Standing Up to Putin and Other Analysis

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Hello, ladies.

Hello, gentlemen.

This is the Victor Davis Hanson Show.

We are recording on Sunday, March 6th, 2022.

I'm Jack Fowler.

The host, the star, and the namesake is Victor Davis-Hansen.

He is the Martin and Ely Anderson Senior Fellow at the Hoover Institution and the Wayne and Marsha Buskie Distinguished Fellow in History at Hillsdale College.

You'll find everything Victor writes at victorhanson.com.

We're going to talk more about that later.

We've got a lot to talk about today, Victor.

On this podcast, much of it will do with the Ukraine war.

And we're going to begin with a piece you've written, an exclusive piece.

We're going to take it out a little bit from behind the paywall at Victor Davis Hanson, VictorHanson.com.

And we're going to learn about the four schools of conservative thought on Ukraine.

And we're going to do that right after this message.

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We're back with the Victor Davis Hansen Show.

Victor, you wrote this piece, two-part series, in the Historian's Corner part of VictorHanson.com, and it's titled Conservatives on Ukraine, Four Views, Both Right and Wrong.

So Victor, would you tell us what these four views are?

And of course, they relate to Ukraine, Russia, Putin.

They analyze pros and cons, overreaches, underestimizations.

Is that even a word?

Underestimations

of various aspects of the conservative movement.

You categorize them and then you analyze them and you come up with some synthesis in the end.

So, Victor, it's a great piece.

You got to subscribe to VictorHansen.com to read it in its entirety, but let's talk about it nonetheless.

Victor, tell us about this two-part piece you've written.

Yeah, let me start with kind of out of order, Jack, and talk about the two

conservative positions, which I don't think the majority of conservatives hold, which I think would be unwise.

The first is the neoconservative nation building.

And I don't know, is that Lynn Cheney, or is it some of the apostate, never Trumpers that still consider themselves Republicans, or this Kinzenser January 6th committee member?

But that position is

sort of what I felt like after 9-11 going into Iraq, which I supported in Afghanistan, but then I sort of thought, no more of this, no more Libya, no more Syria, none of that.

But these guys believe it's our duty to take enormous risk to not only stop Putin, but to bring Ukraine within the fold of the West, regardless of its historic relationship with Russia and the tensions that thereby arise from that.

Specifically, Jack, they want to basically say it can be in NATO at some date.

And they're clear about that.

Number two, they want to come into the EU.

They're clear about that.

They have idolized the Ukrainian government.

I have nothing but praise for Zelensky, but they've overlooked all of the Ukrainian interference with U.S.

domestic politics and corruption, Verisma,

Lieutenant Colonel Benman's offer of being Ministry of Defense in the Ukrainian government.

And they want us to take risk.

So they want a no-fly zone.

That is American fighter pilots will be shooting down Russian.

They will shoot them down.

And that will cause, I don't know what, but it could in theory cause a nuclear standoff.

And so.

That's saber rattling.

And it's very ironic, Jack, because it kind of feeds into the left.

The left, I guess it's because of projection that they have appeased Putin through 2009 reset all the way to Biden, begging him to have oil and everything in between that you and I have talked about so often, the uranium one of dossier, all of that stuff, that they're making up for that appeasement by trying to outdo everybody in their ferocity.

toward Putin, which, you know, I don't have any problem with that, but it's very ironic.

And so these neocon left have kind of joined them that we're going to do it right this time and be a near belligerent.

Then there's the, I guess I called it in the piece, the paleo

Putinites.

And these are a small fraction.

There's some people on Fox, a guest and host that get a little bit there,

but

they point out a lot of good reasons why we're in this jam.

And they said, you know what?

After the fall of the Berlin Wall and the end of the Cold War, the shambles that Russia was in, they made certain promises for Yeltsin.

And Ukraine gave up their nuclear weapons.

And in exchange, there was a deal that it would kind of follow the Finland-Austria path after World War II.

That was the model, that it would not be a member of NATO, but it would not be.

part of the Russian Federation.

It would be an independent country, but it would be non-aligned and therefore serve as a buffer state in the manner that the Eastern European Warsaw Pact countries used to be, but now had been firmly aligned with the West and no longer were.

So that was the deal.

And then in this view, Victoria Newland and people in the State Department in 2013 and 14 deliberately overturned that with a wink and a nod.

They said that Ukraine should be Western.

They helped get rid of the Russian puppet government.

And we go into the Ukrainian-American interference with each other's internal policies.

And the point of all that is, we pretty much told the Ukrainians, without backing that rhetoric up with deterrence, that you are now a European country and eventually you'll be an EU and NATO member.

And how do you like that, Russia?

And this is a place, as we've talked before, where 5 million people were killed in World War II.

That is legitimate, but they went the next step, Jack, in saying, therefore, Putin had righteous reasons to go in and do what he's doing.

And that's not true at all.

That's like saying,

well, Chamberlain and Stanley Baldwin for five years appeased Hitler, so he had a right to go into the Sudetenland where there were German speakers and this irredentist type project.

No, no.

Once he goes into somewhere and he starts killing a lot of people, it doesn't matter all of the blunders that brought him there other than to learn from them.

What matters is getting him out with the least amount of deaths.

So I think some people, in their anger at the hypocrisy of the left

and the naivete of the bipartisan Washington establishment that both demonized Putin, but empowered him and angered him, that they are responsible, therefore, for Putin being there rather than Putin being responsible.

So I kind of rejected those two.

The other two I tried to fuse.

One was the American first.

We have to look at everything through the lenses of what is in the United States' interest and what's realist.

Another view, the realist conservatives.

And that is, it's very nice to talk about democracy, but until human nature changes and evolves, people react to certain ancient laws of deterrence.

Prepare for war if you want peace, balance of power, alliances, etc.

When you fuse those two together, I think it comes out to the mainstream Republican or conservative policy toward Putin.

That is, we're not going to have NATO pilots inside Ukraine.

We're not going to try to kill anybody in the sense of assassination.

We're not going to give them warthog planes so they can stop that convoy.

We are going to

push more weapons through the pipelines for them.

And we're having a great debate that's the left, unfortunately, is very hypocritical about pumping more energy to collapse the world price and deny Putin the $1 billion a day, petrodollars that he's using that fuels this war.

And we feel that if we were successful and we give this encouragement to Ukraine,

China is watching, Iran is watching, and they will kind of suggest to themselves: wait a minute, what should have been a two-day victory

might suggest there's other things at work, i.e.,

the West does fight.

It's not completely dead.

Two,

these javelins and advanced stingers are sort of something we hadn't anticipated on.

They are a quantitative, a game-changing development in the challenge, counter-challenge response of defense and offense.

The Ukrainians

are a model to everybody.

And therefore, maybe the Taiwanese will fight like the Ukrainians.

Maybe they can have airlifted, air-dropped javelins in there.

They have a wider sea, et cetera, et cetera.

Whereas in the past, Jack, people said, oh my God, he's going to take Ukraine in two days.

It's got 40 million people.

Little old Taiwan's only got 26.

Ukraine is almost 20 times bigger than Taiwan.

Can you imagine if the decrepit Russian army crushes Ukraine in two days, what huge China will do to that little speck in the Pacific?

They'll just obliterate it.

And we have nothing, we just can't do anything.

And now, all of a sudden, Zelensky, who seems to be not afraid of catching a bullet, and Putin's afraid of catching a bug, apparently, the way he's at a table when he doesn't have anybody around him, it's changed everything.

And that's where I think Republicans are realist and American interests first, and they're not incompatible.

Victor, I just, since most people won't be able to read this, again, you should subscribe to VictorHanson.com.

You wrote this, the road to this current disaster goes through the Obama hot mic revelations, the defense cuts, the fear of selling Ukraine offensive weapons, Biden's Afghanistan debacle, energy cutbacks, and the beseeching of Biden for Putin to pump oil for us that we consider too dirty to pump ourselves.

And do not forget the Russian collusion hoax, the Alpha Bank hoax, and the fake steel dossier hoax.

So there's a lot I think that agitates on that paleo-Putin front that clearly agitates.

I don't think it justifies at all, nor does it seem to justify what could be next steps post-Ukraine.

What you mentioned on javelin, the javelin dynamics of tank warfare, if our listeners don't already know or haven't already heard, you and Sammy Wink recorded a podcast this weekend called Tanks in Ukraine and in history.

And it's a great reflection on on tanks and history, but you do talk at great length about this back and forth between anti-tank missiles, the javelin in particular, and how it's the anti-tank ascendancy over tanks that seem to have been superior in recent military history.

So I want to recommend our listeners to catch that and your thoughts on that.

Well, Victor, let's move on.

Still related to things Ukraine.

And pretty simple.

You know, Lindsey Graham.

Senator Lindsey Graham called for the assassination of Putin.

I'm sure that thought's on millions of people's mind.

Would he just drop dead, go away?

Someone put a bullet in his head.

But for a United States Senator to say that, I don't know, kind of

thoughts out loud that may not have been worthwhile, may have complicates situations.

Victor, not to pick on Graham, but pick on him if you want.

But those kind of thoughts stated in public, do you see them hurting or not hurting?

the current situation.

Oh, I don't think they make it any better.

I don't know how much they hurt it, but the U.S.

pretense is always that we don't engage in assassinations.

Now, look, we have, but every time we have, whether it was taking out an ally that we sort of allowed happen Diem in Vietnam, or all of those bizarre plots against Castro exploding cigars, remember all that stuff?

They were all unearthed in the 1976 Church Intelligence Special Committee on Intelligence when they went after the FBI, the CIA, and National Security Aid, all of that stuff.

And it didn't make good reading.

I mean,

it doesn't seem like a good idea.

And then, of course, the day before, the two days before we went into Iraq, remember George W.

Bush had got supposedly reliable intelligence where Saddam Hussein was, and they had a guided bomb go in and try to blow him up.

But instead, he deliberately given the shelter maybe of anti-Saddam people who were sheltering, and we got them all killed instead.

That was pretty controversial.

So I know we assassinate people with drones now, and I don't know what he means, but he was talking about encouraging, I think he's Stauffenberg or some type of Brutus internal coup.

The problem with it is, is that.

Zelensky has a lot of legitimacy now because this is an indigenous, innate, homegrown Ukrainian resistance.

And he's going to win if he gets enough supplies.

I know that the experts doesn't think he is, but I think he will.

All that credit will go to him.

And we don't want to go in there and fight his war for him or arrange a coup.

Putin is actually more valuable to the West as weakened and humiliated than he is dead or martyred.

And he's losing every day global credibility, the fear of him.

And there's nothing wrong with allowing that.

to progress.

And more importantly,

I don't know if somebody did take him out, their criticism would be, well, he wasn't democratic.

It might be that he wasn't a tough SOB dictator, that he was incompetent and he got us into, you know, a meat grinder in Ukraine and he turned off the world and we got another general or an oligarch over here, an old commie KGB guy who could do a better job.

And they might not be as, you know, almost 70 years old.

And he looks like somebody's had a...

you know, a big dose of daily steroids as well.

He doesn't look well.

He looks moon-faced and flabby.

He never did before.

So I'm not sure that it would be wise to encourage that either morally, ethically, or realistically, diplomatically, strategically, whatever term adverb we use.

I just don't think it's a good idea.

For the same reasons that you do,

it's something we don't talk about openly.

I mean, sometimes it might be moral to get rid of a Hitler rather than kill a bunch of Germans, but you don't really talk about it.

You just do it.

But

I don't think Lindsey Graham should have said that.

No.

Okay.

We're going to talk about Iran in a minute, but I just move back to the javelins.

Can you find, just outside of incompetence, and maybe that's the only explanation, why didn't we flood Ukraine with javelins and or other supplies needed to combat a Russian army or any army?

I mean, it was.

I didn't know it was coming.

Have you heard anything?

Yes, I've heard all

I've heard all sorts of things.

I get emails from everybody, not everybody.

I don't want to act like anybody really wants to write me, but I've had several people

with apparent informed opinions tell me why.

And they arranged the gamut.

One person wrote and said, Mr.

Hansen, they had anti-tank weaponry that was good enough to knock these columns down from their post-Soviet depots.

They're Soviet weapons.

They're analogous to what the Russians use.

They're perfectly okay.

They had plenty of them.

And they have destroyed the majority of targets and they will continue to do so.

I don't know if that's right or not.

I've had other people who say

they're very expensive.

They're 200,000 plus for the shooter and the shell or the missile is $80,000 to $100,000

and

all of the stocks in the world basically are on their way to Ukraine.

I've had other people say

that

the new, I don't know what you would call it, javelin plus three or whatever they are, are a very different weapon than the initial javelins of the late 90s or early 2000s.

When I was embedded in Iraq, I saw them, some people shooting them as a demonstration.

and a couple of them.

And I thought then in 2007, they were pretty, in six and seven, they were pretty impressive.

But apparently the new ones, Jack, have a range of almost two and a half miles.

They can go up 400 feet in the air and hit a helicopter.

And the initial trigger, triggering, they don't put out a flash or noise, but they have sort of a sub

slow speed initial trajectory that gives the guy shoot and scoop.

So he shoots it.

and then runs away and then there's an afterburner that kicks in.

They have this weird trajectory where they go up and come down on the less armored top of the tank.

So, all of that means they're a lot more expensive and they don't have a lot of the latest kind that would be very valuable.

I've heard that.

And I've also heard that there is no shortage.

They've got plenty of them.

And one of the reasons that that convoy is just sitting there is not because it's too muddy or the tires were rotten or the the soldiers are conscript and starving, but that they have pre-selectedly shot, blown up tanks at the beginning and the back of the column.

And they're sort of boxed in there and they're inert.

I've heard that.

And I've also heard this from political people who have said to me, well, it's just what Obama and Biden have done.

And whatever conservatives want, they do the opposite.

So Biden is just saying, you know, Obama didn't sell them offensive weapons.

Trump did.

So I'm going to do the opposite.

Biden did not want the wall.

He stopped it because Trump did.

And he wanted to go back to the Obama position on every single issue.

Biden's knee-jerk Pavlovian response was just whatever Trump did, I'm doing the opposite.

And I'm getting back to the golden years of Obama when we didn't sell offensive weapons.

And then there's a matter of how many of them.

I've heard 500 to 1,000 they had from the Trump years, and they quickly used them up in one or two days.

But all of this now seems to be dwarfed by the fact that every arsenal in Europe, the Europeans quite boldly, are just emptying their arsenals and they're shipping them to Poland and Romania, Hungary, Slovakia, all these NATO countries, and they're being trucked across the country.

They're having people train Ukrainians in how to use them.

And there's 10 or 12,000 of them that are in transit.

And if that were to be true, along with Stinger missiles, they would have air parity.

And if they have air parity, then

all of those artillery platforms are in danger.

What I'm saying, Jack, is that right now the damage that we're watching

in Kharkiv and Kiev and Odessa and these Maripo, all these cities, they're mostly the result of what has always been a Russian forte since World War II, and that is heavy industrial artillery, 200 millimeters and up, huge artillery shells that can go 25 miles and blow things, the smithereens and next generation Katushka rockets, that kind of stuff.

And they're all around these cities,

and they all depend on one thing, and that is air superiority on the part of the Russian Air Force.

If they were to lose that, either through stingers or we're supposedly going to give Poland, for example, F-15s, and then in exchange, they'll turn over their late model Russian fighters, 30 or so, I guess, or more, to the Ukrainians who know how to fly them, and they have air parity.

Then in theory, they could blow up all of those artillery platforms, or maybe they could do it with drones.

I don't know.

But that's the problem right now.

They're being shelled mercilessly from artillery.

And the Russians are experts at that.

Every time they fight a war, that's how they try to win.

They just plaster the enemy with artillery shell.

Well, Victor, I said we were going to talk next about the Iran deal, but I lied.

We're going to talk about how this war has come to the New York Opera.

And we're going to do that right after this message.

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We're back with the Victor Davis Hansen Show.

We are recording on Sunday, March 6, 2022.

So, Victor, I'm going to title this Russian cancellation, The New York Met, band A diva soprano, Anna Nitrobko, who's, I believe has been singing there for 20 years, from performing because she will not condemn Putin.

There were some academic types also, I'm sure you've heard these stories, who reacted to the attack on Ukraine by banning coursework on Dostoevsky.

So, you know, the blood is up, obviously, but I think there are some lines that need to be drawn.

You may disagree.

In some ways, the anger about this war is righteous and right, the anger against Russia and Putin.

But in other ways, it seems to outpace the hostility we had to the Soviet Union.

And I'm not trying to compare the Soviet Union and Russia.

They're two distinct things, Russia, you know, 2022.

But the Soviet Union was an entity that crushed hundreds of millions of people, murdered millions of people for decades.

But even during the height of the Cold War, America was doing an Apollo-Soyuz program with this nefarious government.

So all that blathered, Victor.

Can a line be drawn when it comes to cultural reaction to Russia at war in Ukraine?

I think your point is a good one.

And that is when we faced a nuclear and far more powerful.

equally nuclear, far more powerful Soviet Union, and they crushed Czechoslovakia and they crushed Hungary and they went into Afghanistan.

Did we kick out every Russian chess player?

Did we cancel the poor little Russian cats, our cat shows did we go after every single thing russian as we did in world war one after germans when we even banned i think in some states the teaching of german in high school yeah i don't see the point of it you remember in world war ii on the eve of max behret the great german boxer who was finally knocked out by joe lewis right but he was anti-hitler after the war he not only was at odds during the war with the nazis he wasn't strong enough enough advocate of anti-Semitism and racism and Nazism,

advocate all the things that Nazis stood for.

But he suffered, but he became a Pepsi, I think it was Pepsi-Cola executive, and he made a lot of money and he helped a lot of people who were victims of Nazism and he helped Joe Lewis.

He was a good guy, but in this Nazi period,

He became the unwilling symbol of Aryan white superiority in boxing, even though he didn't want anything to do with it.

So my point is, what's a person to do?

I mean, not everybody can be a Sarkov or, you know, a dissident, a Russian dissident.

Not everybody can be a social nitsin.

So I don't quite get this idea when you tell all these Russian people all over the world, I don't have a problem with going after the oligarchs.

They're corrupt.

They stole things and they should take their licks if that's what people want to do.

But to go after these Russians and say, you know,

you're associated with Putin and you haven't spoken out.

Well, if they spoke out, maybe if they spoke out, they'd go after their family in Russia.

Right.

Are you trying to tell me that Putin's not capable of that?

Of course he's capable.

Of course he has.

He arrested an American basketball player, a black woman, the other day.

So you know what he's capable of.

So I agree with you.

I want to be very careful after giving everybody advice not to say anything close to criticizing the anger at Putin.

But what the left is doing with all of this is they are transmogrifying this thug who's ahead of an autocratic nation trying to destroy, if not absorb, a former republic into some kind of avatar totem maybe of whiteness or anti-woke or when Putin has given lectures about we don't have transgenderism here, we're not ashamed of our past.

People on the internet have shown Putin's recruiting commercials versus ours for military service.

So the left has constructed Putin into this domestic enemy, as I said, the gap tooth tattooed evil guy on Hollywood, the Russian TV, Russian Today guy who's a spokesman, propaganda, Baghdad, Bob type.

And they've just gone full blast.

And that's okay, but I don't quite understand

the disequilibrium, the asymmetry with China, for example, just to take Iran.

While they're doing this, they are asking the Russians to broker a

deal with Iran, A, so Biden before the midterms can say, I got the RAN deal back.

They're not going to get a nuke when he knows they are.

It's even worse than the original deal.

And he wants Iranian oil on the market so he can say to everybody, I got gas prices down before the midterm.

So, Russians are doing that, and they're not saying anything about that or the Iranians or anything.

And I just don't understand why all of a sudden, Russians, the Russian people, I'm not talking about Putin.

And we saw this, Jack, with the Russian collusion hoax, the Alpha Bank hoax, the Steele dossier hoax, this demonization of Russians as sort of white racist, white right-wing, non-woke people that we're going to hate collectively in a way that we don't do to the Chinese.

I guess because the Chinese still claim they're commies or they're marginalized people that aren't white, I don't understand, or they've got a better and a more effective propaganda.

But after all,

China slaughtered thousands when they absorbed Tibet.

They just absorbed Hong Kong.

They've got a million people in

concentration camps.

They harvest organs.

They do horrible things.

And we don't apply that same standard to them.

So I don't know what the left is up to with this Russian under every bed paranoia, especially during the Cold War.

You know, they were telling us, we're rooting for Kasparov.

We don't like Bobby Fisher.

We need Dante detente, all that stuff.

But they have connected this

with a domestic anti-Trump.

Putin is like Trump.

They're both white supremacists.

They're both right wing.

Therefore, every Russian is evil.

I think half the country in Russia probably doesn't like what Russia is doing.

And they can't say anything.

But if he wins, of course, they'll all say it was wonderful.

But for now, I don't get it.

I really don't.

But I see it everywhere.

Well, Victor, you conveniently brought up the Iran deal, and you stated one of the explanations for why the Biden administration is working with the Russians is that there is some political benefit to it.

We got a deal.

That's what you said.

As if this will persuade Americans, the majority of whom thinks he's incompetent and leading America in the wrong direction, etc.

How resuscitating and making even worse a deal that was already politically unpopular and seeing it as a political benefit for November, I don't get that.

Yeah, I'm trying to figure out what's behind this sudden leftist fur.

It's almost warlike, you know what I mean?

And hatred.

And, you know, if we're going to be analytical about it, we could think of three or four probable reasons, Jack.

One is that they are guilty that they have appeased him.

And I'm talking about real appeasement.

It was Hillary Clinton that hit the right reset button.

It was Hillary Clinton that oversaw the transfer of uranium-1

assets to the Russians.

It was Hillary Clinton's foundation that got millions from Russian oligarchs it was hillary clinton's husband that got five hundred thousand dollars for a stupid little talk in moscow it was the left that embraced the lies of the steel dossi and used russian sources willingly to provide those lies it was

the left that went full bore into the alpha bank story and the Russian collusion hoax, which made things a lot worse.

It was the left who stopped oil drilling and made Putin.

So maybe they're projecting their own sense of inferiority and vulnerability and exposure onto their opponents.

I don't know.

And they're going to try to say, well, yeah, we appeased them and we were weak, but you know what?

Nobody's going to be stronger than us now.

We're going to out-nuke everybody on Russia.

And, or it could be another reason.

It could be this is a midterm.

Joe Biden is a fool.

He's a dunce, but he's our fool and dunce.

And he has nothing,

nothing in his favor as we look at the biggest wipeout in memory in the midterm.

We've got to get him some accomplishments, Jack.

So what we're going to do is we're going to scream and yell that we want to do all this stuff.

And we're going to do it so much that

the average voter won't remember what we really did, that we appeased him and we didn't give him any aid.

I mean, we didn't give Ukraine any aid and we appeased Putin, but we're just going to saturate the airways where we're tougher than anybody as we go in the midterms.

And if Zelensky survives, we were the ones under Joe Biden's brilliant leadership that saved Ukraine.

That's another possible explanation for the inexplicable.

Or

I don't know.

They're really nation builders and they really do believe in their messianic zeal that Ukraine is a part of Europe, it's going to be a part of NATO, it's part of the EU,

and they want to create a, I don't know, diversity, equity, inclusion state everywhere in the world.

I don't know.

But it's inexplicable that the left of all people is becoming old blood and guts George Patton.

You know, it doesn't make any sense, but yet they are, and they're very intolerant.

They're going after Tucker Carlson.

They're going after J.D.

Vance.

They're going after Laura Ingram.

They're going after all these people

who I think maybe given the invasion, what happened, they would take back some of the things they

said, i.e.,

if for no other reason they thought he wouldn't invade or it was a trumped up war.

But most of them are trying to say, okay, arm them, the Ukrainians, but then don't cut our defense budget.

Or,

okay,

borders are important, then defend our borders.

But I think they get attacked by the left for putting it in either or terms, as we talked about earlier.

You can do both.

Although I think J.D.

Vance said the other day that, yeah, you can do both, but we don't do both.

So let's do the one first.

And if that works, we'll do the other, i.e., close the border.

And if we can do that, then we'll worry about the Ukraine's border.

But it's this miraculous flip-flop of the left from pacifist greens all of a sudden to war-mongering interventionists under the leadership of, of, you know, FDR Winston Churchill Biden.

Except, except, Jack, on one critical issue, and that stops right when you get to the word oil

and gas.

Don't dare open Anwar.

Don't dare have new federal leases.

Don't dare finish Keystone.

Don't dare tell banks they should finance fossil fuel.

They don't want any of that.

Don't dare get that pipeline in the Mediterranean going back to Italy.

Don't dare do that.

Did you hear Pete Buttigig, Jack?

It was crazy what he said.

I try to avoid him, Victor.

Tell me, what did he say?

He gave a lecture.

Oh, it was gobbled.

Yeah, I did.

Yeah.

You needed to go to the short-term problem.

Thousands of people are getting killed in Ukraine.

He goes, as for the short-term problem,

we can get around this.

You know, this is the guy that does all the photo ops riding his bike.

Maybe you can get a shield and send a bunch of bikes over to Ukraine where they wear shields and ride into battle

balky's or something he's still working on chest feeding i think um he's a he's a fool he really is yeah hey victor this is uh i didn't have it on our agenda to talk about the state of the union but we just went down a laundry list

and and it was only a few days ago from when we are talking right now and it prior to the state of the union we discussed what could he possibly say knowing he wouldn't say anything he bid into to give america a little hope to reboot whatever you might want to call it but your thoughts quickly on what was in my mind a cartoonish performance i just was i i can't imagine anyone giving a worse speech never mind a worse state of the union well sammy and i i think mentioned that we had a disagreement about iranians remember he said for

Ukrainians, he said Iranians.

I don't think he did.

I told Sammy he didn't.

I went back and looked at it five times.

I think he said Uranians.

That is members of the planet Uranus that are fighting.

But

she thinks he confused Iran with Ukraine, and I think he confused a different planet with Earth.

So that was our big disagreement.

And Sammy still insists it was Iranians.

And she pointed out that Camilla Harris corrected him under her breath.

But very quickly, look, Jack, the bar is so low,

so low.

I was talking to some really great law enforcement officers.

That's all I'll say.

I don't want to give them away their identities.

And one of them said, that was a pretty good speech.

And I said, what?

And he said, well, he stood up.

He finished his sentences, more or less.

He didn't die.

So what he was saying was

that he's 79 non-compos mintas and they don't think he can do anything.

So if he goes to Delaware for the weekend and shuts everything down and just takes his previgen and I don't know what else.

Metamucil.

Metamucil supplements, gets

jello or maybe some type of mind-clearing drug and rest, rest, rest, then he's good for an hour.

But he wasn't good for an hour by standard.

any standard barometers of excellence.

He didn't finish sentences.

And, you know, when I get tired, I had a bike accident, so I've had a lot of stitches in my mouth.

I think 80 of them inside.

I start to sort of slur my words and I can't help.

But when I listen to him, it's as if his heart cannot pump enough blood so he can breathe and talk at the same time.

And that's a sign of congestive heart failure.

And you can see him and hear him.

And those words, I mean,

there's no hiatus.

It's just one, the last consonant just blends into the next vowel and it's just all a slurry.

And I don't have no idea what he's saying half the time.

It could have been that he was reading it for the first time also.

No, he was reportedly reading it.

He'd read it several times.

But again, the bar is so low that people said the fact that he finished it

is an amazing achievement.

And then, of course, when he goes into a cabinet meeting right after that, there's no question.

There's never any question because they know he can say anything, anytime, anywhere, anybody.

Trump could do the same thing, but at least Trump, it was kind of funny.

And it was, you know,

when I mean anything, anywhere, anytime, anybody, I mean something crazy or, you know, like lying dogface pony soldier or hey, fat, or hey, junkie.

or put you all in chain, that kind of stuff.

Or hey, boy.

And so it was just a laundry list.

It was, you know what it was?

Just to finish, Jack, it was he sat down, or I don't think he sat down.

His speech writers, such as they are, got down and said, what is he polling the worst in?

Hmm, border, yeah.

Foreign affairs, yeah.

Energy, yeah.

inflation yeah so we'll have a reference to each but we can't do anything because they contradict our leftist ideology that caused those problems and we're held hostage by the squad and and bernie and elizabeth warren the obamas so they just went down so he just said oh you know there's inflation and it's getting

and then oh the border we're going to secure it but no details nothing it would just check the list and mention it and therefore i i did that and he looked like he was pretty bored with it so he he's not going to offer any solutions because he caused the problems There were no problems when he came in.

All he had to do was smile and let everything go on autopilot.

The border was going to be secure.

Energy production was at a historic high.

There was no inflation.

Afghanistan was still stable.

The Iran deal was out.

The Paris Climate Accord was out.

The defense budget had been increased.

Critical race theory was under assault.

BLM had been discredited.

All he had to do was just say, that's all mine.

He did a good start, Jack, with the vaccinations because he did nothing.

And he even claimed that nobody had been vaccinated.

Remember when he came, even though I think it was 17 and a half million?

So he just said, well, my vaccinations, and I got them out.

So I thought, wow, you were the one that said that you shouldn't take a vaccination because it had Trump's fingerprints on them.

But if he had applied that plagiarist, and he's good at plagiarism, that plagiarist strategy to all of Trump's achievements and just said they were mine, Trump stole them from me, and I approve of them, he would be in great position.

He'd be pulling 55% right now.

Well, Victor, you said the bar is low.

Speaking of bars, after

this break, we're going to take an important message.

We're going to talk about former Attorney General Bill Barr.

Again, right after this important message.

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We're back with the Victor Davis Hansen Show.

Before we get into our final topic, I'd like to encourage our listeners to visit the place I work at, the Center for Civil Society.

We're trying to strengthen civil society.

So visit our website if you don't mind, center for civil society.com.

And I also write a weekly email newsletter called Civil Thoughts, civilthoughts.com.

It offers a dozen worthwhile pieces out there that any intelligent person would probably be interested in reading.

And then as mentioned earlier in the podcast, VictorHanson.com.

Victor writes a lot.

of exclusive content that you can only read there and you can only read it with a subscription.

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And if you like it, it's $50 for a full year.

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That is quote unquote ultra content.

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So, folks, if you enjoy Victor's writing, and I don't know who doesn't, go to victorhanson.com and subscribe.

Victor, Bill Barr, former attorney general, has a new book out, and he's been getting a lot of publicity this last week, visiting networks, etc.

I think it's fair to say that his book is in part a direct attack on Donald Trump, in particular for his role or culpability, some degree, for the capital assault on January 6th, 2021.

That's how it's being portrayed.

And actually, this is kind of what Barr said.

In addition to Barr, former Vice President Mike Pence gave a speech a few days ago.

I don't think he mentioned Donald Trump directly, but it's being interpreted as a dig at Donald Trump.

He said something to the effect of, you know, we shouldn't be saying nice things about Vladimir Putin, even, you know, I think Donald Trump referred to him as a genius.

That's the kind of stuff Pence was.

poo-pooing.

So you have Barr, you have Pence.

Trump responded to both.

But do you think these, let's just call them attacks, that may be an overstatement in some cases, but do you think these attacks on Donald Trump will weaken Donald Trump and his hold on the GOP?

Donald Trump cannot be weakened unless Donald Trump weakens Donald Trump.

And you and I have talked about that before.

He's got to be very careful.

with these adjectives, i.e.

the omission of them.

So when he says that Vladimir Putin is a genius, I went back and looked at that entire comment and things he said at CPAC, and he contextualized that.

He said, he's taking us to the cleaner.

It was the same stuff he says about the Chinese.

And the point of all of it, any fair-minded adjudicator would say that, is that he laments the fact that they're sneaky and Machiavellian and we're naive and stupid and they're winning, therefore.

But he doesn't say that, Jack.

All he has to say, as I said earlier, is the dangerous genius of Vladimir Putin, the evil genius, the dastardly genius, anything, but not genius alone.

But I know what he means, but all he does is create these sound bites for the left.

And then somebody who doesn't, there's, you know, hard at work painting a house or under the house plumbing gets on the way home, here's Trump called Putin a genius.

Oh my God, what am I going to say when my wife and I are arguing?

And she says, well, see, you're Trump.

That's the the problem.

The other problem is it's a nature of that genre.

When you sign a book deal and you're not writing on a topic, in other words, Bill Barr is not writing a book on the art of jurisprudence or the Office of the Attorney General, just like Bob Gates's memoir when he was Secretary of Defense under Obama, just like all of them.

They're writing something that is not going to be analytical.

It's going to be a narrative, autobiographical, but it has to be a racy account.

So when they sit down with those, and I've done this, sit down with editors, not about a memoir, but on other things, they want to know what is the key punchline.

So they obviously told Bill Barr, if we're going to give you a million dollars or whatever it was, I want to know what you're going to say.

And I need five or six.

headlines so I can put them out there and leak them before pub date and people will pre-order your book.

And one of them apparently was was that donald trump caused january 6th or donald trump never had any evidence but i don't know what percentage of the whole book that constitutes it might just be four people and the rest of it's pretty pretty fair-minded so i don't know the other thing is two things very quickly bill barr did donald trump a favor He was in a mess after the firing of Jeff Session.

He needed an attorney general that had wisdom and the confidence of that swamp and was a Republican, was a Bush kind of centrist Republican, but was independent enough to see that Donald Trump was being railroaded by the Mueller investigations.

He came in, he took a lot of flack for a very fair but controversial summation of the Mueller report.

I don't know why they got mad at him, because if they didn't like his summation, they just had to read the report.

And nobody ever since then has ever said he was wrong and that Trump was really guilty.

But, and he did that.

He got in trouble for Trump about Michael Flynn when he more or less just yanked off the federal prosecution of Flynn and a lot of other things he did for Trump.

And then at the very end, they got in this row about January 6th.

Okay, so I don't think that Trump is legitimate in saying, you know, he sold me out or he did that.

He did a lot of good things.

Now, finally, finally, Wendy Victor, there's something about these cabinet positions and sub-cabinet positions that people should keep in mind.

A lot of the people who get into the cabinet or they're in the bright lights of the White House would not be there, Jack, if it was not for the president.

Pete Butterjig was on his back way back to being what, ex-mayor of Notre of South Bend.

South Bend, yeah, excuse me, I was going to say Notre Dame.

Essentially Notre Dame.

Notre Dame city, yeah.

Right.

But South Bend, and that was it.

But he owes now Joe Biden, or he'd be nothing.

So Bill Barr was in comfortable retirement.

He'd been, had a stint as attorney general, but he wasn't very well known.

Now he's known worldwide, and it's pretty good reputation, I think.

So he has to factor that in.

I haven't read the book.

I don't know if he did, but he owes somebody something for doing that.

And all the generals, that's what I get very, I got upset.

So many of the generals,

they were not known.

They were in retirement.

They were on corporate boards.

So Trump put them in there.

What I'm talking about, Jack, is this sound not blind loyalty, but a modicum of gratitude that hedges.

And how would that work out in a memoir?

You would say things like, unfortunately, I disagreed with my commander-in-chief.

He had this position.

I had this position.

And this is why I think that I'm right.

And believe me, I've been in conversations with some very powerful people.

And

if I taped every single thing they said, or if they taped everything I said and released it, that would not be a fair representation of that conversation, if you know what I mean.

I'm afraid I know what you mean.

And I don't believe a person should do that.

Right.

Don't these people have some

responsibility?

Yeah.

Don't they have some responsibility to at least show gratitude?

Well, you don't have to write the book either.

You don't have to write the book.

And who didn't write, let me think of people who didn't write books that could have blown everybody out of the water.

Let's try George Kennan.

No, excuse me, not George Kinnan, George Marshall.

Kinnan did write one, but you know, Kinnan's book, it's like Dean Achetson.

They're not tell-all in a negative sense.

They're mostly policy, the history of policy.

And George Marshall wouldn't write one at all.

And when you read Eisenhower's Crusade in Europe, it's very even-handed.

It's not controversial.

So there's a way to do it is what you're saying.

And I agree with you.

Yeah.

Bill McGurn, a great friend, and you know Bill, who was a speechwriter for Bush.

And he's just like, I would never write a book.

I mean, you're involved.

You see things intimately.

You take on.

Yeah, okay, I'll come work for you.

And I think the quid pro quo is, I have to shut my mouth.

And there's so many speechwriters who write books so they could say that, you know, the words essentially came out of their pen.

And I'm Marius.

I think it's

people, but it's

I mean, I've had people call me in politics or government, but I don't think it's my, I've talked about it to close friends in confidence, but I don't think I'd ever say, oh, so-and-so called me and I'm going to write about what was disturbing in that conversation, write a call.

You know, I don't think you should do that.

I just don't don't think you should do it.

Break down.

If you're going to do it, then tell the person you're going to do it.

This is on their record.

And if you, Victor, break down someday and do a column about me.

Not that anyone would care, but I'm sure you can write something pretty salacious.

Okay, my friend, this is about all the time we have.

But as we do at the end of our podcast, we thank people and we thank no matter where you listen to the podcast.

If it's on justthenews.com, which is the host for the Victor Davis Hanson Show, or Stitcher, Google Play iTunes.

Thank you.

On iTunes,

people leave five-star ratings.

Thank you for that.

Some people also leave comments.

And here's one.

It's from MBA PSU.

The headline is VDH is the best with three exclamation points.

My wife is tired of me saying every time VDH appears on TV, quote, we have to listen to VDH.

He's the smartest man on TV, end quote.

Thank you for that, MBA PSU.

I think that's pretty cool.

And, you know, Victor, I decided to go on, was looking for some stuff on VictorHanson.com.

And it just dawned on me, oh my gosh, you know, people leave comments for the podcast on your website.

So I thought I'd just read one and, and it's from David.

It's titled Strength and Deterrence.

I think that's the podcast he's referring to.

And he wrote, listen to this twice.

This is a podcast from last week, Strength and Deterrence.

Listen to this twice.

So many solid points.

And pointing out unintended consequences is so spot-on and quite unbelievable, but so true.

Please remind Jack that there are very few words you just don't use in radio.

Flaccid is one of them.

So I apologize.

I did not remember saying flaccid.

I know we don't do any spots for

you were doing a double entendre, hunt.

I didn't pick that up.

I didn't recall anything.

So my memory is

a bit on that point.

Can you say erect?

Well, somebody just did.

Well,

on that

funny note, we will say thank you to all our listeners and we'll be back again soon with another episode of the Victor Davis Hanson Show.

Thank everybody.

Thank you, everybody, for listening.

Deeply appreciated.