Andrew Klavan mocks Hillary Clinton’s "cackling Harriton" persona while slamming Obama’s Cuba détente, citing Mary Anastasia O’Grady’s reports of Castro’s escalated repression—arrests, torture—and U.S. dollars propping up state monopolies amid migrant surges under Dryfoot Wetfoot. He accuses CBS of burying Benghazi and IRS scandals, then pivots to Trump’s 2016 bid, clashing with Reince Priebus over bound delegates while defending Kevin Williamson’s critique of cultural collapse (drugs, absent fathers) as class-neutral. Concluding, he ties economic stagnation to media hysteria, framing societal fears as detached from reality. [Automatically generated summary]
This election cycle, we've heard a lot from the Democrats about how the Supreme Court's Citizens United decision must be overturned.
In Citizens United, the court decided that the right to speak your mind politically was all like First Amendment-y and stuff, and that people probably shouldn't be censored if we want to keep calling ourselves America instead of something else like Stinkyland or Shut Upspill.
On their side, Democrat politicians feel that Citizens United allows ordinary people to go around saying bad things about them, and that that's got to be forbidden in the Constitution somewhere, probably in the secret invisible part that only certain Supreme Court justices can see, right next to the clause that guarantees you can have an abortion and the one that ensures gay people can get married.
But you know, when you think about it, if we're going to give up the right to free speech, instead of powerful people like Hillary and Bernie censoring ordinary people like us, maybe ordinary people ought to censor powerful people like Hillary and Bernie.
After all, if speech is going to be outlawed, the first sort of speech to go ought to be lying.
So we here at the Andrew Clavin Show hereby declare that from now on, politicians running for office must speak only the truth.
Even their campaign slogans, signs, and bumper stickers have to be completely honest.
Here are 10 suggestions that will act as guidelines for honest political signs and bumper stickers.
1. Vote for Hillary, because America deserves a cackling Harriton with a voice like a garbage disposal.
2. Hillary in 2016, because she wants it so bad she can taste it.
3. Bernie Sanders, because you have more stuff than I do, and I want to take some of it.
4. Feel the burn, because America is still the richest, most powerful nation on earth, and screw that.
5. Trump for president, because 225 years of democracy is enough.
6. Donald Trump.
He's bought off politicians his whole life.
It's his turn to be on the selling side.
7. John Kasich, because leftists think Republicans are mean when they're really nice.
Now they can think we're nice when we're really mean.
You might need a bigger bumper for that one.
8. Vote for John Kasich.
He's hunch-shouldered, makes funny hand motions, and will force bakers to make cakes for gay weddings.
9. Senator Ted Cruz, because defending the Constitution is more important than whether or not you happen to be kind of creepy.
10. Vote for Ronald Reagan.
Even though he's been dead for more than a decade, he'll still make a better president than any of our other choices.
Trigger warning, I'm Andrew Klavan, and this is The Andrew Klavan Show.
Ah, that was good.
I like the bumper stickers, you know?
I mean, I think it would change everything.
We would know, yeah, I'll vote for her.
She is a screaming.
I think we could use a screaming heritage with it.
Barack Obama's Cuba Policy00:13:35
All right, from Hillsdale.
What if it was a requirement for every person in public office to sleep with a copy of the Constitution under their pillow, or even an inflatable Constitution on the pillow next to them?
That would be kind of weird, but better than what we have now.
Instead of simple random drug tests, we'd have simple random constitutional rights tests.
That would be capital punishment if you failed, I think.
If you want to fully understand the Constitution and your constitutional rights, go get the free online course, Constitution 101, at Hillsdale College.
This shows up in your email box.
You get a free course from the college's professors.
You can sign up for Hillsdale College's Constitution 101 at hillsdale.edu slash Andrew.
This is a free course in your mailbox at hillsdale.edu slash Andrew.
Know your rights, know your Constitution.
It will make you different than all the politicians.
All right.
So, the rosy-fingered dawn of a new week of Andrew Clavin shows breaks over the hearts and minds of America.
It's kind of like you look outside.
It's like the last scene in Night of the Living Dead, you know, where they're cleaning up the zombie, you know, shooting, you know, let's move through here, just shoot them in the head.
That one's all messed up, you know.
It's what it's like after a clavenless week.
It wasn't so bad.
It wasn't so.
I mean, the worst thing is happening is our president, our lovable president, is over in Cuba, has gone to Cuba.
Do we have that picture of him standing this morning?
There he is, standing in front of the picture of mass murderer Che Guevara and celebrating, I'm sure, the wonderful government that has been oppressing people over there since the revolution.
I mean, this is our, you know, the president did this because back in December, he declared that he thought it was time to normalize relations between us and Cuba.
And there's things that he can't do.
He can't open up business between us because only Congress can do that.
And the president has heard of Congress and he knows they're supposed to do something.
And he's, you know, somebody explained to him that this might be one of like passing laws might be one of the things that Congress does.
But he can go over there and visit, and that is what he's doing.
And the reason he's doing this, and they've said this, Deputy National Security Advisor Ben Rhodes said the aim of the trip is to make the Obama administration's Cuba policies irreversible.
So once he goes over there, once the president has normalized relations, it's going to be hard for the next president to shut the door on them again.
So let me, just in case people don't understand, like it always sounds good to be friendly.
You know, nobody wants to be unfriendly and nobody wants to be, these guys are right off our coast.
Nobody wants to be.
Let me just explain or let a good columnist on the subject explain why this is such a moral wrong.
It's a moral wrong.
Mary Anastasia O'Grady is the South American Latino area, Latin America area columnist for the Wall Street Journal.
I always like her because she has the name of a nun, Mary Anastasia O'Grady.
It's like, ah, Sister Mary Anastasia O'Grady is good to.
But she's a very good reporter and she writes a column and she says, you know, they want to make this policy irreversible.
But she says on Cuba's part, there is nothing to reverse.
This is Mary Anastasia O'Grady writing the Wall Street Journal.
She says, since Mr. Obama launched his détente, the regime in Cuba has doubled down on its long-standing practices of denying employment to dissidents as well as beating, torturing, and jailing them.
And one of the things, by the way, is the reporting here is not being done by anybody critical of the regime because if you're critical of the Castro regime, they don't let you over there to report, all right?
The Obama administration boasts, and this will get you, that the Obama administration boasts that it negotiated the liberation of 53 political prisoners in 2014.
Hooray, they've got off 53 political prisoners.
But more than half of those have been rearrested, and four who received multi-year sentences were exiled last week.
In 2015, there were more than 8,600 political detentions, and in the first two months of this year, there were 2,555, according to the Cuban Commission for Human Rights and National Reconciliation.
Cuba has done nothing to respond to Obama's opening.
This is like, just like the Iran deal, this is a totally one-sided deal.
It's Obama, what a nice guy I am, but the commies are just doing what they always do.
On March 13, O'Grady goes on, on March 13, the secret police in Havana again set upon the ladies in white.
This is a group of peaceful dissidents.
One member, Alyuska Gomez, told the online newspaper Diario de Cuba after her arrest, she said, after they had taken away all my belongings, she said they told me to strip naked and I refused.
So they threw me down on the floor and took off all of my clothing right in front of two men and they dragged me completely naked into a jail cell.
Now remember, you know, we read stories like this, but remember when this is happening, this is the cops doing this, okay?
There's no appeal, there's nowhere to go, there's no paper that you can protest, there's nobody who's going to get you off the hook.
You're in Cuba, you know, it's CU and CUBA, baby.
You are there, you know, and they take you away.
Just like that guy in North Korea who supposedly stole a sign off a wall, an American, and just got sentenced to 15 years in prison.
There is nobody to help you.
When the state has that kind of power and the state turns against you, you got nowhere to go.
So these are the guys that Barack Obama is now legitimizing with his visit.
And he's going to, you know, he'll say, oh, well, we visited with some dissidents, but he's going to be visiting with terrorists too.
I mean, he's got terrorists coming to the baseball game he's going to see, and he's legitimizing that kind of government.
O'Grady goes on, and this is really the important part.
The Obama administration boasts that it negotiated the liberation of—oh, sorry, that's the wrong—I just read that.
The big lie, the big lie will be that by legalizing commercial and banking relations with Cuba, the U.S. will empower the Cuban people.
The opposite is true.
Okay, so Obama is saying, hey, we'll be bringing in business.
Everything will be better because, of course, if you're a communist country, you've taken over all the businesses.
You've gone broke because there's no competition and there's nothing to make you do anything better.
It just becomes a payoff for the government.
All of business just becomes one big crony capitalist payoff for the government without the capitalism.
Raoul Castro legalized a narrow number of economic activities for the purpose of putting to work millions of Cubans the bankrupt state can no longer employ.
Okay, so what that means is, as under socialism everywhere, the state has gone bankrupt, the businesses have failed, they can't employ people anymore, people are starving.
The poverty in Cuba is terrible and has remained terrible, and this narrative that it's our fault has nothing to do with it.
It's their economic system that has done this.
So they privatized a couple of economic activities like shining shoes and selling flour.
I mean, really, that low-level things.
These businesses, says O'Grady, these businesses such as selling fruit and shiny shoes are not allowed to hire employees and they are only legal as long as they remain the urban equivalent of subsistence farming.
If there is a great capital infusion from the U.S., if money comes over there, it can flow only to state-owned monopolies.
If we start doing business with Cuba, we're going to be passing them dollars.
The people get paid in pesos, which are absolutely worthless.
And all those dollars go to the Castros.
They go to the Castro Mafia.
The big profits, O'Grady says, go to the Castro Mafia, which uses some of the money to run the repressive intelligence network necessary to contain rebellion and keeps the rest for personal gain.
So visit Cuba.
Your dollars will go to dragging these women into jail cells naked and paying off for the luxuries of the very few because we know under these equal regimes, some people, some pigs are more equal than others.
Okay, but the news is not all bad because Obama is in Cuba, but Cubans are now pouring into America and nobody is talking about this.
Okay, the only person writing about this is Cheryl Atkins.
Now, you remember Cheryl Atkinson.
She was the CBS investigative reporter.
She was forced off CBS News for repeatedly attempting to expose scandals in the Obama administration.
Benghazi, he was writing about Benghazi.
She was writing about the IRS and her stories kept getting into these boondoggles and just disappearing without a trace.
She writes about it in her book.
It's just, you know, just remember, at CBS News, the brother of the CBS News president, David Rhodes, is Obama's deputy national security advisor.
We just mentioned him.
That's Rhodes.
That's the brother of the guy who runs CBS News, okay?
The guy, John Dickerson, who is the host of Face the Nation, he wrote an article about why if he wants to transform American politics, Obama must declare war on the Republican Party.
It was an article titled, Go for the Throat.
That's John Dickerson, okay?
Face the Nation.
Scott Pelle, the nightly news director, this is, I'm taking this off, Instapundit once likened global warming skeptics to Holocaust deniers.
Scott Pelley's show, according to Atkinson, Scott Pelley Show is so slanted that the best reporters at CBS don't want their stories on the biggest news program on CBS.
They're trying to keep them off the news program, which is unheard of.
Okay, so I'm just bringing this up because Cheryl Atkinson now has her own syndicated show called Full Measure.
And it's always reporting on stuff that nobody else is reporting on.
She's an excellent, excellent investigative reporter.
And she is reporting that there are these Cubans.
We have a law here called Dryfoot Wetfoot.
That's what the slang for it is.
And because Cuba is such a repressive regime, we had this rule that if you escaped and you got one foot on American soil, you were in.
You didn't have to go back.
It was not like, you know, the Mexicans in theoretically you could turn them back, arrest them, and all this.
If you're a Cuban, you set one foot out of the ocean onto dry land.
This happens in Florida.
I was in Miami over Christmas and people were telling me that when they show up, people run out of the hotels.
Americans run out of the hotels because this is how great Americans are and start showering them with money, start dragging them out of the water and pouring, you know, stuffing $100 bills in their hands and things like that to welcome them to America and give them some kind of start in the country, okay?
Because this is the law.
And these guys, so what's happening now is in Laredo, Texas, these guys are just walking across and they are pouring in.
And the administration is not telling anybody about it.
They're not talking about it.
The representative, the congressman, Henry Quayar, didn't even know about it.
He found out about it like watching it on the news somewhere.
He didn't even realize it was happening because the Obama administration didn't say anything about it.
So he's on Cheryl Atkinson's show.
We have a show.
Put the second clip, number three, and just here he's talking about this law.
Basically, they think that this new relationship with the U.S. means that Congress is going to change the Cuban Adjustment Act, which means that they're going to take that away.
So they want to come in and take advantage of this law while it still exists.
Would you go so far as to say the administration was keeping this secret?
Surely they knew about these massive influxes.
Without a doubt, they knew about it.
No ifs, no buts.
Why they were not providing that information, why they were not even providing that information to members of Congress that represent those areas is without due respect to the administration.
I don't think that was the right thing to do.
Right.
So this is the biggest influx of Cubans.
In other words, if things are going to get better in Cuba, we're going to have to change the law where you don't get in just because you set foot here.
And so they're afraid the law will change.
So they're getting out of there as fast as they possibly can.
This is the biggest influx since the Mario boatlift, which you remember from Scarface.
If you saw the movie Scarface, that was when Fidel Castro opened the prisons and just said everybody can leave.
So all their criminals came here, including the guy up from Al Pacino place in Scarface.
So don't despair.
This is actually good news.
The thing is, all these desperate people who've been living under communism are coming here to be free.
And Obama, this desperate communist, trying to restore socialism, has gone over to Cuba.
It's a fair trade.
The thing is, we've got to keep the Cubans here and leave Obama over there.
Everything is good.
See, you get the good news here.
We have the good news.
All right, let's talk about your privacy for a minute.
Your privacy is constantly under attack.
Big companies, tech companies are scanning your emails, and then they pour those stupid, kind of creepy advertisements into your computer.
Very, very weird as far as I'm concerned.
And of course, the government has got every piece of information about you that they can possibly have.
Try to take back some of your privacy.
Claw back a little bit of your own life from the government and from the corporations by getting an email address at Reagan.com.
It'll be yourname at Reagan.com.
That will be your private email address.
Not only will you be able to have Reagan's name on every one of your emails, which will, believe me, improve your emails immensely, but they also promise you that your emails will never be scanned or shared with third parties.
So go to ReaganPrivacy.com and secure your personal private email address.
Take back your privacy.
And if you do it now, you get two free bonus months at ReaganPrivacy.com.
Okay, so that's the good news on Cuba.
The good news on Cuba is we've made a great trade.
We've gotten a bunch of free enterprise Cubans over here, thousands and thousands of Cubans pouring into Laredo, and we've sent our communist president over there.
Take Back Your Privacy00:11:14
I think it's absolutely great.
Now, this brings me to something that has been bugging me now for weeks.
And I just want to run this by the audience and see what you think.
You know, my pal Kevin Williamson has been writing some brilliant stuff over at National Review.
The guy has just a big brain and he's on fire.
His material is great.
And recently, you know, all over the weekend, if you watched the news programs, all you heard was, how can we stop Trump?
How can we stop Trump?
Can Trump be stopped?
Can Trump be stopped?
Can we stop Trump?
And what's his name?
Reince Prebus, the guy who runs the RNC, was trying to normalize the idea of an open convention in which Trump might be dumped.
In fact, we have a brief cut of him just trying to explain how that would happen.
Well, a plurality is a minority, and a minority doesn't choose for the majority.
So you have to have a majority of the delegates in order to be the nominee.
There's nothing magical about the number.
It's 50% plus one.
So no one's disenfranchised.
In fact, they're enfranchised by receiving bound delegates based on the outcome of the elections.
And so that's all it is.
And so you have to have a majority in order to be the nominee of our party.
It's no different than when I became chairman of the party.
I won on the seventh ballot, George.
Hardly a landslide, but I was never behind.
But no one called me the winner on the second, third, fourth, or fifth ballot.
I had to get to a majority.
Most state chairmen out there across the country go through this same process on the floor of conventions.
So that's why to us, it seems natural that you'd have to have a majority of your party say, yes, that's the person I want to be the nominee.
There's nothing wrong with that.
See, so he's trying to tell you, because Trump on his side is saying there's going to be riots if I don't get it.
If I walk in there and I'm just 100 delegates short, there are going to be riots.
And what Pribus is trying to sell is the idea that no, these are the rules.
He's got to follow the rules just like everybody else.
We'll wait and see.
Wait and see if there will be riots and wait and see also if they can get the delegates not to vote for him.
Personally, I think Trump is going to walk in with the majority.
I think it looks harder now, the math looks harder now.
But I think as he gathers steam, he's going to get more and more wins.
That's just the way it looks to me, but the whole election has been so unpredictable that I wouldn't bet on my own predictions either.
But of course, there is one way to stop Trump, and that's for people to stop voting for him.
That would do it right there.
I mean, that would be really, really effective if people stopped voting for him.
And we've talked endlessly about what his appeal is and how he works and all this stuff.
And one of the things that everybody acknowledges is that there is this very strong sense among white working class people that they have been forgotten, that they've been forgotten by the Republicans.
They were forgotten by the Democrats.
Democrats hate them, basically.
The Republicans pay no attention to them.
They feel out of work.
They feel dissed.
They feel that the white male is the villain in every story that's being told.
They feel that China is taking all our businesses away.
Now, a lot of this is untrue.
Free trade has really helped people, even though in localities it means that cheaper jobs are going to go to cheaper places so that everybody gains by having cheaper products.
The fact that you can afford an iPhone is an amazing thing, but it means that you send it to economies that can pay workers less, and it's not slave labor.
Kevin Williamson at the National Review caused a firestorm a week or a week and a half ago.
It took me a while to get to the article, by basically saying these white working class people have got to stop complaining.
They've got to stop complaining because the businesses that they're lamenting are gone and they're just going to be gone.
And their real problem, he says, is that they have let their cultures fall apart.
That the white working class, and this has been, there have been books written about this and everything, the white working class have let their cultures fall apart.
They're no longer getting married.
They're no longer going to church.
They're no longer staying around to take care of their kids.
They're getting addicted on drugs.
And here is Kevin summing this up.
He says, this white working class anger is perpetuating a lie.
The lie is that the white working class that finds itself attracted to Trump has been victimized by outside forces.
It hasn't.
The white middle class may like the idea of Trump as a giant, pulsing, humanoid middle finger held up in the face of the cathedral, the great powers that be, the establishment.
They may sing hymns to Trump the destroyer and whisper darkly about globalists and the establishment, but nobody did this to them.
They failed themselves.
If you spend time in hard-scrabble white upstate New York or eastern Kentucky or my own native West Texas, Kevin Williamson says, and you take an honest look at the welfare dependency, the drug and alcohol addiction, the family anarchy, which is to say the whelping of human children with all the respect and wisdom of a stray dog, you will come to an awful realization.
It wasn't Beijing.
It wasn't China that took their jobs away.
It wasn't even Washington, as bad as Washington can be.
It wasn't immigrants from Mexico, excessive and problematic as our current immigration levels are.
It wasn't any of that.
Nothing happened to them, he says.
There wasn't some awful disaster.
There wasn't a war or a famine or a plague or a foreign occupation.
Even the economic changes of the past few decades do very little to explain the dysfunction and negligence and the incomprehensible malice of poor white America.
There is more to life in the 21st century than cheap sentimentality about how the man closed the factories down.
The truth about these dysfunctional downscale communities is that they deserve to die.
Economically, they are negative assets.
Morally, they are indefensible.
Forget all your cheap theatrical Bruce Springsteen crap.
Forget your sanctimony about struggling Rust Belt factory towns and your conspiracy theories about the wily Orientals stealing our jobs.
The white American underclass is in thrall to a vicious, selfish culture whose main products are misery and used heroin needles.
Donald Trump's speeches make them feel good.
So does OxyContin.
What they need is an analgesics, literal or political.
They need real opportunity, which means that they need real change, which means that they need a U-Haul.
What he's saying is get out of these dying factories, dying factory towns, and go someplace and get retrained and get a job.
Okay.
This caused a firestorm because essentially what Kevin is saying is what a lot of people have said to black communities all this time.
You know, a lot of people say to black communities, stop complaining about slavery.
It was over in 1864.
You know, it's been over for a long time.
Stop complaining about white oppression.
Nobody's oppressing you.
Stop having babies out of wedlock.
Stop taking drugs.
Stop committing crimes.
Go to work.
Get a job.
Start a business.
That's what he's saying.
Now, there's no question, there is no question that poor people are kept in poverty by bad behavior.
I have some sympathy for this because, you know, if you go to a school, and I have gone, you go to some of the worst schools in the country, say you meet a third grader, what you meet is you'll meet a little boy who five years from now is going to be a dangerous gangster and today is one of the sweetest little guys you're ever going to meet, right?
That kid is going home where his mom may be a crack or where his dad isn't there.
Kid doesn't stand a chance to form a personality that can do the things that he needs to do.
That is why, that is why the abandonment of marriage, the abandonment of our culture of fatherhood and all this, is so destructive because it turns people into their own worst enemies.
You know, this is why, so I have some sympathy, but the sympathy on the Democrat side always turns into helping them, making this continue, funding the illegitimacy, funding women to have, paying women to have kids out of wedlock, saying, telling feminists, telling people that they don't need fathers.
Oh, a woman needs a man like a fish needs a bicycle.
As I've pointed out before, you get a lot of fish in prison because they didn't have a bicycle, and that's what is happening.
And all Kevin is saying here is that this is happening in the white communities too.
And the whites going out to Trump and saying, yeah, give us our welfare, give us our, you know, our free money, give us our free social security, don't cut our social security, are just the same as the blacks going to the Democrats and saying this.
It's the same group of people.
As I keep pointing out, when you think of things racially, you just get stupid.
So the question that I want to raise, and I'm kind of running out of time, so I think I'm going to continue this conversation into tomorrow because I think we have another day before the next primary when we have to start dissecting those again.
But the thing I want to talk about is that maybe we're worried about the wrong things.
Maybe all of us are panicking about, you know, life is getting better almost everywhere.
Violence is down.
Poverty is down.
Starvation is down.
Technology is on the rise.
Free markets are on the rise everywhere but here.
Everywhere but in America.
Okay.
So what we have here, we have sunk on the list of the freest countries.
We've sunk down in the list of the free economic countries.
So maybe the problem isn't China.
Maybe the problem isn't even immigrants because I know how upset people get about this.
And I've said this before, obviously we need to take care of our borders.
We can't let people come through our borders.
But maybe we're looking at the wrong problems.
And maybe the system, the media system we have set up is through no fault of its own, really.
I mean, we have a lot of dishonest news people out there, but the media is geared toward bad news.
The media is geared toward panic.
The media is geared toward letting the craziest person talk.
Okay, this is the thing.
It's more entertaining to bring on a person with a really, really stupid opinion than it is to bring on a person who's sensible and speaking intelligently about the problems of the day.
So what I'm wondering, what I look at is I look at a guy like Trump who I feel is not fit for office.
I look at a woman like Hillary Clinton who I feel is not fit for office.
I look at a guy like Bernie Sanders who I think is a joke.
I think he is a bad person.
I think he's an honest person, but I think he's a bad person, a guy who honeymooned in the Soviet Union while they were imprisoning dissidents and when they had so much blood on their hands.
That's a guy without a moral compass.
That is a guy who does not know what he's talking about and who does not know what has lifted people out of poverty.
How have we reduced ourselves to three lousy choices like this at a moment when we're not that bad off, when things are not that bad?
And I know that's the most un that may be the single most unpopular thing I've ever said.
Things are not that bad.
That may be the worst thing.
We may lose more listeners for that than anything else.
I can attack Trump, people threaten my life.
But when I tell you that things are not as bad as our reaction to them, that may be the thing that people do not want to hear.
So let's get come back tomorrow and explore that a little bit more.
Dark Times, Bright Hope00:03:36
Just explore what's really going on.
And there are real dangers out there and real problems and really bad things to be afraid of.
I'm not going to deprive you of your fear.
I'm not going to deprive you of your panic.
I'm not going to deprive you of your depression.
And if I do, you can still listen to Ben and where to find it again.
But just a little dose of reality might calm people down just a little bit and let them think again.
All right.
Stuff I like.
It is the beginning of Holy Week, which probably many people don't know.
This is the week when I hesitate to use the word celebrate, but we commemorate Jesus' crucifixion, his coming into Jerusalem.
Yesterday was Palm Sunday when they commemorate his coming into Jerusalem.
And of course, everybody cheered for him.
And within a week, they killed him.
You know, that pretty much tells you everything you need to know.
There's a wonderful line in the Gospel of John where it says the people believed in him, but Jesus did not trust himself to them because he knew people.
No one had to tell him about people.
He knew what was in people.
And that was all played out.
And it's, I don't, I can't think of another religion that celebrates such a disaster.
It celebrates the sense that when things are at their worst, they may really be, you may really be on the verge of the greatest triumph of all.
So that's kind of what we're going to be talking about this week, in a way, that things seem really dark right now.
But how dark are they and how dark will they get?
So let me, I'm going to, this week I'm going to try and hit some things that are kind of religious books, but books that are not things, not just books, but movies, things that you may not think of as being religious, but maybe have a religious thing.
While I'm doing that, let me plug my own religious book, The Great Good Thing, A Secular Jew Comes to Faith in Christ.
It won't be out until September, but you can pre-order it now on all the websites, Amazon.com and all the other bookselling websites.
I just finished the audio recording, the audio book, so I got to read it out loud, and I can recommend it.
I was reading it.
I thought, hey, this guy is really good.
The Great Good Thing, so go on, please, on Amazon.
It would help me if you would pre-order it.
Here's another book, though.
A book called Tiger and the Smoke, A Mystery by Marjorie Allingham.
It was written in 1952.
And Marjorie Allingham was kind of like Agatha Christie, one of the British women who wrote these things, but she wrote much tougher stuff.
She wrote a series on an inspector named Albert Campion.
And Campion is in this book, but he's kind of a minor player.
She just put him in there, I think, to keep the series going.
Tiger and the Smoke, I won't tell you it hasn't dated a little bit.
It has.
Some of its action is not written the way you would write action today.
But she virtually is inventing the serial killer story.
I don't want to say serial killer, but the villain who is just a force of evil.
And when you read this book, you'll say, well, how is this a religious book?
But read it carefully because it is a very philosophical, even though it's a very exciting action-adventure story, it's a very, very philosophical look at the attitudes of people after World War II, when remember, the world had been swept away and with it, the foundations of that world, which was our religion.
And her villain and the conclusion of this book tell you a lot about Holy Week and the meaning of Holy Week.
It's just a mystery, just an exciting story, but I think if you read it carefully, it'll tell you a lot about what Holy Week means.
That stuff I like.
Sorry for all the good news.
I apologize.
But, you know, it happens.
These little glitches in the system happen.
We'll be back with more despair and cynicism tomorrow.