Congress's Big Bad Week and Europe's Continued Decline: The New Fifth Column

Discussions of GOP spending, police abuse narratives, and the French elections, with guest James Kirchick

The backslapping in the White House rose garden had only just ceased up when Kmele Foster, Michael C. Moynihan, and I broke out the Sam Adams and top-shelf listener-whiskey for some insta-analysis of the latest Affordable Health Care Act. (Speaking of which, read Reasontastic takes on such from Peter Suderman, me, Eric Boehm, and Elizabeth Nolan Brown.) We also get into this week's GOP-led federal spending increase, the uncommon threads attempting to link a spate of recent police-abuse stories, and how President Donald Trump may be negotiating from a position of strength with Republican lawmakers.

In addition, The Fifth Column welcomed to its airwaves James "Jamie" Kirchick, author of the new book The End of Europe: Dictators, Demagogues, and the Coming Dark Age. We talked French elections, Brexit, the decline of institutional democratic socialism, the mechanics of Russian infiltration into Central Europe, and what a Kirchickian foreign policy would look like vis-à-vis Estonia. Listen to the whole sprawl here:

And make sure to check out Nick Gillespie's interview with Kirchick last month on the Reason podcast.

You can locate Fifth Column at iTunes, Stitcher, Google Play, wethefifth.com, @wethefifth, and Facebook.

Comments

[Fist of Etiquette]

Is Moynihan doing a Masshole accent on the bingo card? I'd like to hear a whole show done in your native, regional accents.

[Matt Welch]

If it's not, it really should be. And I don't know if you're psychically prepared for my half-Spicoli, half-Jim Rome patois....

[Fist of Etiquette]

I'll get a doctor's note. Make it happen.

[GILMORE?]

On a scale of 1-to-Yeltsin, how drunk is this podcast?

[Buddy Bizarre]

W.C. Fields.

[GILMORE?]

we shall see

[UVaGrad]

So does Ron Paul get brought up at all?

[Bender B. Rodriguez]

Trying to find Welch's Instagram account just to see this fabled table of booze, but it seems to be well-hidden.

[Buddy Bizarre]

I found it right away. He now has a bar following him.

[Bender B. Rodriguez]

Trying to find Welch's Instagram account just to see this fabled table of booze, but it seems to be well-hidden.

[kobu]

??????O My Co-Worker's step-sister made $13285 the previous week. She gets paid on the laptop and moved in a $557000 condo. All she did was get blessed and apply the guide leaked on this web site. Browse this site....
This is what I do.------------->>>.??????? ?????____BIG.....EARN....MONEY..___???????-

[GILMORE?]

Trying to find Welch's Instagram account just to see this fabled table of booze, but it seems to be well-hidden.

here

[GILMORE?]

In Which Michael Moynihan Demonstrates He Can Pronounce French Swedish Names Correctly

[GILMORE?]

* i confess i'm still a little unimpressed with Kirchick after his moaning about "Trump's threat to the the entire liberal world order" in the podcast w/ nick.

He seems like a sharp guy, but also someone who has spent too much time around other young smarties who litter the foreign affairs world... where before long everyone is parroting the same establishment-justifying horseshit, which basically assumes that the world only functions because of the bold efforts of technocrats and bureaucrats like they themselves aspire to be.

That the world needs interventions here, but not too much here, and just enough regulations here, and more multilateralism there, and you see it really just requires more and better Top Men for all of this to function correctly, and well, if it doesn't, Topper Men are probably needed.

Its a sort of 'endlessly recycling received wisdoms' pretending to be insight.

I'm familiar with this because i dated people who worked for the UN for about a decade.

[GILMORE?]

**iow, its just my vague impression of lots of similar sounding arguments

[GILMORE?]

In Which Michael Moynihan Offends All of Southern Europe by Pretending They All Sound Like Super-Mario

[GILMORE?]

In Which Matt Welch Describes Attending a DC Cocktail Party, Dismissing Reason Commenters as "Dullards"

[GILMORE?]

In Which Matt Welch Rediscovers that Politics ="The Feels" and ~!="Policy"

[GILMORE?]

In Which Matt Talked Dishes About Meeting Debbie Wasserman Schultz and.... Talking About Baseball

*it is around this point when the whiskey really kicked in and shit got real

[Fist of Etiquette]

Out. Of. Touch. With. Middle. America.

[Buddy Bizarre]

I should have waited for Gilmore's commentary so I could follow along.