Hey everybody, we got a great one today, you know, for a change. And this time, this time I'm not lying.

Stuart Stevens, one of the founders of the Lincoln Project ad maker for a ton of Republicans

over the years, including for George W. Bush's presidential campaigns,

where I met him in a spin room after a Bush-Gore debate. The spin room is where advocates

for the two candidates spin for the media after the debate. And he was spinning, of course,

for Bush and I was spinning for Gore.

I clearly did a better job, obviously, because Gore won the popular vote.

Gore got more votes than Bush.

Anyway, oddly, Stuart and I became friends, and now he's become a bitterly,

bitterly disaffected Republican, and I mean bitterly, to the point of some borderline self-loathing.

I had him on the podcast a couple years ago when he wrote a book about the Republican Party entitled

It Was All a Lie. And I wanted to pick up on that conversation and talk about his old party

today and going forward. Of course, back in that 2000 Bush Gore race, it was a lie and that's what I was saying in the spin room that night.

Bush had been saying over and over again that, quote, by far the vast majority of my tax cut

is going to those at the bottom. And of course, the opposite was true. The vast majority of his tax cut was going to

those at the top, and it exploded the debt, which had been nothing. Clinton handed Bush,

a balanced budget. Bush handed Obama the Great Recession and a massive deficit.

Republicans are always deficit hawks when Democrats are in the White House,

but of course they're the ones that have historically created the, by far the largest debt.

But what Stewart and I talk about here is about much darker stuff. You know,

in 1995, I wrote a book. Rush Limbaugh is a big fat idiot and other observations. And of course,

it was really about Limbaugh as a liar, not about how fatty was. This was before fat shaming

...