I don't know if you've listened to my podcast before, but sometimes there's a bit of explicit language, and this is one of those times.

It's Wednesday, August 15th, from Slate It's The Gist I'm Mike Pesca.

The Turkish lira has plunged to depths not seen for about 15 years.

It lost about half of its value against the dollar this calendar year,

which of course means it's the perfect time for a Turkish president, Erdogan, to offer this assessment as he did in the New York Times,

uphead how Turkey sees the crisis with the U.S. Subhead unilateral actions against Turkey by the United States will undermine American interests

and force Turkey to look for other friends and allies.

That's right, that's right, Turkey saying, maybe we don't want to be your friends anymore.

Now that we've lost half our buying power, maybe we don't want your business.

Can you imagine what the U.S. would do if Turkey were a friend?

Now that Turkey's riding low and now that the government could collapse, I think it's the perfect time for Erdogan to talk about all the things that we've done wrong to him.

Okay, it is obvious as a nationalistic autocrat that Erdogan knows how to play the nationalistic autocrat card for the public at home.

That's what the New York Times op-ed seems to be doing.

I mean, maybe he looks to Putin who at one point had okay relations with the U.S.

But then was able to turn enmity with the U.S. to his advantage at a time of internal economic malaise.

But Turkey's economic problems are a lot worse than Russia's were.

The New York Times daily, the podcast suggested something that I don't know why I agree with.

They said that autocracies are just bad for business. I don't think so.

I think ideocracies are bad for business. Erdogan is a good thug, but a bad banker.

Yesterday, the Wall Street Journal produced a chart showing that democracies don't really have the clear lead overall autocracies

in terms of return on investment. The U.S. is a democracy, trending perhaps towards the less democratic,

but we're doing quite well. If openness and democracy were the goal, Asia should envy Europe.

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