Andrew Clavin dissects Ringa for Barack Obama, a Harvard poetry collection mocking its absurdity while skewering media narratives around the Tea Party and 9/11 truthers. He clashes with David Brooks’ NYT lament over Western decline, dismissing it as elitist and absurdly blaming U.S. oppression for Islamic terrorism, then pivots to Trump’s foreign policy with Michael Durant, who argues his adaptability contrasts with Obama’s failures. Durant praises Trump’s alignment with conservative goals despite "Never Trump" resistance, while Clavin praises The Great Good Thing as a post-Woodstock manifesto—ending with a melancholic 1960s song and the show’s chaotic charm. [Automatically generated summary]
Many on the left are having a hard time getting over the end of the Obama administration.
They miss the good old days of having a classy, elegant, well-spoken president destroy every American value and institution while allowing the world to go up in flames.
In token of their sadness at Obama's parting, the Harvard Review has gathered together 200 poets to write a Ringa for Barack Obama.
A Ringa is a form of poetic tribute which features two stanzas.
The first stanza is a haiku, which of course is an ancient form of short but extremely annoying poetry in the tradition of the people who brought you Pearl Harbor.
The haiku is followed by a wacky, which is a couplet named after the editors of the Harvard Review.
The review's introduction to this poetry collection in tribute to Obama reads, quote, and yes, this is a real quote, we are embarking on a literary project of historic proportions, one that expresses the profound sense of gratitude we have for a modern political leader who is measured, thoughtful, humane, and literary-minded, unquote.
Here are a few samples of the poetry, and I swear I am not making these up.
What big ears you have, Mr. President, and heart big as big can be, big as this pyramid and sphinx in the drifting sands of time.
Here's another one.
Old school, so cool, you.
Solitary writer dreams, midnight floating world.
Sing Paul Green to me, baby.
Sing, Barack, sir, as you please.
Once you start them, it's kind of hard to stop, isn't it?
Your weather said cool.
Cigarettes, oratory, who dubbed them mom jeans?
The moon doesn't care, I know.
Your light glows from the inside.
Okay, I guess it was hard to get any poets with, you know, talent to participate in an exercise like this.
So I thought, as a public service, the Andrew Clavin Show would contribute our own Ringas of haiku wacky or wacky haiku or just wacky wacky as the poetical case may be.
Here's one we made up, for instance.
IRS scandal, not a smidge of corruption.
Ha Snow falls on an empty space where journalism once was.
Brings a tear to the eye, doesn't it?
Here's another Clavin Ringa.
Country unemployed, but I have tenure, Barack.
I don't give a rats.
You were so cool, it's too bad about the incompetence.
And finally, never say Islam makes problem invisible.
Holy crap, we're all dead.
It's not in the New York Times, so it never existed.
According to the Harvard Review, a new poem will be added to the Ringa every day for the first hundred days until there is not a single person left outside of academia who is not laughing hysterically.
I'll close with one more poem.
Trigger warning, I'm Andrew Clavin, and this is the Andrew Clavin show.
I'm the hunky-dunky, life is tickety-boo.
Birds are ringing, also singing, hunky-dunky-dunky.
Shipshaft, tipsy-topsy, the world is a bibli's in.
It's a wonderful day.
Hoorah, hooray!
It makes me want to sing.
Oh, hurrah, hooray.
Oh, hooray, hurrah.
All right, you can't make this stuff up, I swear.
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All right, we have Michael Durant.
I just love that kids.
These people are out of their minds.
We have Michael Duran.
We're going to bring him on.
We're going to stay on Facebook and YouTube, but that's no excuse not to come on thedailywire.com and subscribe for a lousy eight bucks a month.
But we have Michael Duran, a senior fellow at the Hudson Institute in Washington, D.C. He's an expert in foreign affairs, mostly the Middle East, primarily the Middle East, was on the National Security Council during the last Bush administration.
We're going to talk to him about Trump's foreign policy, which is this weird experience of he keeps doing the right thing and everybody keeps saying, well, yeah, he did the right thing this time, but it's all going to go south soon.
So we're going to ask Michael about that and why people are taking that at issue.
Why We Left Facebook00:07:26
He is the author of Ike's Gamble, America's Rise to Dominance in the Middle East.
Really interesting subject.
But first, first, we started out this week.
I have to read.
I almost never do this, but I've got to read a column by David Brooks.
Okay, David Brooks, David Brooks is like the king of Knucklehead Row, which is what I call the op-ed page of the New York Times, which you may remember used to be a newspaper.
And he wrote a column today.
We started out talking about, I just got back from England.
I was talking to my friends, and I was talking about how they have this reaction to Donald Trump, which is not based on policy.
They're British.
Why should they care what his policies are?
But it's a reaction to class, the fact that he is not, like Obama was, a classy guy.
Obama was a classy guy.
He was total incompetent.
He was a leftist.
He was an ideologue.
He was corrupt, but classy.
He really was.
So David Brooks writes this column today in the New York Times, a former newspaper, called The Crisis of Western Civ.
And he talks about how he used to have a narrative of what Western civilization was.
Here, let me read it to you.
The Western Civ narrative came with certain values about the importance of reasoned discourse, the importance of property rights, the need for a public square that was religiously informed but not theocratically dominated.
It set a standard for what great statesmanship looked like.
It gave diverse people a sense of shared mission and a common vocabulary, set a framework within which political argument could happen, and most important, provided a set of common goals.
So far, I agree.
This is all true.
Starting decades ago, many people, especially in the universities, lost faith in the Western civilization narrative.
They stopped teaching it, and the great cultural transmission belt broke.
Now many students, if they encounter it, are taught that Western civilization is a history of oppression.
Also true.
It's amazing what far-reaching effects this has had.
It is as if a prevailing wind which powered all the ships at sea had suddenly ceased to blow.
Now here is where we start to get a little bit dicey.
It suddenly ceased to blow.
This has been going on since 1968, right?
So my math isn't great, but that's like 50 years, okay?
But it suddenly ceased to blow.
And now various scattered enemies of those Western values have emerged, and there is apparently nobody to defend them.
The first consequence has been the rise of the illiberals of the illiberals, authoritarians who not only don't believe in the democratic values of the Western civilization narrative, but don't even pretend to believe in them as former dictators did.
Over the past few years, especially, we have entered the age of strongmen.
We are leaving the age of Obama, Cameron, and Merkel and entering the age of Putin, Erdoyan, El-Sisi, Xi Jinping, Kim Jong-un.
Guess what the next name is?
Just guess.
And Donald Trump.
And Donald Trump.
So the age of Obama, the age of Obama, right?
This is a year ago, the age of Obama, Cameron, and Merkel, who didn't believe in Western civilization at all.
I mean, that's not true of Cameron, but Obama was an anti-Westerner.
I mean, think about the logic here.
He abused our institutions, the IRS, the Justice Department.
He apologized to our enemies for America.
He went out to the Middle East and apologized for America to those people, those people who have kept their citizens, if you can call them citizens, enslaved and in ignorance and in poverty, year after year after year.
And he apologized to America.
He bowed to guys who fat, you know, chics who like sit on the heads and lives of their people, who treat women like second-class citizens, and he bowed to them.
But he was the age of Western civilization, and now it's all gone wrong.
And the thing is, just like with some of my friends, this is about class.
Remember, David Brooks is the guy who looked at Barack Obama and admired the crease in his pants, right?
He admired the crease in his pants, and he said, I looked at the crease in his pants, and I knew he was going to be president, and he was going to be a good president.
I mean, I thought like maybe his tailor should have been president if the crease in his pants was so great.
Maybe the guy who pressed his pants should have been elected.
But listen, you know, let's just go back.
I want to play two cuts of Brooks on PBS.
This is during the election when he says everything is going bad because people aren't even listening to the debate.
They're just voting essentially their class.
Listen to what he says.
At the end of the day, people are going to come home to who they were.
And what's depressed me, frankly, most about this race is we went into this country, a divided nation, and now the chasms are just solidified.
So divided along race, divided along gender, urban, rural, college-educated, non-college-educated.
We can go down the list.
And basically, less educated or high school educated whites are going to Trump.
It doesn't matter what the guy does.
And college-educated, going to Clinton.
Everyone's dividing based on demographic categories, and sometimes you get the sense that campaign barely matters.
People are just going with their gene pool or whatever it is.
And that is one of the more depressing aspects of this race for me.
The gene pool, that's the problem.
It's not that you're out of work.
It's not that you've been screwed by elites like David Brooks for 50 years.
It's not that these guys have been sitting on the head.
I mean, he works for the New York Times, one of the enemies of Western civilization.
And that's not the problem.
The problem is your gene pool.
You are not classy enough.
Your pants are not pressed well enough to understand what David Brooks understands.
But that's because, but the thing is, these ideas, these fine Western civilization ideas, they're not for you.
You know, you don't have the, you know, you can't understand them.
And they're certainly not for Muslims because Muslims can't understand them.
Because here, after an attack, Ted Cruz, this is back during the campaign, Ted Cruz recommended that we need heightened security in Muslim neighborhoods, heightened investigators, more people looking into Muslim neighborhoods, watching the mosques and finding out what's going on.
And here is Brooks' reaction to that.
And listen carefully, because this is an amazing statement that he makes for a man of his education.
Yeah, I've spent the last week so repulsed by Donald Trump.
I'd forgotten how ugly Ted Cruz could be, but he reminded us this week.
You know, as I said, and as everyone says, the reason we have terrorism is not because the Prophet Muhammad came down and not because there's a religion called Islam.
That's true.
The reason we have terror is that young men are alienated and feel they can wage war and a just war against societies that are racist and xenophobic and crushing toward them.
I'm going to stop it there.
So the reason we have the problem is not because of Mohammed.
What a Mohammed.
He was just standing around minding his own business.
You know, it's not that they have ideas of their own.
It's not that those ideas shape civilization.
Somehow you're supposed to be able to live for 30 years, like a refugee is supposed to live for 30 years in a civilization that treats women like dirt and then come to the West where we tend to treat women as if they were human beings, some of us.
And then somehow all that stuff, all those ideas that you've been living with for 30 years, they don't matter anymore.
If you listened carefully, he was blaming us for Islamic extremism.
He was saying we have oppressed them so badly.
We have oppressed them so badly that they're reaction.
Who are the enemies of the West here?
Who are the people who undermine Western civilization for blaming us for our enemies?
Stamps and Oppression00:02:18
That is the whole thing that they teach these kids in school.
That's the whole reason they don't believe in free speech, why they're rioting when Ann Coulter comes.
It's a hundred-pound woman.
They're so scared of a hundred-pound woman and her ideas that they have to put on masks and beat people up.
You know, it's not, the thing is, it's not a matter of class.
It's a matter of ideas.
And these ideas, good ideas and bad ideas, they affect everyone, including David Brooks, whose ideas are completely ridiculous in this case.
And we're going to just see a little bit more of that before we bring on Michael Durand.
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Thinking About Trump's Risks00:15:45
You know, I just want to say one more thing about this whole idea of who are the enemies of Western civilization.
Yesterday there was another horrible attack in Paris.
Guy opened fire with an AK-47.
I think right now the death tolls are one.
He killed one cop on the Champs-Élysées, which is, you know, this sort of Broadway, Fifth Avenue.
It's the Fifth Avenue of Paris.
Just a beautiful, beautiful place.
So Donald Trump came out and said this.
He was giving a joint press conference with the Italian prime minister, and this is what he said.
Our condolences from our country to the people of France.
Again, it's happening, it seems.
I just saw it as I was walking in, so that's a terrible thing, and it's a very, very terrible thing that's going on in the world today.
But it looks like another terrorist attack.
And what can you say?
It just never ends.
We have to be strong and we have to be vigilant, and I've been saying it for a long time.
So, a little simple, honest, plain speech from our president, and the media went nuts.
How could he say it was a terrorist attack?
He didn't know.
He just saw it on TV.
Why did he jump to conclusions?
Why did he jump to conclusions?
But let me remind you, just let me remind you of what the media has been doing all this time.
September, this is coming out of the New York Post.
September 2009, the discovery of hanged census taker Bill Sparkman in rural Kentucky fueled media speculation that he'd been killed by anti-government Tea Partiers.
February 210th, Joe Stack flew a small plane into an IRS building in Austin, Texas.
The media immediately suggested that the anti-tax rhetoric of the Tea Party led to the attack.
That same month, a professor at the University of Alabama, Amy Bishop, shot and killed three colleagues at a faculty meeting.
The gun-loving Tea Party came under immediate suspicion, but Bishop was a lifelong Democrat and Obama donor.
March 2010, John Patrick Bedell shot two Pentagon security officers at close range.
The media went wild with speculation that a right-wing extremist had reached the end of his rope.
May 2010, Bedell, by the way, turned out to be a registered Democrat and a 9-11 truther.
May 2010, New York authorities disarmed a massive car bomb.
You remember this?
Mayor Bloomberg immediately speculated that the bomber was someone upset about the president's new health care law.
August 2010, 2010, amidst the debate over the Ground Zero Mosque, Michael Enright stabbed a Muslim cab driver in the neck, immediately dubbed an anti-Muslim stabbing.
You know, we've just seen this again and again.
I can't remember the name of the gay guy who was crucified on the fence.
Remember, they've written a play about it.
Do you guys remember who that was?
I can't remember.
It's just become this kind of gay talking point.
But it turned out to be some kind of drug deal gone wrong.
They just completely, what is it?
Matthew Shepherd?
Yeah, that's it.
Matthew Shepard, thank you.
You know, they have been selling this narrative.
It's all one-sided.
And so when David Brooks sees that Western civilization has been undermined, he ought to take a look in the mirror and see who does this, who does it, and who jumps on our president every time he opens his mouth for anything about anything.
Which brings me to my guest today, who is Michael Duran, a senior fellow at the Hudson Institute in Washington, D.C., specializes in Middle East security issues.
He was in the administration of George W. Bush.
He served in the White House as a senior director in the National Security Council.
He is the author of Ike's Gamble, America's Rise to Dominance in the Middle East.
And this is a fascinating subject.
It's the Suez Crisis of 1956 and how it convinced Eisenhower that Israel, not Egypt, was the strongest American ally.
So it really set the tone of our foreign policy until Obama, basically Israel was stabbed in the back repeatedly.
Ike's Gamble, America's Rise to Dominance in the Middle East by Michael Durant.
Do we have Michael?
Hey.
Yes.
There you are.
And look, I love that backdrop.
Did you paint that on or is that real?
No, it's actually real.
That's a federal triangle.
What you can't see right over there is the old post office.
It's Donald Trump's building.
There it is.
Right across the street from Trump.
He did a great job on that building.
It was just sitting there empty for years, right?
He did, yeah, he did.
And relevant to what we're going to be talking about, when he won, me and my friends who had supported him, we had to kind of secretly go over to have drinks in Trump Tower.
I'm so excited about their work, you know.
So I was watching from England where I was vacationing, and I was watching Trump, the bombing in Syria, and I was watching the bombing in Afghanistan.
And every piece was, well, yes, that was the right thing to do, but Trump has no philosophy.
But Trump has no idea what he's doing.
But Trump is going to lead us all to nuclear war.
I offered to give a free Andrew Clavin Pulitzer Prize to the first guy who wrote an article that said Trump did the right thing, full stop.
You know, just the end of this.
First, let me ask you this.
As a foreign policy expert, do you begin to discern a Trump doctrine or do you think he's flying by the seat of his pants?
I think it's something in between.
I don't think we yet have a Trump.
The way I see it is that there's a kind of, and this isn't unique to me, there are two clear tendencies in the administration.
One of them is the America First nationalism, let's do less tendency.
And the other one is sort of traditional Republican foreign policy, I would say.
And they're trying to sort that out.
But what they're finding out very quickly is that some of the more hopeful aspects of the America First foreign policy, like we're going to be able to work well with Putin, we don't have to get involved in Syria and all this, that it just doesn't actually work when you start to look at what's happening.
And so the voices who say, you know what, we're in a competition with the Iranians, we're in a competition with the Russians.
We have to reassert our deterrent capability and all this, they're kind of winning the argument.
I don't know that they'll ever completely win, but they're defining the tone because the ideological America First answer to the problems of the Middle East just doesn't work when you come into contact with reality.
Right.
I mean, that is the difference between ideology and reality, a difference that Obama never learned.
But Trump, I mean, my observation of the guy, and people keep saying he's stupid, he's ignorant, he's all these things.
He does seem to learn.
He does seem to get it.
And there's no question that he's making these decisions, right?
No question.
And I mean, look, the thing that was most amazing to me about 70 years old, a guy who set in his ways, this isn't foreign policy, but just his ability to think and innovate, was the win in the election.
And he had a completely unique understanding of the American electorate and how to get elected.
Everyone told him he couldn't do it, and he did it.
Let's start with that.
You know, in your David Brooks segment, you said he had his little history of what was wonderful about Western civilization.
I noticed that what was missing from that was the sovereignty of a democratic people, the voice of the people, which is what he doesn't like.
He likes democracy in the abstract, but he doesn't like the demos, right?
Right.
Well, so I expect this from the New York Times.
I expect the, you know, they had a hilarious article that said, yes, he's doing the right thing, but there are risks, as if there was such a thing as a foreign policy without risks.
But what about the right?
The right is cutting him no slack.
The idea that he might be making good decisions because he's making good decisions full stop just doesn't exist on the right.
I mean, or at least on a certain segment of the never Trump right.
Yeah, the intellectual right.
I'm afraid that the intellectual right is they're invested in his failure psychologically.
I mean, if you talk to people, they'll say, yeah, maybe it can get better.
I'm trying to be hopeful.
But it's always qualified.
It's so, yeah, he did the right thing in Syria, but he did it for the wrong reason.
My favorite one like that was when they said the attack that he carried out against the Syrians was smaller than the one that Barack Obama didn't carry out.
I missed that one.
That's a great argument.
But Obama didn't do it.
And Trump did.
And that's all the that's and he did it quickly.
You know, within, he didn't deliberate for six months and then not do it.
He did it very quickly.
And that makes all the difference.
But sorry, go ahead.
Well, I just wanted to say also, I mean, one of the things that the bizarre things that happened when I was away was the Russian collusion narrative all but disappeared.
But so did the Obama-spy narrative.
Nobody's talking about either of those things.
Yeah, the collusion narrative hasn't disappeared.
It's still there.
People are hanging on to it.
They're still believing that Comey is going to come up with some prosecution that's going to blow it all.
It's crazy what they think.
And the thing is that if you go back to, like say last August, the Never Trump letter that was in the New York Times, they predicted these are the Republican intellectuals, and not just intellectuals, I mean, very serious people who held very high-level jobs in government.
They said that Trump is going to be a uniquely reckless president if he's going to become president.
But the other thing, when you were talking to these people here in Washington, and they're my friends, actually, so I have to be careful, be a little bit delicate in what I say.
At the time, they never believed that he would actually become president.
Whoops, my light just went out here.
Oh, well, you'll have to look at me in the shade, guys.
We can still see it.
So we understand it's Washington.
Nothing works, right?
So they never actually believed that he was going to win.
So this allowed them, I think, now this is, you have to engage in a little psychologizing here.
It allowed them to play with house money psychologically.
There was never going to be a situation where they were going to be denied a job or hurt in some way for having this very extremist or idealist, idealistic position, namely that he is uniquely dangerous to the Republic, which is what they said.
And taking that position also put them, it was very, they indulged themselves morally.
If he's uniquely dangerous, I mean, they're taking a real principled position.
There's no calculation here.
This is, we're just trying to save the Republic.
So once you've said that, he's going to lose.
And not just lose, it's going to be a disaster for the Republican Party.
And he's uniquely reckless.
And then what happens?
He wins.
He delivers a historic victory to the Republican Party.
And so you have to decide, well, am I going to say, okay, I'm going to live with him?
And that I got it all wrong, including my moral evaluation of him?
Or am I going to continue with a moral evaluation?
And that saves their view of themselves, if you see what I mean.
So the first minute they say Trump is doing a good job, they lessen themselves in their own estimation, you're going to say.
Right.
So some of them are trying, others are not.
But the thing about the collusion, they also, of course, hate his Russia, the Russia policy that he expressed during the campaign.
So they want the collusion to be true, and they don't want to look too closely at the Obama surveillance aspect of it, because that will also diminish.
It's either one or the other.
It was either Obama was surveilling him and presenting him as Putin's puppet, or he actually was Putin's puppet.
And so psychologically, they're invested in the Putin's puppet narrative.
And they're not where you are.
I know very few of these guys that are anywhere close to where you are.
I mean, where you said, okay, I didn't want him.
He wasn't my choice.
But I'm going to evaluate him.
And you know what?
So far, he looks pretty conservative to me.
So that's okay.
This is not what we're hearing.
And it's not what a lot of the conservative publications are saying either.
What they're doing now is, and I won't name them, but you know them well.
They're calling balls and strikes, you know?
Exactly, exactly.
Yeah.
We're just neutral observers over here.
And the problem with that is ultimately the midterm elections come along and the next presidential election comes along and the alternative is going to be far worse than what we've got and you haven't supported him.
I mean, it seems to me that if he's walking in the general right direction, you know, we can pat him on the back and occasionally he's going to do something we don't like.
You know, that's fine with me.
And I'll tell you what, if he makes a big mistake, they're going to be all over him.
Yeah.
Because that's vindication.
We told you so.
Here it is, the disaster.
So we're talking to Michael Durant from the Hudson Institute, the author of Ike's Gamble, America's Rise to Dominance in the Middle East, which is a really fascinating subject, the Suez Crisis of 56 and how it turned Eisenhower toward Israel.
But let me get a general idea from you as a foreign policy expert.
You're looking at what's going on.
Are you happy with what's going on, basically, the way he's handled Syria, the way he's handling the North Koreans?
Are you sitting there thinking yes, but, or are you thinking, no, this is pretty much the way we should go?
No, I'm happy.
I'm happy.
I mean, look, I resigned myself a long time ago to the fact that I'm not going to get the world that I want exactly as I want it.
Given the realistic alternatives, I'm very, very happy.
And I think the trend is all in the right direction.
I want to say one more thing about these guys, if I may, that popped into my head.
Unlike the Democrats, right, who, you know, like CNN has gone all in on Trump is evil, and so have a lot of the other networks.
And their ratings are, they're benefiting from it, right?
But Trump is not an existential threat to the left in the way that he is to the never-Trump Republicans.
Huh.
Right?
You think he's more of a threat to them than to the Democrats?
And to their careers.
And they, look, on two levels.
One, Trump, kind of what you were talking about before, about the David Brooks, the style thing.
Trump sent a very clear signal, which is disturbing to people like me who scribble for a living.
I can't make money like Michael J. Knowles with no words.
None of us can.
Don't worry about it.
But Trump sent a clear signal that he doesn't care about us.
We don't matter.
And I've been wondering since he did that, like, do I matter?
Do I not matter?
Like, can you actually run a government and foreign policy and everything without us?
Are we just irrelevant?
A little pimple on the government, you know?
And it's disturbing to think.
So there's that aspect.
But then they are invested, the never-Trump Republicans, in a view of American foreign policy that Trump has pretty much rejected, right?
And so if he wins out, that view is going to die.
It's going to wither.
And I don't think anyone's thinking in those terms, but it weighs on them psychologically again, I guess.
It's really interesting.
Listen, Mike, I really appreciate your coming on.
I hope you'll come on again.
I'm going to have to let you go.
But I also, before I do let you go, I want to thank you for what you said about my book, The Great Good Thing in the Wall Street Journal.
You named it as one of the books of the year, and I really appreciated that.
Oh, can you give me two sentences on that?
To praise you?
Give me two sentences to praise you.
I'll never stop anyone from praising me.
Listen, I loved your book.
I absolutely loved your book.
And I just wanted to say, I wrote a couple of lines in that little capsule review in the Wall Street Journal that they cut out, right?
I said, this is a kind of a manifesto for those of us who came of age in the dingy afterglow of Woodstock, right?
And you bring a sensibility to this issue that sometime happy on.
Barry Mann's Sensibility00:04:26
We'll talk more about it.
But look, let me put it to you this way.
If there's one thing that evangelical Christians don't do well, right?
It's irony.
You know, you mentioned 1968 before, and I was thinking, you know, I was once reading, I think, Wikipedia article about Mitt Romney.
And I noticed that in 1968, he was doing his missionary work for his church abroad, and he was in some kind of terrible accident, and he was in traction for a year.
And I was thinking, Mitt Romney spent the summer of love in traction.
You know, he just, he missed it entirely, right?
So what you have in that book is a blend of post-1960s, 1970s irony.
You bring a Jewish ironic sensibility, but also this post-1960s sensibility together with some serious thought about religion.
And that mix, I had never seen it anywhere before.
It spoke to me so, because I'm 55 years old.
So it spoke to me directly.
You know, I still love to hear Jimi Hendrix all along the watchtower.
And that's never going to go away.
But I think that's true for a lot of people who are devout.
So it's fantastic.
Wow, thank you very much.
Thank you.
And now I have to bring you back so you can talk.
But thank you very much, Michael.
That was really interesting, really an interesting take on this.
Michael Duran of the Hudson Institute, the author of Ike's Gamble, America's Rise to Dominance in the Middle East about the Suez Crisis.
Thanks a lot.
We will talk to you again soon, I hope.
Thank you.
Take care.
Really interesting.
My book is called The Great Good Thing since it was such an advertisement.
I don't want you to miss The Great Good Thing.
The Great Good Thing, a secular Jew comes to faith in Christ.
Really interesting take about this, you know, and it did remind me, it reminded me of a novel.
I think it's called House of Leaves by a guy whose name I can't pronounce.
It's a wonderful, wonderful ghost story, but very hard to read.
So I can't recommend it to everybody because it's very dense.
It's very intellectual.
But basically, one or two incidents happen in this book, and the rest are just people talking about it.
I think that's my impression of the Donald Trump presidency.
He does something, and then everybody has to talk about it for a million years.
So I agree with Mike about this, that a lot of this is about how much smarter than Donald Trump they are.
And maybe they're not.
Maybe Trump is a lot smarter than we think he is.
And I think he so far has shown himself to be a practically smart man, if nothing else.
All right, stuff I like.
We always end with music.
The Clavenless weekend is upon us.
It seems to, I guess it did come a little faster because we only did three shows this week.
We will be back with four full shows, although we're skipping Tuesday and doing Friday next week, which means you should start to get your mailbag questions in soon.
Get them in soon so I can do it the mailbag on Wednesday.
If you are a subscriber to thedailywire.com for a lousy eight bucks a month, you can send in your questions.
I will answer them.
The answers will be 100% correct and guaranteed to change your life occasionally for the better.
Stuff I like, we like to end with music.
And here is a song.
Maybe somebody out there can help me with this.
This is a song that no one has ever heard of.
This will be the first time you've ever heard it.
It's by a husband and wife songwriting team named Barry Mann and Cynthia Weill, who were just one of these teams that just turned out hit after hit in the 80s and 90s on Broadway.
Remember they say the neon lights are bright on Broadway.
You've lost that love and feeling.
Blame It on the Bossa Novo, which was kind of a gimmick song, but it was a big head, brown-eyed woman.
A lot of songs.
And this was one of their songs that didn't really take off.
In the 60s, I think it may have been the early 70s.
I was a huge Bill Cosby fan.
And this was before the whole sex thing.
But he had an opening act.
It was two guys, a duet.
One of them played the bass, not the bass guitar, but the bass.
It's like boom, boom, boom, boom.
And the other guy sang, and that's all it was, bass and vocal.
And they were spectacular.
They may have been brothers.
I think they were two black guys, and they may have been brothers.
They were just spectacular.
I cannot find any trace of them.
And I have looked at old ads for Cosby's appearances and all this.
I cannot find any trace of who these people were.
They put out two albums, meaning vinyl albums.
They were just great.
And one of the songs they sang, and I saw them in concert, I saw them performing, opening for Cosby, was this song by Barry Mann and Cynthia Weil named Angelika.
And I wish I could find their cut of it.
I can't.
I got Barry Mann singing it.
Searching For Bass Duo00:01:14
So this is to end the week.
It's Angelika by Barry Mann.
I'm Andrew Clavin.
This is the Andrew Clavin Show.
We'll see you again on Monday.
Each night I meant to say I missed her through the day.