Andrew Clavin dissects David French’s quixotic third-party bid, praising his integrity but mocking its futility while contrasting Trump’s scandals with Clinton’s corruption—yet dismissing any real alternative. He skewers Obama’s Elkhart economic boasts, crediting fracking over federal grants like the $39.2M Navistar flop, and exposes both candidates’ failures on globalization’s job losses. Clavin mocks conservative welfare critiques as hypocritical, defends art’s moral complexity against puritanical attacks, and ends by framing political stagnation as a crisis of vision, not just policy. [Automatically generated summary]
The Weekly Standard's Bill Crystal is trying to convince National Review writer David French to run for president as a third-party candidate.
And Crystal says he believes French will do it if he ever wants to see his wife and children again.
Let's take a look at some of the pros and cons of a David French third-party candidacy.
Pro.
David French is a man of integrity and decency who reliably stands up for constitutional principles and moral behavior.
Khan, no one like that could ever get elected president.
Khan, if French runs and Donald Trump loses to Hillary Clinton, Trump can believably claim that he was stabbed in the back.
Pro.
French is an Iraqi war veteran and may actually have the skills to sneak up behind Donald Trump and stab him in the back.
Pro.
French is a Harvard-trained lawyer who has spent his career fighting for free speech and religious liberty.
Khan, one of French's religious liberty cases is said to have been the inspiration for the film God Is Not Dead, which means French would never be able to show his face in the light of day ever again.
Khan, when Bill Crystal selected French, Crystal knew full well that French would never be able to garner enough votes to stop either Donald Trump or Hillary Clinton.
Pro.
Everything Bill Crystal knows turns out in the end to be wrong, so maybe French actually has a chance.
Pro, French is a serious thinker and an honest man who will display neither the irresponsible buffoonery of Donald Trump nor the corrupt dishonesty of Hillary Clinton.
Khan, where's the fun in that?
Pro.
A David French candidacy could go by the catchy name of the French Revolution.
Khan, that's going to get really old very, very fast.
Pro.
Whereas Donald Trump is a serial adulterer with multiple marriages, and Hillary Clinton's marriage has been a long-running farce during which she's trashed the victims of her husband's despicable sexual escapades, French is a church-going Christian who has a beautiful and intelligent wife whom he seems to adore and three stunningly lovely children who seem genuinely happy and well-raised.
Khan, clearly French lacks the qualifications we seem to be looking for in a president.
Pro.
If French can garner enough electoral votes, he could stop both Hillary and Trump from gaining a majority, whereupon the election would be put to a vote in the House of Representatives.
Khan, given the record of the House of Representatives, this would probably mean a third term for Barack Obama.
And finally, pro, French is far and away the best choice to head an America of sane and intelligent citizens who love freedom and the Constitution.
Khan, we're not living in that America.
Trigger warning, I'm Andrew Clavin, and this is the Andrew Clavin Show.
Exactly, the third term for Barack Obama.
That was a little inside baseball, but I think those of you who know our House of Representatives will understand.
All right, we'll talk about this third term party, third party election, whatever it is, with David French in a minute.
Good mailbag yesterday, excellent mailbag, I thought.
Subscribe, 30 days free, $7.99 a month after that, and you can participate in the next mailbag and keep asking questions until we get to one I know the answer to.
It could take months, for all I know.
All right, so David French, I have to tell you, I met David French on a National Review cruise.
And it was kind of funny.
I was on a panel about free speech, and I'm sitting next to him, and he's a lawyer.
He spent his life, you know, fighting these college speech codes and things like this and doing a really good job of it.
And we were having a good conversation, but he was sitting right to my right.
So later on, we docked in some Canadian city.
They all look alike.
I think it was Toronto someplace.
And I'm wandering around and I'm looking for a place to have dinner and I bump into a guy who's obviously from the cruise.
I think we had little tags or something.
And we get in a conversation, and he says, Well, why don't we sit down?
Why don't we have dinner together?
And I'm thinking, well, this is some guy, one of the audience members of the crews.
And I sit down and we start talking, and he obviously knows me.
And I said to him, You know, I got to admit, I don't know who you are.
I don't remember your name.
And it turned out to be David French.
He'd been sitting next to me, so I never got a good look at him.
You know, I didn't recognize his face.
And we had a lovely dinner.
And by the end of it, I walked away and I thought, this is a terrific guy.
I mean, really a substantial guy who left his wife and kids to serve in Iraq because he felt he should.
He didn't have to.
I mean, I felt I should go over there.
I went over there for like five days.
He went over there and served.
So, I mean, it's really a much different level.
I mean, very, very impressive character.
So anything I say about this is not about him.
It's not knocking him.
But I am finding it very, very hard to get excited about the idea of a third party candidacy.
I mean, here's the thing that I like.
I like that it's gotten under Trump's skin.
Before the name of French was announced, Bill Crystal was sending out these kind of hints that he had somebody impressive, and it really got to Trump.
Play that first Trump quote, Trump number one.
Crystal's the one that's the last one.
Don't forget, he said Trump will never run.
The guy's not a smart person.
He said, Donald Trump will never run.
Remember?
Do you remember?
I actually blame you.
Why do you put this guy on television?
I see him on the different shows.
He's got no credibility.
Said, I won't run.
If I run, I won't do well.
If I do well, this and that.
He looks like such a fool.
I saw him on one show, he's practically crying because he can't justify it.
Now he comes out with a tweet over the weekend, over Memorial Day weekend.
It sounds like he's going to put somebody up.
Even I thought it.
I thought, oh, they're going to find some indie.
Now he comes out with something saying he was almost, almost kidding.
Okay?
Let me tell you, these people are losers.
He's trying to make you, he's trying to drive you guys a little bit nuts.
If they do an indie, assuming it's decent, which I don't think anybody with a reputation would do it because they'd look like fools.
But what you're going to do is you lose the election for the Republicans, and therefore you lose the Supreme Court.
Therefore, you will have a group of people put on the Supreme Court where this country will never, ever recover.
It will never, ever be the same.
So that's Trump hitting people where they live.
He's got perfect political instincts.
He knows the thing the conservatives can't quite get out of their mind is Hillary Clinton appointing the ninth justice to the Supreme Court.
And so he goes right there.
And the thing is, you know, I think there's just truth to this.
You know, French gives conservatism a voice, and that's great.
That would be great if he did that.
But he doesn't really solve our tragic problem.
Our tragic problem is that one of these people is going to be president of the United States, either Trump or Hillary, no matter what we do.
Guess who said this?
David French.
Before this came up, French gave an interview, and he said the same thing.
Listen to this.
I'm not one of these Republicans who said, or conservatives who says, well, I'm just going to take my ball and go home.
As much as I don't trust that Donald Trump is going to go into office and advance the conservative values that he claims to have recently embraced, and as many concerns as I have about some of his other positions, he's not in the same league as a Hillary Clinton who I believe should be indicted before the election for her mishandling of classified information, or a Bernie Sanders,
a socialist who just proposed one of the largest government expansions and tax increases in human history.
And he's just getting started with his socialist platform.
So there's tremendous differences between the parties.
This is about the GOP primary in my mind.
What do we do in the GOP primary?
Once the GOP primary is over, it's an entirely different political race.
See, that's basically it.
I'm a simple guy.
I'm a simple guy.
I've listened to all these arguments.
You give me two people, one of whom's going to be president of the United States.
I got to pick one of them.
I got to pick one of them.
It's hard to pick because I think that doesn't mean either of them is good.
And by the way, I know this is bad for audience.
The audience wants to believe in someone.
The audience wants to believe in someone.
If you come out and say Donald Trump, you get the Donald Trump audience.
That's a big audience.
That's what Drudge and Breitbar and Fox are all living on, the Trump audience.
If you come out and say never Trump, you get the never Trump audience.
If you come out and say this tragic fact that we've got two, we're going to have to choose between the lesser of two evils, and there's no way to pretend one of those is good.
You get a very small audience of people with a tragic outlook.
Yes, six guys.
This is why Jesus lost the popular vote, by the way.
It's like not comparing, not comparing anything, just saying some ideas are not popular, and the idea that you haven't got a good choice is not a pop.
Listen to, I want you to hear this stuff that I get, by the way, just the comments.
This is on Goodreads.
Goodreads is the place where I go to talk about literature.
I'm not on Goodreads very much, but this is where people talk about books.
And it's a lot of kids talking about books because I write some young adult suspense novels and they'll come on and talk about this.
This is what I got this morning.
This is what I woke up to this morning.
Sir, you used to be my favorite author of all time.
However, after seeing you dismantle Donald Trump, I'm now going to burn all of your books that I own and regret the money I spent on them.
However, it wasn't that much anyway.
Have fun with Hillary, you decrepit old fool.
So I just want to say, if you didn't spend that much money on it, screw you.
That's the audience I get.
But you know, we conservatives, we pick on liberals all the time, and quite rightly, for doing things that feel good that cause destruction, right?
They give welfare to people and they say we're hateful because, you know, they use quotes like Mitt Romney's, oh, 47% of the takers and all this stuff.
But all we're really saying is that welfare creates skewed incentives.
If you pay people to have children, they have children.
If you pay people to invent new kinds of computers, they invent new kinds of computers.
That's true of every single person.
What you pay them for is what they do.
You know, Barack Obama is going around touting the fact that unemployment has dropped to 5%.
Know when that drop started?
It started when John Boehner, the evil John Boehner, who all the conservatives hated, when he cut off, he wouldn't extend unemployment benefits.
That's when it started to drop.
Because if you pay people to be out of work, they will be out of work.
And the thing is, we keep making fun of the left for doing things that feel charitable to them, that feel good to them, but have disastrous results.
Well, you know, it may be that conservatives not accepting the fact that we have lost this election.
We have lost on every level.
There's no conservative running.
There's no conservative principles in the offing.
There's no conservative president in the offing.
We're going to have to choose between one bad thing and another.
It may feel good.
It may feel good to stand on principle.
But I don't know.
More and more, the more I think about it, the more convinced I am that we're just going to have to make a choice.
So my attitude is this.
You know, when my father came to pick my mother up for their first date, he said to her, which no man should ever say to a woman, where would you like to go?
And she said, I'm here to be entertained.
Well, I am my mother's son.
I am here to be entertained.
I'm going to entertain, be entertained by the melee of this election.
So yesterday, speaking of the melee, Barack Obama, Barack Obama is, he is such a fascinating character.
He obviously does not, as a political entity, as a political man, he doesn't want to get involved in the firefight between Bernie and Hillary.
For one thing, I think he just doesn't want two sides.
But I think personally, this is just my guess.
I don't think he wants to get in bed with Hillary because if she gets indicted, if Comey comes out, you know, then he can jump over to Biden and he's clean.
Once he's backed her, you know, once he's really linked himself to her, then he goes down with her.
And if he pardons her or if he tells the FBI not to indict or tells his Justice Department not to indict, then he's Gerald Ford, you know, who pardoned Nixon.
You know, he's the guy who makes a political deal.
His whole legacy goes down the drain.
So he doesn't want to get involved, but Trump is in his head.
And Trump keeps saying what he's been so protected.
The press has lied about him and protected him and guarded him and buried every scandal and buried the failure of Obama.
And Trump is out there going, this guy's an incompetent.
He's an incompetent.
So Obama, this is my favorite cut from yesterday, favorite pieces of tape.
Obama goes to Elkhart, Indiana, to basically tout his successes in the economy.
And we'll talk about that in a minute.
But he's trying to talk about Trump and he doesn't even want to name him.
Listen to this.
if we turn against each other, based on divisions of race or religion, if we fall for, you know, a bunch of okey-doke,
just because, you know, it sounds funny or the tweets are provocative.
then we're not going to build on the progress that we've started.
Okey-doke.
Yeah, but he sounds like a pointy pig.
It's all of okey-doke.
It's all of oakie.
He's just been reduced to this stuttering fool by Donald Trump.
So he's in Elkhart, Indiana.
And the reason he's in Elkhart, Indiana, is in 2009, right after the crash, unemployment was like at 19%, and now it's at 4%.
So he's there saying that this is all his doing.
It's not.
I mean, just being straight up honest, the big industry in Elkhart, Indiana is the RV industry.
And the EV industry has come roaring back.
Why?
Because the price of gas has dropped.
And why has the price of gas dropped?
Nothing to do with Obama.
It's because of fracking and because OPEC can't decide.
Just now they decided they couldn't put a ceiling on production.
They can't put a ceiling on production because we're producing our own.
So if they put a ceiling on production, we're like, so long, OPEC, you know, then how are they going to fund blowing us up?
I mean, it's like, it's not a good system for them.
They're kind of in a bind.
So Elkhart has come bouncing back.
One of the things that they did do, and this is really interesting, they spent $39.2 million on a federal grant for a company called Navistar that was supposed to build electric vehicles, right?
That went right down the drain.
It closed.
It was like they opened the door and closed it again.
So that's $39 million of your money, so don't laugh too hard.
Just thrown away.
Okay, so he's in there kind of touting this thing, this economy.
And the economy is just when Barack Obama was elected, the night he was elected, a worried conservative friend of mine said to me, the problem is the economy is going to bounce back.
It's going to bounce back on his watch.
It has to.
I mean, it just crashed.
You know, a dead cat would bounce, as they say.
You know, even a drop a dead cat from a building, it bounces.
That's where the economy was.
So we all knew the economy was going to come back, but it has come back in this weak-kneed, limp way where the gross national product, our growth is almost nothing.
Jobs Disappearing Narrative00:08:56
Wages are stagnant.
The kind of jobs that people are getting and not the kinds of jobs they lost.
And that's what Trump is saying.
So play Trump number two.
This is what he's talking about.
We have a country that doesn't win anymore, right?
We know that.
When was the last time?
Seriously, think about it.
When was the last time we had a victory in this country?
We don't have victories anymore.
Did you see our GDP?
It's like almost zero.
If that happened in China, they'd have a revolution.
It's, you know, they get down to 7%, 8%, and they start devaluing their currency again, which kills us because they take our jobs and they kill our companies when they do that.
And they're not supposed to do that.
And they're not supposed to be building fortresses in the South China Sea.
They have no respect for our country.
They have no respect for our president.
They think he's a total lightweight.
And now he's going to be campaigning.
And you know what?
He shouldn't campaign.
He should go out and do the job that he's supposed to be doing, not campaigning.
That's why Obama is stuttering because Obama has narcissistic personality disorder.
And anybody who attacks him, he hasn't been attacked for eight years.
We saw yesterday that when a reporter actually had the temerity to ask him a question, the other reporters beat up the reporter.
You know, he's been protected all this time, and now suddenly he's under attack.
He can't even mention Trump's name.
It's like ISIS.
ISIS is making a fool of him.
So it's always ISIL.
It's ISIL.
It sounds like something you buy at an ice cream truck.
It's ISIL.
He can't say ISIS.
He can't say Donald Trump.
He's on PBS with Gwen Eiffel, and she asks him, why can't you say Trump's name?
And he goes in and he gives his narrative of why people are upset about the economy.
Why don't you mention Donald Trump by name?
You know, he seems to do a good job mentioning his own name.
So I figure, you know, I'll let him do his advertising for him.
Do you consider at all that any of the support for him is backlash against you personally?
Well, here's one thing I would say, and I just spoke about this at the local high school.
I think Trump is a more colorful character than some of the other Republican elected officials.
But a lot of the story that he's telling is entirely consistent with what folks have been saying about me or the general story they've been telling about the economy for the last seven and a half, the last 10, the last 20, the last 30 years.
And you can actually describe the story fairly concisely, right?
The basic story they tell is that the problems that the middle class working families are experiencing has to do with a big bloated government that taxes the heck out of people and then gives that money to undeserving folks,
welfare cheats or the 47% who are takers or whatever phrase they use, that businesses are being strangled by overregulation, that Obamacare has killed jobs.
And the fact of the matter is, when you look at it, the government, as a proportion of our overall economy, is actually smaller now under my presidency than it was under Ronald Reagan.
Well, I don't want to pick all of this apart.
I don't have time to pick all of it apart.
But the one point, first of all, with Obama, it's never his fault.
It's never his fault.
It's always the narrative.
It's always this narrative, this evil Republican narrative.
It's always Fox News.
Fox News has got this evil narrative.
But partly, part of this narrative happens to be true.
And he always says it in this dismissive voice, which kind of says, like, wait a minute, can we look at this?
Can we look at the facts?
Overregulation, bad regulation, is a problem.
Dodd-Frank is a big problem.
Dodd-Frank has essentially put the government into boardrooms of big companies so they can't innovate.
They can't do anything without the government saying, well, you know, it's like when you want to cut down a tree and suddenly the local neighbors say, oh, that's an oak tree.
You can't cut down an oak tree.
Like, what do I care?
If it's blocking my driveway, cut down the tree.
It's my driveway.
I want to cut down the tree.
You know, so that part is really true.
Taxes, taxes have gone up since Reagan.
I mean, remember, taxes were at 70% or something.
Top tax rate was maybe 76%.
I can't quite remember when Reagan took office.
Then he cut it to like 23%.
Now it's up to around 40 or 50%.
It's been climbing, steadily climbing as it always does.
But okay, you know, maybe that's not the central problem.
Reagan, after all, was solving problems for his time.
You can't just do the same thing over and over again and expect the same results.
But this is – the thing that's going on is really happening.
People are not hurting and they're not nervous and they're not anxious because of a story they're being told.
The economy is a visceral experience for all of us.
We know when our jobs don't pay well.
We know when our jobs are disappearing.
So he goes to Elkhart and a guy from the Steelworkers Union stands up and says, my job is gone.
It was touching.
He said, my job is gone.
There's nothing for my people.
There's nothing for my people.
And in one of these moments that Obama sometimes has as he struggles to speak without a teleprompter, he actually starts to knock against the truth a little bit.
Play the third Obamacare.
For those folks who've lost their job right now because a plant went down to Mexico, that isn't going to make you feel better.
And so what we have to do is to make sure that folks are trained for the jobs that are coming in now, because some of those jobs of the past are just not going to come back.
And when somebody says, like the person you just mentioned, who I'm not going to advertise for, that he's going to bring all these jobs back, well, how exactly are you going to do that?
What are you going to do?
There's no answer to it.
He just says, well, I'm going to negotiate a better deal.
Well, how exactly are you going to negotiate that?
What magic wand do you have?
And usually the answer is he doesn't have an answer.
Okay, he doesn't have an answer.
That's absolutely true.
But neither does Obama.
If you listen to what Obama is doing, here's what's happening.
Here's why these jobs are disappearing.
You know, as a society, as the world gets more technological, you get more specialization.
I mean, think about it.
The easiest way one to think about it is a doctor, right?
You used to need one doctor.
Why?
Because they didn't know anything.
Now, it takes one doctor.
I know a doctor whose job is to read x-rays.
That was her job.
She read x-rays.
That takes a kind of training, it's specialization.
So you have specialist jobs.
As you specialize and as you globalize, as the market becomes global, the people who do the lower-end jobs, those jobs get done in lower-paying countries.
They don't have the same unions.
They don't have the same regulations.
They don't have the same living conditions.
They don't have the same prices.
They can pay a lot less.
And that means you pay a lot less for the phone that got made overseas.
But it also means that job is gone.
And Obama told the guy the truth.
It's not coming back.
It is not coming back.
And when Trump says, oh, I'm going to force it to come back by putting tariffs on things, that's not going to work either.
You can't do that.
Meanwhile, there's been this atomization in our society, right?
Everybody wants to be who he is.
You be you, you do you.
You know, this is the whole thing.
And that's part of what's happening.
We're all so separate.
Where is the new economy coming from?
Obama thinks, oh, if I can just convince these other countries to have the same kind of crushing regulations and stupid environmental rules that we have, their prices will go up and then they won't be able to undercut us.
Well, that's just as stupid as Trump doing what he does.
They're not going to do that.
These struggling economies, these third world economies, they're not going to burden themselves under first world regulation.
It's just not going to happen.
There's no deal that Obama can make.
And the other thing that's not going to work is these big LBJ things that Hillary Clinton and Obama keep saying, oh, we're going to train you, we're going to have this program, we're going to have that program.
Those things were invented when our society was one thing.
It was one big America that we sort of thought of as one country.
That's gone.
That America is gone.
It's UBU, pal.
And so the economy that's coming is a personal economy.
It's the Uber economy.
It's the Lyft economy.
It's the bed and breakfast, what's it called, Airbnb economy.
Why?
Because those things can't be sent overseas.
Those are low-level jobs, not low-level, but non-educational requirement jobs that can't be sent overseas.
A guy in India can't pick you up at your door, right?
A guy in Siam can't fix your toilet.
He's got to come in the door and fix your toilet.
Art's Soul Matters00:04:21
You know, that's the thing.
He can't be a nurse for you.
If you're an old person, he can't be a house nurse.
Those are the jobs that are going to come.
Those are the jobs that the Democrats are fighting against.
Every time an Uber shows up, they want to regulate it out of business.
So they haven't got the answers.
And the problem we have, the problem we have is that neither does Trump.
Remember, Trump is the guy who said, he said, politicians have used you and sold in your votes.
They have given you nothing.
I will give you everything.
I will give you what you've been looking for for 50 years.
I'm the only one.
It sounds like a Disney villain, you know?
Like, I'm going to give you everything.
So there are no good choices, and no good choices is the choice we're going to have to make.
And that's the thing, because nobody has come up with the new vision, the new vision for a new economy.
We're listening to old solutions on both sides, and these are people who are telling us they're going to manage our decline by giving us stuff.
It ain't going to work.
All right.
Let me move into stuff I like a little early so I can just talk about something that we were talking about last week.
Last week, I had my friend Tyler Smith on, a critic, and we talked about sex scenes and movies and the fact that I like Game of Thrones, and a lot of Christians say, oh, you shouldn't listen to Game of Thrones as big if you go on and listen, look at that one.
It was Wednesday or Thursday, I guess, next week, of last week.
Thursday of last week.
A lot of comments.
I mean, over 30, 40 comments on there arguing about this issue.
And Christians reliably show up and they say this.
And here's one of the comments on here.
Our bodies and the ability to reproduce are sacred gifts from God.
Any depiction of sex and entertainment is satanic and pornographic per se.
Marriage is the foundation of our entire civilization, and sex is the binding force between husband and wife and is what creates our families.
To film it is offensive and libertine.
The priorities are backwards as far as I'm concerned, choosing comfort, entertainment over what's right.
Okay?
Now, I completely disagree with this.
I don't disdain it.
I don't disrespect it.
That's your point of view.
That's your point of view.
Tyler himself said he had a problem, personal problem, watching Game of Thrones.
And by the way, much as I joke about pornography, and much as I believe there is no man, at least on earth, who doesn't look occasionally at pornography, I think pornography is as dangerous as drugs.
I mean, it is just stimulating a piece of your brain with meaningless stuff, and you can get hooked on it, and people do get hooked on it all the time, and it's very, very destructive of relationships and lives, okay?
So I'm not talking about pornography.
I'm talking about the true depiction of life.
My problem is, is that the arts for me are not just entertainment.
They are entertaining, they are delightful, but they are also the way that we learn about the internal world of human life, the internal experience of being a human being.
They are like the little, art is like the little knobs on towels that increase the area of the towel that makes the towel more effective.
These are little knobs in your brain that increase your wisdom about what it's like to be a human being.
That's why we read Shakespeare.
That's why we watch, we go to the opera.
That's why we watch TV.
Good TV, read good books.
It increases your wisdom about human life.
And you cannot do that by lying.
You cannot do it by lying.
You have to depict life in all of its vagaries and all of its corruption and all of its sexuality, its deep sexuality.
I admit this can be abused, but that's why I believe in art telling the truth.
Okay.
So today there was a wonderful quote from G.K. Chesterton in the Wall Street Journal.
And this to me is what distinguishes true art from false art.
Chesterton said, great Catholic apologist, an interesting essay might be written on the possession of an atheistic literary style.
There is such a thing, says Chesterton.
The mark of that style is that wherever anything is named or described, such words are chosen as suggest that the thing has not got a soul in it.
Thus, they will not talk of love or passion, which imply a purpose and a desire.
They talk of the relations of the sexes as if they were simply related to each other in a certain way, like a chair and a table.
Thus, they will not talk of the waging of war, which implies a will, but of the outbreak of war, as if it were a sort of boil.
Thus, they will not talk of masters paying more or less wages, which faintly suggests some moral responsibility in the masters.
They will talk of the rise and fall of wages as if the thing were automatic, like the tides of the sea.
Art lies to us when it takes the soul out of man.
Favorite Gershwin Lyrics00:02:48
And this brings me amazingly back to George and Ira Gershwin.
Okay, I've been doing the stuff I like.
There's been songs by George and Ira Gershwin, and everybody knows by now who's been listening to the show that I like 30s and 40s music.
I like it more than the music after the Beatles, basically.
I think that it was better.
And one of the reasons it was better is because if you listen to the lyrics closely, they basically often make this connection.
There is a song by George and Ira Gershwin called Our Love is Here to Stay, which has one of my favorite lines in all of my favorite lines in all of music.
It's not one of my favorite songs, but it has the line where he says, in time, the Rockies may crumble, Gibraltar may tumble.
They're only made of clay.
But our love is here to stay.
Okay, and I think they do this again and again.
Here's one of my favorite George and Ira Gershwin songs from the 1937 Staron Rogers film, Shall We Dance.
They can't take that away from me.
And listen to the way it moves between, it moves between physical things that his lover does and moves into the spiritual things it does.
It makes it, it's brilliant.
Take a listen.
The way you wear your hat.
The way you sip your tea, the memory of all that.
Oh, no, they can't take that away from me.
The way your smile just beams.
The way you sing of kings.
The way you haunt my dreams.
No, no, they can't take that away from me.
We may never, never meet again on the bumpy road to love.
But I'll always, always keep the memory young.
The way you hold your knife.
The way we dance till three.
The way you changed my life.
No, no, they can't take that away from me.
No, they can't take that away from me.
The way you hold your knife, the way you change my life.
See, reality is spiritual.
The physical is just the language in which reality speaks.
That's the truth, and the truth will set you free.
That's why no one wants to hear it.
Okay, next week, California, it's going to be an interesting week.
Get through the Clavenless weekend as best you can, and we'll be back.