YouSaid · the spoken record

P.J. O’Rourke

lines on the record: 29
first: 2019-11-22
most recent: 2019-11-22
sittings or episodes: 1
sources: podcast

Every line below is reproduced as it was said and linked to the record it came from. Nothing here is summarised or generated. Directory · Search · Corrections

“I can't get the local or the state or the federal permits to put new tanks back in. He said our business is doing really well. I can afford Obamacare. And I provide health care for my employees. But he said it never seems to occur to those guys down in Washington that every time they have a bright idea, 50 crap land on my desk to be filled out. He said, I don't have a legal department. I don't have a health and human services department. I don't have a personnel department. It's me and my wife and I'm a mechanic. And then I've got this junkyard out back and it's been a junkyard since the 1920s and now it's got an endangered newt in it. And I said, okay, okay, fine, but how does sending a maniac to Washington fix this? And that's when he said, that's what they got comin'. So, a little listening to guys like that would be helpful.”
2019-11-22 · Intelligence Squared · P.J. O’Rourke and Lionel Shriver on the Battle for the White House · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And I would say that they've got to listen. They have to listen to what And the best example of that that I came across when I was covering the campaign was I got to know and got to like very much this fellow in New Hampshire. He had a garage, a body shop and a gas station sort of operation. And he was doing pretty well for himself. And he was really a firm Trump supporter. And I ask him basically why. I said, you know, do you like the guy? He said, I don't like the guy. I don't like the guy. I wouldn't want him around. I said, you know, so what's going on here? And he said, well, you know, I have three gasoline tanks that have been in the ground for too long. They're at the end of their safe existence. They need to be replaced. I can't get the local or the state or the federal permits to pull these tanks out.”
2019-11-22 · Intelligence Squared · P.J. O’Rourke and Lionel Shriver on the Battle for the White House · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“If we're lucky We're luck This session is called the Battle for the White House, and most battles are won because of a successful strategy or plan. I'm interested to know what each of you would say is your three point plan. You've asked for pithy questions. I hope it's okay if I ask pithy answers. But your three-point plan for beating him. And in particular, one of the things I'd like to hear is how we communicate beat him in communication terms. It's very easy to dismiss Trump as an idiot, as somebody who's corrupt. But one of the things that he seems to have done, or at least the team around him seems to have done, is to have cut through and communicated to the 51%. How do we beat in communication terms somebody who seems to have an ability to do that? In the same way that take back control was a motto that was irritating for those of us who were on the remain side of the debate. It captured something, it synthesized something, and it”
2019-11-22 · Intelligence Squared · P.J. O’Rourke and Lionel Shriver on the Battle for the White House · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Let's thank God for that because let us always choose disorganized and marginal evil over well-organized evil. We really don't. And to Lionel's point is that there is an element in the United States of really repulsive politics. You could hardly have a country of almost 400 million and not have that element. But our Ku Klux Klan, they're morons for the most part. I mean, they're out there and they can't even have such a such”
2019-11-22 · Intelligence Squared · P.J. O’Rourke and Lionel Shriver on the Battle for the White House · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I would give it a little different explanation of that. I think the American economy has been bubbling along pretty well for such a long time now that it's become sort of invisible. When the economy is very volatile, popping up and down constantly, it becomes a strong political issue. In this case, it's the candidate and the incumbent who have been popping up and down with great volatility while the American economy has just been sort of steaming along. And I think people have begun to take it a little for granted. But you're right. You're right. We should have discussed that a bit because it is helpful to an incumbent, even as odd and incumbent as Trump is, is going to be helped by a good economy.”
2019-11-22 · Intelligence Squared · P.J. O’Rourke and Lionel Shriver on the Battle for the White House · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I actually wish I'd thought of that as a matter of fact. Now that you remind me, I might have said maybe Nicki Haley will be the rallying. I think pretty good. I mean, she's Shares a good record. She's very effective politician. She has Sort of feeling of strength and positive energy about her, yeah, she could very well. And she's, you know, by politician age standard, she's quite young too. So there'd be time for her to be maybe the Phoenix rising from the ashes.”
2019-11-22 · Intelligence Squared · P.J. O’Rourke and Lionel Shriver on the Battle for the White House · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“None. I mean, first place, there is no sort of central, this is like a starfish or something. It doesn't have a central nervous system with a brain at the middle of it. It's just a big blobby thing. So they're not really considering that. And if an individual Republican does consider the question of America becoming less Caucasian, more diverse, younger, he'll go, ah, they'll grow out of it. One of these days they'll wake up at 40 and realize what their tax bill is and that they got to send their kids to private school because the public school stinks, you know, and then nobody's fixed the potholes. And we'll have them no matter what color they are, no matter what preference they may have or what their last name is.”
2019-11-22 · Intelligence Squared · P.J. O’Rourke and Lionel Shriver on the Battle for the White House · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“The two circles of the Venn diagram barely touch each other. So the Republicans will go down in flames as they have many, many times before, and then the Democrats will screw it up. It may take four years, may take eight, and the Republicans will pop back up again and we'll be back at it.”
2019-11-22 · Intelligence Squared · P.J. O’Rourke and Lionel Shriver on the Battle for the White House · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It's going to destroy the Republican Party, but it won't really matter because, as I explained, and the party doesn't really exist anyway, so you can't really destroy something that isn't there. I mean, what we have in the United States rather than political parties in the sense that most of the world has political parties, that you join, you carry a card, you can get kicked out of, you pay dues to, ours are just a big sloppy tendencies. We've got a big sort of sloppy tendency to think, oh, the government should do a little more to help do this, that, and the other thing. And another big sloppy tendency, often present in the same person going, wait a minute, what's that going to cost? And so it's really Venn diagrams. Sometimes there's a great deal, as there was in the 50s, there's a great deal of overlap. Sometimes there's like an 80% overlap. Sometimes as at the moment,”
2019-11-22 · Intelligence Squared · P.J. O’Rourke and Lionel Shriver on the Battle for the White House · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It really doesn't, Len. I actually went and did the math on this. And if you took all of the income of the top 10% of earners in America, if you took all their income, it would fund the federal government for exactly one year. And then the next year when you came back, would that top 10% be there? I don't think so. I think they'd be in the Cayman Islands or someplace and it just wouldn't, you know. Then you say, oh, well, well, you know, wealth is not just what one earns, it's what one's worth. And so I did my best to figure out sort of net worth of the top 10% of Americans. If you took all the net worth of the top 10% of Americans, it would fund the federal government for not quite the four years that it would take you to get re-elected to your second term. It's gone. It's gone. You can't go back and get more. Is the problem?”
2019-11-22 · Intelligence Squared · P.J. O’Rourke and Lionel Shriver on the Battle for the White House · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Alexander the Great would have begged to differ, but... But nonetheless, I take it, I mean, you know, just as a man, and it's just one of those things, well, I think Americans have kind of given up telling the truth to any kind of polling outfit anyway. But I mean, that's certainly not a question you're going to get an honest answer to.”
2019-11-22 · Intelligence Squared · P.J. O’Rourke and Lionel Shriver on the Battle for the White House · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Nobody's going to answer that question, say, yeah, no, I can't vote for him, you know, because it's just too strange. I mean, I don't like that stuff. Nobody's going to say that to a pollster, you know?”
2019-11-22 · Intelligence Squared · P.J. O’Rourke and Lionel Shriver on the Battle for the White House · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“He's a mayor of the fourth largest city in Indiana. South Bend, very important place in America until 1963 when the Studebaker plant closed. So yeah, that's a big problem. But I do think that, I mean, I agree with Lionel. I think the gay thing is a little bit of a problem, and it's not a problem we're going to be able to get honest polling about.”
2019-11-22 · Intelligence Squared · P.J. O’Rourke and Lionel Shriver on the Battle for the White House · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I just fear that Mike's going to do the numbers on this and determine, calculate that it is fatal and that it moved too slow.”
2019-11-22 · Intelligence Squared · P.J. O’Rourke and Lionel Shriver on the Battle for the White House · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“He considered getting in 2016, and he told me that the reason he didn't do it is he put his people on this and they did all the analysis, and it seemed that his entrance into the race, in that case as a third-party candidate, would have helped Hillary lose. Of course, she managed that on her own, as it turned out. But besides coming in late with Mike being a problem is he's also very New York, and he's not as well known. I mean, his business is, you know, people think he's a TV station. They don't know he's a person. Those of us who lived in New York while he was mayor, and he was a very good mayor, we all say, hey, there's the guy, wonderful technocrat, you know. We know who he is. We think he's great, but he's not that well known outside the group of people who are in New York or New York adjacent or frequent New York visitors.”
2019-11-22 · Intelligence Squared · P.J. O’Rourke and Lionel Shriver on the Battle for the White House · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Actually, I know Mike, not very, very well, but I know him fairly well, and I've spent a fair amount of time talking to him. He put a, I mean, he has people. He has people who really know stuff, people who can count to 11 without taking a sock off, all sorts of really smart people.”
2019-11-22 · Intelligence Squared · P.J. O’Rourke and Lionel Shriver on the Battle for the White House · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, no, no. I mean, I've been saying for quite a while that the Democrats are operating on the premise that nobody can lose to Trump and by God they're going to find that nobody. I don't really have preferred a Democratic candidate, but anybody, yes, anybody sane will do, you know, anybody sane and pretty much has it together whose ideas aren't completely crackpot and who doesn't want to spend gajillions of dollars, any sort of regular old Democrat would be fine with me.”
2019-11-22 · Intelligence Squared · P.J. O’Rourke and Lionel Shriver on the Battle for the White House · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I'm 72 years old and I get to say things like that. Because I look at the poor guy and I think everything you said, everything you said, and I think, yeah, ooh, me too, you know, I mean, I came into this room. Why? Anyway, as I was saying. Is that I know personally, 72 years old, I'm moderately fit, you know, maybe not quite as clean living as Joe is, but, you know, I'm all right for my age. And I think, you know, day after day, America is an immense country, and day after day after day of busing around having six pancake breakfasts and seven spaghetti dinners, you know, with various volunteer groups and so on, and giving the same gibberish speech over and over again and not quite remembering what part of it I'm in, you know, and where it's supposed to end or begin for that matter. I'd be dead in a month, and I fear he may be too.”
2019-11-22 · Intelligence Squared · P.J. O’Rourke and Lionel Shriver on the Battle for the White House · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“To Washington. And some of those people, now they're not going to, some young Twerp calls them up for a phone poll or something, you know, some kind of polling institution or some East Coast media elite queries them at Walmart. They're not going to come around and say, yeah, I've had it with him. But in private, I am hearing, I live way out in the country and I know lots of people voted for Trump. And in private, I'm hearing, well, you know, The place seemed to be run by clowns, so we've sent a clown down to headed up, you know, and didn't work out all that well. I'm not so sure we're going to do that. So I think his base support is slipping, but I think it's a very hard thing for polling institutions to measure.”
2019-11-22 · Intelligence Squared · P.J. O’Rourke and Lionel Shriver on the Battle for the White House · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Think it's happening. I actually do think it's happening because when I was covering the election in 2016, there were a lot of people who were telling me that they didn't really care all that much for Trump as a person. They were put off by him, wouldn't want him in their home. And then I would say, well, why are you sending him to Washington then? Why are you voting for him? They said, well, that's what Washington's got coming. You know, I mean, it was a point taken. I mean, people were just kind of, and I'm sure that this was, there was some of this in Brexit too. People were disappointed, upset with government. I have a libertarian theory that as government expands, it necessarily fails because when government promises everything to everybody, everybody's going to be disappointed. And so everybody gets angry at the government. And people were sending a sort of middle finger.”
2019-11-22 · Intelligence Squared · P.J. O’Rourke and Lionel Shriver on the Battle for the White House · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Is there anything that social media hasn't made worse? I mean, whose bright idea was it to put every idiot in the world in touch with every other idiot?”
2019-11-22 · Intelligence Squared · P.J. O’Rourke and Lionel Shriver on the Battle for the White House · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I very much agree. I think it's very important that he be voted out. I don't want Trump supporters saying he was kicked out on a technicality or something, you know, some sort of oddball long. He butt-dialed the Prime Minister of the Ukraine, whatever. No, I want him clearly and definitely voted out by the people of the United States. That would be certainly my preference.”
2019-11-22 · Intelligence Squared · P.J. O’Rourke and Lionel Shriver on the Battle for the White House · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So I think she wants this to be a hanging question when the election comes along. Otherwise, he's going to be going around saying, I got exonerated, see? The Senate said I didn't do it. You know, I didn't do it. I really didn't do it. I bigly didn't do it. And so I think that Nancy Pelosi was saying, yes, yes, by all means, let's impeach him, but not too soon. Let's impeach him at a time where all the accusations against him in the House will have been aired, but the Senate hasn't got its aura in yet.”
2019-11-22 · Intelligence Squared · P.J. O’Rourke and Lionel Shriver on the Battle for the White House · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Now that's what I think actually Nancy Pelosi has been up to. She is no fool as a politician. And I think she was perfectly well aware that if they impeach too soon and that if something extraordinary didn't happen in the Senate, and I mean truly extraordinary, it would have to be like an instant Darwinian evolving of a spine Simply doesn't happen over the course of a couple months.”
2019-11-22 · Intelligence Squared · P.J. O’Rourke and Lionel Shriver on the Battle for the White House · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“From the Senate innocent or guilty. So he will be left accused by the House of Representatives. The problem with that is the House of Representatives has been accusing him of everything you can think of from the moment he became a nominee. And one of the reasons that people don't aren't as appalled by Trump as they ought to be is the kind of criticism that Trump has taken and the kind of people from whom he has taken that criticism. They're the kind of people that a lot of Americans in the heartland of America really don't like, like the New York Times. And they know full well that if Trump cured cancer, the headline in the New York Times would be heart disease kills more people. So, you know, they're not only not listening, they're not listening with a will.”
2019-11-22 · Intelligence Squared · P.J. O’Rourke and Lionel Shriver on the Battle for the White House · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“He hasn't been tried. He hasn't even been properly arraigned. That all happens over in the Senate, and for political reasons, it's not going to happen at all. The other thing I just want to make clear is that I looked into the timing on our previous impeachments, and I did look into Andrew Johnson's as well, is just how long it takes for this thing to happen. It's almost inevitable that this will not be done, not be finished by the time the election comes along in a year. All prior experience we have on this, the Clinton impeachment, that Nixon was impeached and the process almost impeached, the process was halted by his resignation, and Andrew Johnson, of course, was impeached. It just takes longer. So what's going to be left there? There will be, I don't think, any verdict.”
2019-11-22 · Intelligence Squared · P.J. O’Rourke and Lionel Shriver on the Battle for the White House · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Or is it a place? If so, in what place is that place? And then when you find out about the place, it doesn't seem like it was ever a very nice place anyway. And I honestly think the Democrats have just come out and say, we're impeaching him because he's a big sleazeball. He's a big slime ball. You can't deny that. It's all over the place, everywhere in every action of his that's been recorded since he came of age. And I think the Constitution is quite clear about this. It doesn't say just treason. It doesn't say just high crimes, whatever. It also says misdemeanors. And misdemeanors is just plain means. I looked it up in the dictionary. It means bad behavior. Congress is perfectly within its rights. We do have to clear that up a little bit, I think, especially for Americans as well as Brits, is that an impeachment is simply he got arrested.”
2019-11-22 · Intelligence Squared · P.J. O’Rourke and Lionel Shriver on the Battle for the White House · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It was foggy. I mean, one thing you have to understand about what's going on here is that not only does a large percentage of Americans not care, but an even larger percentage of Americans are going Ukraine. Now, was that the planet that made us giggle in middle school?”
2019-11-22 · Intelligence Squared · P.J. O’Rourke and Lionel Shriver on the Battle for the White House · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, I was a Republican, but I'm taking a few years off. I suppose really at heart I'm some sort of libertarian. I kind of believe that mind your own business and keep your hands to yourself. I call these the Clinton rules. Hillary, mind your own business, Bill, keep your hands to yourself. That pretty much covers my political. And I too regard Trump as an absolutely unmitigated disaster and a great reminder, something we always have to keep in our heads about democracy is a simple mathematical fact. 50% of people are below average in intelligence Be helped.”
2019-11-22 · Intelligence Squared · P.J. O’Rourke and Lionel Shriver on the Battle for the White House · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source