Andrew Clavin skewers Democrats for weaponizing MLK Day while mocking their hypocrisy, then pivots to the GOP’s identity crisis: Republicans lost $35 in poker bets and their 2016 primary to Trump’s empty populism over Cruz’s principled Ivy League constitutionalism. He contrasts Cruz’s Obamacare shutdown victory with Ryan’s Baltimore agenda—tax/healthcare reform—now overshadowed by infighting, warning the party risks collapse if it abandons Reaganite grit for pragmatism. Creed’s Rocky Balboa analogy frames losing on principle as a path to redemption, while the left’s anti-win morality (DDT bans, lighter cars) proves fatal. Clavin ends by swapping politics for jungle warfare, teasing Leningen vs. the Ants as the real survival guide. [Automatically generated summary]
Meeting at an undisclosed location in the dead of night, the Democrat candidates for president gathered once again on Sunday to debate matters they wished to keep secret from the general public, like what they believe in and how they would govern.
With socialist crazyman Bernie Sanders gaining in the polls, corrupt Harridan Hillary Clinton attacked her opponent by accusing him of sticking to his lunatic principles instead of cynically lying and changing his opinion whenever he wants to, like she does.
Sanders defended himself by declaring that he was only obeying the voices in his head.
For his part, bland, waxy-faced non-entity Martin O'Malley bragged that when he was governor of Maryland, he had cut down on the number of people incarcerated through the simple expedient of allowing Baltimore to sink into a morass of violence and crime.
In the debate's most emotional moment, Mrs. Clinton addressed the nation directly, saying she would not be deterred in her quest for money and power, even if she was indicted by the FBI.
Just try to stay out of my way.
Just try.
I'll get you, my pretty, and your little dog, too.
To this, Sanders responded with an emotional appeal of his own.
Sanders ended the evening by pounding his shoe on the podium and screaming, we will bury you.
Mrs. Clinton responded by calling Mr. Sanders sexist and claimed that a woman president would be just as capable of destroying this country as any man.
The debate ended at the stroke of midnight when all three candidates melted into thin air and were suddenly gone.
Trigger warning, I'm Andrew Clavin, and this is the Andrew Clavin Show.
That was an exact reproduction of the debate, which I'm sure you were all watching.
I'm sure you all turned off the football to watch the debate.
So happy Martin Luther King Day.
You know, we're all gathered around the Martin Luther King tree singing Martin Luther King carols.
You know, this is the day.
This is the day when Democrats get together to celebrate the civil rights leader by betraying all his principles.
I mean, it's like, this is, you know, after all, this is the man who said we shouldn't judge each other by the color of our skins.
We should judge each other by the content of our characters.
To which the Democrats said, that means changing their entire platform, you know.
But they get together.
Grumbling About Gratitude00:04:45
It's nice.
They get together at the gravesite of Martin Luther King and chant Black Lives Matter until they can actually hear him rolling over his grave.
It is, I mean, Republicans get, conservatives, I should say, get annoyed because it feels like the left has co-opted this holiday.
And so sometimes you hear people being disgruntled.
This holiday makes me a little disgruntled because I've just come back from Christmas and New Year's.
I've had this long break and at New Year's you make these resolutions.
I'm going to work harder and I'm going to do more and I'm going to really get it my day.
And then they have this day off, you know, where you can't get anybody on the phone and it's like just annoying, you know, but still, he was a great man.
He was a great evangelical Christian.
Remember, that's the God who the Democrats booed at their convention three times.
I think that had something to do with denying him thrice, but he was a great evangelical Christian, as all people who have stood up for the rights of the oppressed in America and elsewhere almost are, almost always are.
And he really did just, you know, every guy who ever hit him with a fire hose, every guy who ever set a dog on him, was a Democrat.
And so when they get together and co-opt this holiday, it makes us a little, a little, just a teeny, tiny, tiny, weeny bit annoyed at these guys.
But, but, that's enough about the evil party.
Today we're going to be talking about the stupid party.
All right, this is going to be a show about the Republicans.
I had this great weekend.
I had this wonderful weekend.
I started off playing poker with J.A., our producer.
He and his friends were, I shamed him by announcing on the show that he had not had me to his last poker game.
So I shamed him into inviting me.
And, you know, I haven't played poker in eight years.
I talked about on the show how I was thrown out of my last poker game when they found out I had voted for George W. Bush in the second Bush election.
And they actually asked me not to come back.
They said, it makes us uncomfortable that you're here.
So I had a poker game for eight years.
So I did.
I love playing.
I'm not that great, but I love playing.
I went and J.A. and his young friends took $35 off me.
And that was before the game started.
They just kind of mugged me.
That was a little untoward, but other than that, but that was great.
Saturday morning, I woke up and I read the Wall Street Journal.
And the first thing I look at in the Wall Street Journal, I look at the front page, and then I turn to the opinion pages where all the real information is.
And I always read this little thing, the notable quotable section, because it's always got some famous guy saying something really concise.
It's always kind of short, but it's just some really concise thing.
And it's usually a historical figure, but sometimes it's a modern writer or something like this.
And I opened it up on Saturday, and it was me.
And I thought, I thought, oh, Andrew Clavin, I love that guy.
He's so smart and good-looking, you know.
So now I only have one.
I have now achieved all my ambitions in life, except for one, which is I want to be, this is my last ambition.
I want to be the answer to a crossword puzzle clue.
And it can't just be any crummy crossword puzzle.
You know, it has to be like the journal of the Times or some respectable crossword puzzle.
The day that I fill in my name in a crossword puzzle, it'll be like Nunc Demeters, baby.
I am out of here.
It's like, now let your servant depart in peace, you know.
So that was nice.
But anyway, the best thing about the weekend was I love spending time with my wife, but we never can go to the same movies because she really has gotten to the point where she doesn't want to see anything disturbing at the movies.
And one thing that happens to you as you get older, you do stop, like gratuitous violence on screen stops being as amusing as it was when you were young.
Like you look around, if you're in a horror movie, like a real slasher horror movie, look around, you don't see too many people over 40 there who look like they shouldn't be locked up because, you know, as you get a little older, you start to realize that people are real, flesh is real, death is real, you know, and it starts to feel like, eh, maybe that's not as it's not as entertaining to see some young person cut to pieces with a butcher knife as it seemed to be when I was a young person and thought I was never going to die, you know.
So I get that, but I still like gritty, tough, violent dramas.
I like to see reality.
And my wife at this point is like, why do I have to watch that?
You know, I know reality already.
I don't have to see this.
So we can never go to the movies together.
And she likes, she now likes these little arty films that I'll watch, but I'll watch them when I get the DVD because it's just not worth seeing them on the big screen because they're too small.
However, she heard some guy, I guess the screenwriter of Creed being interviewed.
And she said, you know, I wouldn't mind seeing Creed.
And I was like, hey, you're kidding, a fight movie?
And I'll tell you, we're in, we're gone.
I'm like, it's too late to change your mind.
I've reserved it.
By the time she finished the sentence, I had booked the tickets.
So I got to go see Creed, which was very enjoyable.
And I'll talk about that in a little bit.
Obamacare's Constitutional Stand00:14:41
And of course, it's the football playoffs when all the best teams get together to fight their way to the point when Carolina can play the Patriots.
Because we all know what's going to happen.
And you're a crummy.
That was my revenge for that poker match was watching Seattle get the threat.
You know, I don't mean to hate Seattle.
I know you're from Seattle.
It is a beautiful, but something about those coffee-drinking left-wing guys, I hate the fact that they have a great football team.
And they were just, I mean, they did.
It was a noble effort.
It really was.
I thought that they were, I thought they had been blown out.
Then they came back steadily, surely.
They never gave up.
It really was a great game.
And that Green Bay game was just crazy.
Watching sports and watching Creed, which of course is the rock, that's the Rocky movie, so it's a boxing movie.
And, you know, it started me thinking about all that, you know, just exposure, I guess, to sports and sports culture and all this.
It started me thinking about the ideas of winners and losers.
And of course, the minute you think about losers, you think about the Republican establishment, you know, because they are the guys who have been running candidates for eight years against this incompetent socialist, dishonest guy in the White House, and they keep losing.
And so I started to think about this whole concept of winning and losing and this kind of weird relationship we have with winning and losing and why it is at this point threatening to really just tear the Republican Party apart.
And so I saw this article in National Review.
It's about the Republicans gathering to discuss their agenda.
So all the congressional Republicans get together.
And, you know, this is the Republican establishment.
And I'm not into demonizing these guys, okay?
I think they've been weak against Obama.
I think they felt themselves hamstrung by the fact that we have this president who's the first black president and no one will lay a glove on him and there's no possibility of impeaching him.
The country would go up and smoke.
So he can almost do anything he wants.
And, you know, I don't think Obama is an evil guy, but I do think he doesn't have a great relationship with the Constitution.
I think the fact that he can do anything he wants, I think that's just like the ring in Lord of the Rings.
It's just going to make you worse and worse and worse.
And his principles, even though he does have principles, they are not principles that I recognize as good.
So, you know, you say, well, how can you say he has principles?
He lies to us all the time about what he stands for.
That's one of his principles.
One of his principles is it's okay to lie to the public as long as you are pushing this leftist rock up the hill and trying to get closer and closer to European socialism.
So the GOP doesn't know why we hate them.
They're just absolutely baffled by this rage that feeling.
They think like, you know, we did, you know, we have majorities.
We've won majorities in the House and Senate.
We've capitulated to Obama on every possible, you know, on immigration, on every, you know, Obamacare.
We haven't done anything about Obamacare.
That's not true.
They actually did send a bill to the president to repeal Obamacare.
But, you know, it's all useless.
It's this kind of kabuki.
And so people are furious.
So they gather together.
And here's, I'm going to read part of a little bit of this article from National Review.
The Republican Congress gathered this week in Baltimore to begin developing Speaker Paul Ryan's conservative agenda.
And then later on, it tells you what the agenda is.
He says the top five priorities are national security, tax reform, health care reform, welfare reform, and, quote, restoring the Constitution, unquote, by rebuilding the separation of powers.
He promised that House Republicans will have a complete agenda by the time we have a nominee.
So I'm in favor of all that stuff, right?
I mean, that basically means repealing Obamacare, you know, getting spending under control.
But as they gathered together, the presidential race and the prospect that Donald Trump or Ted Cruz might become the party's standard-bearer was on everyone's mind.
Ryan's agenda is as much about moving the congressional GOP from an opposition party to what he likes to call a proposition party as about fashioning a bulwark against a potentially divisive nominee, right?
They don't want a guy who the country is not going to like.
Conversations among members before now have largely lumped Trump and Cruz together.
Let me just pause on that for a minute, to take Trump, who is a demagogue with fascism.
He's not a fascist, but he's a demagogue with fascist tendencies with no relationship whatsoever to the Constitution.
Barack Obama has a bad relationship to the Constitution, but he does have a relationship to the Constitution.
He knows it's there.
He knows there are words in it.
He knows the words are supposed to have some kind of relationship to what he does.
It's kind of this vague cloud of knowing in his mind.
Trump has no idea what the Constitution says, what it's about, how many branches of government he has.
He's just huge.
Everything's going to be great because he does it.
In Baltimore, this article goes on to say, in Baltimore, it changed.
Members began privately debating the merits of each, attempting to determine which of the two, Trump or Cruz, would be more amenable to their forthcoming agenda.
Okay, so which one is better?
If it's going to be one of these guys that they hate, they hate both of them.
One of them has no relationship to the Constitution.
The other is an Ivy League constitutional scholar devoted to the Constitution.
They can't see any difference between those two.
They just want both of them are problems.
The developing feeling among House Republicans, Donald Trump is preferable to Ted Cruz.
This is why they call it the stupid party.
Here's a quote.
If you look at Trump's actual policies, they're pretty thin.
There's not a lot of meat there, says one Republican member in Ryan's inner circle who requested anonymity to speak frankly about the two frontrunners as leadership has carefully avoided doing all week.
If Trump were to get the nomination, he would be, quote, he'd be looking to answer the question, where's the beef?
And he will have, and we, the congressional Republicans, will have that for him.
The member says he believes that when it comes down to it, almost all of the candidates would subscribe to the conservative agenda he and the rest of leadership are hoping to advance, except, that is, for Cruz.
And the guy says, this anonymous guy says, look at the Senate.
He hasn't been a team player.
He's always been his own person with his own aspirations and his own vision, only concerned with where he wants to go.
And you know, for us, we want to work closely with the president and with Cruz.
There's a question of whether that could happen.
A preference for Trump over Cruz is by no means universal within the conference.
Cruz has earned endorsements from a number of House Freedom Caucus members.
Most pollsters are saying that Cruz may create even more trouble than Trump.
In other words, what they're saying here, what they're saying here, is that Trump has no agenda.
He has no policies.
So therefore, he'll be amenable to taking our policies, which is this old thing about demagogues.
Once we get him in power, we'll be able to control him.
Once we get him into power, we'll be able to control him.
He has no principles, so we can sell him our programs instead.
What could possibly go wrong?
What could possibly go wrong with that idea?
I mean, how stupid are these guys?
How blind are they to who these people are?
Cruz is a guy.
He might be divisive.
All my friends who are in the establishment, and I have a lot of friends, especially back east, who are real establishment Republicans, they assure me Cruz can't win, can't win the general election.
That's what they tell me.
I don't believe that, but that's what they tell me.
But it's because he has these principles.
It's because he believes in something.
And when you say he doesn't belong, he shouldn't be a leader because he's not a team player.
Leaders aren't team players.
Leaders are leaders.
That's the difference between them.
The other day, I was on a podcast with my friends Rob Long and Peter Robinson and James Lilacs.
They do a podcast over at Ricochet.
It's really good.
But they're very middle.
That's very middle right, center right, very establishment.
These are three extreme.
I mean, all of them.
Rob Long was one of the head writers on Cheers.
And Peter Robinson works for the Hoover Institution.
And he does that great television show.
I forget.
Now it's at the Wall Street Journal.
I always forget what it's called, but it's a wonderful interview show.
And James Lilacs is a very, very funny conservative writer who's frequently on the Hugh Hewitt Show.
They're really bright guys.
And Rob Long says to me, a year ago, you and I, he's talking to me, he says, a year ago, you and I had lunch.
And everybody in the Republican Party was saying Jeb Bush, Jeb exclamation point Bush, was going to be the nominee.
And you, I said to Rob, that he's not going to win a single primary.
I don't know what you're talking about.
He's not going to win a single primary.
And Rob said to me, this is an extraordinarily bright, you know, Yale-y guy.
He says, how did you know?
How did you know?
And I cracked up.
I cracked up on the air.
I said, how could you have thought?
How could you have thought that this guy, this guy, that, you know, you don't have to give the base everything.
The base will compromise.
The base will grumble and come, but they'll come along with a guy who basically is, but this guy, you know, it's not that he's not conservative.
I mean, William F. Buckley said the greatest thing about the Bushes.
He said, he said of the first George Bush, the first President Bush, he said he's conservative, but he's not a conservative.
And the article makes all the difference.
These guys don't have a series of conservative beliefs that they can turn to in their moment of need.
They just kind of go with their hearts a lot of times, and that's, you know, not going to work once you're president.
Just take a look at this.
Here is Jeb Bush talking about immigration, right?
Now, remember that immigration is one of the things that has not just the base going crazy, not just the republic, but also blue-collar workers, because it's the blue-collar workers who are losing their jobs and their schools and their ERs to illegal people who are here illegally.
These are not the immigrants who make America great.
These are the people who sneak over our borders.
And here's, this is the thing that drives, it's driving the base crazy.
It's driving the Democrats who would, the blue-collar Democrats who would come over, the old Reagan Democrats who would come over.
It's driving them crazy.
This is Jeb W. Bush talking about it.
Someone who comes to our country because they couldn't come legally.
They come to our country because their families, you know, a dad who loved their children was worried that their children didn't have food on the table.
And they, you know, wanted to make sure their family was intact.
And they crossed the border because they had no other means to work to be able to provide for their family.
Yes, they broke the law, but it's not a felony.
It's kind of the, it's a, it's a, it's a, it's an act of love.
It's an act of commitment to your family.
You know, it's also an act of love to take care of the people in your country who are, you know, are killing themselves with heroin and prescription drugs because they've become useless, because they have no training to move into the new tech, the new technological economy.
That also is an act of love before you left these guys, you know, I mean, I know, I know the Bushes need somebody to mow the lawn outside their mansion, but that's not the point.
You know, it's not the point.
And it's also not the point what this guy's intention is when he crosses the border.
He may be a great person.
He may be a family man doing the best for his family.
That's not the point.
The point is, do we have borders or not?
Do we have a commitment to our workers or not?
So Barack Obama's first election was, took place when illegal immigration was the hottest topic.
Toward the end of the election, the economy, of course, because of the crash, that became the hottest topic.
Who did the Republicans give us?
They gave us John McCain, one of the most liberal of Republicans, a total rhino, who said this whole circus, he called it, the circus about immigration is just hurting the party.
So just forget about it.
These things may matter to you, but they don't matter to us.
So you, so you just forget about it because you need our votes.
We don't need your votes.
Oops.
You know, that didn't work out so well.
This is also a guy who said, the economy, I don't really know that much about the economy.
What was it, quote?
The issue of economics is not something I've understood as well as I should.
This is a lifetime senator, okay?
You know, so, gee, how did he lose?
Then we have, we have three elections after this.
Now, here's a speech that Ted Cruz gave, I think, to the heritage people, and he describes these three elections.
This is the midterm election, the second Obama election, and then the next midterm election.
We've had three elections since Barack Obama was elected.
Two of them, 2010 and 2014, the number one issue, was repealing Obamacare, and we won historic tidal wave landmark elections.
In between the middle election, 2012, we sought out and nominated the one person on the planet who had actually designed and implemented a plan just like Obamacare.
Literally, there are seven billion people on the face of planet Earth.
We could have walked up to anyone.
We could have said, sir, have you designed and implemented a plan like Obamacare?
No, you're our guy!
It's great, and it's absolutely true.
It's absolutely true.
So the question, can Ted Cruz win the general?
I don't know.
I don't know if he can.
He's pretty much, he stands for what he stands for, and he stands up for what he stands for.
They keep yelling at him that he shut down Congress, he shut down the government, over funding Obamacare and how terrible that was, but of course, after that, that's when we won that landslide election in the midterms, so they don't always know what they're talking about.
However, if he loses, he's going to lose because of his principles, and so that's what I was thinking about as I'm watching Creed, as I'm watching the football games, thinking about what's our attitude toward winning and losing supposed to be?
I mean, because the left has told us that winning and losing, basically the entire principle of winning and losing are evil, that if somebody is a loser in the game of life, if he has kids out of wedlock and can't afford to pay for them, if he leaves behind a trail of kids with various mothers and then for some reason lives in poverty because he didn't get an education and he gets sent away to jail because he sells drugs,
that's somehow the fault of the atmosphere, that's somehow the fault of the people who are prejudiced.
It's not because he's a loser.
That's not it.
That's not it.
You know, if somebody can't afford to pay a homeowner's loan, we'll give them a homeowner's loan anyway.
What could go wrong?
What could go wrong?
Why should he lose out on owning a home?
When the economy crashes because of that, when the economy crashes because of all those homeowner loans that can't be paid back, the guys that they blame are Wall Street, and there's plenty of blame to go around on Wall Street.
Wall Street has been dishonest and unregulated too long.
That's true.
But at least the Wall Street people were playing to win or lose.
You know, they were saying, hey, I see this is a stupid policy, loaning money, but I see how I can make money off it, so I'm going to make money off it.
Rocky's Indomitable Spirit00:05:16
And they did.
It was a boom.
It was a boom in the stock market, just like there is now until a week ago.
And so they were playing to win or lose.
And the left maintains that this is bad.
It's just your intentions that matter.
Everybody gets a trophy.
Everybody gets a trophy.
It's just your intentions that matter.
We mean to clean up the environment.
So we banned DDT.
Tens of millions of people, mostly African children, die of malaria because of this and are dying, I think it's like 800,000 kids a year, something like that.
But that's okay because they meant to clean up the environment.
You know, they make lighter cars.
More people get killed.
That's okay because they meant...
Affirmative action.
Affirmative action increases the rate of black failure by putting people in positions that they can't...
In schools where they can't deal.
But if you're opposed to that, you're wrong because then you're letting people win or lose according to the, you know, according to this kind of raw competition, this raw capitalist competition.
But winning or losing, winning and losing is it not only teaches you what works, it also teaches you what you're willing to lose for because losing is...
Somebody once said, I can't remember, it was a baseball manager, said, losing feels worse than winning feels good.
Losing feels bad.
Losing feels bad.
And it teaches you what you're willing to lose for.
Okay.
So I go to this movie Creed.
And remember, Creed is about Rocky and Rocky starts with the movie Rocky.
And you have to remember the thing about Rocky is that Rocky's a loser.
Rocky goes into that first, in that first fight against Apollo Creed and he loses, but he goes the distance.
And so he's a hero because he goes the distance.
So Rocky, in this movie, Rocky's an old man now.
Celeste Sloan's an old man.
He's been nominated for a best supporting actor for this.
He won the Golden Globe for it.
He's terrific.
He's great in it.
And a new young fighter who's the son of Apollo Creed comes to him and asked to be trained.
And first he doesn't want to do it.
And of course he does it.
It's hardly a spoiler to say that he takes him on to train him.
And there's a scene where he sets the kid in front of a mirror and has him shadow box himself in the mirror.
Play just a bit of that scene.
All right, Donnie, get into your stance.
Make a small target.
Turn sideways.
Okay.
You see this guy here staring back at you?
Yeah.
That's your toughest opponent.
Every time you get into the ring, that's who you're going against.
I believe that in boxing and I do believe that in life.
Okay?
You throw a jab in the jaw.
All right, one to the gut.
Now, every time you punch this guy, what's he doing?
He's throwing one back at him.
That's right.
So either you block it, slip it, or get out of the way.
So, I'm going to leave you two alone for a while.
Good luck.
That classic Rocky moment, I think.
And it's great, because Rocky is a loser, but he loses on principle.
He loses by standing up for the indomitable human spirit.
That's why he loses.
We all know it.
We all know why that picture is great.
And he comes back.
And the thing about when you lose for principle, when you lose for principle, you come back.
You can come back.
And he does come back in the sequel, and he wins.
He becomes the champ.
And Rocky is a champ because of what he lost for and because of how he plays and what he wins for.
And, you know, they say it's not whether you win or lose, it's how you play the game.
I don't believe that.
I believe it's not only whether you win or lose.
It's also how you play the game.
Because when you lose on principle, there is no shame to it, and you will come back.
And that idea is built into the very foundation of our culture.
You know, you look at the Muslims still fighting the Crusades, still angry about the Crusades, because they have no system in their system of thought, has no outlet for loss.
You know, God is God.
God is all-powerful.
God is beyond reason.
He must win.
If you believe in God, you win.
And they are still fighting those battles.
They're still fighting those battles.
We have a loser God.
We have a loser God.
If you read the Old Testament, the story of the Jews, it's a story of people who give up their freedom for a king.
And God says, you know, they're rejecting me, but give them the king.
And they have that king, and the king leads them to empire.
They have the empire of David and Solomon, and it is in that power that they lose themselves, and their empire collapses.
And they end in exile.
They end in exile, and at the last part of the Bible, they come back and start to rebuild.
But it's with this real humility where they recommit themselves to principles.
They gather outside the rebuilding temple, and they reread the Bible.
They reread the law to recommit themselves to principles.
And, of course, the Christians, their God comes, and they think he's going to lead them to power and glory, and he gets wiped out.
I mean, it's a disaster.
It's a complete disaster.
I mean, Christianity is a complete disaster.
And the idea of Christianity is that you are playing a bigger game.
You are playing a bigger game than the game that's on the field.
You're playing a game that goes beyond life itself.
And that's why, you know, when Jesus says, blessed are the poor, blessed are the miserable, blessed are the...
Because he's saying, you know, you stick to this, and you will win.
Seek ye first the kingdom of God, and all these things will be given unto you, okay?
Leningen vs. the Ants00:04:01
That works for Rocky Balboa.
He comes back, and it worked for Ronald Reagan.
Ronald Reagan, remember, he lost the nomination to Gerald Ford.
He stuck to his principles, and he came back.
And when he came back, and when he won, he transformed the country.
He transformed it back into what it is.
Ted Cruz might lose.
He might lose.
But to confuse him with Donald Trump is to confuse everything.
It's to confuse everything that matters.
You don't have to like Cruz.
You don't have to support Cruz.
But to confuse a man like Cruz, a man of principle, with a man of no principle, and say, we'd rather have the man of no principle because we'll fill him up with our principles, is insane.
It's stupidity at the level of madness.
I mean, it's stupidity at the level of madness.
You know, if we run on our principles and lose, we will come back and win.
If we run without principles, the Republican Party will dissolve and will deserve to dissolve.
If we win on our principles, if we win on our principles, we'll transform this country back into something like what it's supposed to be.
That seems like worth fighting for to me.
I mean, it seems that's worth losing for, and it does seem something, a system by which we can possibly win.
All right.
That's my take on our lovely Republican friends who are sitting there banging.
It's always wonderful.
It's always wonderful when people, intelligent people of goodwill get everything exactly backwards because it's proof of original sin, and it's proof that there's still a Republican party.
Stuff I like.
I'm going to do jungle adventure stories today.
I was talking to Jay Hay.
There's just not enough jungle adventure stories anymore.
And the best ones are some of the best adventure stories ever written.
This one is, tell me if you've ever heard of this, John.
This one is a twofer because there's both a great story and a fun movie about it.
It's called Leningen vs. the Ants.
No.
No, I know.
But it's like, it was written by a German guy, 1937.
You can get it in, I think, Otto Penzler's Big Book of Adventure Stories.
I know it's in there, but it's in a couple of adventure stories.
It's hard to find.
It's about a guy who fights army ants.
I mean, every couple of years, every few years in Africa, these army ants get together and they're incredibly intelligent as a body and they strip clean vegetation, animals.
They'll just eat anything alive.
And this is about a tough plantation owner who just says the human mind is tougher than any force of nature.
And he sets himself, as everybody's running for their lives, he sets himself against these ants.
And really, read the story first because the movie is only good.
The movie's fun.
It's old-fashioned and fun.
It's Charlton Heston as the guy and he fights these ants.
It's really fun.
And it starts, I have one, I could find one scene and they added this.
This is not in the short story, but in the movie there's this kind of sexy thing where he sends away for a mail-order bride and he gets Eleanor Parker, as if, as if that's who shows up when he's sending away for a mail-order bride.
But this is their first confrontation.
What I want to say is this, our contract, marriage by proxy, is not an uncommon way to get a wife in the jungle.
Only you are uncommon.
How did my brother find you?
He advertised in the New Orleans papers.
You'll be flattered to know there were nearly 50 applications.
He picked you.
Not exactly.
I didn't apply.
You see, I've known your brother for many years.
He asked me to read the applications and help him choose a wife for you.
I became interested.
Finally decided I'd be much better for you than anyone else.
Your brother didn't agree with me, but I managed to convince him.
It wasn't easy.
Very stubborn man, your brother.
You might not believe that.
It runs in the family.
Really?
That's sexy stuff, actually.
In 1954, it's called The Naked Jungle.
The Naked Jungle with Charlton Heston, but it's based on a great, great adventure story called Leningen vs. the Ants.
And we will have more jungle adventure for you, both in the jungle of L.A. and in the jungles of the world.