Episode 752 Scott Adams Let Me Tell You How Much I HATE My Government Today, IG Report, Impeachment

Bum, bum, bum bum bum bum bum bum bum bum bum bum bum bum bum bum bum bum. Hey, everybody, get in here. Let me print out my notes here while we're waiting. Well, well, well, well, well. Before we get to the good stuff, let's do the even better stuff first. And it goes like this. All you need is a cup of mugger, glasses, snifter, sign, chalice, tanker, thermos, flask, canteen, grill, goblet vessel of any kind. If you're not here already, you might miss the simultaneous sip, the thing that makes everything better. But you know, I can't be in that good of a mood today. I'm trying to, I'm trying. But I'm so fucking pissed off this morning that I could barely sip. Join me, will you? Caffeine is just gonna make me angry. Allow me to grab my notes here. Don't go anywhere. Stay there. Stay. Alright, Got my notes. Well, where to begin? First of all, those of you who watched yesterday know that I used some Benadryl the night before and woke up with half a brain. Now imagine me with half a brain. Literally. My IQ was cut in half. I couldn't figure out how to turn on my television yesterday. Not a joke. The day after I woke up from Ben and Jill the night before, I actually couldn't figure out how to turn on my television. Literally. That's not a joke. So that's how I was doing yesterday while I was trying to decode the IG report and the impeachment hearings. If you ever have a chance to take Benadryl and then try to understand an IG report and impeachment on the same day, don't try. It's not going to work very well. All right. Well, you probably all know that the Democrats have gone ahead with their articles of impeachment. And even though I expected it, not just expected it, but it was just. Everybody assumed it wasn't even any doubt. Even though I knew the day was coming, I did not anticipate how I would feel about it. And how I feel about it. I'm not worried because everything's going to be fine. The country will be fine. Senate will take care of business and get rid of it. But as I was watching this disgusting group of politicians pretend to be sad and pretend to be sincere, I was overcome with hatred. And I don't really spend a lot of time hating anything. There are things I prefer, things I dislike, things that need to be criticized. But rarely, if ever, do I feel a genuine feeling of hatred. And when I watched Adam Schiff and Jerry Nadler and Nancy Pelosi and then I'm going to throw Jeffrey Toobin in there. As I was just watching them on cnn. I don't think it's just that they disagree. I don't think it's just that they're on a team doing things I wish they weren't doing. There's something about this group of people that makes me fucking hate them. Like I actually hate their guts. And I've never hated a politician in my life. In fact, I didn't even hate these politicians yesterday. There was something about watching them stand in front of the country and knowing that they were acting that just triggered something in me. Had I thought for even the smallest moment that they believed what they were saying and that it was for the good of the country and all that, if I believed it even a little bit, I would have said benefit of a doubt. Maybe they think it is for the good of the country. They do not think it's for the good of the country. It's transparent, it's bad acting, it's disgusting. And I fucking hate them. I've never hated my government before. It actually happened today. This is the first time. You know, I lived through the Vietnam War, wasn't happy about that. I was not happy about the Vietnam War. I lived through lots of things that the government did that I didn't think was a good idea. I lived through the Iraq War. Not a fan, Wasn't a fan. But I'll tell you, nothing has made me actually angry until today. Now everything's going to be fine. And the Democrats have basically collected themselves together to run into a narrow ravine where Trump and his supporters will machine gun them. I'm not talking literally, figuratively, figuratively. They set themselves up for the worst election cycle that maybe we've ever seen. It could actually flip Congress. I don't know if it will, but I'm not predicting that. But I don't know if the rest of you are having a reaction to anything like the one I'm having right now. Can you tell me in the comments, did something flip in your head the way it did in mine when I just watched this despicable bunch of fucking assholes stand there and hurt the country and pretend they were helping it in the worst acting job you've ever seen in your whole fucking life? Disgusting. None of these people deserve their job. And let me go further. If the Republicans in Congress do not act to censure or whatever the hell they have to do to kick Schiff and Adler out of Congress. If they don't at least try that process, at least gin it up and get it going, it might not succeed. But if they don't at least try to get these guys removed from Congress, I'm going to be pretty disappointed with the Republican side, let me tell you. What do you think is the big problem here? Let me tell you the big problem. If all you've got is a hammer, everything looks like a nail. If we keep electing, I'm not going to stop swearing today. Today is not the day for you to tell me. Scott, watch your language. That's not going to happen today, all right? If we keep electing fucking lawyers, you're going to get a bunch of fucking lawyers running the country like the fucking mess that you're seeing right now. None of this happens without a whole bunch of fucking lawyers in the same place acting like fucking lawyers. Let's give some people who aren't fucking lawyers to run the fucking country. Jesus fucking Christ. I am so fucking sick of lawyers. Let me tell you now, I don't know if it's. I don't know if coming off my Benadryl haze is making me angry here today. It's entirely possible, but I'm super fucking angry. Really, I am. All right now, Nancy Pelosi. It's a somber day. It's not a somber day, you cunt. It's not a somber day. Don't even act like it's a somber day. It's not a somber day. You're all drinking and, you know, Serenity now. So some of the things we learn about the from the IG report. Let's talk about that. So it turns out that Jonathan Turley is the only guy who knows anything whose name isn't Alan Dershowitz. So Turley writes this article in the Hill and then has to write another article to complain about how CNN took his article and misconstrued it. Oh, my God. So poor Jonathan Turley, trying to communicate to a dumb fuck population and failing, even though he's amazingly good at communicating. Amazingly good. Best you've ever seen. And one of the things we learned is that the so called predicate, meaning the reasons to start an investigation, here's actually the standard. For the FBI to start an investigation, it only requires an articulable basis. Do you know articulable means? It means you could put it in a fucking sentence. If you can put it in a fucking sentence that makes sense, you have the right to look into it. So did the ig. I'm Sorry. Did the FBI have enough articulable basis to do the investigation? Well, the inspector general says yes, because the standard is bullshit. There's no standard. You can't violate a standard that doesn't exist. An articulable basis is as close as you can get to not existing. So I don't blame Horowitz for saying that the FBI had a basis because there's no standard for the basis. They can't violate standard that doesn't exist. So that's the first thing. But the second thing is, what did they do after they had that articulable basis and they kept running into information that would tell them that there's nothing there. Well, I'm going to surprise you a little bit, and I want you to go back and look at your filters on life and tell me if your filters predicted. Remember I always tell you that we're all living in these different movies. We're all in different bubbles, we're all seeing this different reality. But if you want to test your version of reality or your filter on reality, make predictions and then see if your predictions work. If they don't, maybe your filter was bad. Let me tell you how my filter works. I have what I call the Dilbert filter. Dilbert being a cartoon character who is famous for living or working in an organization where people are incompetent all the time. My filter said that. That Epstein could kill himself and that all of those. That incompetence you saw in the jail could be just normal incompetence, because, yes, there can be that much incompetence in an organization. Likewise. So I said, it's more likely Epstein did kill himself because incompetence is the most normal thing in the world. It's not the exception. If you think incompetence is the exception, then you say, well, how could those cameras be turned off? How could those guards be asleep? How could they not check? How could they falsify their diary of their rounds? How could that be? Easily incompetence. It's the most massively common thing in the world. Now let's look at the FBI. My filter said the most likely explanation for the FBI's actions was massive incompetence. The Horowitz looked into it and said there's massive incompetence, but no sign of something like an organized deep state. I know we're still waiting for Durham. We'll get to that. But whose filter predicted that the result would be a whole bunch of incompetence and not an organized deep state? Only mine. Only mine said that the incompetence of the guards is just incompetence. And Epstein killed himself because he was at least good at stuff. Epstein was a monster, but he was really good at stuff. He was a master. He was a concert pianist. He was good at making money. He was good at manipulating people. He was really good at stuff. No surprise that he was good at killing himself while all around him were incompetent. So we have not yet ruled out. Well, let me talk about this. So the FBI, incompetence and the 17 things that went wrong. The question is asked, and I saw somebody ask this, how is it likely that the FBI could make 17 mistakes that were all in the same direction? Did you see that? I actually tweeted it. Not because I agreed with it, but because it was an important thing to talk about. All right, if there are 17 mistakes and it's. And it's just a random distribution of mistakes, you would say, well, that's impossible. It's something like one in a hundred thousand odds that you would have 17 mistakes all in the same direction, right? Wrong. Now let's try putting the Dilber filter on it and see how it looks. Put the Dilber filter on it and explain why all 17 mistakes are in the same direction. Easy. Let me ask you this. You're an employee. You've been assigned a task. Your task is to fill out some paperwork and get something approved. Do you ever exaggerate your argument? As just an employee of any big organization, do you ever exaggerate your case to get approval of something? Every fucking time. Every fucking time. Another way to explain all 17 errors is incompetence and the fact that there are probably so many. There are probably so many different rules in the FBI that have to be satisfied that if it's like every other big organization I've ever been in, the only way you can get from A to B is by breaking rules. Confirm this for me in the comments. Those of you who have experience in big organizations, can you get anything done without breaking the rules? No, you can't if you're trying to get an investigation done because you're biased, let's say you believe it's something that's important or you're biased. Either of those cases, if you're trying to get something done, you're looking into something. Could you make 17 mistakes? Or let's say errors in judgment or forged forms or whatever, all. All in the same direction? Yes. It wouldn't even be unusual that all 17 of your mistakes are in the same direction doesn't mean there's a conspiracy. It doesn't even mean they're biased. They probably are because everybody is. So I'm not saying they're unbiased. I'm just saying you can easily get to 17 mistakes in the same direction without anything being unusual about that. Because employees are trying to get something done. They're going to make all of their mistakes toward the direction that they're trying to move things. That's not unusual. It doesn't mean a coup. It also means just employees doing what employees do in big companies, violating the rules to get something done. Typical. Completely typical. And if they had a bias, that there was something there that would guide them. Now, just to show you, I actually can look at both sides. Was it allowable that the FBI would use such a thin predicate for starting the investigation? Yes, under these conditions. The conditions are that the downside was enormous. So the risk of having a president who was in the pocket of Russia, enormous. So if you have an enormous risk, a republic ending risk, would you say, well, there's only a little bit of evidence that that might happen? No, you would take the thinnest evidence because it's the biggest risk. I hate to tell you I'm not. It could have been biased, but not in any way that's criminal. Everybody's biased. Everybody is blinded by their bias. You could simply be blinded by your bias and not do anything criminal. Just make decisions that were kind of biased, informed. Anyway. So I think that if the FBI wanted to defend themselves and they're doing a terrible job of it, they should say that given the size of the risk, it would take the smallest bit of suspicion to warrant an investigation. And Even then when McCabe said, well, look at the Steele dossier, which was complete bullshit, nobody knew if it was 100% bullshit. If it had been 1% true and nobody knew at that point, would that 1% chance of it being true still be worth looking into it? Because the risk of being wrong about it and losing the republic to Russia is so great. Yeah, it is. I hate to tell you, but you can completely explain the FBI's motivation by risk management, incompetence and bias, but not necessarily overthrow the government bias. Did I tell you that when that when Strzok and Lisa Page texted about the insurance policy, that that was probably just something taken out of context and did not mean the insurance policy was to remove the president. It meant that they better look into it in case there's something there. The Horowitz report did not find the Strzok and Page in their communications that we know about were indicating any kind of a coup. They found the opposite. Who predicted that Page and Strzok would not be found with a smoking gun, rather that that conversation would just be a different context. One person in the whole world, and it was me. So just, just keep that in mind. All right. Now, that said Durham, who's the criminal part of this, disagrees with some of Horowitz conclusions, I think, about the predicate of it. So everything I just said could be completely revised by what we find out from Durham. And Durham, of course, had more powers than Horowitz. So we should assume he has a bigger view of the field and that he might have some information about people outside of the FBI. CIA, maybe. Maybe. Maybe the CIA, maybe the Democratic Party, maybe Russia, maybe Great Britain. So Durham might have a whole different idea about how this all got started, but no matter how it got started, and that might also raise more questions about individuals within the FBI making decisions. So I think there are some FBI people in trouble now. Did you see Trump came down hard on. Ray is head of the FBI. Right. And what did Trump say about him? Oh, Trump tweeted, I don't know what report we're talking about. The Horowitz report says, I don't know what report current Director of the FBI Christopher Wray was reading, but it sure wasn't the one given to me. With that kind of attitude, he will never be able to fix the FBI, which is badly broken, despite having some of the greatest men and women working there. Now, I completely understand why the President would be taking the hard line against the FBI that he is, because there were 17 mistakes that all went against him. If you're ever in a situation where there are 17 mistakes and they all go against you, and you can fire the guy who's in charge of it, who's now fixing it. You're going to fire that guy. So if I were in the President's position, I'm pretty sure I would say exactly what he's saying and I would be going just as hard as the FBI. But I'm not in the President's position and I have a little bit of distance from it. So I can say that incompetence still does explain and some bias, but not necessarily a coup. Is it evidence More than a coup. But maybe, maybe Durham will find that there's a coup and will change everything. All right. I'm not even sure it matters anymore what the impeachment hearings produced. I feel as Though none of the. The actual fact matters were completely irrelevant. But. Here are some things. Wow. It's hard to think when you're mad. Did you ever get really mad and your brain is just like it's on fire and you can't even decide what to complain about next? All right, so it looks like the impeachment is going to be about obstruction of justice and abuse of power. Abuse of power is complete bullshit. Because as somebody tweeted this morning, well, Scott, I have to bring in my friend. Why didn't the President investigate corruption sooner? If he cared about corruption, why didn't he do it sooner? Why did he only do it with Ukraine? If he cares about corruption all around the world so much, why does he only care about Ukraine? Scott, why? Well, Dale, let me answer that. How many other countries had at least reason to believe that they might have blackmail material over the guy who was polling the highest to be President Biden? How many other countries look like they controlled the next President of the United States? 2. And the President mentioned them both China and Ukraine. Why did the president wait? Because Biden wasn't looking like he was going to win the election before it didn't fucking matter too much. If you're looking at national priorities, if it had been Tulsi Gabbard who had a problem or was, or Yang or somebody who's polling at 3%, do you think it would have been a priority to look into it? No, it's a priority because Biden was at the top of the list to be the next President of the United States. And there was a genuine reason to think his family was tied up with other countries in a way that would have some blackmail potential. That was the highest priority in the whole fucking country. And he. He did it when he could. Now, let's ask the next dumbass question. If you've never been involved in any kind of management or big organization, you would be very confused by this. You would say, well, Scott, why didn't he do it sooner? Why didn't he order somebody to do it sooner? Do you think if the President could have just ordered his underlings to look into Ukraine and get the result that he wanted, you don't think he would have done that? Do you think he had to take the phone call himself and he thought, well, I think I'll just start by having a phone call with the President. That's where it'll start? No, if he could have done it some other fucking way, he would have done it. It would have already been done. If he could have done it sooner. It would already be done if he could do it without a phone call to the president. And guess what? Even a phone call with the president of Ukraine didn't get it done. So if that didn't get it done, because I don't think Ukraine's investigating anything if that didn't get it done, why would you be so dumb fucked to think that it could have gotten done if the president just ordered an underling to go do it. Hey, underling, go do with Ukraine what I can't even get the president of the Ukraine to agree to do if the president to president can't get it done. Stop asking me why he didn't do it sooner. That's why. Because even talking president to president couldn't fucking get it done. So don't tell me why he should have done it the other way. If that couldn't get done, there's no other way that would have got it done. Now. The other thing is, why didn't he do it sooner? Why didn't he do it sooner? I literally have a chapter in my book titled Loser Think, in which I say, every time you hear somebody say, why didn't you do it sooner? That is an illegitimate opinion. Because you know what could be done sooner? Every fucking thing in the world could be done sooner. So when you say, if you hear anybody say, why didn't it happen sooner? Why didn't you do it sooner? That person is an asshole. Why didn't you do it sooner? Is every spouse talking to their spouse? Why didn't you do it sooner? Well, that's very nice, but why didn't you do it yesterday? Well, it's nice of you to do something right today. Why didn't you do it yesterday? I'm so fucking mad at that opinion. That's why I made a chapter of it in my book Loser Think. All right, So I think, you know, the public. The public could not have possibly looked at the IG report in any detail and understood it. The public could not possibly look at the impeachment proceedings in all of its complexity and possibly understand it. So when you have big, complicated stories, what does the public default to? The public defaults to whatever is the simplest version of the story, the simplest narrative that is also true. What is the simplest narrative that is also true about Ukraine? It's the one I've been saying for two fucking months. And now Representative Crenshaw tweeted, and I retweeted it yesterday. The same point. Here's the simplest story at the impeachment hearings. When I forget who it was, some Republican asked the witness for the Democrats if there was a good reason, a predicate, if you will. So during the impeachment hearings, the Democrats own lawyer said when questioned that there was a good reason for President Trump to look into Burisma and the Bidens. That's it. That's it. That's the whole story. You don't need to ask any more questions. Here's the mistake that Jordan makes when Representative Jordan tries to. And all the lawyers were fucking idiots on this thing. Crenshaw is not a lawyer. Right. He's the only one who found the simple story. All of the lawyers who were involved couldn't find the simple story because they treated all the evidence like it had to be attacked individually. Oh, well, let me attack this. But if this, how about this? Let me find a reason why all the evidence is not what you think it is. You don't need any of that because as Representative Crenshaw noted that once the Democrats have admitted that President Trump did have a legitimate reason to look into Burisma and Biden, nothing else matters. It doesn't matter if he threatened to withhold the money, which. Which he probably didn't, but it wouldn't matter because if it was legitimate, then the President has every right to use every tool at his disposal to twist until he gets some. Until he gets some traction from the other side. If you answer that one question, do even the Democrats who looked into it, the ones who want the President impeached, do even they agree that it was. That it was appropriate for him to look into it? And they do. That's it. You can stop asking any other details about that story because all of them follow after that point. Nothing matters after that point. So Crenshaw found the simple narrative and the only one that mattered. And all the lawyers on the President's side couldn't find it. They couldn't find it, but he did. He found it. So maybe you need somebody who's not a lawyer to know what's important because lawyers don't know how to do that. Lawyers work by the hour and they go after every fact, every time as if they were all equally important or something. Now watching you also the clip probably of Matt Gaetz just annihilating the lawyer, Goldman just annihilating him in public. I've never seen anybody get that annihilated because he asked. It was an amazing moment. So he asked Goldman if he believed he was partisan and Goldman said he was not partisan. And then Matt Gaetz puts on a big easel behind him. A big blow up of the tweet from this Goldman who said he was not partisan. Let me just say that tweet looked a little bit partisan. A little bit partisan. So that guy got totally annihilated. And let me tell you, I can't tell how much bias I'm bringing into this because the people involved seem very unlikable. Have you noticed that? Have you noticed that the pro impeachment people are. And this could be just bias. So I actually have a genuine question in my mind. Is it a coincidence that the people on the pro impeachment side are all such unpleasant personalities? They're people that you hate before they've even said much? Is that just my impression? Because the vibe I get from all of them is I was bullied as a child. And I mean this completely serious. This is not. The next thing I say is not meant to be hyperbole. It is not meant to be just some partisan kind of taking sides. The vibe I get this doesn't mean it's true. I'm just telling you how I receive it, like how it's being absorbed by me. The vibe I get is the people who are the most, let's say, illegitimate, the ones who are looking like actors pretending to be concerned about the Republic, but they're really just trying to impeach the president. They all seem like people who got bullied when they were younger and that President Trump just triggers that and that they're working off some kind of trauma from their childhood. Now, is it likely that Adam Schiff was ever bullied as a child? Yup. Is it likely that Jerry Nadler was ever bullied as a child and also by President Trump? Yep. Is it likely that Jeffrey Toobin was ever bullied as a child? I don't know, but probably. And I say that because most people are bullied. Right. The only people you might imagine were not bullied as children are people who are really big and muscular and kind of alpha. Looking by everybody else, you would imagine that just about everybody else has been bullied, and some more than others. Nancy Pelosi, I don't know what happened to her. I've lost all my respect for her. And I have to admit, I had a lot of respect for Pelosi when she was just being a good speaker of the House and resisting the other side. That's all part of the game, and I'm totally cool with that. But Pelosi has managed to take the lead from Jerry Nadler and Adam Schiff. So if your speaker of the House ends up working for the two bullied members of the House, you can't respect that anymore because there's no leadership there. So Pelosi has abandoned any pretense of leadership and now she's just a follower of Nadler and Schiff and whoever else is paying them, I suppose. All right, so let's see. So the abuse of power is a standard which should remove both Nadler and Schiff, wouldn't you say? Don't you think there's plenty of abuse of power going on by Congress right now? I mean, it looks like abuse of power to me. And if it looks like it, that would be enough to pursue it, I would think. And by the way, the dumbest thing that the Democrats are saying is that if you don't remove Trump right away, he'll use other countries, possibly Venezuela. I actually heard that yesterday. Somebody said, what if he starts asking Venezuela to help him in the election? You're not even pretending any good anymore. You're not pretending. Well, what about Venezuela? Come on. If the best argument you could trot out on national television and one of the Democrats did this yesterday, was that if we don't stop him, he might use another country, what if it's Venezuela? Somebody actually said that with a straight face on television yesterday. Unbelievable. All right, so I hate my government. The Congress has a 9% approval rating before this happened. So before impeachment, they had a 9% approval record. It's not going up. There's nothing that happened today that will make that 9% inch up. It might approach zero. We might actually be at the point where the next poll could show zero approval for Congress. Or if it had a 2% approval, it would be the 2% who are not paying attention, I suppose. But does Congress deserve a 9% approval? It does not. Not even close. It's not doing anything right at this point. How about that usmca? So there's word that maybe there'll be action on the USMCA so that the Democrats can can act as though they were doing their job. Too little, too late. Don't even pretend you're doing your job. The reason that it made sense for them to wait for the USMCA is that if they approve it now, the results won't be obvious before election. If the USMCA had been approved a year ago or whenever it was ready, there might have been enough time before election for it to have worked its way into the system and to start showing up in the gdp. But if you wait like they did. Even if it's the greatest thing in the world, you're not really going to notice it by election day. So somehow the Democrats have managed to take something that was unambiguously good for the people, agreed on by both Democrats and Republicans, and couldn't fucking get that done. Couldn't get it done. Seriously, why would you give them even any, you know, why would 9% of the people think that if you can't do something that both sides agree on, that's not just doing your job poorly, that's not even doing your job, that's doing nothing. All right, I'm just looking at your comments now because I'm so angry. So there are two. Well, let's talk about the other impeachment. So one was. Oh, the other one is obstruction of justice, and the other one was abuse of power. Obstruction of justice. Now, I believe Dershowitz has already ruled on this, if you will, figuratively speaking, and said that you can't find the president guilty of obstruction of justice if he wants to go to the courts to get a decision about whether people can appear to appear and testify. How do you argue with that? How do you argue with Dershowitz, who says you've got three branches of government, when two of them disagree, they take it to the courts. That's the normal process. That's what the president would have done. How do you say it's an abuse of power? When you're using the system the way it was designed, exactly as it was designed, you're not bending the rules, you're not pushing the envelope, you're using the system exactly as the framers drew it up and what they wanted to happen. Let the courts decide. And you're going to impeach a president for wanting to let the courts decide what he should do? Are you kidding me? And abuse of power. If the abuse of power was just asking for the Biden, the Biden investigation of Ukraine, if that's what that refers to. And I guess we'll wait to see if there's more to that. But if that's all it refers to, then the Democrats own lawyer saying that that was a legitimate thing to look into is the end of the story. So you've got two counts which can be dismissed with almost one sentence apiece. Let me see if I can do this. I'm going to dismiss both of these impeachment counts with one sentence apiece. On the obstruction of justice one, the one sentence would be, you can't impeach a president for Asking the court to decide what the court should decide. In other words, it's the court's job. So one sentence, that's the entire defense. You don't even need to get into details. But will the Republicans get into details? Of course. Because they're all lawyers, or too many of them are lawyers about abuse of power. Is there one sentence that can make that go away? Yes. Democrats have agreed that it was worth looking into. Burisma and Biden. That's it. There's nothing else that you need to say you could have. This is the only impeachment that could be entirely defended by tweets. Just imagine this and tell me if you think I'm exaggerating. Let's say the impeachment gets voted on and the House votes to impeach, then it gets kicked over to the Senate to try it. If Lindsey Graham said, I'm going to do the entire defense in two tweets, one tweet, it's not obstruction of justice. When the president asks the Supreme Court to decide something. That's it. One tweet. The second tweet. It's not abuse of power. If everybody agrees that this was a national interest to ask about Barisma and Biden and then just vote. If the Senate puts on more of a defense than those two sentences, they're working against themselves. Because as soon as you make it complicated, you give credence to the other side. If the Republicans in the Senate allow themselves to get into the details and to argue whether or not there was a quid pro quo or any of that, if they allow themselves to even engage in that argument, they're working against themselves. Because the more they allow that, it's something to talk about. The more that they get into the details, the more the public watching it, who doesn't really understand any of it, the more the public is going to think, well, there must be something there, because they're having this lively debate on the details. So logically, there must be something there. But if you say the impeachment is so thin that we're not going to put up a formal defense, I'm going to give you two sentences that make both of them go away, and then we're going to vote. That's what they should have done. Now, the other thing that's bothering me greatly is who was one of the witnesses at the impeachment hearing, named Burke? Apparently, part of his opening statement, he played a misleading edited clip in which he showed the president saying. Or the quote, anyway, I didn't watch it. Live. But I guess he showed part of the quote where the President said that Article 2, meaning the part of the Constitution that says what the President can do would allow him to do anything he wanted. And he plays this video in public in front of Congress. Do you know what's wrong with it? What's wrong with it is he edited out the part where the President clearly limits his comment to the single question of whether a president can hire and fire within the executive branch. And on that question, nobody disagrees. Nobody disagrees that a president can fire the head of the FBI. He hired him, he can fire him, and for any reason he wants. So when I saw Burke put that up there, which is nothing but a fucking lie. It's a transparent, easily identified fucking lie that this guy's doing in front of Congress, in front of the country. And at that point I said to myself, the Republicans should call a recession. And then they should come back in and say, here's the full video that shows the part you edited out. And then just walk out, just walk out. Because walking out on that one point would have made the news cycle about that one point. And when the country sees what the Democrats are willing to do to impeach this president, and that's the easiest thing you could prove is here's the video they showed you and here's the rest of the video, the same video. Here's just the rest of it. Or the transcript, if you will. But in either case, all you'd have to do is show the full thing. And anybody could see that he took it out of context intentionally. And at that point, you'd have to say, well, if this is your story, we're going to let you live with it. We're not even going to put up a defense and just get up and walk out. Because that's the only thing that the news would talk about. They say, why do you do that? Why is he making up stuff out of context? And by the way, you know, it's the same thing that the Democrats did with the fine people hoax. There are people in this country, most of them probably, who believe the President of the United States called the neo Nazis in Charlottesville fine people. Why did they believe that? Same reason. Because they saw a video and a transcript taken in a context. If you see it in his full context, the President says in direct language, direct language, he says, I'm not talking about the white nationalists and the neo Nazis. They should be condemned. Totally exact quote. But the Democrats take that part out. So it makes it misleadingly look like he was talking about them when he said, fine, people. It's exactly the same thing that Burke did yesterday. He took a public. And keep in mind that the public, that the President's actual statements in both cases were public. There's nothing hidden. And still they have the balls to show part of the video, which is intentionally misleading. All right, that makes me hate my government. The fact that the Republicans stayed in the room after that and didn't just stop everything right there. The Republicans should have stopped this show right there. They should have said, wait, wait, wait. We're going to use all of our time from now until the beginning just to talk about that. Because that tells you everything you need to know. Public. The public only needs to know that. And you know what would have saved that? If one Democrat had said, you know, Burke, you make a good case. But I have to admit that video was taken out of context. That's not what he was talking about. If one Democrat had said that, I'd say to myself, huh, there's hope, because the Democrats think they have a good case. Why would you throw in something that's an obvious lie if you have a good case? Let me ask you that question. Would the Democrats include an obvious lie that they obviously know is a lie? Because in this case, this one's such a simple situation. You know, he was talking about just firing Comey, and you just leave that part out if you have to do that as part of your case. Do you have a case? No, you don't. Republicans should have walked out on that point, and they should have just. Just said this whole thing, and then they should have let it go to the Senate and then vote on it. And after they voted, they should try to bring up Schiff and Nadler on some kind of expulsion charge. So you can't impeach. I guess technically you can impeach Congress people, but they can be expelled for various bad behaviors, and they should definitely be expelled for this. This is so far over the line of what any of us should be willing to put up with. All right, that's enough for today. I believe. I believe I've said enough. And I will end by reminding you that my predictions and filters said the following. I said the Russia collusion was fake, and it was. I said that the President's abuse of power is BS and when the Senate votes, you'll see that that's bs. I also said that the FBI actions were probably more like incompetence plus bias, more than that, than some kind of coup attempt. And so far, Horowitz backs that up, but Durham might not. So my prediction is not confirmed yet. We still need to wait for Durham. If it turns out that the real problem came from, say, somebody who worked at the CIA at the time, for example, that would still be compatible with my opinion, because I was talking about the FBI and Lisa Page and Sprock and their text and stuff. I did not think those were smoking guns. But that doesn't say that Brennan and. Well, let's just throw Brennan's name in there. And Clapper. Those two guys have some explaining to do. And I think Durham is going to have some interesting stuff about Brennan and Clapper. So we'll wait on that. If it turns out that Brennan and Clapper get off free, well, I'll be surprised because my filter says different. And I will talk to you later.