Matt Welch
speaker
460 appearances
11 recordings
2 series
first heard Dec 2024
last heard May 2025
Matt Welch’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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Appearances
No, nothing. I mean, having covered her in Iowa and on the campaign trail in 2020, I know a lot of journalists kind of struggled with how to comment on scenes like that. There are a lot of things that come to mind, but you had to speak in code when you talk to your readers about stuff like that. Yes, she was essentially... spinning these giant sandcastles of nothingness.
But it's impossible to convey the exact impression that she's giving while she goes off on these rants.
There were no jazz hands. That was a jazz hands moment.
We talked about this on our show. They're trying to get a piece of the spontaneous and sometimes obscene and sometimes off-color trolling style humor that exists on the Trump side. But the whole point of that is that you can't script it. You can't do your normal schtick and just add the word dick to it and get more traffic that way.
it's actually exponentially worse than what you were doing before, right? Because now you're just doing, it's the same old thing, but let's just add a useless obscenity that we ourselves look uncomfortable saying.
It's one thing if it just comes right out of you as part of a spiel that rolls off the tongue, but if you have a staff of people in whatever committee room coming up with, let's just call them a dick, That tells me that their messaging, that they have nothing left in the basket in terms of messaging ideas.
You know, the Democrats seem always to think that everything is a messaging problem. And if they just change a PR strategy, then it will change some kind of underlying reality that they're not in touch with. There was a great play by Joseph Heller, who is the author of Catch-22 called We Bomb the New Haven. And there was a character in it who says, we're going to bomb Constantinople off the map.
And somebody else says, why don't we just bomb the map?
um and that's what they're always trying to do they're trying to take the shortcut to to actually connecting with voters or changing their policy or changing the actual political direction of what they do to to gather more voters by changing the message and they've done that so many times uh not realizing that you have to actually make some kind of substantive offer to the people that's different than what you were doing before
For them to take notice, just like a different presentation doesn't change much.
There's two things about this. This is an old trope in media and in comedy. It's the urban, sophisticated kid who's picking on the rural hayseed. People have been doing this since there's been journalism. H.L. Mencken was an expert practitioner in this, going to Tennessee and picking on all the local folks during the Scopes Monkey Trial. A, you have to be accurate.
In other words, the caricature has to be successful and true in some way and not just some stereotyped idea that you picked up by not observing people in real life. The other thing is, if you're going to do that, if you're going to use the sharpest scalpel that you have in your drawer, you've got to do it on your own.
people too and that's why it's okay when you read mencken he goes after the people who live in baltimore and his peers and and politicians and people on both sides of the aisle with just as much viciousness as he did uh the people in rural tennessee that's what's missing from this show um it just it it's it's not funny because it's just a stereotype and it's it's not meant to go in all directions
Well, Megan, thanks for having me back again. Sadly, under these circumstances, or actually since everybody got out, I guess we're okay. Megan, the first thing, when I saw the in-cockpit video this morning, I heard you reading your email in the last block there. Then I guess I can talk like this. That jet was coming down like a turd off a tall moose.
landing an F-18 aboard an aircraft carrier, our average rate of descent is about 800 feet per minute. And I think the last flight tracker data that I saw for this RJ was about 1100 feet per minute. So that RJ came down a lot faster and harder than I would have landed aboard the boat.
And I think, you know, one of the one of the officials yesterday or last night said, hey, crosswind wasn't an issue. Whenever anything like this happens, Megan, I grab my aviation app and I immediately look at the weather, see what the weather is. And landing on runway 23, the winds were out at 270. So about 40 degrees off the nose or down the runway in really gusty conditions. So it looks like
This airplane didn't really have too much of a flare, which is when you get close into the runway, we pull the nose back, pull back on the throttles and kind of do that nice, what we as Navy pilots would say, Air Force landing. But this landing was hard and it looks like it sheared off the right main landing gear.
took the wing with it, and then the only wing that was left, the left wing, still producing lift, they kind of corkscrew and roll down the runway. But my God, you know, we jokingly in aviation say any landing we can walk away from is a good landing. That was a pretty bad landing, and thank God a lot of people walked away.
Oh, my God. Yeah. I mean, whether if they're talking about clouds or low ceilings or anything like that, just because the sun is out doesn't mean the weather is great. Very, very gusty conditions. When I looked at my phone after the mishap, it was 25 gusts, 45 knots, which is absolutely significant. That's that's some sporty wind conditions. If it's right down the runway, right on the nose.
That's fine. Still a little sporty. But if it's 40 degrees off, you're kind of crabbing into the wind and having to take that crab out at the last second. Very, very sporty conditions. Sporty. What a word. Or varsity or JV, however you want to word it. It was definitely not pleasant conditions. I'm dangerous, obviously.
Showing 281–300 of 460 · page 15 of 23
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