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Feb. 6, 2020 - The Ben Shapiro Show

01:04:00

Acquitted And It Feels So Good | Ep. 948

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Time	Text
	President Trump is acquitted in the Senate.
	Mitt Romney votes to convict.
	And Joe Biden's long journey to nowhere continues.
	I'm Ben Shapiro.
	This is The Ben Shapiro Show.
	The Ben Shapiro Show is sponsored by ExpressVPN.
	Why haven't you gotten a VPN yet?
	Visit expressvpn.com slash ben.
	Well, it's over.
	We're done.
	Okay, so was that a giant waste of time?
	Yep, pretty much.
	It turns out that entire impeachment debacle was a giant waste of time.
	We spent an enormous amount of time and energy covering something that amounted to nothing.
	The only person who ended up crossing party lines to vote against the president of his own party was Mitt Romney of Utah.
	We'll get to Senator Romney in just one second.
	But suffice it to say, President Trump ends this thing in a better position than he began this thing.
	Right now, an extraordinarily high percentage of Americans, according to Gallup, are positive about the economy.
	Some 63% of Americans approve of President Trump's handling of the economy.
	Trump's approval rating is closing in on 50% for the first time in his presidency.
	The Democrats look like they're in disarray.
	This did not do any heavy lifting for them.
	They didn't change broad American perceptions of President Trump.
	That was all baked into the cake already, as it turns out.
	They didn't change broad American perceptions of Congress other than the generalized belief that Congress is useless and a partisan institution designed to go after people of the other party.
	So nothing really changed here.
	And despite the attempts by the media to turn Romney's vote into a referendum on Republicans generally, that didn't change anything either.
	Because again, people kind of knew who Mitt Romney was.
	People knew kind of what Mitt Romney was going to do here.
	Sort of see how Mitt Romney perceives himself.
	So the media's attempts to turn that into a big story are, of course, a giant fail.
	According to the New York Times, after five months of hearings, investigations and revelations about President Trump's dealings with Ukraine, a divided United States Senate acquitted him on Wednesday of charges that he abused his power and obstructed Congress to aid his own reelection.
	Bringing an acrimonious impeachment trial to its expected end.
	In a pair of votes whose outcome was never in doubt, the Senate fell well short of the two-thirds margin that would have been needed to remove the 45th president.
	The verdicts came down after three weeks of debate, almost entirely along party lines, with every Democrat voting guilty on both charges and Republicans uniformly voting not guilty on the obstruction of Congress charge.
	Only one Republican, Senator Romney of Utah, broke with his party to judge Mr. Trump guilty of abuse of power.
	This was the third impeachment trial of a president and the third acquittal in American history.
	It ended the way it began, with Republicans and Democrats at odds.
	And of course, that was never going to change.
	Nothing really did change here.
	All that happened is that President Trump now gets to go around holding up a newspaper that says acquittal.
	And here is the thing.
	Here is the thing.
	The expectation that Democrats had.
	I don't know what they thought they were going to get out of there.
	Okay, so President Trump shows up at the National Prayer Breakfast this morning, and he literally is holding up a copy of USA Today with the giant headline, Acquitted.
	Sort of like Harry Truman in 1948, holding up the headline, Dewey Defeats Truman.
	And he's holding up all the headlines, right?
	He's got the New York Times over there and the Washington Post.
	He's holding up every newspaper he can find saying Trump acquitted.
	And in the minds of the American public, that means this is over.
	And basically, no matter what happens on the Ukraine score, it's not going to matter anymore.
	In the same way that once the Mueller report came over, that didn't matter anymore.
	So it looks like they keep taking shots at him and he looks Teflon.
	The more shots you take at the president of the United States and the more that bounce off of him, the more it looks as though he is impregnable.
	Impregnable, as though he is not damageable.
	And that is clearly true of President Trump right now.
	That hasn't stopped the Democrats from trying to claim that somehow they won a victory here, but they didn't.
	They didn't.
	It turns out that when you take a shot at the president this way and you miss, That it doesn't redound it to your benefit.
	And this certainly has not redounded to the benefit of the Democrats.
	We'll get to more of this in just one second.
	First, let's talk about your employees.
	So you may have noticed that we started our show a little bit later than usual today.
	And you may have been asking yourself, just why?
	Well, let's say that you had a very, very important producer, somebody you've been working with for years, really terrific at his job, and he just decides to take a day off.
	And it is the most inconvenient day off in human history.
	So when the technology starts to go south, there's no one there to fix it.
	Let's call this person Austin.
	And let's say that Austin just, he wasn't there today to make sure that everything ran.
	Now, it's not quite his fault.
	I mean, he had planned on this day off, but still, but still.
	Does a doctor get an emergency phone call in the middle of the night and show up at the hospital?
	He does.
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	Okay, so...
	The Democrats keep trying to claim that they are not owned here.
	Here is Justice Roberts yesterday declaring that Trump was not guilty on the abuse of power votes.
	This was the historic moment when it became obvious, if it was not already, that Trump was not going anywhere.
	Here is Justice Roberts announcing the result of the vote.
	In this article of impeachment, 48 senators have pronounced Donald John Trump, President of the United States, guilty as charged.
	52 senators have pronounced him not guilty as charged.
	Two-thirds of the senators present not having pronounced him guilty.
	The Senate adjudges that the respondent, Donald John Trump, President of the United States, is not guilty as charged in the first article of impeachment.
	Okay, so that was the moment.
	Now Democrats are still trying to suggest that they won a victory here.
	So you have a couple of big opinion pieces today.
	One from Adam Schiff, Jerry Nadler, Zoe Lofgren, Hakeem Jeffries, Val Deming, Sylvia Garcia, and Jason Crow.
	Those would be the Democratic House managers in the impeachment trial of President Trump.
	And they wrote an opinion piece for the Washington Post that is titled, Trump won't be vindicated.
	The Senate won't be either.
	Yeah, okay, we're at the jerk store.
	We're at the jerk store, right?
	Seinfeld's jerk store.
	You remember this episode where Costanza gets in an argument with a guy and then he comes up with a great comeback, but it is too late.
	It's now too late, right?
	He's left the venue.
	And so he waits like the entire episode and then drops the comeback randomly at a certain time.
	This is the Democrats now.
	They are now in the jerk store episode of Seinfeld.
	According to these House Democratic managers, over the past two weeks, we have argued the impeachment case against President Trump, presenting overwhelming evidence that he solicited foreign interference to cheat in the next election and jeopardized our national security by withholding hundreds of millions of dollars in security assistance to pressure Ukraine to do his political bidding.
	Now, again, if they thought they had overwhelming evidence, they wouldn't have needed additional witnesses.
	So it's weird that they were moaning about the need for additional witnesses.
	When the president got caught and his scheme was exposed, he tried to cover it up and obstruct Congress's investigation in an unprecedented fashion.
	Again, that is not true.
	As the trial progressed, a growing number of Republican senators acknowledged that the House had proved the president's serious misconduct.
	No, a growing number of Republican senators acknowledged that the president had done something wrong, but they did not believe that the House had proved the accusations that they brought to the fore in this impeachment trial.
	Nonetheless, the House Democrats say, throughout the trial, new and incriminating evidence against the president came to light almost daily, and there can be no doubt it will continue to emerge in books and newspapers and congressional hearings.
	Most important, reports of former National Security Advisor John Bolton's forthcoming book only further confirm that the president illegally withheld military aid to Ukraine until Kiev announced the sham investigations that the president sought for his political benefit.
	Although Bolton told the House he would rather sue than appear to testify pursuant to a subpoena, he appeared to have a change of heart and made it clear he would be willing to testify in the Senate.
	That's not accurate either.
	Basically, he said, I'll testify, but it was unclear that Bolton was ever going to violate executive privilege absent some sort of court order.
	Now, what they're saying here is not entirely false in the sense that it's quite possible that they then call Bolton in the House.
	He says something damaging.
	The Republican senators look bad.
	It's one of the reasons why I was not completely sanguine on the idea of no more witnesses.
	I thought, OK, maybe the best thing to do here is have two weeks of witnesses, get this all behind us, and then the Democrats have no more bullets in their gun, right?
	All the ammo has been spent.
	So we'll see if this materializes or not.
	But I will say that after the acquittal is over, the American people, I think, are just breathing a sigh and being, OK, that's another thing we don't have to worry about now, because honestly, this thing was just a pain in the butt.
	Notwithstanding the Constitution's mandate to the Democrats that the Senate shall have the sole power to try impeachments, a narrow majority of senators opted not to, and instead acted as though it were an appellate court precluded from going beyond the record in the House.
	Nothing supported this unprecedented prohibition on witnesses and documents, except the overriding interest of a president determined to hide any further incriminating information from the American people and a Senate majority leader in his thrall.
	You're right.
	The Senate was not prohibited from calling witnesses, but the Senate is not obligated to call witnesses either.
	This is why the Senate gets to preside over the rules of the trial.
	And if you don't have a majority, you don't really get to bitch about the fact that you don't have a majority in the Senate when it comes to obviously constitutional procedures.
	And then the Democrats suggest that this means that President Trump is basically going to cheat in 2020 no matter what.
	And as per the usual arrangement, the Democrats then decide that there is only one hero, one hero of the day, and that, of course, is Mittens' Mitt Romney, the senator from Utah.
	The House Democratic managers say, And there was.
	Mitt Romney, the senator from Utah, showed a level of moral courage that validated the founders' faith that we were up to the rigors of self-governance.
	Now, this stuff I'm not willing to hear from Democrats.
	Romney, the senator from Utah, showed a level of moral courage that validated the founders faith that we were up to the rigors of self-governance.
	Now, this stuff, I'm not willing to hear from Democrats.
	I'm not.
	Now, here's my perspective on Romney.
	So first, here's what Mitt Romney had to say in announcing that he was going to vote to convict President Trump, the senator from Utah, and of course, 2012 Republican nominee for president of the United States who got shellacked by Barack Obama.
	Here's Mitt Romney announcing his vote to convict Trump.
	The grave question the Constitution tasks senators to answer is whether the president committed an act so extreme and egregious that it rises to the level of a high crime And misdemeanor.
	Yes, he did.
	The President asked a foreign government to investigate his political rival.
	The President withheld vital military funds from that government to press it to do so.
	The President delayed funds for an American ally at war with Russian invaders.
	The President's purpose was personal and political.
	Accordingly, the president is guilty of an appalling abuse of public trust.
	Okay, and then Romney defended this on Fox News.
	He suggested that it was hard to imagine a more destructive attack on the Constitution.
	He had sort of a media rollout of his vote.
	It was pretty obvious, apparently, to people inside the Senate, this is the way that Romney's been going over the last week or so.
	So here's Romney.
	I believe that the act he took, an effort to corrupt an election, is as destructive an attack on the oath of office and on our Constitution as I can imagine.
	It is a high crime and misdemeanor within the meaning of the Constitution, and that is not a decision I take lightly.
	It is the last decision I want to take.
	The personal consequences, the political consequences that fall on me as a result of that are going to be extraordinary.
	But I swore an oath before God, and I'm a religious person, that I would apply impartial justice.
	And applying impartial justice said what the president did was grievously wrong.
	Okay, so I think that Mitt Romney is getting this wrong, right?
	I've said this all along.
	I think that Mitt Romney is not calibrating his verdict correctly.
	I understand why he is doing what he is doing.
	I do.
	I mean, I'm not going to sit here and pretend that President Trump made a perfect phone call.
	I'm not going to sit here and pretend that President Trump did nothing wrong with regard to Ukraine.
	I think that Senator Lamar Alexander's threat on why he was voting for acquittal and why he was voting for no new witnesses was basically correct.
	Lamar Alexander said that the president did something wrong, but it doesn't amount to an impeachable offense, mainly because the president didn't show that he had the motive to simply skew the election in 2020.
	That's what this is all about, as opposed to thin-skinned nonsense about 2016, which is really a much more plausible theory of what exactly Trump was into with regard to Ukraine.
	I can see how Romney would come to this conclusion.
	I think the conclusion is wrong.
	I think that all the other Republicans agree that this conclusion is wrong.
	So, a couple of things.
	I think everybody is wrong about Romney, first of all.
	I don't buy into the theory that Mitt Romney is some sort of ridiculous charlatan who is simply in it for the walls.
	He's simply in it because he wants the strange new respect of the media.
	That's not the impression that I get of Romney as a human being.
	I don't think that Mitt Romney is somebody who was who is simply doing this for the thrill of the thing.
	I think that he felt that he had taken an oath of office and that as he analyzed the evidence, this is the side he came down on.
	And that's his prerogative.
	He's an independently elected senator from Utah.
	I think he's wrong.
	I think he's wrong.
	I think he's dead wrong.
	But do I think that it is his responsibility to adjudicate whether his opinion is going to impact Trump or impact 2020 or any of the rest of that?
	That's not his job in this particular arena.
	His job is to decide whether this rose to the level of high crimes and misdemeanors, which is why when Senator Rubio suggested that, sure, this was kind of a high crime and misdemeanor, But I'm going to vote for acquittal anyway because there's an election coming up in 11 months.
	Well, that is actually not the function of the Senate.
	So Romney independently adjudicating how he felt about this?
	I'm not going to come down on Romney for that.
	I'll come down on him for his judgment.
	I think his judgment is incorrect.
	But the hit on him from the right, which is that he's a cuck, he's a traitor, he's the worst.
	I just I don't buy it.
	Right.
	Donald Trump Jr.
	did a little bit of this yesterday.
	He tweeted out that he wanted Romney expelled from the caucus.
	Okay, first of all, the GOP doesn't expel people.
	Second of all, this notion that Romney is sitting there and he's super bitter that he's not Secretary of State or something, I have serious doubts about that.
	Again, assuming the worst of intentions from Romney in a situation where I really don't think the evidence justifies that is a bad look for Republicans and it's silly.
	On the other hand, I'm not willing to hear from House Democrats that Mitt Romney is a man of courage.
	That I'm not willing to hear in the slightest.
	And not willing to hear that at all.
	Why?
	Well, the reason that Mitt Romney is not president and Donald Trump is, is because the media savaged him as Donald Trump in 2012.
	The media and the Democrats, the same people who today are praising him, praising him to the skies.
	Oh, brave.
	Oh, Mitt Romney.
	He's the greatest.
	He's the best.
	Five seconds ago, I'm old enough to remember it.
	Five seconds ago, you guys were declaring that he was a racist who put dogs on the top of his car, was gonna put black people back in chains, wanted to shove women into binders.
	That he was a horrible one-percenter who disdained the poor, who fired people so they would lose their health care plan and their wives would die of cancer.
	That Mitt Romney was a brutal homophobe who would forcibly cut the hair of gay kids back in the 1950s.
	Now you painted Mitt Romney, the most milquetoast human being who has ever walked the planet.
	Perhaps the most bland human being who has ever walked the planet.
	But at least in his life, a very upright citizen, you painted him as the worst person ever to walk the earth.
	And then Republicans were like, okay, you're going to paint anybody that way?
	Like, yeah, how about Trump?
	Take this.
	Okay, so I'm not going to hear from Democrats what a wonderful, virtuous, upstanding citizen Mitt Romney is now that he has done something you like.
	He didn't change.
	You are just a bunch of opportunistic a-holes.
	I mean, that's what's happening here.
	It's like this I'm not willing to hear so on the right I'm not willing to hear that Mitt Romney who I think we all basically agreed in 2012 was a good guy and that even if you disagreed with his politics even if you thought that he was vacillating on key issues like abortion over the course of his career even if you thought that he like I wrote a column in 2008 why Mitt Romney should not be the nominee and then I wrote one again in 2012 why he should not be the nominee.
	I actually didn't favor Romney as the nominee in 2012 when he won the nomination but It was pretty obvious that Mitt Romney is not a bad man or that he isn't motivated by the desire for MSNBC love.
	Okay, so I'm not gonna hear that from the right.
	And on the left, I'm not gonna hear you guys champion him as a hero because honestly, go screw yourselves.
	You're ridiculous.
	And when I hear MSNBC cheering Mitt Romney, you can just, you can shove it.
	All you people in 2012, you were declaring him the worst person on earth so your beloved Barack Obama would retain the presidency despite the fact that he was a garbage president.
	And now all you, oh, Mitt Romney.
	Oh, Mitt Romney.
	Anybody who falls for the strange new respect line from the Democrats is a fool or a moron.
	Or just deeply disingenuous.
	Because guess what?
	The strange new respect lasts for approximately as long as they don't realize that Mitt Romney is going to vote with Trump on 95% of issues.
	Which, by the way, is a fact.
	The Strange and Respect for Jeff Flake was based on the fact that he was mean to Trump.
	That he said nasty things about Trump.
	Jeff Flake voted with Trump most of the time.
	And if he had continued on in the Senate voting with Trump, he wouldn't have gotten... They wouldn't have said that his votes in favor of bills that Trump sponsored were now principled votes.
	That it was the same principled man standing up to Trump and voting for a thing.
	Because the way it works for the media is when you agree with them, you're a good, noble human being.
	And when you disagree with them, then you're a bad, evil human being.
	So Mitt Romney agrees with them on impeachment.
	Now he's a hero of the republic.
	Five seconds ago, he was the worst person ever to walk the earth and must never be president of the United States and was a ridiculous fool to boot.
	But here's MSNBC praising Romney to the skies because they're a bunch of liars.
	Mitt Romney, of course, the former Republican nominee.
	In the moment, as he was speaking, it felt historic indeed.
	It will cement Senator Romney's legacy and stain what the White House was no doubt hoping would be a clean party-line acquittal today, despite the party's refusal to hear from witnesses or admit new documents into evidence.
	Democrats are taking pains to draw a distinction likely to become a refrain in the coming weeks and months that today's acquittal does not equal an exoneration for the president who will remain impeached forever.
	Okay, and again, listen to that media coverage.
	Brian Williams, when he's not flying fake helicopters over a rock being shot down by the insurgents.
	I'm sorry, this whole thing is ridiculous.
	Just doing the bidding of the Democrats.
	Well, he was acquitted, but he wasn't exonerated.
	Yes, but an acquittal is never an exoneration.
	That's not what acquittals do.
	I mean, that's not what trials are.
	Trials are not exonerations.
	Trials are acquittals.
	Like, by their very nature.
	We'll get to more of this in just one second.
	And by the way, it just demonstrates that Trump is winning.
	The fact that everybody is acting as they are acting right now.
	We'll get to that in just one moment.
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	Now again, do I think that Mitt Romney did anything that is morally bereft here?
	No, I don't, because I don't think that it is the responsibility of a United States Senator to be looking along the spectrum of, oh no, Democrats are going to use what I say against the President.
	That's not his job here.
	Do I think that he was wrong in his judgment?
	Absolutely.
	This is why I think that both the media response and the Republican response here are pretty ridiculous.
	And when I say pretty ridiculous, I mean supremely ridiculous.
	Elizabeth Warren out there praising Mitt Romney.
	It's just ridiculous.
	Elizabeth Warren, who hates Romney?
	I mean, let's be real about this.
	Elizabeth Warren thinks that Romney's a skunk.
	Elizabeth Warren is a despicable human being.
	And here she is with Lawrence O'Donnell, both of whom hate Romney, but now they love Romney.
	Now Romney's the best.
	Strange new respect pouring from the heavens.
	What was it like listening to that one Republican stand up and see this case basically the same way you do?
	I thought I was listening to a decent and honorable man who stood up and did the right thing.
	He was a decent and honorable man, except when he voted for, you know, like Justice Kavanaugh.
	Then he was a bad man, but now he's a decent and honorable man.
	Meanwhile, you know, the White House is pursuing a stupid strategy with regard to Romney.
	Here's what they should do.
	They should just say, listen, Mitt Romney is entitled to his own judgment.
	Mitt Romney is entitled to his own take on this issue.
	The president has been acquitted.
	52 other senators disagreed with him in his own party.
	His logic obviously didn't agree with theirs, but he's a United States senator.
	Have a nice day.
	That should be it, because the bottom line is you still have that picture of Trump holding up the big acquitted sign.
	And the acquitted sign is the only thing that matters.
	The media want to play up the conflict between Romney and Trump and set this thing up as true hero of the republic, Mitt Romney, versus Donald Trump.
	Instead, Trump should just defuse that and be like, OK, fine.
	Romney has his view.
	I have my view.
	Obviously, I win.
	Right?
	You can afford to be magnanimous in victory instead, because magnanimity is not in the cards for the White House.
	They released, Trump tweeted out a video montage bashing Romney, which of course, like, what is the point of this?
	Seriously, what is the point of this?
	Here he is doing this.
	Slippery, stealthy.
	Mitt Romney had us fooled.
	Being in Donald Trump's magnificent hotel and having his endorsement is a delight.
	Posing as a Republican, he tried to infiltrate Trump's administration as Secretary of State.
	President-elect Trump is the very man who can lead us to that better future.
	Now his cover's blown.
	Exposed by news reports as a Democrat's secret asset.
	I can't believe you're gonna lose.
	Yeah, yeah.
	Barack Obama will be re-elected President of the United States.
	Come on!
	Come on!
	Mitt Romney's a Democrat's secret asset?
	He's a secret asset?
	He's the Senator from Utah, which is maybe the reddest state in America.
	Truly, just ridiculous.
	So this is ridiculous on all sides.
	And again, I'm not going to take it from the media who suggests that Romney is now a great hero of the Republic when they hated him five seconds ago.
	I'm not going to take it from Republicans who voted for Romney five seconds ago.
	Romney McDaniel, who was forced to change her last name basically by the Trump White House.
	In order to be the head of the RNC, she tweeted out, this is not the first time I've disagreed with Mitt, and I imagine it will not be the last.
	The bottom line is, President Trump did nothing wrong, and the Republican Party is more united than ever behind him.
	I, along with the GOP, stand with President Trump.
	Okay, again, like, whatever, whatever.
	Okay, so, here is the, here is where we now sit.
	Here's where we now sit.
	And here's where the President's head should be, as opposed to in Romney-land, which is where the media would like it to be.
	The president wins.
	He wins.
	And this is why the appropriate attitude, and I don't think you should be saying it out loud, because again, I think that the Trump that you like best is the Trump you see during State of the Union, you know.
	Considered Trump.
	Contained Trump.
	He's like nuclear power.
	You want to have some pretty heavy cement shielding around the nuclear power that is generating all of the energy.
	That Twitter is the nuclear leak.
	The president tweeted out that he would be president for life just to troll the Democrats, which is kind of, I'll admit, it's hilarious, okay?
	May not be good politics, but it is really funny.
	He tweeted again this graphic that he had tweeted before.
	It was a cover of Time magazine that shows Trump 2028, Trump 2032, all the way till Trump 2048.
	At which point, the President of the United States would be, let's see, he is 73 years old, right?
	And then it has Trump 2056, right?
	It starts moving.
	Trump 2060, Trump 2064.
	They're gonna be 150 years old.
	And the Democrats online, they're going crazy over this.
	They're like, he means that he's really gonna be President forever.
	Not unless his disembodied head is gonna be President of the United States in 9,000, in 60,000, in forever.
	Like, it's ridiculous.
	They're really doing this.
	Like, this means he's never going to leave office.
	He's going to declare himself dictator.
	He's going to, like Darth Sidious, defeat the power of death and hook himself up to machines.
	He'll be the disembodied floating head of Larry King from Futurama.
	Or, alternatively, he's trolling you guys and your idiots, which I think is much more likely.
	Alrighty, we're going to get to more with regard to the Democrats' attempt to buy back A victory from impeachment.
	Plus, we have to get to the 2020 Democrats.
	The reason they're focused in on impeachment still, even after this thing is over, is they are looking at their field and they are in a state of sheer, absolute, unbridled panic.
	And they definitely, definitely should be.
	We'll get to that in just one second.
	First, let us talk about the fact that you've got some big events coming up this year, right?
	And that means that you want your teeth to look good for all the pictures.
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	You flushed your retainers down the toilet when you were 15, and now, your teeth have slid out of place.
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	So as I say, the Democrats are in a state of sheer disarray because this has all gone wrong for them.
	The Iowa caucuses, it turns out, as we'll get to in a second, were a complete and utter cluster F.
	The race now looks like it is moving solidly in the direction of Bernie Sanders because whereas before it looked like the field on the progressive side was split between Elizabeth Warren and Bernie Sanders, it turns out that Sanders is increasingly consolidating the progressive socialist wing of the Democratic Party and there are serious splits in the non-sufficiency.
	Socialist wing of the Democratic Party between Biden and Bloomberg and Amy Klobuchar and Pete Buttigieg.
	There are too many candidates in that lane right now, which is precisely the opposite of where that candidacy was five seconds ago.
	So that's a very dangerous place for the Democrats to be.
	So instead, the Democrats are trying to cling to the last vestige of, but we did.
	We impeached him.
	We did.
	We impeached him really like we did.
	And so they're trotting out Chuck Schumer, suggesting that instead of conviction, we got Dershowitzian arguments.
	He wasn't actually acquitted.
	He wasn't actually acquitted.
	He's still he's still impeached, guys.
	He still is.
	Come on.
	Instead of maintaining the president's innocence, the president's counsel ultimately told the Senate that even if the president did what he was accused of, it's not impeachable.
	This has taken the form of an escalating series of Dershowitzian arguments, including, quote, abuse of power is not an impeachable offense.
	Quote, the president can't be impeached for non-criminal conduct, but he also can't be indicted for criminal conduct.
	Quote, if a president believes his own reelection is essential to the nation, then a quid pro quo is not corrupt.
	Yeah, none of this makes any difference.
	This is just the Democrats shouting at the sky because they didn't get what they want.
	So instead, you have Joe Biden out there on the stump mumbling to himself about how Trump shouldn't view a quiddle as a victory.
	There's only one problem.
	Anytime the president surpasses an expectation, this is the dirty secret of politics.
	It's something Bill Clinton was really good at.
	Bill Clinton would deliberately set low expectations just so that he could surpass them.
	Well, the expectations for Trump are so low that when he surpasses them, It's great for him.
	So if the expectation that the Democrats built up is that Trump would be exiting office and then Trump is acquitted, that's a big win for him.
	But Biden says Trump shouldn't view acquittal as a victory.
	He shouldn't.
	And then Biden basically keels over.
	He's already calling it.
	He says it's a victory on the impeachment hoax on Twitter.
	Is this a victory for the president?
	I can't imagine being president of the United States and having all one party plus someone from your own party vote to say you should be thrown out of office and view that as a victory.
	I don't know.
	Also, where am I?
	And why?
	And why?
	Again, the Democratic attempts to buy a victory from the ashes of defeat.
	That graphic's the only one that matters.
	Donald Trump holding up that newspaper that says acquitted.
	That is the only one that matters this morning.
	Instead, you get Sherrod Brown, the Democratic senator from Ohio, writing in the New York Times, and private Republicans admit they acquitted Trump out of fear.
	Out of fear.
	So now it's all about the Democratic senators who are fearful of Trump.
	And that is why they voted the way that they did.
	So, Mitt Romney is the only man of honor in the Senate, only because he happened to vote alongside The Democrats are banking still on impeachment, despite the fact that it's a failure out of the simple calculation that the more they talk about their own candidates, the more trouble they have.
	Iowa continues to be just a complete disaster area.
	So the results are still trickling in from Iowa.
	Basically, the results show that Bernie won the most votes, but that Pete Buttigieg walks away with most delegates, or at least even in the delegate count.
	Pete Buttigieg is getting a bump in New Hampshire from all of that.
	Now there are reports that one of the reasons that the Iowa caucus has failed, and the Democrats are now trotting this one out, is that on a 4chan board, people had posted the number of the DNC hotline for reporting the precinct results, and they clogged the lines, and so this supposedly twisted everything.
	There's only one problem, which is that the DNC itself has said that there weren't significant problems in this particular area, that the problem with the app was just a problem with the app, that there is no real doubt about the election results.
	They want to blame it on Republicans in some way.
	They want to blame it on trolls in some way.
	But this was pure, unbridled stupidity.
	Because if you don't protect yourself in the middle of an election, then I honestly don't know how you can expect the American people to trust you running virtually anything, right?
	I mean, it's very difficult to imagine how we are supposed to hand over our health care to people who can't run an election involving 170,000 voters.
	Iowa has released some results.
	They're still not up to 100% of results.
	And then they started releasing minor corrections Last night, they said there will be minor corrections to the last batch of results, and we'll be pushing an update momentarily.
	There was an error that apparently confused votes for Bernie Sanders for votes for Deval Patrick.
	Pretty obvious that nobody voted for Deval Patrick.
	But the continuing fiasco in Iowa has robbed Bernie Sanders of any momentum that he was going to get from Iowa.
	Pete Buttigieg, however, is getting a fairly large bump in the New Hampshire primary, and that is horrible.
	Horrible news for Joe Biden, because right now, as I say, the Democratic non-Bernie Lane is seriously divided, and that is a huge problem.
	Elizabeth Warren is fading, and she's fading badly, and she will likely be out of the race by the time we hit South Carolina.
	If she finishes low in New Hampshire, which is a state that she really needs to finish top two, then she's toast.
	Because, really, you think she's going to have more momentum in, like, Nevada?
	That's not a place where she's—or South Carolina, where black voters make a huge difference.
	Over half of the Democratic base in South Carolina voting in the primaries is black.
	That's Biden territory.
	So we're going to get to more analysis of the Democratic field.
	You can tell who the frontrunner is because it's the person who's not on the campaign trail.
	So Bernie's now playing it safe.
	Bernie is not making a lot of public appearances.
	He's not doing a lot of interviews.
	He's just tweeting stupid Platitudes from his Twitter account to the cheers of the moronic throngs that populate that dumb website.
	We'll get to that in just one second.
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	Okay, we're gonna bring you the latest on the Democratic race.
	The panic is setting in and it is obvious that the panic is setting in for the Democrats.
	We are going to get to more of that momentarily.
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	Also, gang, if you haven't noticed already, 2020, it's wild, man.
	This is wild, right?
	We've already finished an impeachment.
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	We had the Iowa caucuses, absolute failure.
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	It's getting crazy, and this is just the beginning.
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	So as I say, the Democrats are in a state of sheer panic because their supposed frontrunner, Joe Biden, is in a state of absolute collapse.
	And he's basically admitting as much.
	Iowa was a bad showing for him.
	He ended up at something like 16% of the vote compared to Pete Buttigieg at 27% and Bernie Sanders at 26% in terms of the delegate count.
	That's a bad showing.
	He finished fourth, right?
	He finished behind Elizabeth Warren, too.
	That is not where you want to be.
	The Rubio strategy from 2016, it turns out, 3rd, 3rd, 3rd, 3rd, 3rd, 4th, 3rd, 1st, 3rd, 3rd, 4th.
	It turns out you don't win the nomination that way.
	That is not a way to win the nomination.
	At some point, you're going to have to win something, which is why the biggest thing on the calendar right now for Joe Biden is Nevada.
	And we have no polling data from Nevada, as in none, zero, zip, zilch.
	Last poll taken in Nevada was USA Today, Suffolk, January 11th.
	And it had Biden up one over Bernie Sanders.
	That ain't going to cut it.
	If Biden loses the first three and Sanders wins the first three, Then he's in real trouble now.
	He got a bit of a reprieve because the Iowa caucuses ended up being a bleep show.
	But by the same token, if he finishes fourth in New Hampshire, and now he's finished fourth in the first two states, if he does not win Nevada outright, he's toast.
	Because all the momentum is gone.
	He doesn't have a large bankroll.
	He doesn't have momentum.
	He's not somebody who's inspiring.
	He was the default anti-Trump candidate.
	And then Bernie came along, and it turns out that with a solid core of 25%, as Donald Trump found out, you can win primaries that way.
	You can, because everybody else will split.
	There are too many candidates in these races.
	Well, the New Hampshire presidential primaries, a few weeks ago, the polling showed that Biden was running up close to Sanders, right?
	That he was in first or second place in all of the polling, virtually all of the polling, that Buttigieg and Warren had started to slide a little bit.
	After Iowa, There are two new polls out.
	There's one from Emerson.
	That poll shows Bernie Sanders up 31-21 over Buttigieg, with Biden and Warren down at 12.
	So there's a solid shot that he gets shellacked in New Hampshire.
	There's another poll out from the Boston Globe at Suffolk, and it has, again, Buttigieg jumping, Sanders at 25, Buttigieg at 19, Biden at 12, and Warren at 11.
	So these polls are consistent in showing a massive collapse for Joe Biden in New Hampshire, which is a very, very bad look.
	As Alaa Pundit writes over at Hot Air Today, he would have been okay finishing second in Iowa to Bernie.
	He would have even been okay-ish finishing third behind Bernie and Warren.
	Either result would have set Biden up to deliver this sales pitch to the rest of the Democratic electorate.
	You now have a clear choice between pragmatism and socialism, between electability and purity.
	I'm the only electable pragmatist left in town.
	Choose.
	But finishing behind Buttigieg deprives him of that argument.
	And by the way, finishing equal to Klobuchar deprives him of that argument, which is why people from Biden's campaign are basically going, well, what if we just pretend the Iowa results are illegitimate?
	What if we pretend Biden actually, like, did okay in Iowa?
	So there's even a split inside the Biden campaign.
	It's just chaos over there.
	Simone Sanders is a campaign surrogate for Joe Biden.
	She was on the national TVs, and she was asked if the Iowa results are legitimate, and she refused to answer the question.
	Yesterday, your comms director, Kate Bedingfield, was raising concerns about the legitimacy of the results.
	Is that a concern you still have?
	Look, I stand by Kate Beddingfield's comments, and I would also underscore that the integrity of this process is very important.
	So you're saying the results that we are currently... Simone, this is very important.
	Brianna, if I may?
	Brianna, I know it's important, so if you will let me finish.
	If you would allow me to finish.
	No, because you're not answering my question.
	Brianna, what I'm saying is that the results that we have seen are partial results.
	We do not have all the data.
	Okay, so again, she refuses to say that the results are illegitimate, but she does say that we don't have all the data.
	So they're trying to throw aspersions at Iowa.
	Okay, fine.
	Even take Iowa off the table.
	Biden needs to do better in New Hampshire, doesn't he?
	I mean, at least he has to show some signs of life.
	The great suspicion of Joe Biden is that he's actually a dead human being, that he's not actually alive.
	So Joe Biden basically admitted as much yesterday.
	He said, listen, we took a gut punch in Iowa.
	24 hours later, they're still trying to figure out what happened in Iowa.
	At this rate, New Hampshire will be the first in the country to get the vote.
	I am not going to sugarcoat it.
	We took a gut punch in Iowa.
	The whole process took a gut punch.
	OK, and then he tries to buy it back by saying that the process took a gut punch.
	But really, he knows that his campaign took a gut punch in Iowa.
	And this has led Biden to go on attack, which is a bad sign for Biden, right?
	He thought he was just going to float right over these primaries.
	This is the point where Joe Biden is Count Dooku in Revenge of the Sith.
	And he is looking over at Barack Obama.
	And Barack Obama is giving the thumbs down so that Anakin can behead him.
	Right?
	I mean, that's what's going on right now.
	He's looking over and he's like, why aren't you helping me?
	I'm your Sith apprentice.
	And Barack Obama's like, no, you just thought you were.
	Anakin, finish him.
	I mean, that's truly what's going on here.
	There's only one person who can save Joe Biden.
	And that guy is out golfing somewhere.
	Right?
	That guy has no interest.
	He's Rorschach.
	He looks down on Joe Biden and he says, So this has led Joe Biden to go on attack.
	He's now attacking both Pete Buttigieg and Bernie Sanders.
	He's saying that either would be a risk because Pete is the mayor of a town of 100,000 people.
	How is that guy going to be a winner in a national election?
	And Bernie Sanders is a socialist.
	These are the choices that you are choosing.
	Now, again, this is a sane case.
	But the problem is that being default candidate has rarely worked.
	Being default candidate is usually likely to fail.
	The only time that I can remember default candidates sort of walking away with it was Mitt Romney.
	And that was after everybody tried everybody else.
	But in any case, here is Joe Biden going hard after his political opponents.
	But if Senator Sanders is a nominee for the party, Every Democrat in America up and down the ballot in blue states, red states, purple states, in easy districts and competitive ones, every Democrat will have to carry the label Senator Sanders has chosen for himself.
	He calls him, and I don't criticize him, he calls himself a democratic socialist.
	Is he really saying that the Obama-Biden administration was a failure?
	Pete, just say it out loud.
	I have great respect for Mayor Pete and the service of this nation, but I do believe it's a risk to be just straight up with you for this party to nominate someone who's never held an office higher than mayor of a town of 100,000 people in Indiana.
	And that, of course, is true.
	And it's amazing to me that he's waited this long to say it and that nobody else has said it.
	This is what happens when you tut-tut all of your rivals all throughout the campaign.
	Eventually, you're forced to attack them, but now it looks like a desperate attack because you're starting to lose momentum.
	Here's the bottom line for Biden.
	Biden doesn't know what his brand is because he doesn't have a brand.
	And so he keeps trying to brand himself.
	He said yesterday they call him Middle Class Joe.
	Who the hell's ever called him Middle Class Joe?
	Has everybody in the Senate just walked by him?
	Hey, look, there goes Middle Class Joe.
	What a failing campaign.
	I mean, he feels like Jeb Bush circa 2016.
	I mean, it really is pretty brutal for Biden.
	I talk about the working poor all the time.
	I know they call me Middle Class Joe because they think I'm Middle Class Joe because I'm concerned about the middle class.
	And the reason I'm concerned about the middle class is to find an avenue to get to the middle class, to be able to stay in the middle class.
	And when the middle class does well, everybody's a shot.
	People have a way up.
	And in fact, the wealthy do very well.
	I'm sorry, was he talking?
	I sort of fell asleep there.
	I think everybody else fell asleep too.
	Meanwhile, speaking of desperate candidates, Elizabeth Warren trying to recapture the magic that she had six months ago, but the magic is gone.
	And so she's trying to play the woman card because she is one of the only frontrunners who is a lady, who has the lady parts.
	So here is Elizabeth Warren explaining that if you don't vote for me, it's because you're a sexist.
	Okay, this didn't work for Hillary Clinton.
	It's not going to work for Elizabeth Warren, especially since six months ago, she was leading in the primaries.
	So here she is doing the I am woman, hear me squeak.
	As a woman studying politics here at St.
	Anselm, I sometimes feel as if I will be at a disadvantage when I enter the workforce, since the majority of people associate politics with men.
	Do you believe that the men in this race have a better chance of beating Trump solely because of their gender?
	I believe they may think so, but they'd be wrong.
	She's so tiresome.
	Okay, so she's toast.
	She's gonna fall apart.
	Biden is falling apart.
	And that means that Bernie has basically clear shot at the nomination.
	Bernie has nobody standing in his way at this point.
	If he wins New Hampshire, and right now the polls show he's gonna win New Hampshire walking away.
	If he wins New Hampshire, and then he shows up, if he wins Nevada, this thing's over.
	And you've got an octogenarian socialist loon bag who staffs completely with people who hate Israel and hate Jews.
	That guy is gonna be your nominee.
	And it's amazing because nobody's gonna ask him a tough question.
	I mean, just take a look at Bernie Sanders' Twitter feed for a second, okay?
	This is, it's gonna be a never-ending source of irritation to me that nobody in the media will ask this man a tough question about the fact that he was a communist for most of his career and is a communist today, but then hides it beneath absolute ridiculous platitudes.
	So take these kinds of tweets, right?
	This one from just a few minutes ago.
	The ideas we are talking about, a livable planet, healthcare as a right, a humane immigration system, disability justice, a living wage for all, are not radical ideas.
	These are issues of basic justice.
	They're not ideas at all.
	They're nostrums.
	They're phrases.
	They don't mean anything.
	And this is Bernie's routine.
	It's so irritating.
	One of the things that you learn as a lawyer is you ask people to define their terms.
	Definitions are really important because words mean things.
	And when people obscure definitions, what they are doing is lying to you.
	And Bernie, despite all of the talk about how honest he is, about how forthright he is, Bernie is a liar.
	Because the fact is that Bernie will not explain to you what he means by anything.
	If you say, Bernie, what do you mean by socialism?
	He won't say, I mean public ownership of the means of production, of course.
	I mean collectivization of major industries.
	That's not what he will say to you.
	He'll say, well, if by socialism you mean that everybody should have a living wage, then I am a socialist.
	Okay, that is, you're not even defining living wage, let alone how you achieve one.
	Okay, capitalism achieves living wages.
	If capitalism didn't achieve living wages, you wouldn't have seen the greatest rise in human prosperity in the history of humanity by exponential scores like the way you have since 1800.
	You wouldn't have seen half the globe raised out of abject poverty by free trade and capitalism since 1980.
	You wouldn't see any of that.
	But Bernie says things like, I'm for a living wage.
	That means I'm a socialist.
	No, it just means that you're not using words properly.
	He says things like, I want a livable planet.
	I guess this makes me a socialist.
	No, you're right, Bernie.
	Everybody else wants a dead planet.
	Everybody else wants to choke on smog and die.
	That's what we all want.
	Because it is only socialists who want a livable planet.
	The rest of us would prefer a planet that is literally on fire.
	Literally.
	Like where you just walk around and it's the end of Terminator 2.
	Where everybody's just walking around on fire and your flesh is getting blown off your skeleton.
	Like, come on.
	Healthcare is a right.
	Okay, that again.
	What do you mean by this?
	That means nothing.
	The South African constitution guarantees healthcare as a right.
	You know who doesn't have healthcare in South Africa?
	Like everyone.
	It guarantees housing as a right.
	You know who doesn't have a house in South Africa?
	Half the population.
	Just saying something is right does not mean that it materializes.
	He says he wants a humane immigration system.
	No, you're right, Bernie.
	Everybody who opposes socialism is in favor of a brutal immigration system in which we treat people horribly.
	But this is Bernie's shtick, and no one asks him, what the hell you mean?
	And there's a reason no one asks him what the hell he means.
	There's a reason.
	Because the minute that he gets down to brass tacks, everything turns ugly.
	The minute he gets down to brass tacks, everything gets really ugly.
	There's a perspective on the left, and it is very prominent, that government is capable of doing all of these things.
	Particularly, that government is capable of achieving equality of outcome.
	On a very root level, what the Constitution guarantees, and was supposed to guarantee, and increasingly did guarantee, as it was fulfilled for all citizens over time, was equal protection before the law.
	What that meant is that everyone was going to be treated equally by the law.
	That it was not the job of government to establish, quote-unquote, equality of opportunity.
	You know, I know that Republicans sometimes use equality of opportunity, but equality of opportunity would encompass things like, okay, some people grow up richer and some people grow up poorer.
	Obviously, people who grow up poorer have different opportunities than people who grow up rich, so you'd have to equalize these circumstances of birth.
	But that's not what the Constitution guarantees.
	The Constitution guarantees equality before the law, because you're a human being with individual rights, and the government doesn't get to treat your neighbor differently than the government treats you, right?
	That is what the Constitution suggests.
	The left suggests a form of Rawlsian, John Rawls philosopher from the mid 20th century, Rawlsian social justice.
	And what that suggests is that we are supposed to use government to achieve equality of outcome.
	How do we do this?
	Well, imagine, here's the Rawlsian construct.
	Barack Obama used to quote Rawls all the time.
	The Rawlsian construct is the idea that you don't know how you are going to be born.
	So imagine that you're going to be reincarnated in any society, but you don't know what kind of society it is or who you are going to be in that society.
	What kind of society would you hope was actually ruling?
	You don't know whether you're going to be rich or poor or smart or stupid.
	So what would you hope is the society that would be on top?
	What would the government look like?
	So under those circumstances, I reject the premise because that's not the way reality works.
	Presumably everyone would basically be a Marxist, right?
	Because if you're poor, you wish that you would be rich.
	And maybe you'd be born rich, but maybe you wouldn't be.
	And if you're risk averse, you don't wanna be the person who was born poor.
	Maybe you're born smart, maybe you're born stupid.
	The idea is on behalf of folks on the left, that government is capable of achieving these outcomes.
	Government is not capable of achieving equality of outcome.
	It's just not.
	LBJ tried this in the mid 60s.
	He ended up with the greatest growth of government In the history of the United States and he didn't end up lowering poverty in the United States.
	The percentage of people living below the poverty line right now is effectively the same as it was since the beginning of the 70s.
	So the notion that Bernie Sanders is gonna come along with governments and that he's going to fix all problems, basically his plan goes like this.
	Declare that socialism is, insert thing you want, question mark, utopia.
	That's Bernie Sanders' program.
	And here's the thing.
	Once he has to fill in those gaps, as it turns out, to achieve equality of outcome, what you usually have to do is kill a few people.
	I mean, this is what communism does.
	It says, in order to achieve equality of outcome, we're gonna have to seize the property of a few people.
	If they don't like it, then we're gonna have to imprison them.
	We're going to have to restrict them from moving.
	We're going to have to crack down on individual rights.
	We're going to have to redistribute everything.
	Eventually what we're really going to need to do is just collectivize the ownership, make it government-owned so we can redistribute the proceeds.
	We're gonna need to do that at the very least.
	Okay, that ends up pretty ugly.
	And this is why when Elizabeth Warren tried to fill in the gaps on Bernie Sanders, on even basic things that he's proposing, like Medicare for all, she got destroyed.
	Because Bernie will say Medicare for all, and people will say, so what's your plan for this?
	And what does it look like?
	And Bernie will just say things like, well, it will cost you less.
	Well, no, it won't.
	But he doesn't ever actually roll out his plan, right?
	He'll just promise you the moon.
	And then when you say, okay, how are you gonna get to the moon?
	And he just refuses to answer the question, then this is a sign of genius.
	Elizabeth Warren, the problem for her is, she would promise you the moon, and then we'd say, okay, so how are we gonna have to get to the moon?
	And she'd say, well, what we're gonna need to do is we're going to need to take you and load you as fuel into this rocket.
	It's gonna be bad for you, it's gonna be great for everybody else.
	And America's like, that sounds kinda bad.
	The minute you put any flesh on the bones of Bernie's ridiculous nostrums, his agenda completely collapses, which is why the media don't bother to actually load any flesh onto the skeleton.
	All of his campaigns are like this.
	If you watch his rallies, if you look at his Twitter, I mean, stuff like this, right?
	If you feel like our political system doesn't work for you, now is the time to join in our fight.
	Together, we are going to end the corruption of a system that helps billionaires but leaves working people behind.
	We are going to build a government that represents all of us.
	What the hell are you talking about?
	This is all empty rhetoric.
	It doesn't mean anything.
	What is your actual plan?
	What is your actual plan?
	And the answer is he doesn't have an actual plan.
	He just has a bunch of nonsensical garbage that he tosses out there for the pleasure of idiots who think that simply expressing a wish makes it more plausible that it will come true.
	And you never have to connect the wish with the reality at any point.
	At some point, This reality will have to set in for Bernie.
	I mean, at some point he will be asked these tough questions, but apparently he's going to be able to float right through the primaries without anybody asking those tough questions.
	Why?
	Because the Democratic Party decided to suck off the teat of Bernie Sanders' socialist energy, and now it's too late.
	Now it's too late.
	The bloodstream has been poisoned.
	Bernie Sanders, you can't adopt half of Bernie Sanders' plans and then rip on Bernie Sanders' general ideology, which is what Joe Biden basically has tried to do.
	You can't do that.
	It's bound to fail.
	And that's why Bernie is in very good position moving forward, and Democrats are in sheer panic, and they should be in sheer panic.
	Okay, time for a couple of things I like, and then we'll get to a thing that I hate.
	So, things that I like today.
	So, very sad, Kirk Douglas passed away yesterday.
	He's 103 years old.
	So, that always sort of mitigates the sadness to the extent that if you live to 103, that's a pretty long and good life.
	Kirk Douglas, of course, one of the biggest stars in Hollywood from basically the 50s through the late 60s.
	He had a solid 20-year run as one of the biggest stars in Hollywood and made a bunch of just fantastic movies, right?
	Spartacus is a great movie.
	I'm a huge fan of the gunfight at the OK Corral.
	Really underrated flick.
	And I think his best movie, what many people believe is his best performance, is the movie Ace in the Hole, which is a movie about a story that was really big at the time.
	There was even a novel by Robert Penn Warren that was written about this, the Pulitzer Prize winner.
	The movie Ace in the Hole is about a journalist, a really corrupt, it's such a cynical, hard-boiled movie.
	It's about a cynical and corrupt journalist who is covering the story of a man who is trapped underground in a mineshaft collapse and about how he blows up the story and people are arriving and rooting for the guy and he's lying to the public about it in order so that he can achieve some sort of greater measure of fame.
	It's a really brutal, hard-boiled movie.
	Here it is, Ace in the Hole.
	Wash that platinum out of your hair.
	Phony, below-the-belt journalism, that's what it is.
	Not below the belt, right in the gut, Mr. Boone.
	Human interest.
	Nothing you've ever seen before has the tremendous human interest of Ace in the Hole.
	For here is a startling story of human emotions and human desires, played against the most exciting fight to save a man's life ever depicted on the screen.
	Now, when Smollett comes, you can give him your orders.
	Tell him to go in through the cliff dwelling, shore it up, and get him out fast.
	Not through the cliff dwelling.
	You can't get him out that way anymore.
	It's a movie that's really the This is Billy Wilder.
	And Billy Wilder, of course, one of the great directors in Hollywood history, actually produced, directed, and wrote this one.
	It's a really fantastic movie and an absolutely true take.
	If you haven't seen Richard Jewell yet, the new Clint Eastwood movie, this is basically a very early version of Richard Jewell about how journalists suck.
	It is accurate.
	Kirk Douglas is an actor who played mean a lot, sort of like William Holden in his early days.
	And he was magnetic on screen.
	I mean, he's terrific in Spartacus.
	Underrated as an actor because he's a movie star more than he is an actor.
	But in a sense, in the whole, he does some actual acting.
	Was not afraid to play nasty on screen.
	Of course, his son, Michael Douglas, survives him.
	And so, you know, prayers for the family of Kirk Douglas.
	I saw some people last night who were passing around old accusations that were sort of rumors that had never been corroborated about him and Natalie Wood.
	That he had allegedly raped Natalie Wood.
	That was trending on Twitter last night.
	It seems to me that if you're going to make an allegation that you ought to – of that sort, that you ought to back it up more than just to have that trend on Twitter on the day that the man dies at 103 years old.
	He was alive until yesterday.
	If you wanted to make that an issue, perhaps you should have made that an issue a lot earlier.
	It seems rather cynical to do it on the day that the man dies.
	Okay, time for... Well, actually, another quick thing that I like.
	So, I do love when folks on the left take things incredibly literally.
	They have no sense of humor, they have no... Folks on the hard left, I'm talking about.
	You'll see, people on the left.
	We'll get very upset because we have this leftist tears tumbler, as though it is not, number one, semi-ironic, and number two, as though it does not make the distinction between leftists and liberals.
	People get very mad about this.
	Oh no, why are you so brutal?
	The leftist tears, aren't you just playing on fears?
	No, if you don't get the joke, you don't get the joke, and I can't explain the joke to you, but...
	Leftists do this routinely.
	They sort of take things incredibly literal.
	So listen to AOC taking incredibly literally the phrase that you're supposed to pull yourself up by your own bootstraps.
	That is just... It's an idiom.
	It's an idiom.
	A lot of idioms don't make physical sense.
	Have your cake and eat it too.
	What the hell is that supposed to mean?
	But here's AOC explaining that because the idiom, lift yourself up by your own bootstraps, doesn't actually make physical sense, therefore, as an idea, that you should actually work hard on your own to overcome your obstacles, therefore, that doesn't hold true either, which of course, this is galaxy brain stuff from AOC.
	Hutchinson, I also want to thank you about bringing up the poverty draft and this idea of a bootstrap.
	You know, this idea and this metaphor of a bootstrap started off as a joke because it's a physical impossibility to lift yourself up by a bootstrap, by your shoelaces.
	It's physically impossible.
	The whole thing is a joke.
	Thank you, AOC, for explaining that you cannot physically lift yourself up by your own bootstraps because they are connected to your feet, and that's not the way that force and physics work.
	Yes, we got all of that.
	Thank you, Galaxy Brain AOC, for explaining that basic idioms don't necessarily make sense.
	Wow.
	You've changed my opinion.
	Now I am a Marxist.
	Now I'm a Marxist because that phrase doesn't make sense on its own.
	You're exactly right.
	Now this means that we have to redistribute all income in American society.
	Excellent, excellent point, AOC.
	Unbelievable.
	Okay, time for a quick thing that I hate.
	So the New York Human Rights Commission has gone completely insane.
	Peace by Robby Suave over at Reason.com.
	The New York Commission on Human Rights, an oversight agency that monitors compliance with the city's incredibly broad anti-discrimination law, has now ordered the fashion company Prada to stop selling certain toy dolls, described by many as racist caricatures akin to blackface, and send its employees to sensitivity training.
	This is supposedly in a free country.
	The New York City Commission on Human Rights is now ordering people what they can and cannot sell on the basis of restriction of speech.
	In doing so, the overzealous agency is claiming vast new powers to police a private entity's behavior.
	Unfortunately, Prada is meekly submitting to the commission's demands, and other companies, including Dior and Gucci, are facing similar inquisitions, which, of course, is not any sort of shock because the bad publicity associated with the New York Commission on Human Rights going after you is not worth the profit to be made from selling trinkets.
	In September, the Commission announced that an employer or landlord's use of the term illegal alien could be considered a form of illegal discrimination and result in a fine of up to $250,000.
	The sweeping declaration was made without any reference to off-cited limitations.
	Hostile speech must generally be severe, pervasive, and objectively offensive to rise to the level of harassment, for example.
	There is no way that that meets with First Amendment approval.
	But this is what the New York City Commission on Human Rights said.
	I mean, they've suggested that if somebody comes into your bar and they're a transsexual or transgender person, And that if you call them by their biological pronoun, maybe you should be fined a quarter million dollars.
	Does that really accord with your vision of the First Amendment?
	If it does, let me suggest you're getting the First Amendment completely, completely wrong.
	Even before the Declaration, the Commission had begun an investigation into Prada after receiving complaints that some of their merchandise was racially insensitive.
	According to the New York Times, for the last year, the New York Commission on Human Rights, the law's enforcement agency of the municipal government charged with overseeing the city's human rights laws as they apply to housing, retail establishments, and other areas, has been investigating and in settlement talks with Prada, a process culminating in a deal signed on February 4th, just in time to set nerves on edge during fashion month.
	So the commission sent Prada a cease and desist letter after a member of the commission saw a New Yorker's angry social media post about the doll.
	This New Yorker, Chinyere Ezee, a civil rights attorney, filed a complaint with the commission last January.
	So Prada signed an agreement with the commission.
	The company will now force all of its employees and company executives in Milan, Italy through racial sensitivity training.
	Then they will appoint a diversity and inclusion officer subject to the commission's approval.
	So the commission now gets to hire people over at Prada.
	It's unbelievable.
	This person will be tasked with quote, reviewing Prada's designs before they are sold, advertised, or promoted in any way in the United States.
	Okay, so this is just the government taking over product development at Prada and Prada going along with it because in order for them to operate without legal liability in the city of New York, they're just going to let This person greenlight all projects appropriate for the city of New York.
	I mean, this is tyranny.
	It really is.
	It really is.
	And you can see this easily happening with regard to any variety of products in New York City.
	Let's say that they decide that the New York Post, let's say the New York Post uses the term illegal alien, and the New York City Human Rights Commission decides the term illegal alien is in and of itself discriminatory.
	Or the New York Post decides to call people by their biological pronouns.
	And the Human Rights Commission says, you're not allowed to do that.
	And if you do do that, then your distribution of the newspaper every single day will be punishable by a $250,000 fine.
	So here's what we're going to do.
	We're going to appoint a person to the board of the New York Post, and that person is going to be an editor who is going to go through and check all of your content for discriminatory content.
	And that's how we are going to effectuate a hate-free New York.
	Would that be a violation of freedom of speech?
	You bet your ass it would be a violation of freedom of speech, and it would be tyranny.
	It would be the government overtly cracking down on freedom of speech.
	That's no different just because you're selling the product.
	Hey, also, Prada is required to tell the commission the demographic makeup of its staff at every level and summarize Prada's past and future activities aimed at increasing the number of people from protected classes underrepresented in the fashion industry.
	So they're now going to decide on the staffing, company-wide, based on quotas.
	So New York City, with its non-elected Human Rights Commission, because I don't believe these are elected positions, I believe they're appointed by the mayor, These people are going to decide for Prada how to staff their entire company.
	Their entire company.
	If you are a moron, you now locate your business in New York City.
	You wonder why people are rushing out of New York City to Florida?
	This is why people are rushing out of New York City to Florida.
	Gucci has already announced they are going to do this sort of thing.
	As Robbie Suave points out, in short, government bureaucrats have decided that existing anti-discrimination law gives them the power to tell fashion companies what sort of merchandise they can sell.
	This is explicitly power they have claimed for themselves.
	Deputy Commissioner Sapna Raj made this clear to the New York Times, saying, quote, I don't know that we realized previously so many major fashion houses had the ignorance of the history of racism in this country.
	We hope companies realize they need to be very careful about how they market and advertise, that they need to have a larger social and cultural consciousness.
	If this doesn't scare the hell out of you, it's because you don't understand what free speech was supposed to be.
	It's so funny, there are people on the left who will say things like, cancel culture doesn't exist!
	You are literally cramming down the ability to cancel an entire company based on the size of the fines so long as you do not approve of their staffing decisions and product and marketing decisions.
	That's not freedom.
	That's not freedom in any way, shape, or form.
	But this is the world.
	There are all these memes out there.
	This is the world the left wants.
	This is the world the left wants.
	If the left had its way, they would be appointing a couple more justices to the Supreme Court so that any legal challenge to this sort of thing would be knocked down.
	And then the Democrats on a national level would be pushing for hate speech legislation.
	We're five minutes away from this.
	It already exists in Britain.
	It already exists in Canada with dire effects.
	So when the left tells you they are for personal freedom, just remind them that personal freedom apparently doesn't extend to the ability to market or say the things that you want to market or say so long as you live in New York City.
	Unbelievable stuff.
	Alrighty, we'll be back here later today with two additional hours of content for you.
	Otherwise, we'll see you here tomorrow.
	I'm Ben Shapiro.
	This is The Ben Shapiro Show.
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	President Trump has officially been acquitted in the Senate's farce impeachment trial, but not before snake in the grass Mitt Romney gets in one last little nip before being relegated to ignominy and obscurity.
	We will compare sanctimonious backstabbers with serious and successful conservatives.
	Then the Trump administration leaks a draft of possibly the single most important executive order We will see in our lifetimes to make America beautiful again.
	Finally, Andrew Yang reminds us why the left, no matter how wacky, should never be trusted.
	All that in the Mailbag.

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