Americano's Year in Review - 2021

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The Spectator

News Commentary, News, Daily News, Society & Culture

4.4 • 785 Ratings

🗓️ 17 December 2021

⏱️ 42 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

Douglas Murray joins Freddy Gray for a look back at yet another tumultuous year in American politics. They discuss the irreconcilable divide between left and right, the origins of Covid-19, the war in Afghanistan, the fallout from the 2020 election and much more, including the temptations of a bottle of Glenmorangie whiskey.

Transcript

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0:00.0	The Spectator magazine combines incisive political analysis with books and arts reviews of unrivaled authority.
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0:27.6	Hello and welcome to the Americano podcast, a series of discussions about American politics, life and culture.
0:36.5	My name is Freddie Gray. I'm the deputy editor of The Spectator.
0:40.8	I am delighted to be joined by the Spectators' Associate editor, Douglas Murray, and we're going to
0:46.4	be looking back over the year. And because this is the Americano podcast, it's going to be a focus
0:51.5	on American politics. And Douglas, you've spent a bit of time in
0:54.8	America this year. And so I think you're a very good person to talk to about this. But I'd like to
1:00.5	start by looking at something that happened to Joe Biden yesterday. He was asked by a reporter,
1:06.8	well, a reporter confronted him and said, you know, 800,000 Americans have died of COVID.
1:11.6	And why are you not putting more pressure on the Chinese government to be more transparent about the origins of the virus?
1:21.3	And Biden just looked at him and laughed and walked off.
1:24.9	And, I mean, it struck me as a very, very odd reaction to what should be
1:29.8	an extremely important political question. And I wondered if you saw it and what you thought
1:35.5	about that, and whether you agreed with me that it was a very, very odd thing for a president
1:39.6	to do, a very odd way for him to respond. It was odd, very odd, but it's not uncharacteristic,
1:46.8	nor is it some example of late Biden.
1:49.9	It's the sort of thing you could see Biden doing at almost any stage in his career.
1:54.7	He is a great political survivor.
1:57.4	From his decades in politics, he's learned how to brush things aside. He's learned how to laugh
2:04.0	things off. He often does so in a very creepy, frankly, manner. And that I thought was what was
2:10.8	occurring in the clip you described. It was almost as if you're saying, you've got to be joking
	...

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