America This Week, April 26, 2024: "The Magic Weekend"

It's a beautiful day in Las Vegas, springtime, and I'm in a pretty good mood.

The seasons are finally turning, and the craziness of the election season is upon us. So there will always be plenty to talk about.

Yes, the Deep State is Actually Kind of Awesome spoof video. And we have a sizable amount of submissions. I'm going to be making an announcement about a winner, maybe more than one winner, on Monday. So tune in. Probably going to rope Walter in just for some consultation about some of these.

So I guess we'll be awarding second place. It's like Larry Bird's first three-point contest. I'm just looking to see who's coming in. second. What he told the other guys in the locker room.

So, look, there was a lot of stuff that happened in the news this week. We could obviously talk about protests that are raging as we speak, not far from me, in Columbia University, in Yale, NYU, across the country. But there was also a very consequential story over the last weekend that has potential ramifications. And there's a really interesting thing that's developed out of it. So Saturday, in kind of a rare Saturday congressional session, there was a series of votes where all sorts of things just suddenly got passed.

The long-awaited funding bill for Israel and Ukraine and Taiwan, $95 billion in mostly military aid, which Republicans had been stonewalling for a long time, finally got passed. FISA got passed. The TikTok ban was also thrown in there in one of the bills.

But let's just start with what it looked like when they passed the foreign aid bill, Walter, because I think you'll find—I mean, we've all seen this scene, but it kind of sets the scene for everything else. Here's the actual vote.

. The bill is passed. One voting president.

Okay.

The House will be in order. The chair would remind my colleagues to observe proper decorum. Flag-waving on the floor is not appropriate.

The House will be in order.

Without objection, a motion to reconsider is laid on the table. For what purpose does the gentleman from Florida rise?

The gentlewoman from Florida.

So, that was Florida Congresswoman Ana Paulina Luna saying, put those damn flags down. This became a big deal, the whole waving of the flags. Kind of interesting, because we've been hearing a lot about how the Democrats are the only adults in the room, and they're waving Ukrainian flags on the House floor. And then Mike Johnson, who was in the process, or is about to be crowned, Winston Churchill for his role in getting all this passed. Afterwards, he comes out and gives a statement.

We should only wave one flag on the House floor. And I think we know which flag that is. Okay.

And then there was a series of reactions to this. And I kind of want to start with this one, Walter, because this was the most striking. This is Morning Joe.

And they have a very interesting take on what happened that weekend.

And you can only imagine that Donald Trump was not happy to hear Mike Johnson talking about. He used the phrase axis of evil. He said, I believe the intelligence.

We've got Republicans. He's a Republican from the before times. He used the phrase axis of evil. He believed the intelligence. We are going back in time to the Bush era.

Everybody's stoked about it. And this is just the beginning of that theme. This, this, this would continue throughout the week. This whole idea that we're going back to the more civilized Bush era, when we were fighting terrorism and everybody was on board with it. But.

First of all, what do you think of that whole? he's from the before times thing?

So I don't know why he stuck that in there, but apparently joking Putin and ruralness is important now. And he made sure to do that. Second of all.

by conservative voters. She means conservative voters in Moscow, conservative voters who support Vladimir Putin, conservative voters who hate freedom in Ukraine, who hate freedom across the West, who hate freedom. In places that Americans guarantee freedom since 1945..

Yeah. Terror lovers.

In rural America. We're going to join his later comment.

Anyway. I noticed also what was her name? The New Yorker writer.

They have made a religion of war. Not to be too preachy here. And apparently he's joined it, that they are going to equate that with a kind of American belief system. Our continuous funding wars is honest of them, at least. And as far as the before times go, they are the Joe type people.

The MSNBC people are not usually given to nostalgia. That's often a conservative trait. We're said to be one. But we're now seeing these kind of Democrats, liberals, so on,

harken back to a time of normalcy and goodness that, like you say, was probably the Bush times when.

Funding wars and crying terrorism and doing everything in their power to clamp down on the ability to question it domestically.

Felt like the good old days.

And so, so they're back. It's happy days. The Fonz and Richie and Bush era militarism.

That's supposedly normalcy in America, that baseline, and we're back to it, they say and cheer. So that's where we stand in terms of political culture right now. And, you know, as far as Mike Johnson, being hailed as Churchill.

Well, that might be premature. Churchill only became Churchill after World War Two was won. And this has yet to be won in any meaningful sense. I couldn't help but see that flag waving as a part of a future video reel that might include mission accomplished. George Bush on the air.

You know, they act as though this funding bill was a victory in a war rather than a deepening of our commitment to a war that is very murky in terms of its outcome. In fact, one of the provisions of this bill was to declare, within a certain amount of time, what exactly our agenda is in Ukraine, what we will consider victory. And I have yet to see that articulated completely.

With. He had meetings with the White House, he had meetings with the Democratic leadership, and they laid out a series of conditions under which they would support this bill. And one of them was, you know, sort of getting answers. You know, what are the benchmarks? What are we calling victory over there?

How long is this going to go on? What's? how do we account for the money we've already spent?

Plus, they wanted, you know, what they call, I guess, transformative border security legislation, which, incidentally, symbolically also got killed on the same day. You know, we could argue about the border thing. It's not the thing that I've spent a ton of time on, but it's just interesting that, basically, Johnson is being hailed for not negotiating on behalf of his constituents. And the Republican Party, you have to remember, this has been a continuing development within the Republican caucus, which is that they they don't want this Ukraine war. I mean, the most recent poll that I saw that was significant, you know, had 61 percent of Republican voters opposed to spending any more money there.

The number has been kind of going up since November.

So this idea that, you know, he's some sort of Churchillian hero for delivering this vote, I understand why they're excited about it. But, you know, from a Republican point of view, you know, it's, it's at best a questionable move. But let's look at this. Here's here's the piece that, you know, raised some eyebrows. immediately.

The bypassing of the accidental speaker became an unlikely Churchill.

qualified for that appellation.

But, you know, if we're going to call everybody Hitler on one side, we may as well call everybody Churchill on the other and just have at it.

that's pretty much it, I think. But this story also contained a piece of video from Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell. Which I think was very interesting.

And there was a lot of the same kind of jingoistic lunacy in the air.

And it's interesting that we're sort of merging themes, you know, the sort of neoconservative Republicans. David Frum's now kind of a Democrat, right? But his axis of evil is now part of this calculation. Are we going back to the Bush years? It feels quite like that.

It's just the same interventionist concepts and the same rhetorical tactics.

Tucker Carlson broadcasting the enemy's propaganda. I don't know that I've ever seen Tucker Carlson demonize Ukraine. He seems to have called for some kind of understanding with Russia, some great power understanding. But so I'm not sure McConnell was accurate there.

So we've gotten an enemy's list and we've gotten a hero's list. Tucker Putin, Marjorie, Taylor Greene and Mike Johnson standing against them in his Churchillian way.

What we haven't had is any discussion of the battlefield situation in Ukraine. The likely outcome in the short, midterm and long term.

Nor do we really know much about the toll the war has taken so far. This was a completely superhero based set of arguments without any reference to what's happening. What's happening on the ground strategy.

And.

That's our discourse now. And that. But, as I said at the beginning of the show, that, you know, two thousand.

Three or something, or 2006 is being held out as the, as the baseline for American normalcy is just fast. But I think it's, as I said, also honest, because what we're seeing, Matt, and we saw in this bill was a combination of foreign military aid and the domestic rules by the so-called TikTok ban.

Which are designed to contain dissent. And to me, that's an admission that this is all one fight. It's not just fight against Putin, but it's a fight against those forces at home that might constrain our muscular militarist foreign policy. So they put it all in one package. And at the end of the day, not only are there more missiles abroad, but there is a narrower opportunity at home, probably to discuss these things.

But the chilling of our our national conversation is happening at the same time that we're getting rah-rah about war is absolutely predictable and harkens back to post Patriot Act America.

And then there's the, you know, the goofing on, you know, with a little bit of an anti-war twist to it. I just haven't seen anything like that in so long.

Right, right. You know what I'm saying?

And I think that a place like Daily Show is supposed to let a little pressure off in this very contradictory situation.

I can no longer imagine that they have independence editorially at these places. They always somehow work with the larger power structure.

And I'm happy to see it, frankly, personally. I think that war is one of those things that should probably be treated as an evil, a necessary evil, perhaps. But not—shouldn't result in, you know, homecoming-like bursts of enthusiasm.

And that's what we saw on the floor of the House. I mean, whenever you're delivering major weapons systems and death, even if it's to the enemy, I don't know that the mood around that should be one of celebration.

And so maybe it's gone a bit too far for the TV watchers of America. I'm not sure.

The Republicans don't want the Ukraine aid. There's been an uproar over censorship and surveillance and other things, like, you know, the leveraging of Internet services to clamp down on opinion, things like that. These are all things that the intelligence community wants. It looked like there was going to be a moment where there was going to be some voter defiance, sort of symbolized by the refusal to go along in the House with more voting for the Ukraine war.

And when they because I didn't, I just didn't think they were ever going to get the votes to do that. And they ended up getting it by like a three to one margin.

And it's a sweeping victory, I think, for the national security establishment. And that, I think, accounts a little bit for the celebratory edge to the passage of all these bills. I mean, from striking down TikTok to passing FISA, which is, you know, people probably, you know, our listeners know was beefed up, but probably most Americans aren't aware, you know, included an upgrade as significant as the one the last time FISA went before Congress.

The FISA Amendments Act really sort of souped up a law that had been around since 1978.

. This is going to do the same thing. It's going to bring it up, you know, a big notch. They got all kinds of stuff that they wanted. They got the wars that they wanted.

They got funding even for Taiwan.

And, you know, where's the opposition? You're not hearing the Democratic opposition to Israel on the floor. Even Bernie Sanders was really muted about the whole thing.

And I can imagine they do feel relieved because they're giving each other cover. You know, each side is giving the other side cover. The Republicans are helping out on Israel and the Democrats are helping out on U.S.