Andrew Clavin’s Ep. 66 skewers Trump’s poll surge (35% in New Hampshire) as a backlash against "electable but never elected" GOP elites, framing his rise on anti-"political correctness" fury—mocking "period positivity" claims and transgender sports policies as societal distortions. He ties Iran’s Rouhani’s Italy visit to Obama’s nuclear deal, calling it a blunder that fueled Tehran’s executions while crippling Europe, before warning truth’s collapse empowers populist chaos. Sinatra’s reinvention becomes a grim metaphor for America’s fractured identity. [Automatically generated summary]
He's sold more than 25 million records worldwide and has the voice of an angel.
Oh, hi.
I'm Josh Groban.
And I have the voice of an angel.
Josh Groban's multi-platinum, The Best Tweets of Kanye West, was the number one album of 2011.
And now, his highly anticipated follow-up.
The best tweets of Donald Trump.
I've never seen a thin person drinking diet cold at Barack Obama's birth certificate is a fraud.
A fraud.
Robert Patson should not take back Kristen Stewart.
She cheated on him like a dog.
And we'll do it again.
Just watch.
Donald Trump's tweets will make you laugh.
They'll make you cry.
But mostly they'll make you cry.
Amazing how all the haters and losers keep tweeting the name Face Von Clownstick.
Like they are so original.
And like no one else is doing it.
Buy now and got the exclusive new bonus track, Losers and Haters Absolutely Free.
Sorry, losers and haters, but my IQ is one of the highest.
And you all know it.
So please don't feel so stupid or insecure.
It's not your fault.
It's not your fault.
You'll get all the controversy.
We need global warming.
All the self-promotion.
My fragrance success is flying off the shelves at Macy's the perfect Christmas gift.
All the contradiction.
Macy's stars suck and they are bad for U.S. NA and so much more.
The best tweets of Donald Trump.
Available wherever Trump stakes.
Trump water, Trump Vents where Trump the Fragrance and Trump the Home Mattress collection is sold.
I'm officially running for President of the United States.
Hashtag make America great again.
Trigger warning, I'm Andrew Clavin, and this is the Andrew Clavin Show.
That was Josh Grobin on Jimmy Kimmel Live, sent to me by Ben Shapiro, who he was just cracking me up yesterday.
First, he was cracking me up when I was here.
And then I went home and, you know, I actually work for a living.
I went out to write, and he keeps sending me this funny, really funny stuff.
I finally was like, no, he, did you see that thing he did where on the Daily Wire he had compare.
Can you tell Trump's tweets from Kanye West's tweets?
I tried to do it.
I just failed the test completely.
It was impossible to tell who was Donald Trump and who was Kanye West.
So who knows which of them will be our next president.
All right, it's the last show of the week.
I weep for America as they go into the Clavenless weekend.
You know, people, I know people here in the studio are just in mourning.
Lovely Lindsay, you look lovely in black, Lindsay.
With the hood and the little scarf and everything.
So all the political news is bad, I think.
I think we can now safely say that the political news is all bad, that Donald Trump's standing in the polls is holding and whether the, no one's voted yet, but if the polls are accurate, he looks like very good to win the first three states.
And, you know, he was on Bill O'Reilly last night.
Bill O'Reilly interviews Donald Trump.
It's like these two immense egos, you know, these two huge, huge, as he was a huge egos.
It reminded me of another, the other late night guy.
It reminded me of Jimmy Fallon when he did that routine of Trump interviews himself.
Do we have like a second of that?
Me interviewing me, that's what I call a great idea.
Of course it's a great idea.
We thought of it.
Okay, interview time.
Question one.
Are you ready for the Republican debate next week?
You know, the truth is, I'm always ready.
It's really going to be a big debate, but I'm always ready.
It's not just big.
It's you.
Good, Next question.
How are you going to create jobs in this country?
I'm just going to do it.
I'm just going to do it.
That's what Bill O'Reilly.
Basically, Bill O'Reilly, Roger Ailes must have sent O'Reilly out to beg Trump to do this debate.
And it was like he was debasing himself, trying to get him to do it.
And O'Reilly is saying to him, put your personal feelings aside and do what's right for the nation.
And Trump was like, I'm sorry.
I know, understand what you have.
Put my personal feelings aside and do what's right for someone else.
I know, understand that language.
It must be some foreign language.
And this is the guy.
This is the guy who the polls are now telling us is going to be the Republican nominee.
And if that's not bad enough, wait, wait, there's more.
Here's something from the Hill.
Jeb Bush has surged to second place behind Republican presidential rival Donald Trump in the early voting state of New Hampshire, according to a new poll.
The former Florida governor and future loser of the presidential race has the, doesn't say that, has the support of 18% of likely Republican primary voters in the granite state.
Trump holds the lead with 35%.
John Kasich follows Bush at 14%, with Marco Rubio at 9% and Ted Cruz at 8%.
Support for the pack of establishment candidates has fluctuated as they battle for a strong second place finish behind Trump.
You know, I've almost been afraid to talk about this.
I've continually said that there is a chance, I haven't predicted this, but I think there is a chance that the battle between Trump and Cruz will end up allowing a more moderate establishment and possibly more electable candidate to rise to the top.
And I keep saying I think it'll be Rubio.
And the reason I think it'll be Rubio is Rubio is actually electable.
You can actually imagine somewhere, you know, after a couple of tokes, you can start to imagine that maybe Rubio could beat Hillary Clinton and become president of the United States.
But no, you know, I kept thinking, every time I would say it in the back of my mind, I kept thinking, maybe it'll be Bush.
And I would think, no, no, don't even think it.
Don't even allow that thought to rise.
But of course, of course, he's, you know, Bush has been spending a million dollars a week, I think, attacking Rubio because he knows he's his competition.
And the establishment likes Bush because they love to throw up these guys they think are going to are perfect because they're electable.
We're throwing up the guy who's electable who never gets elected.
He never gets elected.
And so they keep throwing him up.
And then they blame us.
You know, well, you didn't show up at the polls because the guy sucked.
You know, he was boring.
And he has that look.
You know, Bush, I don't actually think Bush was a bad governor, by the way.
And I'm not even sure he'd be a bad president, but he has that look in his eyes like, please don't take my lunch money, you know.
Trump keeps slapping him around.
And there's just no way.
I mean, Hillary would make mincemeat of him.
And just the names, Clinton and Bush, running against each other.
I mean, Clinton had a good, quiet presidency because he basically kept the Reagan inheritance intact.
And, you know, Bush had, the last Bush had this very difficult presidency because all this terrible stuff happened.
And he, you know, handled it in a sort of mediocre way.
And, you know, it's like, it's just too easy.
It's too easy.
Anyway, so that's what's coming down the pike politically.
Patrick O'Brien, one of my favorite writers of the last century, wrote these sea stories about Aubrey and Matron, Captain Aubrey and his friend, Stephen Matron.
He had a line in one of his books, which I've always loved the line because I used to say it, and then one day I read it on the page, I thought, oh, well, it must be true, which is that the doomsayers are always right.
You know, the doomsayer, the people who say that things are going to hell are always right, because things always ultimately fall apart.
That is human life, right?
Everybody dies.
Every civilization falls.
But it matters when they fall apart and where you are when it happens, you know.
And this is why when Barack Obama talks about the right side of history, he's blowing it out his ear because it's such a stupid thing to say.
Because there is no, because your life only lasts a certain period of time, there is no right side of history.
It's just where you are when things happen.
So if you, say, were born in Germany in 1930 and you lived till today, which would be about 85 years, right?
Yeah, that's 85 years.
So, you know, if you had that life, you could say, wow, boy, things have really gotten better in Germany.
Things have really, you know, things just must always get better and better.
You know, except I didn't like that part when they put me in the gas chamber and killed me for no reason.
You know, that was kind of bad.
And then when I got stuck behind the Berlin Wall and they were torturing me and listening to all my conversations.
But when you look at the big history, the right side of history, when you get the big picture, everything's just been getting so much better.
It's too bad I'm dead.
So it really doesn't, this whole idea that things progress and they get better is a half, it's not even a half truth because ultimately everything collapses.
So now we're in this moment with this election.
We've got, on the Democrat side, we've got an obvious felon running against a socialist who escaped from the 1940s, you know, to come back, come back and sell us, you know, the Soviet Union, it's the future, believe me, you know, it's like, okay, you know, that's right, we were following you, Bernie.
So that's on the one side.
And then on the other side, we have Donald Trump, a huckster, basically, a complete, you know, complete phony, who might be running against Bush, you know, a guy who is like, just has, I am going to lose written across his forehead.
And I'm thinking like, well, what were the doomsayers saying?
And in some sense, it's not being a doomsayer.
Advantages And Disadvantages00:08:56
It's not being negative to say these are certain things that are bad.
And one of the things that I've been talking about forever has been political correctness and this culture of lies.
And I really do believe that what we're seeing right now is the sour fruit of this tree of lies that has been growing in America, in American culture and Western culture since the 1960s.
I mean, since the 1960s, we have had this thing, they call it political correctness, because they have to call it something.
Even the word political correctness is a euphemistic lie for a system of trying to lie reality into what you want it to be.
So, you know, if black people on average commit far more crimes and you're afraid of a black guy when you see him coming down the street and you cross the street because you don't happen to want to get mugged and you don't know this guy from Adam, he may be a brain surgeon, you know, like Ben Carson, or he may be out there to mug you and you don't know, so you cross the street and you're afraid.
It's your fault.
It's your fault.
You were supposed to lie.
You were supposed to pretend not to be afraid and pretend that these statistics don't exist and pretend, you know, it's craziness.
And some of it, I mean, it always starts as a matter of politeness.
They're basically telling you, don't be rude.
You know, don't say rude things.
So, you know, I mean, I was once at a dinner table where I started to talk about what I think is an absolute travesty, which is people getting divorced when they have young children.
I mean, I think that shatters children's lives.
And I understand sometimes it's inescapable.
You're being abused.
Your wife is an addict.
There's something really terrible going on.
But a lot of times, I know a lot of people, especially in this town, who get divorced because they saw something better or they didn't like being chained down and they just destroy.
It's like blowing up the kids' planet.
It is like blowing up the kids' planet.
Of course, I'm talking about this at dinner.
I'm sitting next to the woman, you know, my wife is waiting for the shoe to drop.
And when she says, I got divorced and my kids are three, and they're fine.
You know, they're fine.
It's like, you know, and what do you say?
No, they're not.
It starts as politeness.
And some of it, we don't notice it happening because it's funny.
You know, what these guys are always saying when they're trying to tell us that the truth is not the truth, it's hilarious sometimes.
One of my favorite sites, our pal, Michael Knowles, who does some work here, and I don't know what he does, but we let him in because he dresses better than all of us put together.
I mean, he just glasses up the joint.
But he showed me this site, Everyday Feminism.
Everyday feminism is like a vortex of stupidity.
It's like all the stupidity on the internet, all the bad ideas on the internet, go washing down like down a toilet, and they end up on everyday feminism.
So I just, here's just one piece that Michael sent me about menstruation, right?
This is the problem facing America today.
Menstruation is shamed in our society.
And we don't have to go far to find examples of this.
And the stigma leads to a lot of misinformation around menstruation, a lack of open discussion about period-related health issues and not enough access to menstrual products.
I know how tough it is to get tampons in this country.
You have to go up to the guy with the raincoat and he opens the rain and goes, you know, hands you the tampon.
As a society, it's absolutely imperative that we work towards destigmatizing menstruation because we need more conversations about this.
This is what we want to be talking about.
The period positive movement, it's the period positive.
I'm not, I swear I'm reading this right off the page.
The period positive movement aims to do that through discussion and education.
It aims to encourage open discussion about periods and raise awareness around menstrual health.
But unfortunately, wait, I haven't even gotten to the funny part yet.
But unfortunately, a lot of the period positive movement is exclusionary.
In order for the movement to be more impactful and less oppressive, we need to think deeply about the various ways in which we can make period positivity more inclusive.
Number one, include people who are trans and or non-binary.
Often menstruation is equated with femininity and womanhood.
Who got that?
What are they?
That's terrible.
That's terrible.
Only women are allowed to menstruate.
This is a disaster.
When we're taught sex education and biology in school, we're told that menstruation is something that cis women and only cis women experience.
In other words, feminine women.
I can't believe she goes to a school where they teach you that if you're an unfeminine woman, you don't menstruate, but what do I know?
Menstruation is portrayed as a woman's issue.
I think that's what it is, literally what it is.
This goes on, I mean, it's insane.
It goes on, and it's really funny.
But, but, you know, so we're laughing and it is hilarious.
But it also seeps up into the society.
This idea, she goes on to say basically, you know, if we frame menstruation as only a woman's issue, we imply that trans men and non-binary people who happen to menstruate are actually women.
What's wrong with us?
So this idea that gender doesn't exist, you know, the idea that race does exist and the idea that gender doesn't exist, seeps up into the society, so to speak.
And now, you probably heard about a week ago, was it?
Olympic Committee has changed their rules so that a guy who declares he's a woman can compete as a woman without even getting an operation.
If they declare themselves women and reduce their testosterone below a certain level for at least 12 months prior to competition, they can compete against ladies.
Now, there is a funny side to this, obviously.
It's comical.
Here's this comedian, Bill Burr.
It's a little racy, but we bleeped it.
Transgender athletes, I don't understand that.
You know, I understand it.
You know, you want to switch around.
I don't give a.
But I'm a sports fan.
That's a really new concept to me that you can be a dude, right?
Ranked 80th in the world.
You have your d ⁇ cut off.
You put on a sports bra, and now you're the number one tennis player in the world just coming out there with your man's shoulders.
That doesn't seem fair.
I might be wrong.
I might just be an old guy.
I have no idea.
It might be wrong.
I don't know.
But okay, it is, and it is.
It's hilarious.
But it's also serious.
I mean, you know, women are, women, athletes are like artists.
They risk their whole life to do something that really you may not be able to do.
You're betting your whole life on your talents.
Most people don't do that.
They bet their lives on their skills or their positions or their inheritance or whatever, or their hard work.
But artists and athletes are betting their whole life on their talent.
I know when I've had big contracts that have made the news, there's always some reporter who calls you up and he says, wow, it's like winning the lottery, isn't it?
And you go, no, no, not quite like winning the lottery.
It's more like betting your whole life on a big risk and eventually getting enough money so that if you prorated over all the times you worked at night and didn't sleep and stayed up all, you know, and went to work at your day job the next morning, if you added it all up, you're making about five bucks an hour.
And so, yeah, you know, now I have a nice house, but like before, I was living in a shoebox and eating spaghetti every night.
And, you know, so like athletes do this too.
They train and they train.
And, you know, an Olympic athlete, are you kidding me?
Training and training, and then you get one shot.
Remember that song, One Moment in Time, that was the theme of the Olympics?
You get that one moment to do it, and you're up against a guy?
You're up against a guy.
You know, here is Rhonda Rousey, the mixed martial arts fighter.
And she was asked about Fallon Fox, who is a trans, I don't know what to call him.
The guy is a guy, but he decides he's a girl and he goes out and fights.
So Fallon Fox goes out and fought a woman named Tamika Brince and just gave her a concussion, fractured her orbital bone, which is the bone over her eye.
And I have a quote from her.
The woman, she said, she said, I fought a lot of women and have never felt the strength that I felt in a fight as I did that night.
I can't answer whether it's because she was born a man or not, because I'm not a doctor.
I can only say I've never felt so overpowered ever in my life.
Here's Rhonda Rousey just speaking simple common sense about this.
Transgender fighters should be taken by a case-by-case basis.
And if you already developed through puberty as a man, I don't think you should be able to compete as a woman.
But I mean, I really tried not to give my opinion on this subject until I really extensively researched it.
And, you know, it's just the bone density and bone structure you have after you've gone through puberty as a man.
It's just, it's an advantage over a woman, you know.
And something like MMA, you know, if somebody kicks you and if you check a kick, the difference between if the person that threw the kick and the person checking the kick hurt, gets hurt, I mean, it has to do a lot with the bone density, and it's just an advantage.
Okay, so that's simple sense.
So in other words, you have to do it before puberty, which is child abuse.
I mean, to mutilate a confused adolescent's body because, you know, I mean, kids think all kinds of things and to decide which one of them is trans and which one of them is just loopy, which one of them is just going through a phase, you know, and mutilate the kid's body is disgusting.
Devaluing Truth and Lies00:08:57
It's a terrible thing to do.
And then this woman who, you know, she's a fighter.
She trains to do this.
She's putting her body on the line.
It's a tough thing to do.
These tennis players who work and work, you know, they really bust their chops to train, just like artists who sit up all night and write a single sentence over and over again to make sure it's right, or paint a painting and throw it away and throw everything away until, you know, we were talking before we came on about those 10,000 hours.
that you have to put in before you get good at anything.
And then to have it stripped away because these people want to see, to lie the world into obedience.
They want to lie the world into obedience.
And we saw it also with the Oscars.
I've been talking about that a lot, that a couple of black actors complained because there were no black actors nominated for the Oscars two years in a row.
Whereas if you go back and look, if you calculate the number of blacks nominated since 2000, it's about 10%.
There are about 12% blacks in the country.
And that's not even counting the people like the guy, Inorito, who made the Revenant, which I like so much, who's now a famous Latino director who's going to be nominated several times for years to come.
And already, I think he won last year, didn't he, for Bergman?
So now the Academy caves in and they decide we're going to stack the Oscars because there's too many old white men in there.
We're going to stack our academy with diverse people, as they call them, namely people who all think the same thing but have different colored faces and are men and women and all that.
Which means, as I've said repeatedly, that now when one of our insanely talented black actors actually wins an award, the award is tainted in the same way a victory is tainted if you happen to be a man beating the crap out of a woman in a mixed martial arts fight.
You know, your victory is tainted.
And now your victory as an Oscar winner is going to be tainted by this.
And they destroy competition because they're destroying truth.
All right, look, you can say these people are millionaire athletes, millionaire actors.
What's the difference?
The difference is the problem is the attack on the truth, the devaluing of the truth.
Today in the Wall Street Journal, they have that notable quotable thing that I've told you I love.
When you devalue the truth, you don't just devalue, you devalue the individual.
Because what is life?
What's life and freedom about if not to find the truth?
It's not to find your truth.
It's to find your experience, because there's only one truth.
It's to find your experience of the truth.
You know, what do you love?
Who do you love?
How have you been deceived?
How have you deceived yourself?
That's what all of life is about.
That's what growth is about.
What career do you want?
What woman do you like?
What man do you like?
Whatever.
Who are you?
That's all about finding the truth.
And to have somebody tell you that certain roads that you go down are offensive, to tell you that things that you see in front of your eyes are not there because it's wrong for you to see them, is to have yourself stripped away.
Here's a guy, his name is Brendan O'Neill.
He's the editor of the online magazine Spiked, and he was speaking at the What Cannot Be Said conference at the University of California, Irvine.
I love that name, the what cannot be said.
And he says, campus censors can't be held entirely responsible for their therapeutic censorship.
In fact, in many ways, they are the products of a culture that has been growing for decades.
In other words, their teachers taught them this stuff, and their teachers are now making fun of them for being too sensitive, but it's they who taught them how to do this.
He says, the safe space is a terrible trap.
It grants you temporary relief from ideas you don't like, but at the expense of your individuality, your soul, even.
If you try to silence unpopular ideas, you do an injustice both to those who hold those unpopular views and also to yourself through depriving yourself of the right and the joy of arguing back, taking on your opponents, and in the process, strengthening your own mental and moral muscles.
Liberate yourself, destroy the safe space.
He leaves out the fact that sometimes those people convince you.
You know, I used to be in my youth a pro-abortion guy, and one day I got in an argument with a friend, and it lasted through much of the night, and I walked away and I thought, you know what?
He won that argument.
And it took 20 years for me to accept that.
20 years for me to change my mind because I've surrounded in this atmosphere where it was wrong to think what I came to think.
It was wrong to say it.
It was wrong to say that abortion is wrong.
Only through having an argument, it was a perfectly friendly argument, but an intense one, do you change your mind?
You learn how to change your mind.
The devaluing of truth doesn't just devalue the individual, though.
Dan Henninger had an amazing column.
I mean, his columns are not always this amazing, but this one has really something.
Dan Henninger in the Wall Street Journal wrote a column about the Iranian president going to Italy.
Obama has made this deal with Iran that has taken away from the Europeans.
They don't have to put sanctions on Iran anymore for building their nuclear weapon, which of course Iran is continuing to do.
So since they don't have to have sanctions, they can do business with Iran, and they've brought in billions of dollars of business in to prop up their crumbling economy.
So let's count for a minute the number of lies that that takes in.
It takes in the lie that Bernie Sanders is telling us, that we need to be more like Europe.
Their economies are in terrible, terrible shape.
They're in debt up to their ears and mostly in the south, but it's going to creep up to the north because now they've got the European Union, so they're all going to be bailing each other out.
So now they have the president, what's his name, Rouhani, come over.
And they cover, do we have that picture of the art museum?
This is Rome's Capitoline Museum.
They cover up the nudes in the museum so he's not to be offended.
And people in Italy were just making fun of this.
They were laughing about it, saying they don't want him to have a hormonal reaction and thereby deprive them of this, I can't remember the amount, but it's this huge amount of money coming in, $18 billion, $18 billion worth of business that he is bringing in to prop up their economy.
So Henninger writes about these three pictures.
This is one of them.
The next picture is him talking to the Pope.
So here they are just having a fine old time, these guys.
He says, set aside the role, says Henninger, set aside the role Iran has played in the deaths of a quarter million Syrians and the refugees now destabilizing Europe.
One still may ask, why such public and jolly photo ops with this person?
The U.S. State Department's religious freedom report says in 2014, Iran executed at least 24 individuals for the crime of Mohariba, enmity against God.
And surely that understates the total killed.
The persecuted in Iran include Baha'is, Sunni Muslims, Christians, notably evangelicals, Jews, Yossanis, and even Shia groups.
So this is the guy the Pope is hanging out with, and, you know, like it's supposed to be real politic.
But really, you know, this is a moral tragedy, a moral travesty.
Show the third picture.
This, of course, we all know.
These are the captured sailors that was such a triumph.
John Kerry was saying, oh, how wonderful, how wonderful.
We made this deal, and now they've released him.
Well, they humiliated them, okay?
Western schools, says Henninger at the end of this column, may no longer teach the Battle of Thermopylae.
That was the one from 300, right, where these guys stood off the Persian invasion and eventually allowed the Persians to be beaten back by the democratic Greeks.
They may no longer teach the Battle of Thermopylae, but one may assume Hassan Rouhani knows the details of Persia's historic loss to brave Greece in 480 BC as if it were yesterday.
Putting a white box over a Venus to placate a Rouhani is a loss in the Persians' return trip to the West.
They're saying the Persian conquest is now coming through.
This funny stuff we see, this funny PC stuff with the menstruation is not just for women and, you know, let's have guys fighting women in the Olympics and competing against women.
It's all, as a listener wrote to me this morning, he said, it's all fun and games until someone gets elected.
That's right.
That's exactly right.
It's funny, but it really seeps into the entire culture.
And this is why these candidates are, to bring me back to where I started, right?
Hillary Clinton is living in this culture of lies.
Bernie Sanders is living in this culture of lies.
If it weren't for these lies, you can't attack Obama because he's black.
You can't attack Hillary because she's a woman.
Oh, the economies in Europe are just doing great.
We should imitate them.
It's because of those lies that those guys have any political careers whatsoever.
And it's because of those lies that we have a Donald Trump.
Because what Donald Trump has mastered, he has mastered the art of telling what sounds like the truth in order to support lies.
You know, he's not a Republican.
He's not a conservative.
Lost in Truth's Web00:04:36
He's nothing.
He's just a huckster.
But because he talks so cruelly and so bluntly, it sounds like the truth.
And we're so hungry for that sound of truth.
We're so hungry for that sound of truth that a guy like Donald Trump can use that to pump himself up to where he is now.
And I think all this political correctness is now coming to fruition, this poison fruition, to give us the election that we're having right now.
As I say, no one's voted yet.
And it really is going to be interesting to see whether the power of truth comes back to people as they walk into the voting booth for this country, which, let's face it, is in a lot of trouble.
So guys, I hate to leave you on that note, but it has been a tough week politically.
And Trump has mastered the art of stealing the limelight and taking the focus away from the issues and putting it on him, him, him, him.
Stuff I like.
Frank Sinatra, you know, Frank Sinatra is like the most important singer in my life.
When I was a kid, a miserable little kid, and all my friends were listening to classic rock.
I was listening to Sinatra.
There was nothing like Sinatra to capture the sorrow and melancholy and yearning of being a kid, of being an adolescent, especially an adolescent like me who was sorrowful and yearning and miserable.
And Sinatra just spoke to that.
And so when other kids were taking drugs, because everybody was taking drugs, I was drinking because of Sinatra.
I drank and smoked because I wanted to be Sinatra.
The thing is, it's now his centenary or something.
He's like, he'd be 100 years old, so everybody's doing a lot of programs about him.
But the thing that bugs me is people listen to the late Sinatra, who was not very good.
He had lost his voice.
He made one good album with Antonio Carlos Jobin, where he used his now whiskey-sodden, cigarette-sodden voice to good effect.
But stuff like New York, New York and My Way and those songs, you know, there really were not, he wasn't, that wasn't when he was at his best.
In the 40s, way before my time, but in the 40s, he was this big, huge star with the Bobby Soxers, just like the Beatles were.
The teenage girls would show up and scream and scream.
And he was a skinny little kid, and he was singing these romantic seduction songs and all this stuff.
And he was just enormous.
He was on radio, he was movies and all this stuff.
And then suddenly he crashed.
He lost his voice for a while and he went out of fashion and he was in debt and he was recording these gimmicky songs just to stay alive and it was terrible.
And he reinvented himself by going to Las Vegas and becoming a Vegas singer, but also by, instead of being this young heartthrob, he turned himself into the older, more experienced veteran who had seen things and he had seen sadness and he then started to sing these really sad albums that people don't remember that brought him back, brought him back and made him the star that most of us now think of him as.
And he did one of the very first concept albums.
Was called In the Wee Small Hours of the Morning.
And this was kind of as he started his comeback.
And his voice at this moment was, it had never been better, and it would never be better.
It was just an incredible instrument.
And Sinatra was not the greatest voice.
He didn't have the greatest voice in the world.
I mean, as a pop singer, Bing Crosby had a much finer instrument.
But Sinatra used to take these songs and put the music away and just read the lyrics to himself as poetry.
And he would just read the lyrics until he really understood them.
And then he had a way of phrasing things, stretching out consonants instead of vowels, just the way he put the words together, where he would communicate the lyrics so powerfully that he really changed the way popular music was sung.
And so, this song, In The We Small Hours of the Morning, just a taste of the sorrow that he conveyed and the kind of experience.
The new guy, you can see, can they see the cover of the album?
You can see the cover of the album showed that it was a concept album, that this was going to be about love lost and experience and all that.
Just take a listen to this in the wee small hours of the morning, while the whole wide world is fast asleep.
You lie awake and think about the girl and never ever think of coding she when your lonely heart has learned its lesson.
Wee Small Hours Heartbreak00:00:42
You'd be hurt if only she would call in the wee small hours of the morning.
That's the time you miss the most.
Oh, oh, heartbreaking stuff is really beautiful.
All right, folks, try to keep the Republic alive for the next three days.