Ep. 252 dissects media bias against Trump, citing his 40% approval—lowest for an incoming president—while Congressman Duffy predicts a rebound. The episode contrasts Trump’s chaotic rhetoric with Obama’s "scandal-free" myth, exposing Benghazi, IRS targeting, and Bergdahl’s secret swap. It frames Davos globalism as a driver of inequality, linking Brexit and Trump’s rise to Burkean backlash, then pivots to NASA’s decline under Obama, mourning Gene Cernan’s 1972 moonwalk as the last. The host argues conservative radicalism fuels progress, while leftist policies stifle ambition—from space exploration to economic disruption—suggesting Trump’s unpredictability may yet reshape America’s trajectory. [Automatically generated summary]
Many of you may be wondering what's going on politically in California and how can we make it stop.
Well, good news.
In electing Kamala Harris to replace Barbara Boxer as our U.S. Senator, we have raised the intelligence of our representation a hundredfold so that our senator is now an idiot instead of a walking turnip sculpted into a shape vaguely reminiscent of Barbara Boxer and named Barbara Boxer.
Senator Harris's inspiring stupidity was on display last week when she questioned Mike Pompeo.
Pompeo is Donald Trump's appointment to head the Central Intelligence Agency and Senator Harris grilled Pompeo on all the important things a CIA director has to know.
When quote, CIA analysts look for deeper causes of rising instability in the world, one of the causes those CIA analysts see is the impact of climate change.
Do you have any reason to doubt the assessment of these CIA analysts?
Senator Harris, I haven't had a chance to read those materials with respect to climate change.
I do know the agency's role there.
Its role is to collect foreign intelligence.
Now, before you think Harris is being completely irrational, let me point out that she clarified her climate change remarks by saying that oleogenous winter chickens walk on the smoke-filled iron of mandala.
And okay, that doesn't make much sense either, but it's a little bit more reasonable than asking a prospective CIA director about the weather.
Senator Harris went on to raise another urgent CIA issue, gay marriage.
Harris asked Pompeo if his opposition to gay marriage meant he'd be unwilling to hire gay people, which is very important because if there are no gay people in the CIA, who's going to seduce information out of those loosh, olive-skinned young men wearing white suits and smoking perfumed cigarettes in the Casbah.
Now, I do have to admit that these exchanges made me wonder if Pompeo was ready for the CIA job.
After all, our top spy should be able to keep his composure even when irrational people like Kamala Harris are gibbering nonsense in his face about irrelevant issues.
Personally, I want a top spy who can look at a blithering dunderhead like Senator Harris and coolly light the fuse of a bomb with his cigarette before driving away in his Aston Martin DB10 specter, preferably with a shapely blonde double agent with a 36 bra size as opposed to a 36 IQ.
Instead, Pompeo gaped at Kamala Harris with an expression that seemed to say, uh-oh, I'm late for my Senate confirmation hearing, and I seem to have accidentally wandered into a screen test for the new reality show, 10 Random Questions to Ask a Guy.
All the same, I feel confident that as long as Kamala Harris is one of California's senators, our homosexual spies will be cultivating sources among the clouds in order to keep tabs on any suspicious weather.
Please get me out of California.
Please.
Trigger warning, I'm Andrew Clavin, and this is the Andrew Clavin Show.
I'm the hunky donkey.
Life is tickety boom.
Birds are ringing, also singing, hunky-dunkity.
Ship-shaped topsy, the world is at bitty zing.
It's a wonderful day.
Hoorah, hooray.
It makes me want to sing.
Oh, hoorah, hooray.
Oh, hooray, hurrah.
Yippee.
It's the mailbag tomorrow.
Hooray!
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Get the Birch Gold Kit00:02:46
So here's what happened to me yesterday.
I'm having coffee with Jeremy Boring, the God King of the Daily Wire, and we're discussing this thing that Trump said where he said everybody's going to get insurance, no matter whether they can afford it.
And I said to Jeremy, you know, I have no idea, you know, because we're worried that Trump is going to veer off to the left because he's kind of had this history of going left-wing.
And I said, I don't know what he means when he says that, and I don't think any of the experts know what he means.
I don't think his transition team knows what he means.
I'm not sure Trump knows what he means.
So I go home and I'm watching Brett Baer show and he's got Pulitzer Prize winning commentator Charles Krauthammer on and he says, what do you think of this comment about everybody getting insurance?
And Krauthim says, I don't know what he means, and I don't think his team know what he means.
And I don't think he knows what he means.
And I thought, well, wait, I'm doing Pulitzer Prize level commentary here because nobody knows what's going on.
Which is one of the reasons we here at the Daily Wire keep trying to get you to go and look at Birch Gold.
Don't listen to what I say about it.
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But you should really just check it out.
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Don't take my word for it.
All right.
Glee Over Trump's Picks00:02:31
So Donald Trump is driving me and the rest of the commentariat crazy because he goes around and he says these things and two new polls, and it seems to be affecting, whatever is happening, seems to be affecting his popularity.
Two new polls, one from CNN and another conducted jointly by ABC News and the Washington Post, showed Trump to be the least popular incoming president in modern history.
Trump's approval rating in the CNN poll released Tuesday sat at just 40%, 44 points below the 84% that President Barack Obama took office with in 2009.
Okay.
Now, Trump, of course, immediately tweeted out, these are the same stupid people who took the polls and said I couldn't win the election.
But, you know, a lot of those polls, especially the national polls, were right.
They were right on the numbers.
It just didn't occur to anybody that the national poll numbers don't matter because we have an electoral college system.
Congressman Sean Duffy, who was on Trump's transition team, said, what's actually happening here is the public fight that Mr. Trump is having with CNN and other media groups is taking some skin off his poll numbers and it's gone down.
But he says he'll get it back.
The thing is, like I personally, and I've talked about this, I have a piece up on PJ Media, my Claven on the Culture blog at PJ Media, that you can read.
It was put up on Real Clear Politics, and it's getting a lot of response from a lot of people who agree with it.
Usually, no matter what I say, somebody is attacking me, but this piece seems to have really hit a nerve.
I'm feeling glee.
I am feeling genuine glee because I had all these doubts about Trump.
I still have them.
I didn't like the way he ran his campaign.
I didn't like the attacks on guys like Ted Cruz, his father killing Kennedy, all that nonsense.
All that stuff bothers me.
Obviously, the remarks about women, not, you know, sad, bigly, you know.
So all that stuff really worried me about him.
I have been experiencing, I think he's doing great so far because forget about what he says for just a minute and what the president says is important, but forget about it.
I think his picks for his cabinet are serious.
He said, I am going to pick the best people.
Remember, everybody would say, well, what do you know about anything?
And he said, I'm going to pick the best people.
I knew the best people.
And he did.
He did.
These guys are great.
I like them all.
I like Tillerson.
I like Sessions.
I'm especially thrilled about Betty DeVos, is that her name?
The education lady.
She's up for, I think her hearings start this week.
You know, so I'm watching what he does, and it seems like he has learned something.
The last three or four weeks of his campaign were different than the rest of his campaign.
Brett Stevens' Column: Action vs. Words00:15:17
They were more elevated.
They were smarter.
They were on message.
But, but when he gives these interviews, he says things, and again, I don't know what they mean, and nobody knows what they mean, and they're driving the commentariate crazy.
Brett Stevens has a column this morning.
Brett Stevens, very anti-Trump, really dislikes him.
But it's a really interesting column because it's just, you hear the frustration, the craziness.
You know, while this is going on in Davos, Switzerland, which I feel that they should be renamed Versailles, because that's what I feel this is.
This is Davos, Switzerland.
They're all meeting.
This is where all the globalist billionaires go and they meet and they discuss how they're going to globalize the economy.
They've got it all figured out.
And right now they're looking out the window and there are all these people standing outside with pitchforks and torches, you know, and it's like, excuse me, but I think maybe things are, you know, they've got Brexit, they got Donald Trump.
People are saying, we don't like this.
This global movement that has been going on since World War II has done some good things.
First of all, it kept Germany, England, and France from killing each other for a couple of years.
They stopped fighting wars for the first time in history, so that was a good thing.
Poverty is dropping around the world.
Third world, I mean, it's virtually disappearing.
The way that poverty is going down, you know, really should make the heart sing.
And all these third world countries, a lot of poverty is vanishing.
But, but in rich countries, inequality is skyrocketing, unemployment is skyrocketing, or in places like Britain where unemployment is not skyrocketing, wages are stagnating because these clowns want to control everything and they don't know.
They don't know what they don't know.
They don't know that socialism causes societies to split into two.
Capitalism has this graded steps.
You have the poor going up step by step, step by step to the rich.
Socialism, it's just the rich guys in the government, the powerful guys in the government, and the rest of us.
And that's what they have moved toward.
Plus, plus, you know, people like their countries.
They want their countries to be their countries.
They don't want Syrian immigrants coming in, sweeping in, molesting women, holding these religious beliefs that are not compatible with Western civilization, that may not be compatible with civilization at all.
You know, just because you sit in a room in Davos sipping champagne and you have a theory that everybody can get along doesn't mean you're right and doesn't mean that life on the ground is any good.
When you have places in Paris, in Paris, where women can't go, you have made a mistake and it's on you.
It's not on the little people.
It's not on the ladies who can't go into these places anymore, getting grabbed in the streets of Germany.
You know, it's on you guys in Davos.
And when they say when they elect Donald Trump, they're sending you a very loud message.
And the thing is, you know, these revolutions are frequently, how can I put it?
Blunt.
It takes blunt instruments.
You know, there's a famous quote.
Let me see if I have it here.
I think I do.
There's a famous quote by Edmund Burke.
Edmund Burke is like the founder of modern conservatism, right?
a British parliamentarian.
And he wrote a very famous essay on the French Revolution.
Burke was right about everything.
He was amazing.
He saw the French Revolution, he said, this is bad.
He saw the American Revolution, he said, this is good.
He just got it.
And his reflections on the French Revolution, where he talked about the worth of tradition and all these things, is a founding document.
Everyone should read it.
He's a beautiful writer, and it's a founding document of conservatism.
Here's just one little paragraph from it.
The most wonderful things are brought about in many instances by means of the most absurd and ridiculous, in the most ridiculous modes, and apparently by the most contemptible instruments.
Everything seems out of nature in this strange chaos of levity and ferocity, and of all sorts of crimes jumbled together with all sorts of follies.
In viewing this monstrous, tragic comic scene, the most opposite passions necessarily succeed and sometimes mix with each other in the mind.
Alternate contempt and indignation, alternate laughter and tears, alternate scorn and horror.
And so what he's saying is that sometimes, you know, when these big changes come, they come in this kind of comedy of strangeness.
And he talks about contemptible instruments.
And that's what a lot of commentaries are looking at in Donald Trump.
They can't believe the things that are coming out of his mouth.
So here's Brett Stevens talking about Donald Trump.
And he says, first we had Donald Trump's press conference attack on CNN's Jim You are fake news Acosta.
Then a salvo against the pharmaceutical industry, which Trump said is getting away with murder.
Mr. Trump also accused intelligence agencies of leaking a smear against him, asking in a tweet, are we living in Nazi Germany?
This was followed by an interview with British and German newspapers in which Mr. Trump called NATO obsolete, dismissed the European Union as basically a vehicle for Germany, and threatened to slap a 35% tariff on BMW for wanting to build a plant in Mexico.
The president can't do that, by the way.
Oh, and the feud with John Lewis, the congressman from Georgia, we know about this.
We talked about this yesterday.
He attacked Trump.
Trump attacked him back.
So say this for Mr. Trump, says Brett Stevens.
He has no use for pieties.
Mr. Lewis is routinely described in the press as a civil rights icon.
The next president could not care less.
Wall Street Journal Republicans believe that business decisions should be left to business.
As of Friday, those businesses will do as Mr. Trump says.
NATO, too old.
The EU, not salvageable.
The Fourth Estate, a fraud.
The folks at Langley, a new Gestapo.
All this baits Mr. Trump's critics, this columnist, not least, into fits of moral outrage, which is probably his intention.
Nobody in life or literature is more tedious than the prig yelling, is nothing sacred.
Liberals intent on spending the next four years in a state of high decibel indignation and constant panic are paving the way to Mr. Trump's re-election.
If you want to see this played out on television, watch Joe Scarborough go nuts discussing that.
He can barely get the words out.
Look at this.
It's exhausting.
I mean, speaking of my rules, I also had another rule.
We can fight one battle at a time.
Don't come at me and tell me that you want to take on this.
I tell myself, one battle at a time, all right?
And we cleared the decks of that.
This weekend alone.
And I'm sorry.
I'm just going to say.
I'm just going to say, this does not last long.
This does not continue.
There is a breaking point.
It just, it is.
He's not even sworn in yet.
His numbers will collapse into the 20s.
Yeah.
If this continues.
Just like Meek and I predicted, and we've said it, as you know, just like we predicted he could win the Republican nomination, I'm telling you this will not last.
This weekend alone, Harold, he's in fights right now with the preeminent civil rights leader in America, with the entire intelligence community, perhaps the most important community to have on your side as president, and the most dangerous to cross politically.
The single most important military alliance of our time, according to his own Secretary of Defense, NATO, and the single most important leader in all of Europe, Angela Merkel.
That's just on this holiday weekend.
This will not last.
That's great.
You barely get it.
You should have heard what President Obama said, because he's a lame duck.
Yeah!
All right.
We got to say goodbye to Facebook and YouTube.
The laughs will continue at thedailywire.com.
Subscribe, and you can be in the mailbag tomorrow, which will be a little uncomfortable.
But when we take you out of the mailbag, we will answer all your questions.
All right, let's go back to this Brett Stevens column because what he says next is really interesting.
But the main reason the president-elect's attacks stick is that they each have their quotient of truth.
Mr. Trump is not wrong that NATO's European members don't carry their weight.
He isn't wrong that the EU is in deep trouble no matter what he says.
He isn't wrong that Mr. Lewis's attack on the legitimacy of his election was out of line or that the congressman's courage in the 1960s should not insulate him from criticism today.
He isn't wrong that drug companies price gouge, nor is he wrong to be infuriated by BuzzFeed's publication of an unverified opposition dossier regarding his Russia ties.
He isn't wrong either to suspect that outgoing CIA Director John Brennan may have leaked that the president-elect had been briefed on the contents of the dossier.
In his previous incarnation as President Obama's top counterterrorism aide, Mr. Brennan developed a reputation as a leaker and spinner of the first rank.
We know he goes on to say this is not reform, this is revolt.
And he's right, it is a revolt.
And by the way, I've said this before, but I have to go back to this.
These guys just throwing out the fact that it's dangerous to mess with the CIA.
Thanks, but we don't actually need a shadow government in the terms of the CIA telling the president what he can and can't say.
They did this to George W. Bush.
The CIA is a defender of the leftist status quo.
They are a defender of big government because they are part of big government and they convince themselves that they're defending the country and therefore they're more important than whatever president is passing through.
And that is very, very dangerous and people should be outraged about it.
If they're leaking stuff on Donald Trump, people should be outraged about it.
That is not the way we want our CIA to behave.
And if I don't show up tomorrow, you'll know why.
Okay?
So here's the thing.
Trump is overturning these pieties and he's a blunt instrument because sometimes, you know, I'm not sure when he says NATO is obsolete.
I'm going to be honest, I'm not sure he knows what the word obsolete means.
I think he may mean dated.
I don't think he means throw it away.
And is it dangerous for the president to say that?
Yeah, with Putin eyeing the Ukraine and thinking, hmm, that would make a nice lunch.
You know, yeah, it's a little dangerous to have him saying that NATO is obsolete.
What he may mean is that NATO needs to be reformed and needs to be changed.
But listen to the narrative.
Remember, this narrative is so powerful, this intellectual idea that makes it impossible.
It's like a current that sweeps you away.
And to claw your way out on shore takes the kind of blunt action that Trump is doing.
Listen to yesterday, we talked about John Lewis, and we talked about the fact that by attacking him without any kind of censor whatsoever on himself, Trump really overturned this idea, this piety that the 1960s are still going on, that blacks are still in this systemic oppression.
Don't get me wrong, there's plenty of stuff wrong in the black community, there's plenty of bigotry to go around all around the world, everywhere, in the black community as well as the white community.
But if you tell me that there is systemic oppression, you have to show me a law that is in the system.
You have to show me a part of the system that is rigged against blacks, and you can't do that.
So, Martin Luther King's son, MLK3, went in to meet with Trump and he comes out and the press surrounds him.
These questions, you have to listen to these questions, begging him to unleash.
And this is a man of God, a man who's worried about the poor, a man who wants to work with Donald Trump and any other president who's in there to alleviate the pain of the poor.
And listen to them.
And one of these guys is Jim Acosta, the guy Trump kicked down the street.
Listen to this.
As you know, Representative Lewis still has the scars from the march on Selma.
Were you offended by the President-elect's tweet that Representative Lewis is all talk and no action?
First of all, I think that in the heat of emotion, a lot of things get said on both sides.
You know, many African Americans, many African Americans are very concerned about a Trump presidency.
A woman came in here last week and told me he's going to have black people up against the wall, both literally and figuratively.
Did he allay your concerns that he'll be a president for all people, black and white?
Well, certainly he said that he is going to represent Americans.
Kurt, if I may follow up, isn't there something that just cuts to your core when you hear the president-elect refer to John Lewis as all talk and no action?
I mean, nothing could be further from the truth, isn't that right?
John Lewis is not all talk and no action.
No, absolutely.
I would say John Lewis has demonstrated that he's action.
From this day, what would your father's message be to president-left Trump?
What do you think your father's message would be to president-elect Trump?
This is the final answer I'm going to have because I'm going to reiterate what I just said.
I think my father would be very concerned about the fact that there are 50 or 60 million people living in poverty, and somehow we've got to create the climate for all boats to be lifted.
I mean, that is unbelievable.
That one, I think, doesn't it cut to your core?
I think that was a cost of, you know, why don't they just make the statement?
Just said, say, what Martin Luther King's son would have said if he were me, you know, is that, I mean, this is amazing.
It's amazing.
And it's especially, I pointed this out before, the only thing that the left has going for them is this accusation that we're racist, that we're homophobic, that we're bad guys, you know, we hate everybody, and that they feed this to minority communities to keep them in line, to keep them on what conservative black people call the government plantation.
That is what conservative black people call it.
And when, you know, Steve Harvey, we talked about this.
I think he went to Trump Tower and he said, this is a great man.
I'm going to work with this guy.
Listen to Mark Lamont Hill, this Columbia, a very glib Columbia professor.
I've been on Gutfeld's show with him.
And just, I really feel like he's a, I'm not going to call him names, but I just don't feel that he's always saying what he means.
And here he gets challenged about the fact, what he said was all these show business and athlete guys are going to talk to Donald Trump, but not the really important people like college professors.
They're not talking to Trump.
We want these guys to say that.
Listen as he gets goaded and he just slips.
He loses it.
This is what it sounds like when a Democrat, when a leftist loses control of the narrative.
Listen to what he says.
Because they keep bringing up comedians and actors and athletes to represent black interests is demeaning.
It's disrespectful and it's condescending.
Bring some people up there with some expertise, Donald Trump.
Don't just bring up people to entertain.
So you were at the meeting.
You heard and saw everything.
I don't understand how anything I say would prompt that question.
Listen.
Unless Steve Harvey turned into a policy analyst in this behind-the-scenes meeting, then it doesn't matter what I was there.
I was saying, Mark, the people he's trumpeting up and putting in front of the cameras.
Mark, you weren't even there.
You don't even know what happened.
Okay?
Okay.
Yes, I do.
Are you disagreeing that he brought you?
Are you just talking?
You weren't in the room, sir.
You weren't there.
How does that negate my point that he brought Steve Harvey and then put him in front of the cameras?
That's my critique.
Here's the deal.
You don't know what happened.
First of all, Pastor Daryl Scott, Michael Cohen, they are in a process of bringing all types of people from all over the country, from all different backgrounds, like we have, the member diversity coalition, where we reach out to all different types of people.
It was a bunch of mediocre Negroes being dragged in front of TV as a photo op for Donald Trump's exploitative campaign against black people.
Mediocre Negroes Exploited00:02:30
Mediocre Negroes?
I'm sorry.
You know, that's what it sounds like when a leftist loses control of the narrative.
They panic and their true selves come out.
Mediocre Negroes.
You're talking about top athletes, top performers, guys with television shows who are working for their living and making it and trying to go back into the community which is suffering from so much dysfunction and talk to the president, the guy who's going to be running the country, and make sure he understands what's going on and make sure they can get him to reach out a little bit.
Mediocre Negroes?
I mean, come on.
What if Rush Limbaugh said that?
What if I said it?
I mean, really?
Seriously?
I mean, the guy would be taken on, you know, and then he talks about Donald Trump's, I can't remember what he called it, the war attack on black people or something like this.
I mean, that's who these people are.
They are looking at these guys who are performers and professionals and working hard, and they're mediocre Negroes.
Good God.
I mean, that is what it sounds like.
And if you don't think this, you know, the black thing is the cutting edge because that's their base.
If Trump raises the boats in the black community, as I hope to God he will, I mean, that is one of the things I think if he can bring back the economy and make sure that that raises all boats, not just, as in the Obama economy, not just the guys on Wall Street, not just the 1%, if he can do that and win 10, 15% of the black vote, 20%, there won't be a Democrat Party.
If that happens, we are talking about President Mike Pence in eight years, which would be bliss as far as I'm concerned.
But that's just the cutting edge.
It's everything.
It's everything they say to make you think the way they want you to think.
Here is the New York Times, a former newspaper this morning.
Now, I get this digitally, so I don't know what the front page looked like, but on the digital edition, these two stories were juxtaposed against each other, all right?
Here is Donald Trump is taking power, and this is what it looks like.
The Germans are angry.
The Chinese are downright furious.
Leaders of NATO are nervous while their counterparts at the European Union are alarmed.
Just days before he is sworn into office, President-elect Donald J. Trump has again focused his penchant for unpredictable disruption on the rest of the world.
His remarks and a string of discursive and sometimes contradictory interviews have escalated tensions with China while also infuriating allies and institutions critical to America's traditional leadership of the West.
Scandal-Free Legacy00:03:41
Okay, here they are in Obama, you know, looking back over Obama's presidency.
In the beginning, there was hope.
I swear, I swear I am not making this up.
A racial barrier shattered.
An anxious nation eager to turn the page on foreign war and economic hardship and the audacious plans of a new president.
President Obama stood on the west front of the Capitol on January 20th, 2009, and dismissed as small-minded those who would question his grand ambitions.
Well, you can tell where the rest of the story goes.
The evil Republicans stop him in his track, and he's not as great as he should have been because of the evil Republicans.
Listen, this is from my pals at Newsbusters, one of my favorite sites, just an invaluable site.
This is their patch together of journalists talking about Obama's administration.
Listen to this.
This is cut five.
And he's been scandal-free, frankly, in the White House.
We haven't had that for a while.
He ran an administration that was largely scandal-free.
There's a White House that takes pride in being scandal-free.
That in the Obama years, which are remarkably scandal-free.
A lot of people were talking about how he's going to be remembered for the scandal-free administration that he ran.
The president has been very rightfully proud of the lack of scandal in his administration.
So far, there's been no major scandals of brown top aides.
But President Obama has run an amazingly scandal-free administration, not only he himself, but the people around him.
He's chosen people who have been pretty scandal-free.
This has been a scandal-free administration for the last eight years, and oftentimes people don't even talk about that fact.
You get the feeling that the Obama administration was scandal-free.
John Fund and Hans von Spakovsky have a piece in the Wall Street Journal, Obama's scandal-free administration is a myth, and they list them.
State Department email, in an effort to evade federal open records laws, Mr. Obama's first Secretary of State set up a private server.
We know who that was, Hillary, I forget.
Operation Fast and Furious, the Obama Justice Department, lost track of thousands of guns it had allowed to pass into the hands of suspected smugglers, IRS abuses.
Mr. Obama's Internal Revenue Service did something Richard Nixon only dreamed of doing.
It successfully targeted political opponents.
If that had happened during the George W. Bush administration, there would still, there would be whole shelves of books being written about it.
Benghazi, Ambassador Chris Stevens and three others were killed in the attack on a U.S. diplomatic compound in Libya with less than two months to go before the 2012 election.
The State Department falsely claimed the attack was not a terrorist attack, but a reaction to an anti-Muslim film.
Hacking Mr. Obama presided over the biggest data breach in the federal government's history.
All of these scandals were accompanied by a lack of transparency so severe that 47 of Mr. Obama's 73 inspectors general signed an open letter in 2014 decrying the administration's stonewalling of their investigations.
One reason for Mr. Obama's penchant for secrecy is his habit of breaking rules, from not informing Congress of the dubious prisoner swap involving Sergeant Bo Bergdahl and the Taliban to violating restrictions on cash transfers to Iran as part of a hostage release deal.
The president's journalistic allies are happily echoing the scandal-free myth as we just saw.
The media's failure to cover the Obama administration critically has been a scandal in itself, but at least the president can't be blamed for that one.
You know, this president is very difficult to call.
This is a moment in history.
It really is.
It reminds me of Andrew Jackson's ascendancy.
Conservatives And The Moon00:06:36
This is a turning point.
You know, after the 2008 crash, Obama had a chance to make this a Democrat country forever.
He blew that chance.
He muffed it.
It's his fault because he didn't bring the right in, and he did everything by executive order, which can all be erased.
He had only one side of the country with him, and not even half the country with him.
He blew it.
And now it's Donald Trump's turn, and we just don't know yet who this guy is because everything he has done has been great.
But he does say things that are really hard to understand and to put into context.
We will not know.
And this is what's driving the commentariat and the Davos crowd crazy.
We will not know until he takes office which way this thing is going to go.
I'm personally hopeful, but we will not know.
All right, for stuff I like, outer space.
I got to talk about outer space for a minute.
You know, Gene Cernan died at 82, the last man to walk on the moon.
When do you think the last, do you know when the last man to walk on the moon was?
Anybody?
1961 or something?
1972, 1972, okay?
So that's, you know, math is not my strong point, but that is 30, 40, almost 50 years.
I mean, this is an amazing thing, all right?
That we went to the moon and gathered all this energy and intelligence and all this stuff for the space program.
And our space program is virtually gone.
Our space program is virtually gone.
Listen, here is Gene Cernan walked on the moon with Harrison Schmidt, who I think was a geologist or something.
Here they are walking on the moon.
This is the last time human beings were there.
I was rolling on the moon one day in America, remote of December.
And that is the voice of American optimism, American exploration, American frontierism, the same frontierism that took us to the West.
It's a voice that has virtually been smothered by these leftist scolds.
And they call us conservatives, but I don't really think conservatives in America are conservatives.
I think conservatives in America are the most radical people around because there's only one new idea in political history, and that's freedom.
That's the only new idea is that people should make their own decisions and the government should be as small as we can make it without everybody killing each other.
I mean, that is the only new idea, and that's the idea that American conservatives have traditionally defended.
You know, when John F. Kennedy said we're going to the moon, not because it's easy, but because it's hard, he put that on the government.
He made a government agency to send us into space.
And the problem with that is he got all the greatest intelligence, all the science, all the energy for that project into one place, as the government can do, as only the government can do.
But then it's stuck in government world.
And the problem is, is there's always somewhere else to spend the money.
There's always, I remember back in the space age days of the New York Times, why are we going to the moon when there's problems on Earth?
And the reason is we'll never solve the problems on Earth.
There are always going to be problems on Earth.
There's always going to be a constituency that can be bought with government money.
And so ultimately, NASA becomes just a burden because by the time Cernan walked on the moon, nobody even watched it on TV.
It was like, another guy walking on the moon.
We were used to it by then.
So it loses its appeal to the government because they can buy votes elsewhere using money for, you know, a living, vibrant civilization tosses stuff away.
You know, they'll build a palace, they'll tear the palace down, they'll build the Coliseum.
That's the way the Romans would, you know, just like get rid of it.
They'd use the old bricks to fill up the, you know, the old bricks from a golden palace that today would be this major tourist attraction.
They just fill up the hole so they could build the Coliseum on top of it.
It's a dying community that starts to conserve everything, that starts to worry, can we use this?
Can we spend that?
Can we use oil?
Can we do it?
Please don't touch that.
Everything has to be kept pristine.
You know, I lived in Britain for many years, one of my favorite countries, some of my favorite people over there.
But with good reason, they conserve everything.
And the fact is, the country becomes a museum.
There's no way to move forward.
They hate watching movies like Downton Abbey and stuff like that, where they go back into the past because they want a vibrant new culture.
But you can't have that culture and conserve the old.
You have to build on the old.
And it's really the left that's conservative.
It's really the left that doesn't want to budge, that doesn't want to hurt anything.
Preserve the earth, preserve this.
Whereas we want to go to the moon, and the only way to do that is with individuals and companies that see some profit there or just see adventure.
Just, you know, some rich guy who just sees an adventure.
You know, when NASA chief Charles Bolden, he was Obama's guy, he says, this is what he said.
When I became the NASA administrator, President Obama charged me with three things.
One, he wanted me to help re-inspire children to want to get into science and math.
He wanted me to expand our international relationships.
And third, and perhaps foremost, he wanted me to find a way to reach out to the Muslim world and engage much more with dominantly Muslim nations to help them feel good about their historic contribution to science, math, and engineering.
That's a government space program.
That is what a government space program does.
It's individuals and businesses that say, you know what, let's go to Mars.
Let's just go to Mars.
When I was a kid, we played World War II games, we played Cowboys and Indians.
We were living out the past in our games of America, of what made America great.
Today, kids play Star Wars, they play Guardians of the Galaxy.
The future is around the corner, and the only people who seem to be seeing it are the people they call conservatives.
You know, space is our destiny.
And every time a politician says that, he's laughed off the stage.
Every time a politician says, you know, we've got to get into space, we've got to get off the planet, we got to get more resources, more room, more ideas, more places to go.
He gets laughed at like he's some kind of nut.
But that's the obvious truth.
So stuff I like today, I'm just going to say outer space and wish Gene Cernan godspeed back into the real outer space.
We will be back tomorrow with the mailbag.
Be here, get your questions in now, and I will answer them all.
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