not symmetry. The Israeli military forces are warning the civilian population to evacuate.
They're saying, look, this is what you should do. You should not be in these areas.
This was not something that Hamas did or Israelis. So there is not a moral equivalence between what happened over the weekend and what is about to happen.
What is about to happen is solely the responsibility of Hamas. This is an intentional thing that they did.
They were hoping, they are planning on, as you point out, using civilians as human shields, not just Israeli civilians, but their own civilians. So they are unleashing intentionally this wave of terror on their own people.
Yes, yes. And so it's very important that everybody understands what Hamas's mentality is.
You're not dealing with people like you and me. You're not dealing with people for whom death is tragic and horrible.
I mean, Hamas is a martyr culture. Part of the problem that Israel has is it's surrounded by a lot of these people who believe in martyrdom.
In a normal deterrent situation, Charlie, you or I could say, look, you mess with us, we mess with you, right? You kill us, we kill you. But you kill people in Gaza and Hamas celebrates that.
All the death and destruction, it makes Israel look bad. And if Hamas fighters die, that's martyrdom.
They celebrate, they glorify the violence. That's why what Israel has to do in situations like this, they have to prevent them because once the killing starts, you're just helping the militants and the martyrs.
By the way, we should just mention here because we talked about Israel's policy toward Gaza. Some of the commentary that I'm seeing seems to miss the fact that Israel no longer occupies Gaza, that they withdrew from Gaza.
I think this seems like a relevant point, especially when we're seeing some of the comments, particularly on the left, about Israel being an apartheid state and we need to end the U.S. support for Israeli occupation.
Israel is not occupying Gaza anymore. That's kind of a significant baseline point when we're discussing this.
So yes, Israel doesn't occupy Gaza anymore. Withdrawal was part of an attempt to see if a kinder, gentler approach worked.
But let's not gloss over the massive blockade that's going on, right? That Gaza is completely trapped there. I mean, it's a terrible situation for Israel.
What would we do if we had, you know, a population a quarter of our size sitting on our border and like firing rockets in? I understand this. So we have Hezbollah, who is sitting on another border firing rockets as well.
Mona Charon has a great piece in the Bulwark about all of this with a little bit of the background. And also pointing out, you know, don't try to draw some moral equivalency between what Hamas is doing and what Israel is about to do.
She writes, Hamas calculates that we'll be able to use the imagery and reality of Palestinian grief and suffering to hurt Israel again, and perhaps even to draw Hezbollah, another Iranian proxy, to join the conflict. Hezbollah has about 130,000 missiles in Lebanon and commands 20,000 active fighters along with 20,000 reserves.
On Sunday, there were short exchanges of fire between Israel and Hezbollah, suggesting that they are on a hair trigger already. So there's a real danger that this could escalate and this could spread, particularly as Israel launches, you know, fire and fury on Gaza.
And that is, you know, when I said it's going to be righteous and terrible, I meant, you know, capitalizing. I mean, it will be, I'm not criticizing it, but it will be very, very dramatic.
And so the question is, what will the rest of the world do? What will Iran do? What will Hezbollah do? We just don't know. What will Saudi Arabia say? What does this mean for the future of diplomacy? The fact that so much of the Arab world, Saudi Arabia, Qatar, et cetera, put out statements essentially blaming Israel for all of this.
I mean, this changes everything in terms of diplomacy, right? I mean, for people who thought that we were going to somehow ease into a post-Abraham Accord, Kumbaya world, I'm not seeing it. No, and of course, the point of it was to derail that vision, right? Well, success for anyone who has studied the Middle East or followed the history of the Middle East.
This is how it always happens. There are so many forces.
There are so many people involved who are invested in violence, who are invested in warfare. And even though most, you know, Jews, most Arabs want peace, it's really difficult to do that when a thousand guys can go execute an operation like this and trigger a massive conflagration.
Well, let's talk about some of the reaction over the weekend. I tried to come up with a very incomplete list of the absolute worst takes.
Before we get to those, though, Michael McCall is the chairman of the House Foreign Affairs Committee, and he was on one of the Sunday shows yesterday. This is not one of the worst takes yet, but describing what we know about what happened.
We do know that Iran is behind this. They have financed this every step of the way, and they've trained these terrorists.
This must have been planned for months to strike on the 50th anniversary of Yom Kippur, the war in 1973. And that's very evident.
I'm also concerned about the $6 billion in lifted sanctions that have now gone into Iran. I don't think it played a part in this event, but it certainly could play a part in any future terror activity.
Yeah, I don't know where the money is, Will, but I would think you might want to put a stop on that check. That's just my thought.
It's not a check. It's Iran's money.
Just so everybody knows, like it was moved from like South Korea to Qatar and it was sanctions money. It wasn't our money.
It wasn't taxpayers' money, right? Well, of course, speaking of the worst takes, Republicans almost to a person are citing all of this. And of course, Donald Trump, the former president of the United States, had this to say over the weekend.
Here's a little compilation of some of the things, some of his comments. The war happened for two reasons.
The United States is giving and gave to Iran $6 billion, $6 billion over, over hostages, over hostages. And what's going on with Israel right now? People were shocked.
I wasn't shocked because two weeks ago we gave us $6 billion. He wasn't shocked?

Oh, fuck that guy.

We're going to hear that $6 billion every minute of every day for the next several months, I'm guessing.

So you and I, Charlie, we exhale carbon dioxide, right? Donald Trump exhales lies.

And this is a really spectacular one, right?

He says two weeks ago, it's actually like four weeks ago, we transferred this six billion.

He lies about what it is.

So that's four weeks ago, right?

Meanwhile, McCall is saying, obviously, this was planned for months, right?

Because it was planned for this 50th anniversary.

So the logistics that went into this with getting the rockets together and everything

took a long time.

So Donald Trump is lying.

He's lying because all he cares about is attributing to Joe Biden and to this transfer of Iran's money the reason for this attack. The attack was going to happen anyway.
There's no causal connection. It just looks bad.
Yeah. Okay.
Among other really, really bad takes, and we can just sort of run through this, Elon Musk actually linked to an account on X that refers to Israel as the Zionist regime, the Jewish terror state. He since deleted that.
Musk recommended this information. He said, you know, go to this site for information on the Israeli attack.
It's an anti-Semitic account with a history of spreading disinformation. Wonderful.
Don Jr., this is one of my favorite tweets. Don Jr.
used the incident to display his own inveterate ignorance once again. He actually put out, how is it possible that I've seen more videos out of the sworn Israel in a few hours than I've seen in Ukraine in almost two years? I don't know, maybe because you've had your head up your ass for two years, because you've been too busy kissing Vladimir Putin's butt to notice what's going on in Ukraine? I regret to tell you that Lawrence Tribe, a progressive law professor from Harvard who we have quoted many times, also in a since-deleted post, put out, is Netanyahu wagging the dog of war to get attention away from his own war in the independent judiciary? J.D.
Vance, of course, blames America first. By the way, this is a new thing among Republicans, blaming America first.
We did it. We paid for it.
J.D. Vance says, as we watch this horrible situation in Israel unfold, Americans must face a stark truth.
Our tax dollars funded this. Bullshit.
The Democratic Socialists of America, if you follow this one. Oh, God.
they're having a rally in support of Palestine. And this Democratic congressman named Richie Torres really went on a torrent this weekend, attacking the Democratic Socialists and his colleagues from the squad for attacking Israel or blaming Israel.
I don't know what Richie Torres' story is, but he is really outspoken. He said, the New York City DSA, Democratic Socialists of America, is planning to hold a rally tomorrow glorifying the terrorism of Hamas as resistance.
And then he just walks through how awful that is. So just a reminder, there is an element of the left that has been consistently anti-Israel and will blame Israel for anything.
let me pull back from whether this is right or left and just draw a general argument what happens in politics is we tend to sort of find people who agree with us and then we form like-minded silos right and we have our issues there's your issues and there's our issues like ukraine if you're on the right now ukraine is your issue you lefties right but israel is our issue right so yeah don't care about Ukraine do care you're on the right now, Ukraine is your issue, you lefties, right? But Israel is our issue, right? So don't care about Ukraine, do care about Israel. Or I care about the Palestinian cause.
And so even on a day when a bunch of Hamas terrorists went and murdered a bunch of Jews, I'm going to like talk about Palestinian rights. Read the room, read the situation, okay? Like, and just to turn things around for a little bit, about 30 years ago, a Jewish settler went in and murdered like 30 Muslims who were like praying in Israel, right? That would have been a really bad day for me to talk about, you know, the importance of defending Israel against extremists, right? So folks, I appreciate all the concern about Palestinian causes.
Today is not the day for that. It's going to be really bad in the next couple of weeks as Israel goes into Gaza.
And by the way, Charlie, this applies to us too, right? For those people who believe in Israel's right to defend itself and who recognize the threats to Israel, we mustn't lose our souls and we mustn't lose our perspective. And just because it is true that Hamas uses human shields does not mean that Israel should go into Gaza with no regard for civilian casualties as a result of its operations.
Okay, here's a strange one. Here's a strange reaction.
Mike Pence, who, in case you forgot, is actually still in the race for president, Donald Trump's former vice president. Remember Mike Pence? who occasionally says things that you go, hey, that's wonderful.
He had this to say in reaction to the attack on Israel this week. And listen to this.
I also believe this is what happens when we have leading voices like Donald Trump, Vivek Ramaswamy, and Ron DeSantis signaling retreat from America's role as leader of the free world. Oh, I really want to agree and applaud that.
All of my instincts, I have to say, I mean, they're all up there going, but then I go, wait, wait, wait. If we accept the argument that this has been planned for a long time and it's hard to get into Hamas, I don't think that Hamas launched this because of anything that Ron DeSantis or Vivek Ramaswamy has been doing.
I would be more than willing to blame this on Donald Trump, but I'm not totally seeing this. And I thought it was interesting that Mike Pence, who's basically been handed this high lob to do what he does so well, which is just attack Democrats, that he decided to turn this on his fellow Republicans.
The whole thing was puzzling me. What do you think? Can I applaud Mike Pence here? I mean, I've been enjoying Mike Pence ever since several weeks ago.
He gave a speech about populism versus conservatism. I mean, it was great.
Wonderful speech. Pence has been in the process.
I know everybody. There are a lot of Bulwark readers and listeners who like this spies Mike Pence.
He stood next to Donald Trump. It's all true.
But recently, Mike Pence has been on a start to express the truth tour. And so he's been acknowledging a lot of the stuff.
He's right. But he had to take a partisan political shot.
I guess I'm trying to have something of a consistent standard here, is that if your first reaction is to say, how can I score a political opponent against somebody that I'm running against? It's like a little cringy, right? Well, he's right though. He's right that these are voices of appeasement.
Charlie, you and I were just discussing Ukraine, Israel, and the Republicans have decided we don't care about Ukraine, but we do care about Israel. No, Pence is saying, I'm consistent.
You may disagree with me. I may be wrong, but I am a consistent hawk.
I believe in a strong American foreign policy and a strong American involvement in Israel and in Ukraine. And these guys like J.D.
Vance can't talk soft about Ukraine and then suddenly pose as hawks when it comes to Israel. That's going to be very interesting because the whole J.D.
Vance line is that any money you spend on any country fighting for its own freedom is somehow coming out of American taxpayers' pockets and is bad for America, right? That's the whole America, America first. So you're right.
At some point, I think we do have to have a vigorous discussion about you cannot say that it is wrong for us to support Ukraine and then pivot and say that we are a reliable ally of Israel,

that if you have basically signaled

we're withdrawing from the world

and we will let the big fish swallow the small fish

because it's not our problem,

then what message are you sending to Israel

and to any other country that might fight for it?

So I agree with that.

I just, I'm trying to figure out Mike Pence's psychology. It's like Mike Pence woke up.
He says, I'm going to run for president. I'm going to stand for these values.
And then the next day, of course, it'll be something different. But okay.
But sometimes deeply flawed people make deeply true arguments, right? And that's just the way it is, right? So just because we don't like Mike Pence and because Mike Pence was a weasel for four or five years, right?

So he's expressing Reagan conservatism.

That is a legit point of view that ought to be heard here. Can I say one more thing here to undercut all of this causal analysis? Because I think it's all bullshit.
I just think Hamas was going to do this anyway because they wanted to undermine peace, right? Yeah. The complaints that any kind of softness in the United States joe biden you know with the money to iran or appeasement among the republican elite right affected what happened here in israel they ignored the obvious truth that israelis themselves elected a parliament that installed a look right-wing lakud government the government of israel is a right-wing hawkish government.
Don't tell me that Hamas looked at what was going on in the United States and said, you know, oh, you know, they're soft, so we're going to attack Israel, when Israel itself was electing a hawkish government. Hawkishness failed here.
It failed. All right, so among the weird things that we're talking about today is the fact that all of this is taking place.
The world is obviously a very, very dangerous place. And the United States Congress appears to be absolutely paralyzed because I am not an expert in the operations of the House, but much smarter people tell me that unless there's a speaker to the House of Representatives pretty much is out of business.
They can't do anything. There's also a thing called the Gang of Eight, which are the top congressional leaders who are always briefed during a time of national crisis or global crisis.
It's not clear whether or not the acting speaker should be included. We don't know what's going on with the House.
The House can't really pass any legislation. It cannot do anything until it has it as a speaker.
And who knows what's going to happen. So there was a lot of wish casting over the weekend, a lot of fan fiction.
There was the fan fiction, hey, maybe there's going to be a consensus speaker. Maybe Republicans will vote for a Democrat.
I don't know. Are you smoking that hopium? No.
Okay. I mean, this is like, it's one thing to find the pony in the pile.
It's another thing to be smoking the, hey, maybe I will date, maybe I'm going to be dating Taylor Swift and maybe Republicans will vote for Hakeem Jeffries. The other, though, wishful thinking, there are moderate Republicans who are saying, look, this is an emergency.
We need to bring back Kevin McCarthy, which strikes me as also unlikely. However, this does change the dynamic because this is not like everybody's prepared to sit back and eat some popcorn and watch Jim Jordan and Steve Scalise piss on each other and maneuver and go back and forth and try to come up with 218 votes.
Now the cost for, you know, watching the Jackal Caucus play games with Congress seems to have been raised. So what's going to happen with the speaker's election this week? It's going to be Scalise or Jordan.
I don't think there's any other possibility. McHenry, I'm telling you.
McHenry would actually be better than either of them by a large margin, which probably means it won't happen, right? Almost guarantees it. Charlie, every time, every time I have tried to make predictions about what is going to go on in the Republican Party based on rationality, I have been wrong.
So they won't do the rational. I am not judging.
Look at me. But on this question of like, how much does our chaos affect things in the chaos in the House? I think not much.
Oh, I don't know. Going forward.
OK. In terms of the things that the House has to do, like budgeting, right? Keep the government open.
Yes, yes. Keeping the government open, I fully agree, right? The House can take that down.
And they will take that down in November, I think. But in terms of responding to a situation like Israel, I think the House of Representatives was already kind of irrelevant.
I mean, there's a gang of eight and they do need to be brief. But it wasn't like Kevin McCarthy was running a tight ship in terms of everybody being together and here's where the United...
That's true. And I think there's some denial about that.
So I think there was already chaos and now there's more chaos, but yeah, I don't think it affects the foreign policy situation. Where did you come down on this debate about what Democrats should have done? I know it feels like ancient history now.
That was like less than a week ago, right? I mean, that was, it feels like another lifetime ago. But you had the Gates caucus, the crazed, slavering, jackal caucus, and then the Democrats went along with it.
Now, I think it's crazy to think that they should have bailed Kevin McCarthy out, but there are others who think that, no, they should have been the grownups. They should have done the statesman-like thing.
Well, what should Democrats have done? I think the House Republican conference is unsalvageable. I think it can't run the House, so I don't think that voting to keep McCarthy there was going to solve the problem.
I mean, Kevin McCarthy was, he was bankrupt in terms of he had made so many promises to so many people that he couldn't keep. McCarthy is a weasel, So his promises were contradictory.
He told Biden he would do things. He told the right.
He was not sustainable. So I don't think there's anything Democrats could have done.
Part of me, sort of the nicer version of me, look, Charlie, we at the Bulwark believe in institutions and we should try to uphold the institutions even when the other side is trying to tear them down. But I don't think it was salvageable in this case.
And I think that by going with Gates and taking down the speech, which is what normally you would do. We Democrats support Hakeem Jeffries.
If you want unity, vote for our guy. If you want your guy, we're going to vote against him.
That's a perfectly reasonable position to take. And if you can't get enough Republicans together to keep your guy in power, then you shouldn't have had him there in the first place.
Yeah. And also, it was not a vote for the institution because that would have really defined deviancy down to think that Kevin McCarthy somehow became this pillar of the institution.
No, it does not actually work that way at all. OK, so this fight between Scalise and Jordan is interesting.
And we were know, we were talking about Mike Pence saying unusual things. You know, remember when Ken Buck was kind of a Tea Party, fire-breathing, right-wing congressman from Colorado? He still is, kind of.
But he says some awfully interesting things. So he was on one of the shows yesterday talking about Jim Jordan and Kevin McCarthy and everything that was going on.
and I thought he made a highly relevant point. This guy is way to the right.
I would say he's right. Well, I won't say way to the right of the median of the House Republican caucus, since that's pretty far right.
But, I mean, Ken Buck's never been considered a rhino before, right? Right. Except he's obviously kind of fed up with the jackal caucus a little bit this is ken buck yesterday morning jim jordan and steve scalise voted to decertify the electors i don't know that it's going to be a very big factor at all i think the factor uh george is that we continue to perpetuate a lie about the 2020 election being stolen that we talk about the january 6th events as an unguided tour of the Capitol,

that we are pretending that the people who assaulted police officers and destroyed federal government property are political prisoners. Yeah, so he seems to be thinking, yeah, our larger problem is that we've crazified our party.
Know what I'm saying? Yeah, right. And Charlie, I love it when extreme right-wingers say stuff like this, because look, I can disagree with them on policy, but there's a shared reality.
Things are true or false, right? The election was not stolen, right? January 6th was an insurrection. Those are not political prisoners.
What Buck is doing is validating in a way that I never could. You never could, right? He's a very hard right guy who is just telling the truth.
So he can communicate with conservative Americans, including some people who are sympathetic to Donald Trump, and just say, the sky is blue. The election wasn't stolen.
Right. So he's validating that.

I think that's important.

He adds in there. He says Scalise is not really any better than Jordan because Scalise and like Jordan voted to decertify the electors on January 6th.
That's an important point because we've lost some perspective about how, as you put it, crazified the Republican Party has become. that we think that because Scalise isn't as bad as Jordan,

that Scalise would be a sort of moderate speaker? He would not be. In one respect, there is a distinction between the two.
And it's not that Scalise is better, it's that Jim Jordan is exponentially worse. It'll be interesting to see whether or not it's relevant to the House conference, that Jim Jordan was very much a conspirator on January 6th, that he is knee deep, that he's not just one of the guys that voted against certification.
I mean, he's got his fingers in it. He defied the subpoena.
There's a very, very detailed piece by David Korn over in Mother Jones. I mean, think about how weird the world is that I'm citing Mother Jones.
But David Corn is a very good reporter and he lays out all the ways in which Jim Jordan was a co-conspirator in what many of us regard as an attempt to overthrow the U.S. government and overturn the election.
Now, maybe that won't matter, but what a statement it will make for House Republicans to nominate somebody who was that active in trying to throw out tens of millions of votes. I just think it's going to be extraordinary.
Who really was complicit in this violent attack on the U.S. Capitol, in which, can I remind people, people died and police officers were assaulted? This was Liz Cheney talking about Jim Jordan.
I think it was on Wednesday. She said, exactly what you said, Charlie, quote, Jim Jordan knew more about what Donald Trump had planned for January 6th than any other member of the House.
If the Republicans decide that Jim Jordan should be the speaker, there would no longer be any way to argue that a group of elected Republicans could be counted on to defend the Constitution. So she's not just pointing out that Jordan was up to his eyeballs in the plot.

She's saying that if other Republicans,

if the House Republican Conference decides

that that man, someone who did that,

should be Speaker,

then the whole Republican Conference

cannot be relied upon.

And she says any Republican.

She is talking about an entire political party,

and she's right.

Well, Jim Jordan has some other baggage as well. And yesterday, Nancy Mace, who by the way, this is where Kevin McCarthy and I actually agree.
Nancy Mace is a whole different story. Try to figure out Nancy Mace.
Nancy Mace, again, is one of these people who they go have good days, and they'll have bad days, and they'll have like, what the hell days. So she was on one of the talk shows yesterday and she's asked about some of the other issues involving Jim Jordan.
I know you've been outspoken about defending victims of sexual assault due to the past allegations against Jim Jordan that he turned a blind eye to sexual abuse. Give you any reservations? Yeah, I'm not familiar or aware with that i he's not indicted on anything that i'm aware of and so i don't i don't know anything and can't speak to that but i will say a very yeah i don't i don't know anything and i i don't know anything about that i don't know anything about that she says two days before she has to decide whether or not he becomes second in line to the president of the United States.
Now, I'm just going on this national program to talk about Jim Jordan, and I don't know. He may become the next speaker of the House of Representatives, but I don't know anything about that.
That's become kind of the go-to dodge. Like, no, I didn't read those tweets.
No, I don't know anything about that. Yeah, yeah.
So I don't have to address your point because I'm ignorant. Yeah.
For people who don't follow this, Jim Jordan was, he was not responsible for this, but there was a, what, a team doctor? I can't remember. At Ohio State, the wrestling team.
And there were a bunch of wrestlers who said they had been groped by the doctor. And so this is a sexual abuse case in which Jim Jordan was told, there was witness testimony that he was told.
Jim Jordan simply denied it. He said they're all lying, right? Now, this is men, not women.
And Nancy Mace poses as a protector of women. And Nancy Mace herself a victim of sexual assault, right? So I'm sympathetic to that.
But if you care about this issue, you can't just care about the women. You care about all the victims of sexual assault.
Jim looked the other way, and then he lied, and he claimed that the victims were lying about what he knew. I forget how many years ago this happened, but it's never too old.
And if he's going to be Speaker, it's going to become an issue again. Absolutely.
This is what blows my mind about politicians. Every time you assume that they're going to behave in a rational manner, well, if you ever assume that, if anyone ever assumes that, they're quickly disabused of all of this because it is a little bit like, you know, the RNC is about to nominate Donald Trump with all of his indictments and the crimes and the impeachments.
And then the House Republicans go, hold my beer. Look who we're going to put in as speaker.
We're going to put in the mini-me Trump, who's

also got this credible allegation of looking the other way of sexual assault. I mean, Jesus Christ.

By the way, can we stop hearing about groomers on the left when we have, I mean, with Denny

Hastert, Jim Jordan. I mean, can you imagine what the record of-

Hey, we're the successor for Denny Hastert. Okay, now that's a great line, right?

Jim Jordan. Yes.
Yeah. You missed Denny Hastert.
Okay, now that's a great line, right? Jim Jordan. Yeah, you missed Denny Hastert? Here's Jim Jordan.
Geez. From the people who brought you Speaker Denny Hastert, here is Speaker Jim Jordan.
What could possibly go wrong? Right? Something like that. Okay, so in the time we have left here, I talked with Tim Miller about this.
I'm trying to figure out what Democrats and the Biden administration are doing with the border. And I understand that that's maybe not the top issue this Monday morning, but I wanted to get your take on all of this.
Because you've had what could be interpreted as changes in direction or vibes involving the building of the wall, changes in policy involving deportation of asylum seekers and illegal immigrants, but also, very notably, very outspoken, leading, very prominent Democrats who are very critical of immigration policy. Now, here is the Democratic Mayor of New York City, Eric Adams, and then I want to play Illinois Governor Pritzker, who is also a very prominent Democrat on this issue.
This is New York Mayor Eric Adams on refugees. We can't have a rule that one can come from anywhere on the globe and come to New York City and remain in New York City as long as they want and taxpayers must pick up the course.
We're also getting pushback from the Democratic governor of Illinois, who also had one was rumored to have some presidential ambitions himself. This is Governor Pritzker.
My family were refugees to this country, too. We ought to welcome them, put them through a process, and if they don't meet the requirements, they should be sent back.
Okay, so Will, I'm just getting a sense that there is more resistance in the Democratic Party now to some of the policies and some of the things that are happening with the border. None of them are, of course, going, you know, the heavy-handed Trump, throw them all out, build the wall, but there's clearly some movement.
What is your diagnosis here? Well, a couple of things. First of all, and this goes back to what we were discussing earlier in the context of Israel and Hamas.
When the sky is blue, acknowledge it. Reality, acknowledge it.
Democrats have not been looking squarely, honestly, at this massive migration crisis that has been coming into the United States and up the Western Hemisphere. Eric Adams is doing that.
Eric Adams, you know, he went to the Darien Gap. He looked at this.
I mean, he's got migrants flowing into New York, migrants coming into Chicago. That's what Pritzker is talking about.
They're simply overwhelmed. The United States is not prepared.
We are not handling this well. We can't have this many people coming in and we can't have them concentrated.
It's chaotic and they're concentrated in a few areas. They're overwhelmed.
They need federal support.

Isn't this what Greg Abbott and Rhonda Sanders are saying, Mr. Salatin?

It is. And Pritzker says, let's spread out the migrants to not just the blue cities.
And he's

right about that, right? That's a cynical operation, but they are distributing it from

these red states because that's where they came in. They came into Texas and Joe Biden and the Democrats cannot say that's Greg Abbott's problem.
We're not going to deal with it. So these Democrats in the North are telling Joe Biden, take this seriously.
And Democrats should take it seriously. We were talking before about issue ownership.
The whole border issue seems to be an issue that a lot of Democrats have decided is a Republican issue.

And we can't talk about it or we can't talk about deportations because that's racist or whatever.

Pritzker is saying, nope, they don't qualify.

You've got to send them back.

Henry Cuellar, Democrat in Texas, is saying the same thing.

You've got to show people. And Charlie, Henry Cuellar has says, you've got to put this on TV.

You've got to show the people in Latin America. We are putting people on planes and we are sending them back.
So these are repercussions. It is an administration of a penalty of you will not get a reward for coming into this country illegally.
I think Democrats need to embrace that message. Does this validate though some of the stunts from Greg Abbott and Rhonda Sanders who are putting migrants on buses saying, look, we are overburdened.
We need to share the pain. And aren't now these Democratic governors and mayors saying, yeah, you know, you're right.
We can't stick them all in Florida. We can't stick them all in Texas.
Well, not Florida, but Texas. Yeah, I would say it does.
It half validates it, right? It validates the part where Abbott says, look, they're all in my state. I need to redistribute them.
Now, where he redistributed them to is a separate question. And part of what Pritzker said is you can't just send them to blue cities.
And Pritzker's right about that. If we're going to house them in other places, it should be in red America too.
But it can't all be in border towns in Texas. We'll have plenty of time to talk about this.
I think it's very interesting the way this has played out. I know that Politico over the weekend had an interesting point that in many ways, the extreme position that Donald Trump and the Republicans have taken gives the Democrats a little bit more flexibility because they can, in fact, move toward the center on the issue of immigration, knowing that however far they move, the Republican position is going to be so much more punitive, so much more extreme.
So, you know, there are areas of doing it, but this issue is not going away anytime soon, however much people would like us not to talk about it. Will, we have a lot of ground to cover over the next several weeks.
We'll talk again next Monday, okay? All right, Charlie. Thanks.
Take care.

And thank you all for listening to today's Bulwark Podcast. I'm Charlie Sykes.

We'll be back tomorrow, and we'll do this all over again.

The Bulwark Podcast is produced by Katie Cooper and engineered and edited by Jason Brown.