September 11, 2026 • 37 mins
Hour 2 of A&G features...
- Trump at the Republican convention
- Fighting a chimp
- Remembering 9/11
- Remembering 9/11 continued...
Stupid Should Hurt: https://www.armstrongandgetty.com/
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Speaker 1 (00:01):
Broadcasting live from the Abraham Lincoln Radio Studio. The George
Washington Broadcast Center. Jack Armstrong and Joe Getty. Armstrong and Getty.
And now, here's Armstrong and Getty.
Speaker 2 (00:24):
And then I said, I don't really like the way
Ken talks. And then I said something that they really hated.
Speaker 1 (00:34):
Please, sir, don't say it, sir.
Speaker 2 (00:36):
So I'm not going to say it, but I'll tell
you what I was thinking about, sir. I said, I
don't really like the way he looks.
Speaker 1 (00:44):
I don't like it. I don't like any. But you
know what I do like?
Speaker 2 (00:48):
He was the greatest attorney general in the history of Texas.
Speaker 1 (00:53):
He was the greatest attorney general in the history of
our country.
Speaker 2 (00:58):
He helped us so much with the walls, with illegal immigration,
with everything. He was our greatest attorney general, and he
deserves to go to the United States Senate.
Speaker 1 (01:13):
That's not the average endorsement that you get. What was
your take on the president's delivery there? Look, he's funny.
He's almost like a stand-up comedian at times. So, you know,
if you're friends with him, he sometimes gives you a
hard time. I'm sure he's done that with you before. Yes,
he has.
Speaker 3 (01:29):
I would think if I was Ken Paxton, I would say,
you know, could you lay off the, I look horrible,
my suits are ugly.
Speaker 1 (01:36):
I don't know that we're gaining anything by drawing attention
to your opinion about that. Kind of fun. What a
weird thing.
Speaker 3 (01:44):
That's from the final night. There were only two nights
of the midterm convention last night. I didn't see a
second of it as I was at back-to-school night at
my son's high school, and then I jumped into the
49ers-Rams game, so I didn't catch any of the Trump-Vance speech.
Speaker 1 (01:59):
Very briefly, Brett Baer then asked Ken Paxton some really
hard questions about his record and alleged corruption and stuff,
and Paxton, like a professional politician, parried them very, very effectively. So,
you know, he's good at his job.
Speaker 3 (02:11):
And you're saying the reviews among people who pay attention
to this sort of thing thought J.D.
Speaker 1 (02:16):
Vance was good? Yeah, he had a really good speech.
He's a very good speaker. He had some great moments,
one of them impromptu. Michael, play us 52. It's short.
Speaker 3 (02:26):
What the people at home missed is that we just
had a protester interrupting us and waving the Mexican flag.
Speaker 4 (02:33):
Well....
Speaker 3 (02:38):
Well, my friend, if you love Mexico so much, get
your ass over there.
Speaker 1 (02:42):
I'll buy you the plane ticket.
Speaker 3 (02:51):
And critics just feel like that's horrible and don't realize
that easily a majority of the country agrees with that.
Speaker 1 (02:59):
Oh, yeah. Easily. Not even please. Right. Critics. Shut up.
Speaker 3 (03:04):
Just briefly on the back to school night at my
son's high school. I wish it weren't like this. I
actually pray to try to deal with it. I hated
high school so much. Merely being on my kid's campus and, like,
walking around makes me so uncomfortable.
Speaker 1 (03:22):
Oh, wow.
Speaker 4 (03:23):
Yeah.
Speaker 1 (03:23):
That's how much I hated high school. Just being in
the atmosphere, it's like, oh, God, I hate all these people. Wow.
I don't even know. Wow, your attitude is poison. It is.
Speaker 4 (03:33):
It is.
Speaker 1 (03:34):
It's poisonous.
Speaker 3 (03:35):
I have jury duty today. As I tweeted out last night,
they wouldn't have arrested him if they weren't guilty.
Speaker 4 (03:41):
Right.
Speaker 1 (03:42):
Everybody knows that. To which a number of people reacted
with just horror that I said that. Not realizing that's
a joke or something.
Speaker 3 (03:52):
I don't know.
Speaker 1 (03:53):
Wow. Wow. The humor impaired. By the way, just as
a guy who served on a handful of juries. Your shirt.
Jack is wearing a golf shirt, a polo shirt, if
you will, of roughly raspberry color, I would say. Kind
of light, lavender-ish raspberry. It's got the horses green. They
(04:15):
will assume that you are a gay man, so the
defense will probably want to keep you around. As the
resident jury expert. This is, yes, this is from the
Brady Bunch.
Speaker 3 (04:29):
This is the attitude I'm taking into the courtroom that
I learned as a child watching the Brady Bunch.
Speaker 5 (04:35):
You see, in this country, we're very proud to have
a process known as the law. And under the law,
a man is presumed innocent until he's proven guilty.
Speaker 1 (04:47):
Sure, Dad.
Speaker 4 (04:47):
Right, Dad.
Speaker 5 (04:48):
In other words, we don't hang anybody without a fair trial.
Speaker 1 (04:51):
Everybody knows that.
Speaker 5 (04:53):
Sure, but sometimes we tend to forget. Well, I'm glad
you understand. I'll see you kids later. I have to
go shopping with your mother.
Speaker 1 (05:01):
Now after telling you about hanging, I have to go
shopping with your mother. Had you ever heard that before, Katie?
That's pretty funny. I have, but it's been a while. Oh, God,
that's funny. Beautiful. We don't hang someone. That's right, Dad.
That's right. I don't want to hang somebody if they're innocent.
Speaker 3 (05:18):
So if it's going to be a jury of my peers,
am I going to be surrounded by bald, surly talk
show hosts? Is that what's going to be a room
full of them? That's my understanding, yes. I did think
after I tweeted out that whole, they wouldn't have arrested
him if they weren't guilty. If you ended up on
one of those high profile, Nancy Grace's involved cable news
(05:39):
every day, all day trials, which you don't know that
going in, they turn into that usually. That sort of
remark would, you know, that'd get talked about for an.
Speaker 1 (05:49):
Hour on some CNN show. Correct. Yeah. If it didn't
get you tossed off in advance.
Speaker 6 (05:57):
Yeah.
Speaker 1 (06:00):
I haven't done this in a long time. I've only
made it to the courtroom once.
Speaker 3 (06:04):
I think I've only actually shown up to the courthouse
a total of three times in my life where my
group got called like it did this time, so I
will show up to the courthouse. But the other two times,
you sit there for a while, scroll in your phone,
and at some point say, you can go home, and
that's your duty for the year or six months or
however long it happens. Yeah.
Speaker 1 (06:26):
How often they call you.
Speaker 3 (06:28):
It was kind of exciting when I actually made it
all the way to the courtroom, but man, I don't know.
If I made it all the way to a jury,
what's the longest jury you.
Speaker 1 (06:37):
Served on since you've served a couple of times? Oh, gosh.
It was two or three days. I think it was
like two and a half days. But it was not
a long one by any stretch. I mean, that's a
fairly compact trial. I would not plead hardship. Since it
was a felony, obviously. I would not plead hardship and
try to get out of it or anything like that. But, man,
with my schedule with both kids and nobody else taking
(06:59):
care of them, it would be in my job. It
would be pretty darn difficult for me to arrange making
that work. Oh, yeah. I guess you're a good example
of an exception to what I was about to say,
which is my usual screed. Don't try to get out
of jury duty. Do it. I know it's a pain
in the ass. It's inconvenient. But number one, it is
(07:19):
your civic duty. And if you love this country, that's
one of the most important things you can do is
serve on a jury. And secondly, it's an unbelievable learning experience. Oh,
I'm sure.
Speaker 3 (07:30):
That's why I want to do it. That's why I
want to do it, is just to have the experience
and be able to talk about it or know about it.
If I got chosen, I end up one of the
magical 12 or however many alternates or however that works,
does the trial start today and I'm there today or
does it start next week?
Speaker 1 (07:49):
It would start on very, very rare occasions. It would
start like, all right, we need you back by 1
o'clock in the afternoon and we'll get started. Generally, it'd
be the next day. They'll start in the morning. It's
a Friday, so it'd be Monday.
Speaker 3 (08:01):
I hadn't even really thought about making it. I would
have to make a ton of phone calls to try
to arrange how I'm going to get my kids to
school and picked up and the various activities and all
those kind of things, but I'm sure I could do it.
Speaker 1 (08:13):
Just random strangers I would have driving my kids around.
Speaker 5 (08:17):
Oh, good.
Speaker 1 (08:17):
Good. Super.
Speaker 3 (08:21):
I had another comment on the jury. I accidentally missed
last time. I misread my number or something like that,
and I got an angry letter, so I'm like, Missing
it one more time from ending up.
Speaker 1 (08:31):
In jail, I think.
Speaker 7 (08:33):
Wow.
Speaker 1 (08:33):
Or at least a good night sticking. Here's my memory.
Speaker 3 (08:38):
This clouded my view of juries. My mom served on
a jury once in our small town in western Kansas.
And it lasted a long time. My memory of it,
it was at least a week, if not longer. It
was a neighbor's pipe. Some guy, his pipe broke and
(08:59):
flooded his neighbor's lawn. And they got into whether the
pipe was on their side of the lawn.
Speaker 1 (09:04):
It was all kinds of zoning.
Speaker 3 (09:06):
And it just sounded, I remember hearing about it as
a kid and thinking, I would have to throw myself
out a building. I couldn't listen to that conversation all day,
every day for a week.
Speaker 1 (09:15):
That would be awful. I've got to admit, if it
was like a high-level civil trial... like a complicated liability
case or something like that, man, that would be an
act of self-discipline to really focus. Yeah, the whole.
Speaker 3 (09:30):
Because you had crimes, exciting, you know, gripping, the sort
of thing they put on Dateline Crimes.
Speaker 1 (09:37):
True. Which would keep you interested.
Speaker 7 (09:39):
This.
Speaker 1 (09:40):
Well, I don't know.
Speaker 3 (09:41):
Most of the pipe was on his side, and according
to the statutes and the ordinances, he owes 75% of
the plumbing bill, but not the 25% of the refurbishing
the lawn bill.
Speaker 1 (09:51):
I disagree.
Speaker 3 (09:52):
I think he should pay 18% of the resodding, and
I mean, that.
Speaker 1 (09:56):
Would be so dull. Well, and you have cases sometimes
that are all about accounting. So you got one accounting
expert who says, oh no, that absolutely falls within 403k-1,
and for these reasons and those reasons, and he testifies
for two hours, two and a half hours.
Speaker 3 (10:13):
I sit back in my chair. I'm going to scroll
through my phone. You all come to I will side
with whoever's the majority.
Speaker 1 (10:20):
Oh, beautiful.
Speaker 3 (10:21):
I just can't make myself pay attention to this. Anyway,
I'll let you know.
Speaker 1 (10:25):
And then the defense calls their accounting expert, and he
drones on for even longer. Can you imagine? Do you
take notes or not take notes? You can, absolutely. You
can't take them with you, you can't take them home,
and you can't take them after the trial.
Speaker 3 (10:40):
You can't take them with you where? Like home, or
to the bathroom, or... They've got to stay in the
jury room or in the jury box. What would I
do with the notes in the bathroom that would be untoward? Well,
you'd call the media and give them all sorts of... Hey,
you want to see my notes and what the accountant
said about the plumbing?
Speaker 1 (11:00):
No thanks. I'm good. I'm straight, sir. I saw you
in an lavender shirt and assumed. No, sorry. It's inappropriate.
I'm ashamed.
Speaker 3 (11:10):
With my memory and my lack of caring, I'd have
to take notes on everything or we'd get in there
and say.
Speaker 1 (11:16):
What's this case about again? What are we doing? Oh, no.
Speaker 4 (11:20):
No.
Speaker 1 (11:21):
I request you throw this guy off, but quick. Some
guy did something to somebody. Was it a girl or
a boy? I don't even remember. I don't remember. What
was their skin color? What was their skin color? Oh, Michael. See,
that's too dark. Too inappropriate. Oh, my God. What if
I want to get thrown out? Oh. Here's what I
got to know. What was their skin color? The classic
(11:43):
walk in with a rope. What?
Speaker 4 (11:47):
Okay.
Speaker 1 (11:47):
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(12:09):
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Speaker 3 (12:18):
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Speaker 3 (12:51):
Got a couple interesting angles on the whole 9-11 25th
anniversary to get.
Speaker 1 (12:56):
To, among other things on the way. Stay here. Armstrong
and Getty.
Speaker 6 (13:03):
I've been talking back and forth with these dudes overseas
and they have access to a chimp who's been attacking people.
This chimp is a large male chimp. It's been attacking people.
This is, I couldn't see a more perfect opportunity. I
want the scariest, most aggressive chimp. Because I don't want
anyone after I do this to be still, you know, saying, oh,
it wasn't a mean one. No, I am going to
(13:24):
go to where these guys are and we're going to
set this up. And I am going to take this
chimp and do horrible things to this animal. You guys
are going to see what a human in his true
primal nature looks like.
Speaker 1 (13:36):
That is MMA fighter Cole Johnson willing to fight a chimpanzee.
I'm going to go to where these guys are. Africa?
The zoo? What are you talking about? Down the street?
Where these guys are? The guys who have access to
the chimp. He explained that.
Speaker 4 (13:55):
Sir.
Speaker 1 (13:57):
As my daughter sometimes says to me, Dad, it's a
good thing God made you pretty. Sir, it's a good
thing God made you strong because you are dumb as
a box of hair. Good Lord. You would be killed.
You would be killed.
Speaker 3 (14:13):
Well, and the weird thing is, is that if he
got the best of the chimp, we'd all be horrified
and consider it awful.
Speaker 1 (14:22):
Well, we don't need to worry about that. A chimpanzee
has the strength of like five and a half men.
Speaker 3 (14:29):
I have a chimpanzee story from the weekend, but I
don't feel like it's appropriate right now.
Speaker 1 (14:37):
You have a chimpanzee story from the weekend? Yeah, this
chimpanzee I saw. Wow, okay. I was at an olive garden. No,
I was at the zoo. Ah, that's a good place
to view a chimpanzee. We should probably be saying chimpanzee,
because saying chimpanzee makes it sound as if we're casting
(15:00):
aspersions on the chimps' manliness.
Speaker 3 (15:01):
Or chimpliness, if you will. So this MMA fighter... Wants
to fight a chimpanzee like in a cage. The chimpanzee
would not be aware of the rules. And if you
tap out, it's not going to stop.
Speaker 1 (15:15):
Correct. You will be dead. Gouge your eyes out. Chimps,
it's documented. They go for the eyes and genitals. Barbaric!
It is, sir.
Speaker 3 (15:27):
And then, of course, R-O-Y-H and S-D-Y-T.
Speaker 1 (15:35):
Help us. Rip off your head and poop down your... Oh, my.
Speaker 4 (15:40):
Right. Oh, my.
Speaker 1 (15:41):
That's what would happen.
Speaker 4 (15:43):
Oh, no.
Speaker 1 (15:44):
Again, the referee can try to intercede if he likes,
but it's not going to get compliance.
Speaker 3 (15:49):
So, next segment, I want to talk a little 9-11,
and I'm just... I don't know what put me in
this mood about this.
Speaker 1 (15:57):
I have no interest in the maudlin....
Speaker 3 (16:04):
Sad remembrance angle of it for some reason. Maybe just
I took in too much of it. I feel like
since the enemy still exists in particular, I mean, I
wouldn't like it particularly even if we had defeated the enemy.
Because strong, aggressive societies that are going to survive are, well,
(16:26):
they're strong and aggressive in looking forward.
Speaker 1 (16:29):
They're not rolling around in their grief.
Speaker 3 (16:31):
Right. And then you add in the fact that the
enemy is not only still alive, but in some ways
stronger than they've ever been.
Speaker 1 (16:39):
And still out there and vowing to kill us. And
spending the whole day, oh, that was awful. That was
so awful. I felt so bad. And you felt bad.
We all felt bad. We're all so scared and sad.
And I'm still scared and sad. No, I don't like
that at all. To that point of how fundamentalist Islam
(17:00):
is faring, whether it's stronger or weaker, it depends where
you look. But it reminds me of the question that's
been asked a lot this week, and it's a useful question.
Did we win the war on terror, or was the
war on terror... worth it? Or what lessons should we
draw from 9-11? And again, I find it an interesting discussion,
(17:23):
but I almost feel like, you know, after the fourth
inning of a baseball game, we're asking, so did the
Yankees win? I mean, was the fourth inning worth it?
And I'm like, well, golly, I don't know, because the
ump's saying, play ball, we've got to play the fifth inning.
So yeah, there were ups and downs, there were mistakes made,
(17:43):
there were absolutely the right things done at times, but
This is mid-game analysis, folks. This is going to be
going on for the next perhaps thousand years. The battle
between modernity, Western values, and fundamentalist Islam. Do I have
some interesting info from that day that I'd forgotten? I
read some of the 9-11 report yesterday and the Woodward book,
(18:04):
Bush at War, and a couple of different accounts of
the day before, the day of, and the day after.
They're pretty interesting in terms of our attitude at the time.
Lots of stuff on the way. I hope you can
stick around. Armstrong and Getty. President Bush's chief of staff,
Andy Card, now 79, can never forget it all came
(18:25):
flooding back inside the classroom.
Speaker 4 (18:28):
That day, I promised myself I was going to be cool, calm,
and collected and help the president. I decided I would
tell him two facts and make one obvious editorial comment.
Speaker 1 (18:37):
60 on page 153.
Speaker 4 (18:39):
A second plane hit the second tower. America is under attack.
Speaker 3 (18:46):
Yeah, and I don't think this has a major effect
on anything, but clearly, I didn't think this at the time,
but clearly George Bush should at that point have said,
excuse me, and gotten up and started to deal with it.
The story was for a long time, and I agreed
with it, that he stayed there to remain calm, to
not upset people, but that doesn't make any sense to
(19:07):
me in retrospect.
Speaker 1 (19:09):
But it doesn't matter.
Speaker 3 (19:10):
It's a minor point. And part of that is what
I wanted to talk about is just the things that
you can't feel or really fully understand unless you live
through it in real time. George Will wrote a great piece,
(19:30):
I think the next day, The End of Our Vacation
from History. The United States had been on a vacation
from history where we were completely.
Invulnerable to attack. Nobody could touch us. And it had
been going on so long, we had come to believe
that nobody could touch us. That nothing bad could possibly
(19:51):
happen to us. And that was unrealistic. Is unrealistic, but
it had been going on for so long, it was
just so shocked. Part of it is just so shocking.
We got attacked? Us? And I'm sure it felt that
way for the president, too. I don't think any president...
since then would.
Speaker 1 (20:10):
React the way George Bush reacted. Like, yeah, of course
we did. What do we do now? Who was it?
But we had been in such a comfortable, which fits in.
Speaker 3 (20:20):
So yesterday I did some reading of the 9-11 Commission report,
or listening to it rather, and then read some of
Bob Woodward's Bush at War, which had a lot of
other information around it. And we had been so passive
about Al-Qaeda. and the threat of fundamentals Islam for so long.
(20:43):
And there are examples in both Republican and Democratic administrations of,
you know, we could, we kind of know where bin
Laden is, we could try to take him out now,
but man, some women and children might get killed, or
what if we miss, or, you know, the sorts of
things that we don't worry about near as much now
that we worried about then because we had grown soft
(21:05):
and politically correct and all kinds of different things.
Speaker 1 (21:09):
And for various reasons, the Clinton administration was really one
of the early days of hyper-partisanship, I think, the sort
that everybody talks about now. And I remember the Republican Party,
when Clinton was trying to exact revenge for a couple
of different attacks... and preemptively defying Al-Qaeda. He was accused
(21:30):
of firing Monica missiles and bombing an aspirin factory and
that he was a maniac and way out of line.
And so that contributed, at least on the Republican side
of the aisle, Republican voters to the idea that these
people are no threat whatsoever. Only a jerk like Clinton
would say they were. That was not good. Not good
at all.
Speaker 3 (21:50):
Yeah, there are numerous examples of that. On both sides.
Speaker 1 (21:55):
Absolutely. And I hope we don't lapse back into that
or aren't lapsing back into that. I mean, the greatest
sin of the left is clearly accusing anybody who's concerned
about Islamism of bigotry. That's absolutely idiotic. There's a lot
of particulars.
Speaker 3 (22:10):
From that day where it could have been stopped a
bunch of different times if things had broken just slightly
the other way. It also could have been a lot
worse if things had broken slightly a different way, including
if that plane that the passengers took down had crashed
(22:33):
into the Capitol.
Speaker 1 (22:35):
It had 5,000 people in it.
Speaker 3 (22:37):
The plane that hit the World Trade Center and the
plane that hit the Pentagon was going 540.
Speaker 1 (22:46):
Miles an hour. He put that stick all the way forward.
Speaker 3 (22:51):
And the plane that hit the ground in Pennsylvania also
was going that fast. Of course, part of that was
it was headed down. Gravity was involved. But, man, they
put that plane in. The cleverness of picking four transcontinental
flights so they're absolutely loaded with the maximum amount of fuel,
because three of them were headed to L.A. and one
(23:12):
of them was headed to San Francisco. So they had
the maximum amount of fuel you're ever going to have
on a plane flying in the United States there to
get the biggest fireball you could. If that thing had
gone into the Capitol, wow, what would the conversation have
been then? And killed Half of Congress, all of Congress,
the Speaker of the House and the Vice President. I mean,
(23:32):
it's unimaginable what would have been going on there. So
we both could have gone on the other hand. One
guy got wanded with his box cutter. Our metal detectors
were way different back then. Lack of a sense of
imagination because you're always fighting the last war. We were
(23:53):
looking for bombs and guns because that's the only way
hijackings had ever happened. So we had detectors that could
catch bombs and guns. We had a rule back then
that if you were on some sort of list, you
were not allowed to get on the plane until we
knew your suitcase was on the plane with the belief
that nobody would blow up a plane with them in.
Speaker 1 (24:13):
It because you'd kill yourself. So that would be crazy.
Speaker 3 (24:17):
And our metal detectors were set to just catch a
gun or a bomb and not a box cutter. But
one guy went through, they have the video of this
from the airports, And it went ding or buzz or whatever.
Speaker 1 (24:28):
And they warned him and the guy just kind of says, whatever.
Speaker 3 (24:30):
He didn't figure out what made it buzz or ding
and let the guy go through.
Speaker 1 (24:36):
One very easy.
Speaker 3 (24:37):
And then as the day unfolded, all the giant bloated
bureaucracies started running into each other in all kinds of
different ways. It's really interesting to watch the TikTok of
it when you're reading it in a book.
Speaker 1 (24:52):
You'd have thought... When a plane.
Speaker 3 (24:55):
Got hijacked the way it did, or after it hit
the First World Trade Center, that information had gone around
faster to all the other airlines that, holy crap, this
is unfolding. But it took a long time before we
grounded the flights or were even aware that there were
the possibility.
Speaker 1 (25:13):
Of multiple hijackings going on.
Speaker 4 (25:16):
Shocking.
Speaker 1 (25:17):
And then the thing I was most shocked about reading
the 9-11 report years ago was when it was inescapable.
I mean, every single human being understood that this was
a massive terrorist attack, multi-pronged, etc. And it was decided
that we needed to scramble fighter planes. It was, you know,
it was a Tuesday morning, but the people who made
that decision didn't know who to call. And the people
(25:39):
they called didn't know how to reach the pilots. It
was just kind of, it's a domestic thing. Geez, what
do we do?
Speaker 3 (25:47):
Yeah, there was a lot of that, which, you know,
I hope we're better at now. But I couldn't help
but rereading all that stuff again, thinking, God, if China
shuts down the cell phones and the water plants, it's
going to be that sort of mess all over again.
According to a Woodward book, George Tenet, who was the
CIA director at the time, he's having breakfast with a
(26:08):
senator friend of his. And the senator asked him that
morning when they sat down to eat, the senator said
to him, so what's keeping you up at night? Which
sounds like a legitimate question you'd have for a CIA
director that you meet every once in a while. He said,
bin Laden, man, bin Laden. And Senator was like, oh
my God, bin Laden again. Man, you see bin Laden
(26:29):
in your nightmares. You're obsessed with bin Laden. Well, we
weren't obsessed with bin Laden enough. And it goes through
various arguments in the CIA and other departments in our
spy agencies, in the military, of how.
Speaker 1 (26:42):
Serious we should take the threat from al-Qaeda.
Speaker 3 (26:45):
They tried to blow up the World Trade Center, you know,
once in 92 or 93 or whatever it was, and
we barely paid attention at all. Or one of my
favorite nuggets from this whole thing is, Al-Qaeda blew a
hole in one of our warships there, the USS Cole,
a month before the Gore-Bush election, and it wasn't even
(27:07):
a topic of conversation for the debates or anything.
Speaker 1 (27:10):
That's how blind we were to it. Yeah, it was. Well,
we were especially blind to the idea that fundamentalist Islam, Al-Qaeda,
and its various offshoots were a worldwide political movement as
opposed to Well, prior to 9-11, non-state actors were just
not seen as something you had to worry about much.
(27:31):
You'd have to go in and mow the lawn now
and again because there have always been terrorist groups and
activist groups and that sort of thing. But nobody took
them seriously as a power that could... cause serious damage
or alter the trajectory of history. It was like a
criminal gang. They were looked upon in our laws were
fashioned to treat them as criminal enterprises as opposed to
(27:55):
serious actors on the world scene. That's changed.
Speaker 3 (28:02):
And as we all know, since the CIA, for instance,
had several of the hijackers nailed down, the guys in
San Diego and different people that they are aware of,
but they didn't share that information with the FBI or
whatever other agencies that could have tied things together and
figured some things out because of the whole, what we
(28:24):
learned to be called stove piping thing, which hopefully we've
fixed where they can share information and connect the dots a.
Speaker 1 (28:30):
Little bit better.
Speaker 3 (28:32):
Um, but I, I, giant, giant bureaucracies are just, well,
they are what they are no matter, no matter what,
what their goal is or who's running them.
Speaker 1 (28:41):
And I hope we're.
Speaker 3 (28:42):
Better than we were that day for when the big
Chinese attack comes.
Speaker 1 (28:47):
Here's where we could discuss how smart it was to
develop the director of national intelligence and put another layer
of bureaucracy. And I'm not really super interested in that discussion. I, uh,
bureaucracies frustrate me. Um, But it was probably a good idea.
Whether it still is a good idea, I don't know.
So we'll skip that one. Let other people have it. Yeah,
(29:09):
I think it clearly wasn't.
Speaker 3 (29:11):
But just in general, I don't know how you stay
game ready when you haven't played a game in a
long time. And that's where we were both like... organizationally, factually,
like having rules in place or methods or a plan
(29:34):
or this sort of thing.
Speaker 1 (29:35):
And then just emotionally.
Speaker 3 (29:36):
Emotionally, we weren't game ready for that sort of thing.
to happen because it had been so long. I don't
know how you stay game ready.
Speaker 1 (29:43):
Maybe you can't.
Speaker 3 (29:44):
Because you don't want to be a nut and live
like you're constantly under threat, even though you are.
Speaker 1 (29:51):
Yeah, that's a tough balance. You're probably right. You're never
going to be as ready as you should be if
you've not had a game, as you're saying, for a
very long time. The thing that's changed that disturbs me
the most is that the unity we saw post 9-11
would be much harder to generate now because of the
success of the neo-Marxist critical theory crowd in our schools,
(30:14):
teaching the kids that the United States is a force
for evil. We brought this upon ourselves. We were built
foundationally on racism and oppression and the rest of it,
which is perhaps the boomers and Gen X's greatest moral failings.
We let this happen under our watch in our schools.
But uh what can you do about that it's it's
like the oak tree you know when would the best
(30:37):
time to have woken up to that have been well
probably around 1968 when's the second best time today start
fighting it one example of attitudes i thought was interesting
that i think has changed um so cia director tenant
uh he finally gets back to the office he's talking
to his i think it's armitage but um He's talking
(31:00):
to one of the other people making decisions at this time.
And the tenant says, we've got to evacuate the building.
I mean, their planes stood. They didn't know how many
planes had been hijacked. They knew that some of them
were headed. One had already crashed into the Pentagon, so
they thought other. planes were headed to other buildings there
in D.C.
Speaker 3 (31:18):
He said, we got to get everybody out of the
CIA building, especially the people on the top floor. And
Tenet is told, well, the people on the top floor,
that's where the super high intelligence people that are watching
the world, we got to keep them in place. This
is exactly what they do is deal with. He said,
I'm risking their lives if I leave them up there.
Speaker 1 (31:39):
He said, we're at war, the guy told him.
Speaker 3 (31:41):
This is what they do. You're going to have to
risk their lives. And Tenet said, You're right. And let
him stay up there. But the fact that even briefly,
he thought, I got to get him out of there.
And the other guy had to say, yeah, this is
why we have a CIA. This is why we have
that particular floor. That's what they do for a living.
The fact that it took us a little while to
(32:03):
get up to speed on that sort of thing. And
I hope we're still on that footing, that this is
real and there are bad guys out there and our
bad guys have.
Speaker 1 (32:11):
To take on their bad guys. Yeah, I think we
clearly are to a large extent, although all politics, including
what we're talking about, is downstream of culture, and again,
that's what I worry about. So the football season's kicked
off this week. Super excited. I'm a hardcore fan. I
love it, love it, love it. I've watched college games
(32:32):
and pro games so far. The wait is over. Football
is here, and so is DraftKings.
Speaker 3 (32:38):
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Speaker 1 (33:36):
Armstrong and Getty.
Speaker 4 (33:40):
Tonight's ceremonial first pitch. And please welcome the President of
the United States.
Speaker 1 (34:18):
It would be ridiculous from a rational point of view
to suggest that a middle-aged man wearing a heavy flak
jacket humming a strike over the plate would have any significance.
And yet, God, I'm getting choked up thinking about it.
It was such a moment of, yeah, we're America. Let's
(34:42):
do this. Well, you had the president of the United
States standing up.
Speaker 3 (34:48):
The fact that he's standing on a mound, so he's
up higher, like a target, like, here I am in
the middle of this giant stadium in New York.
Speaker 1 (34:55):
Here I am. I'm not hiding. Days after the attacks.
Speaker 3 (35:00):
Yeah.
Speaker 1 (35:00):
The World Series. The World Series.
Speaker 3 (35:03):
Uh, like I was talking earlier, I mean, it was
a real lesson in the importance of leadership to me.
Speaker 1 (35:08):
And I try to remember that, you know, in a
family crisis or.
Speaker 3 (35:11):
Anything like that, that sometimes having somebody say something or
make an action really makes a difference. The bullhorn thing
that we played earlier when he's standing on the rubble,
everybody needed to hear that so badly to hear him say,
the people are going to pay for this, who did this.
Speaker 1 (35:33):
F yeah.
Speaker 4 (35:35):
Why?
Speaker 1 (35:35):
I don't know. It's just the way we're built.
Speaker 3 (35:37):
We just need to know somebody's taking charge, somebody's doing something.
Speaker 1 (35:41):
We're a social beast. We organize ourselves socially, yeah, and
we have leaders.
Speaker 3 (35:46):
One of my favorite stories has always been from right
after 9-11. The day of 9-11, General Mahmoud Ahmed, who
is the head of Pakistan's ISI intelligence service, which is
all kinds of infiltrated by radical muslims the isi of
pakistan if you know anything about pakistan i mean they
(36:07):
have an interesting government over there where you got to
keep the the muslim extremists happy or you're going to
get blown up yourself they're a nuclear power all kinds
of stuff we have such a weird relationship with them
they had been allowing al-qaeda to go back and forth
across the border and and uh well they ultimately they
hid osama bin laden from us for years um But
(36:28):
so the ISI guy happened to be in Washington, D.C.
on 9-11, and Deputy Secretary of State Richard Armitage, if
you don't remember him, big, giant, barrel-chested, looks like an
offensive lineman guy, allegedly went to Mahmoud that day with
a list of seven demands on how you're going to
work with us. History starts today. There is no black
(36:50):
or white. You're going to work with us on these
seven things. We need to have a military base. We
need to cross over. You need to arrest these people. Or...
Armitage says he didn't say, we're going to bomb you
back to the Stone Age. Musharraf wrote in his memoirs
toward the end of his life that that's what he
was told. We will bomb you back to the Stone Age,
(37:11):
which I believe is what we said.
Speaker 1 (37:13):
Right. We can't say that out loud, you know. That
was a phrase so oft used, we developed an abbreviation
of it, bitabitza. Now that's a threat.
Speaker 4 (37:25):
Hmm.
Speaker 3 (37:27):
More coming up if you miss the segment. Get the podcast,
Armstrong and Getty, on demand.
Speaker 1 (37:31):
Armstrong and Getty.
Broadcasting live from the Abraham Lincoln Radio Studio. The George
Washington Broadcast Center. Jack Armstrong and Joe Getty. Armstrong and Getty.
And now, here's Armstrong and Getty.
Speaker 2 (00:24):
And then I said, I don't really like the way
Ken talks. And then I said something that they really hated.
Speaker 1 (00:34):
Please, sir, don't say it, sir.
Speaker 2 (00:36):
So I'm not going to say it, but I'll tell
you what I was thinking about, sir. I said, I
don't really like the way he looks.
Speaker 1 (00:44):
I don't like it. I don't like any. But you
know what I do like?
Speaker 2 (00:48):
He was the greatest attorney general in the history of Texas.
Speaker 1 (00:53):
He was the greatest attorney general in the history of
our country.
Speaker 2 (00:58):
He helped us so much with the walls, with illegal immigration,
with everything. He was our greatest attorney general, and he
deserves to go to the United States Senate.
Speaker 1 (01:13):
That's not the average endorsement that you get. What was
your take on the president's delivery there? Look, he's funny.
He's almost like a stand-up comedian at times. So, you know,
if you're friends with him, he sometimes gives you a
hard time. I'm sure he's done that with you before. Yes,
he has.
Speaker 3 (01:29):
I would think if I was Ken Paxton, I would say,
you know, could you lay off the, I look horrible,
my suits are ugly.
Speaker 1 (01:36):
I don't know that we're gaining anything by drawing attention
to your opinion about that. Kind of fun. What a
weird thing.
Speaker 3 (01:44):
That's from the final night. There were only two nights
of the midterm convention last night. I didn't see a
second of it as I was at back-to-school night at
my son's high school, and then I jumped into the
49ers-Rams game, so I didn't catch any of the Trump-Vance speech.
Speaker 1 (01:59):
Very briefly, Brett Baer then asked Ken Paxton some really
hard questions about his record and alleged corruption and stuff,
and Paxton, like a professional politician, parried them very, very effectively. So,
you know, he's good at his job.
Speaker 3 (02:11):
And you're saying the reviews among people who pay attention
to this sort of thing thought J.D.
Speaker 1 (02:16):
Vance was good? Yeah, he had a really good speech.
He's a very good speaker. He had some great moments,
one of them impromptu. Michael, play us 52. It's short.
Speaker 3 (02:26):
What the people at home missed is that we just
had a protester interrupting us and waving the Mexican flag.
Speaker 4 (02:33):
Well....
Speaker 3 (02:38):
Well, my friend, if you love Mexico so much, get
your ass over there.
Speaker 1 (02:42):
I'll buy you the plane ticket.
Speaker 3 (02:51):
And critics just feel like that's horrible and don't realize
that easily a majority of the country agrees with that.
Speaker 1 (02:59):
Oh, yeah. Easily. Not even please. Right. Critics. Shut up.
Speaker 3 (03:04):
Just briefly on the back to school night at my
son's high school. I wish it weren't like this. I
actually pray to try to deal with it. I hated
high school so much. Merely being on my kid's campus and, like,
walking around makes me so uncomfortable.
Speaker 1 (03:22):
Oh, wow.
Speaker 4 (03:23):
Yeah.
Speaker 1 (03:23):
That's how much I hated high school. Just being in
the atmosphere, it's like, oh, God, I hate all these people. Wow.
I don't even know. Wow, your attitude is poison. It is.
Speaker 4 (03:33):
It is.
Speaker 1 (03:34):
It's poisonous.
Speaker 3 (03:35):
I have jury duty today. As I tweeted out last night,
they wouldn't have arrested him if they weren't guilty.
Speaker 4 (03:41):
Right.
Speaker 1 (03:42):
Everybody knows that. To which a number of people reacted
with just horror that I said that. Not realizing that's
a joke or something.
Speaker 3 (03:52):
I don't know.
Speaker 1 (03:53):
Wow. Wow. The humor impaired. By the way, just as
a guy who served on a handful of juries. Your shirt.
Jack is wearing a golf shirt, a polo shirt, if
you will, of roughly raspberry color, I would say. Kind
of light, lavender-ish raspberry. It's got the horses green. They
(04:15):
will assume that you are a gay man, so the
defense will probably want to keep you around. As the
resident jury expert. This is, yes, this is from the
Brady Bunch.
Speaker 3 (04:29):
This is the attitude I'm taking into the courtroom that
I learned as a child watching the Brady Bunch.
Speaker 5 (04:35):
You see, in this country, we're very proud to have
a process known as the law. And under the law,
a man is presumed innocent until he's proven guilty.
Speaker 1 (04:47):
Sure, Dad.
Speaker 4 (04:47):
Right, Dad.
Speaker 5 (04:48):
In other words, we don't hang anybody without a fair trial.
Speaker 1 (04:51):
Everybody knows that.
Speaker 5 (04:53):
Sure, but sometimes we tend to forget. Well, I'm glad
you understand. I'll see you kids later. I have to
go shopping with your mother.
Speaker 1 (05:01):
Now after telling you about hanging, I have to go
shopping with your mother. Had you ever heard that before, Katie?
That's pretty funny. I have, but it's been a while. Oh, God,
that's funny. Beautiful. We don't hang someone. That's right, Dad.
That's right. I don't want to hang somebody if they're innocent.
Speaker 3 (05:18):
So if it's going to be a jury of my peers,
am I going to be surrounded by bald, surly talk
show hosts? Is that what's going to be a room
full of them? That's my understanding, yes. I did think
after I tweeted out that whole, they wouldn't have arrested
him if they weren't guilty. If you ended up on
one of those high profile, Nancy Grace's involved cable news
(05:39):
every day, all day trials, which you don't know that
going in, they turn into that usually. That sort of
remark would, you know, that'd get talked about for an.
Speaker 1 (05:49):
Hour on some CNN show. Correct. Yeah. If it didn't
get you tossed off in advance.
Speaker 6 (05:57):
Yeah.
Speaker 1 (06:00):
I haven't done this in a long time. I've only
made it to the courtroom once.
Speaker 3 (06:04):
I think I've only actually shown up to the courthouse
a total of three times in my life where my
group got called like it did this time, so I
will show up to the courthouse. But the other two times,
you sit there for a while, scroll in your phone,
and at some point say, you can go home, and
that's your duty for the year or six months or
however long it happens. Yeah.
Speaker 1 (06:26):
How often they call you.
Speaker 3 (06:28):
It was kind of exciting when I actually made it
all the way to the courtroom, but man, I don't know.
If I made it all the way to a jury,
what's the longest jury you.
Speaker 1 (06:37):
Served on since you've served a couple of times? Oh, gosh.
It was two or three days. I think it was
like two and a half days. But it was not
a long one by any stretch. I mean, that's a
fairly compact trial. I would not plead hardship. Since it
was a felony, obviously. I would not plead hardship and
try to get out of it or anything like that. But, man,
with my schedule with both kids and nobody else taking
(06:59):
care of them, it would be in my job. It
would be pretty darn difficult for me to arrange making
that work. Oh, yeah. I guess you're a good example
of an exception to what I was about to say,
which is my usual screed. Don't try to get out
of jury duty. Do it. I know it's a pain
in the ass. It's inconvenient. But number one, it is
(07:19):
your civic duty. And if you love this country, that's
one of the most important things you can do is
serve on a jury. And secondly, it's an unbelievable learning experience. Oh,
I'm sure.
Speaker 3 (07:30):
That's why I want to do it. That's why I
want to do it, is just to have the experience
and be able to talk about it or know about it.
If I got chosen, I end up one of the
magical 12 or however many alternates or however that works,
does the trial start today and I'm there today or
does it start next week?
Speaker 1 (07:49):
It would start on very, very rare occasions. It would
start like, all right, we need you back by 1
o'clock in the afternoon and we'll get started. Generally, it'd
be the next day. They'll start in the morning. It's
a Friday, so it'd be Monday.
Speaker 3 (08:01):
I hadn't even really thought about making it. I would
have to make a ton of phone calls to try
to arrange how I'm going to get my kids to
school and picked up and the various activities and all
those kind of things, but I'm sure I could do it.
Speaker 1 (08:13):
Just random strangers I would have driving my kids around.
Speaker 5 (08:17):
Oh, good.
Speaker 1 (08:17):
Good. Super.
Speaker 3 (08:21):
I had another comment on the jury. I accidentally missed
last time. I misread my number or something like that,
and I got an angry letter, so I'm like, Missing
it one more time from ending up.
Speaker 1 (08:31):
In jail, I think.
Speaker 7 (08:33):
Wow.
Speaker 1 (08:33):
Or at least a good night sticking. Here's my memory.
Speaker 3 (08:38):
This clouded my view of juries. My mom served on
a jury once in our small town in western Kansas.
And it lasted a long time. My memory of it,
it was at least a week, if not longer. It
was a neighbor's pipe. Some guy, his pipe broke and
(08:59):
flooded his neighbor's lawn. And they got into whether the
pipe was on their side of the lawn.
Speaker 1 (09:04):
It was all kinds of zoning.
Speaker 3 (09:06):
And it just sounded, I remember hearing about it as
a kid and thinking, I would have to throw myself
out a building. I couldn't listen to that conversation all day,
every day for a week.
Speaker 1 (09:15):
That would be awful. I've got to admit, if it
was like a high-level civil trial... like a complicated liability
case or something like that, man, that would be an
act of self-discipline to really focus. Yeah, the whole.
Speaker 3 (09:30):
Because you had crimes, exciting, you know, gripping, the sort
of thing they put on Dateline Crimes.
Speaker 1 (09:37):
True. Which would keep you interested.
Speaker 7 (09:39):
This.
Speaker 1 (09:40):
Well, I don't know.
Speaker 3 (09:41):
Most of the pipe was on his side, and according
to the statutes and the ordinances, he owes 75% of
the plumbing bill, but not the 25% of the refurbishing
the lawn bill.
Speaker 1 (09:51):
I disagree.
Speaker 3 (09:52):
I think he should pay 18% of the resodding, and
I mean, that.
Speaker 1 (09:56):
Would be so dull. Well, and you have cases sometimes
that are all about accounting. So you got one accounting
expert who says, oh no, that absolutely falls within 403k-1,
and for these reasons and those reasons, and he testifies
for two hours, two and a half hours.
Speaker 3 (10:13):
I sit back in my chair. I'm going to scroll
through my phone. You all come to I will side
with whoever's the majority.
Speaker 1 (10:20):
Oh, beautiful.
Speaker 3 (10:21):
I just can't make myself pay attention to this. Anyway,
I'll let you know.
Speaker 1 (10:25):
And then the defense calls their accounting expert, and he
drones on for even longer. Can you imagine? Do you
take notes or not take notes? You can, absolutely. You
can't take them with you, you can't take them home,
and you can't take them after the trial.
Speaker 3 (10:40):
You can't take them with you where? Like home, or
to the bathroom, or... They've got to stay in the
jury room or in the jury box. What would I
do with the notes in the bathroom that would be untoward? Well,
you'd call the media and give them all sorts of... Hey,
you want to see my notes and what the accountant
said about the plumbing?
Speaker 1 (11:00):
No thanks. I'm good. I'm straight, sir. I saw you
in an lavender shirt and assumed. No, sorry. It's inappropriate.
I'm ashamed.
Speaker 3 (11:10):
With my memory and my lack of caring, I'd have
to take notes on everything or we'd get in there
and say.
Speaker 1 (11:16):
What's this case about again? What are we doing? Oh, no.
Speaker 4 (11:20):
No.
Speaker 1 (11:21):
I request you throw this guy off, but quick. Some
guy did something to somebody. Was it a girl or
a boy? I don't even remember. I don't remember. What
was their skin color? What was their skin color? Oh, Michael. See,
that's too dark. Too inappropriate. Oh, my God. What if
I want to get thrown out? Oh. Here's what I
got to know. What was their skin color? The classic
(11:43):
walk in with a rope. What?
Speaker 4 (11:47):
Okay.
Speaker 1 (11:47):
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Speaker 3 (12:51):
Got a couple interesting angles on the whole 9-11 25th
anniversary to get.
Speaker 1 (12:56):
To, among other things on the way. Stay here. Armstrong
and Getty.
Speaker 6 (13:03):
I've been talking back and forth with these dudes overseas
and they have access to a chimp who's been attacking people.
This chimp is a large male chimp. It's been attacking people.
This is, I couldn't see a more perfect opportunity. I
want the scariest, most aggressive chimp. Because I don't want
anyone after I do this to be still, you know, saying, oh,
it wasn't a mean one. No, I am going to
(13:24):
go to where these guys are and we're going to
set this up. And I am going to take this
chimp and do horrible things to this animal. You guys
are going to see what a human in his true
primal nature looks like.
Speaker 1 (13:36):
That is MMA fighter Cole Johnson willing to fight a chimpanzee.
I'm going to go to where these guys are. Africa?
The zoo? What are you talking about? Down the street?
Where these guys are? The guys who have access to
the chimp. He explained that.
Speaker 4 (13:55):
Sir.
Speaker 1 (13:57):
As my daughter sometimes says to me, Dad, it's a
good thing God made you pretty. Sir, it's a good
thing God made you strong because you are dumb as
a box of hair. Good Lord. You would be killed.
You would be killed.
Speaker 3 (14:13):
Well, and the weird thing is, is that if he
got the best of the chimp, we'd all be horrified
and consider it awful.
Speaker 1 (14:22):
Well, we don't need to worry about that. A chimpanzee
has the strength of like five and a half men.
Speaker 3 (14:29):
I have a chimpanzee story from the weekend, but I
don't feel like it's appropriate right now.
Speaker 1 (14:37):
You have a chimpanzee story from the weekend? Yeah, this
chimpanzee I saw. Wow, okay. I was at an olive garden. No,
I was at the zoo. Ah, that's a good place
to view a chimpanzee. We should probably be saying chimpanzee,
because saying chimpanzee makes it sound as if we're casting
(15:00):
aspersions on the chimps' manliness.
Speaker 3 (15:01):
Or chimpliness, if you will. So this MMA fighter... Wants
to fight a chimpanzee like in a cage. The chimpanzee
would not be aware of the rules. And if you
tap out, it's not going to stop.
Speaker 1 (15:15):
Correct. You will be dead. Gouge your eyes out. Chimps,
it's documented. They go for the eyes and genitals. Barbaric!
It is, sir.
Speaker 3 (15:27):
And then, of course, R-O-Y-H and S-D-Y-T.
Speaker 1 (15:35):
Help us. Rip off your head and poop down your... Oh, my.
Speaker 4 (15:40):
Right. Oh, my.
Speaker 1 (15:41):
That's what would happen.
Speaker 4 (15:43):
Oh, no.
Speaker 1 (15:44):
Again, the referee can try to intercede if he likes,
but it's not going to get compliance.
Speaker 3 (15:49):
So, next segment, I want to talk a little 9-11,
and I'm just... I don't know what put me in
this mood about this.
Speaker 1 (15:57):
I have no interest in the maudlin....
Speaker 3 (16:04):
Sad remembrance angle of it for some reason. Maybe just
I took in too much of it. I feel like
since the enemy still exists in particular, I mean, I
wouldn't like it particularly even if we had defeated the enemy.
Because strong, aggressive societies that are going to survive are, well,
(16:26):
they're strong and aggressive in looking forward.
Speaker 1 (16:29):
They're not rolling around in their grief.
Speaker 3 (16:31):
Right. And then you add in the fact that the
enemy is not only still alive, but in some ways
stronger than they've ever been.
Speaker 1 (16:39):
And still out there and vowing to kill us. And
spending the whole day, oh, that was awful. That was
so awful. I felt so bad. And you felt bad.
We all felt bad. We're all so scared and sad.
And I'm still scared and sad. No, I don't like
that at all. To that point of how fundamentalist Islam
(17:00):
is faring, whether it's stronger or weaker, it depends where
you look. But it reminds me of the question that's
been asked a lot this week, and it's a useful question.
Did we win the war on terror, or was the
war on terror... worth it? Or what lessons should we
draw from 9-11? And again, I find it an interesting discussion,
(17:23):
but I almost feel like, you know, after the fourth
inning of a baseball game, we're asking, so did the
Yankees win? I mean, was the fourth inning worth it?
And I'm like, well, golly, I don't know, because the
ump's saying, play ball, we've got to play the fifth inning.
So yeah, there were ups and downs, there were mistakes made,
(17:43):
there were absolutely the right things done at times, but
This is mid-game analysis, folks. This is going to be
going on for the next perhaps thousand years. The battle
between modernity, Western values, and fundamentalist Islam. Do I have
some interesting info from that day that I'd forgotten? I
read some of the 9-11 report yesterday and the Woodward book,
(18:04):
Bush at War, and a couple of different accounts of
the day before, the day of, and the day after.
They're pretty interesting in terms of our attitude at the time.
Lots of stuff on the way. I hope you can
stick around. Armstrong and Getty. President Bush's chief of staff,
Andy Card, now 79, can never forget it all came
(18:25):
flooding back inside the classroom.
Speaker 4 (18:28):
That day, I promised myself I was going to be cool, calm,
and collected and help the president. I decided I would
tell him two facts and make one obvious editorial comment.
Speaker 1 (18:37):
60 on page 153.
Speaker 4 (18:39):
A second plane hit the second tower. America is under attack.
Speaker 3 (18:46):
Yeah, and I don't think this has a major effect
on anything, but clearly, I didn't think this at the time,
but clearly George Bush should at that point have said,
excuse me, and gotten up and started to deal with it.
The story was for a long time, and I agreed
with it, that he stayed there to remain calm, to
not upset people, but that doesn't make any sense to
(19:07):
me in retrospect.
Speaker 1 (19:09):
But it doesn't matter.
Speaker 3 (19:10):
It's a minor point. And part of that is what
I wanted to talk about is just the things that
you can't feel or really fully understand unless you live
through it in real time. George Will wrote a great piece,
(19:30):
I think the next day, The End of Our Vacation
from History. The United States had been on a vacation
from history where we were completely.
Invulnerable to attack. Nobody could touch us. And it had
been going on so long, we had come to believe
that nobody could touch us. That nothing bad could possibly
(19:51):
happen to us. And that was unrealistic. Is unrealistic, but
it had been going on for so long, it was
just so shocked. Part of it is just so shocking.
We got attacked? Us? And I'm sure it felt that
way for the president, too. I don't think any president...
since then would.
Speaker 1 (20:10):
React the way George Bush reacted. Like, yeah, of course
we did. What do we do now? Who was it?
But we had been in such a comfortable, which fits in.
Speaker 3 (20:20):
So yesterday I did some reading of the 9-11 Commission report,
or listening to it rather, and then read some of
Bob Woodward's Bush at War, which had a lot of
other information around it. And we had been so passive
about Al-Qaeda. and the threat of fundamentals Islam for so long.
(20:43):
And there are examples in both Republican and Democratic administrations of,
you know, we could, we kind of know where bin
Laden is, we could try to take him out now,
but man, some women and children might get killed, or
what if we miss, or, you know, the sorts of
things that we don't worry about near as much now
that we worried about then because we had grown soft
(21:05):
and politically correct and all kinds of different things.
Speaker 1 (21:09):
And for various reasons, the Clinton administration was really one
of the early days of hyper-partisanship, I think, the sort
that everybody talks about now. And I remember the Republican Party,
when Clinton was trying to exact revenge for a couple
of different attacks... and preemptively defying Al-Qaeda. He was accused
(21:30):
of firing Monica missiles and bombing an aspirin factory and
that he was a maniac and way out of line.
And so that contributed, at least on the Republican side
of the aisle, Republican voters to the idea that these
people are no threat whatsoever. Only a jerk like Clinton
would say they were. That was not good. Not good
at all.
Speaker 3 (21:50):
Yeah, there are numerous examples of that. On both sides.
Speaker 1 (21:55):
Absolutely. And I hope we don't lapse back into that
or aren't lapsing back into that. I mean, the greatest
sin of the left is clearly accusing anybody who's concerned
about Islamism of bigotry. That's absolutely idiotic. There's a lot
of particulars.
Speaker 3 (22:10):
From that day where it could have been stopped a
bunch of different times if things had broken just slightly
the other way. It also could have been a lot
worse if things had broken slightly a different way, including
if that plane that the passengers took down had crashed
(22:33):
into the Capitol.
Speaker 1 (22:35):
It had 5,000 people in it.
Speaker 3 (22:37):
The plane that hit the World Trade Center and the
plane that hit the Pentagon was going 540.
Speaker 1 (22:46):
Miles an hour. He put that stick all the way forward.
Speaker 3 (22:51):
And the plane that hit the ground in Pennsylvania also
was going that fast. Of course, part of that was
it was headed down. Gravity was involved. But, man, they
put that plane in. The cleverness of picking four transcontinental
flights so they're absolutely loaded with the maximum amount of fuel,
because three of them were headed to L.A. and one
(23:12):
of them was headed to San Francisco. So they had
the maximum amount of fuel you're ever going to have
on a plane flying in the United States there to
get the biggest fireball you could. If that thing had
gone into the Capitol, wow, what would the conversation have
been then? And killed Half of Congress, all of Congress,
the Speaker of the House and the Vice President. I mean,
(23:32):
it's unimaginable what would have been going on there. So
we both could have gone on the other hand. One
guy got wanded with his box cutter. Our metal detectors
were way different back then. Lack of a sense of
imagination because you're always fighting the last war. We were
(23:53):
looking for bombs and guns because that's the only way
hijackings had ever happened. So we had detectors that could
catch bombs and guns. We had a rule back then
that if you were on some sort of list, you
were not allowed to get on the plane until we
knew your suitcase was on the plane with the belief
that nobody would blow up a plane with them in.
Speaker 1 (24:13):
It because you'd kill yourself. So that would be crazy.
Speaker 3 (24:17):
And our metal detectors were set to just catch a
gun or a bomb and not a box cutter. But
one guy went through, they have the video of this
from the airports, And it went ding or buzz or whatever.
Speaker 1 (24:28):
And they warned him and the guy just kind of says, whatever.
Speaker 3 (24:30):
He didn't figure out what made it buzz or ding
and let the guy go through.
Speaker 1 (24:36):
One very easy.
Speaker 3 (24:37):
And then as the day unfolded, all the giant bloated
bureaucracies started running into each other in all kinds of
different ways. It's really interesting to watch the TikTok of
it when you're reading it in a book.
Speaker 1 (24:52):
You'd have thought... When a plane.
Speaker 3 (24:55):
Got hijacked the way it did, or after it hit
the First World Trade Center, that information had gone around
faster to all the other airlines that, holy crap, this
is unfolding. But it took a long time before we
grounded the flights or were even aware that there were
the possibility.
Speaker 1 (25:13):
Of multiple hijackings going on.
Speaker 4 (25:16):
Shocking.
Speaker 1 (25:17):
And then the thing I was most shocked about reading
the 9-11 report years ago was when it was inescapable.
I mean, every single human being understood that this was
a massive terrorist attack, multi-pronged, etc. And it was decided
that we needed to scramble fighter planes. It was, you know,
it was a Tuesday morning, but the people who made
that decision didn't know who to call. And the people
(25:39):
they called didn't know how to reach the pilots. It
was just kind of, it's a domestic thing. Geez, what
do we do?
Speaker 3 (25:47):
Yeah, there was a lot of that, which, you know,
I hope we're better at now. But I couldn't help
but rereading all that stuff again, thinking, God, if China
shuts down the cell phones and the water plants, it's
going to be that sort of mess all over again.
According to a Woodward book, George Tenet, who was the
CIA director at the time, he's having breakfast with a
(26:08):
senator friend of his. And the senator asked him that
morning when they sat down to eat, the senator said
to him, so what's keeping you up at night? Which
sounds like a legitimate question you'd have for a CIA
director that you meet every once in a while. He said,
bin Laden, man, bin Laden. And Senator was like, oh
my God, bin Laden again. Man, you see bin Laden
(26:29):
in your nightmares. You're obsessed with bin Laden. Well, we
weren't obsessed with bin Laden enough. And it goes through
various arguments in the CIA and other departments in our
spy agencies, in the military, of how.
Speaker 1 (26:42):
Serious we should take the threat from al-Qaeda.
Speaker 3 (26:45):
They tried to blow up the World Trade Center, you know,
once in 92 or 93 or whatever it was, and
we barely paid attention at all. Or one of my
favorite nuggets from this whole thing is, Al-Qaeda blew a
hole in one of our warships there, the USS Cole,
a month before the Gore-Bush election, and it wasn't even
(27:07):
a topic of conversation for the debates or anything.
Speaker 1 (27:10):
That's how blind we were to it. Yeah, it was. Well,
we were especially blind to the idea that fundamentalist Islam, Al-Qaeda,
and its various offshoots were a worldwide political movement as
opposed to Well, prior to 9-11, non-state actors were just
not seen as something you had to worry about much.
(27:31):
You'd have to go in and mow the lawn now
and again because there have always been terrorist groups and
activist groups and that sort of thing. But nobody took
them seriously as a power that could... cause serious damage
or alter the trajectory of history. It was like a
criminal gang. They were looked upon in our laws were
fashioned to treat them as criminal enterprises as opposed to
(27:55):
serious actors on the world scene. That's changed.
Speaker 3 (28:02):
And as we all know, since the CIA, for instance,
had several of the hijackers nailed down, the guys in
San Diego and different people that they are aware of,
but they didn't share that information with the FBI or
whatever other agencies that could have tied things together and
figured some things out because of the whole, what we
(28:24):
learned to be called stove piping thing, which hopefully we've
fixed where they can share information and connect the dots a.
Speaker 1 (28:30):
Little bit better.
Speaker 3 (28:32):
Um, but I, I, giant, giant bureaucracies are just, well,
they are what they are no matter, no matter what,
what their goal is or who's running them.
Speaker 1 (28:41):
And I hope we're.
Speaker 3 (28:42):
Better than we were that day for when the big
Chinese attack comes.
Speaker 1 (28:47):
Here's where we could discuss how smart it was to
develop the director of national intelligence and put another layer
of bureaucracy. And I'm not really super interested in that discussion. I, uh,
bureaucracies frustrate me. Um, But it was probably a good idea.
Whether it still is a good idea, I don't know.
So we'll skip that one. Let other people have it. Yeah,
(29:09):
I think it clearly wasn't.
Speaker 3 (29:11):
But just in general, I don't know how you stay
game ready when you haven't played a game in a
long time. And that's where we were both like... organizationally, factually,
like having rules in place or methods or a plan
(29:34):
or this sort of thing.
Speaker 1 (29:35):
And then just emotionally.
Speaker 3 (29:36):
Emotionally, we weren't game ready for that sort of thing.
to happen because it had been so long. I don't
know how you stay game ready.
Speaker 1 (29:43):
Maybe you can't.
Speaker 3 (29:44):
Because you don't want to be a nut and live
like you're constantly under threat, even though you are.
Speaker 1 (29:51):
Yeah, that's a tough balance. You're probably right. You're never
going to be as ready as you should be if
you've not had a game, as you're saying, for a
very long time. The thing that's changed that disturbs me
the most is that the unity we saw post 9-11
would be much harder to generate now because of the
success of the neo-Marxist critical theory crowd in our schools,
(30:14):
teaching the kids that the United States is a force
for evil. We brought this upon ourselves. We were built
foundationally on racism and oppression and the rest of it,
which is perhaps the boomers and Gen X's greatest moral failings.
We let this happen under our watch in our schools.
But uh what can you do about that it's it's
like the oak tree you know when would the best
(30:37):
time to have woken up to that have been well
probably around 1968 when's the second best time today start
fighting it one example of attitudes i thought was interesting
that i think has changed um so cia director tenant
uh he finally gets back to the office he's talking
to his i think it's armitage but um He's talking
(31:00):
to one of the other people making decisions at this time.
And the tenant says, we've got to evacuate the building.
I mean, their planes stood. They didn't know how many
planes had been hijacked. They knew that some of them
were headed. One had already crashed into the Pentagon, so
they thought other. planes were headed to other buildings there
in D.C.
Speaker 3 (31:18):
He said, we got to get everybody out of the
CIA building, especially the people on the top floor. And
Tenet is told, well, the people on the top floor,
that's where the super high intelligence people that are watching
the world, we got to keep them in place. This
is exactly what they do is deal with. He said,
I'm risking their lives if I leave them up there.
Speaker 1 (31:39):
He said, we're at war, the guy told him.
Speaker 3 (31:41):
This is what they do. You're going to have to
risk their lives. And Tenet said, You're right. And let
him stay up there. But the fact that even briefly,
he thought, I got to get him out of there.
And the other guy had to say, yeah, this is
why we have a CIA. This is why we have
that particular floor. That's what they do for a living.
The fact that it took us a little while to
(32:03):
get up to speed on that sort of thing. And
I hope we're still on that footing, that this is
real and there are bad guys out there and our
bad guys have.
Speaker 1 (32:11):
To take on their bad guys. Yeah, I think we
clearly are to a large extent, although all politics, including
what we're talking about, is downstream of culture, and again,
that's what I worry about. So the football season's kicked
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Speaker 1 (33:36):
Armstrong and Getty.
Speaker 4 (33:40):
Tonight's ceremonial first pitch. And please welcome the President of
the United States.
Speaker 1 (34:18):
It would be ridiculous from a rational point of view
to suggest that a middle-aged man wearing a heavy flak
jacket humming a strike over the plate would have any significance.
And yet, God, I'm getting choked up thinking about it.
It was such a moment of, yeah, we're America. Let's
(34:42):
do this. Well, you had the president of the United
States standing up.
Speaker 3 (34:48):
The fact that he's standing on a mound, so he's
up higher, like a target, like, here I am in
the middle of this giant stadium in New York.
Speaker 1 (34:55):
Here I am. I'm not hiding. Days after the attacks.
Speaker 3 (35:00):
Yeah.
Speaker 1 (35:00):
The World Series. The World Series.
Speaker 3 (35:03):
Uh, like I was talking earlier, I mean, it was
a real lesson in the importance of leadership to me.
Speaker 1 (35:08):
And I try to remember that, you know, in a
family crisis or.
Speaker 3 (35:11):
Anything like that, that sometimes having somebody say something or
make an action really makes a difference. The bullhorn thing
that we played earlier when he's standing on the rubble,
everybody needed to hear that so badly to hear him say,
the people are going to pay for this, who did this.
Speaker 1 (35:33):
F yeah.
Speaker 4 (35:35):
Why?
Speaker 1 (35:35):
I don't know. It's just the way we're built.
Speaker 3 (35:37):
We just need to know somebody's taking charge, somebody's doing something.
Speaker 1 (35:41):
We're a social beast. We organize ourselves socially, yeah, and
we have leaders.
Speaker 3 (35:46):
One of my favorite stories has always been from right
after 9-11. The day of 9-11, General Mahmoud Ahmed, who
is the head of Pakistan's ISI intelligence service, which is
all kinds of infiltrated by radical muslims the isi of
pakistan if you know anything about pakistan i mean they
(36:07):
have an interesting government over there where you got to
keep the the muslim extremists happy or you're going to
get blown up yourself they're a nuclear power all kinds
of stuff we have such a weird relationship with them
they had been allowing al-qaeda to go back and forth
across the border and and uh well they ultimately they
hid osama bin laden from us for years um But
(36:28):
so the ISI guy happened to be in Washington, D.C.
on 9-11, and Deputy Secretary of State Richard Armitage, if
you don't remember him, big, giant, barrel-chested, looks like an
offensive lineman guy, allegedly went to Mahmoud that day with
a list of seven demands on how you're going to
work with us. History starts today. There is no black
(36:50):
or white. You're going to work with us on these
seven things. We need to have a military base. We
need to cross over. You need to arrest these people. Or...
Armitage says he didn't say, we're going to bomb you
back to the Stone Age. Musharraf wrote in his memoirs
toward the end of his life that that's what he
was told. We will bomb you back to the Stone Age,
(37:11):
which I believe is what we said.
Speaker 1 (37:13):
Right. We can't say that out loud, you know. That
was a phrase so oft used, we developed an abbreviation
of it, bitabitza. Now that's a threat.
Speaker 4 (37:25):
Hmm.
Speaker 3 (37:27):
More coming up if you miss the segment. Get the podcast,
Armstrong and Getty, on demand.
Speaker 1 (37:31):
Armstrong and Getty.
Hosts And Creators
Joe Getty
Jack Armstrong
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