Ben Shapiro dissects the New York Times as "pure horse manure," mocking gender studies’ absurdity—like "The Lactating Man"—while slamming its biased 2021 shooting editorial, later corrected. He contrasts Capitol Police heroes Griner and Bailey’s bravery with media demonization of white cops, calling it a "double standard." The Mueller "witch hunt" mirrors Fitzgerald’s Plame probe, he argues, citing Toobin’s flawed obstruction claims and Dershowitz’s "C-minus" grading. Ends by linking fatherhood to God, then pivots to a 1960s song mystery solved via iPhone—all while bashing media bias and free-speech erosion. [Automatically generated summary]
Nearly 15,000 students graduate with gender and cultural studies degrees each year.
15,000 innocent young people conned out of their money and left for braindead.
It's a national disgrace.
What happens to a young person who has suffered this fate?
It's more than likely he or she or they or it or whatever the poor slob has been taught to call himself goes on to commit the same terrible crime against others that has been committed against him or it or whatevs by writing gender study or cultural study articles in peer-reviewed journals.
Our crack team of hard-working researchers managed to unearth some of these articles by taking time out during the cutscenes of Ratchet and Clank to read a piece by Elizabeth Harrington of FreeBeacon.com.
All articles and quotes are non-made up.
A peer-reviewed article published last year in Progress in Human Geology was entitled, Glaciers, Gender, and Science, a Feminist Glaciology Framework for Global Environmental Change Research.
The article says that while glaciers are, quote, key icons of climate change, the relationships among gender, science, and glaciers remain understudied.
This paper proposes a feminist glaciology leading to more just and equitable human-ice interactions, unquote.
To be fair, this article did improve my personal relationship with ice by causing me to pour a large dollop of whiskey over it.
Another article from Dance Research Journal is called The Pilates Pelvis, Racial Implications of the Immobile Hips.
This article, quote, examines the treatment of the pelvis in the Pilates exercises single leg stretch and leg circles, which reinforce behaviors of a racially white aesthetic, unquote.
In order to personally check this assertion, I watched dozens of videos of scantily clad women stretching their sleek, well-toned legs open and closed and up.
What was I talking about?
Oh, yes.
Another example of the tragic detritus left behind by the minds of gender and cultural studies students comes from a publication called Men and Masculinities, which features articles by people who seem never to have experienced either.
One article puts forward the theory that the condition known as impotence or erectile dysfunction is a fiction meant to reinforce, quote, dominant thallocratic notions of healthy male heterosexuality, unquote.
The author asserts that by using feminist analysis, she will eliminate the perceived need for an erection.
I can personally testify that that works like a charm.
And finally, from the journal SSRN comes the article, The Lactating Man, which says, quote, lactation and breastfeeding are typically viewed as inherently female activities.
This article questions this gender normativity of milk and argues that male lactation blurs the distinction between male and female, as well as perhaps between humans and animals, unquote.
Police are still hunting for the author of this article to make sure she doesn't go anywhere near children or men or cows.
I think these sad documents prove beyond a shadow of a doubt that gender and cultural studies are among the leading causes of ignorance, stupidity, and madness.
I would call for their complete abolition, but I need the laughs.
Trigger warning, I'm Andrew Clavin, and this is the Andrew Clavin Show.
I'm the hunky donkey.
Quip and the Electric Toothbrush00:02:54
We are back the last day before the Claven-less weekend.
It's been kind of a clavin-less week, to be honest.
And even though I was here, I couldn't get...
You should see...
If you could see the place that we are broadcasting...
I feel like I'm broadcasting out of the ruins of Berlin at this point.
I should be talking in German.
We did get our sign back.
This is good.
I mean, this is the most expensive part.
And we do have our two lights that are stolen from the no-tel motel rooms rented by the hour.
Lobby.
Somebody, some hooker in the lobby is going, where the lights?
What the hell?
So today we are going to talk about the New York Times because you remember the old story about the psychiatrist who tries to cure the optimist kid by bringing him into a room that's just full of horse manure.
And the kid is so thrilled and he starts digging through the horse manure and he says, with all this manure, there's got to be a pony here someplace.
The New York Times has now perfected being pure manure, no pony.
So we're going to get to that in a little while.
But first, we have to talk about Quip.
And the reason Quip comes up is because, you know, we've been missing Michael Knowles while we've been around today.
And I saw on Twitter that Knowles tweeted out his breakfast today, which was a cup of coffee and a cigar.
So if you have a cup of coffee and a cigar for breakfast, your teeth are going to look terrible.
They're going to look just absolutely black and disgusting.
And if you want to know how to keep your teeth white and clean, you've got to use an electric toothbrush.
They really work.
I use them all the time.
They really work well.
They really do keep all the stains off your teeth.
But, but the typical electric toothbrush is like the size of a cannon.
It's like carrying a cannon around.
When you travel, you have to leave it behind.
And that is why there is Quip, which Quip is a beautifully designed, sleek electric toothbrush.
It works on a AAA battery, I think it is, and it just has this super slim design.
You can pack it if you're traveling.
You can throw it in your Dopkit.
It works great.
And it solves the other problem which electric toothbrushes have, which is that you can subscribe and for just five bucks every three months, they'll send you a new brush because you're supposed to replace these things every three months and it's really easy to forget.
And who knows when you bought the thing?
Are you going to mark it on your calendar?
No, this just shows up at your door with a new brush, which you will need.
Quip is backed by leading dentists and was named as one of Time Magazine's best inventions of 2016.
They won a 2016 GQ Grooming Award and lots of other things.
And you can see, you just have to look at it.
You'll see Quip starts at just $25.
And right now, to get Quip, if you go to quip.com/slash Claven, you'll get your first refill pack free with a Quip electric toothbrush.
That's quip.com/slash Clavin, K-L-A-V-A-N.
Your first refill pack free at quip.com slash clavin, G-E-T-Q-U-I-P dot com slash Claven.
They're really good.
They're just good looking, and the electric toothbrush is terrific for your teeth.
Bernie Sanders' Statement00:14:42
Before we talk about, obviously we're still dealing with the aftermath of this terrible shooting.
It's just how, you know, when these things, when you avoid the big disaster, I mean, Steve Scalise is still in critical condition, so it could degenerate into a disaster.
But when you think about what it could have been, I mean, the nightmare that it could have been, you know, it means that you've avoided this disaster, which is the main thing.
But there's the subheading of the fact that now you don't really realize the full effect of what happened and the full reality of what happened.
And the reason for that, we have to say, has to do with two people named Crystal Griner and David Bailey, who were the cops.
The Capitol Police were assigned to Scalise because he was in the leadership and wouldn't have been there had there not been somebody in leadership present.
And they just open fired on the shooter, were wounded, continued firing, and took the guy out, and also ran to help the victims at the same time.
Amazing heroes.
And I think that here is a stupid, obvious point that I haven't heard anyone make because it's kind of politically incorrect.
So if you can't come here to hear stupid, obvious, politically incorrect points, where are you going to go?
I just want to point out that these two cops, very high probability that they're Democrats.
Okay?
And the reason I say that is only 4% of the people in Washington, D.C. voted for Donald Trump.
These are two people of some colour.
You know, there's some shade of brown, the two of them.
Crystal Griner is married, is a woman married to a woman.
So these are people in the kind of typical constituency of the Democrat Party.
And if it's fair to point out the fact that the shooter was a leftist and was acting on leftist principles for leftist reasons, he was a Bernie bro.
He was killing people.
And if it's also fair to point out, as I have repeatedly pointed out, that the people that the Black Lives, the white cops that the Black Lives Matter and the New York Times are always pilloring are risking their lives to defend the Black Lives Matter constituency.
I think it's fair to point out that underneath all the screaming and yelling we're doing at each other are people on both sides of high nobility and grace who we should be talking about from time to time.
We should remember that even though it is right and good and fitting for us to fight at the top of our lungs and fight fervently and even viciously at times for the things that we believe in, I always say this, I'm a conservative because I'm a liberal.
I'm a conservative because I want everyone to be free, everyone to do what he wants.
I don't want the cops breaking in into a gay person's bedroom any more than I want the cops breaking in on my bedroom.
And I was alive at the time when that could happen.
So I don't want that happening.
I don't want a florist who for religious reasons won't go to a gay wedding, won't service a gay wedding.
I don't want her, him or her penalized any more than I want myself to be penalized.
I mean, my freedom depends on everybody else's freedom.
And that is a conservative principle now, that only one side believes in that.
Only one side believes in free speech.
And so I am a conservative for some of the people, on behalf of some of the people who hate me and some of the people who demonize me, you know.
And this brings me to a story I want to talk about while, by way, I will get back to the shooting and the aftermath of the shooting.
But I want to talk about a stupid story about Stephen Miller from Heat Street.
And it's not that Stephen is stupid, but when Wonder Woman came out, a theater in New York, the Alamo Theater, announced they were going to have a woman-only screaming.
And Stephen Miller decided to troll them by buying a ticket to the woman-only screening and posting it on Twitter.
And his point was, first of all, just to annoy them, obviously, but his real point was that in New York State, it's illegal to keep people out of a public place on gender grounds, on grounds of gender or race or anything like that.
And so he was saying, you know, that while they're being triumphantly feminist, they are also breaking the law.
And nobody had pointed this out.
And of course, Twitter went nuts, and they were yelling at him, why do you have to do this?
And rolling their eyes at him, and oh men, this is typical men and all this stuff.
And he got all these things and he was hammered and hammered, just complete, you know, complete Twitter madness, the usual thing that happens on Twitter when you disagree with somebody, just slinging insults, curse words, the whole thing.
So he goes to the movie, right?
And he walks in and he gives his ticket and they're sitting there in the movie.
They got one guy, I guess, in this theater.
And he writes this.
He says, I didn't know what to expect showing up to an advertised all-women screening of Wonder Woman, where radical outrage mongers on Twitter were offering bounties to either mace me in the face or dump soda on my head.
Okay, that's what they were saying.
When I took my seat, there were no hisses, no soda bombs, no photographs, no daily show ambushes or mobs of proud boys, whatever the hell they are, no managers asking me to leave.
By the reaction upon arrival, it became apparent how Twitter outrage is not real life.
And as I had predicted, no one in the theater would care.
This was a movie theater, not a college campus, and everyone there was there for the same reason.
It's the most anticlimactic case of a man buying a movie ticket in recent history.
But that one line, I think, is really important to remember that Twitter outrage is not real life.
And when you have a shooting like we had yesterday where Republicans were targeted and people go on Twitter, and some of them were people who should know better, who worked for venues like Huffington Post, and they should be fired.
And of course, that guy, Milos, what's his name?
The guy does the Daily Coast, was one of them just saying horrible, violent, ugly things about the victims.
But most of the people saying those things, they don't represent anybody.
They have no constituency.
Or if they have a constituency, it's one another.
Most of us understand that this is not the way to go forward.
And I think the problem is, the problem is that the media business model is built to service the outrage.
It is built to service the people who are angriest.
And this is, you know, it's more on the left because they have more media than we do.
They have more media that is supposed to be, and these are the real offenders.
They have more media that is supposed to be objective and straightforward and fair and balanced and isn't.
They have ABC, they have CBS, they have NBC, they have CNN, all of them supposed to be direct news, New York Times, all the news that's fit to print.
And they are all lying, and they are the ones who are following this business model.
It's different when we at the Daily Wire, a right-wing site, or the folks at MSNBC, a left-wing place, when they service their constituency, that's different than what you are seeing at, for instance, the New York Times.
The business model is to serve the people you know will come back because a lot of people who aren't angry, a lot of people who aren't consistently outraged, aren't thinking about politics all the time.
You know, Americans traditionally don't think about politics all the time because that's one of the good things about freedom.
You don't have to think about politics all the time.
So if you want to serve your audience, you have to say outrageous, biased things on the left or right.
And that to serve that business model has become, you know, it used to be things like CBS, NBC, and ABC, they were liberal, but they weren't what they are now, which is simply manufactured hatred, left-wing hatred that comes out.
And it's very divisive because we all feel we're being lied to.
Which brings me to the New York Times.
But before I talk to the New York Times, I've got to say goodbye to Facebook and YouTube.
That means you've got to come over to the DailyWire.com to hear the rest of the show and to subscribe.
And if you subscribe for the year, you get Ben's new book about the championship White Sox.
You have to do, that's an annual subscription.
It's a lousy eight bucks a month.
And for that lousy eight bucks a month, you can be in the mailbag, which, as you saw yesterday, results in all your problems being solved.
So come on over to TheDailyWire.com.
So after an incident like this, it is traditional to show for suddenly some people to talk a little bit about unity.
And we're going to get to the New York Times, and this is going to the New York Times.
It's traditional for those in authority to express unity.
And it was done best yesterday by Paul Ryan in a speech in the House.
We'll play just a little bit of that.
We are all giving our thoughts to those currently being treated for their injuries at this moment.
And we are united.
We are united in our shock.
We are united in our anguish.
An attack on one of us is an attack on all of us.
Those applause, that was a standing O, and the applause went on for a long time and became cheers and all this stuff.
Nancy Pelosi also did this.
She was not as good at this.
And this, you know, the word evanescent was made for moments like this, quickly vanishing.
You know, the comedy vanished.
The good feeling vanished almost.
It's already gone.
Nancy Pelosi is already making statements blaming Republicans.
But I do want to add Bernie into this, Bernie Sanders, just to show you one of the things that is bothering people like me, that bothers people on the right.
Bernie Sanders, this guy, this shooter, was a Bernie Sanders supporter.
He was a volunteer for Sanders campaign.
And having seen people who like me say and do terrible things, I know it's an absolutely nauseating feeling when somebody takes something you says and twists it for the purpose of hate.
And Bernie Sanders is not to blame for the shooting.
It's not his anything he might have said.
It's nothing like that.
I do not feel that in any way, shape, or form.
But, but I will point out that there is a double standard.
And this guy, remember, is this guy was a political actor.
This was a political act of terrorism.
This is an act of left-wing political terrorism.
And so here's Bernie Sanders' statement, which I sympathize with.
Madam President, I have just been informed that the alleged shooter at the Republican baseball practice this morning is someone who apparently volunteered on my presidential campaign.
I am sickened by this despicable act.
And let me be as clear as I can be.
Violence of any kind is unacceptable in our society.
And I condemn this action in the strongest possible terms.
Real change can only come about through nonviolent action and anything else runs counter to our most deeply held American values.
Fair enough.
But I just want to point out, yesterday we were talking about the Gabby Gifford shooting, which is a comparable shooting in the sense that it was a congresswoman, but not comparable in the sense that it was committed by a guy with no politics.
And I'll get back to that in a minute, but it was committed by a guy with no politics.
He was just nuts.
And the media and politicians combined together to blame this on specifically Sarah Palin and some campaign advertisement where she had put a gun sight over congressional districts saying these are the districts we have to target for electoral victory.
Okay, so she was using a metaphor there and they were blaming her for the shooter, for the inspiring the shooter who had nothing to do with that.
But after the Gifford shooting, obviously John McCain, the then, you know, who had been a presidential candidate, came out against it.
And this was what Bernie Sanders said about McCain's statement.
He said, my colleague, Senator John McCain, issued a very strong statement after the shooting in which he condemned the perpetrator of the attack.
I commend him for that, but I believe Senator McCain and other Arizona Republicans need to do more.
As the elder statesman of Arizona politics, McCain needs to stand up and denounce the increasingly violent rhetoric coming from the right wing and exert his influence to create a civil political environment in his state.
Now, why is it then that Bernie's condemnation of this guy who was a political actor, who did act politically, why is it that he did not go far enough?
Why isn't he writing this letter to himself and saying my colleague Bernie Sanders didn't go far enough and should be condemning the violent rhetoric which exists throughout the left, including in Shakespeare in the Park, where they are assassinating Donald Trump in the guise of Julius Caesar every night and getting a standing O from all the very daring artistic radicals saying what all the other dangerous artistic radicals are saying among people who aren't going to penalize them at all.
So taking no risks, no artistic risk, saying nothing.
I mean it would be far, far more shocking if they didn't make Julius Caesar Donald Trump.
So all I'm saying, double standard, and that brings me back to the New York Times.
I'm going to replay.
I played this yesterday.
This is the Gabby Gifford shooting.
Jared Loffner, the lunatic who did this shooting, this is his best buddy talking about his motives.
He did not watch TV.
He disliked the news.
He didn't listen to political radio.
He didn't take sides.
He wasn't on the left.
He wasn't on the right.
So now the New York Times, which is really, it really is, I call it a former newspaper.
It's trash now.
I read it every morning just because I need the satire and to just make sure what's in it so you don't have to read it.
But it is a piece of trash.
It used to be a great newspaper.
I know that is hard to believe.
It always was attacked by conservatives for being too liberal.
It used to be kind of liberal, but it was very fair.
And their news gathering was second to none.
The problem is they still have some great reporters, but the great reporters are being used for slanted purposes, so their greatness is actually being perverted.
I mean, it's worse when their reporting is good because their front page is so slanted and their op-ed page is now just a joke.
I mean, it really is a joke.
Here is their editorial.
And to put this in context, the Wall Street Journal had a very, non-editorial basically just praising the police officers, the heroic police officers.
But here's the New York Times.
Was this attack evidence of how vicious American politics has become?
Great Reporters, Slanted Purposes00:13:22
Probably.
In 2011, when Jared Lee Loffner opened fire in a supermarket parking lot, grievously wounding Representative Gabby Giffords and killing six people, including a nine-year-old girl, the link to political incitement was clear.
Before the shooting, Sarah Palin's political action committee circulated a map of targeted electoral districts that put Miss Giffords and 19 other Democrats under stylized crosshairs.
Conservatives and right-wing media were quick on Wednesday to demand forceful condemnation of hate speech and crimes by anti-Trump liberals.
They're right.
Though there's no sign of incitement as direct as in the Giffords attack, liberals should, of course, hold themselves to the same standard of decency that they ask of the right.
Oh, how noble of them.
First of all, the guy, the shooters in yesterday's incident, the shooters' Facebook page was just one retweet of leftist propaganda, and there was nothing, nothing to connect Sarah Palin to this crime.
That op-ed is an entire line.
So of course Sarah Palin came after them.
She called it a repulsive, she called it sickening, and they did issue a they issued a correction finally after they were just hammered by it.
Even the Wall Street Journal hammered them for it.
And it said, let me see if I can find the correction.
Oh yeah, an earlier version of this editorial incorrectly stated that a link existed between political incitement and the 2011 shooting of Representative Gabby Giffords.
In fact, no such link was established.
I do not accept that correction.
They didn't apologize, but I wouldn't accept their apology.
Because think for a minute what it means about the culture of the New York Times for them to make that mistake.
There's only two possibilities.
Either they didn't know, they only listened to themselves, so they didn't know that the rants that the left went on about the dialogue all turned out to be untrue.
Either they just don't pay attention to the truth and they only pay attention to themselves, they're in this, which is what I think actually, that they're in this room full of people who all believe the same things, who are all on the same page, just reinforcing each other's opinions, or they lied in the hopes, which is also a possibility of the Times today.
This is an editorial.
This is from the editorial board of the Times.
So they lied, assuming that their audience, you know, they can keep their audience stupid.
They know that people who read the New York Times basically are getting all their news from left-wing sources.
They're not reading the Wall Street Journal like I'm reading the Times.
They're not looking at real clear politics, which has op-eds from both sides, and reading the op-eds on the other side, which I do.
They're not doing any of that.
They know that they can keep their audience stupid.
You know, Mark Twain used to make some hilarious jokes about Congress and Congress people.
And he once said it could probably be shown by facts and figures that there is no distinctly Native American criminal class except Congress.
So that means that in Congress yesterday, and I know it was evanescent and disappeared very quickly, but in Congress yesterday by showing a little sign of unity and a little bit of putting aside political differences in the face of tragedy and violence, the knaves and jokers in Congress were acting better than the editorial writers at the New York Times.
You know, it would be shameful, but I know they don't have shame at the New York Times.
I know they don't do that anymore.
But it really does speak to something that is just, you know, this is the flagship paper of the left.
This is the left's Bible.
This is what they think is the truth.
When they read the New York Times, they think they're getting the truth.
And it never occurs to them that that paper actually now makes you stupider.
If you read the New York Times and nothing else, or you read the New York Times and other people who reflect the New York Times, you are stupider when you put that paper down than when you picked it up.
That is absolutely, absolutely shameful, lying, divisive, hate-filled.
And did I say stupid already?
I'll say it again.
So on top of this, we now have, as predicted on the show, which is where the future comes to rehearse, as predicted on the show, we now have a story from the Washington Post that the special counsel overseeing the investigation into Russia's role in the 2016 election is interviewing senior intelligence officials as part of a widening probe that now includes an examination of whether President Trump attempted to obstruct justice.
Officials said this is Robert Mueller, the guy I said they should never have appointed, not because he's Robert Mueller, but because we didn't need a special counsel, because there was no investigation into Donald Trump.
He's supposed to be investigating Russia, and now he's investigating whether Trump, apparently investigating whether Trump tried to obstruct justice.
Let me point out one thing about this immediately, that it's a leak from a supposedly secure source.
Very few people would have known about this.
So this means that Mueller's people are now leaking and are now part of this war the deep state is waging against our duly and legally elected president, okay?
So this is already wrong.
But of course the bigger thing is this.
What is this guy investigating?
He's now going to be investigating.
This stuff always, always, always metastasizes.
There's no way to fire him, right?
You can fire him legally, but there's no political way to fire him without it's becoming a huge thing.
Look how huge James Comey fire James Comey's firing became.
But why is he, if this is a true story, why is he investigating obstruction of justice?
What did the pres could the president do that could be called obstruction of justice?
You know, there was an argument about this between two guys who are good friends and know each other.
One is Jeffrey Toobin, the legal analyst, the left-wing legal analyst at CNN, who was a student of Alan Dershowitz, I believe at Harvard, and was, Dershowitz says an A-plus student.
So here is Jeffrey Toobin saying that when Donald Trump said, you know, I hope you can let Michael Flynn go, this was obstruction.
Here's Toobin.
Let's just keep this in perspective.
There is a criminal investigation going on of one of the president's top associates, his former national security advisor, one of the most handful of most important people in the government.
He gets fired.
He's under criminal investigation, and the president brings in the FBI director and says, please stop your investigation.
If that is an obstruction of justice, I don't know what is.
My pal Mike Gallagher had Dershowitz on, Toobin's former professor, and he asked him to grade Toobin's remarks.
Here's Dershowitz's reply.
It's just audio.
Oh, that's a C-minus.
I think Jeffrey got an A-plus.
He's a really good student, but that's a C-minus answer.
The president could have called in the head of the FBI and said, look, you are directed not to prosecute this guy because he's a good guy.
And that would have been allowed.
That would have been allowed.
There's no problem under the Constitution with the president deciding who to prosecute.
That's what Thomas Jefferson did.
That's what Abraham Lincoln did.
That's what John Kennedy did.
Moreover, he could have done it in a much more direct way.
He could have said to Comey, look, your prosecution or investigation of Flynn is over.
I'm now pardoning him.
End of it.
I'm doing what George Bush I did.
I'm pardoning him.
That's my power.
Is that an obstruction of justice?
Can a president be indicted for exercising his power to pardon?
Of course not, unless he's been bribed to do it or some other independently criminal act.
But Jeffrey, great guy, very smart.
C-minus.
C-minus, right?
C-minus.
He'd probably give me a D-plus on my analysis, but I was a teacher.
He was a student.
So, you know, this is, I mean, somebody pointed this out.
I'm not sure.
I can't remember who it was.
But if John F. Kennedy had called J. Edgar Hoover into his office and said, stop bugging Martin Luther King, or you're fired, or had fired him for bugging Martin Luther King, nobody would look back on that and complain.
Bush was completely within his, Bush.
Trump was completely within his rights to do it.
And here is the danger.
Carl Rove writes an excellent column today in the Wall Street Journal, and it's important because Rove was part of the W. Bush administration when the special prosecutor Patrick Fitzgerald, the special counsel, was appointed to investigate the leaking of CIA agents Valerie Plame's name, okay, to the columnist, Robert Novak, okay?
And this was, on its face, it was a complete, what they now would call a false flag by the left and by the media.
Valerie Plame's husband had written an untrue op-ed in the New York Times, and Novak proved that it was untrue, and in doing so, mentioned the fact that her husband, Joseph Wilson, had gotten the job through Valerie Plame, and suddenly that became the scandal because they didn't want the scandal to be the fact that the New York Times was running a dishonest op-eds slandering George W. Bush because Wilson's attack on Bush was untrue.
So the whole scandal was a nonsense.
But the Bush administration, just like Republicans always, let themselves be gulled by their own principles.
They let themselves, you know, well, we have to behave at this very, very high moral level.
And yes, you do have to behave at a moral level, but not so high a moral level that you can be tricked and conned into investigating yourself when it's not necessary.
So Patrick Fitzgerald was appointed, and here's Karl Rove.
He's in the administration.
He was in the administration at the time.
And he says, Mr. Fitzgerald knew within days, if not hours of his appointment, that the leak had come from Deputy Secretary of State Richard Armitage, but that it violated no law since the CIA employee was no longer a covert operative.
Despite no underlying crime, Mr. Fitzgerald spent more than three years obsessed with trying to justify his existence by prosecuting someone in the Bush White House for lying under oath.
I was one of those in his sights.
He focused on me because while I could not remember a brief call in 2003 from a time reporter, I had ordered my staff the following year to search for any evidence I had talked to the journalist.
That was supposed to be proof I had lied.
Mr. Fitzpatrick gave up hunting me only when he learned that my lawyer had directed me to search my files after hearing from the reporter's colleague that I had talked with him.
Instead, Mr. Fitzpatrick indicted the vice president's chief of staff, Louis Scooter Libby, a very good man, on a disagreement over who said what, when, and to whom.
There was no underlying crime.
And we know there's been no investigation of Donald Trump on this collusion with the Russians.
And so now Mueller is going off already.
This thing is metastasizing into this investigation.
Remember, Fitzgerald got the same reviews when he was appointed as Mueller.
What an honest guy he was, what a good guy he was, how straight arrow, what a good lawman.
It's just all he cares about is law.
All sides trust him.
But these things have a mind of their own.
And he's, you know, Mueller has appointed some people with very dodgy backgrounds in the sense that they're big Clinton donors.
He's a friend of James Comey's.
There is every reason to feel he should recuse himself from this.
He'll never be fired, but it's not going to happen.
This is going to go on for years and years and years.
And it could result in charges of obstruction of justice that have no underlying reality, but still will be damaging to the president.
This is, you know, Donald Trump tweeted, and I'm no big fan of Donald Trump's tweets, but the president tweeted, You are witnessing the single greatest witch hunt in American political history, led by some very bad and conflicted people.
They made up a phony collusion with the Russian story, found zero proof.
So now they go for obstruction of justice on the phony story.
Nice.
Donald Trump is 100% correct.
That tweet is absolutely right.
The president has every reason to feel that he has been hard done by.
They should never have done this.
They never should.
All right, so look, you know, a difficult week in a lot of ways, terrible, terrible violence, and this thing with the council is just a con job.
It really is.
It's bad news.
And now I'm sending you into the Clavenless weekend.
So basically, you're screwed.
That's all there is to it.
It's Father's Day.
So happy Father's Day to all fathers.
I have to say, you know, we were talking yesterday a little bit about masculinity.
And I always used to try to annoy my children by telling them that they had absolutely zero right to criticize me.
I was zero interested in their criticisms of me in the same way that God is not interested in my criticisms of him.
And, you know, I have said this before, but Sigmund Freud believed that God was just a fantasy projection of our fathers onto the universe.
I believe that he got that exactly the wrong way around.
Faith and Projection00:03:22
believe that the trust and faith and desire for justice and strength that we bring naturally to our fathers comes to us because of our inner knowledge of God, that we're in fact projecting.
We're not projecting our fathers onto the face of God.
We start by projecting our knowledge, our inward knowledge of God onto the face of our fathers.
And it is up to them to try and live up to that image, which of course none of us can do, but we can try.
And we do that by giving life, by giving all the blessings of life, by not asking necessarily for thanks, but asking that the people that we raise and that we give those things to live out lives that are worthy of the things that they were given.
And so if you have done that job as a father, you would deserve all credit and all glory for filling in for the bigger father here on earth.
And I think it is a beautiful thing.
And for those who did not have fathers like that, remember that your expectations of your father that were disappointed, they come from a higher place.
That father, that father remains all-loving, all-forgiving, and all-knowing.
And so you are not alone.
You are not without a father on Father's Day.
Stuff I like.
Here's a story from the old days, right?
Here's from the old days before there were apps, okay?
I had this song running in my mind.
It is famously, it's a famous instrumental song from the 60s.
Now, I didn't hear it back then, but it did sort of just faintly come into my head.
I don't know where.
I don't know where I first heard it.
It was a big hit in the 60s.
And it was an instrumental.
It was just a simple, quiet instrumental.
But I just, the music haunted me.
And I asked everyone, what is this song?
And I would sing the song and all this.
I asked my father, who played music on the radio and knew everything.
He knew every song there ever was.
He didn't know.
He had never heard it.
Maybe I wasn't singing it right.
Of course, today you would just sing it into an app and the app would tell you.
One day, this went on for 20 years.
I mean, 20 years, I could not remember the song, and I could not get it out of my mind.
I mean, it was just, it was haunting.
It was truly haunting.
It's a beautiful melody.
One day I'm driving along and I hear a non-instrumental version, a version with lyrics.
And all I heard was the last, I don't know, 10 notes, and then it was over.
But the last 10 notes of the verbal version, the version with lyrics, had the name of the song, Stranger on the Shore.
And then I was able to hunt it down.
And now, as a joke, the guy who played this is a clarinet piece played by a famous British clarinetist named Acker Bilk.
Acker Bilk.
And he was a great clarinetist.
And now, as a sort of punishment for having this thing in my mind all these years, it's now on my iPhone.
It's some of the music on my iPhone.
And because the guy's name is Acker Bilk, it's the first song on my iPhone because his name is Acker, right?
So every time I plug my iPhone into my car, this music fills the car.
So every time I turn my car on, I'm listening to this music again.
It's still a beautiful, beautiful song, kind of melancholy, kind of wistful, good to end a week like this on.