Transcript: America This Week, Episode 77, February 23, 2024

Matt and Walter discuss the Russia “insta-threat” and review “Sonny’s Blues”

Matt Taibbi: All right. Welcome to America This Week, I’m Matt Taibbi.

Walter Kirn: And I’m Walter Kirn.

Matt Taibbi: Walter, how are you doing? I’m down in Florida, hence the gear. This is television broadcast gimmickry right here, but you’ve got your lumberjack thing on, so we’ve got a whole...

Walter Kirn: Yeah, we’ve a whole north-south thing. I’m somewhere in the Great Northwoods at Paul Bunyan’s camp making flapjacks with Babe the Blue Ox. That was a mythology I grew up with, and this is the only clean shirt I have this morning, so...

Matt Taibbi: I love it, excellent. Well, it’s been a weird week, not quite as apocalyptic as last week’s news, but awful lot of weirdness, as usual. The one that really struck me, and maybe it’s slightly old news for folks by the time this comes out, but this completely out of thin air invented story about the Russian threat that is being done in this continuing all-out knockdown, drag out effort to get the House to pass this military aid bill for Ukraine that it clearly does not want to pass. They clearly don’t have enough blackmail material on the last however many members of the Republican caucus, so they cooked up this story in the morning where they had Mike Johnson, the new House Intelligence chief, come out and say there was a credible threat involving Russia. This was straight out of the Bush years with the bar graph charts about how scared we should feel every day that the DHS used to put out.

Walter Kirn: Well, I was going to say, Matt, when you said this week wasn’t as apocalyptic as last week, that we should probably have a meter down in the corner. Out west here, we have a fire danger sign outside the national forest when you drive in, there’s this little half of a pie graph that goes from yellow to red, and there’s an arrow showing fire danger, and I think when it’s pointing to the red, it means that where you’re going is actually on fire, and we stay always toward that end lately, and last week or this week, it did seem to touch almost the extreme with this notion that nuclear weapons in space are going to knock out satellites, thereby knocking out modern life as we know it.

Matt Taibbi: And then it turned not even to be in deployment. I’m sorry, it was just so funny.

Walter Kirn: Well, the Democrats, in their full capture of 1980s apocalypticism, which belonged then to the Right, are now constantly throwing the Book of Revelations at us, and space nukes is something like the seven-headed dragon, or one of these villains-

Matt Taibbi: It’s the seven golden bowls full of God who lives forever and ever.

Walter Kirn: Right, Book of Revelation.