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Jan. 9, 2020 - The Ben Shapiro Show
58:35
The Revisionist History Begins | Ep. 928
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As it becomes clear Iran backed away from conflict, the media seek a new spin.
Joy Behar and the crowd at The View discover they actually like neo-Nazi Richard Spencer, and Mitch McConnell vows not to take advice from Nancy Pelosi.
I'm Ben Shapiro.
This is The Ben Shapiro Show.
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Well, the last 72 hours, literally the last week, has been a major win for the Trump administration.
Why?
Because as I have been stating, ever since Soleimani was killed, the Trump administration has re-established a long forgotten doctrine known as deterrence.
And it's amazing to watch people in the media, all of the talking heads, all of the wonks, tell you that deterrence is something that doesn't exist, could never have existed with Iran.
All of that predicated on their worship for Barack Obama, who was a magical, magical man.
In their view, the way this worked is that President Barack Obama had done something magical.
He had basically converted Iran into Sweden.
All he had to do was sign a few checks to the mullahs, and then they would abandon their nuclear program, not just for the 10 years specified by contract, but for all time.
And as for the terrorism and the ballistic missile testing and the development of terrorist groups all around the region and the interference in Iraq and Lebanon and Syria and Saudi Arabia and Yemen, all of that, well, we would just ignore that because Barack Obama had done something magical.
And Barack Obama's narrative had always been, They either sign a check to the Mullahs or, alternatively, that you go to war with them.
Those were the only two alternatives.
There was no third alternative.
And then Donald Trump came along and he said, you know what?
There's this thing that we used to do here.
It's called deterrence.
Deterrence.
And this works for Trump.
Trump doesn't have to understand the totality of deterrence theory because the theory is really quite simple.
And Trump gets it because he gets it in most areas of his own life, which is you threaten somebody with something worse than they are threatening you with, right?
They threaten you that they are going to bring a knife, you threaten to bring a gun, right?
It's the Chicago way.
Trump at least gets that much.
And so when it came to Soleimani, basically the Iranians kept upping the ante, upping the ante, and Trump kept ignoring it because he did not want a conflict in the Middle East.
He's the only president of my lifetime who has not been in an overt shooting war in the Middle East.
And the president of the United States finally had had enough and he said, okay, you tried to burn our embassy.
We're going to take out your big bad terrorists, Soleimani, Qasem Soleimani.
And the media said, oh, well, war is now inevitable.
Now we're going to have World War Three.
And Trump was like, well, not really.
Not so much.
This is called deterrence.
The Iranians are now on notice that there are such things as lines.
And if you cross those lines, there will be consequences.
And this gave the lie to the media's coverage of Barack Obama.
Obama was exposed, but he'd been exposed already.
I mean, the Iranians were getting more and more militant.
Even in the aftermath of the nuclear deal, the nuclear deal was signed in 2013.
The nominee for U.S.
CENTCOM by the Obama administration said in March 2016 that the Iranians had actually become more aggressive in the wake of the Iran nuclear deal because they had more money to play with and they knew that the only thing the West cared about was the nuclear weapons development, not the expansion of terrorism and terror growth around the region.
So the media had Barack Obama had already been exposed by events, but the media had not been exposed.
The media could continue to propagate the lies that have been fed to them by Ben Rose, who then went out and bragged about how he lied to the media and how they had formed an echo chamber on his behalf.
Well, now that Donald Trump has shown over the last 72 hours That the laws of political gravity did not cease to apply with Barack Obama.
That there is such a thing in foreign relations as actual deterrence.
The media have been completely and utterly exposed for the fools that they are, and what this has created is a need for the media to now defend their flank.
The media now need to come up with an alternative explanation for how things just went so right.
For Donald Trump, that Soleimani is dead, and the Iranians were so cowed that you are seeing the PMF, the terror group that was responsible for the attempted burning of the U.S.
Embassy in Baghdad, basically backing off.
There are open calls by people like Muqtada al-Sadr, who is the leader of Shia Muslims in Iraq.
There are calls by him for the PMF to disband as a functioning entity.
I mean, all of that is a result of Donald Trump using some deterrence.
And so the media have to come up with an alternative explanation.
And as we'll see, their alternative explanation is that Donald Trump continues to be a nut and a very stupid nut, and that we ought to trust the Ayatollahs, and we ought to trust Barack Obama, and we ought to trust them.
And so what they're doing now is they're talking up the possibility of war, even though it is absolutely clear at this point that Iran has backed away from the war.
Again, there was another report today that the Iranians had basically warned the Iraqis.
The administration's denying this, as they should.
I mean, they should deny this because the fact is that If the Iranians were trying to save face, then suggesting to the world that the Iranians called up the United States and said, guys, get your guys out of there because we just need to save face here.
If the U.S.
were to spill that on the world stage, then that would necessitate more Iranian action, presumably.
So the U.S.
basically saying, yeah, no, they meant to harm us.
They just weren't able to do so.
It's a better line than, yeah, the Iranians completely chickened out and they called us and told us to get our guys out of the way so that they could save a little bit of face.
That's what Mike Pence was saying today, for example, that this was a strike that was meant to kill and we just had this great early warning system.
Count me a little skeptical on that point, but the media continue to play up the possibility of war because they just can't accept the fact that Iran has always been violent, that the possibility of war that existed six months ago, existed three years ago, existed eight years ago, existed 20 years ago, and will continue to exist years from now, but that it has not been heightened by the United States taking a hardline position.
In fact, it has been decreased in terms of intensity and possibility of scope.
By the fact that they've been deterred from future action.
Like, Iran hasn't changed its regional orientation.
And the United States has not changed its regional orientation.
The difference is that Iran knows it can't get away with as much, and so they are going to scale back some of their more overt terror activity.
Doesn't mean the problem is solved.
It does mean that Donald Trump has backed them off of a lot of the activities that they were pursuing that were getting more and more overtly aggressive.
Still, the media are going to play up the possibility that we're still at war.
Right now, we are still in danger of launching into an immediate full-scale war.
And so you get articles like this from the Associated Press.
The U.S.
and Iran step back from the brink of possible war on Wednesday as President Donald Trump signaled he would not retaliate militarily for Iran's missile strikes on Iraqi bases housing U.S.
troops.
No one was harmed in the strikes, but the U.S.
forces in the region remained on high alert.
Speaking from the White House, Trump seemed intent on de-escalating the crisis, which spiraled after he authorized the targeted killing last week of Iran's top general, Qasem Soleimani.
Did it spiral after that or was it, you know, like the burning of the embassy, the shooting down of the American drone, the destruction of Saudi oil facilities, the bombing of ships in the Strait of Hormuz?
According to the media, it's always about Trump because the world began- Trump is like gods to these people.
Or the devil.
The world began spinning as soon as he spake the words.
We'll get to more of the media's malfeasance on all of this momentarily.
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So, the AP is already talking up the possibility of further wide-scale conflict, which is really not in the offing.
It will be low-level conflict, as it was before.
According to the AP, though, despite such conciliatory talk, the region remained on edge.
American troops, including a quick reaction force dispatched over the weekend, were on high alert.
Well, that makes sense.
I mean, you're going to want to continue to be on high alert, but the idea that we're going to full-scale war now is, I think, Pretty much off the table since the Iranians really backed down.
What's hilarious, and we'll get to the media response in a second, is that the House Democrats, in an attempt to backfill a hole that they dug for themselves, right?
We were in the middle of World War III, according to the Democrats.
Trump had brought us to the brink of World War III.
Everyone was going to go die.
Stockpile food.
Get your food, get your water, make sure you got your water purification tablets.
I mean, it was just going to be a mess.
Zombies in the streets, chaos everywhere, dogs and cats sleeping together.
It was going to be insane.
This was the Democratic narrative.
And then none of that happened.
Iran just backed down, which is what smaller countries do when faced with the greatest military fighting force in the history of the world, as it turns out.
So now Nancy Pelosi and the members of the House are trying to backfill that and make Trump look like a bad guy, even though Trump won this round.
He did.
The United States won this round.
So, what are House Democrats doing?
Well now, House Democrats emerged yesterday from a classified briefing on Wednesday, deeply skeptical of President Donald Trump's decision to order the killing of a top Iranian leader, and unconvinced he posed an imminent threat to the United States.
Okay, first of all, the definition of imminent threat I think needs to be assessed here.
So what you're seeing in the media is imminent threat means we had a very specific knowledge of the specific plan that the specific terrorist was engaged in and thus we had to kill him because tomorrow he was going to do something.
The Trump administration used the word imminent in sort of a broader sense.
I think the sense that most of us use imminent when we talk about terrorism.
In other words, were there working plans in place to harm America and her interests?
When it comes to Soleimani, that was basically his day job.
This is like asking, as Noah Rothman at Commentary Magazine put it, whether at Dunkin' Donuts they're preparing to make donuts that day.
That's what Soleimani did for a living.
Soleimani's job was to plan terror attacks.
That's why Mike Pompeo, the Secretary of State, when asked about imminence, he said, well, I mean, last week they burned our embassy, and the week before that they were shooting rockets at our bases, so it seems like a pretty good bet that he was not going to suddenly turn into a monk and go live at a monastery.
Well heard the congressman from Texas, who in fact has been rather Trump skeptical.
He came out, he said, I think that an attack from Soleimani was imminent because that's literally what the man did.
Are you convinced that an attack from Soleimani was imminent against Americans?
I do.
You had some very sophisticated consumers of intelligence that talked about how credible this information was.
There was a level of specificity.
But I could go even further beyond this immediate threat.
Qasem Soleimani has been a threat, an acute threat to the United States for a very long time.
And taking him off the battlefield has had a significant impact.
It showed the Iranian regime that there's going to be consequences to their What exactly was Osama Bin Laden's imminent threat when he was killed?
The answer is probably not much because he was essentially isolated in his compound in Pakistan.
Does that mean it was illegal for the United States to kill him?
Absolutely not.
Yet House Democrats are now trying to complain that it was illegal.
What's the purpose of this?
Seriously, what's the purpose?
The same House Democrats who cheered when Barack Obama violated the War Powers Resolution.
They cheered.
He literally started a war in Libya and then just stayed there.
He killed Muammar Gaddafi for no apparent reason.
Truly, no apparent reason other than his belief that Qaddafi was engaged in human rights violations.
But Qaddafi at that point was funneling us information.
Qaddafi had been neutralized as a threat to the West, and the war in Libya ended with vast swathes of refugees entering Europe.
It ended with the burning of the American embassy in Benghazi.
It ended with the provisional government of Libya having to try to govern with no available forces from boats offshore.
It was a complete disaster, the war in Libya.
The Obama administration pushed it anyway to the cheers of Nancy Pelosi.
Now Nancy Pelosi is like, well, we need to restrict the president's ability to strike at Iran.
Now, listen, on a principled level, should the president of the United States have the kind of war-making authority that he has been granted over the last several decades?
The answer is no.
The Constitution of the United States declares that Congress should have the authority to declare war.
The president of the United States must have the ability to respond quickly to threats because you don't have time to just get a session of Congress together when there's a terrorist attacking you to kill a terrorist, for example.
So even under the most, I think, strict circumstances, it would be difficult to argue that it's unconstitutional for Trump to shoot a missile at Soleimani.
But For broader sort of engagements, the idea that you need congressional approval makes a lot of sense.
I mean, the fact is that the Congress of the United States has basically been rendered a vestigial organ when it comes to the declaration of war.
In the 1970s, I think it was 1973, the War Powers Resolution was brought to the fore that suggests that the President of the United States can get involved in foreign wars, basically for a period of, I believe, 60 days under the War Powers Act.
And then he has to go to Congress for reauthorization.
It has basically been ignored ever since.
The United States has not had a single declared war, formally declared war since World War II.
The Vietnam War was not a declared war.
The Gulf War was not a declared war.
Gulf War II was not a declared war.
There was an authorization for use of military force that was passed by Congress in the aftermath of September 11th.
The interpretation of that document has been widely variant.
Did it cover Iraq?
Unclear.
Did it cover activities outside the Afghanistan sphere?
Probably.
How far did it go?
Not clear.
Does it cover what's going on right now in Iraq or Iran?
You know, 20 years later?
Unclear.
So the idea that Congress should seize back some of its war-making authority under the Constitution, I actually am very much in favor of, simply because I think that when a Democrat is in power, it would be better if Congress were able to check the power of any president.
I'm not in favor of the broad expansion of executive authority, but what I'm saying here is that the House Democrats picked a very weird hill to die on, that now all of a sudden it's, well, Trump has challenged congressional authority.
By any standard, what Trump did to Soleimani is so much less than anything that Barack Obama did for eight years, droning America.
Anwar al-Awlaki, who was a terrorist, was also an American citizen.
Obama droned him.
And you'll remember that Rand Paul got up and did a filibuster over that drone attack, saying, well, that guy's still an American citizen.
You don't just get to drone him.
They can think that Rand Paul is wrong, but the suggestion that Trump droning an Iranian terrorist who was in Iraq planning terror attacks.
That's why he was there.
I mean, he was literally meeting with the head of the PMF.
They were in the same car.
That's why they're both dead today.
The idea that that is a violation of presidential authority, but Barack Obama for eight long years was not violating executive authority in launching undeclared wars in Libya, a full-scale drone war across Africa and the Middle East.
You're gonna have to explain that one to me, Democrats.
Democrats don't have an explanation.
It really is not driven by any real principle.
All this is driven by is anger that President Trump showed them up because that's all that happened here.
Remember, they didn't try to press this resolution in the aftermath of Trump firing a missile into Syria after Syria gassed some of its own citizens again.
They didn't try anything like this.
Why?
Because Obama had done exactly the same thing with Syria except less.
Here, the problem was that Trump humiliated Obama, he humiliated the Democrats, and now they're going to seize back congressional authority, supposedly, under the auspices that Soleimani was not an imminent threat.
You really are going to have to explain why it was illegal or bad to kill Soleimani.
You're really going to need to explain that before you start discussing how Trump did a very bad thing.
And this is why you're going to hear in a moment, I'm going to distinguish between some of the right-wing conservative opposition to executive authority coming from people like Mike Lee, and to a certain extent Rand Paul, and the left wing.
anger at executive authority, which is coming purely from a place of, we hate Donald Trump, we don't like that he humiliated Barack Obama, and now we are going to check the executive authority.
We'll get to all of that in just one second.
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Okay, so Nancy Pelosi on Wednesday announced that the House would vote on Thursday to limit Trump's war-making powers, likely presenting a united democratic front against the administration's recent moves against Iran.
So they are now opposing the moves that box in Iran.
This is now the formal democratic position, not that they have a general objection, the way that Mike Lee does, to executive authority, but that they have a specific objection to what Trump just did in Iran, which is insane because this is the most successful foreign policy move since really Maybe the end of the Reagan administration, but certainly since since Gulf War one, the bottom line to this is that Iran was backed off of its aggression.
They were backed off and they lost their top commander.
They lost their top terror commander, who was by all accounts the most effective person in In Iran.
And the Democrats are angry about it.
They're upset about it.
Why?
Again, not because they believe that the congressional authority has been violated.
Barack Obama did it routinely.
The reason they're upset is because Donald Trump gave the lie to the Obama administration's lie, and now they've been exposed.
So here's Nancy Pelosi saying, we're going to vote on a War Powers resolution.
Speaker of the House, Nancy Pelosi, putting out a statement moments ago saying that a War Powers Resolution will be voted on in the House tomorrow.
A War Powers Resolution, she says, to, quote, limit the President's military actions regarding Iran.
And this legislation is going to the Rules Committee and, she says, will be voted on tomorrow in the House.
Okay, I know that we're all ignoring the fact that the Iranians tried to burn our embassy in Baghdad last week, but imagine the kind of insanity it takes to hate Trump so much that the Iranians burn an American embassy?
And your first move is we've got to limit the president from retaliating.
We have to limit the president from responding.
Again, not coming from a place of principled opposition to executive use of commander-in-chief power, but coming from we just don't like that Trump has exposed our entire ideology on foreign policy.
And the way Politico reports this is just ridiculous.
Lawmakers from across the House Democratic Caucus left a closed-door meeting with top Trump administration officials in a secure room in the Capitol on Wednesday frustrated If not outright angry at what they described as a vague justification for last week's deadly drone strike that killed Iranian Major General Qasem Soleimani shortly after he arrived in Baghdad.
So they're angry that we killed Soleimani?
They're angry at the justification, which is that he was involved in the burning of the United States Embassy last week?
This is what they are angry at?
Seriously?
Pramila Jayapal, Democrat of Washington and co-chair of the Congressional Progressive Caucus, which is, she's kind of an adjunct member of the squad.
She says, there was no raw evidence presented that this was an imminent threat.
Okay, so he's only a non-imminent threat, meaning that, I guess two weeks from now, he was going to murder Americans, but we didn't know if he was going to murder Americans, like specifically tomorrow.
Here is Jayapal announcing that Trump recklessly assassinated Soleimani.
I mean, this is doing the PR work of the Iranians.
This is the result of reckless actions by President Trump of military brinksmanship.
President Trump recklessly assassinated Qasem Soleimani.
He had no evidence of an imminent threat or attack.
And we say that coming from a classified briefing where, again, there was no raw evidence presented that there was an imminent threat.
Okay, again, I'm gonna need to know whether any of these Democrats asked for the raw classified information that led to the death of Anwar al-Awlaki.
What was the imminent threat from Anwar al-Awlaki?
What was the imminent threat from Osama bin Laden for that matter?
It turns out that killing terrorists is authorized under the Authorization to Use Military Force.
That is pretty much the only thing that is authorized under the AUMF that was passed in the aftermath of 9-11.
And what this really is about is Democrats being upset that Donald Trump did a thing that they don't like, that exposed their entire ideology.
That's why you have Jerry Connolly out there going, this briefing was entirely unconvincing.
Okay, like, again, where were you when Barack Obama was declaring war in Libya without any congressional authorization, then ignoring congressional blowback?
My reaction to this briefing was it was sophomoric and utterly unconvincing.
And I believe more than ever, the Congress needs to act to protect the constitutional provisions about war and peace.
There was no rationale that could pass a graduate school thesis test.
I was, well, utterly unpersuaded about any evidence about the imminence of a threat that was new or compelling.
Okay, well, even if that had been presented, do you really think the Democrats would be out there today saying, well, I guess that was new and compelling.
I guess that everything is fine now.
Do you really think that that's the case?
Because I really don't think that that is the case.
Mitch McConnell, for his part, was slamming Nancy Pelosi over all of this.
And he's exactly right to do so.
It's troubled me that Speaker Pelosi responded to the earliest reports yesterday by leaping to blame, quote, needless provocations by our administration.
In other words, blaming the United States.
So let's be clear, we can and should debate how to responsibly respond to Iranian threats, but the notion, the notion that our administration is to blame for Iranian aggression Mr. President, that's nonsense.
Utter nonsense.
Well, of course it is nonsense.
And again, the fact that Democrats are so opposed to what happened with Iran has little to do with the actual action with regard to Iran and much more to do with protect the precious, as always, Barack Obama.
Now, I will say there is such a thing as principled opposition to what just happened in Iran.
It comes from two places.
One is an actual anti-interventionist stance, right?
An actual isolationist stance that's held by senators like Rand Paul.
And then there's the sort of constitutional perspective, which is that the president of the United States of either party should not have the kind of authority that is routinely used by presidents of both parties.
That's sort of the position of Mike Lee from Utah.
Mike Lee was fulminating after the briefing the way the Democrats were, too, saying that he was going to support the Democrats' War Powers Resolution.
The only difference is I think that Mike Lee would support it whether it's against a Republican or a Democrat.
I think the Democrats would only support this against a Republican.
These powers are not ours.
They don't belong to any of us.
But when we allow them to be exercised through the wrong branches of government, with the wrong process, when you don't have debate and discussion, you don't allow the process itself to correct itself for the American people who will be most affected by these decisions to weigh in.
That was insulting.
That was demeaning to the process ordained by the Constitution, and I find it completely unacceptable.
On that basis, I've decided to support Senator Kaine's resolution, subject to the minor amendments that he and I discussed earlier today.
Okay, now full disclosure, I'm very friendly with Senator Lee, I think that he's an excellent senator, and so perhaps I'm granting him the benefit of the doubt, but I do know his constitutional perspective well enough to know that this is a consistent constitutional perspective.
That is not true for the Democrats.
And the fact that the Democrats are out there praising Obama for his interventionism, I mean, again, he did start shooting war in Libya, for his intervention in the Middle East without any congressional approval and, in fact, in spite of congressional disdain.
And yet now they are complaining about all of this.
They want to restrict war powers.
That's a cynical play.
The Democrats' behavior here is just amazing.
The fact that Ilhan Omar, an open anti-Semite, who openly sympathizes with the Ayatollahs, I mean, she put out a tweet yesterday about economic sanctions against Iran, suggesting that economic sanctions are a form of warfare, which is weird because she doesn't really care about, in fact, she supports sanctions against the Jews!
Jews.
Ilhan Omar really does not like them Jews.
She's very much in favor of BDS against Israel, a democratic ally of the United States.
But she says economic sanctions against Iran are very bad.
Shocking.
Yesterday, she did this press conference where Ilhan Omar expressed that she had post-traumatic stress disorder thanks to tensions with Iran.
Well, clearly we should formulate our foreign policy based on the fact that Ilhan Omar is having flashbacks or something.
I feel ill a little bit because of everything that is taking place.
And I think every time I hear about, I hear of conversations around war, I find myself being stricken with PTSD.
And I find peace knowing that I serve with great advocates for peace and people who have Sean, Courage Against War.
Are we supposed to take this human being seriously?
This is a human being we are supposed to take seriously?
A person who once wrote letters in support of people who had joined ISIS, asking a judge for more mercy upon them?
This did happen in Minnesota, well reported by the Minneapolis Star Tribune.
She sits on the House Foreign Affairs Committee despite the fact that she says an anti-semitic thing approximately once every 32.9 seconds.
This human being who says, yes, clearly we should formulate our Iran policy around Ilhan Omar because she feels a little, a little ill.
She feels a little ill.
Really?
Okay.
What this is about for people who are not Ilhan Omar, who's just a radical, who is not cold, she's lukewarm at best with regard to America's anti-terror efforts.
Let's just put it that way.
The mainstream democratic players are more focused on how much they hate Trump than they are about the interests of the United States.
And that is pretty obvious.
James Clapper, the former head of the Central Intelligence Agency under Barack Obama, he suggested that, you know, when we were paying off the Iranians, that wasn't us paying off the Iranians, we were just It's giving them the money that they had already earned.
I mean, we were just freeing up their money.
I've heard this talking point from many members of the left, that when the Obama administration shipped pallets of cash to Iran and gave them $150 billion, that that wasn't bad, because after all, that was money that had been earned by the Iranian government.
I mean, that was money that was owed to the Iranian government.
Okay, well, you know what's a thing that we do here in the United States?
Let's say that a drug dealer gets arrested for being a drug dealer.
We seize his assets.
One of the reasons we seize his assets is because we don't want him using those assets for further drug dealing.
The notion that, well, you know, that drug dealer really did earn that money.
I guess we should just sign that check over.
A uniquely foolish position from the Obama administration that was pursued to the hilt and led to the rise in terror.
It is not as though we provided taxpayer money to the Iranians.
What we did was, what the administration did, was unfreeze assets that were actually the Iranians.
The weapons, security assistance funding for weapons systems that we were providing the Iraqis way back when.
So we freed that up.
And the actual intelligence evidence that I saw before I left Money is fungible.
It's fungible.
They didn't have to use that specific earmarked dollar for buying a ballistic missile.
If they used that specific earmarked dollar for something else and then used a different dollar for the ballistic missile, the dollar still went for the ballistic missile.
Ridiculous.
Okay, but the media really have been outshining themselves.
They really are just...
outdoing themselves on a regular basis.
So if you ever had doubts that the media and the Democratic Party are just wings of one another, that the Democratic Party is the activist wing of the media and the media are the PR wing for the Democrats, all you had to do is watch the media this week who are doing the overt work of the Obama administration, which is to say the overt work of the Iranian PR agencies, which is to say the overt work of the Iranian PR agencies, because effectively the Obama administration became a PR agency for the Iranians in order to push the
The Obama administration had to make the case that the Iranians were good, reasonable, decent people who are going to moderate and who are going to become friends to the world community so long as we appease them.
And so, what you saw from the Obama administration over and over is that when Iran would do something terrible, it would be, well, no, you're just getting Iran wrong, guys.
You're just getting Iran wrong.
Basically, the Obama administration became the girlfriend to the abusive, drug-addicted boyfriend trying to explain her boyfriend to her parents.
That was what the Obama administration became with regard to the Iranian government.
He's like, well, you know, he's he's not that bad guy.
Sure.
You see the bruise here?
Like, yeah, he hit me.
But I mean, I did offend him, to be fair.
And yeah, he's a drug addict who like who tried to prostitute me for money.
But let's be fair.
I mean, he had a rough childhood.
That was the Obama administration with regard to Iran.
And the media started doing the same thing.
And now they continue to do the same thing.
The media's take on all of this is so patently removed from reality that it should destroy their credibility in a massive way for a huge period of time.
It won't, of course, because once you have authoritative voices standing in Tehran, well, that means they know things.
Alternatively, they don't know a damn thing.
And many of them are unbelievably stupid and or dishonest.
We'll get to that in just one second.
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So the media simply cannot bring themselves to acknowledge the overt reality, which is this was a win for America and it was a win for Trump.
And there's some members of the media who don't really like Trump very much, or at least not honest enough to admit this.
I had on Ian Bremmer yesterday, who's a foreign policy analyst for GZERO Media, teaches, I believe, at Georgetown.
And Ian is certainly no Trump fan.
And he said, Iran is weaker than it was when Trump took office, and Trump just opened a window for negotiation, and Trump has actually re-established a level of deterrence with Iran that the Obama administration had completely avoided.
At least Ian is honest.
But most of the members of the media, not nearly as honest.
How do you know?
Because they were just repeating Iranian propaganda while the Iranian retaliation was going on.
Here was MSNBC reporting false dead Americans during the attack.
Those were just notices that were put out by the Iranians.
Honestly, it's an amazing thing.
They do the same thing with regard to Israel and its enemies.
Whenever the Palestinians, when the government authorities in the Gaza Strip, for example, put out casualty numbers, the media just repeat it without even checking it.
And those casualty numbers are always inflated and always refuse to take into account military-age males who are actually members of terrorist groups.
Well, they did the same thing.
MSNBC did the same thing in the middle of this attack.
They just started repeating false numbers about dead Americans that didn't exist.
Assad airbase and there being 30 casualties.
I just want to be very clear, we don't have independent confirmation of that as of yet.
That is a claim being made on Iranian state media.
Iran's state media is claiming that 30 U.S.
soldiers have been killed in this attack.
Now, this is not confirmed.
This is just coming from Iranian media.
But we have just stepped over the precipice, Chris.
You've stepped over the precipice.
Based on a report from Iranian state media that was a full-on lie that had no merit to it whatsoever.
Sure, we're not gonna take it too seriously, but you should take it super duper seriously.
And every element of what Trump has done along the way has been criticized for the dumbest possible reasons.
You go on Twitter today, people are criticizing the fact that Trump sniffs during his speeches.
It's been a thing during his speeches for a very long time.
They're suggesting that the reason he sniffs is because he's on Adderall.
They're criticizing the fact that he was slurring a couple of his words How about the fact that Joe Biden cannot string together a human sentence?
How about the fact that Nancy Pelosi bobbles her words routinely?
But Donald Trump is a very bad man because of that.
An MSNBC panel yesterday could not even believe that military brass were attending Trump's speech.
How could military brass... Here's Ben Rhodes, the vicious liar, going after the Trump administration.
How could the military brass attend Trump's speech even though they were the ones who had presided over the attack?
It's just sad that we're still sitting here with a President of the United States who out of a weird mixture of envy and deep antipathy has to attack his predecessor in the most political manner with the military standing behind him discussing life or death issues.
We just shouldn't come to this, Nicole.
We're better than this.
Our politics should be better than this.
This is a damned liar.
He's a damned liar.
A repeated damned liar.
He's just awful in every way.
And he's an Obama administration advocate sitting... How dare Donald Trump exploit the military this way?
Barack Obama literally went to an airbase, I believe it was in Afghanistan, and suggested that the soldiers made a great photo op.
That's a direct quote.
Okay?
It's enough to boggle the mind.
The gaslighting is unbelievable.
And speaking of obsessions, it's not about Trump being obsessed with Obama.
It's about the fact that Trump just showed up Obama.
And that Obama's legacy is a bag of flaming dog poop.
Obama's legacy on Iraq is horrific.
And it was led by Ben Rhodes.
It was led by Susan Rice.
So what do the media do?
They go get Ben Rhodes and Susan Rice like, why is Trump so obsessed with us?
Why is Trump so obsessed with us?
Also, why is Trump such an ugly orange man?
The projection here is just astonishing.
Meanwhile, you have columnists for the New York Times trying to pretend that a win is a loss.
You've got Nicholas Kristof over at the New York Times who has a piece today that says, Trump has a bizarre idea of winning.
Here's what he says.
For now, we seem to have averted an all-out shooting war between the United States and Iran.
Yet it's not over.
The world is more dangerous than it was a week ago.
No, it most assuredly is not.
Soleimani was a massive chess piece.
He is off the board.
The Iranians are backing off of aggression inside Iraq because they don't want to cross red lines.
No, the world is not more dangerous than it was before.
Most assuredly, it is not.
President Trump's exuberance, says Nicholas Kristof, suggests that he may have learned precisely the wrong lesson from his clash with Iran.
Trump and some of his supporters are crowing at the lack of American casualties.
Iran may have carefully aimed so as to miss people in ways that remind me of the hubris preceding the 2003 invasion of Iraq.
As there were then, there are today concerns about whether intelligence has been overstated, leaders are thumping their chests, and there's too much confidence in the ability of the military toolbox to solve complex problems.
So he can't actually explain why this was a bad thing?
So he's just going to go back to the Iraq War, which in popular revisionist history was a complete loss for the United States, despite the fact that the original aim of the war, which was to depose Saddam Hussein, was accomplished inside of three weeks, thanks to the greatest military in the history of the world.
But according to Nicholas Kristof, this is a big loss.
Why?
Well, Trump, who in 2012 repeatedly claimed that Barack Obama would start a war with Iran to help win re-election, is already running election ads on Facebook trumpeting his killing of Major General Qasem Soleimani and stating that this is keeping America safe.
Again, Trump did not quote-unquote start a war with Iran to win re-election.
That's absurdity at the highest level.
And killing Soleimani is a good thing.
I'm sorry that Democrats are finding it hard to campaign against killing terrorists, but You guys picked that position.
You didn't have to.
But here is how Nicholas Kristof characterizes the results.
You ready?
This is idiotic.
Iran has cast off nuclear curbs so that it is now potentially within five months of having enough fuel for a nuclear warhead, down from almost 15 years when Trump took office.
It was not 15 years when Trump took office!
That was their voluntary statement that they would not develop nuclear weapons for quote-unquote 15 years.
The nuclear deal didn't even extend for 15 years.
It extended for 10 years.
And their development of nuclear weapons was a secondary priority for them next to their development of regional power, which they had been pursuing pedal to the metal ever since the Iran nuclear deal.
United States forces, according to Christoph, may be pushed out of Iraq, allowing Soleimani to achieve in death one of his foremost goals in life.
I'm gonna need some evidence there.
And I don't wanna hear your bull crap about the Iraqi parliament voting to eject the United States.
They don't even have the power to do that.
It takes a cabinet request.
The cabinet doesn't exist.
The reason the cabinet does not exist in Iraq is because the president, the prime minister of Iraq, does not have any authority.
He's the acting prime minister because of protests inside his own country that were suggesting that he was enthralled to Iran.
There's not support inside Iraq by Shia, by Sunnis rather, and Kurds for the United States to pull out of there because they know the moment that happens, the Iranians basically take over.
American forces in Syria may be difficult to support without the military presence in Iraq, so some or all of them might pull out as well.
Another strategic victory for Iran.
Wait a second.
Are you saying that pulling troops out of the region would be a victory for Iran?
Because it was my impression that Barack Obama precipitously withdrew all troops from Iraq, or nearly all troops from Iraq, leading to the rise of ISIS, leading to the continuation of Syria, leading to Russia taking over Syria and Iran funding Syria.
Nicholas Kristof, man.
I mean, the disconnect from any... Do people have memory?
They're like Dory from Finding Nemo.
They got memories that last for 32 seconds.
It's unbelievable.
It's incredible.
The military campaign against ISIS is on hold, giving terrorists a chance to regroup.
We need some evidence of that.
Iran's regime, which had been threatened by enormous protests at home and in Iraq, has been rescued by Trump's actions.
Rescued by Trump's actions?
Truly, they've killed 1,500 protesters.
Listen, when you're talking about regime change, first of all, Christoph and the rest of the left don't want the regime changed in Iran.
Barack Obama didn't want the regime changed in Iran.
He wanted to strengthen the regime in Iran.
But, if you're talking about regime change in Iran, there's only one real way that's happening, from inside the Iranian military.
Because the people do not have anything like the sort of ability to overthrow the military that they had in other countries where the military was smaller.
The fact is that as long as the military support the mullahs, the mullahs will remain in power.
It will take somebody in the military changing his mind in order for that to change.
But there have been roiling protests across Iran for literally years at this point and I'm old enough to remember in 2009 when the Iranians were out in the streets protesting by the hundreds of thousands and Iranian troops were gunning them down and Barack Obama did nothing, nothing to help, nothing.
But according to Nicholas Kristof, Iranians have rallied around the flag and the Iraqi narrative has changed overnight from the bullying of Iranians to the bullying of Americans.
Really, is that what the Iraqi narrative is?
Because it seems that the Iranians just fired actual ballistic missiles into a foreign nation.
Instead of bringing troops home, Trump has had to deploy more to the Middle East at huge cost.
Wait a second, two points ago, Nicholas Kristof was arguing that we should not bring any of those troops home because it would free up the Middle East for ISIS and for Iran.
Now he's arguing that Trump should bring the troops home.
It's like the narrative will shift just so that Trump is bad.
That's all.
So much winning and there will be more, says Nicholas Kristof.
It's true that Iran's foreign minister, Javad Zarif, said that Iran's response had concluded, but Zarif is a moderate, often outmaneuvered by hardliners.
I know this partly because back in 2004, after Zarif approved a visa for me, I was detained in Iran by security forces looking for information that could embarrass Zarif and get him fired.
Oh, well, Nicholas Kristof is friends with Zarif.
That means he's a moderate.
So we're still hearing echoes of the Ben Rhodes crap that there is a moderate faction inside the Iranian government that is being challenged by the hardliners inside the Iranian government.
It's like saying, who's more pro-Trump, Ivanka or Trump?
What are you even talking about?
There are not two parties here.
It's a one-party dictatorship.
Then you have Jamel Bui, who just writes foolishness every week for the New York Times that Trump we did not want to see.
When are we going to stop trying to rationalize the irrational?
Deterrence is not irrational.
It is not irrational.
But according to Jamal Bowie, it's just that Trump is a nut.
He says, this standoff, which in its latest incarnation saw Iranian missiles sailing toward bases in Iraq on Tuesday night, is so consequential, it's been hard not to impute some logic to the president's actions, even as many observers acknowledge the lies and dysfunction surrounding the attack.
It's only natural.
We're just looking for some sort of logic.
But we've learned since the strike on Soleimani was almost certainly another impulsive action from an impatient president, except for the fact the New York Times reported that Mike Pompeo had been pushing for Soleimani's killing for literally months on end.
He says that Trump is not a steady hand, he's never been one, yada yada yada.
So apparently, Trump is the nut, and it's only thanks to the forethought of the Iranian regime that everything is hunky-dory.
The Washington Post editorial board today is insisting that Trump didn't win.
I'm not owned, I'm not owned!
He shouted as he turned slowly into a corncob.
According to the Washington Post, proclaiming Trump victorious in Iran is short-sighted and premature.
Oh really, what was it when you declared Obama victorious in Iran after he decided to sign them checks so they could pursue further terrorism and ballistic missile testing while pretending that their nuclear program was shut down for all time?
What would you call that?
According to the Washington Post, Mr. Trump's acolytes quickly proclaimed him victorious for having eliminated the architect of Iran's foreign adventurism while avoiding a more damaging response.
That assessment was premature and short-sighted.
Iran's strikes on U.S.
interests and allies will almost certainly continue in the coming months.
Oh, you mean as opposed to like before when we had months on end of them firing rockets at American military bases and pursuing terrorist actions across the Middle East?
Unless the Trump administration quickly steps up its diplomatic aim, what Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei called his ultimate aim, the removal of the United States from the Middle East, could soon be realized in Iraq and Syria.
Again, based on no evidence whatsoever.
But the media are going to try to declare a victory, an actual loss, because that's how much they hate Trump.
How much do members of the media hate Trump?
Yesterday on The View, Joy Behar mentioned that white supremacist Richard Spencer, one of the Charlottesville leaders, had decided that he would no longer endorse Trump going into 2020.
Why?
Because Richard Spencer didn't like that Trump had threatened, quote unquote, Aryan cultural heritage sites.
This is part of this idiotic race nationalism that suggests that, first of all, Persians are Aryans.
And then second of all, that Trump is pursuing the interests of the Jews.
Here's Joy Behar, full-scale moron, suggesting that Richard Spencer leaving Donald Trump in terms of allegiance is a good thing, and then the entire crowd cheering a white nationalist.
You remember Richard Spencer?
He's basically the organizer of Unite the Right, the white nationalist group that was marching in Charlottesville.
It was all in for Trump.
Not anymore.
Here's his quote.
He tweeted last night, I deeply regret voting for and promoting Donald Trump in 2016.
Oh my gosh.
Wow.
That's interesting.
Do you know why?
Because Trump, like I said yesterday, Trump ran on not invading and not being a warmonger.
That's what I'm talking about.
I mean, he ran non-voting and now... Welcome to the resistance, Richard Spencer.
Okay, when you are praising a white nationalist to own Trump, you're doing everything wrong.
But this is what... I mean, it's unbelievable.
This is what the media will do just to avoid the obvious conclusion, which is that Trump got to win here.
This is what they will do.
It's unbelievable.
Now if Chris Matthews, or as they say, Trump, he keeps attacking Obama, why does he keep attacking Obama?
Why is he so mean to Obama?
If I was such a nice guy, I'd get up here, I'd get up here every morning, in my ruffle coat, come here with a shoe, come in here and explain that President Trump's a meanie with regards to Obama.
Whereas I, I love, I love Obama.
He gives a tingle at my leg.
I remember when he signed that Iran nuclear deal, I basically orgasmed on stage, it was crazy.
Well now, here I am, explaining that Trump, he keeps attacking Obama because he's mean!
Not because Obama's policy was garbage, but he's mean!
Go, Chris Matthews, go!
In the midst of this international conversation, he throws in this almost clinical need to attack Obama.
It's almost like Tourette's.
Can he not get through a conversation without... But in this case, it was so scurrilous.
He's basically saying, as you pointed out, you see those bombs hitting our American base in western Iraq last night?
Oh, they were paid for by Barack Obama.
Like he's back there, he's the bursar, he's the financial guy behind these bombs.
It's an outrageous stretch.
Is it an outrageous stretch?
He signed checks to the Iranians, he opened their economies so they could pursue terror.
Secretary of State John Kerr announced back in March 2016 that yes, some of that money would go to pursuing terror and ballistic missiles.
He's got like Tourette's!
He's so mean to Obama!
He's so mean to Obama!
I love Obama!
I'd give that guy a back rub right now!
He's beautiful!
Sorry Kathleen, I'm busy tonight!
Chris Matthews over on MSNBC.
Alrighty.
Time for a quick thing that I like and then we'll get to a quick thing that I hate.
So, things that I like.
possibility of shame.
This would be a shameful moment for them.
But good news for them.
They have no capacity for shame.
And so we will continue to lie to the American people from the stage at MSNBC.
Alrighty, time for a quick thing that I like.
And then we'll get to a quick thing that I hate.
So things that I like.
So first of all, Nancy Pelosi has been completely outmaneuvered.
She had no leverage.
When she held back the impeachment charges, she had no leverage, none whatsoever.
And everybody knew she had no leverage, but the media tried to proclaim that she was a genius.
Another example of the media being garbage at their jobs.
The media tried to suggest that Nancy Pelosi really had outplayed Mitch McConnell.
Ah, you see?
If she doesn't hand the charges to McConnell, then she won't have handed the charges to McConnell, and then McConnell won't be able to acquit Trump.
And so then, and then, and then, and, and, and then she'll have won!
And she'll have won, guys!
Because then, she will not have handed the impeachment charges to McConnell, and then McConnell will just be sitting there!
Then what's he gonna do?
Then what's he gonna do?
Then he'll be all mad, won't he?
Because then he can't do anything!
Like, he can't impeach Trump!
But, but, she'll have impeached Trump, but she won't hand the charges- It never made any sense.
Basically, Nancy Pelosi was threatening to do a thing McConnell didn't want anyway.
And she was like, Mitch McConnell, if you don't do what I want, I will give you this ice cream cone.
This ice cream cone right here, I will give it to you if you don't do what I want.
You're not gonna do it?
You want it?
Here it comes!
Here comes the ice cream!
Here's the ice cream!
And Mitch McConnell's like, you gotta be kidding me.
Like, this is incompetence at the highest level.
It's ridiculous.
You have nothing, you have no leverage, nothing to threaten with.
The Republican caucus is not going to agree to your procedures on impeachment after you ran the House investigation in the dumbest possible way, refusing to call any of the witnesses who are actually relevant or wait for a judge to actually decide whether those witnesses could be called in the first place.
So Mitch McConnell yesterday is like, no, we're not haggling over this.
You've got to be kidding me.
Anybody who's proclaimed Nancy Pelosi a master strategist has not been watching the last year of Nancy Pelosi running the house.
In the last year alone, Nancy Pelosi basically got played by the squad.
And let's be frank about this.
The combined IQ over at the squad If it were electricity, could not toast a piece of bread lightly.
I mean, those are not a set of brilliant human beings over at the squad.
They say dumb things routinely, they step in it all the time, they say openly anti-semitic things, but Nancy Pelosi could not even motivate her own base to condemn anti-semitism in its own resolution.
Instead, they had to put together a huge resolution condemning all the bad things, including asparagus for dinner.
Because she just couldn't stand up to the squad.
And so Nancy Pelosi lost control of her own caucus.
Then, because she lost control of her own caucus, she had to push for impeachment when censure would have been a much easier move on Ukraine and probably would have drawn some Republican votes.
Instead, she pushes impeachment.
And then she's caught out because it turns out that they don't actually have the grounds for impeachment.
They couldn't prove their case, which is that Trump Was deliberately attempting to sink Joe Biden, not because of concerns about corruption in Ukraine, not because of actual corruption concerns about Hunter Biden, but specifically because he wanted Joe Biden out of the way for 2020.
They couldn't prove it.
And then Nancy Pelosi was like, oh, well, I guess now that I'm caught here, well, I'm just not going to give it to you.
These impeachment charges.
Now, this this right here.
This bag of poop.
I'm just not gonna- I'm gonna keep this bag of poop.
I'm gonna put it in my refrigerator.
I'm gonna let it stink up my fridge every single day.
But you're never gonna receive this bag of poop.
And Mitch McConnell's like, well, I never wanted the bag of poop.
If you want to hold that bag of poop, you can keep holding the bag of poop.
It's a bag of poop.
Here's Mitch McConnell explaining.
Supposedly, the explanation for this shameless game playing is that Speaker Pelosi wanted... leverage?
Leverage?
To reach into the Senate and dictate our trial proceedings to us.
Now I've made clear from the beginning that no such leverage exists.
There will be no haggling with the House over Senate procedure.
We will not cede our authority to try this impeachment.
The House Democrats' turn is over.
The Senate has made its decision.
My favorite is the animated Mitch McConnell right there.
That is Mitch McConnell getting animated.
You do have to love the low-key nature of Mitch McConnell on this sort of stuff.
Leverage?
Leverage?
Are you out of your mind?
According to Reuters, the U.S.
Senate will move forward with its own legislative agenda next week unless it receives articles of impeachment against Trump from House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, McConnell said on Thursday.
He said on the Senate floor, there's real business for the American people that the U.S.
Senate needs to complete.
If the Speaker continues to refuse to take her own accusations to trial, the Senate will move forward next week with the business of our people.
In other words, fine, don't send it.
See if I care.
Why would I possibly care if you're not sending it?
So that means that Nancy Pelosi has now basically been boxed in.
But my favorite thing is that you're not allowed to say that Nancy Pelosi botched this.
You must never say.
Then Nancy Pelosi botched this.
There was one Democratic congressperson who actually said it.
His name is Adam Smith, Democrat of Washington.
And he said, we should be sending these impeachment charges over if we actually take them seriously.
And then the entire Nancy Pelosi wing of the media and the Democratic Party, but I repeat myself, They came out and they're like, Adam Smith is a bad man.
Nancy Pelosi's a genius.
She's a genius, guys.
She is geniusing it up.
Massive, incredible, unbelievable, unspoken genius.
You challenged Nancy Pelosi?
She's on the cover of Time Magazine, by the way, this week.
Time Magazine, just another media repository of idiocy.
On the cover, a piece written by Molly Ball, titled, Her Gamble.
That's the, and so the idea is that she, there's no gamble here.
What is that?
And then there's a picture of Nancy Pelosi.
God, the media are so disgusting!
Like, they're just awful.
There's a picture of Nancy Pelosi, lit from behind slightly.
So you actually get the halo of light bouncing off of her well-groomed hair.
And the headline is, we've upped the ante.
Why Nancy Pelosi is going all in against Trump.
Oh, the heroism.
Oh, the unspeakable heroism of Nancy Pelosi.
Molly Ball writes, Nancy Pelosi isn't wild about the question.
The impeachment of President Trump is underway, and I've asked the Speaker of the House if she thinks it's the most important thing she'll ever do.
We're sitting in her elegant office in the Capitol, on gold-upholstered armchairs around a low table topped with a vase of hydrangeas.
One of my favorite things about these sorts of long-form pieces is the description of the surroundings, because it tells you everything you need to know about the journalist.
That description.
She's elegant, right?
Because what they're saying about the surroundings is the person, right?
If it were Donald Trump and you're sitting in the same place, it would be Donald Trump sitting in his vulgar office in the White House, surrounded by gold-adorned Versailles furniture, topped with a vase of fake flowers.
But with Nancy Pelosi, it's Wow, she's a queen in her own right.
It's just, it's amazing.
Don't you see?
Can't you picture it in your mind's eye?
a low tabletop with a vase of hydrangeas.
Wow, she's a queen in her own right.
It's just, it's amazing.
Over her shoulder, the sweeping view of the National Mall is shrouded in wintry clouds because the scene has to be set.
Don't you see?
Don't you see?
Can't you picture it in your mind's eye?
Can't you picture how the wintry clouds, the threat to democracy, is coming over the National Mall, that symbol where Martin Luther King once spoke?
Can't with the Washington Monument, the...
Bolts of lightning striking as Nancy Pelosi stands up and picks up the hammer of Thor!
According to Molly Ball, for a long moment, the speaker goes silent as she seems to compile in her mind the list of accomplishments she'd rather claim as her legacy.
Apart from declaring war, this is the most important thing that Congress can do, she finally says.
I'm most proud of the Affordable Care Act, but this is the most serious initiative I've ever been involved in in my career.
Molly Ball says Pelosi has spent decades at the highest level of politics, but the past 12 months have been arguably her most consequential.
Really?
She hasn't passed a single piece of major legislation?
I'm gonna go with the Obamacare.
Obamacare was definitely the biggest thing she ever did.
No question about it.
She's correct about that, but according to Molly Ball, it's that she was part of the resistance.
Resistance!
She wore a pussy hat and everything.
Woo!
Returning to the speakership after eight years of running the House Democratic minority, she established herself as a counterweight and constrainer of this divisive president.
She outmaneuvered Trump on policy from the border wall he didn't get to the budget agreement he signed, loaded with goodies that Democrats wanted.
She oversaw an unprecedented litigation effort against the executive branch, racking up landmark court victories.
Oh, you mean there were a bunch of lower courts that didn't like Trump and ruled against him and then all of that was overturned by the Supreme Court for the most part?
And she was the tactician behind the investigation that resulted in Trump's impeachment on December 18th.
That really took a huge amount of tactics.
I mean, what an amount of tactics it took to say, we're going to investigate the president for impeachment.
And then your majority of Democrats that you run actually impeach.
Wow.
The tactical brilliance.
I mean, imagine it's like the tactical brilliance.
If I were to poll my employees about whether they liked the show, and then it turns out that most of them say yes, and the rest of them get fired.
My tactical brilliance unparalleled.
Nancy Pelosi said to her own caucus, you should impeach Trump, and then they impeached Trump.
Boom!
Mind blown.
Tactical brilliance of having not a single Republican on board.
Not one.
Just un... The woman is Clausewitz.
I mean, what can you say?
What is most striking, according to Molly Ball, about this moment in Pelosi's career, is that at the peak of power, she is not protecting her position, but rather using it in aggressive, even risky ways.
Bullcrap!
If she weren't protecting her position, she would have condemned Ilhan Omar, and Rashida Tlaib, and Ayanna Pressley, and AOC, and the rest of the squad repeatedly.
But instead, she has kowtowed to them.
Of course she's protecting her position.
She's been protecting her left flank.
There's a brief moment in time where it looked like she was going to challenge them, and then, Trump got involved and said that the squad sucked.
And then Nancy Pelosi immediately jumped in and said, they're the greatest.
They're the most beautiful young women standing up for femininity.
Just the revisionist nonsense from the media.
My God.
Does impeaching Trump is a gamble for Pelosi?
Really, is it a gamble?
What's the gamble?
Where is the vast outcry from Democrats suggesting that there's going to be hell to pay if Nancy Pelosi does this?
According to Time, it has intensified Republicans' fealty to the president.
He was already polling in the 90s with Republicans.
Rallying his base, supercharging his campaign fundraising, potentially increasing his re-election chances.
By the way, that suggests it's not a risk for Nancy Pelosi.
She's not running for president.
It's a risk for whoever runs against Trump.
But in the House, it's not risking anything.
The polarizing effect could jeopardize Democrats who hold seats in Trump territory and thereby endanger Pelosi's House majority.
Yes, but she made the calculation that she is more in danger from the left wing of her base than she is from Republicans retaking the House.
Pelosi has always been a risk taker.
From defying Chinese authorities by protesting at Tiananmen Square in 1991.
Defying Chinese authorities?
She was... Really?
She's an American citizen.
To pushing Obamacare through the House with nary a vote to spare in 2010.
That's not a risk.
She was doing what the President wanted her to do.
But she was careful to cast impeachment, not as a political gambit, but as a project to preserve the checks and balances of American democracy.
That's my responsibility, to protect the Constitution.
Could anything be more fawning than this?
It's hard to imagine anything more fawning than this.
But here's the bottom line.
She botched it.
She really botched it.
And she didn't go all in against Trump.
She had nothing to risk because her base freaking hates Trump, despises Trump.
But just the amount of navel-gazing sycophancy here is beyond compare.
Molly Ball writing, no aspect of the spectacle was too small to escape Pelosi's control.
When the Intelligence Committee held its public impeachment hearings in November, Pelosi noticed that Chairman Adam Schiff's head reached nearly to the top of his high-backed chair.
After Intelligence finished its work, Judiciary, chaired by Representative Jerry Nadler, was slated to hold hearings in the same room.
Pelosi thought if he sat in the same chair, Nadler, a head shorter than Schiff, would look small.
Pelosi sent word down there would have to be a change in furniture, and when Judiciary convened on December 4th, Nadler was seated in a leather-backed chair that reached no higher than here.
My God, she even did the Feng Shui in the Judiciary Committee!
What genius?
Alternatively, she put together an impeachment effort with only Democratic votes that is going absolutely nowhere.
And now she has to browbeat her fellow Democratic congresspeople into pretending she's good at her job.
Adam Smith had to put out a statement today saying, I misspoke this morning.
I do believe we should do everything we can to force the Senate to have a fair trial.
If the Speaker believes that holding onto the articles for a longer time will help force a fair trial in the Senate, I wholeheartedly support that decision.
I am concerned that Senator McConnell won't have a fair trial.
I am with the Speaker that we should do everything we can to ensure he does.
Ultimately, I do want the article sent to the Senate for the very simple reason that I want the impeachment process to go forward.
To the very end, he says, oh yeah, by the way, what I said before, it's still true, but Nancy Pelosi yelled at me, and so now I'm going to pretend to back off.
This whole thing has been a debacle for Democrats.
It will continue to be a debacle for Democrats.
It is a clown show.
And yet the media will continue to pretend that Nancy Pelosi is unbelievably good at her job.
When in fact, she used to be good at her job.
Like 2010, she was good at her job.
Now, she's had an awful year.
She's very bad at her job right now.
And it is perfectly obvious to anybody who has eyes to see and is willing to not listen to the stupid morons over in the media who continue to just carry water for Democrats.
The media partisanship in the Trump era is just as bad as it was during the Obama era.
It's just more overt.
That's all.
Alrighty.
Well, we've run out of time for Things I Hate.
I think that counted as a thing I like and a thing I hate, but at least I gave you the impeachment update.
We'll be back here a little bit later today with two additional hours of content.
Otherwise, I'll see you here tomorrow.
I'm Ben Shapiro.
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