Live from Music Row Thursday morning on The Tennessee Star Report with Michael Patrick Leahy – broadcast on Nashville’s Talk Radio 98.3 and 1510 WLAC weekdays from 5:00 a.m. to 8:00 a.m. – host Leahy welcomed recovering journalist Clint Brewer in the studio to comment upon President Biden’s recent speech alluding to political violence around the midterm elections November 8.
Leahy: In the studio, all-star panelist, good friend, Clint Brewer – a recovering journalist.
Brewer: Yes.
Leahy: I suppose it takes a long time to get to recover as a journalist.
Brewer: You never fully recover. And that’s a positive statement. There are things about the profession that are great. H.L. Mencken has this favorite quote where he refers to it as the life of kings.
Leahy: Really?
Brewer: Yes.
Leahy: Interesting.
Brewer: Yes. It’s just a really fun profession.
Leahy: And H.L. Mencken was the premier journalist in America from the 1900s to the 1920s. And I think the right word to describe him would be acerbic, wouldn’t you say?
Brewer: Just a little. (Laughs)
Leahy: Just a little bit. He came to Tennessee for the Scopes trial.
Brewer: Did he really? That’s interesting. I didn’t know that.
Leahy: And his commentary was withering, as you might imagine.
Brewer: Withering.
Leahy: Yes, withering. Let’s talk a little bit about the midterm elections. Mercifully, this will be the last time that you’re here on a Thursday when we’re talking about the midterms.
Brewer: Mercifully. Am I that bad on the air, Mike?
Leahy: It’s not that you’re bad.
Brewer: It’s that we’re finally there.
Leahy: It’s that we’re finally there. Oh, my goodness.
Brewer: Can we double back on the president’s remarks real quick?
Leahy: Yes.
Brewer: Look, nobody should be in favor of political violence.
Leahy: Really? If you listen to the president, regular Republicans just love some political violence.
Brewer: Wasn’t Antifa political violence?
Leahy: Yes.
Brewer: You can’t be a good citizen of this country and be in favor of political violence. You can’t be. He said that the speech, and the information coming to the White House, was that the likelihood of political violence around this election was high.
And my attitude towards it as a citizen, as a taxpayer, as a voter, is if we got bad people getting ready to do bad stuff, let’s go get them. Let’s go find them. And let’s do it ahead of time.
Leahy: Let’s just say he hammered, shall we say, the Paul Pelosi attack. He actually used the word “hammer” in his speech. Here’s how he described the Paul Pelosi attack, which is still very weird. “He woke him up. He wanted to tie him up.
The assailant entered the home asking, ‘Where’s Nancy?'” The very same words used by the mob when they stormed the United States Capitol on January 6th. That was, like, the main theme of his speech.
Brewer: Was this political violence?
Leahy: He’s a crazy person. He’s an illegal alien.
Brewer: Look, I think what happened to Paul Pelosi was terrible. It’s horrible. Marsha Blackburn said it. Many Republicans have said it. I don’t see anybody out there cheerleading this guy who attacked the man. He’s an elderly man.
Leahy: Eighty-two.
Brewer: It’s reprehensible. Celebrities have bad things happen to them like that. She’s a very famous person. But here’s my point. I stand with everyone who decries political violence, but on the eve of an election, to use the presidency to stand out there and say this, if there is a credible set of threats, we should be publicly addressing those credible sets of threats.
We should be dealing with them from a law enforcement standpoint. Getting up on the podium and announcing them, vaguely, just seems very sort of, I don’t know, craven to me.
Leahy: Craven is a kind way to describe it, I would say.
Brewer: Yes.
Leahy: But now the question is, how did the legacy media treat this speech? What are the headlines today?
Brewer: I think it was accepted on its face, at face value. And here let’s swing to the other side of the aisle, right? And we’ve talked about it on the show.
As you see the Ron DeSantises and the Glenn Youngkins and the Rick Scotts and the Tim Scotts and all these folks rising up in the Republican Party, what you’re seeing from the Donald Trump camp is less and less credibility. And we’re still fighting about the last election, and it doesn’t help the party.
Leahy: Yes. But don’t you think Trump is turning the page?
Brewer: Maybe. I think he’s finally figured out one of the cardinal rules of politics, which is to be in favor of what’s going to happen. He picked his raft of bad candidates, which the Republican Party is having to pour immeasurable resources into to get across the finish line in these Senate races.
Leahy: When you say his raft of bad candidates, I’m thinking in your mind you put Dr. Oz in Pennsylvania and Herschel Walker in Georgia. And yet …
Brewer: They’re still ahead. In fact, I think they’re going to make it. Let’s be honest here. It’s not being quarterbacked out of Mar-a-Lago. We got some very smart people making these races happen.
Leahy: Speaking of Mar-a-Lago, we’ve got our election night special Tuesday night from 7:00 p.m. to 10:00 p.m. We will have a report directly from Mar-a-Lago.
Brewer: There you go.
Leahy: I can’t tell you who will be on that call, on the other end of the call, but it will be somebody you would want to listen to.
Brewer: Oh, cool. My point is that the legacy media is always going to lean a little bit left, or a lot, depending on the outcome. But as conservatives, we don’t have a counterpoint voice to what’s happening on the Left when the presidency is used to prosecute their case.
And we need to have people who can speak with authority and who can speak with a measure of impartiality about facts and just say, Mr. President, if there’s a credible threat, you need to tell the American people. If we’ve got flashpoints in this country, mobilize the National Guard, like, let’s get busy. Let’s not give speeches about it.
Leahy: Is that speech going to have any impact on the outcome of the midterm?
Brewer: It just felt like the message was boogie, boogie, boogie, vote for Democrats.
Leahy: Pretty much.
Brewer: In that sense, it robs him of his credibility. So you have a leader on the Left robbing themselves of their own credibility. You have an ousted leader on the Right who has been robbing himself of his own credibility. So what does that middle fill up with?
And what do the rest of us, who don’t particularly care for the leadership styles on either side, where do we go? The answer is it’s going to make the next election cycle really really interesting.
Listen to today’s show highlights, including this interview:
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Tune in weekdays from 5:00 – 8:00 a.m. to The Tennessee Star Report with Michael Patrick Leahy on Talk Radio 98.3 FM WLAC 1510. Listen online at iHeart Radio.
Photo “Joe Biden” by Joe Biden.
