Mark Hertling and Ruben Gallego: A Rush to War

- Hello, welcome to the Bower Talkcast. I'm your host Tim Miller. We got a double header for you today

“in segment two, Senator Rubin Gaeo has been on fire”

on social media about all this. So I wanted to grab him and talk to him about how the Democrats should deal with the Trump Iran war news. And tonight, for the political junkies,

will be live on YouTube in Sub-Stack as the Texas Senate primary results come in. I guess there's some Texas House racist demonstrable as well. So come check us out on your platform rejoice.

But first, he's retired at US Army Lieutenant General.

He served as Commander in the Surge in Iraq from 2007 to 2009. He writes a military affairs for the Bower thank God. And he's the author of a new book. If I don't return a father's wartime journal,

that's released next week, but it's available for pre-order now. I'll put the link in the show notes. You go pre-order that book right now. It's Mark Hartley.

How you doing now? - Hey, Tim. It's good to be with you. And thanks for talking the book for me. I need it.

- It's wonderful. I, you know, I was paging through it last night in this morning. But tonight, we'll get into the book, the end. But it's nice to see it's one of these books

that's like my attention span as being negatively impacted by, you know, the internet, by my Twitter addiction, et cetera. And I read way more books in a year in the past few years and I have recently.

So the nice thing about your book is it's one of those. You can just kind of pick up and do a couple chapters in the middle, you know? You don't have to, you don't have to commit to the whole.

- Yeah. - How many pages is it? - 325, I think, something like that. - You don't have to commit to the whole 325. You learn some life lessons along the way

if you just pick up a couple chapters. We'll get to that. - We'll get to it.

- But first, we gotta do more podcasts.

- Yeah, I think the first question is, do you have any more clarity today that we did yesterday on what exactly it is that we're doing here? It seems like we have some mixed messaging

coming out of White House. - No, it's actually getting worse from what I can tell. There's more messaging of exactly what the end state is. And that's important to the military commanders. I mean, you know, if you say regime change

or regime decapitation or take out their navy or destroy all their ballistic missiles, you have different planning cycles.

“I think the military operational campaign”

is really going toward destroy as much stuff as possible within the country. But, you know, the Israelis, I think have maybe even a different mission set based on their actions.

They are looking at true decapitation without any kind of thought about what comes next. They just wanna destroy all of Iran's leadership, kill all of them and destroy as much stuff as they can as long as the Americans

or hangin' on. And what's interesting, Tim, I heard this morning that the Iranian leadership is now calling this. War without rules, a game without red lines,

and a contest of endurance that they think they can win over the United States, 'cause they know how quickly we get fatigued in tired of the new cycle. And so we'll see how that works out.

- To your point about the different goals and missions, I'm just wondering what Israel as we're coming on. So this is developing right now. We've news that the Israeli struck the meeting of the Iranian Supreme Council

where officials were gathering to choose a new Supreme Leader. So I mentioned on yesterday's podcast that Trump had told, I believe we'd told the New York Times that they'd two or three people in mind,

you know, for the Delcy Rodriguez of Iran. And then by Italian talk to John Call of ABC, a few hours later, he realized that we'd killed all of the potential folks that we had in mind for the next phase of the regime.

Now, it appears that Israel is expanding their operation to seems like kill anybody in any type of leadership role in Iran. And that is important in that you can speak to this, but knowing what you're going for matters.

And if the object of this was a Venezuelan style campaign, and that's what the U.S. wanted, and the government officials told us it was, right, that they had a goal of having some continuity. And I was on a podcast yesterday with the MAGA guys debating them.

“And that's what he was saying, this is like Venezuela.”

Well, if that is our goal, but then Israel is out there just killing everybody that could possibly take over, because they're not interested in that. They're not interested in continuity.

I could see it's like that's a pretty important tension. - It is, and I'm also struck by what you just said about the MAGA guy saying, it's just like Venezuela. 'cause Harkening back to Venezuela, we didn't know what they were trying to do there either.

- Right. - I mean, was that regime change counter narcotics, counter terrorist, you know, what was it?

They finally snatched one guy.

And my take of Venezuela right now is it's not a whole lot

It's still kind of a corrupt society.

“There's not a whole lot of changes taken place.”

They still have the same security forces. And in transferring that to Iran, what's interesting to me that I don't think most American politicians understand is their leadership isn't based on personalities.

It's based on institutions. And as long as they can maintain institutions, and that's what this mage list, this coming together to take a boat on the new supreme leader, was all about.

I mean, they all sit around a room, sometimes on the floor,

but it always has rugs and kind of a centralized,

bunch of chairs around one big meeting space. And they make decisions based on who's got, I'll use the Arab term, not the Persian term, Wasta, who's got the most Wasta, the credentials, the creds. And it's a fascinating dynamic that's very different

from taking a boat for the people you think you will have as your leader in the United States or most Western societies. On the next messaging, we're getting it out of the administration as well.

“I was watching JD Vance last night on Fox.”

And he had seemed like at least recognized that there is some miscommunication here and really tried to focus his message on obliterating around's ability to have any kind of nuclear ambitions.

And he's saying that was the objective

what he was saying on Fox.

Hegset yesterday morning during his press conference was not that explicit. And well, actually, why don't you just talk about what you saw yesterday from Hegset with he was trying to explain

what the military objectives were yesterday? - Well, his was sort of a, it was an unbridled presentation of more sick of and see toward Trump, but also the dynamics that he's shown with his knife hands

and the kinds of things that a squad leader does to a group of six or seven soldiers. You're gonna do this today. And it's embarrassing for someone who's in that kind of a leadership role

to do that kind of her rank. But his comments, I mean, he started off by saying we didn't start with regime change. That's not what we were going to do although the regime has changed now

that we've killed them all. So he kind of counter the president's message earlier messages. And then he said,

“let me see if I can remember, I wrote it down”

but he said, we're going to destroy their enable capability, we're gonna make sure that they can't defend with conventional weapons and missiles, what they've been defending, which is their creation of a nuclear capability

and we're gonna destroy their nuclear capability. So that sounds like nothing but kinetic strikes with a kind of amorphous political outcome. So he's talking from the standpoint of a tactician and not connecting the tactics of the strikes

to what the overarching requirement is from the civilian leadership. And maybe that is the clarity at this point, which is that they're kind of in yellow mode and don't care what the next leadership of Iran looks like.

And one of the things JD Vance of us and on Fox was, we would love it if someone came to power in Iran that was willing to show respect to the U.S. But ultimately, whatever happens to the regime in one form or another, it's incidental.

It's incidental. All JD cares about is that somebody respects him. Respect my authority. But it's incidental, who is there? - That's one step below the knife hand,

so I'll do this, which is what Heggseth always does.

Hey, here's what I wrote it down. I wanted to pull it up, but here's what Secretary Heggseth said. His objective, this is what he said in order, destroy the navy, their drone capability, and their offensive missiles.

The Iranians can't have nuclear weapons and they can't use conventional umbrella to protect their nuclear ambitions. Those were the three things he said. Okay, that's a kinetic strike package.

Here's what we want the military to do, but there's nothing beyond that. And that's a pretty big mission set because when you're talking about the size of the country of Iran, those ballistic missiles are warehouse everywhere,

an nation that's three times the size of Texas. So when you're talking about planning aircraft or Tomahawk missiles into those locations, you're spread out over literally almost the Eastern United States from Missouri to the East Coast.

So good luck with finding all of them, although they now have said there's been over 2,500 kinetic strikes from aircraft and missiles. It's still, there's probably a whole lot left that they haven't reached.

And most of them are underground and buried in mountains. - That takes to nothing but there's been a lot of conversation about over the last 24 hours, I don't want to get your take on, which is the munitions stockpiles,

and the territory is so large, obviously it's gonna take a lot of material from us.

“And so there have been some conversations”

that their shortages Trump deleted about this last night from his social media account and on the screen, some of what he wrote. The United States munitions stockpiles have at the medium and upper medium grade,

never been higher or better.

At the highest end, we have a good supply, but are not where we want to be. Sleepy Joe Biden spent all of his time in our country's money giving everything to PT Barnum of Ukraine. Zelensky in parentheses, hundreds of billions of dollars worth,

and he didn't bother to replace it. Translate that for me. - Okay, what he's saying is we evidently gave up every one of our, or most of our military supplies to Ukraine. That's not true, there's a certain stockpile of weapons

that we sell or give to foreign governments. It's called FMS Foreign Military Sales.

“That is separate and distinct from the things”

that we have in stock to contribute to every one of our contingency plans, as long as you're conducting sort of a risk mitigation of, hey, if we're fighting now in Iran and we're using a lot of stuff, how is it affecting the contingency plan for, let's say, North Korea or China?

And there are guys in the joint staff, I was the guy at one time when I was a young Brigadier general, they kind of raised the flag and said, hey, we're using too much ammunition in Afghanistan, and if we move to Iraq, we're not gonna have enough for that.

That happened in 2003, and we're gonna put great risk on all of our other contingencies, to something flares up in Korea or in China or in Russia or any other place. So there are literally bean counters, as they call them, in the Pentagon saying, how much stuff do we have?

I would say from the very beginning of the President Trump statement that we have a whole lot of stuff at the high and upper end level. I'm not sure what that means. I mean, there are precision weapons and they are accounted for by type.

And I don't think he can say that because we have been using quite a bit over the last couple of years. And we've been especially using a lot. If you're talking 2,500 strikes in a four day period, which we've conducted, that's a whole lot of precision weapons.

And Tim, I'll say one more thing. I'll give you a little military tip. I'm watching on the news, the films that they're showing. You know, what we call in the military war porn. You know, you're watching all kinds of things exploding.

I saw this morning, the Department of Defense released some films of precision missiles hitting trucks. Now, it's great war porn because it hits right in the middle of a truck and it blows up. But I don't think I'm going to waste unless it's a very valuable target.

And you know what's inside that truck. I'm not going to waste a, you know, $100,000 missile on a $10,000 truck that really isn't all that effective. So what they're striking is also important. There are things, now I'm really going to get geeky on you.

There are targeting, yeah, there are targeting plans. It's a, hey, today, we're going to wake up. We're going to climb in our airplanes and we're going to hit this target that the intelligence guys have told us is very important. That's called a kinetic strike package where you know where you're going.

You know what the mission is, you know what you're going to hit. There are other things called TST's, time-sensitive targets, where pilot is flying around the area. And he sees something on the ground like an air defense piece of equipment. He radios back to headquarters, hey, I've just gotten this target.

I need to hit it. So you go in and hit it.

It's a target of opportunity, basically.

Most of the packages, I think, that they've conducted in the first three days are those kinetic strike packages.

“That's what the chairman described yesterday.”

That they have targets for the B1 bombers, the F-22s, the F-35s, all the different aircraft or hitting different types of targets. And they're all very well synchronized. But they're all using precision weapons that are very expensive. And they're running low on an operation that we had planned for.

The other piece, I'll say, is the defensive weaponry. What that means is the Patriot missiles and the Thad missiles, which are two air defense units. We have scattered those batteries, the units that operate those missiles all over the Middle East to defend our allies, the Gulf States. They are firing those things like crazy, because incoming missiles, incoming aircraft,

they're striking and hitting down.

A Patriot missile cost about a million and a half dollars a piece.

So when you shoot that thing, the Chachin goes up in terms of the cost.

There's not a large stockpile of those, as we saw during the Ukrainian war.

“So for the president to say, we've got a whole lot of things that we can continue to use.”

That could be true. I haven't been in the Pentagon for 10 years. I doubt it, but they're using quite a bit of them on a daily basis. When this takes us to, you're kind of thinking about going into the war and the timing and the preparation and ensuring that you have that kind of material and it's related to one of the things that they were telling us at the start, which was, you know, that there was

some type of imminent threat that required the action at the time that it came. And Marco was asked about that yesterday, and his response has created a lot of a stir, so I want to play that for you. There absolutely wasn't an imminent threat. And the imminent threat was that we knew that if Iran was attacked,

and we believed they would be attacked, that they would immediately come after us. And we were not going to sit there and absorb a blow before we respond to it.

Because the Department of War says that if we did that, if we waited for them to hit us first

after they were attacked, and by someone else is real attacked them, they hit us first, and we waited for them to hit us, we would suffer more casualties and more deaths. And so the president made the very wise decision. We knew that there was going to be an Israeli action. We knew that that would precipitate an attack against the American forces, and we knew that

if we didn't preemptively go after them before they launched those attacks, we would suffer higher casualties and perhaps even higher those killed. And then we would all be here answering questions about why we knew that in date. That's crazy to me. I not to be a patent, but it seems like the imminent threat came from Israel.

And if you just take them at their word, that they were saying that we had to do this, because we knew Israel is going to attack, and that the result of Israel's attack was going to be that our troops were at risk.

It's amazing when I heard him talking about that yesterday.

I thought to myself, "Oh, okay." So Israel caused all this by saying they were going to attack. And as a result of that, we have a preemptive response to some other nation attacking that could cause a regional conflict. Okay, got it, Marko, that makes no sense at all to me.

I don't understand that. And he was talking so fast and with a dry mouth, and for folks who don't understand military operations, what he was saying was ludicrous. You know, there was a great debate in 2003 in the U.S. military about preemptive strikes. And it's a moral issue.

“Do you strike first when you think someone is going to come after you?”

And in that case, it was a rock. But now we're talking about a preemptive strike based on another nation going to war and putting us in the crosshairs. Doesn't make sense to me. It's not part of our existential approach to providing security for the United States.

Also, the other nation we're working with. So it seems to me that if we needed more time to prepare, I'm sure to get to here in a second, that we could have asked for that. I don't understand where we had to be responsive to Israel's chosen timeline. But Israel was even making the case that they were under an eminent threat.

I noticed you mentioned that Marco is the dry mouth. Does that say something to you? It tells me he was nervous. I mean, you look for body language. It was the same thing he had when he gave the response to the state of the Union address a couple

of years ago when he resorted water. So it is a indicator of nervousness. The mouth is drying up. He knows he's caught in some things that he doesn't want to talk about. And it appeared like he was really riffing there for a long time. All right, for a while now, I've been telling you about my cat journey in this household

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“So I want to talk about the preparation and why this,”

and that, I know obviously it matters because the rationale for the warm matters and whether we did it according to Marko's own words because we felt like we had two because of Israel, that matters. It also just matters as, you know, the type of prep that we could do in the region. There are two things that jumped out to me on this front. One is so we've learned a little bit more about the six casualties. That six U.S. service members were killed. They were all in a

make-shift operation center in Kuwait, an Iranian strike hit that operation center. There's no warning. There's no siren that went off. You know, more about this than me. I guess I guess a amateur, I look at this and say, well, man, couldn't we have done more to solidify and protect our make-shift operation centers if we were picking and choosing the time that this was going to

“start? Maybe that's not right. I don't know. What, what, what's your reaction to that? And what”

is a make-shift operation center? Yeah. Well, what this was, it's in a place called Shweba, which is in Kuwait. And it's right on the port. And the operation center was literally the administrative base. So it has a finance center, a personnel center. You go in there and sign in and sign out. And it has a theater, an expeditionary support command. And that's a fancy term for a bunch of logisticians. People that drive trucks provide oil, provide ammunition, provide stuff for

a unit. That port at Shweba has a theater, it's called a theater support command, the first theater

support command that is always there. And they rotate both active duty soldiers and reserveist and

national guard into that location. I'm not sure which national guard unit was there, but the majority of the forces in that are national guard or reserveist. And what they do is they support the warfighter out of a base that's right next to a port. So as people come in and equipment's delivered, they're the ones that are driving the trucks, given the fuel, those kind of things. When Secretary Hegg says that it was a fortified operation center, I don't think he really knows that doesn't

define what it was. I've been there. I've been to the first theater support command or that area. And what it is is a not-up tent. It's like one of those temporary aircraft shelters. And inside, there's a bunch of people on computers and typewriters and just processing stuff. So it's a command post. Like we have on the board where we talk about things. It's a pun, I guess. But fortified means it probably has a fence around it. It's a building that's made out of tin that's insulated.

It has some tents nearby. There's probably some sandbags around the tent. But when you say fortified you think of this grand fort with large boulders around it. It is not that or defenses. Well, and it does have some defenses. I mean, at the port, there are types of small

weapon system that can shoot down incoming aircraft. But at Schwäbe, they're never used. I mean,

you know, since the Gulf War, this has become an administrative logistic area. And an air and drone are missile got in there and killed six people and wounded a whole lot of others. By the way, there are many of those all over Kuwait. This isn't singular. And I'm sure right now the commanders on the ground and there are really reassessing, you know, how to protect some of those temporary facilities from drone strikes and missile strikes. And I guess the other thing that

folks have been saying is that what has been able to get through the defenses is the drones more. The shot drones in particular, you know, we've seen obviously this big change over in Ukraine

“about the type of war, the type of what's going to get through into key even what's being”

intercepted. Is there anything that can be learned from that or, you know, kind of lessons at this point about how things are changing? Yeah. Well, I mean, our military has taken a real close look at that and we're we're garnering information from the Ukrainians, which is extremely valuable. And when we've cut ties with Europe to the degree we have, it's a whole lot harder to get that information to improve our forces. But when you're talking about this, you had drones.

They come in a variety of sizes, techniques, approaches, uses, summer reconnaissance, some drop bombs, some shoot missiles. Some of them have ranges of 1,500 kilometers, which is about 1,000 miles. You know, the drones that hit the U.S. embassy in Riyadh really surprised me last night,

So that's, that's a pretty long distance and unobserved. Yeah. Some of the

“Shahed drones are flying low. There are maybe 300 to 500 feet. Some of them are up to 30,000, 60,000 feet.”

Some of them have wingspan of eight feet. Some of them are jet-propelled and have wingspan of 20 feet. Wow. But this is a product that has been developed by the Iranians. They have sold them to the Russians to great effect in Ukraine. And it's going to be something that it's a poor man's approach

to attacking bases. So you can either spend, you know, a million dollars on a cruise missile

are you can spend $5,000 on a small Shahed or $10,000 on a large Shahed. It goes underneath the radar in many cases, and it can attack bases. And you can't afford, as I was saying before about the Patriots and the Thad missile systems, you can't afford to shoot a $2 million or Patriot missile at a $20,000 Shahed drone. One other thing, just as it kind of relates to the timing and Marko's point about how we felt like we had to do this is, you know, the evacuation

“so it's happening in the kind of chaos in the region. Obviously, this is something that you”

had to deal with. You coordinate, you know, defense military coordinates were state and, you know,

you don't want to tip off the enemy, but you also want to make sure people are protected.

Well, yesterday, the Assistant Secretary of State sent out a depart now all caps memo telling Americans in 14 countries that they should use available commercial transportation to get out of that country due to serious safety risk. A couple hundred thousand Americans live in these 14 countries that includes Egypt, which is pretty far from this war at this point. I don't know what that tells us something that they're doing that. It includes a bunch of countries where the airports

are shut down. There aren't, you know, there aren't commercial airport opportunities in UAE Kuwait and some of these countries at this point. You know, it kind of reminds you of the Afghanistan thing, one of my criticisms of Biden, which was like, I feel like we could have done more to warn people to get out. Obviously, there's a risk profile associated with that. You know, the more we're doing that of that, the more Iran can prepare, or the more the Taliban can prepare in the Afghanistan

case. So talk about like that and kind of balancing those considerations. Yeah, there's a mission set for military commanders called Neo. It stands for non-combatant evacuation operations. I had to prepare and almost execute one of them when I was commanding in Europe to a

country I shall not name. But when we first started planning for it, we estimated there were

from the State Department. There were about 10,000 American citizens in that nation that we would somehow have to plan to get out. The thing about the contention between the military and the State Department, the military says, hey, I've got a mission to do to get 10,000 soldiers out here. We got to start doing it right now. Well, the State Department will say, no, no, no, you're not going to do that because that's going to cause a whole lot of turmoil and people are

going to think that the governments exploding and things are falling apart. So no, you can't make that announcement. So the military has to plan sort of undercover to get boats and ships flowing in and airplanes, you know, the civilian airplanes coming in to pick people up. And it's really hard, especially in big countries. The one I had, we estimated there were 10,000 American citizens there. By the time we were done with the planning and almost into the execution of that mission,

there were 120,000. So imagine trying to get 120,000 Americans out of a country

“from a military standpoint. That's what happened, truthfully, in Afghanistan. There was a lot more”

than could be handled. When the State Department puts the warning out like that, it causes turmoil in the local government. Saying, hey, the Americans are leaving, the Brits are leaving, you know, all the Westerners are leaving, what the hell's going on? And they start panicking. So you have to try and avoid that. So normally the State Department folks wait until the very last minute to do that. But it's part of a plan. It's part of a coordinated plan. And when you're doing an evacuation

after a war started, you're asking for trouble. Yeah. That should have been part of the pre-conflict plan. But Tim, this gets to the point of there was a whole lot of hubris in our government in terms of this attack plan against Iran. I think the president was enamored by what happened in a very precise and surgical strike in Venezuela. And he thought he could do the same thing in Iran. And it's a different country with a different approach, with a different population and a different

Anything you plan to do will fall apart in a heartbeat. And I think a lot of people were saying

“that before this all started, we're seeing great big things happening right now because of a lack of”

planning and an understanding of what the true mission was. And I guess that's the point about the evacuations, right? It's like in a nothings going to be perfect in any of these situations, right? It's hard to play in for all the contingencies. But we got to do this on our terms. And if you one thing if Iran decided to bomb Bahrain or Kuwait, one of our bases randomly, then we're figuring out how to screw it. That's not what this was. Like we were planning it. Okay, I want to get to your

book. Anything else I have an ask you just about kind of what you're seeing in the short-term horizon here? Obviously a lot of this is unpredictable. Yeah, I just think the biggest thing we ought to focus on right now is the timelines. You know, the president's been all over the place three to four days, five weeks, six weeks. We could stay longer. We need to ship more forces there. So there is an ever-increasing timeline on the part of the United States. And the Iranians are basically

saying, you know, we can outlast them. We can go 60 to 90 days and continue to harass not only the United States and Israel, but all of the Gulf states. That's, that's going to be an interesting proposition to watch. One of the things that Iraqi told me one time when I was trying to pressure him to do something when I was in Iraq, he looked at me and he said, General, you got to understand. Because I was tapping my wrist, I was saying, hey, we only have till Tuesday to do this. And he said,

“General, you have to understand, you may have the watch, but we have the time. And it was kind of an”

interesting lesson for me to learn. All right, guys, we're getting heavy on the podcast today. We're talking about war. We're talking about journal and for your kids when your scaredy might not come back home to them. And maybe you aren't the journaling type, but one thing you can do to protect your kids is get life insurance. Thankfully, we've got select quote for you. For over 40 years,

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battalion, half our squadron, yeah, half your squadron, yeah, half your squadron was likely to die in a mission in Iraq. And I assumed it was in Second Iraq War. Because in my, I was such a, I was a kid, I was a baby, you know, during Iraq War 1. And in my mind, that was a very, you know, cut and dry mission in and out. Not a lot of her asks. We dominated them. You know, that's sort of what it is in the mythos of it now. And so I was interested to start reading it that, you know,

this journal was from that first world, well, we really didn't know a lot. And you kind of went in expecting it to go worse than it had. So anyway, talk about that a little bit. We were told it was going to be a blood bath. You know, we were going into Iraq in 1990, the late 1990, and we were facing Saddam Hussein who had just, he had the fourth largest army in the world. He had just fought an eight-year war against Iran. He had used chemical weapons on his own

citizens and the Kurds in Halabcha. So when we got the intelligence estimates, as soon as we were told the deploy, the intel chief told us, hey, you're in the cavalry squadron, which is something that's out front of the rest of the division. Our job was to find the bad guys and then pass them

to the tanks. And he said the cab is probably going to have sustained 50 percent casualties.

So my major brain at the time, as well as some of our other soldiers said, wow, that's, that's a coin toss flip of whether or not you're going to come home. So my wife and I had two young

come home, what can I leave my boys that will help them grow to be met? And I have it right here, because I have the book and the record. This was the book that I kept with all the journal entries, you can kind of see it, where I just started writing about life before the war started, before we were crossed into a rock from Saudi Arabia. And there were all different kinds of subjects that I wanted them to know about, you know, love, emotions, fear, friends, friendship, you know, those kind of

“things. So every day I would pick a subject and write a page of, here's what you need to know as”

young kids. Then the war started, so the middle section of the book is about the war itself, and then the end section is what it was like after the war while we were still out there for a long time. And that that book came into this. So every day in the book, in the journal, it starts with a date in 1991, has a subject, goes for a page, and our youngest son found the journal a couple of years ago and he typed it up as a gift to me, gave it to me at Christmas and said, Dad, my brother and I

knew what you were doing. You were preparing us if you didn't come home. It was obvious in the pages that you were trying to teach us life lessons. He said, but you did come home. And now you have five grandsons and two granddaughters. Why don't you write more for them on what you've experienced since 1991? Well, that's 35 years of experience, both in the military and in cable news and in healthcare

“and at the bull work and in teaching in college, the original journal has the original entries that are”

short, and then it has an explanation of what I've learned about those same kind of things like friendship and love and emotions and fear since then. And so it was an easy book to write because I had an outline already. I just followed what was in the original journal. I went a little bit more about just kind of thinking back to your headspace when you were writing this at the time.

You know, because it kind of scrambled my perception of that first Gulf War, right? A little bit,

right? Because it's like, yeah, this was also not a war that was about some urgent imminent threat to our country and our safety. Right. And here you are right about my age now, basically, with two young kids, you had to be thinking, man, I don't know. In the pages, it doesn't, there's no like bitterness really showing. And at some point, I would think that you would be feeling like, I can't believe that this is going to be a coin flip situation for my life

over Kuwait. And I'm just wondering kind of like how you are processing that and thinking about it and compartmentalizing it when you are initially writing the journal. When you think about what a soldier does, when you sign up in a professional force and you take that oath to the country, to protect and defend the Constitution, which means obeying the order of the president too, you realize that there might be an unfortunate situation where you're going to have to put your life

on the line and sacrifice for that country. So it's, it's part of your duty requirement. And that was one of my transformations to him to be honest with you because during that conflict with two little

boys, I was thinking, oh my god, I'm not going to come back. I'm never going to have a beer again.

I'm not going to write bikes with my kids and my wife and you know, you think those kind of thoughts and it's all directed inward about you. You know, I want to come back. I don't want to die. But in later deployments to combat, as you assume more responsibilities, that changes because and I talk about this in the book, when I went back to Iraq in 2003 and then again in 2007, I was a one-star general than a two-star general and I had X number of forces in 2007. We had 30,000

Americans in our unit. So those were people I was responsible for. And it wasn't so much about me, it was bringing them back. In fact, right before we deployed, I had a young woman come up to me.

She was a sergeant and she had never been to combat before. And she had the same experience I was

“having in 1991 because she came up to me and she said, sir, are you going to bring us all home?”

And boy, that was a punch in the gut because I realized, man, I'm responsible for bringing them all home and I know that's not going to happen. The chance of going to war, someone's going to get killed. So that's a tough question to answer to a young soldier who's going off to combat for the first time. So those are the kinds of things I talk about in the book. You know, my publisher last week Tim told me he said, you know, this isn't a war book. He said, this is a book about family and about love

and about leadership. And he says, and then after all those things, it's a book about war. So yeah, it was a fun book to write. It's also about growth. You look, you're a career.

It was to trust me. It was. When I wrote, why we did it. But I had to like, I went back and re-read a lot

of the stuff that I was doing earlier in my political career when I was Republican. And I had to like,

“think about it. Like, why did it? Like, what was my mindset at the time? Why was I doing it?”

You know, there's certain things I re-read. They're embarrassing, obviously, or certain things. I have different, obviously, different perspectives on now. I'm wondering how that was for you. I've been like looking back on like the journal of your younger self. And you mentioned a little bit of it right there about how you kind of went from focusing so much inward to focusing more about other people. But were there other examples of growth and wisdom gained?

Oh my gosh. Yeah, all sorts of things in terms of maturity and having a better understanding of life. And that's in the book, too. I try and portray that. And this isn't really a book about me. It's just like you just said, it's about growth. It's about understanding leadership and values and ideology. And the army, you know, I talked about how the army transformed from 1991 to today. I mean,

“going across the desert in 1991, there was no such thing as GPS at the time. There were no cell phones.”

So we were in the middle of this flat desert trying to work our way to figure out where the hell we were using a boat compass and a land device that we stole. And one of the towers for the Loran was in Iraq. So we were actually using a tower in Iraq to maneuver through 250 miles a desert that were flat and we didn't know where we were. So that's kind of a evolutionary change. There were other changes like intelligence processing. The use of drones. We had drones in 2007.

We didn't in 1991. The dynamics of friendship and what a true friend is. You learn a lot about what a real friend is. And that's one of the first chapters. The emotions of fear and respect for one another. Cultures. When I first went to West Point, you know I'm from St. Louis.

I had never left the city of St. Louis until I went off to West Point. My first time on a plane.

Since then, I've been to 123 different countries and have tried to analyze cultures in each one of those. So I can learn more. And even that's a huge growth requirement, too. Just understanding the people of the globe. I mean, it's a little different going to Saudi Arabia versus like North St. Louis versus South St. Louis. The cultural gaps a little wider. A little bit. Yeah. And, you know, I did a lot of eating and drinking from my country along the way, too. So that was

kind of fine. Yeah. Like I said, it's fine. I mean, obviously you could read a cover to cover. We could be kind of a coffee table, book situation where you page through and look at different nuggets of wisdom. It's a good bathroom book. Come on. It's a good bathroom. I wasn't going to call it a toilet book. It is a good bathroom book. It's a really good bathroom book. If that's the type of thing you're into. I try to keep by the bathroom books in my house. Yeah, just as a little

reminder for people when they're when they're visiting, but that this would be a good bathroom book, especially if you're a military family. All right. But there are two chapters. I was just pageant through. They're kind of funny and relevant to the podcast. So I want to leave us with those. I mean, at a whole chapter on cursing. Yeah. My parents biggest critique of this program is the amount of cursing that I do. Fuck yeah. You talked about how cursing kind of makes you feel bad.

It makes me feel good. And so let's discuss. I want to see if I can glean any wisdom from you on on the topic of cursing. I think Mark Twain said there's a huge difference between obscenity and profanity. Have you ever heard that statement? Yeah. You know, I have used the F bomb more recently. Thanks to me. You're going backwards. Thanks to the administration. I think. But yeah, it is an expression of emotional, just, you know, your distraught. So you throw something out there.

I normally use it at the administration or at St. Louis Cardinals games when they're performing very poorly. The original entry was for our sons. Yeah. It was just teaching them a little bit

“about language and how you should approach life. I'm glad you brought that one up.”

The last one I want to start with, you, you, you kind of begin with what I think is that I learned about you that you're a cryer. Your, your wife says you're a cryer. Yeah. I love crying and mail tears.

I've never made you cry on this podcast. So that feels like now an objective for me going forward.

Just say you know. But on the podcast, it's our emotions. Yeah. We like to cry. Is that okay? Would you feel comfortable crying on the podcast? No. No. It's just doing the life. That's a private, it's your private. Yeah. Well, no, I'm not actually. I mean, I cry at both happy and sad events. When I'm at a wedding of people, I don't even know or when I'm at a graduation, a high school or college, I think about potential of people. And I get emotional, it's thinking they've got

deaths and people who, you know, soldiers, you know, the six soldiers that were killed

that we talked about earlier. I mean, when I, when I heard that, I teared up a little bit. Because I think, I don't know if I told you this, but I've got a box on my desk right here that I open every morning. And, you know, when I look at those soldiers, I don't cry every day when I look at that. But I do think about what kind of life they would have lived and how, because they haven't, I have to earn it for them. I have to be a better person because they made the ultimate sacrifice.

And I've got to represent them because they were serving under my command. I appreciate that very much. I just turned that a little bit. Say, I did not know that's good. I wanted to say it. That's important, actually. It is a good male message, actually, crying and being in touch with their emotions is

important. And so in a book for two sons, I was making a little joke about it. But it also,

“I think is important and meaningful. So I appreciate it. General Hartling, appreciate so much”

you able to add your wisdom to us here at the bulwark. Go get his book. If I don't return a father's wartime, general link here in the show notes. Appreciate you very much, sir. We'll be talking to you soon. Hey, thanks, Dan. Appreciate it. Up next, Senator Ruben Geigo. All right. We are back. He's a Democratic Senator from Arizona. I'm a Marine Corps combat veteran. He's deployed to Iraq in 2005 and served as an infantryman. It is Senator Ruben Geigo. How you doing, man?

I guess, okay. You guess, okay. I wanted to start with that. So I was watching you on Chris Hayes last night. And you got like quite emotional talking about his war with Iran. You got a little bit. And I saw his wondering, like, what does underneath that? Like I want to learn a little more about your experience and why this is not that hard. Like, you know, my, my friends died. My best friend died. You know, the 23 men of my company died in another war that was hastily decided to go to a

“war of choice. And, you know, seeing this, our leadership, while other than actually live through this,”

kind of doing the same mistake. And, you know, maybe it's not going to cost, you know, the amount of men in cost in Iraq, but it's already cost six people their lives. And, and I don't know how many civilians, right? Six Americans, their lives. And I don't know how many civilians all around the world where whether it's Iran is real. Sorry about Qatar. Right. You know, this is just not thought out. And now I hear more and more that we just decided to do is because we're following Israel.

Okay. Like, where was the force protection? Where is the proper ammunition? Where is the exit plan? All these things that they're not even answering right now. And it just reminds me so much of what happened, you know, when I was in Iraq, and I just don't want another generation of men in women to be dealing with this. One of the reasons that we reached out is that struck by your post about this, you think on fire on social media, on this in general. And you do the one thing

I've been demanding of Democrats, which is like, it's you posting, right? Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, you just think it's a conversation. It's a conversation. It's a conversation to make staff. It is me posting yes. Tell your staff to let up the dog off the chain. Okay. They have a great idea. Okay. And because they haven't had a chance for a while, yeah. Because that is what is required in the year 2026. And and you've been talking powerfully about this. And Jim Shooter is a good

reporter. I was just, yeah, I kind of contextualizing what was happening right now. And did it post, you know, about how he had covered the rock war. And, you know, he's reminding folks that the eye told the Iranian regime was involved in a lot of terror attacks that they saw us our troops during that war. You replied to that. I don't need revenge. And I don't want another generation of veterans dealing with the consequences of war in my name. I just thought

“that was so powerful and important perspective on this. Yeah. And because like, I hear this other”

mess. And then by the way, I'm not saying that Jim was actually advocating shots going to war that. Like, I read it as he was just kind of making an information. But what I wanted to make sure the rest of the the rest of the public understands. And this is also a reflection of not just me but other Iraq and Afghanistan veterans. Like, don't don't assume just because what they did, which is was awful, you know, and let's be clear. Iranian backed militias had and we're probably

given, you know, some very powerful IEDs that killed a man to a lot of us. And also they traded

even with the Sunis, as largely fighting the Sunian surgeons. And knowing now what I know from what I understand the intelligence that some of those IEDs were attempted and were used against us. But also I talked to my Marines. I talked to the the Marines. I served with I talked a lot of Afghan veterans. And we know what I ran to it. But don't use that as an excuse for us to engage us and get us involved in another illegal war. Another war is going to cause more and more

people. Don't do that in our name, right? And there was another, I can't remember where it was,

medium and like, like, well, what it makes me feel personally is, yeah, I hate the fact that I ran killed potentially some of the Marines I served with and other friends that served in the military. But also when you're a leader, you don't go after other countries and put your men and women at risk for your personal, you know, feelings, right? I need to look out for the better men of my country men, my country, my, my, the women and men serving this country. And I'm not going to go to war

to engage and revenge, right? There's a lot of ways to do that. There's a lot of ways to keep our country secure. And sometimes it does involve war. I'm not like a piece nick by any means either. But I also need no that when you when we're going to do this, when we're going to go to war, that it really has real, real consequences. Like when I, and I'm sorry, I'm going on my ramp,

“like, I think the morning after we started the war with Iran, my, my mom was over at my house,”

having breakfast with me. And she commented to me, like, how scary it was for her, the times that I was in Iraq because especially after a couple of us started dying, you know, there was there was a lot of questions about whether or not I was still alive. And she said it was a worse feeling in the world knowing that I could have been dead. And she refused to answer doorbell.

She refused to answer the door. She was always afraid and Marines were going to show up. And,

you know, say something that happened to me, like, it really struck me that like, I feel like our leadership had never thought about that. And I don't want people to feel that unless we absolutely need to, unless we know that our, our security is actually her bed risk. Yeah, and this goes to the rational. I mean, Donald Trump literally laid out his feelings as one of the rationales and one of the conversations he's been having with reporters, he hasn't spoken

to the American people, he's in calling reporters. And one of me said, you know, Diatola almost got me, but I got him. And it's like, a crazy thing to say, a rational. I thought, I swear to God, I thought that was like something from, I don't know if you've seen the way I'm going to get you sucker, I thought that was a lying from that. Like, I was like, when I heard that he actually said that, I was just like, this is just shocking. So lunacy. And then, as you mentioned earlier,

there's been a lot of kind of conversation about what Marco said. And Mike Johnson said this yesterday,

which was basically that like, we had to go when we did because because we knew that Israel

was going to attack Iran. And we presume that Iran was going to then attack us in reaction to that. And so we had to act imminently. So I, to me, I listen to that. It's like, well, I mean, technically speaking, the imminent threats seem to have been from Israel, right? Like, if we wanted to take our time, we could have asked them to wait or, you know, we could have done more preparation. Yeah, well, those are a lot of options. A lot of options. No, yes, there's a lot of,

I didn't hear like, well, we tried to talk to Israel to him like, hey, this is not the right time. We do it. This is not the way to do it. This is going to escalate to beyond a point of no return. Israel's using our weapon system, using our intelligence, probably using our automatic efforts to actually fly over some of these countries. There's a lot of things we could have done to stop Israel from doing a pre-infestrike on on Iran. And there's a lot of things we could have

done to make sure Iran was at least slowing down, whatever is was whatever was potentially threatening Israel. But it seems like we just kind of either wanted this to happen or just didn't know how to stop it, which is, which tells me there's just a total lack of leadership at the top. And then total lack of, there's just so cavalier now about military, the, our use of military

“power, right? I think they got a lot of confidence with the first 12-day Iran war and then”

there are confidence with the Maduro operation that they just thought that this would, you know, be another cakewalk. But at, you know, at some point there's just only so much munitions we could make. There's so much we had to protect. There's so many, you know, operations we have to worry about that this is going to start costing us. It's going to cost us in manpower. We're going to start costing us in munitions and we have to start pulling

them in from other places. Like if I'm South Korea, Taiwan, Japan, I'm going to start getting pretty worried when I start seeing more and more of my, you know, it's actually defensive capabilities that we share with these countries being pulled to the Middle East. As an millennial, you're familiar with the Lee Roy Jenkins, me. Yes. It's the world of warcraft. It was, it was

basically a play or they're just like, fuck it. Lee Roy Jenkins, like, I'm, they were really,

yeah. I get felt like that. And you listen, I watched JD Vance last time, Fox. We've listened to Trump a couple times and like they literally don't have an exit plan. Yeah. They have different explanations for why we went in. But nobody has an exit. Nobody, and they're just like, we're just going to kill a bunch of their leadership and kind of see what happens. Lee Roy Jenkins. See what happens. Yeah. Lee Roy Jenkins. By the way, I don't know if you saw there was an actual

radar. If you ever see the radar screen, I guess, there was a, like, a civilian airplane that tried to do a Lee Roy Jenkins in the middle of this war and actually flew right through. Like, so, yeah, no, there is no. Like, there is, like, that's a crazy part about this. And like, it's like the very simple things that, you know, and I suspect what actually happened was that there was

“some kind of professionals within the department of defense that's like, no, no, no, no, you need to”

do XYZ. And that's why some, some of them were removed by the way. And I think, also remember,

of fans instead. But you need to plan properly. You know, there's, there's a, God, I'm going to

mess it up. And somebody's going to get pissed beginning to mad at me. But there's a saying, like,

“piss poor planning predicts piss poor performance, right? Like, they basically did that, right?”

There is no planning. So you did in plan for the exit, did in plan for even the execution. You plan to drop bombs. But you did in plan what's going to happen when they were able to send back, right? This is why our embassies, by the way, are literally under siege right now, both by protesters, but also by drones, right? Our, our, our embassy in, uh, Saudi Arabia is getting hit by, by drones right now. They did in harden, for example, the, the site in Kuwait that's pretty close to the border

of Iran, and it got hit by drones. All those six deaths came from one drone strike or multiple drone strike, but I won location because they didn't card in this, like, these couple trailers, right? This is what happens when you rush to war. And when you treat, you know, human lives, our forces, our own forces in such a, a cavalier manner that you don't really worry about their, uh, operational security. Speaking of firing, there's another story I want to ask you about. Have you seen this, uh,

sort of in Carol Lenig about FBI agents, cash, but tell fired 12 FBI agents at staff last week for their role in the classified documents, investigation against Trump among those 12 were an elite counter espionage unit that investigates threats from foreign adversaries, but specializes in Iran. Part of the reason they've been brought into that classified documents case, remember, risk is Trump had Iran war plans and his bathroom at Mara Logo. And so we fired last week, like,

they knew this was coming. I guess, I don't know, maybe BV had told them yet, but they knew this was coming possibly. And they fired the counter intel experts on Iran inside the FBI in saying, Well, I mean, it's, it's even crazier than that. Like some of the FBI, counterterrorism experts are literally at home depots being provisional ice agents, right? Or they're at the local, you know, cutting city, trying to hunt down, you know, whatever unfortunate poor mom that doesn't

“have her right visa right now. That's what they're using with some of our brightest, uh, you know,”

and best people. We have ATF agents, right? First of all, a lot of ATF agents were fired because,

you know, there's an element of the White House doesn't believe that there should be any type of restrictions on weapons, but there also there's a lot of ATF agents, the people that we'd be making sure that if there are any Iranians, supercells in this country could not get a hold of bond-making materials or weapons, they're all right now, probably like, you know, roaming the streets of wherever it is to try to quote, unquote, find these illegal immigrants. And I'm not, like,

exaggerating that. Actually, you know, down here in DC, I was at dinner with my wife at the, at the Warf I think it's called, or the peer camera what it is, and sure it should. There's ATF agents walking around, uh, with their flatjack inside. Like, is that really the best use of a, someone who's probably making closer $120,000 a year? No, but, you know, this is, this is, this is their play, right?

“And now they're saying, like, well, you need to get, you know, we need to fully fund DHS.”

DHS is fully funded. They have $135 billion. They have more money than the, the Marine Corps,

you know, but what they're not doing is you're not actually putting them and using them to their true, that most advantage. The fact that you don't know that's called the Warf, like, that is some solid, like, you're not a beltway insider, uh, flex there. Like, I don't know what it's called. Okay, does this neighborhood in DC? I don't even know what it's called. I don't know if it's Northeast South, I don't know any of that stuff. You know, just like, I'm a real American. Real America.

I want to ask about how the, um, how Democrats should talk about this stuff, and I'm going to get the immigration next, because, you know, not to glaze you too hard, but you did overperform Combo by quite a lot in the election. So there's maybe something can be learned from this. I've, on the war stuff, I've seen some, and look, as you mentioned, you're not a piece Nick, you are a Marine vet. I'm a former neocon. There are certain times where I, and I, I've

no luck for that until that. Yeah, exactly. There's certain times where I would be supportive of military action, um, on behalf of the Democratic mission abroad. This is just not that. And I worry a little bit. I see some Democrats elected officials doing a lot of caveatting, and, um, I'm just wondering what kind of advice you have for your colleagues about how to talk about this. Like, I do everything from personal experience and probably shoot way too much off the

hit. But I, I think, am reflecting what a lot of normal Americans are thinking. They don't necessarily get into this process question, right? What they're thinking is, why is this so important that you're risking my kids' life? Number two, why is this so important that you're not paying attention to a lot of the problems I have right now in my life? Very simple, right? So I, I've, I've been of the opinion that, you know, we need to talk about the morality and like the distraction,

because that's what people are talking about. They're not talking about war power resolution,

drafted. I've actually heard this. I'm like, it's going to get drafted and go to war. I don't want

even sign my kid up for selective service now. You know, I'm afraid of my kid who's, you know, you know, and the reserve's going to be a call-up. I'm afraid of my kid that's already overseas going to get sent into this. Number two, why are we spending all this money? Like, they like,

“all these countries in the Middle East have a lot of money. Why are we spending all this money, right?”

These are the things that are very simple for people to understand. I think we should not be afraid to communicate that. And people are sick of war, man. They're just so sick of war. It's okay for us to say like, this is not our war. This is not a timing for us to do this. And like, there is a lot of ways for us to counter Iran, by the way. And there's a lot of ways to actually counter Iran militarily that aren't, you know, a full-scale war. And maybe there is a long discussion we can

have about what that looked like and whether any administration did it incorrectly for so long,

perfectly good discussions to have. That's not the discussion right now. The discussion is, are we going to gauge in war, how does this end and how much is going to cost me? Same question, but on immigration. I think the last time we talked actually, I was talking about how it's a little frustrated that some Democrats were not going to the map fighting these ice thugs because, you know, concerns about the political elements and the mistakes of the Biden administration,

at the border, et cetera. So, you know, here we are right now. You mentioned the DHS fight. How do you think you're probably should be talking about the immigration issue right now? Well, they get very simple. Like, where we are, it's actually where the American public is, they don't like the enforcement they're saying right now. And look, we have to be also very honest. Yes, the border was messed up. Biden messed up the border. Democrats messed up the border last

time around. We should not have had, and you know, I get y'all this all the time, but we should not have had millions of refugees being able to go to the border and use a loophole to actually cross over the border, right? That caused chaos. I was like, I'm a border state. We saw it. We saw it all the time, right?

“That's what the American public wanted to stop, by the way. What they did not want is the chaos”

to move from the border into our streets. What they did not want is ice agents after only 45 days, Jim and a weapon and be able to roam free where they not want is racial profiling, especially of minorities, you know, like Latinos and African Americans are being pulled over by these guys. I mean, in Minnesota, you know, black and Latino police officers were being pulled over by ice because they haven't been driving, right? Because these guys want to hit their milk, their milk

cool does every day. So, you know, we need to be very confident where the American public is. The American public wants deportations of criminals. They don't want the the guy who's just working here who just has not gotten the right paperwork, right? They don't want racial profiling, and they certainly don't want the federal federal agents treating US cities like war zones. And until we get some reassurances from this administration that that's not we're going to do,

and reassurances, I mean, actual laws, we shouldn't just give them more money. At the end of the day, again, back to this, my whole thesis, they already have enough money to do whatever they want. And so if we, you know, zero out whatever they're going to get this year, they're still going to be able to do it. But morally, we're at least putting our online in the sand saying you're not going to be able to do this. Like right now, they're using this money to buy

massive warehouses where they're going to use ostensibly to to detain illegal immigrants. But, you know, with this administration, just don't know where else you could go. Real quick, Father, there's just a couple of politics things. You and Doris Graham Platner. This was in politics? No, can't pay in politics, bro. I can't do it. I can't do it.

Dork politics. Okay. You and Doris Graham Platner in the main center and he's in a primary Janet Mills sitting governor. There have been a couple of people nagging you about that. Part because Platner has some controversies around the tattoo that he covered up, but he has on some podcasts with a guy that does some anti-Semitic conspiracy theories. And Michael Cohen wrote that between your critiques of Marco and endorsing Platner,

“you know, that's leaning into this anti-Israel stuff. How do you respond to that criticism?”

I guess you just can't appease anybody. Because I got like, you know, I also endorsed like Hilly Stevens and anti-crack, right? And I was accused by the left of being in the pocket of Israel.

First of all, explain those three endorsements. I'm picking people that I know can actually win

the general election. It's very simple. Janet Mills can't win the general election. It's just, how are you going to send an 80 year old, we just had a whole referendum on. That's an 80 year old candidate to run and say that we need to have that person run against the establishment. When this is a change election, right? It's that simple. Like Platner can bring out new voters, can he get crossover voters? Look, and I think the other thing, this is a class to issue

more than anything else. Platner went on to a podcast where someone, you know, not on that actual podcast, but later on, did spew some conspiracy theories. There's been a lot of establishment Democrats that everyone loves. I don't have to go to the names, but you could all look it up, that have gone on other podcasts of people that have done anti-Jewish, anti-Semitic,

They're, they're the establishment candidates. They're running for important offices, right?

“So it's okay for those guys to do try to get crossover, but this guy isn't, right?”

This guy isn't allowed to do it because at the young age of 20 something, he got a stupid tattoo with all his Marine Corps buddies, by the way. It wasn't just him. And then proceeded, reinvest twice, and then go through a secure background check where three times you, they check all of your tattoos.

When you're doing that, to make sure you don't have any extremist tattoos. And nobody in any

agency and/or in the military said that tattoo that he and his buddies got was anti-Semitic, right?

“And so for me, you know, I have lived in the real world. I have grown up as a Marine. I almost got”

a stupid tattoo, not a skull and a costume like this guy, but I almost got a really stupid bullet tattoo on my body. Didn't do it because to be honest, me and my buddies got a way too drunk that night,

it was when we got back from the first, my first activation. And so I understand when he said,

like, I didn't know what it was. Most people in this world just aren't political, and we want people to get into, to be authentic and actually be able to talk to people and get them to cross over. But I guess they could only be perfect in order for them to do that. They actually can't have lived experience. They can't actually have been stupid at some point. They can't actually have been, you know, a young, in, in, in, in, in,

in, in, don Marine getting drunk in Croatia. And that's what really really ticks me off is that, you know, from, from the get-go, as someone who actually has been, you know, in politics and has been a Marine has been a gun Marine. Like this was one big op that was designed by people. They want Janet Mills to win. And they just leaked it and then that's it. This guy is an authentic man. You know, he's not anti-Semitic, you know, and more importantly, you know, not more importantly. But just as important is that he's going to win this election.

And we need to win elections. We cannot go another four, five, six years, you know, trying to get the Senate back. Like we need to consistently win because whoever's going to be president 2020, eight, we need to hand them the house and the Senate. And by us getting someone that's 80, right? 80, will they even be alive at the time? 2020 rolls around. Like I think that's legitimate concern. Also, nobody likes finger-wagon nags. This is going to be a problem for J.D. Vance next time. And it's just, it's a problem sometimes. So that's left. You went through this, like some of your text leak about like a joke you made about democratic women. And it's just like, like, normal people, every once in a while say something strange on social media are text jokes to their buddies.

Yes, we're idiots. We're idiots. Well, he's not my buddy anymore. That's, that's the most heartbreaking one of my best friends from the war. He got me because I defended Kelly against, you know, the DOD and it's so heartbreaking. But, you know, yes, people do stupid things. Do you learn from it? You know, are there a character or they're not? And the other thing again, I don't understand why I can't basically state what Marco Rubio has said, what Johnson has said, what Tom Cotton has said, the cause for us to go to war.

If we're not allowed to question our foreign policy just because involves Netanyahu, then I, what's going on here? And like, by the way, like, I'm supportive of Israel and it's right to exist as a right to exist as a Jewish state. Is it we can't have qualms with our friends. We can't have debate. We can't say like we don't think that this is good in our national interests without being accused of being an anti semi. Then what kind of relationship is this that that's being established?

“All right, thanks so much, man. I'm way over. Do you have a Texas Senate hot take of the elections tonight?”

So my only, my only take because I was just there is that Texas is the Arizona of 2018, where people were stunned by the movement of voters. I think that's actually what's going to happen there. I don't know who's going to win the Senate race. Both of them have different paths to be able to win the general, but the electorate is in the right place, in terms of who they're going to go and vote for. And there's going to be a potential huge stunner up and down the ticket. I think in Texas come election day. And I look forward to going in and campaigning there, too.

Thanks, brother. Really appreciate you. Senator Ruben guy I go. Everybody else, we're back tomorrow for another edition of the show. See you all then, peace. The board podcast is produced by Katie Cooper with Audio Engineering and Editing by Jason Brown.