Fidel Castro’s death exposed leftist hypocrisy as media elites like Andrea Mitchell and The New York Times eulogized his 60-year dictatorship—marked by 9,000+ executions, failed revolutions (1953), and the Cuban Missile Crisis—while Obama’s tepid condolences clashed with Trump and Pelosi’s blunt "evil dictator" labels. Castro’s healthcare and education boasts crumbled under tiered access and global university rankings, yet leftists still defend him alongside Pol Pot, framing murder as "social justice." His legacy collides with 2016’s backlash against progressive policies like transgender mandates, while Trump’s school-choice picks and liberal media’s Clinton villainization deepen cultural divides—all set to Cole Porter’s sophistication, a stark contrast to today’s moral decay. [Automatically generated summary]
Well, the good die young, and Cuban dictator Fidel Castro has passed away at 90.
All across Cuba, people prepared for a seven-day period of pretending to mourn while sniggering quietly and hoping no one killed them for it.
While the thousands of people who risked their lives to escape Cuba celebrated Castro's death, all the people who risked their lives to go live in Cuba were sorry to see him go.
Across the U.S., journalists and other Democrats honored Castro in grief-stricken statements intended to comfort the nation with the comic relief of their moral stupidity.
As one sobbing American college student put it, quote, I was so upset by the election of Donald Trump, but now I see that the people condemning Trump are also praising Castro, so maybe they're just knuckleheads and Trump is actually okay, unquote.
NBC's Andrea Mitchell marked Castro's passing by saying, quote, even though he murdered thousands and enslaved an entire nation, he gave Cuba universal health care so that even those who opposed him could walk right into a hospital and have the bullets removed from their brains.
Brian Williams, who has a job at MSNBC for some reason, said, quote, I remember when Fidel and I were fighting in the Cuban jungle together and we ran into a patrol of Batista's orcs who were trying to conquer Narnia and join forces with Voldemort.
That was the moment when I saw Castro was truly a great man, unquote.
The New York Times, a former newspaper, published an obituary saying, quote, some people saw Fidel as a murderous dictator, but some saw him as a fiery, romantic revolutionary with enormous sex appeal, who sometimes they would fantasize about having sex with in a thrillingly submissive way before dreaming they could hand the entire American government into his excitingly masculine and powerful hands so they could be submissive to him all the time.
But that's just some people, unquote.
Among world leaders, soon-to-be-former failed president Barack Obama issued a statement saying, many in Cuba today are receiving the hearts and minds of those across America who, whether they are rich or poor, are looking to the hopes and dreams of an entire nation in the sunrise of its most opulent crescendos.
When told his statement didn't make any sense, Obama poured himself another whiskey and muttered, what difference does it make?
I've accomplished nothing and my life is a meaningless joke.
Leave me the hell alone.
Canada's prime minister, Justin Trudeau, came under heavy criticism for issuing a statement praising Castro.
Trudeau struck back at his critics saying, quote, hey, maybe if you like the way you look so much, oh baby, you should go and love yourself, unquote.
Possibly that was Justin Bieber, but who can say?
Donald Trump and Nancy Pelosi made the wisest and most intelligent statements about Castro's death, and in other news, a cow gave birth to a two-headed human child.
Castro's ashes will be buried beside those of other famous Cubans.
He will then proceed to the throne of God, where in recognition of a lifetime of almost unimaginable brutality and evil, he will be condemned to spend eternity in Castro's Cuba.
Trigger warning, I'm Andrew Clavin, and this is the Andrew Clavin Show.
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Birds are winging, also singing, hunky-dunky-diggy.
Ship-shaped ipsy-topsy, the world is a bitty zing.
It's a wonderful day.
Hoorah, hooray!
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I'm seeing it.
We liked this so much, we're doing it twice.
All right.
Are we on finally?
Yes.
All right.
So today we're asking the philosophical question, if Fidel Castro has a clavenless weekend, is it a clavenless weekend?
I mean, that is the question, because it certainly was for Fidel.
Welcome back.
I hope you all had a nice Thanksgiving.
I returned to you a wiser but fatter man.
I think I must have, I did nothing for four days but eat and drink.
That's all I did and argue with liberals and make myself feel bad about the fact that I have no patience for liberals anymore.
Now I have to walk around going, oh, I wish I were nicer to the liberals, you know.
But I'm not, so it doesn't matter.
All right, we're going to be talking more about Fidel Castro with our Nobel Prize-winning cultural correspondent, Michael Knowles.
I gave him the Nobel Prize because I figure if they're giving it to Bob Dylan and Barack Obama, it no longer means anything, so why can't I just give them to him?
Knowles as well.
We're going to pipe him in here by our miraculous technology.
Before that, let me just remind you that my memoir, The Great Good Thing, A Secular Jew Comes to Faith in Christ, is on sale as an e-book for three more days till the end of the month.
You can get it for $2.99.
But really what you should do is get the hardcover and give it to your friends for Christmas because it makes an excellent Christmas present.
All right, Knowles, can we bring in Knowles?
we chopper him in here and come in.
There he is.
Coming directly from the jungles of Cuba or possibly the desk next to mine.
I'm not sure.
So I wanted to bring you on right away because I wanted to talk about, first of all, the reaction to Castro's death.
I mean, this is a guy almost 60 years, enslaved this island.
He murdered, you know, they have this thing called the Cuban Archive, where they're trying to name all the people that he assassinated.
I mean, by firing squad and tortured and all this stuff.
They're up to over 9,000 now, just naming them.
And the work is going to be going on.
So this is a really, here is Obama's, I was making fun of this, but here is a selection of Obama's statement about the death of Fidel Castro.
At this time of Fidel Castro's passing, we extend a hand of friendship to the Cuban people.
We know that this moment fills Cubans in Cuba and in the United States with powerful emotions, recalling the countless ways in which Fidel Castro altered the course of individual lives, families, and of the Cuban nation.
A bullet to the head will alter your life, no question.
History will record and judge the enormous impact of this singular figure on the people and world around him.
Today we offer condolences to Fidel Castro's family, and our thoughts and prayers are with the Cuban people.
In the days ahead, they will recall the past and also look to the future, as one does.
As they do, the Cuban people must know that they have a friend and partner in the United States of America.
This is, I mean, it's amazing stuff.
Can I just leave after that?
I don't want to go on.
I mean, that says it all, doesn't it?
And, you know, I mean, Trump, to Trump's credit, he just said this was an evil dictator and, you know, good riddance.
Just think of that statement.
Donald Trump has more moral clarity than any world leader.
And Nancy Pelosi was the same.
But how hard was it?
I mean, the stuff that the press was saying was unbelievable.
I mean, did you hear their reactions?
You know, I don't want to bring us back to the last segment that we did on Wednesday, but there was a lot of fake news going around over the past couple days.
Yeah.
My.
You know, actually, before we get to, I do think we shouldn't skip over Justin Trudeau's statement.
Oh, yeah, we did.
I know you mentioned it in the monologue.
Just listen to this.
This is the real one.
It is with deep sorrow that I learned today of the death of Cuba's longest-serving president.
Fidel Castro was a larger-than-life leader who served his people for almost half a century.
A legendary revolutionary and orator.
Mr. Castro made significant improvement to education and healthcare of his island nation.
While a controversial figure, both Mr. Castro's supporters and detractors recognized his tremendous dedication and love for the Cuban people, no we don't.
Who had a deep and lasting affection for El Comandante.
I can't go on.
It gets worse.
I just can't keep reading.
This is amazing.
Let's go back.
Let us talk a little bit about who this guy was and the history of this guy.
I mean, in all fairness, before Castro, Cuba was under the heels of a dictator, Batista, right?
So that's where we start.
Yeah, that's right.
Cuba was under the heels of this obvious tyrant, Fulgencia Batista.
A lot of people in their reactions are saying that we can't criticize Castro because the United States had a relationship with Batista, which doesn't make any sense to me.
But also, there is a moral distinction here between a murderous tyrant who's an ally of the United States and a murderous tyrant who brings Soviet missiles into the Western Hemisphere.
Brought us close to nuclear war.
That's right.
So Castro comes to power.
Castro comes to power.
You know, what's interesting is Castro actually tried to come to power about six years earlier than he did.
In 1953, he staged what he was hoping to be a revolution and was arrested by Batista, thrown in jail for a few years, and then eventually exiled.
He was allowed to go away to Mexico and start planning another revolution with his brother Raoul and with Shea Guevara of T-shirt fame.
Yeah, that's right.
And then he came back to Cuba and overthrew the government.
So you would think, I don't know, this seems to happen a lot in dictatorships when these commies come to power.
Like the Hitler with a push and they put him away and they kind of seasons them in prison and they come back all the stronger.
That's right, yeah.
So you think they would learn their lesson, but Fidel comes to power in 1959.
He is 12 weeks later, takes a trip to the United States, says he has no interest in communism, goes around to Georgetown University, I think, few places, makes nice with Americans, and then within two years has ballistic missiles from the Soviet Union in Cuba, almost launching the entire world into a full-scale nuclear war.
You know, this is one of my earliest memories.
I can remember my father sitting watching TV saying, like, this is the end of the world.
We're all going to die.
My father was a very calm guy.
That's right, that's right.
But by all reports, Fidel Castro was pleading with the Soviet Union to fire the missiles.
This is not a problem.
And the tragic thing was, you know, we tried to get him out of there at the Bay of Pigs.
You know, Eisenhower basically had set up this invasion where they were going to send over the CIA, CIA-backed rebels, basically, were going to go over.
And then Kennedy really got cold feet because they thought like Dick Cheney, the Cubans were going to rise up and throw off their chains, and that didn't happen.
And Kennedy just thought, like, I want this to be a secret, so I don't want to give them the air support they need.
That's right.
It didn't stop us, though, from an estimated 9 to 16 CIA attempts to assassinate Castro and a possible 600 attempts over the course of his life, including certain ideas.
There were a couple really...
Exploding cigars.
Yeah, the exploding cigar.
There was going to be one where submarines fired lights over Cuba to make the Cubans believe that it was the second coming of Christ in revolt against the communists.
That always works.
That always works.
That one has worked a million times.
That's right.
And the thing that gets me about this, a lot of these statements, like the one you read from Trudeau, celebrated how long he was in power.
And they would say, like, he stymied, what was it, six or seven American presidents?
That's not a good thing to have a guy in power that long.
You know, that's a bad thing.
It actually was 10 presidencies that he was officially in power.
And then obviously, he stepped down in 2008 officially.
Something tells me he still wielded a bit of influence current president Raul Castro.
But why is that like a good thing that a guy's in power for 60 years?
That's what we call a dictatorship, right?
That's right, but it's so efficient.
The left really loves that.
Let's get to this thing about, this is what everybody's saying.
Oh, healthcare and the universal health care and education.
He raised literacy.
That's right.
Is this true?
I'll just read you a couple lines from the fake news over the weekend.
Andrea Mitchell said that he gave his people better health care and education and will be revered for the education and social services and Medicare for all of his people.
That woman, like you could, you could shout in her ear and it would echo.
I mean, that is like, she's the stupidest.
All right, go ahead.
Jim Avila at CNN said that even Castro's critics praised his advances in healthcare and education.
I don't know which critics he took.
I didn't get a call.
And Castro was considered, even to this day, the George Washington of his country among those who remain in Cuba.
Now, again, I don't know how many of those who remain in Cuba Jim was able to talk to, but every single person who left Cuba, including Castro's daughter, seems to disagree with the state.
First of all, it was 20% of the country left.
20% of the country tried to escape, tried to escape.
And of course, they were dying and they were being eaten by sharks.
Castro was ramming their boats, these poor rafts that they were trying to escape.
He was having his Coast Guard ram their boats.
There was nobody, as Bill Whittle is fond of, our pal Bill Whittle is fond of pointing out, nobody was rowing their inner tube in the other direction.
From Miami, yeah.
I mean, Chris Matthews really summed up the left's feeling on Castro in this way.
He says, Fidel Castro was a romantic figure when he came into power.
We rooted like mad for the guy, and he was almost like a folk hero to most of us.
That's amazing.
And you know, I will give Chris Matthews credit for being honest.
Yes.
Because I think a lot of left-wingers will tell you that privately, and they're the buttheads.
Castro was a terrible guy, but.
But as for healthcare and education, it is true.
Cuba has one of the best health care systems in the world, but it isn't for Cubans.
Cubans can't use it.
There are about three health care systems in Cuba.
There is medical tourism, which is very popular.
These are usually cosmetic surgeries, Botox, that sort of stuff.
So people from here can go over there, you mean?
That's right.
People, anyone who have hard currency to pay the castros.
That's a lot of money.
Yeah, to keep priming their economy.
So that exists.
There's another healthcare system for party members and VIPs.
Pope Francis and Hard Currency00:07:54
That is also ranked pretty well.
You know, there are a lot of doctors that Cuba exports to kind of make a show of things.
Then there's the third healthcare system, which is for Cubans.
The situation is so deplorable, to borrow a word from the former Secretary of State.
It is so deplorable that people have to bring their own bed sheets, towels, toilet paper, and pillows when they go to these hospitals.
This drives me crazy.
And this is, Michael Moore made a film about how wonderful it all is.
Because this is what communism and socialism always do.
It creates two tiers.
It always creates, it makes everybody equal except for the people in power.
I mean, Castro was worth like a billion dollars.
I mean, he was a filthy rich guy and was living this life of women and mansions and all this stuff, of course.
While people start, you know, when he took, Batista was a dictator.
When he took over Cuba, Cuba was one of the best, one of the best economies in the Latin world.
And now, if you look at Havana, it looks like a bomb.
That's it.
Well, what I don't understand, the one myth everyone keeps talking about is the great educational system.
It's literacy, yeah.
In Cuba, yeah, and literacy and everything.
The University of Havana, which is the university in Cuba, is not even ranked in the top thousand colleges and universities in the world.
It's ranked number 1700 or something like that below tiny universities in Africa and some of the poorer parts of the world.
It's not even in the top 20 universities in the Caribbean.
I mean, this thing is ranked below Mexico, Puerto Rico.
Oh, man.
So I really don't know where.
I mean, and this is a pretty recent study from Spain's Superior Council of Scientific Research.
I don't really know where they get any of these numbers from other than Chris Matthew Feverdream.
And they come from Castro.
I mean, that's one of the big things, all these numbers about their health care.
All right, well, thank you very much.
Our Nobel Prize-winning cultural correspondent, Michael Norris.
Yeah, it's in the mail.
Your prize is in the mail with the chat.
We got to say goodbye to our friends on Facebook and YouTube and come on over to The Daily Wire and you can listen and you could watch if you would just subscribe for a lousy eight bucks a month.
So the thing about this whole, the Castro thing and the reaction to Castro is it really says something important for those of you who spent, you know, Thanksgiving with your left-wing relatives.
It really says something important about the left.
It tells you that they have a worldview in which their idea of social justice is worth murdering thousands.
There's that, you know, as Michael said, and I've joked many times, calling him buttheads, you know, yeah, he murdered thousands, but.
And one of the things I tweeted over the weekend was in American English, he murdered thousands.
The phrase he murdered thousands can't be followed by the word but.
That's not American grammar.
So the thing that Obama is trying to do with that mealy-mouthed statement is he's trying to protect the fact that he, by fiat, opened relations with Cuba and let businesses start to do business with Cuba, which hadn't been happening before.
And Donald Trump, as you remember, has pledged that he's going to stop that or at least renegotiate the deal in Trumpian fashion.
Here is Trump back in September as he was talking about this.
All of the concessions that Barack Obama has granted to Castro regime were done through executive order, which means the next president can reverse them.
And that I will do unless the Castro regime meets our demands.
Those demands will include religious and political freedom for the Cuban people and the freeing of political prisoners.
So this is going to be a problem because some of these businesses are now entrenched in the Wall Street Journal is kind of the Wall Street Journal, which always only cares about business and money and all this stuff, is lobbying, basically lobbying Trump in its article saying, well, how is he going to get these people out of there?
But as long as, as long as this tyranny remains in power, the money that these businesses funnel in is just being funneled to the dictatorship.
Do you think anybody on the street is going to see any of this cash?
You think if tourism goes up, that the regular ordinary guy is going to get richer?
Of course not.
All the money goes to this military government as it does in all these communist countries.
You know, Marco Rubio reacted to, he was on CNN and the reporter asks him basically, well, the Pope said it was sad, and you're a Catholic.
And isn't that the same as Obama's statement?
And Rubio just called Obama's statement pathetic.
Here it is.
Senator, you called President Obama pathetic for offering condolences to Fidel Castro's family.
But, you know, he wasn't the only world leader to do so.
And even Pope Francis sent a telegram expressing sentiments of sorrow.
As a practicing Catholic, what's your reaction to that?
Well, as a practicing Catholic, I believe in the theological authority of the Bishop of Rome.
And that's what Pope Francis is.
On political matters, however, particularly on foreign policy issues, I don't necessarily believe that that binds those of us in the faith in terms of issues of foreign policy.
I still respect it, but this is a very different thing.
Pope Francis is the leader of a religious organization, the Roman Catholic Church.
Barack Obama is the president of the most powerful country in the world.
And what I call pathetic is not mentioning whatsoever in that statement the reality that there are thousands upon thousands of people who suffered brutally under the Castro regime.
He executed people.
He jailed people for 20 to 30 years.
The Florida Straits, there are thousands of people who lost their lives fleeing his dictatorship.
And not to acknowledge any of that in the statement, I felt is pathetic, absolutely.
And it absolutely is.
I mean, Obama's statement, when you read it, it almost sounds like I wrote it for the opening.
I mean, I was making it, I was imitating it, but I thought, like, I really can't push this to past the point of satire.
You cannot get any more mealy mouth.
And now, now we have the problem, as Ted Cruz points out, we have the problem of how they're going to react to the death, because this is the death of a leader.
What do you do now?
Here's Ted Cruz talking about that.
I will say one thing, Martha, that's going to be an interesting test just in the next few days.
I very much hope that we don't see any U.S. government officials going to Fidel Castro's funeral.
I hope we don't see Barack Obama and Joe Biden and Hillary Clinton and Democrats lining up to lionize a murderous tyrant and thug.
If you wouldn't go to Pol Pot's funeral or Stalin's funeral or Mao's funeral because they were murdering communist dictators, then you shouldn't be doing what Barack Obama and Justin Trudeau are doing, which is celebrating Fidel Castro, a murderous communist dictator.
Exactly.
I mean, that is exactly right.
And this is one of the reasons, by the way, that I remain so upbeat about this election.
And I really do remain this way.
You know, I feel we have seriously dodged a bullet.
You know, when I voted for Donald Trump, which I did with no misgivings.
I didn't do it with any misgivings.
Once I made my decision, I knew it was the right thing to do.
But I certainly was sorry that I didn't have another candidate to vote for.
But I have begun to feel that maybe, you know, first of all, maybe I undersold the guy.
I really like the people he's appointing.
I liked him on what he said about Cuba, but I've also liked the people he's appointing.
I was especially happy with his Secretary of Education, Betsy DeVos, who was a Trump opponent.
She didn't like Donald Trump.
I Really Like His Appointees00:02:40
She's a big Republican fundraiser.
She's a major figure in the school choice movement.
And this is so important for the poor.
This is so important for kids who are not getting a good education.
And Obama, he shut it down in Washington, D.C.
And why do they shut it down?
They shut it down because they are in service to the teachers' union, these corrupt teachers' unions that do not give a rap about what their, the children, what happens to the children in their schools, they only care about their jobs and their pay and their seniority and all this stuff.
And you cannot, in LA, you can't fire a teacher, basically.
I mean, it doesn't matter what that guy is doing.
They put him in what they call a rubber room where he can just sort of sit there and collect his paycheck and keep him away from students.
So all of this stuff tells us so much about the people who've been in power for the last eight years.
I mean, that's, you know, you start with, you start with a false view of humankind.
You start with an actually false idea that humanity is simple, that human beings are simply a construct of the societies they live in and the influences that are on them.
So in other words, there's no such thing as human nature.
There's no such thing as feminine nature.
There's no such thing as masculine nature.
It's all a social construct.
Well, if it's a social construct, it can be changed, right?
And if it can be changed, we should now get around to changing it.
All those bad things that we, you know, some of us attribute to original sin, wars and prejudice and all that stuff, it can all be ended if we just get your mind right.
And so we have to get your mind.
How do we get your mind right?
We get your mind right by forcing you not to say the things you say, not to think the things you think, by condemning everything that went before, religion, masculinity, femininity.
You know, it's political correctness.
It's this tyranny of the mind that they seek to impose on you.
Well, of course, since the worldview is wrong, and since people have a nature, human beings have natures, individuals have natures, the genders have a nature, since all those things are wrong, it is endless.
It's endless tyranny.
And it becomes, the tyranny ultimately becomes the point of the exercise.
It's the power to tell you what to think, what to say, that becomes the point of the exercise.
And that is how you get to Orwell's 1984, where the torturer says to Winston Smith, how many fingers am I holding up?
And the right answer is as many fingers as the party says so.
Because the party now is the vehicle for morality.
The party is now the vehicle for change.
And you, as the individual who finds your way, who says, well, yes, you know, I don't want to persecute gays, but I also don't want to cater their weddings.
The Party's Morality Machine00:04:17
That person is forbidden, is verboten.
And, you know, this has been going on.
You know, Maureen Dowd, God love her, I got to say, Maureen Dowd, I always pick on Maureen Dowd because I don't think she's very good at what she does.
I don't like, I think her opinions are simple.
I think her writing, which is always praised as witty, is just silly.
She just calls people names all the time.
However, I've always said, and I say this every time I mention her, she has integrity.
She does report things, and she knows that the people who are reading her don't want to hear it.
She said this the other day, not that long ago.
She said the people she knows who are readers of the Times do not want to hear anything bad about Hillary Clinton.
So if she writes anything bad about it, they all attack her.
I know the feeling.
I know the feeling.
You know, like everybody has to just be black or white.
However, she writes this thing about Thanksgiving.
And she starts out by saying that Donald Trump, during his interview with the New York Times, slammed her.
And she says, during his interview with the New York Times on Tuesday, Donald Trump chided me twice for being too tough on him.
Sitting next to our publisher, Arthur Sulzberger Jr., Trump invited everyone around the table to call him if they saw anything where you feel that I'm wrong.
You can call me Arthur.
Arthur can call me.
I would love to hear.
The only one who can't call me is Maureen.
She treats me too rough.
So Maureen says she had to go from there to Thanksgiving and deal, she says, with my family scolding me about the media misreading the country, because her family are conservative.
And she says, the minute I saw my sister's champagne and a Cersei figurine is the centerpiece.
Do we have that image?
This is the image she put on the, this is her Thanksgiving table.
Do we have that image?
There it is.
So they put a Cersei because her brother, Kevin, says Hillary Clinton is Cersei from Game of Thrones.
And I can't explain it to you, but she's a ruthless, killing, horrible person.
So he put this on their Thanksgiving table.
So she says, this minute I saw this setting, I knew I wasn't in a safe place.
And then she says, she explains, she lets Kevin, she quotes Kevin's column.
And this is Kevin's explanation to the left on what happened, on why Donald Trump was elected.
The election was a complete repudiation of Barack Obama, his fantasy world of political correctness, the politicization of the Justice Department and the IRS, an out-of-control EPA, his neutering of the military, his non-support of the police, and his fixation on things like transgender bathrooms.
Since he became president, his party has lost 63 House seats, 10 Senate seats, and 14 governorships.
The country had signaled strongly in the last two midterms that they were not happy.
The Dem's answer was to give them more of the same from a person they did not like or trust.
preaching and pandering with a message of inclusion, the Democrats have instead become a party where incivility and bad manners are taken for granted.
Rudeness is routine, religion is mocked, and there is absolutely no respect for a differing opinion.
This did not go down well in the Midwest.
And this is the thing, that this rudeness, you know, they attack Donald Trump and they tell you how rude he is, and he is.
He can be incredibly rude.
But isn't it more rude to assume that you are voting for the good of the country, but the person who's voting against you is just a sexist or a racist?
I mean, isn't that an incredibly cruel, rude, stupid thing to say unless you have evidence that that person is voting for that reason?
You know, they say that Donald Trump is a bigot, but who shows up at universities to shout down any speaker they disagree with?
Who sends the security forces to line up and keep Ben Shapiro out?
You know, the left does this all the time.
And they say that Trump is a bully, but who are the bullies?
Who are the ones who tell you you can't say this, you can't say that?
You have to cater this wedding.
You have to believe this.
You have to think, I think this is right, so therefore you have to think this is right, or I will drive you out of business.
They hate Donald Trump.
They are Donald Trump.
They are Donald Trump.
And what the people finally said was, if this is the only language you speak, we will speak it back to you.
And now they're hearing what it sounds like.
They are now hearing the left for the first time is hearing what they sound like to us.
That is what's happening.
Meanwhile, I just want to say again that so far, as far as I'm concerned, Trump is doing great.
You know, I only want one thing from my government, less of it.
That's all I want.
I want less government.
So far, I like the people he's appointing.
So Far, I Like Trump00:04:15
I like where he's going.
All right, some stuff I like besides where we're standing.
2016 is turning out great.
We got Fidelis gone.
We've got Republicans everywhere.
This is terrific.
It looks so crazy, you know?
It's like God was just messing with us all the time.
He was just kidding around.
Stuff I like, I have to say that today, I believe, if I've got this right, I think today is the birthday of William Blake.
And I'm not going to read any of William Blake's poetry because he's just a weird, bizarre poet, but he is one of the essential poets of English literature because he reimagined the entire world as an internal structure.
He brought religion into the human heart, and he really prefigured guys like Sigmund Freud, who put everything in the mind, except Blake actually believed that God was real, but he just believed that he lived within.
You know, he had this very complicated view of the imagination and reality.
But the stuff I like I want to talk about is over the weekend, like I said, I did nothing but eat and drink.
But over the weekend, Turner Classic Movies did a one-day Fred Astaire Ginger Rogers film festival.
And so I picked one that I hadn't seen before, which was the gay divorcee.
And originally, the play was called The Gay Divorce, but the Hayes office said you can't have a gay divorce.
You could have a gay divorcee, but you can't have a happy divorce, so you can only have a happy divorcee.
And it was very what's the word daring for its time in that Ginger Rogers plays this woman who wants to get out of her marriage, so she has to hire a man to pretend to sleep with her so he can accuse her of adultery.
So she has to spend the night with this guy, but meanwhile, Fred Astaire falls in love with her.
I have to tell you something.
Watching these two people dance, these films are now 80 years old.
Watching these two people dance is like porn.
They were so sexy together when they started.
I mean, he had no sex appeal whatsoever, as far as I can tell, but she was really sexy.
And when they danced, it was unbelievable.
And I really recommend, I just play, the original play was, the music was by Cole Porter, one of the greatest geniuses of all time.
It's really interesting that guys like Leonard Cohen, who just died, who's supposed to be the great poet, Paul Simon, supposed to be a great poet, they both have said that they could not hold a candle to people like Irving Berlin and Cole Porter.
And I agree with that.
I think these guys were true geniuses, true American treasures.
Here's just a moment, the one song of Cole Porter's that they left in the movie.
Here's just a moment of it.
Night and day, you are the one.
Only you beneath the moon and under the sun.
Whether near to me or far, it's no matter, darling, where you are, I think of you.
Night and day.
What I love about these songs is they basically asked you to step up, go up a notch, in the same way that rap asks you to step down.
And what the Beatles, the Beatles are the great turning point where suddenly they began singing working-class songs.
And, you know, I've had a hard day's night, and I've been working like a dog.
You know, that was what it was.
Suddenly, the old songs were asking you to step into this world of glamour and wealth and become classier people, whereas the new songs are actually asking you, I mean, the Beatles were right in the middle.
They were saying, here's where we are, and so we're going to sing songs for our people.
But rap songs are actually asking people to be worse.
And when you see suburban kids singing these rap songs, they're actually pretending to be worse than they are.
And then they go and get off and get an education and have a good life.
But the people who are living that rap life are doomed, you know, and that's the difference.
Really, the people on the top should be asking those below them to aspire upward, not trying to imitate them downward.
Anyway, great movie, The Gay Divorcee, Star and Rogers, two of the sexiest human beings.
When they were together, it was just an amazing, amazing thing.
All right, we'll be back to excoriate the left some more and kick them while they're down and possibly stomp on them and do some things I can't even talk about.