Power Line

We’re not done thrashing the Afghanistan disgrace, so we coaxed Michael Anton (the Power Line podcast’s most frequent guest it turns out) to join us for a few quaffs. We use three of his recent articles to launch our discussion, starting with “ Afghanistan: Doomed from the Start.” But we use a section from the middle of this essay, on the blunders of our advisers in the Middle East who don’t... Source

We weren’t able to do an episode for our regular Saturday time slot last weekend because Steve was on the road, so we’re doing this mid-week show with a special return guest, philosopher Spencer Case, who in a previous life served in the U.S. Army in deployments to both Iraq and Afghanistan. While supportive of our military mission, he had misgivings about how it was all going during his Afghan... Source

Lucretia takes over hosting duties for this episode (which seems only truth-in-advertising, since most listeners think she is charge every week), as we contemplate the question: wouldn’t it be nice if we actually had two political parties? We use as our text for the subject one of Harry Jaffa’s earliest essays, “The Nature and Origin of the American Party System,” where he explains why at its core... Source

As everyone knows, California is having another fun-filled recall election next month, and some recent polls show that Governor Gavin Gruesom is in trouble and may well lose. The way California’s recall works is that if a majority votes to recall the governor, the second step on the ballot is to choose a successor, and right now the list of people who have qualified for the replacement field is... Source

When it comes to COVID, Power Line’s go-to source for making sense of the subject is Kevin Roche, who brings his years of experience in the health care field to his very useful website, healthy-skeptic.com. Scott Johnson follows Kevin’s work closely on Power Line (here, here, and here, for example), but we decided it was time to hear from Kevin directly in podcast form. Among his other pithy... Source

We’re back! After a hiatus for a week while Steve was overseas, we return to the bar with some new whiskies and a sequel to our last episode that talked about the hysterical attacks on our friends at the Claremont Institute. Little did we know the liberal hysteria was just getting started! Damon Linker, the columnist at The Week and a previous guest on this podcast, thinks our Claremont friends... Source

Steve figured a nine time zone distance might provide a margin of safety from Lucretia’s rear-end kicking over Steve’s article “ What the Hell Happened to Bill Kristol?“, which Lucretia finds sorely wanting. And his attempts to mollify Lucretia with tales of how great Hungary’s conservatives are was mostly unavailing, even if true. Anyway, in this slightly abbreviated episode (because Steve had to... Source

Once upon a time, “CRT” stood for “cathode ray tube,” sometimes known as “television,” but also oscilloscopes, computer screens, some x-rays, and certain other technical devices designed for testing and calibration. Cathode ray tubes went the way of the Dodo bird quite some time ago, and nowadays CRT means something else: Critical Race Theory. There is one way in which today’s CRT resembles the... Source

Who knew that that hottest new thing in the early 21st century would be an old thing—the nation state? Nationalism acquired a foul odor in the 20th century, but ever since Brexit and Trump upset the cosmopolites from Berkeley to Brussels, the idea of nationalism has crept back into favor, at least with many conservatives. I’ve written my own short overview of the issue a couple years ago now... Source

After a week off for travel and for Steve to recover from the pummeling he took at the hands of “Lucretia” in our last episode two weeks ago, the 3WHH is back with some fresh malts and fresh looks at the news of the week. We start with what appears to be the White House cat fight between First Doctor Jill Biden and Veep Kaaaaammmaaala Harris, and then proceed to examine the special House January 6... Source

If you only go by the major media or your local college sociology department, you’d think rural America is a hopeless domain of drug and alcohol addiction, downward mobility, and dysfunction. Far from it, at least in rural Maine, where author Gigi Georges decided to spend several years getting to know and tracking several young women as they made their way through the challenges of their small... Source

This week’s Power Line Classic format show features Prof. Charles R. Kesler, editor of the Claremont Review of Books, talking about his brand new book, Crisis of the Two Constitutions: The Rise, Decline, and Recovery of American Greatness. Crisis collects several of Kesler’s old and new essays and details how we got to and what is at stake in our increasingly divided America. Source

We get letters. And one from a regular listener baited us with the proposition that since FDR’s New Deal—decried here on a recent episode—is now nearly 90 years old, the duty of Burkean conservatives is now to preserve the New Deal rather than pine romantically for the good old days of Calvin Coolidge. To which Steve responded, well, I guess we should do a seminar-style episode about Edmund Burke... Source

Pour a double for this weeks 3WHH, as Lucretia and Steve host Michael Anton to talk about his extraordinary new article, “ The Art of Spiritual War, Or, How to (Posthumously) Conquer the World from Your Desk.” The author of the famous (or infamous) “Flight 93 Election” article in 2016 covers an amazing amount of ground in a short space, which includes rehabilitating Machiavelli in a certain way... Source

As regular listeners know, we never tire of beating up on Progressivism—both the old kind and today’s high-octane version—and we especially like to beat up on Woodrow Wilson. Most of what we know about Wilson’s perfidy comes from the ur-text of Wilson criticism, Ronald J. Pestritto’s Woodrow Wilson and the Roots of Modern Liberalism from 2005. R.J. (as he is known to his friends), is out this week... Source

The modern conservative movement born in the 1950s had two main objects: It was anti-Communist, and anti-New Deal. Lately, however, some conservatives have warmed up to both FDR and the New Deal, which has to have Robert Taft rolling over in his grave—and maybe William F. Buckley, Jr. too. Conrad Black, an esteemed man of the right, has long championed FDR as a “champion of freedom” (the subtitle... Source

This week Lucretia and I decide to take a break from our recent seminar format—in other words, no schoolwork this week—and just review some of the week’s news instead. Or perhaps we should say non-news, since most of the “news” items we review turn into examples of what’s wrong with journalism today. Call it “The Age of Al Hunt,” in homage to Evelyn Waugh’s device about “the Age of Hooper” in... Source

Fred Barnes recently announced his retirement after more than 50 years as a working journalist, having served as a reporter for the Baltimore Sun, the Washington Star, The New Republic, the Weekly Standard, and the Washington Examiner. He contributed to countless other publications such as The American Spectator and Reader’s Digest, but many people will remember him for his frequent turns on The... Source

All it took was a NY Times op-ed article on the (misunderstood) legacy of Justice John Marshall Harlan’s famous dissent in the 1896 Plessy (“separate but equal”) case to set off a classic “Lucretia” rant: I find the NYT piece more damaging to the cause of equality before the law even than critical race theory. I think [the author] perpetuates that subterfuge that makes it possible for milquetoast... Source

With this episode of the Power Line Show, I’m returning to what I call “Power Line Classic” format, featuring interviews and conversations with interests thinkers, writers, and doers. I took a hiatus from this format last year while I was working on my book, and using the Three Whisky Happy Hour format as a substitute because “Lucretia” does all the work (except for selecting my whisky)... Source