3 Whisky Happy Hour

So your three bartenders are back from overseas, but still a bit jet lagged and struggling to keep up with the news. Was it a good week? The firing of Scott Pelley is certainly good news, as are the initial results of the California primary, where the energy and enthusiasm is clearly on the side of the outsider insurgent candidates. (Knock on wood: let's see how the "vote counting" goes over the next several weeks in the "incompetent" Golden State.) 

Not such a good week for John Bolton, nor for aesthetic sensibility, if the Obama library is any indication. Why does the left prefer brutalist ugliness? We have our suspicions. . .

We do our longer dive this week into some meta-narratives about the Supreme Court, inspired by Paul Moreno's terrific Law & Liberty article, "Save the Last Branch for Me." It's a new day indeed.

We also get in our licks at woke British policing, Star Trek, and the 1979 Book of Common Prayer, which has some rather uncommon Eucharistic forms. Oh, also McDonalds news, just to keep John Happy and well fed.

The end of this week finds the 3WHH crew in situ in Enna, up in the highlands of Sicily, visiting the University of Kore for a conference on, well, everything, though it is hard to tell since half the speakers are speaking in Italian and the rest of us arenspeaking in English. John Yoo's incoming plane was delayed—again—but it gave us the prompt we needed to have in John place R.J. Pestritto, the Dean of graduate education at Hillsdale College, but above all one of the most treachant critics of the Progressive revolution of the early 20th century, and the insidious administrative state it birthed. If ever you want to throw down on Woodrow Wilson—and what sensible person doesn't?—R.J. is your man.

For this episode we consider R.J.'s recent short monograph for the Claremont Institute's "Provocations" series, Government by the Unelected: How It Happened, and How It Might Be Tamed. Settle in with your favorite chianti for this one, as "D.J.—R.J" as I like to call him when he gets rolling on this subject, really gets rolling on this subject with us.

For this episode, recorded in a hotel lobby with some visitors wandering by our "field recording studio (which included Michael McConnell listening in for some of it), we decided to keep the "authentic feel" of the background noise, in case you get to wondering.

We could have called this the jeg lag from hell episode, as John Yoo managed to spend 11 hours on a airplane yesterday that didn't fly anywhere, while Steve, already planted as an advance guard in Palermo ahead of next week's conference in Sicily where the 3WHH crew will be together in person at the University of Enna, is batting both jet lag and a airplane-acquired bug that left his voice raspy.

So Lucretia hosts this week, and wonders whether both parties are a hot mess at the moment, what to make of the scene from the cashiering of Messy Massie to Der Platner of Maine to Ken Paxton in Texas, but landing on the breath of fresh air that is Spencer Pratt.

In the middle of taping the news broke of the resignation of Tulsi Gabbard, so we pivoted to an impromptu discussion of the wider scene of dysfunction in the "intelligence community." Steve made a case for bringing back James Jesus Angleton from the dead, drawing the predictable guffaws from John. 

All just a warm up for our on-location episodes next week.

[CORRECTED AUDIO]

We've had some gonzo episodes before, and a couple of trainwrecks, but this is the first-ever episode that is actually two episodes edited together, with sequence changes, new sound effects, canned insults from John, etc. I explained in a Substack post our technical difficulties that arose in the livestream, and here is the fix. Let us know what you think!

In fits and starts we do cover some breaking legal developments, whether Israel has any hope of a libal action against the New York Times (which richly deserves it), the surprising statesmanlike bearing of President Trump, some surprising remarks on anti-Semitism from T.S. Eliot, and more.

So here we go!

We've had some gonzo episodes before, and a couple of trainwreck, but this is the first-ever episode that is actually two episodes edited together, with sequence changes, new sound effects, canned insults from John, etc. I explained in a Substack post our technical difficulties that arose in the livestream, and here is the fix. Let us know what you think!

In fits and starts we do cover some breaking legal developments, whether Israel has any hope of a libal action against the New York Times (which richly deserves it), the surprising statesmanlike bearing of President Trump, some surprising remarks on anti-Semitism from T.S. Eliot, and more.

So here we go!