Durham Got Bupkis
The Mona Charen Show
The Bulwark
4.5 • 1.3K Ratings
🗓️ 19 May 2023
⏱️ 62 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
Will Saletan joins to talk about his special project on The Corruption of Lindsey Graham. The panel also tackles the Durham Report and Comer's damp squib, as well as high and low points of Biden's presidency.
highlights/lowlights
Damon's:
https://www.nytimes.com/2023/05/18/us/politics/feinstein-illness-shingles-senate.html
Bill's:
Linda's:
https://www.amazon.com/Living-Aimee-Lou-Wood/dp/B0B74YCG3M
Will's:
https://www.propublica.org/article/college-high-school-research-peer-review-publications
Mona's:
https://www.nationalreview.com/2023/05/the-real-robert-f-kennedy-jr/
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Welcome to beg to differ the bull works weekly roundtable discussion featuring civil |
| 0:12.7 | conversation across the political spectrum we range from center left to center right. |
| 0:17.6 | I'm Mona Charen, syndicated columnist and policy editor at the bull work and I am joined |
| 0:22.6 | by our regulars Bill Galston of the Brookings Institution and the Wall Street Journal, |
| 0:27.5 | Damon Linker, who writes the substack newsletter notes from the middle ground and Linda Chavez |
| 0:33.4 | of the Nyscanon Center. We are delighted to welcome as our special guest this week, |
| 0:39.0 | my bull work colleague, Will Salaton. Will has written either a very long article or depending |
| 0:45.2 | on how you want to look at it, a short book called The Corruption of Lindsey Graham and it is |
| 0:50.8 | really, I cannot recommend it highly enough because as you'll to hear in the conversation |
| 0:57.1 | we're about to have it is not a profile of Lindsey Graham and it is not a tell all about |
| 1:03.4 | Lindsey Graham's private life or anything like that. It is a political science evaluation of how |
| 1:10.0 | corruption happens and how authoritarianism can take hold of people. So let's start with why you |
| 1:19.3 | chose Graham as your model of how this descent into corruption and authoritarianism happened. |
| 1:28.4 | Well, so Lindsey Graham was in the middle obviously of a lot of what happened during the Trump years. |
| 1:32.9 | He was also one of the people who was most clear about the danger that Trump posed to the United |
| 1:38.0 | States, to democracy, to the rule of law. That's in 2015, 2016. He became over time obviously one |
| 1:44.4 | of Trump's most aggressive apologists and enablers. So that's part of it. But I was much more |
| 1:50.4 | interested in him as a model of what happened to the whole Republican Party and the reason that I was |
| 1:56.0 | able to write this about Graham was that unlike a lot of his colleagues such as Paul Ryan, Marco |
| 2:02.0 | Rubio, other people who enabled Trump, Lindsey Graham talked constantly. So he left this enormous |
| 2:08.1 | record of one interview, briefing, statement, social media post after another. So it was possible |
| 2:14.9 | to track over time week by week, month by month, how he changed, how he rationalized, how his standards |
... |
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