9, 12, 10, 28, 2, 23.

This is Deep State Radio, coming to you direct from our super secret studio in the third

sub-basement of the Ministry of Snark in Washington, D.C., and from other undisclosed locations

across America and around the world.

Hello, and welcome to DSR's Words Matter.

I am David Rothkopf.

I am here basically to direct some questions to the godfather of Washington, D.C.,

the man who knows where all the bodies are buried and probably buried some of them himself,

Norm Ornstein.

I always shudder to ask you this, but it's just not polite not to.

How you doing today, Norm?

Well, I would have to say, David, that it's not much different than other times, a little bit more upbeat

because my Minnesota Timberwolves did come back from 19 points down to stay in a good spot

in the NBA playoffs. But if that's what we have to grasp at to feel good,

that tells us volumes about the state of the country, does it not? It really, really does.

But let's try to sort our way through the headlines.

We'll leave the Iran more aside for a second.

We talk about that on almost every show we're doing.

I think there's been a kind of interesting phenomenon in the House of Representatives

where we first saw Eric Swalwell and Tony Gonzalez leave at the same moment

in some kind of a deal. Now we've now had a Democratic Congresswoman from Florida leave.

There's another guy in the waiting who's about to get kicked out. I don't recall ever seeing this kind of volume, and yet we're not kicking

...