UN-mitigated Disaster

[MUSIC] Welcome to the Commentary Magazine Daily Podcast. Today is Friday, September 25th, 2026. I'm John Pothore, it's the editor of Commentary Magazine. I'm told that I haven't made this clear enough by some listener, so I'm going to try to make it as clear as possible. We are having a roast, our annual fundraising event, on November 8th here in New York City. To find out more, go to commentary.org/Rost. Commentary.org/Rost, commentary.org/Rost, because people keep asking me, "How do I find out more?" And I mentioned commentary.org/Rost, and then they forget it. And it is true that we do not have a visible link on our website at commentary.org. To that page, I was trying to explain to someone that making alterations on an extant webpage is surprisingly more difficult than you would think. It ought to be that you think it's just something plug-and-play, and it doesn't quite work like that. And so we have never had that available. So as we do with our ads sometimes, I'm just going to say commentary.org/Rost 17 times. That's what the advertisers want us to do to just constantly mention the URL so that people get it. It's commentary.org/Rost, and of course our Roasty is Ron Dürmer. Dan Siener will be roasting him. The comedian Aaron Wexler will be roasting him. Ben Shapiro will be roasting him. And a bunch of other people. So a good time will be had by all. And to find out how to get to attend that good time, of course, what do you do? You go to commentary.org/Rost, and there. You will meet Executive Editor Abe Greenwald, hi Abe. Hi John. Excuse me. You will not meet Abe at the URL commentary.org/Rost. You will meet Abe at the event that follows naturally from clicking on commentary.org/Rost and buying a ticket or buying a table. Also there will be Senior Editor Seth Mendel, hi Seth. Hi John. It reminds me a bit of the scene in Empire Records where you just, you see him, the employee pick up the phone, go Empire Records, open till midnight, midnight, and then slams the phone down. That's where you're slashed, Roasty. One obscure, you have just there. We enjoy a good obscure reference. You are now making an obscure reference to an unsuccessful youth-oriented movie made 30 years ago that I have extremely dim memories of. So about a record store, right? So are there good movies about record stores? I mean, there's high fidelity, right? Which is about a record store. Obviously, record stores barely exist. I will tell you if we're going on this bizarre old man tangent that when I was eight years old or something like that, a movie came out called "Cactus Flower" with Walter Mathau and Ingrid Bergman. That was the, that is now chiefly remembered because Goldie Hahn played the kooky girlfriend of Walter Mathau and won an Oscar. She had been on laugh in the TV show, won an Oscar for "Cactus Flower" and then commenced a rather remarkable, now almost 50 year career as a star, which nobody would have predicted. I'm only bringing this up because there are scenes in her friend or roommate or whatever. She lives in Greenwich Village. And there are these scenes in this record store, which was at the corner of A Street and Sixth Avenue. And I thought it was the coolest thing I'd ever seen because in this record store you go in, and if you, if you wanted, they would take the record, you would bring it to the counter, and they would open it up, they'd open the plastic up and give you the LP, and then there were listening booze. You could go into a listening booth and listen to the record, and I was eight years old, and I did live, you know, I lived five miles away from it, but it was sort of in my city. And I remember just begging my parents to take me to this record store, so that I could, like, go into one of those listening booze and listen to an LP with headphones on. It just seemed like the most exciting thing of all time. Little did I know that you could today, that, you know, 50 years on, or less than 50 years on, you could, like, go somewhere, you could write a, make a two minute movie about Harry Truman and Thucydides meeting, you know, at a coffee shop in Pasadena, and Truman is wearing a suit, and Thucydides wearing a toga, and they have a conversation about Gibbon, and then 30 seconds later, a two minute movie would come out, be spat out by some machine, that you could tell was not real, but was still nonetheless a kind of actual thing. That's where technology is today, as compared to where I was, like, 47 years ago, when the most exciting thing in the world was the idea that you could listen to a record in a record store. That, um, anyway, I, this just shows that we've cleaned out our porch the last weekend, and we, and I found my record player. So, uh, record players of today that you can, you can hook up to a laptop and transfer the sound, because there is, there is something about the crisp sound of vinyl that really is, uh, and so you can, you can load your stuff onto your computer. Little known fact that my late, my late father was an audio file. So he, uh, beginning really in his 50s, uh, became obsessed with, um, with, uh, records. I mean, the, you know, and, and record equipment and, uh, speakers and, uh, subwoofers and tweeters and, uh, amplifiers and various other, uh, kinds of things. And, um, the, uh, this fact, uh, that, um, the recording was made on physical grooves, uh, of, you know, of a piece of plastic, um, that, uh, it's analog and not digital, because there is actually some, for, if you put your fingernail on it and you sort of spun it around, you would hear sound. Uh, it isn't just, whereas, of course, anything, uh, now that's digital, uh, is a conversion of a mathematical formula or numbers or whatever into something that then goes into a speaker that then translates it into sound. And so audio files will tell you that this is, this is real sound. It's not fake sound, uh, and then my, my, my dad, uh, would, you know, we would take a record and put it on this cleaner. You would put clean it and then he would say, because the needle, the needle itself costs like $2,000. So you don't want to take care of the needle. And then after like 15 years of this, like, preposterous process in which it took five minutes to listen to any one record, um, he confessed that it was completely impossible for him to tell the difference between listening to, uh, uh, you know, um, uh, a recording of the Boston Symphony Orchestra playing, you know, Beethoven's fifth on a CD, as opposed to Beethoven's fifth on, on vinyl, uh, but you know, since you're, um, talking about all this and, and technology, I have to say for some odd reason, the fact that a record can produce sound with a, when you spin it and run a needle through its grooves is, is oddly more remarkable to me than the, than digital, uh, audio. I, I, I, it's more flabbergasting. Yeah, I mean, I've sort of, I can't remember now, you know, because I, I think I've read about, you know, how they figured out how to record things on this, on, on, on, on, on these, on these flat discs on these flat pieces of plastic or vinyl or whatever they were. Um, and I remember how, how it happened, um, exactly, but yeah, how, who figured out that you could somehow store sound physically on that physical object that simply needed to be amplified through a needle that wasn't attached to something that could then echo the sound out or like an early, like, Vectrolo, which was literally a, like a horn, like the sound that came out of a Vectrolo was sound that was coming out of a, like something that you would see an old man in a movie set in the 19th century, you know, like an ear horn. you know, that it was coming out of a funnel, a literal funnel of sound. How someone determined that that was possible is in a way, in its own way. - It was Edison did the phonograph, right, which was basically the same thing, right? - You never know if Edison did it or if he stole it from somebody else. - Right, that's true. - One of the great life experiences now is discovering that Thomas Edison was a thug, like a mafia also, be people up if they tried to, you know, wanted to own every film ever made through the Edison motion, the idea was that, you know, if you bought film from him, he then owned the thing that you, you then owned your film. We'd see this and, you know, stuff that goes on now with the idea that when you buy music now, you don't sort of own the music. They can kind of take it away from you. No, and Edison was one of the early masters of the idea that anything that was made with anything that he made he got to, he owned. And if you didn't agree with that, he would send thugs to be you up, which was fun. - He was the original soprano in his own way. - There you go, there you go, the Wizard of Menlo Park. - Menlo Park. - Menlo Park, yeah. So yeah, he was, yeah, he had New Jersey's own. He set the standard for New Jersey criminality back in the 19th century. As you can see, we're kind of temperate because we don't have a big topic today, and I guess where we'll start is talking about, because we've discussed it so much on yesterday's program as a preview, Benjamin Netanyahu's speech before the UN General Assembly, which took place yesterday afternoon, and we were talking about it in prospect yesterday morning. And I'm of two minds about it, but I will say this, that if you needed a, if you needed a half an hour summary of the working theory and working practice of what Zionism is, that is not Zionism as defined by Mark Ruffalo Hitler and Wallace Sean whom I'll bring up in a minute. You could do, you could do no better than the case that Netanyahu laid out for why there isn't Israel and what Israel does and how it acts and why in the end, even if you think Israel is terrible and you hate Israel and you discount everything that he mentioned about the ways in which Israel seeks to limit the damage done to its adversaries after its adversaries attack it and all of that, he just tells this story about his late brother, Yoni Netanyahu, who died in the liberation of the hostages in Tabby on July 4th, 1976, how he himself was, he found him a couple of years earlier, six or seven years earlier, stationed somewhere after some kind of a, attack when he was in doing his military service and that Yoni had said to him, we're fighting these battles and we have no choice, we have to win them because we have no other choice. We cannot lose, it's 25 years since the Holocaust, 20 years since the expulsion of Jews from countries in the Middle East and elsewhere, the survival of the Jewish people and millions of people living there, we have no choice. And so that was the through line of the BB speech was trying to explain why you may think that they didn't have to do this and you may think that they didn't have to do that. Well, he and the people of Israel are not listening to you. Because when it comes to their survival, they have no choice, there is nowhere else to go. There are existential forces attempting to destroy a nation of nine million people, 20% of whom by the way are not Jews, are Arab citizens and Christians and Jews. And so therefore Israel will proceed to act as it deems necessary in its national interest and that everybody who walked out of the hall when he was speaking is a moral coward or were an anti-Semite and then he specifically called you as Aaron Mamdani, the anti-Semitic mayor of New York City. Do you, I mean, I just thought as a Suma, there isn't much people are always saying to me, well where can I read about Israel? Where can I read a good one volume history of Israel, or the Middle East or something like that? So I never have an answer to that question 'cause there is no such book. It's like, where can I read a book about Judaism? It's like, really? There are about 10 million books about Judaism including Judaism. - Well, there's these five main books, right? But you know, Judaism's part of Jewish law is an endless series of disputations between rabbis written and almost impossible to follow style. And that's where the history and literature of Judaism begins. But you know, that kind of like, where can I get just a good summary of that? Well, that speech, I thought, came as close to being, the thing I would say you may, like if you may hate him, you may not agree that his strategies and tactics are the right ones, but that that was as definitive a case to be made for Israel's existence and the way it pursues its own national interest and security as anything that I've come across in my, at least as a matter of public rhetoric by a leader in my life to you guys. - Since '67. I mean, that's where he started. - Yeah, right, of course, yeah. - Yeah, yeah. But yes, I totally agree. I thought it was great, actually, yeah. I'm very curious, and it will get to it as to why you're two minds overall about the speech. (upbeat music) - Okay, everybody, let's talk about Quince. I've been talking to you about Quince for years, the sweaters that I wear every day at the fall and winter, this summer, been wearing the amazing shorts that they sell. 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(knocking on door) - Yeah, I mean, I thought it was good and I also thought that he was given an assist by Macron earlier in the week because sometimes BB shows up and people treat his speeches like they're all the same, old, the same, you know, sometimes he has something to reveal and sometimes Hassan Nasrallah is being obliterated as BB speaks into the microphones. There's a kind of, there's an expectations bar, right? That when it's only a speech, no one's been blown up while people are walking out of the hall, there's no chart and pictures on the wall of, you know, some kind of great Mossad mission into Iran about their nuclear approach. And there's no revelation about how close they're, whatever, there's just BB talking. But the truth is that BB is who he is because he's very good at that. [BLANK_AUDIO] talking is a thing. That's how he became a thing, right? He was, you know, from the beginning of his career when he was a guy who they realized right away could go on TV and talk to the news as a, you know, as a deputy envoy in Washington and then New York, he was just a guy who was who was good at this. So, so it was a reminder also that, you know, BB, just BB talking is actually, you know, usually worthwhile to listen to, especially in that sense. But I do think that Macron gave him a huge assist because sometimes you say we've heard it all before. What do you know, well, I got to hear this again. Not that everybody else also the one doesn't say the same thing, but the complaint about BB is, oh, we got to hear this litany again. But yeah, you do because the president of France, who's, you know, deeply, I mean, how long has he been president of France where he's not, he's not like he just showed up. Macron is one of one of the most prominent world leaders of one of the most important European countries. And he, he, he, his like brain fell out of his ears this week in front of the UN. It was wild to see this idea that Hamas doesn't operate in the West Bank. And by the way, before anybody jumps in, he, the, the, the claim of mis-translation is nonsense, right? Macron said afterwards, the day after where he said my, I didn't, my words were mis-translated. The French words I used were not never operated in, but really should be understood as never governed. And I thought that also was part of what was so amazing about this because it's like, he doesn't speak some obscure language, you know, that was like resurrected, like some kind of like, you know, ammo, you know, like some sort of like a Mesopotamian tongue that, that, that only archaeologists have found clues of. He speaks French. People speak French. They knew what he was saying. The French journalists did not respond by translating it as has never ruled the West Bank, right? I mean, in other, so just not, not to go overboard on that, but the point is that he stood up and he said something totally ridiculous and, and then tried to wiggle his way out of it. And this I thought gave BB a really great opening because France is next to Britain, the colonial power that set the course of the modern Middle East and the shape, specifically the shape of the modern Middle East. And Macron never really confronts that. He never really confronts the fact that not only was France's adventures in Lebanon so formative about in in terms of how modern Lebanon is misgoverned, but also that, you know, kicking Faisal out of Syria ended up turning the Palestinians into the Palestinians instead of, you know, South Syrians or whatever, that the whole conflict broadly has a lot to do with France's mishandling of all that. And he sort of, it's always bothered me how much he skates not because I want manual Macron to be held responsible for, you know, Sykes Beco or whatever, but because I just wanted acknowledgement that when he medals in these conflicts, he has a responsibility to confront the fact that these are like French started fires and he should be putting them out. And he got up there and he totally, he, he just totally fell on his face. And BB had this opportunity then to say, look, this is just with the things you people say here are just wrong, demonstrably wrong. It's not a matter of opinion. It's not a matter of whether you think that we went too far in a military response and something we did, may or may not have been proportionate. This was, these are facts. And you live here in this, in this, BB literally said, BB literally said, you don't know what you're talking about. Yes, right. Exactly. You live, you live in this sealed chamber. Yeah. So, you want to ask one more thing? Yeah. Before you get that, you want to have one more thing about the speech that we didn't touch on, in terms of maybe his having advanced some, making some sort of new news, there was a tease or a hint that perhaps soon something is going to happen to make the Iranian regime fall. That, that came at the end as a kind of message to the Iranian people. Yeah. Well, I mean, the gimmick, so the gimmick and the famous gimmick, and I think 2019, or I can't remember what it was, was when he, he drew on the image of the nuclear reactor, trying to explain what it meant for uranium to get enriched, right? He had that, like, kind of held up a paste board of a nuclear reactor right and drew stuff in pen. So, what he did this time, A, was he held up a beaper. He reminded the world that Israel, you know, took out, you know, thousands of Hezbollah fighters in a single moment in one of the most imaginative and daring acts of, you know, anti-terrorist combat that, that maybe the most that we've ever seen. And that was very pointed, because of course, there he is in this bonded hall of peace where you're not supposed to be baking, doing violent things. And he's like, no, we did it, and we're proud of it, and we're, we're going to talk about this until the end of time. And here's the beaper, just to give you a little glimpse of it. And so, if you're listening to the amitabh my voice and you are a, you know, want to be a terrorist somewhere in the Middle East or you're part of a terrorist group or something like that, just remember what we get, what, what, what we've now shown that we can do. Maybe think twice before you try to, try to take us on. That was number one. And then number two was him leaving this little device, right? This, he said, here's something for you. It's, it's, this is Starlink. Starlink, of course, is the anywhere internet system Elon Musk created that, you know, makes it possible, you know, for you to, if you're driving through North Dakota, hundreds of miles from any cell tower, makes, makes, is why you're, like your, your Google Maps still works while you're, while you're passing wall drug signs. And, you know, this way to the Sturgis motorcycle rally somewhere where there's, you know, literally no way to get any cell phone service. Of course, Starlink has now played, apparently played a significant role in the change in the fortunes of Ukraine and the, in the war between Russia and Ukraine when, when, when he Musk agreed quietly to allow the Ukrainians to use Starlink. And he said this very, yeah, this very interesting little thing, which is, here's this device, I'm going to leave it here so that when people, who are, who are here for the, for this meeting, Iranians are here for this meeting or the leaders of Iran, not the people, but the leaders of Iran, when they're ready to defect and run away to get out of the country that is collapsing. Maybe you can give this, or some of these to them so that they have them in their pockets so that they can get in touch with us and will basically come and, you know, bring, bring the bus, you know, will drive the van and to pick them up and then drive them across the border or something like that. It was the, this is sooner rather than later. And of course, we are getting these penumbres and emanations about how, once the midterms are over or whatever, there was talk something was going to happen this week, you know, the hostilities were going to grow this week and it's one of the pointed and interesting things that, Arachi and Pashesky and the two sort of non, the civilian leaders of Iran, if there are such things, are now very hurriedly throwing up a peace plan. Seven days to bend the curve. What was the term for COVID with two weeks to, to bend the curve or whatever, anyway, seven days to bend the curve. Yeah, it's driving me crazy. Something in the curve. Yeah. Um, that, but yeah, Arachi, like literally said, didn't he was asked specifically about the midterms, right? Before the, and he literally said, yeah, we want it before the midterms. We want to do this before the midterms. Yeah. Yeah. So something to, that, that was also a hint that, you know, things were going on and that they were listening and that the things that people were saying were, there was something behind it because otherwise the Iranians don't care about the midterms. - And in fact, if the Iranians, they would have reason to stretch it out and make Trump's party lose in the midterms and bleed out support. But the fact that they want it, what we're talking about before the midterms means that something is in the works. - Let me ask you, if you were to start a business right now, what would you create? Would it be that idea that you were working towards since you were a kid something that came to mind when you were a college or perhaps a passionate project? If you're ready to hear the of your first sale today, head over to Shopify.com/commentary to start your free trial today. That's right. Start your free trial at Shopify.com/commentary that Shopify.com/commentary. From no matter where you are, including these places, make this your most rewarding season ever with Fandool, agent location restrictions apply, product availability varies by market, cfandool.com for eligibility, gambling problem called 1-800-Gemmler. Well so the proposal is the memorandum of understanding, that's the other comedy here, is that the proposal is almost literally the same text as the memorandum of understanding between the United States and Iran that was struck in April or May. I can't remember when exactly the memorandum of understanding came out that JD Vance negotiated in Pakistan and said, for the first time in 50 years, there's somebody who really knows how to talk to the Iranians. And who killed the memorandum of understanding to bring hostilities to a conclusion and it was not the United States that killed the memorandum of understanding. It was Iran that killed the memorandum of understanding by refusing to reopen the straight, which was what we were going to get out of the memorandum of understanding as an honorable exit, I guess, from our efforts. So there's something comic about that, because it's like they're coming back four months later or five months later and going, hey, we need a peace deal. So here's our deal. We're going to reopen the straight from Wu's. No one is going to do anything in Lebanon. There's like 17 different things. It's like, well, if you wanted this deal, you had it. It was like there in your hands and you tore it up. So it's comic that you're doing it now, but there are two elections. We mention one and not the other, because there are two elections that are about to happen. There's the midterm elections here in the United States on November, whatever it is, fourth, third, I don't even know. And then there's October 27th, which is the date of the Israeli elections. And BB, who was in the fight of his life to secure another term. And at least from one reckoning or one sense of understanding of what would be good for him. Not only is something that he believes in personally, but that might be good for him politically would be if they do have an innovative idea about how to throw the Iranians into chaos and bring the war to a decisive end with a victory for the United States and Israel that involves the opening of waterways among other things and maybe the collapse of the regime, he would sorely be tempted to pursue that before October 27th. So he could bring that to the Israeli voting populace and say, remember my promise here pretty much since I became Prime Minister in 2009 and has been Prime Minister except for about a 15 month gap four years ago, I've said our main task is eliminating the threat from Iran and my term, this term is coming to an end and we're going to do that before this term ends. So while Rajeev did not mention the Israeli elections, mentioned the American elections, I think he's probably also thinking about the Israeli elections which are very very confusing and I have nothing of any, nobody knows what's happening, I don't know a single person, I speak to 10 people a day about nobody knows anything, nobody knows how it's going. The polling is all over the map, there are 17 different parties, parties are forming and collapsing and going into alliances and collapsing alliances and some polls say the Bibi coalition can crawl its way to 61 seats and therefore the majority and some say it can't possibly but that the alternative can't either because the only way for the alternative to make it would be to invite in Arab parties, one of which was in the government that toppled Bibi in 2022, one Arab party but for the first time in Israeli history, the Arab parties have not been, which Arabs have, I don't know how many seats they have on the Knessad but the Arabs do vote, Israeli Arabs do vote on mass for these parties and because the parties themselves are very unclear where they stand on the formal existence of the Jewish state even though they are all citizens of the Jewish state, have been kept out of Israeli electoral coalition politics and now we have this temptation for the anti-Bibi forces of trying to once the election, the dust is settled, trying to reach out to Arab parties or one or two Arab parties to see if they can crawl over the finish line, get 61 seats themselves and topple Net Yahu. Nobody knows what is happening there. The whole fact of the matter and why it is that I'm of two minds is he has been democracies are not supposed to have the same president for 20 years and it's not right and he should have retired, he's 78 years old. He believes he's the only person who can possibly lead this country that is not true. We live in this country which has survived for 240 to 150 years with very terrible leadership at various moments and gotten past it, Israel is now it will be 80 years old next year making it actually one of the older countries on the globe since I think at least 100 countries have come into existence since 1948 as a result of decolonization. It was the first prime minister born in the state of Israel and decolonization. It's a country that's four generations old that turns out to be older than you would think in terms of the UN if you actually go through the list of countries in the UN many of them accepted in the 1950s and '60s and '70s and of course much of the map that we know from that we studied as kids and all of that was hastily drawn in the wake of world or one so you know that that's 100 you know what that's 100 years ago is a very important it's an important point because people talk about Israel as if it's the last country to have been formed in history or something you know yeah I mean two or three countries have come into existence in the last ten years right South Sudan yeah became a country I mean you know like countries are in the in the 90s in the 90s 400 countries emerged yeah like the breakdown of Yugoslavia and the Soviet Union happened in the same decade yes you know this probably half the countries most people can name in you know the entire Balkans came into existence it's just you know seven countries not obscure countries but like countries that people talk about you know yeah in in these areas are are far newer decades newer than both Israel and Pakistan which came in around the same time yeah well Israel Pakistan and India were were became nations in the same year and they were the great anti-colonial that was the beginning of the wave of post colonial nationhood that was part of the story of the 1950s 60s and 70s where dozens and dozens of countries came into being because the because the imperial powers withdrew from them and left behind situations that were often really pretty parless and ruinous corrupt and and genocidal and all kinds of things. So that's why I'm saying Israel actually lands as a relatively, is now a relatively senior country in the history of countries. But it's not, it's a functioning democracy, very fractious and bumpcious and BB is the greatest politician that Israel has ever seen because he has managed to maneuver his way through all of the political realities, having had a one term as prime minister in the 1990s, returning 10 years after he lost an election in 1999 to become prime minister again. And then after winning an election in 2015, managed to survive in other seven years, in part, because when his term ended, because there was no, because the country could not come up with a functional coalition that had 61 seats. And so there were a series of elections beginning in 2019 five, I think four or five, at least, that ended with no result, which is probably the likeliest thing that was going to happen, by the way, after October 27th. But so it's not good. This is actually a bad, it's like a bad public hygiene for BB to win another term. And as a political performer, a speaker, a presence. He has all of the wonderful, positive, amazing qualities of a first-rate Israeli-Jewish politician, right? He's literate, he's quick on his feet, he's utterly self-confident. He is absolutely assured of the correctness of his opinions and is extremely eloquent in being able to express them. He also comes across as being obnoxious and pushy. And he does not cut an attract. I mean, he's actually personally a very, a tri-think, a very attractive. It makes a very attractive presentation of himself and always has, but there's something at root to his personality as a public figure that makes you understand why so many people don't like him. I mean, I can't quite, I don't have a proper analogy to an American politician, but he is, because he combines this quality of being a great public spokesman with also being a problematic public spokesman. And usually, the things that have made him remain, like this once in a generation leader, have to do with his ability to maneuver behind the scenes, both to prevent any rise of a rival within his own ranks to basically rise high enough to say, okay, it's time for you to go, take your retirement and go away now, because he basically decapitates or kneecaps everybody in his coalition and has for 20 years who seems to be getting somewhere with the Israeli public, which is an unattractive quality, obviously. And so I don't think that that's the greatest, he makes the greatest case for Israel's wonderful democracy because he's just, this is not how democracies are supposed to work, the person who is at the top, despite the fact that we hear or talk about, this is the most important election or our lifetime, every election's the most important election or our lifetime, it is the, it is the, as axiomatic about a country that is the result of being ruled by the consent of the governed that it can have other leaders at any given moment, right? I mean, the Athenians who began this whole thing, literally chose their leaders by lot, you know? So unimportant in theory was who it was who actually like was the administrative director of Athens that any citizen could theoretically play that part and that's part of our doctrine also. Like we, anybody can become president and maybe they'll be still stink and then, you know, they'll go away and somebody else will come in and maybe that person will stink and then we'll try again. I mean, that's, that's how it, that's how it works. So that's why I'm up to mine is that he's there, he should probably not have been there, except for this one fact. My sister, Ruthie Bloom, the Israeli commentator, is, so the person who is, his great rival in this election is Gadi Eisenkot, distinguished military leader, and a part of the team of three, essentially the team of rivals that formed the war cabinet after October 7th, so that there should be no major decisions should be made by BB alone or by his government alone. Like that there were, that there, these decisions will be made by a committee that needed to act unanimously or whatever. And then after a year of it, really did not work anymore and the committee was dissolved. As my, as my sister says, people look at Eisenkot and they think, well, he's, you know, he's not, he's incorruptible, which is good and he's a serious and sober person and has a distinguished record and is not particularly ideological. But as she says, if Eisenkot had had his way, Israel would not have won the war with us. Just flatly, like Eisenkot and others, were so stirred, disturbed, you know, heartbroken and torn to pieces by the agony of the hostage families in Israel that were constantly importuning the government to seize hostilities in order to create the conditions for the return of their families and that that was something that was in the eyes of Eisenkot and others. Privileged over the necessity to beat Hamas, destroy Hamas and, and has, well, I guess, and win the war. And so if you're, if you're going on the basis of what we, I think we all here agree what would have been the best outcome, having Eisenkot as prime minister in 2024 could have been spectacularly ruinous. We would not be, even though Israel's reputation is in tatters and there are people protesting outside the win and blah, blah, blah, blah. These guys had their hearts punched out of them and, and, and BB said, we're going to fight this war to its conclusion and get the hostages home and 90% of them came home. And so, Eisenkot was wrong in the, just as BB was wrong in the signature mistake of his political and professional career, which was the concept of the idea that you could, you could keep Hamas quiet in the way and, and not, and take your eyes off the ball. These guys in media's race would have, and would have unilaterally ended the, the conflict, not only because of the hostage families, but also because they were scared of the United States, they were scared of Biden, they were scared of the reputational damage being done to Israel and BB following the doctrine of Yonin Netanyahu who said, we have to win this war, we have no choice. And he was right, in my view, and they were wrong. And so if I, if I were, if that were the thing that I was voting on in, you know, if I were an Israeli voter, I don't know what I do, honestly, because I think he should go for all kinds of hygiene reasons. And on the other hand, I think that that he's, it's very true that the main force against him called it wrong. Just as he called it wrong before 2023, I wasn't called it wrong in the middle of the war. And so that's the main thing that is on his resume now is that he was part of the cabinet and was trying to get BB to stop the war. And he, he's a, he's a bit of BB, you know, reminds me in a sort of obvious comparison. But he reminds me a bit of an, of a sort of Enigo Montoya character, right, with Iran, which is, you know, not that, or not that the Iranians killed his brother, but it's like, you know, you killed my brother, prepared to die sort of things. Instead of you killed my father, prepared to that. But with the Iranians, it's just, you know, this is at the end, he says, Enigo says, you know, I've been, I've been trying to avenge this my whole life. I don't know what to do with my life now, you know. And so that kind of, that, that is very much like BB in a certain way in that BB, when he came in, when he first came up and came into office in the Likud, you had what you called the Likud princes. You had this, like, second generation Likud establishment, Benny Bagan and, you know, people like that. You still had people left over from the first. generation who were, you know, sort of going out to pasture or whatever, however you want to call it the change over. And BB skipped the line in a certain manner of speaking by becoming a celebrity-like figure in America. While all the stuff was going on in Israel, instead of fighting in the trenches in Israeli politics, BB was an envoy here in DC. Where he developed a good relationship with George Schultz and, you know, and some others in the Reagan administration, and he worked in New York as well. And he became this spokesman for Israel, and it all happened 6,000 miles away. And so when he came, when he finally went back to Israel, it was clear that he was a star in the making, you know, it was clear that he was going to be something politically. And, but he hadn't spent time finagling his way through the party that Likud was at the time. And this moment came when Likud was surprisingly kind of cracked open as a party. One government fell, fighting with George H. W. Bush, the government fell, that was sort of the last of the Likud Old Guard. And there was this unusual open space at that, right at the moment that BB came back. He has a knack for timing. And so he sort of, and he ran, and he won, you know, Likud leadership, and then he won by a hair, his 1996 election for Prime Minister, again, Shimon Perez. But that was, what happened was you ended up with somebody in office who hadn't really climbed the greasy pole so much as jumped on a trampoline from the neighbor's yard and landed on top of the greasy pole. And he failed. And he failed his first time. He was a failure. He had his first time. He came back for three years. He was replaced by Huynne Barak, Barak's government fell and then triumphantly, you know, disgraced politician of the past. Ariel Sharon came back to become Prime Minister, won a gigantic landslide of an election in 2003. And what if the alternate history of Israel is what if Sharon hadn't had a stroke? Like we don't, we don't know what would have happened because he had a stroke and then he was replaced by corrupt and relatively unprincipled person in an old mayor who ended up going to go into prison for corruption reasons, but also in the middle of his term throughout a preposterous piece proposal to the Palestinians. More generous than the proposal at Camp David in 2000 and who knows what was going on there. But so this whole DB could have been this could never happen for him. The history is contingent. The Sharon Stroke, Omar, it's failure, the failure of the person probably could have tried to sideline BB by making him finance minister, but he knows that while Israel is a successful Western OECD economy, it has, it's sprang out fourth as a basket case in the beginning, and it slowly put itself together. More slowly than most people remember, had a real crisis in the 80s with inflation, then it had a million Soviet immigrants come in the 90s, but close to this, that time that we're speaking about, Israel was still, you know, shaky on shaking in that sense, and he made BB finance minister because that was a good place to get somebody's head locked off by the crowd outside the angry public, because you could blame, you know, you could always shift blame to the North. The economy's bad, talk to the finance minister, and BB sort of made this miracle happen where he just applied his free market principles that he had picked up, and you know, he went to school in Philadelphia, he went to college in the US, he worked in finance briefly, he worked with Mitt Romney briefly, he had this sort of background, and this capitol's background, and so he said, okay, so here's where we're going to sell off parts of the state, the state's not going to own everything anymore. We're going to, you know, decentralize this, and we're going to, you know, and privatize this, and knock the unions down a peg, and it was a very American thing to do and say, and he gave this incredible series of speeches about it where he talked about the fat man sitting on the skinny man, the thin man's shoulders, and the fat man was the government was the public sector, and the people were carrying the public sector and the public sector unions. On their back, he had made a really great presentation about how it was in the people's interest to do they, they were being asked to carry too much of a burden, and it got through, and it worked. Yeah, it just, that's another way it works, it's great. The reforms worked, and suddenly BB was a guy who had taken, who had deserved a fair amount of credit for really stabilizing the Israeli economy, and then the moment came where he could run again for, so again, the timing, but also he made his own luck in that sense too, very much so. John, I thought you were going to say that you were, of two minds about the speech itself, but that's that you're. Well, I'm in the sense that, presentationally, I think he, it's a, it's a, it's a, it was a, it was a brilliant piece of rhetoric, and you can understand why people who feel antipathetic toward him. I'm not talking now about, you know, Mark Ruffalo and stuff like that. I mean like liberal American, what it is when they listen to him that they don't like, you, you can understand that. He, he, he's very brusque and combative, and, you know, he, he doesn't suffer fools gladly, and he doesn't sweeten the pot. It's very, even the things that he says are, that are about how Israel is so determined to be protective of civilian life and all of that, come across almost as acts of aggression, as he's explaining all the things that Israel did to not commit a genocide in Gaza. He kind of sounds like somebody who was committing genocide in Gaza, if you listen to it in a different, and like, you know, a slightly different tempo. That, so that, that's what, what I was talking about in terms of the speech, is that if you look at it through unsympathetic eyes, people who are, who are not sympathetic to BB, who might otherwise be sympathetic to another Israeli leader, you can kind of understand where they're, where they're coming from. That's, that's, that's all I was, yeah. Yeah, I, but I just, I mean, I sort of don't, I mean, I, I, I, the wrong is, is when I think, right? Well, it's not just saying all speeches job isn't to appeal to, to the minds of Westerners whose countries are not under attack and don't understand the sort of way. It's more about like, look, he's unpopular with American jewelry. So, you know, that, that alone, it's like if, if that's part of his audience, and he, he doesn't do himself any favors with them, not that they're, not that they deserve that favor is done for them. That's not even what I'm saying. I'm not popular with them either. Yeah, I know. Yeah, tell me about it. Okay. Finally, I mentioned the, we had the invocation of the Princess bride by Seth. I also spoke to Princess bride on Wednesday show with Matt cotton that he recommending a book by William Goldman who wrote the Princess bride. He's an actor wall of Sean who plays Uzzini, the, the guy who faces down the dread pirate Roberts and, you know, says to him, you know, never, never, never go up against a Sicilian when death is on the line and then drinks the poison and dies. And that didn't happen. That was something that happened on set and I am now happy to say without fear of anything that I wish wall strong had drank poison and was dead. And why do I think that? Because I, that's a very aggressive thing to say. I'm aware and I have no problem saying something that aggressive because he said something so evil. Yesterday or the day before yesterday is 82 years old. He writes really repulsive plays, by the way. And of course, was in my dinner with Andre, the single most pretentious and over praised movie, pretty much of my entire lifetime. Here's what he said. The Israelis are worse than the Nazis. At least the Nazis had the decency to try and hide what they are doing. The Israelis boast about it. It's demonically evil. And he is referred to in posts that quote this favorably as Jewish actor wall shan wall shan who I believe is. never set foot in the synagogue. His father wasn't his father. Walsh on the editor of the New Yorker was not was not, I believe himself, bar mitzvod. I don't think he and his brother Alan were bar mitzvod. He if you if you asked him what the what the schmal was, he would think he was the character and the labner. It like they did for him to be invoking his Judaism is itself an act. I mean, not that he's invoking it is an active inch of me, but a person who says that Israel is worse than the Nazis is somebody who is libeling and slandering a nation of nine million people. My sister, our podcast producer, Noam Blum, Israeli native, my my my nieces nephews, my grand nieces and nephews and everybody who has any connection to that to that country is now has now been told that they are that they that they are citizens of a country that is worse than Nazi Germany. I did not think that it was possible for anybody on this planet to believe that there had ever has ever will ever be a regime worse than Nazi Germany, a regime that as I continue to say conducted such a genocide from 2023 to 2025 that the population of Gaza is now larger than it was before. It is as BB said in his speech, a ton of a metric ton of food for each person living in Gaza has been delivered to Gaza in the year since the war began, brought through Israel's precincts and everybody in Gaza got vaccines. Polio vaccines, COVID vaccines, whatever vaccines they needed, Israel has not withheld any of those. So it is taking care of the health and the food intake of the of the of the basically the people that they are at war with in contravention to all of recorded history. And for Walshshan and these people who were screaming outside the UN who basically have now adopted this idea that Israel is worse than Nazi Germany because it brags about how it preserves, protects and defends itself from unwarranted attacks by Hamas and then rockets being fired from Iran and the like. The evil that that represents is you know that's why I say I wish I I wouldn't give him the poison and I wouldn't you know I wouldn't take a gun out and shoot him. But if he should it should happen to be in a room in a place where there was a there were two cups before him and one of them had poison in it I would really be delighted if he drank the one with poison in it. Because he's a monster and he's evil and evil doers should be punished for their evil and this is one of the most evil things that I've ever heard anyone say and and I'm sure that he'll win the Nobel Prize now for his awful plays and Dan and Lemon and the this and the that and the learner and the if you've never you've never seen such garbage by the way I mean the spent six or seven hours of my own time in in theaters because people were trying to convince me that even though you have political problems with him he's a really provocative and interesting playwright he's not he's a lousy playwright he's got idiot ideas he writes really really wouldn't dialogue and of course personally physically the last word on him was written by Woody Allen in the movie Manhattan in which he plays the ex lover of Diane Keaton Woody Allen's girlfriend they run into him at a bookstore in New York and Woody Allen she has been talking about him as though he were the great genius of the life of you know the most important person in his life and Woody Allen says this is Jonah that that that homunculus that homunculus is Jonah so homunculus is too good a word for Wallace Sean okay so does anybody want to say something like cheerful since I just you know wished a swallowing poison on on someone so do I can make that way as we approach the festival of booths tonight by the way I can make a recommendation if you want which would be at least somewhat positive since it's okay I do want to say that tonight begins the festival Sukkot which as I say is in English is referred not not anyone uses this term is the festival of booths because you were supposed to go I'm sure Seth has one at his house I have one in the backyard of my in the in the garbage area of my apartment building you're supposed to live in although people don't really do this but you construct a temporary shelter and it's supposed to be temporary it's literally supposed to be an impermanent shelter without a roof you put bamboo can you put other stuff other than bamboo I don't know what what other stuff people like any supposed to cover it really with like living with some living materials to keep the way you have since you have to see the stars you have to be able to see the stars right so it really be so it has to be porous right so usually people that you build this structure which is often you know I don't know 10 by 12 or something like that and keep it in your basement and you bring it out every year and you spend two hours like having tantrums over why the things aren't fitting together correctly and then you then you have to get up on a ladder and roll the bamboo out to cover it but it is essentially a harvest holiday but it's not it's a complicated slightly obscure festival that we celebrate but it is a wonderful community tearing experience because people generally go they spend the week uh going from Sukha to there their own Sukha then they go to your friend Sukha you go to your Shul Sukha you go and have these you know meals um and uh it's early now so actually it'll be it'll be reasonably warm although I gather we're about to have this horrible nor Easter hit um the East Coast so it will not be a happy a happy time to be in your Sukha if you're in the middle of a nor Easter anyway uh so I do want to wish everybody a wonderful uh so-called week but Seth you were uh yeah so I um uh two years ago I remember when this book came out but two years ago book came out in French that I was very surprised that they didn't immediately have an English translation lined up for but is the barman of the Ritz uh by uh Philippe Collin I don't you know I don't know if I'm pronouncing his last name but C-O-L-L-I-N French novelist um and it is it is a novelization of the life of Frank Meyer the legendary Ritz barman and mostly focused through the war right and so the it's just a great story it's not it's not an unknown story but it's to see a novelist bring it a lot bring it to life um it's very interesting because you know the Ritz was like this uh oasis in the middle in the midst of German occupied Paris it was a famous hotel obviously famous hotel everybody knows the Ritz but famous bar two made uh in large part by Frank Meyer who was this uh this secret Jew nobody knew he was Jewish uh but he had this incredible life as a as a rolling roving bartender he spent time in New York and uh he was friends good uh apparently pretty good friends I think the novels right about this with F. Scott Fitzgerald um and others he was you know he was kind of barman to the stars but the intellectual stars anyway they're the cultural stars I would say anyway the Ritz becomes uh you know Madame Ritz who owns the hotel she gets it from you know her husband passes away it becomes this sort of island uh in Paris where the German officers come and stay and drink and all that and the people there are thus left serving the Nazis the occupation forces and there's there's this you know they they they have to wrangle with uh their own consciences because what are they doing are they are they really just like are they just serving the Nazis drinks like is that what history is gonna say about them they serve the Nazis drinks while the Nazis danced right or is there or or or you know what it what do they get what are they doing with the luck that they have by being at this hotel that allows them to come to work every day during the occupation even when times got really bad and there weren't there weren't jobs and there wasn't money around Paris for non-Germans and and the fact that they had food to eat every day right I mean Frank Meyer never went hungry um and him being a a a an unknown Jew uh is the sort of thing that you would expect to know at him and we don't know as much as we would like to about that side of his life so So, Philippe Collin has brought that to the page. pages of this novel, "The Barman of the Ritz," and put us inside what he thinks was going on inside Frank Meier's head. Frank Meier did, in real life, do some, it appears, to try to help the resistance. But we just don't have a lot of evidence. The novel, I think, probably exaggerates the extent to which Meier helped. But anyway, it's a multi-level, you know, tiered thing. It's just, it works on a lot of levels, and, you know, you will meet real people. All these characters are real people. Coco Chanel lived at, Coco Chanel very famously lived at the Ritz, had an affair with the German officer, you know, and all this stuff. You will see the kind of historical, and so, yeah, Barman of the Ritz, Philippe Collin is the author. It was out in France two years ago, and French had just came out in the United States, finally in English. It has, you know, a good American connection, too, because Meier spent time, although he was born here, spent time in America, and FSCOTS, but Gerald, and all that. And there are just some fun, you know, the people at the Ritz are famous. I mean, people will see him interact with Sasha Getri, the playwright, who also is part of this story of, he didn't, you know, get, he made it through. So did he make it through by, was he a collaborator? I don't know. He didn't get killed, so. Right. So Sasha Getri a collaborator? Yes. I mean, he was not a collaborator in the sense that he did not work or get paid for, get paid by the Nazis. But of course, the role of, the role of, you know, the role of, of elite civilians living in Paris under, under, under the Nazi boot is a immensely complex story. But the reckoning of people like Getri and all kinds of people, Marcel Carne, who made children of paradise and others like, and how they, they themselves, they, they themselves never reckoned with their role, they, they, they tried to live out the rest of their lives not having to take responsibility for having, grants, you can't expect people to like, you know, become resistance leaders. But of course, the great lie of postwar France was that everybody was in the resistance. That was, you know, this joke was, as we learned from Marcelo Fools and others like, nobody was in the resistance. In fact, the resistance was largely external and not internal and, and it was a myth to, it was a myth to bolster the, the kind of repellent of civilizational qualities of France that are now represented by a manual or Macron's behavior toward Israel. So we can bring this whole circle back to, back to this week. As long as you're mentioning this, I want to mention another book about France during the, during the German occupation, one of my favorite novels written 30 years ago, sort of like a mystery thriller, a sort of a thriller, but it isn't really Alan First. He was one of the great thriller writers of, of our time. His book is called The World at Night and it is about a, it is about a, a movie producer who was trapped in French movie producer who was trapped in Paris, working for Paramount Pictures as, as their representative and ends up, you know, sort of having to, he gets followed by the Nazis. A lot of stuff happens, but this portrait of what it was like that first conjures up of what it was like to live in France during, as the Nazis occupied. And hunger, like the, the, there was no food. And so people like us on others, his character, the degree to which their lives were spent from morning until night trying to scrounge up enough calories to get through the day to feed themselves because the Germans had absolutely no interest except maybe in supplying the kitchen of the ritz with sufficient food for their, their senior soldiers. And that you, so this is one of the things that you sort of forget about, you know, this nation that somehow is better than Israel is that they occupied France and starved the French because they didn't want to spend any money on administrating, on administrative or welfare or anything toward the French for whom they had nothing but, but contempt. So, and it's just, it's an amazing book. It's an amazing evocation of a historical, of a moment in historical time. It's the world at night by all and first following along with the barman of the ritz, barman of the ritz. Yes. Okay. Yes. Anyway, happy scotes and we'll be back on Monday, Abe and Seth. I'm John Pajor. Keep the camber burning. Ryan Reynolds here for Mint Mobile with your summer price forecast. Now, unfortunately, we're seeing rising costs across the country with power. Possibility, the big wireless hates you 100%. Now, over here at Mint Mobile, we're seeing sunny skies and dropping prices every plan to just $15 a month. Give it a try at mintmobile.com/switch. Up from payment of $45 for three months, $90 for six months or $180 for 12 month plan required $15 per month equivalent taxes and fees extra. New customer offer for initial plan term only greater than 50 gigabytes may slow when network is busy. See terms. Show button here. Football is finally back. And prize picks is going crazy with the deals to start the season, giving out promos every day in September. On prize picks, you can make all the picks you want, all in the same app. And now, prize picks is available nationwide. So what are you waiting for? Lock in for kickoff because everyone and everything is on prize picks. What you want? Download the app today and use code Spotify to get $150 instantly in lineups. If you win your first $5 lineup, prize picks, run your game.