3-4-25 - 9am - The Man Who Would Be King

Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:01):
Up here in Alaska, you can rip off the end
of the straw, take the rest of the straw off
gently with your other hand, and then you can bite
off pieces of the straw, wad them up in your
mouth until they're nice and covered in saliva, put them
back into the straw, and fire them through, creating a projectile.

Speaker 2 (00:19):
I'm pretty sure I used.

Speaker 1 (00:20):
To be able to do that in Colorado as I
was growing up, but I'm fairly certain you guys can't
do that anymore, as it's probably been banned.

Speaker 3 (00:29):
You know, dragons speaking of people that get paid a
lot to do nothing.

Speaker 2 (00:35):
I don't know what.

Speaker 3 (00:36):
Maybe in my brain I just thought, I think I
may know a few people like that.

Speaker 4 (00:42):
We've seen how he spoils girl. So yeah, he makes
way too much.

Speaker 2 (00:46):
He makes way too much money.

Speaker 3 (00:47):
He's got way too much time on his hand, and
all supposedly in the name of defending America.

Speaker 2 (00:52):
You know, well, whatever, my dog defends America.

Speaker 3 (00:57):
Probably so shortly after the attacks on September eleven, there
was an article published by this guy, but the name
was Steve Saylor, and it was called what will Happen
in Afghanistan? And I remember reading it. He published this
story about eight days after Bush's Joint resolution that authorized

(01:18):
the use of force, and it was just over a
week before the bombs of Operation and Enduring Freedom began
to drop. And I forget who pointed the story out
to me. Somebody in my office said, you know, you
probably ought to read this, and so I did. In
this article, Sailor cites Rudyard Kipling's The Man Who Would

(01:39):
Be King, but he specifically cites the movie adaptation of
that This starred Sean Connery and Michael Kane, both the
article and the movie. In fact, if you haven't seen
the movie, you really should go watch it because two great,
two great actors, Sean Connery and Michael Kane. Plus it's
a good story. The movie and the article both really

(02:06):
do make for frustrating consumption, being twenty four and forty
eight years old, respectively. Sailor's assertion is that after the
destruction of Osama.

Speaker 2 (02:19):
Bin Lauden and or the al Qaeda network.

Speaker 3 (02:22):
The United States should steer clear of nation building, and
he cites the experiences of the protagonists, if you want
to call him that, Daniel Dervaut and Peachy Canahan as exemplars.
Carnahan reflecting on a new governing class in the movie,

(02:43):
talks about I have an educated taste in whiskey and
women waistcoats and Bill's affair, but I've had few chances
to exercise it lately, because then that governs spend all
their time making up new laws to stop men like
you and me from getting anywhere. And whose loss is it?
Why it's England's of course. Now, that occurs very early

(03:07):
in the film, but it stands out to me, especially
as our modern political debate wrestles with, you know, swinging
cuts to the bureaucracy, and and the toll that all
the apparatics take on the instincts of men patriotic and cultural,

(03:31):
as if those two were separable. Then you toss in
the temper tantns of someone who wishes to see Zelenski,
a man himself who would be king treated like royalty
in the Oval office, and think to yourself, if you
want the nation to endure another Afghan style debacle, or

(03:55):
as King Daniel in the movie says, a nation, I
shall make of it with an anthem and a flag. Again,
if you haven't seen the film, you gotta go watch
the Wat's The movie We're always being told that we
should stand with Ukraine, but we're rarely, if ever told why.

(04:19):
When we are told why it is that we need
to side with a liberal democracy, it is that if
we don't stop Putin here, he won't stop anywhere. He'll
eventually move on, and you know, it'll be Moldova, it'll
be the Czech Republic or cech check yah, whatever we
call it now, Poland, it'll be Germany, it'll be all

(04:42):
of Western Europe.

Speaker 2 (04:45):
But will it really because as the war.

Speaker 3 (04:49):
Has now, now we have a little bit of hindsight
and we look behind us, and Putin realizes that, you know,
he was going to sweep in, take over Kiev, take
over the government, take over the governing institutions, you know,
hold an air quote here election, which really means install

(05:10):
a puppet government. And he would accomplish by doing that
what I believe his real objective to be, and that
is to keep NATO from expanding any further. Well, actually
he ended up causing just the opposite, because Finland joined

(05:30):
NATO because of what he did, what Putin did, and
now you got that thousand mile long or longer border
between Finland and the old Soviet Union and what now Russia?
So what is his objective now? If you really read

(05:50):
the stories about what's going on now, it may be
that he has you know, he's faced the reality of
Jiminey Christmas. These people are a lot tough for the
next SPACCE and NATO and the United States moved in
and gave him a lot more armaments than I thought
they would give. Maybe if I just wait long enough,
they'll give up and I can then make my move.

Speaker 2 (06:12):
But he hasn't really said that lately.

Speaker 3 (06:15):
Instead, it's now become well, now, if we need to negotiate,
I want to keep what I got. I want to
keep PRIMEA, I want to keep the dombass religion. Okay, well,
now you're no longer worried about NATO because NATO bringing
Ukraine into that fold is a non starter. And at

(06:36):
the same time we got the United Kingdom, we got
Kiers Starmer basically saying to Zelensky. As soon as he
got shuffled out of the Oval office, he ran over
to London and Starmer propped him back up and said,
I'll give you two billion dollars in loan guarantees now,
plus you know, if necessary, we'll put boots on the ground.

(06:58):
And I boy when he said that, I thought, did
you clear that with any of your part of partners
across the channel? Did Macron agree to boots on the ground. Now,
Macrone has previously proposed boots on the ground and then
backed off when he couldn't get anybody else, and Starmer

(07:19):
has now said it, and I have no I haven't
since the program, or since I finished show prep last night,
but I haven't heard anybody else in the EU, particularly
France in particular, or German or the polls say oh yeah, well,
if you put boots on the ground, we'll join with you.
So once again kind of like Macron, hey all put

(07:40):
boots on the ground. Looks around, I don't see any
other boots, and suddenly that kind of disappears. The adage
that we should necessarily side with a liberal democracy.

Speaker 2 (07:57):
I know, you know.

Speaker 3 (07:58):
I keep hearing I've got to go prove this to myself.
I keep hearing that the Ukrainian constitution prohibits elections during wartime,
and it very well may be that's the language. I've
got to find an English interpretation.

Speaker 4 (08:18):
I believe it's during martial law, right, And he has
to Redeclare martial law every niney or so days.

Speaker 3 (08:27):
Which is what he's been doing, which is different than
the constitution prohibiting an election during wartime.

Speaker 2 (08:37):
He is imposing martial law.

Speaker 3 (08:41):
Because of well, I shouldn't say because of because he can.
That's why he's doing it, because he can. Whether it's
because of the war or on the other reasons, I
don't know. But is it truly I guess my question
is is it truly a liberal democracy? That's starting to
seem farcical to me, And given how the Western world

(09:03):
has indeed in the past, we have prompt up dictators,
we have prompt up terror factions that hold that old
adage about signing with the liberal democracy has scarcely showered
itself in glory in recent decades. In the context of
classic liberalism, which in which I would include, you know,

(09:26):
free and fair elections, free speech, you know, do process,
all those things that you and I kind of take
for granted at times, and of course democratic values, you know, stolen, canceled,
defrauded elections, whatever you might want to be so, from
lawfare to outright cheating, the kind of finger wagging that
once convinced an entire Hemisphere, the tear on the dropping

(09:46):
of billions of dollars of bombs in the desert, for
the short term aid of the defense industry and the
long term aid as it turns out to be of
the Taliban.

Speaker 2 (09:54):
I don't think that works anymore.

Speaker 1 (09:57):
So.

Speaker 3 (09:58):
No, I'm not sure that we always need decide with
the so called victim, and that presupposes that we view
Ukraine as a victimized Western liberal democracy in the first instance.
Do we or don't we? I'm not really sure. I'm
beginning to question that because the longer this drags out,

(10:21):
I really do wonder you can argue the pros and
cons of martial law in certain circumstances. I'm beginning to wonder,
much like we told Juliani after nine to eleven that

(10:42):
you know, you cannot put off the elections, and we
had to threaten him withdrawal of funds to allow the
elections in New York City continue post nine to eleven,
I'm kind of seeing the same thing over here a
little bit. Do we really need to postpone elections? While

(11:06):
we didn't have a war, well except for obviously Pearl Harbor, well,
we kind of had in parts of the I mean,
we had Germans on the east coast, and we had
obviously the Imperial Japanese Army at Tackiness on the far
far left outward islands of Hawaii. We held elections. Now

(11:30):
FDR one, Oh, we can't change horses midstream. Well, let
Zelensky make that argument. I guess the what I'm trying
to make is why not have elections? I might understand
martial law because you've got to control everything going on,
because the war is happening on your soil.

Speaker 2 (11:53):
But can you not have elections?

Speaker 3 (11:57):
Because since that first incursion, that first part of the invasion,
to be more precise, invasion, Biden called it an incursion,
Russia has been held at bay except those in that
little bit of territory that he's managed to keep a

(12:18):
hold of. So you might not have an election that
is in totality covering the entire country. But what about
the rest of the country that is still living under
Ukrainian rule? Why can't they? I mean, it's just a
question to ponder. When you think about the Maiden protests

(12:39):
in twenty fourteen, he was abundantly obvious the fight was
the salient of an expressionist bureaucracy. The European Union. More
than anything else. Ideology played almost no part. Political philosophy
that was out the window. This was a good old
fashioned power game, a Eurasian civil war for resources, and

(12:59):
you know, maybe a little bit more primarily for resources.
Now that's not to defend Putin's response, it's just rather
to contextualize the response. I can think of no other
rational reply to the European Union, NATO and the CIA

(13:22):
literally parking their tanks on Russia's lawn, which should not
be considered an endorsement. Rather, and I told you so
from those who have been warning about this escalating war
for more than a decade. Most Americans haven't paid any
attention to it. But you cannot ignore the history, which

(13:43):
we spent an entire day on yesterday. And so why
do I come back to it today? Because I think
we might be seeing a little bit of a new doctrine,
a foreign a foreign policy doctrine, a military doctrine whatever.
I'm a new Monroe doctrine, but for Eastern Europe, I

(14:05):
don't know, But I think we're seeing the formation of
a little bit of a new doctrine. The only other
excuse that I've been given, and quite frankly, I think
in some quarters been accused of is that we are

(14:27):
anti appeasement is the phrase which is perhaps the most
poignant argument in favor of Ukraine, and that strikes especially
hard with Europeans, particularly in London and in Warsaw, because
a condent that is still reading from the ravages of
the First and Second World Wars is rational in its

(14:52):
homophobia Europe, as Trump and his cadre have been pointing
out for years, is and you have to admit, this
is disturbingly very ill equipped, if equipped much at all,
to fight a real ground war, because for all sircuit
starmers bluster about boots on the ground, as I've said,

(15:13):
Britain has but a handful of operable tanks, seventy seventy tanks,
none of which are really suited to the Eurasian theater.
Nobody ever subs and thinks about the practicality the logistics
of those British tanks. Will they be just like other
tanks that Ukraine is using. And the ground war pretty

(15:37):
much comes to a halt in winter and spring. Winter
grounds frozen, but it's hard to move logistically on both
sides of this battlefront. And then when the spring rains
come and the spring thaws come, it becomes even more
difficult to move logistically. Those tanks have to be backed

(15:58):
up by a supply chain. It goes miles and miles
behind it. Fuel, food, medical care, all the things you
need to advance in the springtime is very hard to
advance because you're slogging through mud again.

Speaker 2 (16:14):
It's World War One all over again. But while the anti.

Speaker 3 (16:19):
Appeasement argument resonates, and it does resonate it, you know,
to be accused of being an appeaser really irritates me.
It causes me to sit back and go, wait a minute,
am I looking for appeasement here? I'm not looking for
appeasement But arguably the most important part of the conflict

(16:39):
resolution here is to drive a wedge between Russia and China.

Speaker 2 (16:48):
I guess the.

Speaker 3 (16:48):
Point is to me, that's the more important objective. Sorry, Ukraine,
but I think the more important objective is to drive
a wedge between Russia and China, because Europe sees this
more like the last century's major wars and America sees
it more like the Cold War. So let's get a
point in the Oval office, when he said, you have

(17:10):
a nice ocean, but lost.

Speaker 2 (17:11):
The room with the follow up. You will feel it
in the future, Mike.

Speaker 3 (17:16):
Just think how much better off this country would be
if they'd had just done that with Fauci and paid
him to not work instead of all the messing around
he's done and causing COVID. Yeah, we're gonna talk about
COVID tomorrow. There's some new information out about the COVID
shot that I find not surprising, but nonetheless it's still shocking.

(17:40):
So let me go back and kind of pick up
about appeasement and misunderstanding.

Speaker 2 (17:47):
The only other excuse.

Speaker 3 (17:48):
That we are given is anti appeasement, and that resonates.
It is probably the most poignant argument in favor of Ukraine.
Nobody that opposes the war in Ukraine wants to appease

(18:09):
Vladimir Putin. That's not the objective. The objective is to
stop the war. Neville Chamberlain wasn't. His objective wasn't to
stop the war World War two. Neville Chamberlain's appeasement of
Hitler was basically, Hey, this is the guy we can
get along with, and so we can keep war. We
can keep war out of out of England, out of

(18:29):
the United Kingdom, Of course Chamberlain was wrong and became
the great appeaser. But anti appeasement is a poignant argument
in favor of Ukraine, and it does strike hard with Europeans,
particularly in London, particularly in Warsaw, because they're still wreathing

(18:52):
from the ravages of the First and Second World Wars.
Whether you want to admit that or not, they still are.
What do you think the whole problem is in Germany
right now with the rise of Nazism again, what do
you think the whole problem is with their whole love
hate relationship with the EU, wanting to create the EU
to compete with US on trade, yet talking about trying

(19:15):
to build their own army.

Speaker 2 (19:17):
But yet the.

Speaker 3 (19:17):
Nation states that comprise the EU recognize that that will
end up creating the United States of Europe, and they
don't really want that. They want to retain their sovereignty.
So they have all these military systems. Every country has
its own system, very few of which are interchangeable, very
few of which can interact with one another. And they

(19:39):
don't even train together. The only training together, I shouldn't
say the only, but the majority of the training that
they do together is how to use their military to
respond to a natural or man made disaster. Because I've
been a part of those training exercises. They don't have

(20:00):
systems that interlock with each other, and there's this They're
just not equipped to fight a ground war. And when
they're not equipped, you think about this. After nine to eleven,

(20:25):
we had citizens in this country, and we had governments
from around the world that were offering and indeed oftentimes
did without our requesting it, send us stuff, stuff, equipment
or teams. One of the hardest things that I had
to do on nine to eleven was whether it was

(20:46):
members of the IDEF or it was part of Russia's
em orcom you know, they have US images like we do,
or whether it was individuals in this country that would
send us or people that were offering me, Hey, I've
got a system that will do X, Y or Z.
Trying to for example, trying to integrate a team of

(21:08):
Russians and a team from Israel, or think about this,
a team from Saudi Arabia. Well, it's talk about weird.
That's when you pick up the phones called the State Department,
ask them and you ask. At the time, you ask
Pillan Powell, what.

Speaker 2 (21:26):
Do you want me to do? With these people. They're here.

Speaker 3 (21:29):
I got to do something with them, can't. We can't
thumb our nose at them. Well, just as I had
those problems, the Ukrainian Army has the same problems when
you get tanks from France, Germany, Poland the United Kingdom,
none of which can really communicate with each other, all
of which I have different operating systems, all of which

(21:52):
require different training. I mean, it's a total cluster what
we're doing over there right now. And all that also
points out that Europe itself is really ill equipped to
fight a real ground war. Not in Ukraine. I mean,
that's problematic enough, but they're ill equipped to fight and.

Speaker 2 (22:14):
Their own ground war on their own soil.

Speaker 3 (22:21):
So while the anti appeasement accusation does resonate, I still
believe that the most important part of the conflict resolution
here is for US, the United States, to be able
to drive a wedge between Russia and China. And quite honestly,
we didn't, you know, Billy Joel, we didn't start the fire.

(22:44):
We didn't start this fire. We didn't start this war. Now, historically,
I would argue that we gave the go ahead for
this war under the Obama and Biden regime, we turned
the blind on well, for that matter, go back to Bush.
Let's go back to Bush. Gave a blind eye to
it too, when you ended up having all the war

(23:06):
between Georgia and Russia and we and we did nothing.
You can take it all the way back as I
did history. You can take it all the way back
to Bill Clinton for that matter. We've just turned a
blind eye to all of this potential conflict. So what
we at least I I see it more like a
Cold war. And Zelenski when he was in the Oval

(23:29):
office and he made that point about how you have
a nice ocean and you're gonna feel in the future,
that's when he lost the room. That's when everybody got
pissed off because that line in and of itself made
Trump invent so irate because their resolution doesn't involve a
decades long conflict as we were almost got, well we

(23:51):
certainly did in Iraq in Afghanistan. So what we're seeing
is a fundamental shift in global power dynamics that needs
to end with China on its back foot and Russia
is squarely more interested in the West than the East. Now,

(24:15):
before you jump to the conclusion and say oh see,
you are a Russian puppet. Chijing Ping is as bad,
if not worse, than Vladimir Putin. They're both thugs, they're
both dictators, they're both violators of human rights. They both
have although I think one more so than the other.
I think Jijing Ping has his sight set on world domination,

(24:39):
and Russian knows that they cannot accomplish world domination, so
they want to align with Chijing Ping, so that if
Jiging Ping ever starts making whatever his first move is,
whether it's on Taiwan somewhere in the South China Sea.
I don't know that Putin can say, hey, leave me alone.
I've always been with you. We won't fight, we won't

(25:01):
start a war on our on our boundaries. We'll leave
our geopolitical boundaries, you know alone. I'm with you now.
We don't want that, we want Russia. That's why when
Putin stood up and said, hey, I got rare earth
elements too, I'd be happy to talk to you about those,
I thought to myself, that's a capitulation. That's a signal.

(25:25):
That's a signal that, hey, if you're going to cut
that with Ukraine, maybe we've got something to talk about here.
So if the if the Trump advanced doctrine is that
China is the greater threat and we've got to get

(25:45):
China on its heels, then anything we can do with
Russia then we ought to do. And if that means
entering a rare Earth Elements agreement with both Ukraine and Russia,
then you know what, why try it?

Speaker 2 (26:03):
Our appetite I think.

Speaker 3 (26:06):
Greenland, Canada, of that, Panama, whatever you want, it is
greater today but requires no blood sacrifice nor billion dollar
bombs to satiate that appetite. This is all against the
backdrop of a post mortem Putin and an impending opportunity
for Russians to see Americans as their friends and allies

(26:29):
rather than their natural enemies. The problem is, I think
with many Democrats, and I think with many neo coms,
and probably with the elites, is oh but Ukraine, But
that's going to if you settle this war that hurts
us financially. They can't see beyond the war. They can't

(26:52):
see beyond the fact that we can oh, we could
have a win win here. I would think that the
neil can conservatives, the neoliberals, the globalists, the elitists should
be pleased, because if they held true to their public
pronouncements about democracy promotion, westernization, and even regime change in Russia,
those are almost certainly in the coming decade if we

(27:14):
play our cards right. But they're not cheering Trump and
Van's efforts. Why because I think, quite simply, they're always
more interested in war than in peace. They're more interested
in conflict over resolution, and they're obviously more interesting cash
piles from their lobbyists in Arlington, MacLean and Shandilla, Virginia,
all of those companies operating just outside the Beltway. It

(27:41):
feels almost tried at this point to say it, but
I think it may be true. The elites won the
war as surely as the pro life lob found reasons
to nitpick against Trump during the GOP primary, fearing and
into a decades long gravy train. The defense industry is
now jerking its new triggered by the only horror that
could ever have forced them to WinCE, and that might

(28:03):
be peace.

Speaker 2 (28:04):
But I would caution.

Speaker 3 (28:05):
Them don't worry about that, because while we're trying to
put China on its heels, you can only claim peace
through strength if you have the wherewithal the means and
the political will to back up peace through strength. You

(28:31):
can't have peace through strength without the mightiest military in
the world. You can't have peace through strength without a
political willingness to use it. But if your greater objective
is to take care of the greater threat to us,
which I believe is China and not Russia, poor Ukraine's

(28:51):
just stuck in the middle. So I go back to
the question I asked at the beginning, Then what would
you do?

Speaker 2 (28:59):
What would you do?

Speaker 3 (29:01):
Because I'm beginning to everyone who criticizes me about my
thinking about this whole Ukraine Russian war is Okay, I'm
tired of trying to give answers. I've reached my limit.
You give me an answer. You tell me what it
is that you want. You tell me what it is
you want boots on the ground, Then bye damn tell

(29:23):
me you want boots on the ground, and then we'll
have that argument. I'm tired of all of the neo cohns,
all the elitists, all the globalists, everybody else telling me that, oh, I'm.

Speaker 2 (29:34):
Wrong, I'm wrong, I'm wrong, I'm wrong.

Speaker 3 (29:37):
Okay, Well, then you tell me what it is that
you want. Tell me and tell and I want specifics.
How much are you willing to spend? You want boots
on the ground if if Ker Starmer or Manuel mcron
put boots on the ground, and that invokes Article five.
Are you going to stand up? And are you going
to adhere to our treaty? Are you or are you not? Otherwise,

(30:00):
tell me what your tell me what your resolution is.
Nobody else seems to have a resolution.

Speaker 5 (30:08):
So, Michael, more about the McDonald's straw. That little star
area in the lid to insert your straw, it does
destroy the new straws. So what I've been doing is
sticking my finger into that little star area and kind
of opening it up more so that it's more of
an opening. But then the star area bites into my finger.

Speaker 3 (30:30):
It's such a thing.

Speaker 4 (30:33):
It sounds like it'll slice up the tip of your finger,
like no tomorrow.

Speaker 3 (30:36):
And it does, and and and then you've got the
whole idea of your sticking your finger in the stupid drink,
you know, And then and then you got to get
your finger back down.

Speaker 2 (30:44):
It's just it's it's it's.

Speaker 4 (30:45):
A horrible whatever craps on your finger is now in
your soda, right, and.

Speaker 3 (30:49):
It's just I don't know why I'm spending any time
talking about Russia and Ukraine when we can spend the
entire hour talking about the First World problem with these
damn straws.

Speaker 4 (30:58):
So many people, so many more people are interested in
that for sure.

Speaker 3 (31:01):
Well, I wonder why, because because Americans aren't interested in
the fact that what's going on right now could just
be the first ness series of events that leads us
to World War III.

Speaker 2 (31:15):
It's it's worth.

Speaker 3 (31:17):
Recognizing, based on everything I said in that last segment
that your response to Trump's pay your own fair share
demand has been kind of how dare you tell us
to pay our own fair share? Except that brings me
to a story that's in today's Wall Street Journal published
a seven thirty six a m. This morning, and the

(31:38):
headline is europe floats the EU. Let me be precise,
The European Union floats one hundred and fifty eight billion
dollar fund to boost military spending after the United States
halts Ukraine aid. The subhead the package allowing higher military
spending marks US siege change in the EU's approach to defense,

(32:04):
and the president of the EU Commission, Queen Ursula van
der Verlion, says that we are living in an era
of rearmament, and Europe is ready to massively boost its
defense spending. Now, I don't want to get in the
weeds here, but of course she's going to say that
because her objective has always been a European army. So

(32:29):
the proof's going to be in the putting whether or
not they can actually get the Nation States to commit
to one hundred and fifty eight billion dollar fund to
boost what EU military spending for each of the sovereign
nations military spending. And I think if it's going to

(32:50):
be the former a EU military spending, how are they
going to give it up? And what's that practically going
to mean? More tanks for the UK, more tanks for France,
Germany and the Poles, or a new tank that is

(33:11):
going to be designed for all of them to be
able to simultaneously train and take into combat. When you
step back from all of the minutia of this, it's
no different than Trump doing doge and saying, you know,
everybody keeps talking about waste, fraud and abuse, but I'm

(33:33):
really going to do something about it. Everybody keeps talking
about NATO and the EU not carrying their fair share. Well,
I'm going to do something about that. And then when
he actually starts doing something about that, then we all
scream and holler.

Speaker 2 (33:44):
And we have the gnashing of teeth because, oh my gosh,
he's really doing what we asked him to do.