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Dec. 21, 2015 - The Ben Shapiro Show
38:02
Ep. 44 - Why 'The Force' Is Evil, and Why Trump Can Beat Hillary

Ben talks about "Star Wars," Donald Trump, Bernie Sanders, and that walking ball of human flatulence, Hillary Clinton. Plus, Steve Harvey screws up "Miss Universe"! Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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Time Text
Here we are.
It is a Monday, and it is the Monday of Christmas week.
And I have the best Christmas gift ever for you.
It's me.
I'm here.
And I have so much to talk about.
We're gonna go over the Democratic debate.
Donald Trump and Jeb Bush get into it again.
Plus, we will talk Star Wars.
Spoiler free Star Wars.
And some stuff I like, some stuff I hate.
So lots to get to here today.
I'm Ben Shapiro.
This is The Ben Shapiro Show.
- Tend to demonize people because they don't care about your feelings.
Alrighty, so here we are and it is Monday.
And we'll start with a little bit of Star Wars commentary.
Now, there will be no spoilers here because I haven't seen the film, but I do want to talk briefly about something that drives me a little bit insane, which is of course the essence of the entire show, things that drive me insane, but there was an article that I saw about a church that was holding some event celebrating the Force.
And I thought to myself, we're finished as a civilization.
Not only because there's so many people who worship at the altar of Star Wars.
Okay, great movies, I love the originals, I grew up on the originals, I love the originals so much that when my younger sister was born and my parents got to, they asked me what I thought her middle name should be, because I really wanted a younger brother and it was a sister, and I said that they should make her middle name Leia, which it is, right?
That's how much I liked the Star Wars films, but...
The morality of the Force is really, really screwed up.
It's really skewed, and it's really screwed up.
So if you remember the original Star Wars films, and this is why I don't worship at the altar of the morality of Star Wars, the original Star Wars films, they're based on the idea that hate and rage are the dark side of the Force, and happy-dappy-do is the light side of the Force.
If you give in to hate, if you give in to rage, then you will have given in to the dark side.
Which is, of course, why the light side gets its ass kicked, right?
At the beginning of Episode IV, The two most powerful people in the universe are a frog that lives in a swamp and an old guy who lives in a cave.
Right?
Those are the two most powerful people in terms of the Force, except for the Emperor, right, who shoots lightning out of his fingers, and Darth Vader, who, as you recall, had all of his limbs chopped off by the guy who lives in the cave.
Right, so Darth Vader, the guy who lost that fight, right?
That guy now runs entire starships and huge planetary doom machines.
And the guy who chopped off all of his limbs with one swipe of his lightsaber?
That guy lives in a cave, waiting for Luke Skywalker to walk around, right?
So the bottom line is, the idea here is that if you use force in defense of good, there is something inherently wrong with it.
This has always been the sort of conflict within Star Wars that doesn't really work.
And that is that, really, in order to defeat evil, you have to fight it.
And you see this at the end of Return of the Jedi.
Jeremy Boring, managing editor, who's a huge Star Wars fan, he and I were discussing this, that Return of the Jedi, the real problem is...
That Luke, in order to win, Luke has to actually fall prey to the dark side, right?
Yoda warns him that if you leave, and Empire Strikes Back says, if you leave, if you don't complete the training, then you'll lose everything that you fought for, and you'll fall to the dark side.
And you're supposed to think, oh, Yoda was wrong, it didn't really happen.
But the truth is, that if you remember back to Return of the Jedi, if you recall this, Luke actually beats Darth Vader by losing his, right?
He loses...
Darth Vader mentions Leia, and Luke loses his blank, right?
And proceeds to beat the living hell out of Darth Vader and then chop off his hand.
Right?
And then, at that point, he says, oh, well, you know, I've won.
I'm a Jedi now, because he doesn't kill Darth Vader.
Right!
And then the Emperor's gonna kill him.
Right?
The Emperor is electrocuting him.
And that's when Darth Vader decides that he's gonna pick up the Emperor and throw him down a well.
He throws him down the mineshaft.
Okay, well, there was a simpler solution, which is that Luke could have walked over, picked up the Emperor, and thrown him down the mineshaft, right?
At that point, he is the most powerful Jedi in the universe.
He just took out Darth Vader pretty easily by knocking him over in like, well, he gets pissed, and literally within the next five seconds, Darth Vader is done, right?
This giant seven foot tall guy dressed in the black skeleton mask, that guy who's been beating the crap out of Luke for three movies at this point, at the very end, Luke turns on the dark side switch, and boom!
He takes down Darth Vader, no problem!
And not just takes him down, he starts wailing on him, right?
Everybody remembers this scene.
It's not even a duel, right?
The duel lasts for five seconds, and then he knocks him over, and he proceeds to just beat the crap out of him until Darth Vader's hand goes wide, and then he chops off his hand, right?
Everybody remembers this.
Okay, so in other words, the only thing that preserves the Rebel Alliance is the fact that Luke actually hates evil.
Right?
And you're supposed to hate evil.
The idea of the Force is this passive kind of Wu, Wei, Dao, Eastern religion stuff.
It's not Western.
Right?
It's actually very non-Western.
The truth is that it says right in Proverbs, right?
If you love the Lord, you should hate evil.
Right?
The idea of the Bible is that you're not supposed to be passive with regard to evil.
You're supposed to hate evil, and you're supposed to fight evil.
And yet, at the beginning of Episode 4, the fact is that all the good people are sitting around doing nothing, and all the people who know the Force are on the bad side.
Right, the fact that because the most effective parts of the Force, as anyone who watches the movies knows, the most effective part of the Force is the dark side of the Force, right?
I mean, they keep telling you the light side of the Force is awesome.
Really?
Is the light side of the Force that awesome?
Like, it allows you to tell a stormtrooper that these aren't the droids you're looking for.
That's pretty much the extent of it.
And also to stand there and get killed by Darth Vader, at which point you turn into a magic ghost.
Awesome!
Or you could control the entire galaxy.
And blow up planets.
So, let's see, which one is more powerful?
This is not an argument in favor of the morality of the Empire.
It is an argument that the picture of this dichotomous kind of... Every religion has the idea of dichotomous good and evil, but good and evil in the Star Wars universe is passive versus active.
It's hatred versus love.
Okay, well the fact is there's no point at which Luke actually learns to love the Emperor and this saves everything.
Right?
If he had learned to love the Emperor, then he would have joined his side, presumably.
So it's very silly.
The truth is that the best plan in all of Star Wars, the actual best plan in all of Star Wars, and he should have done it, is articulated by Darth Vader in Empire Strikes Back.
Can you imagine how different the galaxy is?
Darth Vader says, you join me and we will rule the galaxy together as father and son.
We'll take control of this entire giant military apparatus, and then we can do whatever you want, right?
Where's the downside, exactly?
I mean, as it turns out, according to the new movie, and this isn't a spoiler, they're still fighting people, right?
It's like 40 years later, and Han's super old, and Carrie Fisher's gotten fat, and they're still fighting people.
Wouldn't it have been better if Luke had sided up with Dad, and they'd taken down the Emperor, and then they'd figured out some sort of democratization process for the entire civilization?
That might have been better!
You know, instead of disbanding the entire Iraqi military and then letting it devolve into chaos, it would have been better if they'd actually taken advantage of the systems that were in place.
But here's the thing you have to understand about Star Wars.
George Lucas, when he made Star Wars, people don't know this historically, George Lucas meant it as a swipe at Richard Nixon and the Vietnam War.
Right?
He's actually said this.
Back in 1973, he talked about how he was going to do Star Wars, and he specifically has said that Emperor Palpatine, he says he was a politician.
Richard M. Nixon was his name, right?
Palpatine was supposed to be Nixon, which is weird since Palpatine never got deposed after bugging Darth Vader's campaign headquarters.
And then he said also that this was supposed to be the Vietnam War.
He actually is supposed to, apparently, he said the Viet Cong were supposed to be like the Ewoks, which is a really kind of dismissive view of who the Viet Cong were, considering that they were communist murderers who murdered a crap load of people.
The Viet Cong were just, they were like the friendly Ewoks who were using their primitive weapons to defeat the stormtroopers, which, by the way, is the dumbest part in all of Star Wars, in all of the original Star Wars series.
The idea that you've got this massive weaponry on this forest moon, and all of a sudden you have a bunch of little furry bears that are slinging rocks at these giant metal machines, and the machines are falling over and keeling over, and they have no peripheral vision, so you have two logs coming in and, and hey, look, the AT-AT just went down. so you have two logs coming in and, and hey, No, that would never happen, not in a million years, that's stupid crap.
So anyway, the bottom line is, even for someone who loves Star Wars like me, the morality of the Star Wars universe is actually the morality of the American left.
It's the same morality that you now see...
In every single movie, every single movie or TV show where you have somebody fighting evil, there is a scene now, and it drives me nuts.
There's always a scene where somebody says to the good guy, but if you kill the bad guy, won't you be just like him?
Right?
You've seen this, right?
This is like in every movie now.
There'll be a pedophile, and you'll see the superhero, and he's about to kill the pedophile.
And someone says, you can't do that!
If you kill the pedophile, then you'll be no better than he is.
And I'm thinking to myself, well, no, I won't be molesting children.
And this guy won't be molesting children either, because he'll be dead.
So no, actually, it turns out that I'm nothing like that guy.
It turns out that killing Hitler doesn't make you like Hitler.
It makes you just like the guy who killed Hitler.
Which is a good thing.
Right?
This pacifist notion.
That in order to do good things, you have to be a complete pacifist Quaker.
This means evil people win, and the truth is that at the end of Star Wars, the message of Star Wars is actually counter to the message of Star Wars, right?
What Lucas actually ends up doing, because this is how the real world works and this is how narrative works, you have to fight evil in order to defeat evil.
And you have to use blasters, and you have to use lightsabers, and you have to use the Force, and you have to use...
You have to use X-Wings, and you have to use the Millennium Falcon, and you have to blow up giant planets full of presumably millions of people, but you have to do lots of bad stuff in order to win a war.
But George Lucas, it never occurs to him, apparently, that this is how all of this works.
Okay, so there's a brief commentary on Star Wars.
Again, I haven't seen the movie.
I will see the movie.
I think I will be disappointed by it because, as I've said before, J.J.
Abrams is not my favorite director.
I've now heard For multiple people in this office who have seen the Star Wars film and who are big Star Wars fanatics, that they were disappointed by it.
Jonathan Hay, who does all of the production on this show, he says that it was a six to seven.
Jeremy said that he sort of felt the same.
Mathis, for some reason, is over the moon about this thing, which I say, and so Jonathan was saying like the third or fourth time he sees it, it'll finally hit him, that this movie isn't actually a 10.
And I made the joke that's sort of like seeing a transgender in a bar.
From far away, okay, and then you get close, and then if you have a few too many drinks, presumably, according to those who have done this, apparently, is what I hear, but after a few drinks, then you look around, you realize maybe you should have spotted the 90-degree jaw.
So basically, that's what's happening with Star Wars with some people, is that they're giving it the benefit of the doubt, because they really want it to be so good, and so they're giving it the benefit of the doubt.
Okay.
So that's enough about Star Wars, as well as dismissive transgender jokes.
So, okay, let's talk about the Democratic debate, which is a joke in and of itself.
This debate took place on Saturday night, the Saturday night after Star Wars came out, which means no one watched this thing.
So this is the first you're seeing of it.
This is the second I'm seeing of it.
I didn't watch it live at the time because I have a daughter and a life and things to do.
and like wash my hair and and this thing took place basically and it would be hard to find a way to schedule this where less people would watch this.
I mean this was essentially scheduled on a moving subway from the movie The Warriors at 3 a.m.
on a Sunday morning.
And the moderators are out there with their little clinky bottles going, Hillary, Bernie, come out to play.
And so this took place on a moving subway at 3 o'clock in the morning.
And by the way, it was such a moving subway that Hillary Clinton didn't even show up in time.
I mean, and nobody cared.
I mean, if this had happened when people were watching, it was kind of amazing.
There was one point in the debate where Hillary actually walked into the debate late.
She actually walked in.
This clip, too, so we can watch this because it's kind of hilarious.
We're going to begin on the economy.
We want to turn to the American jobs, wages, and raises in this country.
And we believe Secretary Clinton will be coming around the corner any minute.
But in the meantime, we want to start with this eye-opening number.
And Senator Sanders, this question goes to you first anyway.
In 1995, the median American household income was $52,600 in today's money.
This year, it's 53,600.
That's 20 more years on the job with just a 2% raise.
In a similar time frame, raises for CEOs are more than 200%.
There she comes, big hand!
By the way, she looks like something from Star Wars.
And she walks in, she says, sorry, and she's wearing, I mean, she looks like she's wearing, like, a mal coat, and she, and she kind of saunters on over, uh, shaped like a pear, and stands behind that, stands behind that podium.
Now, the reason that she was late to the debate, and she walks in late to the segment, is apparently she was offstage going to the bathroom, and she had to go pee-pee.
And, uh, and, but they had plenty of time for her to go pee-pee.
I mean, there was, like, a five-minute break, which is, as someone who does radio for a living, Five minutes is a long time.
You can go pee, but you can even do number two.
Like, there's plenty of time to do whatever you please.
Hillary, the reason this happened, according to the Boston Globe, is because one of Martin O'Malley's staffers also had to go pee-pee.
And so they went to the bathroom, and the staffer was inside going pee-pee.
And apparently there are multiple toilets in his bathroom.
It wasn't like there's one toilet in the entire building.
There are multiple stalls.
But Hillary didn't want to go in there while there was someone else in there.
She has to be in the room alone, right?
Princess Hillary has to be in the room alone.
No one can hear her.
Flatulence, presumably.
And so she has to be in the room alone when she really lets loose, even though she is a walking ball of gas.
But she, you know, finally she comes back out.
And it turns out Clint Eastwood was right all along, except that he was right about Hillary, not about Obama, when he said it's an empty chair.
It's actually an empty podium.
And it's Hillary's podium.
So Hillary!
Walks back out, and this debate continues, and no one cares, of course, because, hey, why would they?
Hillary did drop a line that was kind of amazing.
There are a couple things that happened that were noteworthy in this debate.
One was that Bernie Sanders really slapped Hillary around on foreign policy.
And Bernie Sanders, who is the senator from Loonville, he is, um, what he says here about Hillary's foreign policy is exactly correct, actually, which is sort of shocking.
So here is, clip one, Bernie Sanders smacking Hillary around on her foreign policy while waving his arms like Larry David.
I worry too much that Secretary Clinton is too much into regime change and a little bit too aggressive without knowing what the unintended consequences might be.
Yes, we could get rid of Saddam Hussein, but that destabilized the entire region.
Yes, we could get rid of Qaddafi, a terrible dictator, but that created a vacuum for ISIS.
Yes, we could get rid of Assad tomorrow, but that would create another political vacuum that would benefit ISIS.
So I think, yeah, regime change is easy.
Getting rid of dictators is easy.
But before you do that, you've got to think about what happens the day after.
And in my view, what we need to do is put together broad coalitions to understand that we're not going to have a political vacuum filled by terrorists, that in fact we are going to move steadily and maybe slowly.
Okay, so he's actually exactly right about this.
Everything that Bernie Sanders just said, I mean I've never said this before, everything that Bernie Sanders said right there is exactly right.
Now what's weird about this for the Republican race is who can actually say this in a debate with Hillary?
Right?
Because you actually need to take this perspective.
It won't be Rubio.
Rubio voted for the war in Libya.
Rubio's in favor of regime change in Syria.
He and Hillary are actually sort of on the same page in terms of their policy in Syria and Libya, which were two of Hillary's biggest foreign policy boondoggles and mistakes.
Donald Trump can take the opposing point of view.
Ted Cruz can take the opposing point of view.
And we'll get to that in a second because the Republican side of the aisle is now in complete chaos.
It's a complete mess because of the opposition to Trump.
Bernie Sanders hitting Hillary was a noteworthy moment, and it was effective, and this should tell people on the Republican side of the aisle that the George W. Bush regime-change-in-favor-of-democracy ideal has been put to the side now, because even people like me, who are very hawkish on foreign policy, want to see a very effective and powerful American military, look at what Bernie Sanders is saying there, and we say, well, there's more truth to that than Hillary's, let's just knock out Qaddafi and chortle about it while ISIS takes power.
In the country.
The other moment in the debate that was telling was Hillary Clinton at one point said that Donald Trump was the lead recruiter for ISIS.
Here is Hillary Clinton, the Secretary of State, wearing what has to, this has to, Lindsay, you're a girl, this is the ugliest jacket.
I mean, I'm not into fashion, but even I can tell when it looks like you are wearing my grandmother's carpet from 1973 in her, yeah, she looks like a potato.
She looks like she's wearing a potato sack, right?
It looks like she took a burlap sack, cut a hole in it, and then stuck it over her head, which I mean, honestly, if she hadn't cut a hole in it and just left it over her head, that would have improved the appearance for everyone involved.
But here's Hillary Clinton talking about how Donald Trump is the lead ISIS recruiter.
One of the best things that was done, and George W. Bush did this and I give him credit, was to reach out to Muslim Americans and say, we're in this together.
You are not our adversary.
You are our partner.
And we also need to make sure that the really discriminatory messages that Trump is sending around the world don't fall on receptive ears.
He is becoming ISIS's best recruiter.
They are going to people showing videos of Donald Trump insulting Islam and Muslims in order to recruit more radical jihadists.
So I want to explain why this is not in America's interest to react with this kind of fear and respond to this sort of bigotry.
Okay, so first of all, Hillary Clinton has apparently picked up Bernie Sanders' hand motions.
This is actually a change.
I mean, seriously.
Hillary Clinton has a problem, which is that she's such a calculated politician that she unconsciously, and she desperately wants to be liked, so she unconsciously mirrors the stuff that everyone around her does.
This is why when she goes down south and she's speaking at a black church, suddenly she starts dropping the black accent.
She's watching Bernie Sanders get big applause, and so she turns to Sanders.
She sees Sanders doing the crazy hands, right?
Every word has a hand connected with it, and you don't know what he's gonna do, but the hands are moving all the time.
Touchdown.
And Hillary Clinton, you know, she does the same thing there.
But what's amazing, so she's lying there, okay?
There are no ISIS videos, none, where they use Donald Trump to recruit.
There are, however, ISIS videos where they use Bill to recruit, actually.
And if we're going to talk about recruitment tactics for ISIS, pull out from Iraq would be a good one.
Hillary's Syrian policy would be another good one.
America's failures to keep her commitments in the Middle East, that would be a really good one.
The idea that Hillary Clinton has some advantage over Donald Trump in this area is asinine.
She lied about that.
She clearly lied about that.
But the way that it works for the media is that when Hillary lies, it's basically okay.
When Donald Trump does something similar, then it's not okay at all.
So her campaign came out and they said she didn't mean there are videos with regard to ISIS.
She just meant social media with regard to ISIS.
And the media went, oh, okay.
I seem to remember a month of controversy over Donald Trump saying that there was video of thousands of Muslims celebrating in New Jersey.
Right?
We talked about it, like, three weeks ago.
And I remember that there was controversy over Carly Fiorina talking about Planned Parenthood videos.
Right?
Like, a month of controversy over that.
But Hillary says an outright lie here, and it's totally fine, because that's how the media works.
Well, meanwhile, on the Republican side of the aisle, one of the reasons people are interested in seeing Donald Trump in a debate with Hillary Clinton is because they feel like Donald Trump We'll just reach down into his Mary Poppins bag of hammers, basically, and just pull out a Roger Rabbit mallet and hit Hillary Clinton with it.
And that's because of stuff like this.
Here's Donald Trump talking about Hillary Clinton.
He says, yeah, Hillary tends to lie about pretty much everything.
I want to play one particular quote that Hillary Clinton said last night and get you to respond to it.
Here it is.
He is becoming ISIS's best recruiter.
They are going to people showing videos of Donald Trump insulting Islam and Muslims in order to recruit more radical jihadists.
Now I know what you're about to say.
No fact checker has been able to back up her claim on that.
That's exactly correct.
I was going to say that.
Exactly correct.
Right.
Nobody has been able to back that up.
It's nonsense.
It's just another Hillary lie.
She lies like crazy about everything, whether it's trips where she was being gunned down in a helicopter or an airplane.
She's a liar, and everybody knows that.
I mean, but she just made this up in thin air.
And he says she lies about everything.
The thing that people like about Trump is that he'll just say that, right?
She just lies all the time, and we all know that she lies all the time.
What's amazing about the question, though, is you can see Todd doesn't want him to answer it, right?
He says to him, you can see that she says this about you.
I know what you're gonna say.
When's the last time you saw an interview say that?
An interviewer say that?
When's the last time you saw an interview with Hillary Clinton where they ask a question about one of her opponents slandering her, and they say, I know what you're gonna say, but...
But they do it with Trump, right?
And good for Trump for jumping in and cutting off Chuck Todd to answer that question.
Now, with the good Trump comes the bad Trump.
Trump over the weekend was basically endorsed by Vladimir Putin, and he said that he was asked by Joe Scarborough on MSNBC about Vladimir Putin killing journalists.
There is proof that Vladimir Putin has been connected with the killing of journalists.
As far as the reporters are concerned, obviously I don't want that to happen.
Who is this?
Jake Tapper?
I can't remember who this is.
In any case, Stephanopoulos, that's right.
Yeah, the Clinton lackey.
And he's asked specifically about Vladimir Putin, and here is Donald Trump at his worst.
You just saw him at his best.
Now we're about to see him at his worst.
As far as the reporters are concerned, obviously I don't want that to happen.
I think it's horrible.
But in all fairness to Putin, you're saying he killed people.
I haven't seen that.
I don't know that he has.
Have you been able to prove that?
Do you know the names of the reporters that he's killed?
Because I've been, you know, you've been hearing this, but I haven't seen the name.
Now, I think it would be despicable if that took place, but I haven't seen any evidence that he killed anybody in terms of reporters.
Here's what Mitt Romney tweeted about that.
He said there's an important distinction here.
Thug Putin kills journalists and opponents.
Our presidents kill terrorists and enemy combatants.
Does he know for a fact that he kills the reporters?
I don't know.
I don't think anybody knows that.
It's possible that he does, but I don't think it's been proven.
Has anybody proven that he's killed reporters?
And I'm not trying to stick it for anybody.
There have been many allegations that he was behind the killing of Annapolis Sky.
No, no, allegations.
There are allegations.
Yeah, sure, there are allegations.
I've read those allegations over the years, but nobody's proven that he's killed anybody as far as I'm concerned.
He hasn't killed reporters.
So what killing has the United States government done?
George, excuse me.
Let me finish.
If he has killed reporters, I think that's terrible.
But this isn't like somebody that stood with a gun and he's, you know, taken the blame or he's admitted that he's killed.
He's always denied it.
He's never, it's never been proven that he's killed anybody.
So, you know, you're supposed to be innocent until proven guilty, at least in our country.
He has not been proven that he's killed reporters.
But then you said, I think our country does plenty of killing too.
What killing are you talking about there ordered by the United States government?
Well, take a look at what we're doing in the Middle East.
We went into Iraq.
We shouldn't have.
You know that I was opposed to going into Iraq many years ago.
You can cut it out there.
The part about Trump that's bad is that Trump, everything is personal.
He's actually very much like President Obama this way.
And so if somebody says he likes Trump, then that person Trump will now defend.
So he'll defend Vladimir Putin, who's legitimately one of the worst people on planet Earth.
Vladimir Putin is a bad, bad guy.
Vladimir Putin does have political opponents killed.
Vladimir Putin does apparently have journalists killed.
The allegations are extraordinarily credible that his regime has killed journalists.
So, you know, the fact that Trump is defending him, it's not a good moment for Trump.
The reason, however, that Trump is doing well, the reason that Trump is doing well is because of people like Jeb Bush and the establishment.
So here is Jeb.
Jeb talking about Donald Trump.
And there are a couple of things that we need to watch of Jeb here.
So Jeb Bush, who's completely a non-factor in the race now.
He spent $40 million.
He gets like 2 or 3% in the national polling.
It's the most ineffective political campaign probably ever, given the amount of money that he's spent.
Jeb is now making excuses for himself.
He's saying he didn't like that whole frontrunner thing anyway.
Here is the lie of the weekend.
Jeb Bush saying, yay!
People thought you were the frontrunner.
Your campaign is not the frontrunner.
I hated that.
You hated being a frontrunner?
Yeah, I feel much better back here.
Why'd you hate being the frontrunner?
Well, because I've always thought that there was going to be a high expectation for me, and I totally get it.
Because?
Because I have a brother that was president and a father that was president.
And that higher expectation, it was important to realize.
And so being the frontrunner made me feel like that people are going to begin to say, well, the guy's just dancing right through this.
I have to go earn it.
I have higher expectations on me than people have of me, so it doesn't bother me a bit that... We can stop there.
This weakling, and he is, he comes off as weak, this is why, this is why Donald Trump is doing well.
Because you compare him to this, and whatever Trump says, and he says a lot of really dumb and terrible things, Jeb Bush, I mean...
Goodness gracious.
I mean, I was the frontrunner and I really hated it.
Yeah, it's that kind of powerful leadership that we're looking for.
I was winning, but really I'd prefer not to win, I'd prefer to lose, so that people don't have expectations of me.
Yeah, that's somebody who's really gonna stand tall in the face of true adversity.
But then Jeb attacks Trump, and again, it's the attacks on Trump by people like Jeb that are driving Trump to the front of the pack.
Here is Jeb talking about Trump.
I'm trying to point out that he's not a serious candidate.
His answer about the nuclear triad, for example, is mind-blowing.
I mean, not having any knowledge about what the subject is, where you have this exclusive responsibility of the President of the United States as Commander-in-Chief of the Armed Forces to To know women how to use our nuclear deterrent.
I mean, he has no knowledge about this stuff.
He thought, he now has come out saying that Putin is a strong man and a great guy when he's trying to destabilize our relationship with our allies.
He's not a serious candidate.
He's not a serious candidate, but you are, Jeb, sitting there in your little sweater, you know, talking about, and looking like Jimmy Carter over there, talking about how you never wanted to be the frontrunner.
So you're serious, but Trump is not.
Now again, Trump may not be serious.
I think there are a lot of things about Trump that aren't serious.
But I think we're beyond the point of seriousness being a qualifier for high office when President Obama has been there for seven years.
This President of the United States is a deeply unserious man.
President Obama over the weekend said the real reason people are afraid of ISIS is because he hasn't done enough in speaking to the American people about the threat of ISIS.
For Obama, all shortcomings are because we just don't understand him well enough.
It's never because he doesn't understand us, it's because we don't understand him.
If only we would understand President Obama better, then all would be well with the world and all of the critiques of him All the criticism of him, says President Obama, is because of racism.
He said this over the weekend.
So don't talk to me about seriousness.
When Hillary Clinton is your Democratic frontrunner, pathological liar, corrupt beyond recognition Hillary Clinton is your frontrunner, and your secondary frontrunner in the Democratic Party is Bernie Loonville Sanders.
Don't talk to me about Sirius when those are your people on the Democratic side of the aisle.
And don't talk to me about Sirius on the right side of the aisle when the people who you're offering as the establishment picks are people like Jeb Bush, who was supposed to be the great be-all end-all sitting there in his sweater talking about how he never wanted to be the frontrunner.
Really?
Did you not want to be the frontrunner?
Or did you really want to be the frontrunner and you just stink at this?
Is that a possibility?
And it's that kind of pansy attitude from Jeb Bush where people say, OK, I don't even want you in the ring with Hillary.
But here's the problem, OK?
Trump could win the nomination if he does.
It's going to be because of people who are out there saying this.
OK, so this is amazing today, OK?
Bill Kristol, who's the editor-in-chief of the Weekly Standard.
And I like the Weekly Standard, and I generally like Bill Kristol.
I think he says a lot of smart things.
I don't think everything that he says is smart.
There are some people who sort of worship at the altar of Bill Kristol.
I'm not one of those people.
I think that he's right some of the time.
I think that he's wrong some of the time.
But he's certainly a smart guy.
Bill Kristol today tweeted out, quote, Crowdsourcing.
Name of the new party will have to start if Trump wins the GOP nomination.
Suggestions welcome at editor at weeklystandard.com.
So he's talking openly about a third-party run from the left of Trump, right?
Somebody from the establishment GOP running against Trump, which of course would guarantee Hillary becomes president of the United States, right?
If you split the party.
This was the argument originally about Trump.
The argument originally about Trump is that if Trump decided to run third party, he hands the nomination to Hillary Clinton- he hands the presidency to Hillary Clinton.
Now the establishment is saying, we hate Trump so much, Trump is so crazy, that if he runs, we're gonna start a third party to run against Trump.
And this isn't just- this isn't just Bill Kristol.
Jeff Greenfield over at Politico wrote over the weekend, quote, If the operatives I talked with are right, Trump running as a Republican could well face a third-party run from the Republicans themselves.
If you want to see the most sulfurous assaults on Trump like sulfur, don't look to the editorial page of the New York Times or the comments of MSNBC personalities.
Look instead to the most prominent media voices in the conservative world, National Review, the Weekly Standard, Commentary, and the columns of George Will and others.
And then he goes on to talk about how the Republicans really could run somebody third party against Donald Trump, which of course would guarantee the presidency to Hillary Clinton.
They would rather have Hillary be president than Donald Trump.
And here's the sad thing.
They would rather that Hillary be president than Ted Cruz because polls today, Ted Cruz is up 40 to 31 over Trump in Iowa.
Cruz is gaining in the national polling.
Trump is still well ahead in national polling, but Cruz is running second.
And Cruz has a better shot of consolidating support in South Carolina and throughout the South, and in New Hampshire, by the way, because he only has to pick up Ben Carson's support.
He has a better shot of doing serious damage to Trump than Marco Rubio, but they're still backing Marco Rubio all the way to the end.
So that's sort of corruption in the Republican Party.
Well, you know, we're going to yell at the conservatives that the conservatives have to join our party, And if they decide to go elsewhere, they're traitors.
But if they nominate somebody they like, then we're going to run at the first available opportunity.
It's kind of pathetic.
But it's not the first time this has happened, by the way.
People tend to forget this.
But in 1980, when Ronald Reagan won the Republican nomination, there was another Republican in the race.
His name was John Anderson.
And John Anderson actually ran third party against Ronald Reagan.
He was in some of the debates, the early debates, with Jimmy Carter.
He ended up winning something like four to six percent of the vote.
Reagan won walking away anyway, but the fact is that the establishment thought Reagan was so crazy they had to run somebody.
The other example of this is, of course, David Duke running for governor in Louisiana, and the Republican Party decided to put up a former governor just to knock off David Duke, but Trump is not like David Duke.
Trying to compare Trump to David Duke is a bit absurd.
So if the Republican Party wants to guarantee Trump the nomination, all they have to do is keep going With all of this, Trump is the worst, Trump is terrible, and we'd rather have Hillary Clinton than Trump, because now I really don't trust you to pick my nominee.
I really, really don't trust you to pick my nominee.
Okay, it's time for a little bit of stuff I like, and then we'll get to stuff that I hate here on a Monday.
Couple of things, stuff I like, just some funny things that happened over the weekend.
So, I don't know how many of you saw this, it's gone viral on the internet, Miss Universe.
The end of the Miss Universe contest, Steve Harvey.
It's the hosting Miss Universe.
This competition has really gone downhill in a significant way since Donald Trump sold it.
He tweeted this out today.
He tweeted out that he sold it six months ago, and this never would have happened under him.
What wouldn't have happened?
Watch Steve Harvey not be able to read English.
Okay, this actually happens at the very end.
You're going to see Miss Columbia and Miss Philippines both standing there trying to figure out who's going to win the Miss Universe contest.
This is awkward television, folks.
Here we go.
I have to apologize. - Oh my gosh. - You read it wrong.
You'd given it to Miss Columbia.
Right?
She's wearing the crown already.
The first runner up is Columbia.
Oh my gosh, she looks like she got clocked with the truck.
Miss Columbia looks like Miss Philippines also looked like she got clapped with the truck She doesn't really know what's going on Miss Universe 2015 is Philippines She doesn't really know what's going on Miss Columbia is a great fan of the game
She doesn't know what's going on.
Now they're going to have to take the crown off the other girl and give it to Miss Philippines.
The queen is dead.
Long live the queen.
They literally take the crown off the other girl and give it to... See, she's wearing the crown.
There's Miss Columbia standing there wearing the crown.
And Miss Philippines is like, what am I supposed to do, tackle you here, gal?
You know, you might want to just hand it over.
And Steve Harvey's standing there all awkward-like.
And it just goes on like this while they play the triumphant music and Miss Columbia just looks super confused.
And Miss Philippine's standing there, she doesn't know what to do.
Miss Columbia doesn't know what to do.
It's pretty great television.
People were actually saying it was such great television, they thought maybe it was staged.
Here they go, taking the crown off one and giving it to the other.
Here we go.
It's okay, darling.
Let me just take control of this.
This is exactly what's on the card.
I will take responsibility for this.
It was my mistake.
It was on the card.
A horrible mistake, but the right thing, I can show it to you right now.
Okay, so that's a thing that I like today.
We can cut off there.
That's a thing that I like today.
Because it's just hilarious.
Although I will say that my faith in the veracity of family feud outcomes has now been shaken.
Forever.
Because who knows who actually made the lightning round.
Okay, here's another thing that I like.
Okay, so people, there's such a, politics, there's so much about politics that really is surface level.
And people don't like to recognize this, but it really is true.
So, a lot of the scorn for Donald Trump comes from the fact that Donald Trump speaks like Donald Trump.
A lot of the scorn for Sarah Palin came from the fact that Sarah Palin speaks like Sarah Palin.
So somebody cut a video of Donald Trump, and it's pretty spectacular, of Donald Trump talking on Fox News, except they dubbed over it a sophisticated-sounding British man.
And look how all of a sudden it looks like Donald Trump's IQ just jumped about 36 points.
And it really is, it's kind of fascinating because this is how our politics works now.
Folks who can't see this, it's actually, it's Donald Trump talking and then a voice dubbed over at Donald Trump talking about Muslim immigration.
I think I'll win the Hispanics.
I employ thousands of Hispanics.
They love me.
I love them.
And I think I'm going to do great with women.
One of the reasons I'm going to do great with women is that I'm a leader.
I'm not like Hillary Clinton.
She's got no strength.
She's got no stamina.
Everything she does is, like, theatrical.
Donald Trump said this.
Yeah, actually, it's sort of interesting.
She said, I watched her last night, Donald Trump!
Looks like she practices in front of a mirror for two hours.
Donald Trump said, I think he's dangerous.
I'm dangerous.
She's the one that caused all this problem.
With her stupid policies.
You look at what she did with Libya.
What she did with Syria.
Look at Egypt.
What happened with Egypt?
Stop it there.
This is the point.
Doesn't he, Lindsay, does he seem more sophisticated?
Right?
You'd vote for him, right?
All of a sudden he looks like a sophisticate because we slapped the British accent on him.
So folks, next time you hear somebody speak with a British accent, don't fall for the play.
Women particularly.
If you're in a bar and a guy is speaking with a British accent, doesn't mean he's smart or sophisticated or kind or decent.
Just means he comes from Britain.
So, it just shows you how surface art politics is.
Okay.
Now, something that I hate.
Let's talk about...
A little bit.
The budget deal that happened last week.
So Paul Ryan last week signed off on a 1.15 trillion dollar budget deal.
It's an omnibus budget package that keeps the government funded for at least the next five minutes.
And it signs off on all of President Obama's priorities.
Planned Parenthood gets funded.
Climate change gets funded.
The executive amnesty gets funded.
Every single thing gets funded.
And then Paul Ryan, who's the great white hope of the conservative establishment, Paul Ryan goes on national TV and here's what Paul Ryan has to say about the deal that he just cut.
A deal so good for President Obama that Obama called him to wish him happy holidays and Paul Ryan said right back at ya.
Here's Paul Ryan on NBC News with Chuck Todd.
Speaker Ryan has heard the criticism.
I sat down with him on Friday and he said he'd deal with Planned Parenthood in the new year and that conservatives need to accept that he had to make compromises to get a deal done.
Let me first say, this is divided government.
And in divided government, you don't get everything you want.
So we fought for as much as we could get.
We advanced our priorities and principles.
Not every single one of them, but many of them.
And then we're going to pick up next year and pick up where we left off and keep going for more.
Beardy McLumberjack telling us that we are doing the best that we can in divided government.
Yeah, lecture me about divided government, Paul.
Just lecture me about how divided government works.
Yeah, I understand how divided government works, but guess what?
You didn't do your job.
The fact is that the House has one power, the power of the purse, since you already ruled impeachment off the table.
Barack Obama could strangle a small child on national television, and you guys have already said you'll never impeach him.
So, that means you have one power, and one power only.
And that power is the power of the purse.
And you won't use it, because you're afraid that Obama will then not sign the budget, and the government will shut down, and you will be blamed.
Boo-freaking-hoo.
Okay, it turns out that's your job.
And it's Obama's job to represent his side.
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