Episode 24 - The Tweet War With Russia

Hey everybody, it's time for sing along coffee with Scott Adams. Yes, well, I wake up to lots of news today. Time for a simultaneous sip. Oh, early coffee is the best coffee. So you're probably all following the news and you know there are some provocative tweets going on at the moment. We hear. Well, first of all, Paul Ryan is not seeking reelection. I don't know what to make of that. That's more of a political question. But let's talk about the President's tweets. Tweet number one from the President. Let me read it. Quiet. Is Russia vows to shoot down any and all missiles fired at Syria. Get ready Russia, because they will be coming nice and new and smart. Smart. You shouldn't be partners with a gas killing animal who kills his people and enjoys it. Ok. And then follows up fairly quickly with the following. Our relationship with Russia is worse now than it has ever been and that includes the Cold War. There is no reason for this. Russia needs us to help with their economy, something that would be very easy to do and we would need all nations to work together. Stop the arms race with a question mark. Stop the arms race. So here's my assessment of this and where I think it's all heading. Number one, all of the international stuff is connected right now. So whatever the president does in Syria is going to be seen by North Korea, is going to be seen by Iran. So there's, it's important to posture like you're the biggest, toughest monkey in the jungle so you've got that hanging over it. So the president needs to act tough because he needs good results in other places. So if he acts not tough in one place, other people will say, hey, you're not acting tough. So that's the first thing. There's a third tweet. Somebody says, let me see if there's a third tweet before I go on. Oh much. Here's the third tweet from the President. Much of the bad blood with Russia is caused by the fake and corrupt Russia investigation headed up by the all Democrat loyalists or people that work for Obama. Mueller is most conflicted of all except Rosenstein who signed FISA and comey letters. No collusion, so they go crazy. All right, so that's slightly off topic except that has to do with Russia. So here's my take on this. So you've got this alleged chemical gas attack allegedly by Syrians government seems very unlikely and there seems to be some issue about getting people in to actually check. Now given that we don't know, and that the world, at least much of the world, suspects that it was Assad. We have to act tough. So the President is moving our armada nearby and waiting for confirmation or deconfirmation. Is that a word of who did it? So the moving the assets into place we had to do because we have to act tough. Now. Russia had to push back because they've got to act tough, too. So Russia said, if you fire those missiles, we'll shoot them out of the air. Well, that caused the President to have to talk tough. So he said, watch out, Russia. Our missiles are so fast and smart, you won't even see them coming. So far, all we've had is everybody saying what they're supposed to say in this situation. Assad is supposed to deny it. We're supposed to talk tough until we find out what's happening. Russia is supposed to talk tough. So everybody's just sort of doing what they're supposed to do in this situation. I don't think the President has decided about shooting or not. But here's what's interesting. Russia said that they would shoot down the missiles, but they said more than that. They said they would shoot down the missiles and also they might attack whatever they were fired from, which could be cruisers or battleships or, I suppose, aircraft. Now, if Russia were to attack our aircraft or ships at sea, chances are that's hard to contain. That's real war. You notice that the President's tweet did not threaten Russia's assets. Russia threatened the United States assets, meaning that they would go after whoever fired the missile. Trump's tweet was more about the missiles being good. So Trump did not say, and if anybody fires back at us, we'll go back at their source. So he didn't say that. So in the war of words, he did not escalate. So the war of words went, and then the President went, brought it back a level, and then he retweeted, hey, why can't we be friends? So he's already softened it twice, I guess you could say. Here's what I expect to come out of this. I expect that we will not have a confirmed identification of who fired, of who did the chemical attack. And if that happens, the President has now created a situation in which he can back down because he's gone in so strong that if it turns out that he can't confirm who fired the gas, and it just makes sense to let it go because you just can't confirm it, he would not be backing down in a wimpy way. He would be backing down from the strongest possible position, which is something you can back down from. So backing down from a weak position just makes you look weaker. Backing down for a super strong position, which is how he's going into this, gives you the flexibility that you can say, okay, well, had this been confirmed as the Syrian government, we sure would have sent some missiles in there, and they would be smart and nobody could stop them. So it's roughly the right setup for this situation. Now, the scary, dramatic thing to overlay on top of this is that I can't imagine a president who would be more angry than this president is right now. So you've got somebody who has the nuclear codes, and his personal lawyer just got raided, and he just went through a couple weeks of Stormy Daniels and Karen McDougal. So the president's had some events with the resignations. Everything that would make anybody pretty mad. So pretty, pretty mad. So here's what I would guess would happen. The stock market might pull back temporarily. I think we'll hang out for a while until we find out. We don't know who's. Who was behind the gas attack, and then if we're smart, we'll back off. Now, it's still possible we'll fire some missiles. So I don't have a prediction about that, but I think we're going to need a pretty good reason if we fire them. It might just be to show that we can, but it seems like a bad idea at this point. Oh, that's good. Somebody says it was Turkey. Well, who knows? So, yeah, so Alan Dershowitz and the President apparently had a meal together. So I'm going to agree with Preet Bharara. Is that how you say his name? That the FBI's attack, if you can call it that, on Trump's personal lawyer is probably because they have something more than just Stormy Daniels stuff. So they must have something more than that. But here's the problem. They wouldn't have more than that except for Stormy Daniels, except for the president as the president. So there's probably no reason that his personal lawyer is part of this, except that the President is the president. So there's no way that I can be comfortable with that, even if it turns out that Cohen was guilty of some unrelated thing that we don't know about yet. Well, the guy who made Beetle Belly is not alive, so if he got on Periscope, that'd be quite a trick. Yeah, somebody asked me to rearrange my books back there, which I did. All right, well, nobody knows what Dershowitz talked about with the president, but he probably counseled him not to fire anybody. So just to clarify, when I went on and said that the president has a free pass to fire people, that was a free pass from my perspective. Not in a political sense. In a political sense, it might be the worst idea in the world to fire anybody, especially when you can still pardon anybody you want. So you might want to hold back and wait for your pardon. But should he fire anybody? I just want to clarify that. I would personally be okay with that, and I would support it, but that doesn't make it a good idea. Can't pardon for state crimes. Is that true? You can't pardon somebody for a state crime. Interesting. Somebody saying, yes, you can. I guess we need a confirmation on that. I thought the president's pardon ability was pretty thorough, but we'll look into that. It's interesting that we don't know the answer to that question, whether he can pardon for a state crime. My instinct is that he can, but I'm willing to be wrong about that. Yeah, I thought the pardon was absolute. So that's where I'm leading right now. All right, so most of you think the pardon is the right of. The power of the pardon is absolute, and the President. I think I would agree with that, but I'm not the expert here. All right. I don't have anything else to say today. So the summary on the Syria stuff and the tweets is that the president has to push back until they find out who is behind the gas attack. Russia has to push us back. We've said our words. Everybody's acted strong. Now everybody can back off if they need to based on the facts. So I think we're fine. I wouldn't be worried too much about the events of today. So calm down, everybody. I don't expect a war with Russia, and I'll talk to you later.