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May 1, 2017 - The Ben Shapiro Show
20:11
Ep. 294 - Journalists Prove They're Smug Leftist Elites
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As per the usual arrangement, on Sunday, Republicans reached a deal with Democrats to pass a $1.1 trillion spending bill that will avoid a government shutdown through September.
Here's what's in the bill.
Funding for Planned Parenthood, Obamacare, the Iran deal, the National Endowment for the Arts, and sanctuary cities.
Here's what's not in the bill.
Funding for Trump's planned border wall.
Incredibly, the new omnibus even includes a measure to increase the influx of temporary workers under H-2B visas through September.
But at least Republicans raised military spending, right?
That's the take from Speaker of the House Paul Ryan, who has a bad habit of pulling such deals off with Democratic help.
In 2013, Ryan cut a deal with Senator Patty Murray, Democrat of Washington, to raise sequestration caps, cut cost-of-living adjustment for veterans, increase taxes, and do so in exchange for empty promises of future cuts.
On this bill, Ryan brags, quote, we have boosted resources for our defense needs without corresponding increases in non-defense spending.
Of course, Republicans run both houses of Congress this time, and President Trump is in the White House, but no matter, the dreaded government shutdown has been avoided for the time being.
Even the defense increases, by the way, are about half of what Trump wanted.
Republicans caved again.
They were elected to overturn Obamacare.
They haven't, and they won't.
Even the supposed planned vote this week on Obamacare repeal does not repeal Obamacare.
They were elected to build Trump's border wall.
They haven't.
There are no immediate plans to do so.
They were elected to fund Planned Parenthood.
They haven't.
As Bloomberg points out, quote, Overall, the compromise resembles more of an Obama administration-era budget than a Trump one.
The National Institutes of Health, for example, went to a $2 billion boost, reflecting the popularity of medical research among lawmakers.
The deal includes $990 million for famine aid, along with a $1.1 billion boost for disaster recovery funds.
More than 70 anti-environmental policy riders in the bill were defeated.
No wonder Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer said, quote, You know who else liked the deal?
Nancy Pelosi.
Trump is now preparing to push forward the new healthcare plan, which doesn't repeal Obamacare.
His aides say he's going to push for a massive infrastructure spending plan sometime in the next two or three weeks.
Barack Obama would be proud of the Republicans.
I'm Ben Shapiro.
This is The Ben Shapiro Show.
So if all that sounds depressing, just wait for the rest of the show.
But actually, we'll be getting to the White House Correspondents' Dinner, which was, it just demonstrates that Trump's luck definitely extends to his opponents, because his opponents are the dumbest people alive.
The journalists at the White House Correspondents' Dinner made complete fools of themselves.
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Okay, so...
The White House Correspondents Dinner happens over the weekend and this was Trump's triumphant moment because while the White House Correspondents Dinner is going on, this is happening apparently, what was this, Saturday night that it was happening?
At the same time this was happening, President Trump was giving a massive rally in Pennsylvania, which is really smart.
It's really smart and it's really funny.
He gives a rally at the same time mocking the members of the press.
So we'll start with the members of the press who made asses of themselves.
For eight years they disappeared.
Obama just Was a good guy.
Why do we need to watch this guy?
There's no reason we need to watch this Obama fellow.
And then Trump comes back into power, and Republicans are back in power, and suddenly...
They've awoken, like the mummy.
They've awoken from their sleep, and they've come to revenge themselves on all things Trump.
So it started with Will Ferrell showing up at the White House Correspondents' Dinner.
Again, where was Will Ferrell the last eight years doing political comedy?
Nowhere.
He played Bush, and then he disappeared because all of the political comedians just decided it was no longer important to actually do political comedy for eight years because Obama was just such a magnificent fellow.
Well, now Will Ferrell is back imitating Bush, and this time, Democrats are doing the revisionist history where they say, Yeah, we wish we had Bush back because Trump is so terrible.
If you recall, they said the same thing about Reagan with Bush.
So every time there's a Republican president, they say, the last Republican president was so awesome.
We miss that guy.
So here's Will Ferrell doing that routine.
George W. Bush.
How do you like me now, huh? - The, uh...
The prodigal son has returned.
You guys would always sneak up on me with gotcha questions like, why are we going to war?
Gotcha.
Why did you not respond to Hurricane Katrina?
Gotcha.
What is your middle name?
Gotcha.
This is the whole routine they did with Bush, how stupid he was, how terrible he was.
Again, Obama was president for eight years.
Did anybody in the media ask him, why did you go to war in Syria?
Gotcha.
No, nobody asked him that question, because instead of going to war in Syria or doing anything about Syria, you hand it over to the Russians.
Barack Obama about what he was doing at any time during his presidency, even though he was a horrible president.
But Will Ferrell is back, and it's like the Republicans never left power.
Isn't that wonderful?
That wasn't the most offensive part.
White House Correspondents Dinner host Hassan Minhaj.
They brought out this Muslim comedian that nobody's ever heard of, because obviously we need a Muslim comedian.
Not because he's talented, because he isn't, but because if he's Muslim, then it shows that Republicans hate Muslims if they criticize him.
So here is Hassan Minhaj blasting Trump.
It's not bad that he's Muslim, by the way.
It's bad that he's a crappy comedian.
Here he is.
You know, a lot of people told me, Hasan, if you go after the administration, it would be petty, unfair, and childish.
In other words, presidential.
So here we go.
I get why Donald Trump didn't want to be roasted tonight.
By the looks of him, he's been roasting nonstop for the past 70 years.
Historically, the president usually performs at the correspondence dinner, but I think I speak for all of us when I say he's done far too much bombing this month.
Now a lot of people in the media say that Donald Trump goes golfing too much.
You guys are always like, he goes golfing too much, which raises a very important question.
Why do you care?
Do you want to do, do you want to know what he's not doing when he's golfing?
Being president.
Let the man putt-putt.
Keep him distracted.
Teach him how to play badminton.
Tell him he has a great body for bobsledding.
Play him tic-tac-toe.
The longer you keep him distracted, the longer we're not at war with North Korea.
Every time Donald Trump goes golfing, the headlines should read, Trump Golfing.
Apocalypse Delayed.
Take the W. This is great.
I love this.
Even if you guys groan, I've already hired Kellyanne Conway.
She's gonna go on TV on Monday and tell everybody I killed, so... It really doesn't matter.
But I love... I love that everybody's drinking and having a good time.
This is beautiful.
You know Donald Trump doesn't drink, right?
Does not touch alcohol, which is oddly respectable.
But think about that.
That means... Every statement...
Every interview.
Every tweet.
Completely sober.
How is that possible?
Okay, so I can't imagine why Trump didn't show up for this, and I can't imagine why people thought this guy was terrible.
Oh, maybe it's because he's awful.
I mean, just by any objective measure, he's awful at this.
At least he can say that Will Ferrell is a talented guy.
I don't know where they dug this guy up, but this guy would have bombed, like, the local comedy club, and they put him up in front of the entire nation, and he's supposed to be roasting Trump.
And then, of course, everybody on the left said, he destroyed Trump.
Note, Trump's still president.
Just ridiculous.
And then Samantha Bee gets up, the most obnoxious person on cable television.
She's in a running gunfight with Trevor Noah and Amy Schumer and Lena Dunham to be the least funny person in America.
And Amy Schumer gets up and she salutes the press, because if there's anybody who needs saluting, it's the press that wrongly covered this election, that wrongly covered President Obama, that wrongly covered President Bush, and that is now feeding itself for being the greatest people on planet Earth.
Here is Samantha Bee, the least funny woman in America.
I give her the title narrowly over Amy Schumer.
Here she goes.
As much as I might love poking fun at the media, and as much as you all kind of deserve it sometimes, I know your job has never been harder.
POTUS has convinced 88% of his fans that you're an enemy of the people.
You basically get paid to stand in a cage while a geriatric orangutan and his pet mobs scream at you.
It's like a reverse zoo.
But you carry on.
You dig up misdeeds and fraud by the powerful, you expose injustice against the weak, and you continue to fact-check the president as if he might someday get embarrassed.
So tonight... Tonight is for you.
Tonight, the president screams at a pen that Katie Turr is not in.
Cheers!
Okay, so they're toasting themselves because nothing says, in touch with the people, cares about the need of the people, like people wearing thousand-dollar suits and toasting each other for doing basic journalism, which they ignored for the past eight years.
And then the White House Correspondents Association president got up there and lambasted Trump, too.
Again, remember, these are the journalists, right?
These are the people who are supposed to be honestly covering this administration.
Do they think they're going to convince anybody, anyone in America, that they are not just Hateful, spiteful, angry people against the President of the United States when they do stuff like this.
Here's Jeff Mason of Reuters, who's the head of the WHCA.
We cannot ignore the rhetoric that has been employed by the President about who we are and what we do.
Freedom of the press is a building block of our democracy.
Undermining that by seeking to delegitimize journalists is dangerous to a healthy republic.
So where was this guy when Barack Obama was sicking the DOJ on the Associated Press?
Where was he when Barack Obama was directly attacking Fox News and talk radio?
Where was he when Barack Obama was using the DOJ to target Fox News' James Rosen?
And, by the way, actually prosecute journalists?
I mean, prosecute a bunch of journalists for supposed leaks?
Where was he?
He was gone, right?
So for eight years, it was as though Barack Obama wasn't president.
It just disappeared from memory.
There's a line in Field of Dreams in which a very lefty character gets up and talks about how there was Eisenhower, for Republicans there was Eisenhower, and then there was, what was it, he says something like there was three terms of Nixon and then they were just skipped right on to Reagan, skip the Carter years or skip the Nixon years or whatever it was.
Okay, that's actually what Democrats do.
They think that there were two terms of Bush and then eight years just disappeared down the toilet and then there was Trump.
They just went straight from Bush to Trump.
Obama didn't exist in the middle.
And then, the capper of all of this, Samantha Bee, again, the least funny person, woman in America, she gets up there on CNN, and she's asked, as though she's a serious person, on State of the Union, Jake Tapper, who I generally like as a reporter, but Jake Tapper asks Samantha Bee what she thinks of the current state of the country, and she says, she drops this awe-inspiringly stupid line.
Hillary Clinton's Samantha Bee problem.
I know!
So flattering.
I didn't know that there was a Samantha Bee problem, but let me read part of it to you.
The Democratic Party's problem in the age of Trump isn't really Jimmy Fallon, who you had criticized and others have criticized for being too soft on Trump.
Its problem is Samantha Bee, not be alone of course, but the entire phenomenon that she embodies, the rapid colonization of new cultural territory by an ascendant social First, what's your response?
And second of all, how does it feel to be, you know, the face of the problem?
Oh my God, my name was in an article!
It's me!
It's not racism, it's just me.
No, you know what?
I'll wait for all that evidence to roll in and then I'll make up my mind after that.
So just because there was no backup, it was just you?
You know, it's one person's opinion.
One wonderful chap.
Let me ask you a question.
Does he have a larger... and you've addressed this on your show, so remove yourself from it.
Does he have a point about smug liberals?
I'm not talking about you, but is there a smug liberal problem?
You know, that is something that I can't really... I mean, I just can't take responsibility for the way the election turned out.
I just absolutely don't.
I can't.
Is there a smug liberal problem?
You told her not to go to Wisconsin.
I guess I'm, I guess, you know, I don't, I don't think there is.
Like, I do the show for me and for people like me, and I don't really care how the rest of the world sees it, quite frankly.
There's no smug liberal problem.
I do the show for people like me and people like me, but there's no smug liberal problem.
I don't care what the rest of the world thinks.
There's no smug liberal problem.
You just described the smug liberal problem.
You do a show for you and people like you and you don't care what anybody else thinks because you think that you are the repository of all knowledge, wisdom, and decency in the United States, but there's no smug liberal problem?
No.
What we have here is a smug liberal comedienne self-awareness problem.
That's what we have here.
And this is the problem with the left, and this is why Trump is so ever-loving lucky.
He's the luckiest man in America because the left is so smug.
The left is so terrible, and they can't even see it themselves.
So Trump goes out there, and he campaigns, and he's talking to people he thinks are sort of the forgotten people, the people that Samantha Bee just said she doesn't care about because they don't watch her show.
You know, those people, Trump talks to those people, and then he says, look at that smug liberal.
And everybody goes, yeah!
You know why?
Because he's right.
Because they are smug leftists.
That is a smug leftist.
She is awful.
She's sitting there, in her expensive clothing, on an expensive set with Jake Tapper, and before that, on an expensive set at the White House Correspondents' Dinner, with the people who are the repositories of knowledge.
You remember when reporters in the old movies, they used to be people who wore, like, the battered derby hats, and they were the men of the streets who chain-smoked, and they went out there and they reported on things that were happening on the ground?
Now they go to the White House Correspondence Center and there were tails in a tie.
And Samantha Bee wears her very fancy suit.
And they go out there and they jabber about what wonderful people they are.
They become celebrities in their own right.
And this is what Trump hit.
And I want to get to Trump's response because it was top-notch Trump in just a second.
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Okay, so...
Trump responds to the White House Correspondent's dinner with this rally.
Very smart.
He ignores all of the journalists feeding each other and patting each other on the back.
And he was just going to go there and they were going to make fun of him and then there were going to be pictures of him looking sour.
So smart of him to skip it.
I think it's a dumb event.
And so instead, he went to this rally and here is him knocking the media.
A large group of Hollywood actors and Washington media ...are consoling each other in a hotel ballroom in our nation's capital right now.
And that is why people like Trump.
In a nutshell, that is why people like Trump.
And people also like Trump because Trump is on Face the Nation over the weekend, and here is Donald Trump catering to his crowd by basically ripping on John Dickerson, who is the host of Face the Nation.
You know, it's very funny when the fake media goes out, you know, which we call the mainstream media, which sometimes, I must say, is you.
You mean personally, or...?
Your show.
I love your show.
I call it Deface the Nation.
But, you know, your show is sometimes not exactly correct.
And everybody on the right loves this, of course, as well they should, because the media are a bunch of leftist trolls who hate President Trump and hate the right.
Now, the reason the left is scared of Trump is because of something Reince Priebus said over the weekend.
Here's Reince Priebus talking about how the White House considered the changing libel law, changing the First Amendment to the Constitution.
This is why the left looks at people like us, you know, the people who say, look, the media's full of it, and they say, why aren't you scared of Trump, too?
I mean, Trump is the one talking about changing the First Amendment.
Change the libel laws.
That would require, as I understand it, a constitutional amendment.
Is he really going to pursue that?
Is that something he wants to pursue?
I think it's something that we've looked at, and how that gets executed or whether that goes anywhere is a different story.
But when you have articles out there that have no basis or fact, and we're sitting here on 24-7 cable companies writing stories about constant contacts with Russia and all these other matters Do you think the president should be able to sue the New York Times for stories he doesn't like?
I think that newspapers and news agencies need to be more responsible with how they report the news.
That part is true, of course.
Newspapers and news agencies should be more responsible, but this idea that you're going to revise the First Amendment, that does scare people, and it should scare people, because if Barack Obama were saying it, everybody on the right would be going nuts.
Again, this is my shoe-on-the-other-foot test.
If Reince Priebus right now were Rahm Emanuel and he were saying the same things, would you be happy or would you be sad today?
And the answer is you would be sad today because this is not something the president should be saying.
But this is something I want to talk a little bit more about if you subscribe.
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