Hillary Clinton’s Benghazi testimony dazzled critics like Charles Blow—despite her false claims that the 2012 attack stemmed from a YouTube video, not terrorism, while she slept through the 13-hour assault. Media praised her delivery over truth, mirroring Hollywood’s shift to politically correct narratives where conservative views are villainized. The episode ties this to postmodernism’s rejection of objective reality, using Clinton’s polished lies as proof modern culture values performance over accountability. [Automatically generated summary]
Well, Showbiz fans, the reviews are in and there's no question about it.
Hillary Clinton's appearance last week before the House Select Committee on Benghazi was a smashing success.
The Washington Post raves, Clinton emerges unscathed from high-stakes Benghazi hearing.
And USA Today agrees, enthusing this was a good week for Clinton.
Critics around the country cheered Mrs. Clinton's performance as pitch perfect, saying her calm response to hostile questions made her look presidential.
Who could disagree?
Mrs. Clinton's performance undoubtedly brought a new level of articulate dignity and presidential plausibility to her endless series of detestable lies.
Just for example, when Mrs. Clinton told the committee that she had actually believed that a YouTube video had had something to do with the September 11, 2012 attack on the Libyan diplomatic compound that killed four people under her care, just the sheer brashness of that star turn had me thinking Oscar Knight.
After all, Mrs. Clinton not only told her daughter it was a terrorist action on the night of the attack, she told the Egyptian prime minister the same thing the day after.
But Hillary later stood in front of the caskets of the four murdered Americans and told their families and our entire nation that the attack had been a random protest spurred by a video, a lie meant to protect her own position as well as Barack Obama's campaign talking points.
The last time Hillary Clinton was questioned about this lie, she played the part angrily, snapping, what difference at this point does it make?
But that interpretation of her character fell flat with critics and audiences alike.
So this time she reimagined her role and just lied outright with a calm and self-assuredness one can only call masterful.
What a performance.
And who didn't shed a tear when Mrs. Clinton told the committee about how much sleep she'd lost over the four dead Americans?
I know I choked up and even gagged a little.
Mrs. Clinton artfully created an image in our minds of her pacing the floor all those sleepless nights.
An amazing act of creative artistry when you consider the fact that she actually went home to bed while the 13-hour attack was in progress because she said she had a rough week coming up.
So even though it's almost impossible to believe she's ever lost any sleep at all over her fatal dereliction of duty, the way she dropped her voice when she said it, the seriousness of her tone, well, I was convinced, weren't you?
I mean, that to me is what a great performer does.
She makes you buy into something that's completely unbelievable.
Sort of like when Charlize Therone made you believe she could beat people up in Mad Max Fury Road.
It's to see great performances like this that we turn on our TVs during congressional investigations into the malfeasance of public officials.
So I have to add my voice to the raves of critics around the nation.
Hillary's performance at that hearing made her seem 100% qualified to be our president, if our president is someone who constantly lies to cover up unforgivable incompetence, which he is.
Trigger warning, I'm Andrew Clavin, and this is the Andrew Clayton show.
Old one you are.
And who can you leave to be kissing me?
So you can talk.
Yes, I can, I will, and I do.
That's more than talk you'll be getting if you step a step closer to me.
Don't worry, you got a wallop.
You'll get over it, I'm thinking.
Well, some things a man doesn't get over so easy.
There are some things a man doesn't get over so easy.
And definitely kissing Maureen O'Hara had to be one of them.
Maureen Harra died a couple days ago at 95.
I just had to mention it.
I don't want to get into too much movie nostalgia, but she was one of the greats of the screen, an actress from my parents' generation.
And she was, of course, you may have seen her in Miracle on 34th Street, the great Christmas movie, but she was John Wayne's favorite co-star, a great foil for him.
Wayne was never a great romantic lead.
He was too much of a lunkhead, you know, to actually sell, you know, romantic leads, but she brought it out of him.
She made him a romantic lead, and she was never any better, and the two of them were never any better than they were in the quiet man, John Ford's great Irish Western, as it were, in 1952.
And if you're a real movie buff, a real lover of cinema, as they say, look at her first film, 1939's Hunchback of Notre Dame, based on the Victor Hugo novel.
It is a forgotten classic.
It is one of the greatest movies ever made.
And she, it's her first film, and she, I think, comes very close to breaking the law on how beautiful you're allowed to be and still be a living human being.
I mean, she is just insanely beautiful.
And the film contains the greatest single rescue scene in the history of movies.
All other scenes come from that scene.
It's just great.
Anyway, Marina Harrow, dead at 95, great, great actress and John Wayne's best co-star.
So I'm back, Andrew Clavin here again.
And once again, I'm doing this show so jet lagged out of my mind that I'm just barely here.
If at any time in the following 20 or 30 minutes I start making sense or say anything profound, it's because I am actually unconscious and I'm channeling the spirit of somebody much smarter than myself.
Miami's Evolution00:02:22
I was in Miami and really interesting.
I haven't been in Miami.
I can't remember the last time I was in Miami.
It was way before it was the Miami it is today.
Totally foreign city.
It's cliche to say it.
They call it the capital of South America.
I think almost 70% of the people are native Spanish speakers.
And you can go into like major stores and the clerk doesn't speak English.
So, I mean, not just like a bodega somewhere.
You can go into the Home Depot and the clerk doesn't speak any English at all.
And it has this very, very South American feeling.
But it kind of reminded me of Israel in a way because in a strange way, you go to Israel and we kind of think of Israel as us because they're Westerners.
But the fact is when you get there, you realize, wow, this is a Middle Eastern country.
This is a really, really foreign country.
But it's a Middle Eastern country that works because it's run by Jews.
Jews make things work.
And this is a South American city that works because it's run by Americans in the United States.
And one of the things that's happening there is that the South Americans can't trust their own banks.
So they send all their money to Miami.
And Miami's just, it's being built up everywhere.
It's so, it's clean and it's big and it's getting bigger every minute.
Every time I leave LA, I am, it's like traveling into the future because LA is a progressive city.
It's a Democrat city.
And so it looks like garbage.
It looks terrible.
I mean, you go to Dallas, it's like traveling to Tomorrowland.
You go to Dallas and go like, whoa, you know, this actually is the 21st century.
I mean, but you come back to LA and it's like this third world city.
And the same is true in Miami.
You go to Miami and it's just, it's beautiful and it really is vibrant and looks good.
And you come back to LA and it's back to the past.
You know, progressivism takes us into the past.
I mean, that's why, you know, progressivism depends on, I call it progressivism ironically, but leftism depends on provincialism.
It depends on people not knowing what's going on anywhere else.
And that's why they have travel restrictions.
That's why they build walls around their countries.
That's why they have, you know, in the Soviet Union, they have Pravda, here we have the New York Times.
Anything to rewrite, you know, make sure that nobody finds out how much better other systems work, how much better conservative governance is.
Law and Order Machine00:05:01
They just don't want you to know.
Which brings me, because I was traveling, I had to exercise in the gym.
And a great deal of my life and mental energy and spiritual energy goes to avoiding going to the gym.
I mean, I exercise a lot, but I try to do it outdoors.
I used to play a lot of tennis, now I hike all the time.
When you go into a gym and you get on an elliptical machine, I'm convinced that those things are some kind of time device meant to slow time down.
You get on an elliptical machine and time just stops.
I mean, if you wanted to live forever, the only thing to do would be to stay on the elliptical machine.
You'd like never, you'd never get old because the minutes would never go by.
And it doesn't matter.
You know, I love to watch football, but you watch football on an elliptical machine and suddenly you realize there's no action in football.
You know, it's all kind of reassembling and talking and all that.
And then there's this little piece of action.
And even football becomes boring on the elliptical machine.
There is one exception.
There is one magic antidote to the elliptical machine, and that is old episodes of Law and Order.
I don't know why.
I can't explain it.
I can only tell you that if you get on an elliptical machine and you turn on Law and Order, suddenly you're done.
It's just this amazing thing.
It just actually speeds time back up past where it usually goes.
And I mean, it always was a brilliant idea for a show because it's a show that eliminates the personal lives of the characters and just talks completely about their work lives.
And since they're lawyers in criminal cases, it's very exciting in police.
It wasn't an original show in the sense that back in the 60s, 70s, there was a show called Arrest and Trial.
And the first half was about an arrest, and the second half was about a trial.
And that's where the idea comes from.
Law and Order is the same system.
But it was brilliant.
And I know I've talked about this before, and it is a little bit of an obsession with mine, but it's such an obsession of mine.
But it's such a perfect example of the way Hollywood rewrites the world.
And Law and Order is funny because I'm almost sure, I don't know this for a fact, but I'm almost sure that Dick Wolf, the great creator of Law and Order, I'm almost sure he's one of us.
You know, I think he's a Republican.
I've heard this from people who know, I can't confirm it, but I think he is.
When you go back and watch the original year or two years, the show is not conservative.
Well, it's conservative in the sense that it tells the truth.
It shows you difficult cases with two sides.
It's hard to know whether they should follow the law or go make an end run around.
It's hard to know where the truth lies.
And then quite quickly, maybe over three or four years, it becomes a left-wing show.
And this is a natural process in Hollywood because you have a writer's room.
TV shows are written by a number of writers.
So say you have 10 writers.
They get on the show.
The show becomes a success.
The creator, Dick Wolfe, goes off and he starts doing other shows.
And eventually he just goes home and starts counting his money.
So he's not really paying all that much attention.
And as the writers quit and go on to other shows or create their own shows, new writers come in.
And of course, they're left-wingers because, what, 95% of the writers in Hollywood are left-wing.
So it's what's called the O'Sullivan rule.
This was based on a pal of mine, John O'Sullivan, a British journalist, who posited the rule that all organizations that are not openly conservative, that are not declared conservative, become leftist over time.
And that's what happens to television shows.
And so I'm watching, so eventually, Law and Order just became a machine for rewriting conservative reality into left-wing fantasy.
I mean, just every week, if you had a right-wing point of view, or even just a politically incorrect point of view, you were the murderer.
I mean, you could pick him out.
The minute the guy walked in and had a Republican sticker on his, you got him.
That's the, you know, arrest that man.
So this one was about, do you remember a book maybe 15 years ago?
A book came out called The Surrendered Wife.
It was written by a woman.
I can't remember her name, but the idea of this was if you want to have a happy marriage, stop criticizing your husband so much.
Let him take a leadership role.
And both of you will be happy.
Basically, biblical advice, right?
Let your husband lead, and the husband will then pour out himself for you.
And weirdly, of course, this thing was a smashed success, and women loved it, and everybody loved it.
And the left went nuts.
The feminist left went nuts.
On Law and Order on this machine.
I'm watching Law and Order, and instead of, they rewrite everything.
Instead of it being a woman putting out the surrendered wife, it's a silver-haired, pompous, overbearing, controlling male who, the minute he walks on screen, it's like, you know, I don't mean to tell anybody how to live.
I mean, I have noticed over the years that marriages, generally based on these general principles, do seem to be the happiest marriages, but to each his own, you know, it's, I want each person to do his own thing, said no feminist ever.
And that's my point of view.
But on Law and Order, if you hold a non-PC point of view, you are a killer.
It translates into murder.
And that's the way they, every week they do this.
Hamlet's Words00:15:33
Which brings me back to Hillary Clinton.
I just want to understand the rules of this election.
I mean, basically, if Hillary Clinton guns down her lesbian lover on the steps of the Capitol, walks down the steps, throws the gun away like Michael Corleone walking out of the Italian restaurant in the Godfather, calls a press conference at the base of the steps, says there is no body, there was no gun, there was no killing.
The New York Times is going to write an article saying she was poised, she was articulate, she struck back against her right-wing critics.
This incredible witch hunt, this really, because we've moved into a weird state where, I mean, politicians always lie, politicians always lie.
But we've moved into this weird state because of the utter corruption of our news media, where the lie is now judged not on whether you believe it, not on whether it's convincing, but on how well it was told, on how well the performance came off.
If you read the reviews of, and they were reviews of Hillary at this Benghazi hearing last week, they were all about how she appeared, what she looked like.
Now, I just have to remind you, I mean, I'm sure you've seen some of these clips before, but I want to take a look at Hillary Clinton.
I'm really going to just lay it out.
Hillary Clinton, what she said, this is, here's the first one: her at the transfer ceremony where they're taking the bodies off the plane.
The four ambassadors are killed.
It's a 13-hour attack.
These people had asked, our diplomats had asked for help and greater security 600 times before leading up to this attack.
The attack goes on, they're calling for help.
Nobody sends any help.
They know it's a terrorist attack.
We now have seen these emails that she's been hiding all this time.
The emails we're supposed to forget about, we're supposed to be sick about, sick of, we're sick of hearing about the emails.
But in these emails, she emails Chelsea Clinton, her daughter, and says, this had nothing to do with the video.
It was a terrorist attack, which was bad for Obama because Obama was running on the, he was running for his reelection on the promise that the tide of war was receding, the terrorists were on the run, everything was great.
He had won the war that Bush had messed up.
And remember, Joe Biden was taking credit for Iraq.
I mean, this is going to be one of the great achievements of the Obama administration.
All went down the drain when this terrorist attack took place on 9-11, a memorial of 9-11, basically.
These guys are brutalized and then killed.
This is Hillary Clinton standing in front of the bodies of these guys, the caskets of these guys, and addressing families and the nation.
And this is what she says.
This has been a difficult week for the State Department and for our country.
We've seen the heavy assault on our post in Benghazi that took the lives of those brave men.
We've seen rage and violence directed at American embassies over an awful internet video that we had nothing to do with.
Okay.
Now, a press conference that she gives shortly after this.
And this press conference is not just a press conference.
It's used in an advertisement that has played, I think they spent, I can't remember, $80,000.
It was a substantial amount of money taking out advertising space on Pakistani TV so that they could convince our friends in the Muslim world, like Fred is our friend in the Muslim, Fred and Barney Muslim, our friends in the Muslim world, that we're not to blame for this.
Listen, this was used in an ad on Pakistani TV.
Take a moment to address the video circulating on the internet that has led to these protests in a number of countries.
Let me state very clearly, and I hope it is obvious, that the United States government had absolutely nothing to do with this video.
We absolutely reject its content and message.
America's commitment to religious tolerance goes back to the very beginning of our nation.
And as you know, we are home to people of all religions, many of whom came to this country seeking the right to exercise their own religion, including, of course, millions of Muslims.
And we have the greatest respect for people of faith.
To us, to me personally, this video is disgusting and reprehensible.
It appears to have a deeply cynical purpose to denigrate a great religion and to provoke rage.
And remember, the poor clown who made this video was put in prison.
He was carted out of his house with a towel wrapped around his face in the middle of the night because of intense pressure from the White House and the Justice Department.
He was arrested because he had violated his parole by posting this video on a, so basically on a technicality, he was put in a prison system that's overloaded with people who actually killed people.
So this video guy is put in prison to show that we're really good people.
We didn't do anything, you know, it's not our fault.
Okay, now here's Hillary at the Benghazi hearing last week.
One last cut.
And if you look at what I said, I referred to the video that night in a very specific way.
I said, some have sought to justify the attack because of the video.
I use those words deliberately, not to ascribe a motive to every attacker, but as a warning to those across the region that there was no justification for further attacks.
Because if the video had been out there, there would have been justification for killing our people.
I mean, this all depends on the meaning of what is, okay?
Could you do that?
I couldn't do that.
I couldn't stand in front of those bodies and lie like that.
I mean, she knew, she knew what she was saying.
She promised the families we're going to get the guy who made this video.
We're going to get the guy who made this video.
She said that, you know, I couldn't do it.
All right, here's Charles Blow, the very far-left and well-named columnist of the New York Times.
He's well-named because his work just blows.
I mean, it's just amazing.
It's just campaign rhetoric, basically.
But this is Charles Blow reacting to that hearing, those lies.
It was a televised witch trial, but the tribunal had before it a woman who had not confessed transgression and who defied the flame.
This is a column that was called something like, Hillary wins again.
Instead, she was poised, knowledgeable, and unflappable.
She turned the tables.
The committee was on trial and found wanting in motives, authorities, and class.
I keep being surprised by the astonishing degree to which Clinton opponents continue to underestimate her.
She is far from flawless.
Thank goodness.
But she is no slouch or dummy.
She is sharp and tough and resilient.
She is a rock, and she is not to be trifled with.
The Clintons, as a couple and individually, are battle-hardened.
They are not new to this.
They are survivors.
Even when they lose, they survive.
No upstart congressman or woman can do more damage than has already been done and dealt with.
Why can't these people see that?
Oh, well.
So it doesn't matter.
It doesn't matter that she was lying.
It doesn't matter that she absconded on her duty.
None of that matters.
It only matters that she turned in this performance.
Now, as I say, politicians lie.
But the fact that the press has now gone into reviewing the quality of these lies is a direct result of their education.
That was a time when reporter, being a reporter, was a working-class job.
And then those guys just would puncture whoever had power and was pretentious and who abused it.
But once it became a college-educated job, they became stupid because they were intellectuals.
And they were like George Orwell said, you know, there's an idea, referred to an idea so stupid that only an intellectual could believe it.
And the idea here is the postmodern idea of the idea that words don't mean anything.
That's one thing, that words do not have a reference to objects or feelings or experiences in the real world.
Words are to be interpreted.
That there is no truth, there is no moral truth.
That only the narrative matters.
And it's only the person who has the most power, who sells the narrative, wins, and that narrative becomes the truth.
And I just want to point out, because people think this is evil, you know, I mean, I remember the last Pope Benedict was always railing against moral relativism.
And it is evil.
I mean, it's a pathway to evil, not to believe in truth.
But it has been inherent in Western culture since Jesus stood before Pilate.
I mean, the oldest piece of the New Testament we have, the oldest document with the New Testament on it we have, about the size of a cell phone, is the scene in which Jesus confronts Pilate and says, I came to testify to the, and he says, I came to testify to the truth, and Pilate says, what is truth?
What is truth?
Who knows what truth is, basically?
And Jesus has already said, I am the truth.
And this came up, this, for a while, this question was put to bed by the fact that the church, the Catholic Church, became so dominant in the West that it controlled the truth.
It was the answer.
The answer to what is truth was truth is what the church says.
When that fell apart, when Luther hammered up his theses in the church in Wittenberg, that fell apart.
That consensus fell apart.
And ever since then, this dialogue has started again between there is a truth, we testify to the truth, and what is truth.
And if you want to see Shakespeare predicts everything.
The other day I heard Mark Lamont Hill, that college professor who was sometimes on the Greg Gutfeld show, and he was saying, oh, white men who are overrated, Shakespeare, Hamlet, ridiculous, you know, you should read the Revengers tragedy or something.
Just nonsense.
I mean, this is a thing that the left, the left is always trying to end Shakespeare because Shakespeare tells you everything that the Bible can't.
I mean, the Bible tells you everything you need to know about God.
Shakespeare tells you everything you need to know about man.
I mean, it's just an he, he was a mind that it's almost impossible to believe that a person had this mind.
In Hamlet, Hamlet is given a job.
And Hamlet is a rewrite of another play.
There's an old play in which Hamlet is told to go out and get revenge and off he goes to get revenge.
In Shakespeare, Hamlet is told to go out and revenge his father's murder, and he can't do it because he can't figure out where the truth lies.
And there's a famous scene in Hamlet.
Every scene in Hamlet is famous.
There's a famous scene in Hamlet where he's pretending to be insane.
He's pretending to be mad, and the old man Polonius comes to him and he's reading, Hamlet is reading a book, and he says, what are you reading?
And Hamlet answers, words, words, words.
I'm reading words.
That's all I'm doing.
So the words don't mean anything.
There's another scene between Hamlet and Polonius where Hamlet keeps telling him a cloud looks like something different.
He says, it looks like a weasel.
And Polonius says, yes, it does look like a weasel.
He says, no, it looks more like an elephant.
I can't remember what it is.
And Polonius says, yeah, it looks like an elephant.
So he's selling this narrative.
And finally, there's a scene between Hamlet and Rosencrantz and Guildenstern in which Hamlet says, there is nothing either good or bad, but thinking makes it so.
Nothing has a definite moral quality, but thinking makes it so.
And he explains to them that his mood changes the very face of the world.
Everything that was in postmodernism was predicted in Hamlet.
Every single concept is predicted in the mad scene in Hamlet.
But Shakespeare knew that it was insane.
That's why he put it in the mad scene.
He knew that it was not only insane, it was make-believe insane, because people don't really believe there's nothing good or bad.
They just say that in college courses, and they really do teach that in college courses.
And he explained it, and basically, you know, Hamlet takes place before the Reformation, the play, but Hamlet goes to school in Wittenberg, where Luther was and where Luther hanged up, hammered up his 95 theses.
And I believe, this is something that not all critics believe, but I believe that Shakespeare was saying that once the church falls apart, this is where the conversation is going.
And right this minute, I mean, this conversation has gone on.
It was Nietzsche and Dostoevsky.
It was Freud and C.S. Lewis, and this conversation, whether there is truth or not, has gone on through all of Western civilization.
Right this minute, it looks like the people who believe the Pontius Pilots are winning.
It looks like Pontius Pilot and his What is Truth are winning, and just the narrative matters.
Just her performance, Hillary Clinton's performance of the Benghazi hearing matters more than the truth.
I don't believe that's where it's going to end.
I'll talk about that another time.
I'm kind of out of time.
But I will talk about another time why I don't believe that the postmodernists and the people who don't believe in truth are going to win, even in the near run.
Stuff I like.
More importantly, let's get to Halloween stuff I like.
I need just a couple more minutes.
Do I have enough time to talk about this just a little bit?
Yeah, yeah.
Yeah, good.
All right.
This is a film called Diabolique.
I didn't bring a clip of it because it's a French film.
You know, that would be kind of silly to just have people talking French.
Diabolique came out in 1955.
It's a small thriller in black and white.
And remember, by 1955, there were plenty of color films.
It's old, and it's foreign.
So to an American modern mind, it's going to feel a little slow.
And I'm just pointing that out.
The reason it's going to feel slow is because of Alfred Hitchcock.
Alfred Hitchcock discovered, really, on his own, that movies are a visual art.
They're not based on plays.
The old movies are really modeled on the play.
Hitchcock discovered that they were almost a purely visual art.
And in Vertigo, there's a half hour without any words in it at all.
He always said that he was sort of sorry sound came in because there wasn't supposed to be dialogue in films.
What Hitchcock would do is he would cut out transitional moments.
So if you got in your car, drove to the store, walked into the store, he'd cut it out and just put you in the store.
And that was, so his, so films got faster and faster and faster.
An old screenplay used to be 200 pages long.
Today, you're lucky if you can go over 105 pages because there's no dialogue in movies anymore.
Even movies that seem to have a lot of dialogue have no dialogue compared to the old movies.
Okay.
Diabolique came out in 1955.
It was based on a novel by two French writers who also wrote the novel Vertigo that Hitchcock made his great film on.
But this novel, before Vertigo, was snapped up while Hitchcock was trying to get the rights to it.
It was snapped up by a French director called Henri Georges Clouseot, who had made a great film called The Wages of Fear.
Diabolique: The French Terror Classic00:01:45
And he got this movie and he made Diabolique, which is the story of the abused wife of a man who runs a second-rate boarding school.
And the abused wife and the man's mistress, her husband's mistress, start getting together and comparing notes, which is never a good situation for the husband, okay?
And it's a murder story and it's a ghost story.
And if you can get over the slowness, the Frenchness of it, and really focus on it, it is an absolutely creepy, terrifying film.
This film came out in black and white when all other films were being made in color, and it got critical raves.
The critics loved it.
I mean, people loved it, but the critics loved it.
And Hitchcock, who never got any love from the critics, got really ticked off, you know, because he never won Oscars, he never got any respect.
And so he thought, I'm going to make a small black and white film.
And he made Psycho to counteract this.
And Psycho was in some ways both the top mark in his career, because it really was an obviously brilliant, intellectual, artistic film.
And it was also the end of him, because after that he started to take himself seriously, which has ended American artists' careers from Woody Allen, Stephen King, any American artist who starts to take himself seriously because the American arts aren't that serious, gets ruined.
But he did make Psycho off this.
Diabolique, still a great film.
Like I said, it's old, it's slow, it's French.
You have to really focus on it.
But if you do, it will be a great Hollywood Halloween film for this, which I've now learned Lindsay has now taught me to call Halloween.
We celebrate the entire week of Halloween.
It's going to be like Christmas by the time we're finished.