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Dec. 23, 2015 - The Ben Shapiro Show
31:53
Ep. 46 - Why Jews Should Cheer American Christmas

Ben talks Christmas, plus the media's attacks on Ted Cruz. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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Time Text
We are here, and it is two days before Christmas.
I could not be more excited.
At the end of tomorrow's episode, I will carol you a little bit.
We do do this in the Shapiro family, so we'll do a little bit of that on tomorrow's episode.
But today, we have to talk about the Washington Post going after Ted Cruz's daughter.
We'll also be talking about Chris Matthews going off of his rocker, plus something crazy that happened on CNN to a friend of mine, Kurt Schlichter.
We'll get to all of it.
I'm Ben Shapiro.
This is The Ben Shapiro Show.
I tend to demonize people who don't care about your feelings.
Well, after yesterday, this is the show that you have been schlonging for, as Donald Trump might say.
The big story of the evening, and very often lately the news breaks in the evening, the big story of the evening last night was there's this cartoonist who's won a Pulitzer Prize, her name is Ann Telmase, I believe is how it's pronounced.
And Anne Telnes is a real piece of work.
She's a nasty piece of goods, this Anne Telnes character.
She has, in the past, drawn pictures of Senator Ted Cruz wearing a, what are the Mexican hats called?
A sombrero.
Boy, I'm out of it today.
She's wearing a sombrero with tea bags hanging off of it and she's drawn pictures of Senator Cruz as a snake, like a full-on snake.
And so she hates Senator Cruz and she despises Senator Cruz and she found an excuse to go after Senator Cruz in Cruz's He cut an ad, Cruz did an ad, that aired during Saturday Night Live for his presidential campaign.
It was actually pretty funny and pretty cute.
Here is the ad, it's clip number 10 here, and we will play it in its entirety and then we will show you what the Washington Post thought was appropriate to do about this ad.
Imagine the greatest Christmas stories told by the senator who once read Green Eggs and Ham from the Senate floor.
"'Twas the night before the shutdown and all through the house, not a bill was stirring, not even to fund a mouse.
A proven record presents a collection of timeless Christmas classics read by the trusted conservative leader Ted Cruz.
Favorites such as How Obamacare Stole Christmas and Rudolph the Underemployed Reindeer.
All of the other reindeer couldn't afford to hire Rudolph.
Act now and you'll get a leader who does exactly what he says he's going to do.
In this case, read festive stories like Frosty, the Speaker of the House.
Look!
The Speaker is melting before Congress!
And it continues along those lines.
And eventually, you see he's got his two daughters there, and one of his daughters reads a little bit, and his daughter... They're very cute kids.
I mean, I think they're four years old and seven years old, and the seven-year-old's an actress.
I mean, you can see her there doing the googly eyes and being all cute.
And the reason I was laughing, folks, if you can't see, is because when it showed Frosty the Speaker of the House, it was a picture of Frosty the Snowman holding a glass of wine and a cigar.
It was clearly John Boehner.
And so, I mean, it's funny stuff, and it's cute, and it's poking fun at himself.
I mean, there's nothing in here that's a vicious attack, a vicious assault on the Democrats.
It's actually Cruz kind of poking fun at himself and showing that he has a sense of humor.
Well, this set off Ann Telnaes.
As we've said, she's a Pulitzer Prize winner, so here's what we know.
She's won a Pulitzer.
Barack Obama has won a Nobel Peace Prize and a Grammy, all of which goes to prove awards suck.
Prizes are useless and the people who win them are even more useless.
Anne Telnaes is a really quite despicable human being.
Here's the cartoon that she drew.
We're going to show it to you if you subscribe.
Here's the cartoon that she drew and she put up on Twitter and she also put up at the Washington Post.
And what she wrote here, this picture of Senator Cruz in a Christmas outfit, and he is an organ grinder, right?
He's grinding an organ like poor people used to do on Christmas in order to get people to throw money in the hat.
And she tweeted out, Ted Cruz has put his children in a political ad.
Don't start screaming when editorial cartoonists draw them as well.
Now, do you see Ted Cruz's kids in this ad?
I don't.
I see two monkeys, one who's smaller and one that is bigger.
That's right, Antone says that she's going to draw Ted Cruz's four-year-old and seven-year-old daughter as actual, honest-to-goodness monkeys.
A Hispanic man's daughter as monkeys.
And then she said that Ted Cruz, there's an unspoken rule in editorial cartooning that a politician's children are off-limits, but But, when a politician uses his children as political props, as Ted Cruz recently did in his Christmas parody video in which his eldest daughter read, with her father's dramatic flourish, a passage of an edited Christmas classic, then I figure they are fair game.
In other words, they did something that she doesn't like, and now it's not enough to just draw the kids, she's actually going to draw them as monkeys.
They're not just kids, they're monkeys.
And this old bitty, this nasty piece of goods, she has also in the past drawn on the 40th anniversary of Roe v. Wade, she posted, it said this, quote, today is the 40th anniversary of the landmark Supreme Court decision Roe versus Wade, which made abortion legal in all 50 states.
Every year on this day, the pro-life groups descend on Washington, D.C.
to march around the court.
I live in the area, so I've witnessed these over the years, and it always strikes me how the majority of these protesters are very young children.
And there's a caption that says anti-abortion activists march in Washington D.C.
And it shows a fat guy wearing black and a mother wearing white, and they're holding crosses, obviously crosses, with strings that come down, and the strings are connected to small children who are carrying anti-abortion signs.
So this idea that kids are puppets to their parents, it only applies to right-wingers, because as we've learned when Rush Limbaugh said that, made a joke about Chelsea Clinton looking like a dog back in the 90s and all hell broke loose, you can't make fun of liberal politicians' kids.
That's off limits.
But if you label Ted Cruz's daughter's monkeys, That is perfectly okay.
And it's also worthwhile noting this is not a rarity.
If you remember Sarah Palin in 2008, Andrew Sullivan, who was subsequently invited to the White House, claimed that Trig Palin was not actually Sarah Palin's son.
Trig Palin was in fact Bristol Palin's son, and Sarah Palin covered it up.
She wanted to cover up that her daughter had a kid out of wedlock by trying to claim the kid as her own.
You remember that one.
You remember on MSNBC, that idiot Melissa Harris Perry of Nerdland.
Uh, she, of Nerdland fame, she always does hashtag Nerdland during her show.
She made fun of Mitt Romney having an adopted black grandchild because one of his kids adopted a black baby from Africa.
And she made fun of that.
She said, well look, there's the little token in the Romney family.
So it's okay to make fun of Romney's black grandkid.
But if you're a Democrat, then you can use kids all the time.
As we've talked about on the show, we've had videos that we've shown on the show of Democrats trotting out their kids to push gun control.
You remember during Obamacare, President Obama surrounded himself with children when he signed Obamacare into law, when Nancy Pelosi became Speaker of the House in 2006.
You remember she got up there with a bunch of children there.
Not unborn kids, those she kills, but the ones who have already been born, she shows up with in the House of Representatives.
Holding her giant gavel, trying to show that little girls can do anything except be born if their parents want to kill them.
But aside from that, they can do anything, including be Speaker of the House.
So in other words, Democrats will use children as props all the time, but if a politician has his own kids in a joke about Christmas, which I mean, I'm not sure how else you do that joke without your kids in it.
Like, that's the whole joke.
And it's obviously him parodying—and they say it right up top—him parodying his own activities during the government shutdown when he read Green Eggs and Ham during his quasi-filibuster.
I said that he should have written—that if he really wanted to be effective, he shouldn't have read Green Eggs and Ham.
He instead should have read Love you forever, which there's no way to make fun of somebody reading Love You Forever because it is the saddest and most poignant book of all time.
But in any case, Cruz's ad, there's nothing wrong with it, but she puts this out there.
So what happens?
She puts this out there, this bitter old bitty, and she then has to take it down.
The Washington Post takes it down, and they release a statement that says, quote, It's generally been the policy of our editorial section to leave children out of it.
I failed to look at this cartoon before it was published.
I understand why Anne thought an exception to the policy was warranted in this case, but I do not agree.
Why would he understand exactly why Telmeis thought an exception was warranted?
I don't understand that.
Like, what in that makes you say... What exactly would make you think an exception to the rule is... If that rule exists, What here would craft the exception for the rule?
It doesn't make any sense to me.
That's silliness, and it's just a way for him to say, I'm not firing her.
That's really all that is.
I'm not going to fire her for doing something that in any other context we would label viciously racist.
Okay, let's pretend, let's just substitute President Obama's head for Ted Cruz's head in this exact same cartoon, and now we're talking about how the columnist is a vicious racist who ought to be fired.
And in fact, I'm old enough to remember when, just a few years ago, John McCain compared Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, the frontman for the Iranian dictatorship, to a monkey, and people suggested he was racist for doing so.
But it's not racist to attack a Hispanic man's kids as monkeys.
And it truly is astonishing.
And here's how the media covered it, which is even worse, because the media are just beyond gross.
They are so unbelievably gross.
Okay, here's how the media did this, okay?
So, Over at CNN, the headline read this.
Washington Post pulls cartoon depicting Ted Cruz's daughter as monkey-like characters.
Monkey-like characters?
Did you see monkey-like qualities?
Or were those actual monkeys?
Those looked like actual monkeys to me, did they not?
And then what's even better is the lead, right?
Here is the lead for that piece.
Quote, Ted Cruz obtained new ammunition Tuesday to shoot at his favorite bogeyman, the mainstream media, after the Washington Post depicted his two young daughters as monkey-like characters doing the bidding of their father.
So you see, who's the villain here?
It isn't the Washington Post.
It's Ted Cruz, because Ted Cruz was just looking for ammunition so that he could smack the media.
Right?
This was all just a... It was an Admiral Ackbar-type trap, right?
He was just... He set this whole thing up so that the jaws of genius would shut closed around Antelmeas, and then he could fundraise off of it.
And it wasn't just CNN.
Here's the headline from Politico, quote, Ted Cruz lashes out at Washington Post cartoonist for drawing his daughters.
Drawing his daughters, or drawing his daughters as monkeys?
And also, Lashes Out, that's the headline, the headline is Cruz lashing out, the headline isn't Washington Post has to pull a cartoon after their cartoonist draws a viciously racist, nasty piece of garbage crap like this.
That isn't the headline?
And by the way, Phil Kirpin, who I believe writes usually for the Weekly Standard, the American thinker, Phil Kirpin, mid-Washington examiner, Phil's a good columnist, and Phil points out, wouldn't it sell more papers?
Wouldn't it get more clicks if you included the fact that they were drawn as monkeys?
I mean, if the idea is that this is a traffic business, and I run a website, you know, this is a traffic business, include monkeys in the title, you'll get more clicks.
If you just say, here's a cartoon that draws Ted Cruz's kids, nobody clicks on that.
If you say, here's a cartoon that draws Ted Cruz's kids as monkeys, or even clickbaitier, here's a cartoon, you'll never guess how they depicted Ted Cruz's kids.
Right, that's how you gain clicks, but you don't gain clicks by hiding the lead.
Right, but that wasn't, it wasn't just political.
Here's what Reuters said.
Here's the actual, again, headline from Reuters.
Quote.
Okay, the cartoon didn't accuse him of using his kids as props.
The cartoon shows him using his kids as trained monkeys while he's the organ grinder in the background.
But it's all about Cruz blasting.
That crazy Cruz and his anti-media aggression.
What a nasty guy he is.
Mediaite, which is a pathetic left-wing site, here was their headline, quote, Well, I mean, if you want to just fly right past that story, that's the way that you would actually bill it.
Caves into pressure?
Right.
Well, the bad people are the people pressuring them to take down the cartoon.
The Hill, their story says, Washington Post retracts cartoon that calls Cruz's daughter's political props.
Again, Monkeys?
Anyone?
That's the entire headline here.
There is no way to do this particular story with this particular cartoon without saying that the kids are monkeys.
There's no way to do that.
It's like when people were saying there were racist cartoons about Obama.
If they said, cartoon about Obama during government shutdown, that means nothing.
If they said, cartoon depicting Obama as gorilla, that means it's a racist cartoon, right?
Wouldn't you include that in the actual description of the cartoon?
And then the Hill reported that Cruz used this cartoon in a Tuesday fundraising pitch.
Ooh-hoo-hoo.
So he was fundraising off of it, which is called politics.
And then the Washington Post ran a piece from Chris Chaliza, who's just exorable, titled, quote, why that now-retracted Washington Post cartoon is a gift to Ted Cruz.
You see, it's a gift.
See, it turns out that slandering people's kids as monkeys is a gift to them.
Now, as somebody with a very young daughter, a daughter who's two years old and is gorgeous and wonderful, I would be rightly pissed If somebody described my kid as a monkey.
I'd be rightly miffed about that.
It's one of the reasons why I actually make a habit of not bringing my- like, people don't know what my daughter looks like because I don't post pictures of her online.
I don't think it's anybody's business what my daughter looks like or what my wife looks like.
And let me tell you, my wife is smoking hot and my baby's beautiful, but it's none of your business.
Because that's my family and it's none of your business.
And one of the things I hate about the way modern politics now works is I'm supposed to open up my personal life to you.
My wife has a life, my baby has a life, and their lives really are not much of your business.
I understand you want to humanize the people who are around you, but this is why you don't.
Because the minute you humanize the people around you, they immediately get slandered as monkeys.
This is why it used to be better when the politician's family stayed in the background and it was about the politician.
It wasn't about the politician's family.
So bottom line, if you're Trig Palin, you're fair game.
If you're Malia Obama, you're not.
If you're Mitt Romney's adopted grandson, you're fair game.
If you're Hillary Clinton's granddaughter who she trots out at every occasion possible to remind people that she is everybody's abuela, this is something else we'll talk about in a second.
Then you're not fair game?
If you're any child of a Democrat, it's not fair game.
If you're a child of a Republican, then it's fair game.
By the way, I mention the Abuela story because it's really ridiculous.
Hillary Clinton is trying to say that she is Hispanic people's grandmother.
I don't know many old white women with one child conceived in one act of sex with their husband, maybe the one time they ever had sex, and then they have a child, and then they proceed to take millions and millions of dollars and hide email servers.
Like, she's not a Hispanic person.
And there was a hashtag that was trending, not my abuela.
Yeah.
Yeah, I think that that's probably the fairest statement of the day.
Hillary Clinton is nobody's grandmother, okay?
The idea that Hillary Clinton is sitting around playing with her granddaughter... I heard from Alicia Krauss, who's my co-host on The Morning Answer, which is a morning radio show that I do out of Los Angeles.
She said at one point that the way you can tell people, people on the left who don't like kids from the people who do like kids, Is people on the left who don't like kids have either zero or one kid.
If you have more than one kid, that means you actually like kids.
If you have just one kid, and the reason that you have, and it's not that you have some sort of biological issue so that you couldn't have more than one kid, but if you choose only to have one kid, that's because you wanted a dog or a purse.
And that is basically, you know, that's how Chelsea is to Hillary Clinton.
And Hillary is a nasty piece of goods.
In any case, While all of this is going on with Cruz, the headline machine continues to roll about Trump saying that Hillary was schlonged by President Obama in 2008.
And I have to say, it's highly amusing to me, really amusing to me, that the folks in the media who are very upset about Trump saying the word schlonged... First of all, let's just put it this way.
Bill Clinton.
Hillary's husband has the most famous schlong on planet Earth.
Right?
Like, of all the schlongs on planet Earth, Hillary Clinton's husband has the number one most famous schlong that ever was.
Right?
Her chief of staff's husband has the second most famous schlong on planet Earth, because Huma Abedin's husband is Anthony Weiner, who texted his schlong out on the internet to everybody.
Right, so she's surrounded by schlongs at all times, so the idea that she's offended by somebody mentioning a schlong seems a little bit weird to me.
But, you know, all the people in the media are schmucks, so they're making a big deal out of this whole thing.
They're kvetching about it, and they're all verklempt over it, and for people who use Yiddish, I mean, this is like, this is such a nothing.
But it just shows you where the media are, that the number one headline of the day is Donald Trump saying the word schlong about Hillary Clinton.
But Hillary Clinton lying about Donald Trump, the media, Painting Ted Cruz's daughters as literal monkeys, that doesn't even compute for them.
That doesn't even hit the radar for them.
They have to cover it up.
By the way, what's amazing is all the same people who say that they're deeply offended by the idea that Obama schlonged Hillary in 2008, which means, you know, screwed Hillary in 2008.
He says it means beat Hillary in 2008, whatever it means.
But the bottom line is that in 2008, I don't know if you guys remember this, there was an actual YouTube video.
It has like 148 million views.
And it was a, it was a, there was a song I guess back in the time called Umbrella.
And they cut a version of this with a guy playing Obama and a gal playing Hillary Clinton and them having sex with each other.
And I remember all the people on the left laughing at this and thinking it was hysterical and thinking it was funny.
But what's amazing is these folks who, I mean, they are going so crazy over this.
It is truly incredible.
Meanwhile, Donald Trump continues to be amusing.
Donald Trump didn't just mock Hillary over being shlonged by Clinton in 2008.
And as I said yesterday, to be fair, she's not been shlonged in 30 years.
Trump also mocked Hillary Clinton for taking a bathroom break during the Democratic debate.
And the reason we talk Trump is because the dude's entertaining.
He also happens to be the poll leader.
CNN poll today, Trump 39, Cruz 18.
So Trump is running away in the national polls.
Here is the Donald.
So Hillary's going to get beaten, but I haven't started with Hillary yet.
What happened to her?
I'm watching the debate and she disappeared.
Where did she go?
Where did she go?
I thought she quit.
I thought she gave up.
Where did she go?
Where did Hillary go?
They had to start the debate without her.
Phase two.
I know where she went.
It's disgusting.
I don't want to talk about it.
No, it's too disgusting.
Don't say it.
It's disgusting.
Let's not do it.
We want to be very, very straight up, okay?
But I thought that... Wasn't that a weird deal?
We're ready to start.
They gave her every benefit of the doubt.
Because, you know, it's ABC and she practically owns ABC.
She really does.
I mean, George Stephanopoulos interviewed me the other day.
It was terrible.
It was like, it was one of the great interviews.
Did anybody see that interview?
Okay, see this is, I was listening to Klavan's show the other day, to Andrew Klavan's show, and he made such a good point about Trump, and I thought this is really true.
The only person who looks like they're having a good time in this campaign is Donald Trump.
Everybody else looks miserable, and you can see, folks, if you're not watching, you miss out on half the joy of Donald Trump, because at the very end, the reason that I'm laughing so hard is because Donald Trump starts to punch the air.
About how he beat up George Stephanopoulos, and he's making a face like he's about to cave in somebody's head, and it's pretty spectacular.
By the way, I don't know where he buys his ties, but those have to be the most magnificent, widest ties that have ever been created in creation.
I mean, it looks like he just went out and got a parachute and put it around his neck, but Trump, he really enjoys the fight.
Meanwhile, you want to see the opposite of Donald Trump in terms of enjoying the fight.
All this is enjoyable to me, okay?
I want to get over the idea that politics was ever civil.
I know that there's this idea out there that politics was once a civil profession for the gentlemen.
And the gentlemen would get together, and they'd be very civil with one another, and they would all discuss policies over a beer and a whiskey, and then they would come up with the best available policy and pass it for the American people.
And they would never insult one another.
Instead, they would just sip from their snifters of brandy while wearing cravats.
Okay, this is utter crap.
If you look back to 1800, All the way back to 1800, the Jeffersonians and the Adams fans were beating the living hell out of each other.
Jefferson had a guy on his payroll named James Callender, who was the father of muckraking journalism, and was running stories about how John Adams was literally a senile, insane person throwing his wig around the White House.
Meanwhile, the Adams press was going after Alexander Hamilton, who had allied with Thomas Jefferson.
And talking and exposing the fact that Alexander Hamilton had been having an affair.
John Adams said of Alexander Hamilton, these are both founders, right?
These are the people who are the great civil founders of our society.
Geniuses all.
Okay, John Adams said of Alexander Hamilton that he had juices that were so plentiful no whore could suck them off.
Hey, John Adams said that about Alexander Hamilton.
Okay, so the idea that politics was ever some sort of clean and decent business is ridiculous.
And it's one of these things that there are certain myths to American politics that are highly irritating and the media dragged them out every so often.
So when Trump says schlong, we all have to pretend, oh my goodness, we're so offended.
Bill Clinton put his schlong in an intern.
He treated his intern like a humidor, as Kurt Schlichter said on CNN the other day.
And we're supposed to pretend that there's civility in politics anymore?
That there's class in politics?
LBJ, going back to the 60s, used to urinate with the door open so people could watch him urinate while he was having political meetings, because LBJ was a disgusting Bulgarian.
And everybody who's ever written about LBJ knows this to be true.
JFK was having 18 and sometimes apparently 17 year old interns in the White House pool bouncing around with their shirts off.
Okay, so the idea that this was ever a civil society, that politics was ever a civil business, it just is not true.
It's just not true.
And so I'm not going to buy into this whole Donald Trump is coarsening politics.
Barack Obama coarsens politics.
Okay, Barack Obama says that whites and blacks can't get along, essentially, and that the police departments are full of racists, and then he suggests, in an open letter, that Republicans are not tea partiers, they are tea baggers.
Okay, for folks who don't know what a tea bagger is, there's gonna be a little graphic, okay?
What a tea bagger is, according to people like Anderson Cooper, who apparently knows, it's when a dude dangles his testicles over someone else's mouth.
Okay, that's what a tea bagger is, and that is the reference That Barack Obama makes to the Tea Party.
Right?
And by the way, so did Joe Biden.
So don't talk to me about Donald Trump coarsening politics.
We've been coarse for 200 years, 250 years, and Barack Obama's only made it worse.
Everybody's saying, oh, look at this Trump.
He's a showman.
He's a reality TV star.
There are a lot of things to dislike about Trump.
He's a strong man.
He says stupid crap.
He says vulgar, stupid things.
He says things that I think are out of bounds, and I'm not even talking about vulgarity.
I'm talking about his politics.
But don't give me the, he's coarsening American politics.
Barack Obama appeared in an interview with a lady who bathed in Froot Loops.
Barack Obama did an interview with Zach Galifianakis on Between Two Ferns.
President Obama, in the Oval Office, is standing there with a selfie stick taking pictures of himself.
Don't talk to me about the coarsening and the dumbing down of American politics because of Donald Trump.
What absolute horse bucky.
Just unbelievable crap.
Okay, so the fact that Trump takes pleasure in all of this, I find endearing.
Somebody who clearly does not take pleasure in any of this is Jeb Bush.
Jeb Bush clearly takes no pleasure in any of this.
Jeb Bush has now cut an ad going after Donald Trump, and he tries to make the case that he is the only one who's willing to take on Trump, as though this is some sort of point in his favor.
Every time he takes on Trump, as we've said, he looks like Rachel Corey before the bulldozer.
I mean, it is not a good look for Jeb Bush, but this is apparently his big pitch.
So here we go.
Jeb Bush's new ad against Donald Trump.
Do you like Vladimir Putin's comments about you?
Sure.
I'm greatly honored by his statement.
I think it's terrific.
You know, one of the things that you didn't take an opportunity to do last night was to really go after Donald Trump.
Again, he killed journalists that don't agree with him.
Well, I think our country does plenty of killing also, Joe, so having no Donald Trump for Senator Cruz, you have not been willing to attack Mr. Trump in public, but you did question his judgment.
You better not attack him.
I salute Donald Trump.
I'm going to take care of everybody.
Senator Cruz, you have not been willing to attack Mr. Trump in public, but you did question his judgment.
I salute Donald Trump and listen, I commend Donald Trump.
Jeb Bush quickly denounced Trump, tweeting, quote, "A true freedom-loving conservative wouldn't be flattered by praise from a despot like Putin." Where only Jeb Bush really challenged him.
He seemed like he was the only one willing to take on Donald Trump.
And certainly he was the most aggressive in doing so.
Jeb Bush was the only one who tried to go after Donald Trump.
That's your pitch?
Really?
I mean, $35 million later, and that's what you came up with?
That exclamation point and that piece of crap ad?
Like, that was your big idea, that he was gonna go after Donald Trump based on... First of all, the ad is badly cut.
I mean, it's just badly cut.
It's manic, and the music is not useful, and it's distracting.
And then beyond that, he tries to cram all this stuff in.
And notice there are no live clips of Jeb.
Did you notice that?
There are no live clips of Jeb, because if they showed the live clip of Jeb, you would have to see Donald Trump face-planting him on national television, because that's what happens at the end of that exchange.
Instead, you've just got media people I love that he's calling out Cruz as though he's going to win voters away from Ted Cruz.
I mean, Jeb Bush is going to win zero voters away from Ted Cruz, but this is the desperation that has now set in in the Jeb camp.
Talk about running a joyless campaign.
Jeb is running an absolutely joyless campaign.
It is pretty ridiculous.
Okay, so now it's time to talk about some things that I like, and some things that I hate.
So, first, we'll talk about some things that... Let me try to think of something that I like, because I spend so much time talking about things that I hate on this show, and then I'm always caught up a little bit short when it comes time to talk about things that I like.
I was talking short stories yesterday, and, uh, and for anybody who's never read any O. Henry, you should go out and read O. Henry.
Have you ever read any O. Henry?
O. Henry is fantastic.
O. Henry, he... Actually, perfect.
Perfect.
Just in time for Christmas.
I'm sure most people have at least heard of this.
If you've never read the short story, The Gift of the Magi, it is a phenomenal short story.
It is the best, maybe the best short story ever written.
It's actually his second best short story.
His best short story is a short story called The Last Leaf, which is just a beautiful piece of writing.
O'Henry is a really interesting character because O'Henry actually started off as a criminal.
He was in jail.
And he started writing short stories while he was in prison.
And his short stories are really fantastic.
Some of them become the basis for movies.
You can buy collections of short stories by O'Henry for like $4, $5 online.
And they're great.
And they're great bedtime reading because they're all about 10 to 15 pages long.
They're really phenomenal.
So pick up some O'Henry just in time for Christmas.
Okay, so now a couple of things that I hate.
The first thing that I really hate is the paganization of Christmas.
Now, as a Jew, Christmas is not my thing.
When I say it's not my thing, it doesn't mean I don't enjoy it.
I think the lights are beautiful.
I actually love the Christmas spirit.
I love that everybody's in a good mood.
I hate the fact that after January 1, everyone goes back to being depressed and looking like they want to get drunk at a bar and just die in an alleyway like Edgar Allan Poe.
It's kind of sad.
I have to say, for you Christians out there, we Jews have it better than you do.
I mean, we have holidays like once every couple of months all the way through the year.
You guys pack it all in at the end.
Like, one big going-away bash, and then comes January 2nd, like, oh god, there's another year before I come back to Thanksgiving season.
And Easter's not done up the way that it should be because, unfortunately, not enough religious people live in the United States, so Easter has become about the Easter bunny and egg hunting at the White House or some such nonsense.
But the paganization of Christmas is something that I really, truly despise.
And it's not enough just to say Merry Christmas.
As a Jew, I'm gonna lecture you now.
You should know the reason for the season, right?
The purpose of the season is that Christ was born for you guys, and that is a good thing for humanity.
It's a great thing for humanity, right?
Christianity was a boon for humanity because before Christianity, it was all about paganism, and the left really is a pagan ideology.
It's an ideology that government is God, and if you just pray hard enough and make enough sacrifices to it, government will give you whatever you want.
So yesterday we talked about Hillary Clinton saying the government could cure Alzheimer's if we just make the sacrifice of $2 billion per year.
President Obama says we can appease the great sun god and make him stop heating the earth if we just stop driving our cars quite so much.
We can appease the terrorist gods if we just stop with our invasions and if we stop worrying about this Islamic stuff.
The pagan sensibility of the left is on full display, particularly during this season, And when people say that Christmas is too materialistic, it is true.
Christmas has become too materialistic.
But that is because of what does in fact exist, which is not a full-scale, let's kill the Christians war on Christmas, but the idea that it's offensive for people to say Christmas, it's offensive to talk about Jesus, it's offensive to talk about the message that Jesus brought.
And the truth is, the only people who are offended by the message that Jesus brought at this point in time are really the folks on the left, because Jesus came to fight paganism, right?
The fact is that, from the Jewish perspective, I'm gonna talk about a Jew's perspective on Jesus, okay?
We don't think that Jesus was God, we don't think that Jesus was the Messiah.
From a Jewish historical perspective, Jesus was probably a rebellion leader who's trying to lead a revolt against the Romans to reestablish statehood, Jewish statehood, in the Holy Land.
The reason I say that is because the reason that his Jewish followers probably thought he was the Messiah is because those are the criteria for the Jewish Messiah.
So the whole idea of Messiah as God is something that's foreign to Judaism.
It's not, it's a graft from other cultures.
It's not something that comes, there's nothing in Judaism that says the Messiah will come, he will be the Son of God.
There's nothing like that in Jewish philosophy.
However, What Jesus preached, many of his baseline messages, virtually all of them in fact, are messages that are in the Old Testament.
I mean, Jesus says he came not to change a jot or a tittle, right?
He came to reinforce messages that had been lost.
And by the way, messages that were reinforced by prophets ranging from Ezekiel to Zechariah, right?
ranging from Ezekiel to Zechariah and Isaiah, obviously.
They're all preaching a very similar message.
So let's go back to that message.
There is a good, there is a bad, there are things worth fighting for.
Everybody wants to celebrate peace on earth and goodwill toward all, but goodwill toward all means you actually have to make sure that the people you have goodwill toward are not people who want to destroy the all.
So, let's remember why exactly people celebrate Christmas, and when we're sitting around our Christmas trees, or you are sitting around your Christmas trees, I want to thank you, Christians, for making this, America, a Christian country, the best place on earth for a Jew.
The only other place in human history that's been like it is Israel now.
But the idea of a Christian country, this welcoming toward Jews, that comes directly out of a Judeo-Christian tradition that Christmas celebrates and upholds.
So thank you for that.
And thank you for being part of what makes the country great, even as the left seeks to destroy it and replace the Christmas tree with the pagan notion of what the Christmas tree was.
It doesn't Dennis Prager the other day was talking about the fact that so many religious ceremonies are actually hijackings of pagan rituals.
Like we all know that Christmas and Winter Solstice were... that this was originally a hijacking of Winter Solstice.
That if you look in the calendar this was probably not when Jesus was even born.
But that's not the point.
The point is that what religion does is it makes the profane holy.
It takes things from paganism and drags them forward Into the light so that people can, as Prager says, fill old bottles with new wine.
And so we should look at the value of the wine, and we should recognize that what's great about the season is the value that the Christmas tree has now attained in the Christian community, not the tree itself.
You don't love the tree because you're a druid worshiping trees.
You love the tree because of what it represents about your celebration of the birth of Jesus Christ.
So, thank you again to Christians, and you have a wonderful Christmas.
We'll be back tomorrow, just before Christmas, for another episode.
I'm Ben Shapiro.
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