We drew together two members of our “A-Team” and a major Democratic strategist. They are: old friend and regular Chris Robling; the Chicago Tribune’s great editorial cartoonist, Scott Stantis: and joining us for the first time, Kevin Lampe who really is and has long been an election manager and consultant for Democratic party candidates.

Our friendly combatants zero in on a number of expected and unexpected issues and questions.

Among them are:

• T-Tip. Whazzat?
• Obama’s personality as a factor in the great humiliation of his party;
• 32 million green cards for illegals and Republican responsibility for encouraging border-jumping;
• As campaigners, all new Republican Senators  called for full repeal of Obamacare;
• How the life of one of the discussants may have been saved by Obamacare;
• The banning of the  pipeline and the planned death of coal;
• Hillary as failed campaigner;
• The continuing war within the Republican Party;
• Obama’s penchant for “executive actions” and what the new majority (and the Supreme Court?) might do about it;
• Racism, sexism, homophobia and the minimum wage as worn-out Democratic ploys;
• And, oh yes, our problems elsewhere, including Iraq, ISIS, Putin and Ukraine, the Chinese challenge

Ronald Radosh was raised within that culture and ranks as one of the leading and former “red diaper babies.” He went on as an academic to be one of the major investigators of that culture, its works, ways, and achievements. Here in 2001 he discusses, his book, “Commies: The Old Left, The New Left And The Left-Over Left.”  To this day he remains a controversial figure in American  academic life.

What’s Putin doing in the title? That’s to remind ourselves that if the first two items don’t totally exhaust our correlated capacities for worry, pessimism and despair, there’s always the reactivated cadaver of the Soviet Union to keep us in persisting dysphoria. There are Russianists and Russianists and lots of them still linger in Fukayamish optimism that at least the “cold war” ended years ago. A few of the best students of the present Russian reality think otherwise and have good and easily demonstrable reasons. One is David Satter who has appeared here on two of our earlier podcasts. Another is Gary Saul Morson of Northwestern University who recorded this conversation with us just before the emergence of the ISIS and Ebola nightmares.

Here then is his properly pessimistic reading of Putin and the anti-democratic culture from which he comes and by which he and his happy army of kleptocrats are sustained. In other words, when the Ebola scourge has passed and Islamic Jihadism has finally been brought down to a manageable level, the Russian threat to eastern European societies will still be there and may have done them a good deal more damage than Ukraine has already sustained.

Ideas do indeed have consequences and the ideas that flow from University-based Middle East Studies Centers often have strong pro-Arab, anti-Israeli influence in policy-making sectors of the State Department and the White House itself.  According to Martin Kramer, one of the few Israeli policy scholars who has ever served in such institutions – always as a visitor funded by extra-university sources – this is true over all the western world but particularly in the United States.For many years head of strategic studies at Tel Aviv University and now President of Shalem College in Jerusalem, he joined us together with Charles Lipson of the University of Chicago for a discussion of the connection between Muslim jihadist extremism and the views expressed within this sector of American academia, up to and definitely including the new decapitation-prone “Islamic State.”