Is Trump vs. Acosta the Iran-Iraq War of 2018?: Podcast
Assessing the import of presidential tantrums, media hyperbole, military complaints, and the near-arrival of federal sentencing reform
Beloved Reason Editor-in-Everything Katherine Mangu-Ward had a piece in this weekend's New York Times headlined "Trump and Acosta: When Showboats Collide." Given the nonstop borgledy-fraggle of news within the Trump vs. media vs. Trump Möbius strip of blather, we start the latest editors roundtable edition of the Reason Podcast with an extended rumination on the meta-meanings (and lack thereof) of this eternally recurrent combat.
Other topics of note discussed by Nick Gillespie, Peter Suderman, and yours truly include the president's prickly relationship with the military, his sometimes-coherent foreign policy doctrine, the off-again/on-again FIRST STEP Act, plus (for some reason) bidets, Rand Paul prospectively barfing on Mitch McConnell's desk, and whether ladies who dye their hair blue and purple are basically poisonous tree frogs.
Subscribe, rate, and review our podcast at iTunes. Listen at SoundCloud below:
Audio production by Ian Keyser.
'Superator' by Pietnastka is licensed under CC BY-NC 3.0
Relevant links from the show:
"Federal Judge Rules Trump White House Must Return Jim Acosta's Press Pass," by Joe Setyon
"Reporters Become Participants in Tribal Political Warfare," by J.D. Tuccille
"Bob Woodward Is Right: The Press Is 'Emotionally Unhinged' About Trump," by Nick Gillespie
"The Sorry State of FOIA," by C.J. Ciaramella
"Richard Nixon Probably Would Not Have Been Saved by Fox News," by Matt Welch
"The Military Is 'Securing' a 1,900-Mile Border with 22 Miles of Razor Wire," by Eric Boehm
"First Full Year of Trump-Run Foreign Policy Sees Record Number of Bombs Dropped on Afghanistan," by Brian Doherty
"Mitch McConnell Touts Wild Spending Bills as 'Bipartisan' Accomplishments," by Joe Setyon
"Donald Trump Appears Clueless About the Criminal Justice Reform He Says He Supports," by Eric Boehm
"Hey, Libertarians! The Criminal Justice Reform Movement Sees You Out There," by Scott Shackford
"Trump Endorses Criminal Justice Bill, Giving Momentum to Long-Delayed Reforms," by C.J. Ciaramella
"Top National Police Organization Declares Support for Modest Federal Sentencing Reforms," by Scott Shackford
"ABC Makes Patently False Claim About New Title IX Rules," by Robby Soave
"Sole and Despotic Dominion," by Cory Doctorow
Don't miss a single Reason Podcast! (Archive here.)