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July 19, 2017 - The Ben Shapiro Show
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So, Who Owns Obamacare Now? | The Ben Shapiro Show Ep. 343
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On Monday, actor Chris Hemsworth, better known as Thor, explained that the role of James Bond should be redone, this time with Charlize Theron playing the part.
Theron is the star of the soon-to-be-released Atomic Blonde, a Bond-adjacent-born female knockoff.
She embodies every ounce of strength and nobility and dignity and integrity the character should have, Hemsworth explained.
She's smart as hell.
She's physically able.
You know, watching her in those fight scenes in Snow White and the Huntsman—doing it in high heels, by the way, and an eight-foot-long gown—was even more impressive.
And I just think, why not?
It's time.
This is, to put it mildly, the stupidest crap I have ever heard.
But it is not rare to hear Hollywoodites virtue signaling by talking about their ideal Bond.
Ian McKellen said years ago he'd like a gay Bond.
But Bond is Bond.
He has a character.
He's an ultra straight womanizer fulfilling teenage boy fantasies.
That is the entire point of the character.
It just doesn't work the same way with a woman.
Bond is a bad boy because he can seduce any woman no matter how unavailable or beautiful.
Making Bond a woman changes that calculus utterly, because virtually any mildly attractive woman can do the same with virtually any man.
It is not a challenge for Charlize Theron to get a man in bed.
As Amy Schumer has said, I'm 160 pounds and I can catch a bleep whenever I want.
She is scientifically accurate.
As David Schmidt, PhD, writes at Psychology Today, quote, Over the last few decades, almost all research studies have found that men are much more eager for casual sex than women are.
Oliver and Hyde, 1993.
Peterson and Hyde, 2010.
This is especially true when it comes to desires for short-term mating with many different sexual partners.
And it's even more true for wanting to have sex with complete and total strangers.
In a classic social experiment from the 1980s, Clark and Hatfield put the idea of sex differences in consenting to sex with strangers to a real-life test.
They had experimental confederates approach college students around various campuses and ask, quote, I've been noticing you around campus.
I find you to be very attractive.
Would you like to go to bed to meet with me tonight?
Around 75% of men agreed to have sex with a complete stranger, whereas zero women, 0% agreed.
In terms of effect size, this is one of the largest sex differences ever discovered in psychological science.
Okay, folks, this is not sexism.
It is science.
Furthermore, there is always going to be a necessary suspension of disbelief while watching Charlize Theron, who might be 120 pounds soaking wet, beat up guys twice her size.
Watching Daniel Craig, who's probably 170, do the same isn't quite the same thing.
There are plenty of great female action parts.
Theron might well play one in Atomic Blonde, but hijacking classic characters and having them switch genders and or sexuality destroys the characters.
There's a decent case for Idris Elba as Bond.
Color doesn't change the math for Bond's character.
There is no case for Theron or any other woman to be James Bond.
Just stop it.
You're being an idiot.
I'm Ben Shapiro.
This is the Ben Shapiro Show.
This is the Ben Shapiro Show.
Like, this, it's funny, what drives me up a wall, this sort of stuff drives me totally up a wall.
Like, the idea that you're just gonna turn James Bond into a woman and nothing changes?
Because men and women are different, stupid people.
Stupid, stupid leftists.
Men and women are totally different.
Before we get to all of the breakdown from Trumpcare and the fallout, and who's to blame, and is Trump going to pay a price, or is Congress going to pay a price, we'll talk about all of those things.
Plus, I want to get to Jake Tapper taking on Linda Sarsour, which is really quite wonderful.
We'll get to all of those things, and I'll give you the update, by the way, on a prospective intern that we will be interviewing, hopefully, in the next 48 hours.
But before we do any of that, I want to say thank you to our sponsors over at ZipRecruiter.
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ZipRecruiter.com Okay, so we actually love Mathis, we just make fun of him because he's in the room.
ZipRecruiter.com slash Daily Wire.
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If only we had done that with our own employees originally, but now we're stuck with them and can't fire them, Mathis.
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Make sure that they know that we sent you.
Okay, so we actually love Mathis.
We just make fun of him because he's in the room.
If Austin were in the room, which he no longer is, then we'd make fun of him as well.
In any case, you have to be within my actual visual spectrum in order for me to mock you, Jonathan.
In any case, I might as well give you the quick update on Feminist Son Intern because that was making some news last night.
So as you recall, last Friday I talked about this lady named Jodi Allard.
Jodi Allard wrote a piece in the Washington Post, and then she wrote a follow-up piece at some no-name website where she talked about how her sons were potential rapists because they had the penis.
And that means that if you have such a thing, this means that you are a potential rapist, according to Jodi Allard.
So I said that I would offer her son an internship to help him escape the clutches of evil mom.
And last night, Independent Journal Review, a friend of ours named Pardis Sela, who used to work over at Daily Wire, she did a story about this.
She actually contacted Jodi Allard's son and found out that he was interested.
In a natural internship with us and so he sent a resume to her she forwarded on to us last night Jodi Allard obviously out of the loop tweeted at me and said is this internship stunt just a stunt?
We haven't heard anything from you to which I replied well obviously you don't talk to your son who you call a prospective rapist all that much because he sent us a resume and I have it right here on my desk so Uh, hopefully we'll be talking to, uh, to Jared, which is the name of her son, sometime in the next 24, 48 hours.
We're seeing if we can work out that phone call right now.
We'd love to work something out with him.
Obviously, the skill set has to match, but, uh, if it is even a remote match, we'll find some way to work with him, because anything to, to get some money so that he can escape that house, because, horrifying, horrifying.
Okay, so, that is the update.
That particular story.
In other news, the Trump bill went down yesterday.
It went down because Mike Lee and Jerry Moran from Kansas and Susan Collins from Maine and Rand Paul all said they were not going to vote for it.
And that means that a bunch of people on the right are now blaming these folks for the collapse.
Now it's fair to blame Susan Collins because Susan Collins was never going to vote for any sort of Obamacare appeal.
She likes Obamacare.
It is not fair to blame Mike Lee or Rand Paul.
You know, Rand Paul, there's been suggestion that Rand Paul never votes for things because that's just his shtick.
Even that is quasi-fair, but it is not fair to blame Mike Lee.
The reason that it is not fair to blame Mike Lee is because there are a bunch of people today who are saying that Mike Lee preserved Obamacare.
Brit Hume says this, Hugh Hewitt says this, that Obamacare has been preserved by Mike Lee and Rand Paul.
This is a bunch of crap.
Obamacare was preserved by the bill itself.
The bill itself kept all of the regulations under Obamacare.
It added some subsidies and got rid of some of the taxes and it restructured Medicaid.
Now, if the Republicans had come along, I've been saying this legitimately for months, if the Republicans had come along and said, listen, we're just going to fix Obamacare for the time being.
We're going to try and fix it and make some changes that move us in the right direction.
But it's not full Obamacare repeal.
We are gradually going to get to full Obamacare repeal.
Then I would have signed on to this bill in all likelihood.
And I think probably so would Mike Lee.
But by calling it Obamacare repeal and replace, the implication is that this was the last step.
So when people say that Obamacare was going to be repealed except for Mike Lee, that's just nonsense.
It is just not true.
It is fully dishonest when people say that.
Don't look to Mike Lee as the cause of the collapse here.
There are many causes of the collapse here, but the first and foremost one is that Republicans were lying, okay?
They didn't actually want to Get rid of Obamacare.
They just didn't.
Okay?
And the constituents didn't.
President Trump didn't.
President Trump was the one who insisted back in January, by the way, that we not do full-scale repeal.
Instead we do repeal and replace.
That was Trump's suggestion.
And then he walked away from that when it turned out that people couldn't agree on what the replacement would look like and actually didn't want to do full-scale repeal.
So Trump was out there trying to claim this as a victory yesterday, even though it was a loss.
This is what Trump does best.
He likes to spin.
And the fact is that here is President Trump yesterday talking about how it was really a victory.
Like, if you wouldn't know any better, then it was totally a victory.
We have 52 people.
We had four no's.
Now we might have had another one somewhere in there, but essentially the vote would have been pretty close to, if you look at it, 48 to 4.
That's a pretty impressive vote by any standard.
And yet you have a vote of 48 to 4 or something like that, and you need more.
It's pretty tough.
We have 52 people.
Okay, that is not impressive by any standard.
The standard is passing things.
It's like Hillary Clinton saying, I won the popular vote.
Okay, so you got 48 out of 52.
First of all, not even clear there were 48 out of 52.
It's just clear that four would not vote for it, not that 48 would.
But you can't spin this as a victory when it is not a victory.
And as I said yesterday, there was a vacuum of leadership from the top.
Trump doesn't know what's in this bill.
He doesn't really care what's in this bill.
He didn't use the bully pulpit in any way.
He didn't threaten moderates to get on board.
He didn't threaten conservatives to get on board.
He thinks that his Twitter basically alleviates him of the necessity of learning things, and so he can just tweet things out and that will fix it.
That is not correct.
Today he's supposed to have a bunch of senators to the White House where he's going to talk to them about these things.
We'll see if that moves the ball at all, but unless he is actually actively going to use the power that he has to threaten senators who refuse to go along with him, then he's not doing anything.
He's not.
As I said yesterday, the only power that Trump has over these senators, because his approval rating isn't that high, Is that his approval rating among Republicans is still sky-high.
It's still 82% among Republicans.
That means he has the capacity to threaten them with funding cuts.
He has the capacity to threaten them with primary challengers.
He hasn't done any of those things yet.
He's sort of sitting back and letting it happen.
And the reason he's sitting back and letting it happen is because he thinks that, and it's an interesting strategy, he thinks that if he just says that he's going to let Obamacare fail, Then all will be well.
Obamacare will collapse, and then he will be there to pick up the pieces.
People will blame Democrats, not Republicans.
This was his self-stated strategy.
I mean, he said this openly yesterday.
And I think you'll also agree that I've been saying for a long time, let Obamacare fail and then everybody's going to have to come together and fix it and come up with a new plan and a plan that's really good for the people with much lower premiums, much lower costs.
And much better protection.
I've been saying that.
Mike, I think you'll agree for a long time.
Let Obamacare fail.
It'll be a lot easier.
And I think we're probably in that position where we'll just let Obamacare fail.
We're not going to own it.
I'm not going to own it.
I can tell you the Republicans are not going to own it.
We'll let Obamacare fail and then the Democrats are going to come to us and they're going to say, how do we fix it?
How do we fix it?
Or how do we come up with a new plan?
Okay, if this had been his original strategy, then it might have worked.
It's kind of funny to watch Mike Pence in these clips, because he's awkwardly nodding, even though he disagrees.
Like yesterday, Mike Pence said, we still have to repeal.
So he obviously disagrees with President Trump, but that's not his job, right?
His job is to sort of be a yes-man for Trump.
In any case, Trump saying, let Obamacare fail.
This would be a fine strategy if he had come out of the gate and he had said, listen, Obamacare is failing.
We have a problem here.
The only way this is getting solved is with a bipartisan solution.
So, I want to call to the White House Chuck Schumer, and Mitch McConnell, and Nancy Pelosi, and Paul Ryan, and I want to have a series of meetings to set up a framework for a bipartisan fix on Obamacare.
And then, when things collapse, you say, oh, look at those Democrats.
They wouldn't work with us.
There was nothing we could do.
But that's not what Trump actually did, right?
What Trump did is he went to his Republicans and he said, we're going to repeal the whole thing.
That didn't happen.
Then he said we're going to repeal and replace the whole thing.
That isn't happening.
So now it looks like he's just making excuses and blaming Democrats.
That's actually what it looks like, okay?
Again, there's a way to do this where you didn't actually put your handprint on Obamacare.
It's sort of – here's the situation.
The sword is in the stone, right?
The Obamacare sword is in the stone.
That is the status quo.
The sword is in the stone.
There are two things you could do about that.
You could either look at the Democrats and point at them and say, listen, the sword is in the stone.
It shouldn't be in the stone.
You're the ones who put it there.
And I know, and you know, that unless we cooperate, we can't get the sword out of the stone.
Or you could do what Trump and the Republicans did and say, if you elect us, we will remove the sword from the stone.
And then they don't remove the sword from the stone.
And then they say, well, the sword's only in the stone because the Democrats put it there anyway.
Okay, it doesn't have the same appeal.
It doesn't have the same appeal.
And it's a bit of a mistake, because Democrats are jumping on this to say, okay, well, now he acknowledges that Obamacare is failing, he acknowledges that the healthcare system has problems, and he's not going to fix it.
In fact, he's going to make it worse.
So if there were Democrats in there, if you elected us, we'd fix the thing.
Right?
We wouldn't get rid of it.
We'd fix the thing.
This is what Democrats are going to claim.
If you had elected us, if you'd made us, if you'd made Hillary the president, and you'd put us in Congress, we would have fixed the thing.
We would have removed the sword from the stone ourselves.
But, you elected Trump instead, and so he's just going to bitch and complain about what exactly, why the sword is there in the first place.
So Trump is continuing to make this case.
He says, you know, we need to elect more Republicans.
That's the goal here.
Just elect more Republicans.
So the way I look at it is in 18, we're going to have to get some more people elected.
We have to go out and we have to get more people elected that are Republican.
And we have to probably pull in those people, those few people that voted against it.
I don't know.
They're going to have to explain to you why they did, and I'm sure they'll have very fine reasons.
But we have to get more Republicans elected because we have to get it done.
We got it passed in the House.
We would have gotten it very much.
Yeah, you can't use his head as a stand, right?
We don't want that to happen.
You're messing with the wrong guy here.
So we want...
I think we're going to do very well, actually, in 18.
I would be not surprised if something were done long before that.
But in any event, because the margin is so small, the majority margin is so small, we're going to have to go out and get more Republicans elected in 18, and I'll be working very hard for that to happen, okay?
Okay, so this has been the consistent Republican pitch for years, right?
Give us the House, we'll repeal Obamacare.
Give us the Senate, we'll repeal Obamacare.
Give us the presidency, we'll repeal Obamacare.
I don't know how much longer you can run this scam when you run the majority in both houses and you're still not repealing Obamacare and have no intention of passing a full repeal.
Mitch McConnell is supposedly going to put the full repeal to a vote on Monday.
Now, understand something.
Even the full repeal bill, right, the plain, simple repeal bill, doesn't actually repeal Obamacare because the regulations are still included.
It gets rid of the subsidies.
It gets rid of the taxes.
But it doesn't actually get rid of the Obamacare regulations, which are going to require some actual legislation, separate legislation, to get rid of the Obamacare regulations under the reconciliation rules.
Do Republicans need more people in the Senate?
Yes.
And now would be a great time to put more Republicans in the Senate, considering that you've got, I think, ten Democratic seats in red states that are up in this next election cycle.
So if Republicans were to pick up even four of those, then they'd have a really solid majority going into the second half of Trump's term.
But he is going to need to do a better job of making the case.
Again, if you're going to put blame on Democrats, you have to explain why the blame is on Democrats.
Yesterday, Sarah Huckabee Sanders came out and she said that it was Democrats' fault that this had all happened.
It's hard to make the case it's Democrats' fault when you never reached out to Democrats in the first place.
So this is a botch, basically, from the beginning.
And I'm not sure that Trump is going to get out of it that easily.
Now, is it going to hurt Trump?
I don't think it'll hurt Trump.
I think it'll hurt Congress.
So if you look at the generic congressional ballot right now, a generic congressional ballot has Democrats up 10.
That is wipeout territory for Republicans.
If Democrats are up 10, then Republicans, if that were real, right, Democrats would win, probably back the majority in the House.
Unclear what would happen in the Senate, because Senate races are different, but they'd be in good shape to win back the majority in the House.
There's one poll statistic that's great for Trump in this, which says that Are they feeling good right now?
of Republicans who are most enamored of Trump are highly likely to vote, more likely to vote than the 20% of Democrats who really hate Trump, the question is about the lukewarm Republicans.
And what do those lukewarm Republicans think about all this?
Are they feeling good right now?
Are they feeling enthused right now?
So I think what you're going to see is President Trump go back to bashing the media because if legislation is hard, He can do it unilaterally.
He can do it by himself.
The base loves it.
He's going to run against the media in 2018, even if there is nothing else for him to run on.
Meanwhile, the Democrats are going to say, listen, Republicans refuse to even make basic fixes.
There's talk that Trump is going to remove some of the subsidies for the Obamacare exchanges and exacerbate the death spiral in order to bring Democrats to the table.
Democrats are saying, well, that's mean and that's cruel.
So their case is going to be, listen, we all know the thing is flawed, but only one party here wants to actually fix it, and it's not the Republicans, who won't even repeal and replace.
Right?
That's exactly what Bernie Sanders is saying.
He's saying Trump wants millions of people to suffer.
Well, my response is, last I heard, Trump was the President of the United States, the leader of our country.
Republicans control the House and the Senate.
And it is beyond comprehension, all I know it's...
You know, we keep saying this about Donald Trump, but it is beyond comprehension that you have a president who basically wants millions of people to suffer, so he thinks that he can win some political points.
Okay, the problem is that what Trump is saying runs directly into the teeth of this.
Okay, when Trump says, let Obamacare fail, and then the Democrat, and then Sanders goes out and says, when he says let Obamacare fail, what he means is he wants millions of people to die.
Right, when he says that, it has a little more credibility than it normally would, because He's not offering any alternative, right?
And this is the big problem here.
Chuck Schumer says the same thing.
He says, the Republican plan is going to kill the patient.
Obviously, this is exaggerated language.
Obviously, he's wrong.
Obviously, he's lying.
It's amazing.
If the Republicans had just repealed this thing, we'd go back to status quo ante, which was no Obamacare when 92% of Americans had health insurance.
So the fact is that the vast majority of Americans always had health insurance.
It's not that Obamacare saved millions of people or anything, but that's the case Schumer is trying to make.
In fact, passing repeal and having it go into effect two years later is in many ways worse than the Republican health care bill that was just rejected by my Republican colleagues.
It's like if our health care system was a patient who came in and needed some medicine.
The Republicans proposed surgery.
The operation was a failure.
Now Republicans are proposing a second surgery that will surely kill the patient.
Medicine is needed.
Bipartisan medicine.
Not a second surgery.
Okay, and this is why it was important to have a clear strategy going in.
Not because Schumer is anything but a liar.
He is an absolute liar.
As evidenced, Chuck Schumer is a liar.
Yesterday, he tweeted out that anti-Zionism is anti-Semitism.
This is a guy who endorsed, for the leadership of the Democratic National Committee, Keith Ellison, a devotee of Louis Farrakhan, who has said multiple anti-Semitic things in the past and hung out with anti-Semites.
Yeah, Chuck Schumer is a pathological liar on politics, but this is a game, and you have to know how to play the game, and the Democrats right now are outplaying the Republicans, even from a minority position.
It is amazing to watch how incompetent the Republicans are about all of this.
Well, before we get to some more news about Trump, there's some polls out that show how Trump is going to run in 2020.
And we'll talk about that in just a second, but before we get to that, I want to say thank you to our sponsors over at Stamps.com.
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Okay, so with the Democrats claiming that Republicans are waiting in the wings to murder people, you would think that not only would the Republicans be in trouble in Congress, they'd be in trouble in the presidential polls.
And indeed, if you look at the latest poll from Public Policy Polling, yes, it's a Democratic polling firm, and yes, these polls don't mean a lot when they're far out, but it's kind of interesting to look at it.
The fact is that right now, if Trump ran against most of the major Democratic candidates, he would lose.
So, they talked to 836 registered voters.
They said that a majority wished that Obama were president versus Trump, and a minority wished that Hillary were president instead of Trump, although she has worse approval ratings than Trump does.
But, the ones that matter is that against Joe Biden, In a hypothetical matchup against Joe Biden, he would supposedly lose 54 to 39 against Bernie Sanders, 52 to 39.
So before everybody says, well, polling is just terrible.
Polling is always wrong.
The polling at the national polling, the state polling was off in the last election cycle.
The national polling was not off.
The national polling was on.
So before you do the before you say to me, all polls are worthless.
It is not good when the current president of the United States who's in for you know He's only been in for six months.
This should be the high point of his term He's already losing to Joe Biden and Bernie Sanders combined aged 2309 by double digits.
He's apparently Well, losing in a hypothetical contest with Elizabeth Warren.
That one I don't believe.
Cory Booker, 45-40.
Kamala Harris, 41-40.
Now, this should be a tip to Democrats.
This is what's truly fascinating about where the Democrats are.
So I keep talking about the problems Republicans are having, which makes sense, since they're the governing party, and they're not good at it.
But, the problems the Democrats are having are so much worse.
They're so much worse than the problems Republicans are having.
Yes, Republicans are bad at everything except for increasing military spending and tax cuts.
Those are the only two things that Republicans are good at because they have no consensus on anything else, but...
The Democrats have not figured out what exactly their party is about.
Is their party about big government socialism?
The sort of cross-cultural socialism of Joe Biden or Bernie Sanders?
Or are they still so in love with the memory of Barack Obama that they're going to pursue intersectionality down to its root?
Look at those poll numbers again, because this is what's fascinating.
Not that Trump's going to lose to all these people, because, you know, it doesn't mean anything.
We're too far out.
But look at the contrast.
Joe Biden, 54.
Bernie Sanders, 52.
Warren, 49.
Booker, 45.
Kamala Harris, 41.
Which one of those names has been the hottest in the Democratic press lately?
Kamala Harris, right?
The Senator from California.
The first-term Senator from California.
Why?
Not because she's good at her job.
She's unbelievably crappy at her job, just like she was unbelievably crappy at being Attorney General in my state.
But why do they like her?
Because she is a black woman.
And this means that she has checked two of the intersectional boxes.
For people who don't understand what intersectionality is, basically intersectionality suggests that all of American society was designed to privilege white males and that there is an intersectional hierarchy of people who have been victimized by American society Whose credibility cannot be challenged when they talk about how America needs to change.
So, at the very top, you have LGBT folks, and then you have black women, and then you have black men, and then you have Hispanic women, and then you have Hispanic men, and then you have Asians, and then you have Jews, and then finally, way down at the bottom, you have white males, right?
Sorry, Muslims rank somewhere between blacks and LGBT folks.
So, this is the intersectional hierarchy.
The Democrats have decided that it is more important for them to cobble together a coalition of the dispossessed, right, a coalition of the angry, than it is to actually come up with a message that appeals to a broad swath of Americans, which is why they ally with people like Linda Sarsour.
It's why they push people like Keith Ellison.
They've doubled down on identity politics because they believe that the demographics of the country are moving in their direction, and if they continue to alienate white voters, it won't make a difference.
This failed them in 2016 because white voters, white blue-collar voters for the first time voted as a racial bloc, an almost racial bloc.
More white blue-collar voters voted for President Trump than Hispanics voted for Hillary Clinton in the last election cycle.
White voters voted as an intersectional hierarchy group.
In reverse.
But Democrats are still doing this.
And so when you look at the actual... There should be a hint to Democrats, but they're too stupid to take it.
When you look at the candidates who are most likely to succeed against Trump, it is candidates like Joe Biden, a white male, Bernie Sanders, a white male, Elizabeth Warren, a white woman, and then you go down the list and you get to black man Cory Booker and black woman Kamala Harris.
So precisely the opposite of what the intersectional hierarchy would suggest would be a successful strategy.
Is what would work and that's what Democrats are rejecting.
Democrats are much more interested in focusing in full scale on which person can we pick who is going to please minority communities even if they have no broad-based appeal like Kamala Harris.
Pretty amazing stuff, but Democrats are not going to take that advice, and we're going to talk about that in just a second.
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Meanwhile, while all of this is going on, you know, while the Democrats are struggling to come up with an identity, they keep centering around people like Linda Sarsour, okay?
So yesterday, I thought this was just amazing.
The Democrats, the Women's March, we talked about this two days ago.
The Women's March had paid tribute to Assata Shakur, who's an actual terrorist, like an actual terrorist human being, who shot a cop in New Jersey back in the 1970s, in the 79, and then fled to Cuba.
They paid tribute to her, and they did this whole shtick about how they don't believe in her violence, but they appreciate that she fought sexism within the Black Panther Party.
Which is like saying, I don't appreciate what Osama Bin Laden does with American buildings, but I do appreciate him fighting Islamophobia around the world.
No, no, no.
But the Women's March tweeted that out.
So Jake Tapper, who, as I've said before, is one of the few people in the media who I think actually tries to get it right.
And I know there's a lot of disagreement about Jake Tapper on the right.
But I think Jake is actually attempting to be intellectually honest.
Is he still a guy of the left?
I think he is, but he's an intellectually honest fellow, or at least attempts to be.
And so yesterday he tweeted this out.
Shakur is a cop killer fugitive in Cuba.
This ugly sentiments from Linda Sarsour and the Dyke March in Chicago.
You remember that story.
That's where the lesbian march in Chicago banned Jews because they were flying a flag that had a Jewish star on it and it made the intersectional hierarchy uncomfortable.
He said any progressives out there condemning this, which is exactly right.
And then Sarsour called Jake Tapper a member of the alt-right.
She said, So first of all, whenever people say shame, they usually have no real reason to do so.
That goes to Game of Thrones as well.
apologetically Palestinian, pro-immigrant, pro-justice, shame.
Okay, so first of all, whenever people say shame, they usually have no real reason to do so.
That goes to Game of Thrones as well.
In any case, Linda Sarsour says, what about me is so bad?
And Jake Tapper immediately slams her.
He says, your comments about Ayaan Hirsi Ali, for one.
So if you recall, she said about Ayaan Hirsi Ali, who is a Muslim who's no longer Muslim, right?
She's a heretic under Muslim law.
She was generally mutilated by Islamists, and then they attempted to force her into a child marriage.
She fled, she ended up in Denmark, and now she lives in the United States.
I believe that she's married to Niall Ferguson, the historian from Harvard.
And Linda Sarsour had said that she wished she could remove Ayaan Hirsi Ali's vagina.
So Jake Tapper is calling her out on that.
And there's a whole history.
I mean, we've talked about Linda Sarsour before.
Linda Sarsour is a radical.
She is somebody who has spoken highly of terrorists and terrorist groups before.
She's really a devastatingly bad human being.
And Jake Tapper took her to the woodshed here.
When even Jake Tapper is taking you to the woodshed because you're so extreme, that should say something to the Democratic Party.
But it doesn't, because the Democratic Party is so ensconced in its own belief That all that matters is building a coalition to take down Western civilization that they don't care who they include in that coalition.
From Linda Sarsour to Assata Shakur, none of it matters.
You know, cop killers, terrorist apologists, none of it, none of it matters.
So the Democrats are still having this trouble, which means the only unity they have is, again, as always, being anti-Republican.
So, last night they went nuts because apparently President Trump had an undisclosed meeting with Vladimir Putin.
There was a big meeting over at the G20.
there's a big dinner that was held by Angela Merkel over at the G20 and And apparently during the dinner, President Trump, who was not seated next to Vladimir Putin, but Melania was, he got up and he walked away from where he was sitting.
He walked around to Vladimir Putin, pulled up a chair, and proceeded to have a full hour conversation with no other American official present.
So he didn't bring Rex Tillerson.
He didn't bring a Russian translator.
The only person who was there was Putin's translator, which is not great because you never know if Putin's translator is telling Trump lies, right?
Putin could be saying, look at this American schmuck.
And then the translator says, he says you're a wonderful guy.
That's exactly what could be happening.
Plus, Putin is old KGB.
If you are in Trump's cabinet, the last thing you want is a meeting where you don't have anyone in there who's able to at least monitor what's being said.
We've had this problem before.
Last time Trump was in a room alone with Russians.
He ended up spilling Israeli national security information that put in danger an Israeli spy who was trying to spy on ISIS.
So, you have this meeting, and the media goes crazy.
They say, oh, this is obviously something nefarious going on.
Now, listen, do I think that when you have a meeting that's an hour long at one of these things that we should know what's happening?
Yes, because I am for full-scale transparency from any president, and I don't think that that's really appropriate.
I do want to know from the media, and I just don't know the answer to this.
Is it that Trump has lots of meetings with Russians and then doesn't disclose it?
Or is it that Trump has lots of meetings with everyone and then doesn't disclose it?
I mean, I've seen reports that he had meetings with various other governmental actors over the last six months, and then it was reported like four days later, but no one cared because it wasn't Russia.
So, it's hard to tell how much of this is real and how much of this is just the media thinking that every time Trump eats something with Russian dressing on it, he's spying with Vladimir Putin.
In any case, Putin continues to speak highly of Trump.
Here's what Vladimir Putin had to say about him.
You met with Donald Trump recently, this guy questioning Putin.
Could be interesting to hear your impression of him as a person.
I did not expect this, and I believe it is very important for a person who has a public profile, a politician.
He has the ability to listen.
At least this is what our conversation was like.
I do not know what he's like with other people he talks to, but during our conversation, I listened to him with attention as well.
When he set out his ideas and proposals on developing cooperation, and he did the same.
You know, this is something that does not happen all the time.
For a person who works with people who is involved in politics, I reiterate, this is a vitally important ability to be able to listen and to respond and communicate promptly.
You have substantial experience, I believe.
There are some people who only hear themselves.
Whatever you tell them, it is like a buzz in the background for them.
You're talking to them, but they're not listening at all.
The current U.S.
president is different.
He responds to what his interlocutor says, to the arguments, and responds to them.
Okay, so in other words, Putin is trying to butter up Trump.
That's the way that you do it.
This is why you don't want to have these meetings alone.
Trump tweeted out that the media is making a big deal out of all of this, and I tend to believe that Trump is correct about this.
He says, fake news story of secret dinner with Putin is sick.
In quotation marks.
I mean, he might be right about this, but he really needs to learn how to use scare quotes.
That's not how they work.
Well, to be fair, the press wasn't saying that the meeting itself, this dinner, was secret.
They were saying that he never disclosed that he talked with Putin for an hour.
The White House released a statement saying it was a brief meet-and-greet.
People in the room say it was an hour.
So there's still details to come out, but the media is going to continue jumping all over the Russia thing and playing up every little thing, which means that Trump should be careful here, because, you know, if you want to win, then you might want to just be careful about how you conduct yourself.
There's no reason to give the other side this much material on a day-in, day-out basis.
Final conclusion here with regard to Obamacare and where it is going.
I don't think that what happened with Obamacare is going to damage Trump.
It is very obvious that the Republican press are not interested in going after Trump in any way because the constituency for Republicans is still much more enamored of Trump.
Then with Republican Congress people.
Republican Congress people are still much more unpopular than Trump, so you're seeing a motivated attempt by the media on the right to guard Trump from the blowback.
That means that Trump has the power to push something through.
He doesn't have to.
I think what's more likely to happen is Trump is likely to continue shilly-shallying around, not really taking a solid position on Obamacare.
Nothing gets passed, Republicans get blamed in the Congress, Trump separates himself off, and then he works with Democrats.
I think that is the most likely thing, but you never know, right?
It's all unpredictable.
I do not know that his strategy of let it all fail and then Republicans won't pay for it is going to work.
However, okay.
We're gonna get some things I like and some things I hate.
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So Martin Landau died this week, which is really sad.
Martin Landau is a really charming actor.
For some reason, I always used to get him mixed up with Leonard Nimoy, but they're very different actors.
Martin Landau is a much more versatile actor than Leonard Nimoy.
He was in a lot of stuff.
The thing that I grew up with him in was Mission Impossible.
So when I was growing up, my parents used to rent for us old TV shows.
They didn't actually let us watch a lot of the current TV because it was too sexualized.
So they would go out and they'd rent old episodes of The Waltons.
We'd go down to Eddie Brandt's Saturday Matinee, which is the greatest video store in human history.
We'd go over there and we would get old, they had like full seasons of The Waltons and Mary Tyler Moore and The Dick Van Dyke Show.
So we grew up on all that TV.
And one of the shows that I used to watch, they used to also show reruns of it, so I used to get up and watch them, was Mission Impossible, the original Mission Impossible, which is much better than the movies.
So a lot of people like the movies.
The movies have nothing to do with Mission Impossible, basically.
They kept the name, and then they have nothing.
Like, the entire premise of Mission Impossible was all these clever plots.
And most Mission Impossible now is Tom Cruise, which is Jack Reacher, which is Top Gun, which is, you know, it's Tom Cruise just being an action star and running around, leaping off buildings.
That was never the Mission Impossible thing.
The Mission Impossible thing was always, you have a team that's working, and then very little of the jumping off buildings action sequences.
It was much more driven by, can they create a plot to prevent something bad from happening?
Here is the original trailer music from Mission Impossible.
You'll see Martin Landau.
His shtick was that he was always dressing up as somebody.
So every episode, he'd put on a wig or he'd put on, like, a fake nose, and then he would just take it off and be like, ooh, Martin Landau is dressed up as something.
It's fantastic.
So here is the original Mission Impossible.
Mission Impossible.
Mission Impossible.
We'll see you next time.
There's Martin Landau right there, taking off on the big bass, right?
So... Peter Graves was the original.
Remember, he stars in the movie, too.
There's Martin Landau.
Beautiful Barbara Bain.
Greg Morris.
It's a great show, so if you can go watch some of the old episodes.
It's really, really good.
He also had a long career in Hollywood.
He did a lot of pretty good movies.
He made his first major film appearance, you'll remember, in North by Northwest, who was the right-hand man of James Mason, who was the major criminal in that.
He was also in Cleopatra and The Greatest Story Ever Told.
And you'll remember that he was also in Rounders, right?
So if you've seen Rounders, He's great in Rounders.
He's the old law professor who basically tells Matt Damon to pursue his dream of being a loser gambler.
So he's great in that.
And in his later days, he got less productive, obviously, but he does have a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame.
Very, very good actor, and sad to see him go.
Okay, so, other things that I like.
So, this was just hilarious.
Yesterday, Chris Christie, the rotund governor of New Jersey, who everyone hates at this point, went to a Mets game.
And if you're Chris Christie, probably the worst thing you could do right now is go into a highly public setting, and a ball is hit, and you'll see Chris Christie catch it, and watch what the crowd does.
And a souvenir for Chris Christie.
Are you kidding me?
How about that?
You just noticed him.
Doesn't matter.
Still gets booed.
Because he's Chris Christie.
Which is just epic.
So, you gotta love that about the Mets crowd.
I am not the biggest fan of New Yorkers as a general matter, but that is pretty spectacular.
So well done New York Mets fans.
Kinda love it.
it.
Doesn't matter.
Still gets booed because he's Chris Christie, which is just epic.
So you got to love that about the Mets crowd.
I am not the biggest fan of New Yorkers as a general matter, but that is pretty spectacular.
So well done, New York Mets fans.
Kind of love it.
Okay, time for a couple of things that I hate.
Music. .
So the first thing that I hate is that late on Monday, the Trump administration certified to Congress that Iran has been meeting its necessary requirements under the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action.
This would be Obama's Iran deal.
As you recall, President Trump promised that day one he was going to pull out of the Iran deal.
On the very first day, he was going to pull out of it.
It is still operative, and he has now twice certified that Iran is in compliance.
The problem with that is that the Iran deal specifically allows them to continue operating without sanctions.
It continues to allow them to develop their centrifuges at a certain rate.
It requires them supposedly to reduce the number of functional centrifuges used to enrich uranium and forfeit uranium stockpiles.
But they say that Iran is violating the spirit of the agreement, but they're not violating the text of the agreement.
And then you have the State Department saying that Iran remains one of the most dangerous threats to U.S.
interests.
Okay, if that's the case, then just reject the stupid deal.
Just reject the stupid deal.
Last April, Trump was slamming the Obama deal.
That's disastrous.
He said in front of AIPAC that it was catastrophic.
Hey, either kill the deal or don't kill the deal, but this routine where you split the baby is getting very irritating and repeatedly, repeatedly, you get this routine from the Trump administration where they say that they are going to stand by some conservative position and they don't do it.
So the Trump administration just brought in 15—they just issued 15,000 new travel visas for people who are coming into work, for foreigners.
They have now announced—the Trump administration has also announced, aside from keeping the Iran deal, deal.
There are a couple of other things that are skipping, that are missing here, that they've done in the last couple of days that are not good.
The Cuba policy, for example.
They said that they were going to reject Obama's Cuba policy.
They've kept most of Obama's Cuba policy in place.
Again, don't pee on our leg and tell us it's raining.
Okay, if you don't actually want to do anything about something, don't promise you're going to do it.
Don't make promises you can't fulfill, especially when your entire schtick is, politicians are all dirty, politicians are all liars, I'm not one of them.
Okay, other things that I hate.
Dana Rohrbacher, who's a congressman out here in California.
I didn't know whether to put this in things I like or things I hate just because it's so absurd.
Dana Rohrbacher, who I know and Dana is a nice guy.
I've spoken at one of his events.
He has like a drinking beer St.
Paddy's Day event.
And Dana Rohrbacher was questioning someone from NASA yesterday and this is a thing that actually happened in America in the Congress.
The most important thing was if Mars Can I ask permission for one minute for this question?
And that is, you have indicated that Mars was totally different thousands of years ago.
Is it possible that there was a civilization on Mars thousands of years ago?
So the evidence is that Mars was different billions of years ago, not thousands of years ago.
And there is no evidence that I'm aware of.
Would you rule that out?
that see there's some people well anyway i would i would say that is extremely unlikely so that is the thing that happened A sitting congressperson in the United States suggested that there was a civilization on Mars thousands of years ago because they'd said that there was changes on the surface of Mars billions of years ago.
So good job, Dana Rohrabacher.
He's also known affectionately as Putin's congressperson.
He's been very, very warm for Vladimir Putin.
But this is, I think that You may want to think about qualification if you're worrying about whether or not there is civilization on Mars.
If there is, can we send Congress there?
Okay, so other things that I hate.
So yesterday, Tucker Carlson, who I thought he had a debate with Max Boot, which I refrained from commenting on because I just didn't see the point.
I thought it was quite an awful exchange with Max Boot actually.
I thought that Max Boot was largely correct.
I thought Tucker was wildly disingenuous in the interview.
I think Tucker's really good at his job.
I think he's really talented.
But I think that he's demagogic in his approach in many of these cases.
He laughs off any legit criticism of him.
He uses, he insults the person that he's talking to as a preemptory measure.
And then he And then he starts doing the hysterical laugh at the end of his show if he doesn't want to talk about something.
Again, he has such talent.
I wish that he would put it to better use than saying that Russia is not in the top five threats against the United States in an attempt to kind of mimic Papu-Canonism.
Now, moving further and further to the paleo-con right— He had on Max Blumenthal the other night.
Max Blumenthal is legitimately one of the scummier people in American politics.
I mean, just a pig.
Somebody who used to attack Andrew Breitbart regularly, lie about him.
Max Blumenthal is a self-hating Jew.
He's an ethnic Jew, but he has absolutely nothing to do with Judaism.
He wrote a book called Goliath that's been widely panned, in which he repeatedly compares Israel to the Nazis, which is about the most insulting thing that you can do to both Israel and Jews generally.
He is a pig.
Just a disgusting, disgusting, radical human being.
And Tucker has him on the show.
Why does he have Max Blumenthal on the show?
Because Max Blumenthal agrees there's nothing to this Trump-Russia stuff.
So it's very important that you give a platform to one of the worst people on planet Earth in order so that he can talk about it.
I thought the Democrats should have responded with a big narrative against permanent war and for economic equality.
Instead, they're pushing Russia's scandal-mongering non-stop.
It's subsumed all of the progressive grassroots movements I believed in, and it's basically buried the left.
In a militaristic narrative that ambitious figures like Jamie Raskin are advancing.
Mark my words Tucker, when Trump is gone, this narrative, this Russia hysteria will be repurposed by the political establishment to attack the left and anyone on the left.
Bernie Sanders like politician who steps out of line on the issues of permanent war.
Or, uh, corporate free trade, things like that, will be painted as Russia puppets.
So this is very dangerous, and people who are progressive, who are falling into it, need to know what the long-term consequences of this cynical narrative are.
It seems virtually everyone on the left in Washington, with some exceptions, you're one, I know a couple others, but I know people who I think of as reasonable, I don't agree with them, but who seem to really believe that Vladimir Putin was in control of the last election.
Do you think they believe it?
I don't know.
I think there's... I can't speak for other people.
I'm not a mind reader.
But there's definitely a political class in Washington that sees Russia's scandal mongering as a silver bullet to take out Trump.
And then you have the Democrats who are basically... In other words, Tucker is so eager to get somebody who is purportedly of the left, not purportedly, of the hard left.
to talk about why the Trump-Russia stuff isn't a thing that he brings on somebody like Max Blumenthal.
This is the same thing as when Sean has on Julian Assange to talk about how Trump-Russia isn't a thing and then touts him as a hero.
The right is making all sorts of new friends.
If your allegiance to a particular political figure is forcing you into alignment with people like Max Blumenthal and Julian Assange and you are now welcoming them as friends and treating them with anything but disdain, let me recommend to you that you've made some mistakes in your life.
You shouldn't be part of a movement that is now making common cause with people like Julian Assange, who's put American lives in danger, or Max Blumenthal, one of the scummiest people on earth.
It's amazing.
I mean, remember, Sidney Blumenthal was Hillary Clinton's hatchet man.
So we're now at the point, politics is so topsy-turvy and so circular, that at this point, Sidney Blumenthal, who used Max Blumenthal as an advisor on Israel to Hillary Clinton, is appearing on Tucker Carlson's show to defend Donald Trump because Tucker Carlson wants to defend Trump.
I mean, that's how crazy all of this has gotten.
The rules have changed and there are no rules anymore.
It's catch-as-catch-can, but people with principles should think twice before they start making way for people like Max Blumenthal just because he's saying some things you'll like.
Really, really quite disgusting.
Okay, so we'll be back here tomorrow with all of the latest.
I'm Ben Shapiro.
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