The “Tortured Pundits Department” Edition

Rational Security

The Lawfare Institute

Foreignpolicy, Nationalsecurity, News, Government, Politics, Middleeast

4.8 • 2K Ratings

🗓️ 26 September 2024

⏱️ 77 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

🧾️ Download transcript

Summary

This week, Scott was joined by Natalie Orpett, Anna Bower, and Matt Gluck to talk over some of the week's big national security news, including:

“Some Assembly Required.” On Tuesday, President Biden gave his fourth and final speech as president to the U.N. General Assembly. He used the occasion to reflect on the many foreign policy decisions of his presidency, including the withdrawal from Afghanistan, opposition to Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, and the (thus far unsuccessful) pursuit of a ceasefire in the conflict in Gaza. What does this speech—and the year’s U.N. General Assembly more broadly—tell us about the state of his foreign policy legacy?
“Keeping it Peachy.” Georgia’s state election board is in the news for rules changes that some allege could delay finalization of the 2024 election results, opening a possible door for Congress to manipulate the results. But what will these rules changes really mean? And what does it tell us about the potential for (and limits on) efforts to manipulate the outcome of the 2024 presidential election?
“Memo-ries of the Way We Were.” Last week, the New York Times published excerpts from several memoranda prepared by then-President Trump’s White House Counsel addressing questions he appears to have posed regarding his ability to direct the Justice Department to investigate and prosecute individuals. Given Trump’s repeated pledges of vengeance if he were to return to the White House, what do these memoranda tell us about what he might be able to accomplish? And what obstacles may lie in his way, particularly in light of the Supreme Court’s intervening decision on presidential immunity?

For object lessons, Natalie recommended Helen Phillips' new novel “Hum.” Anna stole Scott's object lesson and recommended season two of Rings of Power along with season three of Industry. Scott sang the praises of the best tiny speaker he ever did see (er, hear). And Matt Gluck dug into the sportsball file to urge listeners to begin following the Detroit Tigers' historic playoffs run.

Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Transcript

Click on a timestamp to play from that location

0:00.0	Everyone knows that E equals M C squared. So are all Einstein's, yes?
0:05.4	Well, not yet. But you could be with Salesforce.
0:09.2	Unite your teams around a single shared view of every customer in your business
0:13.4	maximize employee productivity and empower teams with trusted AI
0:17.6	from one secure scalable platform and be the Einstein's you were always meant to be.
0:22.6	Now everyone's an Einstein with Salesforce, the number one AICRM.
0:27.4	Visit salesforce.com to find out more.
0:30.0	So Anna, I think we have to check your audio one more time.
0:36.4	Would you just please deliver your favorite Taylor Swift verse as loudly as possible? Okay, I am absolutely not singing a Taylor Swift verse, but I got to say one of my favorite opening lines of a Taylor Swift song is draw the cat eye sharp enough to kill a man and it is this
0:57.9	song that she because if you know Taylor Swift she loves wearing cat eye eyeliner.
1:05.8	She wrote this song called Vigilante Shitt
1:08.9	that is all about her beef that she had with a scooter Braun who is this guy who she used to work with and
1:17.4	then he bought up all of her masters and she got really mad at him and she wrote this song about how basically she was going to
1:26.0	get vengeance on him and my favorite Taylor Swift songs are the songs in which
1:30.8	she is basically like I'm gonna burn it all down to get revenge on a man.
1:35.3	So that's a lot of them. That's like I think it's like a solid chunk at least.
1:40.1	I need an entire playlist after the Trump I hate Taylor Swift to the social post that was when I went on bin's
1:49.4	Dogshire Daily TV YouTube channel and we I made an entire playlist that was just based on
1:56.5	songs about Taylor Swift wanting to get revenge on a man it was great.
2:00.3	See I think that this is the next phase of, you know, Madeline Albright as the Secretary of State and before that when she was at the
2:08.2	UN, which is topical for our conversation, started wearing pins to indicate what her sort of messaging of the day was going to be and I think the new era of that is which Taylor Swift song do you choose to play as your personal soundtrack?
2:22.0	Well, I was really disappointed because Taylor Swift really let me down on Sunday.
	...

Please login to see the full transcript.

Previous episode | Next episode

Disclaimer: The podcast and artwork embedded on this page are from The Lawfare Institute, and are the property of its owner and not affiliated with or endorsed by Tapesearch.

Generated transcripts are the property of The Lawfare Institute and are distributed freely under the Fair Use doctrine. Transcripts generated by Tapesearch are not guaranteed to be accurate.