Workin’ for the (Post-)Weekend #19: The Final Countdown

Bye-bye, America; and other recent hits!

Happy Election Day, #Fifdom! Today, each and every one of us can be a loser! And remember, as the great American (and #Fifdom Shabbat-dinner survivor) Iowahawk teaches:

David Burge @iowahawkblog

I would just like to say that the more you are psychically invested in the outcome of the election, the more I wish you a day filled with horror and agony

Some other special sniglets to tide you over during these trying times….

* On Members Only #141 we talked at the top about Bill Maher’s “Democracy’s Deathbed” coda to his Friday show. Alert listener Mike Hochanadel then pointed out in the comments section (available uniquely to paying subscribers!) that fave comedian Kyle Dunnigan was lightning quick off the jump with a parody thereof, “Bye Bye America”:

* Speaking of election catastrophizing, remember that time on #373 when Kmele got Adam Davidson and Thomas Chatterton Williams to stop flinging Twitter poo at one another and instead have an adult conversation? Well, Davidson was sufficiently moved by the experience to start a whole new thing:

This is the first letter I’m writing as part of a new project–my attempt to have meaningful dialogue with people I don’t agree with. I’m writing it to Michael Moynihan, of Vice News and The Fifth Column podcast. The idea is for him to respond to this letter with his own, then I’ll write him back. Michael is a good starter disagreeer (sp?) for me, since I’ve known and liked him for a long time and agree with him on a lot.

The gist of Davidson’s opening salvo:

[Our] disagreement, I think, comes down to one simple question: how scared should we be about Trump, Trumpism, and this moment in American history? 

My view: very, very scared. 

* After the Coleman Hughes/Nick Gillespie Great Welch Replacement Theory in #379, the moment seemed ripe for a Most Ambitious Crossover Event. Sure enough, Kmele was on the newfangled Reason Livestream that same week w/ Gillespie and the great Zach Weissmueller:

* Has criminal justice reform made us less safe? A provocative question, one that I suspect our listeners would have some healthy disagreement over. It’s also the headline question on a debate over at Bari Weiss’s Honestly podcast between Fif’ fave SF lefty Lara Bazelon (#357, #369) and Criminal [In]justice author Rafael Mangual, moderated by none other than … Kmele!

* Kmele also went on Fox & Friends a cupla weeks back to talk about plummeting test scores in K-12 schools, and whether it’s all the fault of the Wokes. Cannot make it embed, alas!

* Some pertinent links about the evidently controversial Bobby Drapes (#380), starting with his mentioned books: Rolling Stone Magazine: The Uncensored History (1990), To Start a War: How the Bush Administration Took America into Iraq (2021), and Weapons of Mass Delusion: When the Republican Party Lost Its Mind (2022). I also recommend Draper’s March 2017 New York Times Magazine piece “Trump vs. Congress: Now What?” (Which I riffed on here.) Gillespie and I interviewed Draper at the 2016 Republican National Convention (from which Moynihan and I joined to record #17 way back when this podcast was a baby). Then there’s the classic August 2014 cover story, almost impossible to read now without a rueful snicker or three, “Has the ‘Libertarian Moment’ Finally Arrived?” Here's how that message from another time begins:

“Let’s say Ron Paul is Nirvana,” said Kennedy, the television personality and former MTV host, by way of explaining the sort of politician who excites libertarians like herself. “Like, the coolest, most amazing thing to come along in years, and the songs are nebulous but somehow meaningful, and the lead singer kills himself to preserve the band’s legacy.

“Then Rand Paul — he’s Pearl Jam. Comes from the same place, the songs are really catchy, can really pack the stadiums, though it’s not quite Nirvana.

“Ted Cruz? He’s Stone Temple Pilots. Tries really hard to sound like Pearl Jam, never gonna sound like Nirvana. Really good voice, great staying power — but the whole is not greater than the sum of its parts.”

I met Kennedy (a gabby 41-year-old whose actual name is Lisa Kennedy Montgomery) in Midtown Manhattan at Fox News headquarters, where she hosts a Fox Business Network program called “The Independents.” By cable TV standards, the show, which is shown four times a week, is jarringly nonpartisan, for the simple reason that she and her co-hosts — the Reason magazine editor in chief Matt Welch and the entrepreneur Kmele Foster — are openly contemptuous of both parties. Kennedy spent most of the Bill Clinton ‘90s as MTV’s most vocal Republican, but then she soured on the G.O.P., a political shift that solidified during the spending and warring and moralizing excesses of the George W. Bush years. Sometime after the elephant tattoo on her left hip “got infected and started looking more like a pig,” Kennedy began thinking of herself as a libertarian instead. She, Welch and Foster take turns on the show bashing not only “Obamacare” but also the N.S.A., neoconservatives and social scolds. It’s not a hospitable forum for G.O.P. talking points. “There are some libertarian-leaning Republicans who are afraid to be on our show,” Kennedy told me. Libertarianism’s Nirvana, a.k.a. the former congressman and former presidential candidate Ron Paul, has been on “The Independents” more than once. But Pearl Jam — a.k.a. Ron Paul’s son Rand, a one-term Republican senator who may well run for the presidency in 2016 — has yet to appear.

A few weeks after our conversation, I saw Kennedy onstage in a hotel ballroom, wearing purple spandex, gyrating to the soundtrack of “Flashdance” and hollering into a microphone, “Are you hungry for more liberty?” She was the M.C. for the Competitive Enterprise Institute’s annual dinner, which, as Welch put it to me, “in the tallest-dwarf category is considered to be one of D.C.'s best annual galas.”

* Did someone invoke Kennedy? As in, America’s Wet Nurse? (She, uh, really called herself that last time I was on her show.) Which, thanks to Busty Wimsatt, has been partially captured here:

* Moynihan & I have been yammering a tad of late about the Showtime docu-series The Lincoln Project. Here’s my Reason piece on same: “The Lincoln Project Demonstrates How Anti-Trump Fixation Can Lead to Lousy Policy: Reflexive opposition to the 45th president was terrible for Covid policy and basic ethics.”

* Keeping with recent trends, let’s end this Linksapalooza with some music. The new Giles Martin stereo re-mix of Revolver just came out, and I kind of can’t believe how good it is. This may just be the post-election content you need most: