Live from Music Row Wednesday 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 U.S. Senator Bill Hagerty (R-TN) to the newsmaker line to weigh in on Tuesday night’s State of the Union address and discuss the top three goals he’d accomplish if Secretary of State.
Leahy: We welcome to our newsmaker line, US Senator Bill Hagerty, the junior Senator from Tennessee. Good morning, Senator Hagerty.
Hagerty: Good morning. Good morning.
Leahy: So I saw a picture of you at the State of the Union sitting. You were right behind Joe Manchin. It was where apparently Joe Manchin was standing up and everybody else was sitting down.
You were about six feet away from the nearest other. Senator, tell us a little bit about it. This was your first State of the Union. What’s that event like? It’s all filled with pageantry and, I don’t know, in this case, it looked like a little bit of Kabuki theater to me.
Hagerty: Actually, it wasn’t my first State of the Union. I’ve been there when President Trump was president because I served in his administration. But it was a very different State of the Union when President Trump was in office, because the place was erupting with applause because we were winning back then.
It was a very different story last night with Joe Biden. Again, I was sitting in a different place, sitting on the floor there, as you mentioned, because now I’m in the United States Senate as opposed to a different role I had in the previous administration.
But to hear what happened last night, it was saddening. It was saddening because Joe Biden missed a major opportunity last night. It was his chance to reverse course on his war on American energy.
Instead, he announced he’s going to release 1.5 days’ worth of oil from our strategic petroleum reserve. I checked oil prices this morning. They’re up six percent. This is just meaningless. And what’s happening?
We’re becoming more dependent on Russia by the day from the standpoint of our need for oil. At the same time, we’re funding Russia’s war machine as it attacks Ukraine. This is just preposterous.
Leahy: So tell us about the first State of the Union that you attended. I guess you were in the audience there when President Trump delivered his State of the Union address. Which year was that?
Hagerty: Yes, I was there a couple of years with President Trump and we were talking about putting America first. We were talking about becoming energy-independent again. We were talking about strengthening our military, beefing up our defense, everything that made America respected in the world again.
President Obama leading from behind put us in a very bad place, I can tell you. I was out in the Indo-Pacific as ambassador to Japan. Things were tough out there when President Trump came into office when I came into my position and we moved things back in the right direction.
Dealing with China and getting them to reverse course on the South China Sea, the East China Sea, and dealing with North Korea. They ramped up significantly under President Obama, pushing that back. Getting on the course of energy independence made us an exporter of energy.
I worked very hard to get Japan to put in billions of dollars of infrastructure to import American LNG. My argument with them was, “what has Russia done for you? What has Qatar done for you? America is your strategic ally. We can be your strategic energy supplier.” Biden has killed all of that.
Leahy: Give us a little help here, a little hope, Senator Hagerty. We look at this, and this incompetent commander in chief. We’re stuck with the guy for a period of time, and he seems to be doing everything wrong.
Help me out here. Let’s just say we had a magic wand. And after I waved the magic wand, you become Secretary of State, and you can be in charge of American foreign policy. Given where we are today, what would be the top things you would do right now?
Hagerty: The first thing I would do would be to kill the special drawing rights at the International Monetary Fund. We are actually the largest member of the International Monetary Fund, and I would make certain that America’s participation there is known – that we kill the loophole that would allow Russia to otherwise obtain billions of dollars of what they call special drawing rights for taking converting to hard currency.
I would immediately change course at our southern border. I would work hard to secure that border. And I would work hard again to restart the Keystone XL pipeline coming from Canada, to open up federal lands for drilling and to make ourselves energy independent, because I would understand, unlike the Biden administration, that American energy independence is key to our national security.
Our economic security, international security are inextricably linked. That would make us a far better ally to our colleagues at NATO and put us in a position to come in and rescue them from the geopolitical threat that Putin holds over their heads because he controls their (unintelligible).
Leahy: Unfortunately, I don’t have a magic wand that can do that. (Hagerty chuckles)
Hagerty: I know.
Leahy: And so we’re all stuck.
Hagerty: The next best thing will be in November.
Leahy: That’s true. Here’s the question: Will the damage to our international prestige be so great over the next year of the Biden maladministration that it will be very difficult to recover internationally for the United States?
Hagerty: I think it’s going to be extraordinarily difficult to recover, because we saw something happen in Afghanistan that I believe most Americans never dreamed could happen in their lifetime.
That was a failed retreat that left Americans dead, that put us more than 20 years behind in terms of the situation that the Taliban were in – stronger, well-armed, with $80 billion worth of our equipment, and a void that has never existed like that before.
When you think about the disgrace that presented for America on the international level, I’ve never seen anything like it. And it was following that Russia began to build up significantly on the borders of Ukraine. Following that, China begins to increase, dramatically increasing its incursions in Taiwanese airspace.
We’ve seen Kim Jong-un really ramp up his weapons testing as well. This has created havoc and chaos all around the world, thanks to Joe Biden.
Leahy: And we’re stuck with it. I mean, I’ve got a scenario here where Biden – he’s the president, legal, but not legitimate in my view. And we got an even more incompetent vice president, if you can imagine that.
Your former colleague in the Senate, Kamala Harris. Oh, my goodness. And then we’ve got Speaker Nancy Pelosi. So that’s the line of succession. It wouldn’t do any good to ask Biden to resign or even impeach him. (Hagerty chuckles) It’d be worse!
Hagerty: The thought of Kamala Harris as our president is really scary.
Leahy: Oh, my goodness.
Hagerty: I heard her this morning trying to simplify and break down for an audience what was really happening between Russia and Ukraine. It was unintelligible.
Leahy: It was like she was trying to talk to second-graders. I heard the same thing. “Now imagine Russia is a big country. Ukraine is a small country. Russia is trying to invade.” It was embarrassing. Oh, my goodness.
Hagerty: It was totally embarrassing. I tell you, if I had a second-grader, I think they could do a better job.
Leahy: Absolutely.
Listen to the full interview here:
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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.
The Republic is doomed. They are all morons.
Well, I can agree with you that the ones who are visible — like Biden, Harris, Pelosi, Schumer — are all seriously deficient in their mental capacity. I doubt that any of them are even capable of tying their own shoelaces.
But the ones we don’t see, the puppeteers who are pulling Biden’s strings, are very smart, so we shouldn’t under-estimate their capabilities. You have to consider the very real possibility — I believe it’s a very high probability — that all of these apparently dumb moves by Biden are actually all part of a plan to create chaos everywhere they can in order to set the stage for converting the United States into a socialist dictatorship. I know Lyin’ Joe isn’t bright enough to have figured this out for himself, but the people pulling his strings definitely are!
So the next time you see Joe really f**k things up, just remember: it’s all part of the plan.