Ep. 139 - Bombing The Middle East: An American Tradition
The hypocritical Left and excitable Right are losing their minds over President Trump’s successful order to attack Syria on Friday. We will analyze the case for the strikes, how bombing the Middle East is an American tradition, and why everybody should just keep calm and covfefe. Then, despite the constant negative press, Trump’s approval rating tops 50%. Finally, on This Day In History, the inauguration of George Washington.
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And finally, on this day in history, the inauguration of George Washington.
I'm Michael Knowles and this is the Michael Knowles Show.
So much to get to today.
Before we get to bombing the Middle East, before we get to talking about bombing, maybe we'll bomb them down, I don't know, it's an American tradition.
Before we get to that, we will talk about something that also is the bomb.
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Okay, back to bombing the Middle East.
Bombing the Middle East is an American tradition.
There is nothing new about this.
For those of you who are not history buffs, here is some, I think, archival footage of a joint CIA military intervention in the Middle East in 2004.
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I think we got that from WikiLeaks, and it's pretty incredible that, you know, the government tries to obviously cover some of those things up, but really harrowing footage from another intervention in the Middle East.
Here is President Trump announcing the strikes on Syria.
The purpose of our actions tonight is to establish a strong deterrent against the production, spread and use of chemical weapons.
That's the limited strike.
That's what it's about.
It's not an all-out war.
It's not a ground invasion.
It's about going in and deterring the use of chemical weapons, which are prohibited by about a gazillion international treaties and the policy of the United States.
So there are reports that Defense Secretary Mattis convinced Donald Trump not to take a more robust action here.
President Trump has given different signals on how he wants to approach the military.
What basically happened is we sent powerful missile attacks against three targets aimed at stopping the Syrian regime from using chemical weapons and to deter Bashar al-Assad from using those weapons.
Again, this was the most conservative proposal.
It could have gone a lot further than this.
We could have bombed more chemical weapons research facilities.
We could have bombed all over the country.
We could have hit military command centers.
We even could have hit Russian air defenses in Syria, which would have...
Seriously struck a blow against Syria's military, could have really depleted that military force.
But President Trump used a lot of caution here, and he did basically the most conservative action he could have done while still being somewhat effective.
Apparently Mattis, these are just reports that are coming out, so who knows if the leaks are true, but Mattis urged restraint because also we don't want to provoke Iran and Russia into escalating this conflict.
We don't want to get bogged down in a major war.
Also, we cannot tolerate the use of chemical weapons.
Some people have suggested that Syria doesn't use chemical weapons in these attacks, that really the chemical weapons are being used by other forces, forces that are opposing the Assad government.
This is a very complex war that's multilateral.
There are a lot of different sides fighting for different things here.
We should at least dispel with the absurd notion that the Syrian government doesn't use chemical weapons.
We know that they use chemical weapons.
We know that they have lied about using chemical weapons.
We know that they've lied about using chemical weapons because they admitted to having chemical weapons in 2013 and at other times even after they denied having them in the first place.
So you can't trust the Syrian regime.
The guy is a butcher and his father was a butcher too.
What's interesting here, too, is the National Security Advisor.
So John Bolton is the relatively newly minted National Security Advisor.
This is one of his first actions here.
And he's clearly changed his thinking in some ways on Syria.
Or he's allowing other forces in the room to have more of a say early on in his tenure at that job.
Or Donald Trump just wanted to send a message to Syria.
You know, John Bolton had said that Syria is a sideshow, that the real threat is Iran.
And most serious thinkers on foreign policy and the Middle East recognize that.
Iran is the threat in the region.
And so that plays a little bit into the calculation here, because Iran is exerting a lot of influence on Syria.
We also have a geopolitical adversary in Russia, and Russia's exerting a lot of influence on Syria, so you have to calibrate a response to that effect.
There are provocations here.
Do you remember when Barack Obama said, if there's a use of chemical weapons, that would be a red line?
The minute he said that, he had to justify that threat, except he didn't, because he was weak, because he just ran his mouth all the time and didn't actually back it up with action.
The credibility of the United States is very important here, and that demands a response.
Bad actors all around the world are always trying to provoke the United States to push the boundaries.
China does it.
North Korea does it.
Syria does it.
Russia does it.
Every one of our geopolitical foes does this, and you have to respond.
It's like a little kid with daddy, you know, and the little kid, you know, starts eating all the cookies out of the cookie jar, and if the dad doesn't punish him, what's he going to do?
He's going to eat more cookies, or he's drawing all over the wall.
It's just pushing boundaries to see how far can I go, how far can I go, and we have to smack them down.
This will get to an important aspect of what I think should become the Trump doctrine and American foreign policy in the 21st century, but we'll get to that in a bit.
To compliment Donald Trump even more, this was good diplomacy.
He got the British and the French in line here.
This was a coordinated effort between two of our biggest allies.
I'll try to refrain from making French military jokes because they helped us out in this action.
But, you know, those abound.
There are a lot of jokes about the military and waving things like that.
This all seems reasonable enough.
Here is how some of Trump's allies on the right have responded to these strikes.
Damn it, man.
What the fuck?
Is there nobody here in this goddamn world?
See, I'm pissed right now.
See?
Syria fought Al-Qaeda, they fought ISIS, they fought it all.
And now you got Mattis and all these people shitting all over us.
And the goddamn liberal fascist censoring us everywhere in the last two days.
We did an emergency 36-hour broadcast trying to stop this shit that could lead to World War III. And you fucking liberal pieces of shit.
You fucking liberals.
Fucking supporters.
Fuck you.
You fucking damn degenerate.
And fucking Mueller.
And fucking Comey.
And fucking you.
Every major analyst.
See, I shouldn't even...
This could trigger World War III unlike anything in our history.
And the Russians were the good guys battling ISIS and Al-Qaeda.
I'm not a Russophile.
I've never been to Russia.
But I've studied the geopolitics.
They are the white knights.
And our military, five years ago, joined the Russians to block Obama and the Arab Spring and do the right thing, did the right thing.
And now, Mattis.
And Mattis looks like an Emperor Palpatine.
Oh!
We'll cut it there.
I think that's enough.
I think we actually bleeped out more of that clip than we heard.
I think the majority...
Gotta love Alex Jones.
I find the guy very entertaining.
I do like watching him.
He was not pleased.
How do you really feel, Alex?
What do you really think about those strikes?
So, by the way, he said that this is going to cause World War III. And he tweeted this out.
He said, World War III has just begun.
World War III... And you hear this from these guys who...
Are prone to hysteria on the radio and on TV. So I tweeted out, this was on Friday or Saturday, I said, Alex, I bet you $10,000 this isn't World War III. And he didn't respond.
I said, do you take the bet?
And he didn't respond.
Because I was thinking, you know, I've got a pretty good track record on political bets as my framed Ben Shapiro check over there shows.
So I was thinking I could make a cool 10K and pay for, you know, at least two days of drinks on my honeymoon or something.
But unfortunately, he didn't take the bet.
Because I don't know if he really believes any of that.
We have to get to his assertion that the Russians are the good guys here.
We'll get to that in a second.
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Okay, on the Russians being the good guys.
So he says, the Russians are the good guys here.
The Russians are the good guys here.
We should just pause for a moment to analyze the Syria strikes in light of the Russia collusion narrative, which even Van Jones admitted is an absolute nothing burger, but the left is still insistent on.
They're still insistent that Donald Trump, a man that we've known for 40 years, is secretly Boris from Rocky and Bullwinkle.
He's a Manchurian candidate from Moscow.
Let's just analyze.
So in just recent days, Donald Trump has expelled 60 Russian diplomats.
He did that in March.
This was a major hostility.
And he said it's brought our relations with Russia to the worst point, including the Cold War.
Might be slightly hyperbolic, but pretty bad.
He slapped a bunch of sanctions on Russia, and he's moving to institute more.
And now we are literally bombing Russian-backed forces in Syria.
Will this finally put an end to the Russia collusion narrative?
I know the answer to that.
I know it won't.
Of course it won't.
Because what they're going to say is, they're going to say, well, Donald Trump, you know, if he really wanted to hide the fact that he's colluding with Russia, you know what, he would place sanctions on Russia and he would really, he would expel diplomats and he would bomb Russia so that we wouldn't know that he secretly loves Russia and he's helping Russia.
Ha ha!
We've got him!
That's what they're going to say.
But it's absolutely ridiculous.
To say they're the good guys here is absurd.
You know, we can work with Russia when we can work with Russia.
They've been our geopolitical adversary for 100 years.
That didn't just stop when the Berlin Wall came down.
We know that they try to interfere in our politics.
We try to interfere in their expansionist ideas, too, and that's...
Perfectly well and good, but we shouldn't pretend that they're our buddies or something and they really have the best interests of the U.S. at heart.
Did they swing the 2016 election?
No.
Do some Twitter accounts and some Facebook ads really matter to American politics?
Absolutely not.
Are there greater threats in many areas?
Absolutely true.
But they're not like our BFF, man.
That's a little too much.
So to the issue at hand, President Trump bombed the Middle East.
This is a rite of passage.
This is a rite of passage for American presidents.
In 1998, I remember this, I was eight years old, and we were bombing Iraq.
Bill Clinton decided to bomb Iraq.
And I asked my mother, I said, are we going to war in Iraq?
Why are we fighting Iraq?
Why are we bombing Iraq?
And she said...
She explained foreign policy to me.
This is one of the best explanations I've ever heard, which was, oh, Michael, you know, it's an American pastime, it's an American tradition, and it's Bill Clinton's turn.
Also, he wants to clear the newspapers out of his other stories, which is true, because at the time, all you could see on TV was Lewinsky, and he bombed Iraq, and it got Lewinsky out of the headlines for a little bit.
I mean that to say, he bombed Iraq for a few days in 1998, and it didn't cause World War III, it didn't cause the end of the world, it worked out just fine.
And it actually led in, not strongly enough, but it did feed into a U.S. policy, which was to oppose Saddam Hussein.
It didn't really do much one way or the other.
It didn't cause World War III. Every day of Barack Obama's presidency was spent attacking the Middle East.
George Bush, obviously, after 9-11, after we were attacked, the worst attack in American soil, we had to deal with those countries in the Middle East.
Bill Clinton, obviously.
George Bush, the first.
George H.W. Bush led the Gulf War.
Ronald Reagan sent peacekeeping forces to Lebanon during that country's civil war to maintain order in the region.
Jimmy Carter didn't, but Jimmy Carter's a terrible president, so who cares what he did.
Richard Nixon backed Israel after Egypt and Syria invaded during the Yom Kippur War.
At one point Richard Nixon actually ordered an airlift to resupply the Israeli forces so they didn't get wiped out by the invading Muslim forces.
That's certainly an intervention.
Dwight Eisenhower overthrew the Iranian election in 1953 to reinstall the Shah.
This is a long-standing tradition.
This is nothing new with Donald Trump, and people on the left and the right, on the extreme left or the extreme right, should not freak out about this.
Transcends political boundaries.
And also, this implies a strategy that irks a lot of conservatives from the libertarians to the traditionalists, and that's mowing the lawn.
This probably should be the Trump doctrine.
This probably should be American foreign policy in the 21st century.
Mowing the lawn.
The left and the isolationist right blame the U.S. for the Middle East's problems.
They say, you know, if we just didn't interfere in the Middle East, then they would really like us.
If we didn't interfere in the Middle East, then the civilization that has been at war with the West for 1400 years, they'll like us then.
Then they'll really like us and stop trying to invade.
I know they've been trying to invade since the year 732, but they'll probably stop.
It's America's fault.
Because they've been doing it since 732, and America's been around since 1776, but they'll probably just stop.
That's ridiculous.
Certainly in the 20th century, after independence for a lot of these countries and the Islamic resurgence in those countries have brought a lot of instability to the region, and sometimes you have to mow the lawn.
And by mow the lawn, I mean, you know, be in America, preserve our liberty, keep our money, build a great country, be a beacon of liberty to the rest of the world, facing out to the rest of the world, decide who wants to come in, try to help people out, be overall good and productive and lift everybody up in the world.
A rising tide lifts all ships.
And then, Every once in a while, when they start to act up over in that godforsaken region, go over and bomb them a little bit and get it all back in line.
Because this sounds like it's some bellicose thing or like it's very hawkish.
But I think it's actually the opposite of hawkish.
I'm not saying we should invade and run their countries forever and do all of this, but you have to maintain stability or these events can spiral out of control.
There can be major crises, whole genocides, the use of awful weapons like chemical weapons or nuclear weapons.
You have to maintain some order to preserve the peace.
You need peace through strength.
You're not going to get peace through weakness.
That doesn't happen.
Through weakness you get chaos and terror.
Between 1969 and 2009 there were 38,000 We're good to go.
You can't just leave that region alone because they'll come to get us.
This was the fiction that we labored under for a while, that you just leave it alone and then they won't get us.
You do you, we do us.
But then they flew airplanes over here and they did get us.
And they target American interests and American posts overseas.
And they come over here and they cause trouble.
They cause terrorist attacks.
They become breeding grounds for people whose only goal in life is to destroy the United States, who hate our freedom because of what it is and because of who we are and because of the way that we live, who have a long-standing tradition of despising the West and despising the civilization of the West, and they're going to come get us because now it's easier to get over here.
There isn't an ocean separating us permanently or with great difficulty one from another anymore.
It's very easy to get over here.
The instability over there can and will reach us.
You have to go in and you have to mow the lawn every once in a while.
That's just the way that these things work.
We are the world's superpower.
We don't have to be the world's superpower.
We are because we choose to be.
We have a massive economy.
We have productive citizenry.
We have a stable country, relatively stable country.
Sometimes with the tweets you think that maybe it's not that stable, but it is a stable country.
And we have the military force of the world.
We defend all of our allies.
They have relatively small military forces.
And Americans get indecisive on this question.
Sometimes we want to be the superpower.
Sometimes we want to pretend that it's the 18th century and we can just be agrarians and can rely on the ocean to protect us.
The ocean didn't even protect us in the 17th and 18th and 19th centuries, did they?
The oceans didn't protect us then.
We had a revolutionary war and then we had a second revolutionary war in 1812 when the British tried to invade again.
Even that...
Even that dream of isolation was, I think, largely a fantasy.
And if the nations of the world look to us to preserve the world order, we have to do it.
I guess we cannot do it, but then somebody else is going to come in.
Then a bad guy is going to come in.
Then China is going to run the world order, and they're going to dictate the world order.
Do we want to live in that world?
Period.
Do we want to live in that framework?
No nation would seriously challenge us in an all-out war.
That would not happen right now.
We spend more on our military than China, Russia, Saudi Arabia, India, France, the UK, and Japan combined, at least.
Actually, significantly more than all of them.
That's a good thing.
I'm glad that we do that.
Because that is so far from the majority of our federal budget.
The majority of our budget is unfunded liabilities and entitlement programs in the welfare state.
And for a relatively small amount of money, we get to run the world the way that we want to run the world, which coincidentally is the best way for us and everybody.
It's the fairest.
It's the freest.
It's the most just.
It's the most equitable.
It's the most prosperous.
We shouldn't back away from that.
That's not a bad thing.
And if it means we have to go mow the lawn every once in a while, so be it.
So be it.
What was the problem that happened with the strikes in Syria?
What was the real cost to America?
There was no cost of American lives, thankfully.
There was no cost to American politics, really.
And it was a pinprick strike that took out a lot of chemical facilities.
That's fine by me.
And it defended the credibility of the United States.
To Alex Jones's point, is there a possibility of a superpower conflict?
Of course there is.
There's always a possibility of that.
And there's been one building for a long time.
We have trade tensions with China.
China's aggressing into the South China Sea.
The leader of China, Xi Jinping, is now pretty firmly established as practically a dictator.
Similarly, Vladimir Putin is practically a dictator in Russia, if not de jure, then certainly de facto.
And Russia aggresses into Ukraine, starts invading its neighbors, interferes in Western politics, poisons defectors in the United Kingdom.
That's the backdrop to all of this.
So I suppose an all-out war between superpowers or midpowers could occur, but it's not going to occur because we shot some missiles into Syria and mowed the lawn and defended the credibility of the United States.
And, Absolutely not.
I still have a little bit of time to cover the good domestic news, and then we're going to have to get to this day in history.
In some good domestic news...
Democrats' relentless attacks on Donald Trump are not working.
They actually aren't working.
It seems like it's a constant barrage of attacks, and they just aren't working.
So, you know, Special Counsel Robert Mueller raided Trump's lawyers...
It's going to be a difficult political situation.
Five large firms have passed on representing...
President Trump in this investigation.
So you have this whole backdrop.
You have the Mueller investigation expanding to anything.
You know, a peanut butter and jelly sandwich that Donald Trump ate in the 60s.
They're going to analyze that and find some way to indict him for it.
Then you have James Comey.
James Comey's ridiculous book and ridiculous interview.
This happened last night.
Here's just a quick clip to give you a sense of James Comey.
I don't buy the stuff about him being mentally incompetent at early stages of dementia.
He strikes me as a person of above average intelligence who's tracking conversations and knows what's going on.
I don't think he's medically unfit to be president.
I think he's morally unfit to be president.
Comey worked for Bill Clinton.
I just want to remind everybody of this.
James Comey was the managing assistant U.S. attorney to Bill Clinton.
But no, Trump is morally unfit because maybe he had a one-night stand with a porn star ten years before he became president, and Bill Clinton was creating human humidors in the Oval Office during his tenure.
But oh, but no, he, Donald Trump is morally unknown.
He's upset because he got fired.
And he's talking to George Stephanopoulos, Bill Clinton's communications director.
This is the most ridiculous kind of kabuki theater I've ever seen in politics, I think.
You have this guy, this jilted lover, James Comey, this disgruntled former employee who is a self-aggrandizing person.
You know, who has lied publicly, who tried to insert himself into the presidential election, who tried to play politics.
He thought, oh, he actually admitted to this.
He said, I thought I had to release the Hillary letter at the end of the campaign because when Hillary won, I didn't want her to be illegitimate.
So he obviously has all these political considerations in his head.
And then he's talking to George Stephanopoulos, whose main claim to fame is that he is the guy who spins the news for the Clintons.
That was his job.
That's why we know his name.
That's how he got his job at ABC. There was nothing in this interview, by the way.
Nearly 10 million people watched.
They got nothing for it, really.
Just insults saying, oh, he's not fit.
He's not...
He's mean.
He had a porn star.
Another nothing burger, to use Van Jones' term.
And then, speaking of the porn star, that's another aspect the media keep throwing at us to get Trump's approval rating down.
That porn star describing the details of her one-night stand with Donald Trump.
Yeah.
Just to give you a sense of Stormy Daniels, it's not like she used to have this sordid past and Trump took advantage of her and now she's gotten her life together and she's damaged and Me Too and all this.
She's still a stripper.
She still does all of this stuff.
She's a sex worker, to use the modern phrase.
A political operative friend of mine invited me to a Stormy Daniels show.
He thought it'd be funny that I could wear a Make America Great Again hat and go see Stormy Daniels dance or something.
I ran it by sweet little Elisa.
Surprisingly, she wasn't that supportive of the idea.
And, you know, that's the kind of person we're talking about.
We're talking about a currently working stripper who was arrested in 2010 for domestic violence.
At that time, Stormy Daniels was thinking about running for Senate against Vitter, I think, against another Republican.
So she's clearly had it out for Republicans.
For a long time now, and she's clearly wanted to aggrandize herself on the political stage for a long time.
And she's also a working stripper.
That's what we're seeing.
And they're using that.
She's like this pinnacle of virtue and honesty.
And James Comey, a guy that all the Democrats a year and a half ago said was basically the scum of the earth.
Now they like him because he's hitting Donald Trump.
With all of that, guess what Donald Trump's poll numbers are?
Take a guess.
Do you want to guess?
51%.
51% approval, according to Rasmussen, which is the only daily presidential tracking poll left.
All of that.
The entire apparatus.
You've got the bureaucracy working against him.
You have the Democrats ginned up like they haven't been since the last Republican president.
And you've got half of the Republican Party too timid to support their own guy.
You've got all of these things working against Donald Trump, and yet more than half the country still approves of his job.
Day-to-day.
Day-to-day.
That's the last daily tracking poll left.
Donald Trump's numbers, by the way, have been hovering around there for quite a while.
And they're higher than Barack Obama's approval ratings at this time in his presidency.
At this time in Obama's presidency, it was 47-48%.
Now, I know what you're going to say.
You're going to say, yeah, but at this time in Barack Obama's presidency, he was headed for a wipeout in the midterms.
And it's true.
The 2010 midterms did wipe out the Democrats.
But that seems like a good point until you look a little deeper into it.
The trouble with Barack Obama, his electoral troubles in those midterm wipeouts, were never his problems.
He always remained popular.
48% is a solid number, a solid approval rating if you're president.
Not as good as 51%, which Trump has, but it's a very solid number.
Barack Obama always remained popular.
That's why the Republicans totally took over the Congress, but Obama got re-elected.
That's why people hated Obama's policies, but they liked him personally.
And even with that, Donald Trump's approval rating is still higher than Donald Trump's.
This will be shocking to people who believe what they see on the news, who watch ABC and George Stephanopoulos, former Clinton employee, former Clinton flack, and they say, wow, I can't believe everyone hates Trump.
Oh, except for more than half the country.
Right.
Conventional wisdom.
What does this mean for the midterms?
The conventional wisdom says Republicans are going to get blown out in the midterms.
Democrats only have to flip 24 congressional seats.
It's the House, so every seat is up for grabs.
48 seats are considered competitive here, so more than enough, almost twice, you know, exactly twice as many as need to be flipped.
And the vast majority of competitive seats are in Republican districts.
Okay, that's bad.
That doesn't look good.
And historically speaking, the party in power always gets tossed out in these midterms.
But drill down a little bit.
Only 22 seats right in 2018 are considered a toss-up.
26 seats lean slightly one way or the other, and of those lean one way or the other, 16 lean Republican, 10 lean Democrat.
That kind of tempers the views of this blue wave like Morgan Freeman in Deep Impact, seeing the thing come.
I don't know.
The numbers, I don't know if they necessarily back that up.
The history seems to imply that.
But do the numbers on the ground, does the daily presidential approval rating?
I don't know.
Do the tax cuts that Americans just got?
I don't know.
In the Senate...
There are a lot more vulnerable Democrats than Republicans this year.
There's obviously a thin GOP minority in the Senate, but it's not a good map for Democrats.
Next time will be a good map for Democrats.
This year doesn't look great for them.
So, the conventional wisdom says this is going to be a bad year for Republicans.
Even with all of those details I just gave you, you still think it's going to be a bad year for Republicans.
Except that conventional wisdom is only reliable in conventional times.
These are not conventional times.
As the former FBI director, you know, having like a war of words and yelling insults at Donald Trump on TV, and then the porn star from 2006 going on, and she's still stripping, but she's also...
And then the raid of the president's lawyer, and then half the...
These are not normal times.
And President Covfefe himself, last but not least, of the abnormal things going on in this political time.
These are not normal times.
My recommendation to Republicans is, by all rights, by all rights, Republicans should get blown out in the midterms.
All of the indicators seem to point that way, and yet below the surface, I don't know, and yet these aren't conventional times, and yet Donald Trump's a survivor, and yet the media lie to us.
Republicans have to go out there and vote.
If we can hold the Senate and possibly hold the House or not lose too many seats in the House or whatever, if we can do that, the mainstream media will crack.
They will cry.
They will fill up this leftist-hears tumbler, most importantly.
It will be a wonderful thing for American politics.
It will be 2016 all over again.
Maybe even better because they really think they've got him again.
But it'll fill up the Leftist Tears Tumblr, and that's why you have to go to dailywire.com.
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None of that matters.
None of it matters at all.
Because right here we have...
I'll take a little smell to...
Oh, the fragrance.
This is the James Comey 2018 Vintage.
I think it's a little saltier than other vintages of delicious leftist tears, which can be sold obviously hot or cold.
You can have some mulled leftist tears with a little spice that's nice.
Or you just have it nice and chilled on a summer day wearing your movement sunglasses.
Make sure to go to dailywire.com.
You don't want to miss out.
They're just so delicious.
We'll be right back.
All right, it's time for this day in history.
3.
On this day in history, George Washington leaves Mount Vernon to be inaugurated president.
On this day in 1789, newly elected president and father of his country, George Washington, left his home in Mount Vernon, Virginia, and headed to New York to be sworn in as the first president.
I actually used to live in New York right by where Washington was sworn in.
It's very cool.
It's downtown in New York.
He went all the way up there and he did not want to go up there.
Before leaving, George Washington addressed a group of citizens about how much he did not want to be president.
This is not just private writings.
He's at Mount Vernon.
He's in Virginia.
He's about to go become the first president of the United States and he decides to convene a group of people and complain about it because he doesn't want to do it.
He says, at my age, What possible advantages could I gain from public life?
And Washington at the time, by the way, was only 57.
Young man, even for his era, not some old man.
But the Washingtons tended to die early.
His father's great-grandfather's grandfather.
They all died pretty young, and Washington was keenly aware of this.
He wrote in his diary about leaving to be inaugurated.
He said,"...I bade adieu to Mount Vernon, to private life and to domestic felicity, and with a mind oppressed with more anxious and painful sensations than I had words to express." That doesn't sound very excited.
He had already resigned his military commission at the end of the Revolutionary War.
So he leads the army throughout the revolution.
He really is the father of his country.
And then he resigns his military commission.
And there was some question.
Will he?
Will he become a king?
Will he rule the country himself?
But he went and he asked Congress, he said, how do you want me to resign?
I'm going to resign.
How do you want me to do it?
And then they told him how.
And King George III, his foe in that war, because he did this, called Washington the most distinguished of any man living, the greatest character of the age.
That was his last photo.
This was a heroic act.
Then he goes to Mount Vernon and he lives a happy life.
He didn't want to be president.
He certainly didn't want to leave his wife behind to go up to New York.
And he also didn't want to leave his servant Billy Lee behind.
He just didn't want to leave his life.
He liked his life.
He had a good life.
And he wasn't just kidding, by the way.
I think we now look back on Washington, who says, oh, I don't want to be president.
I don't want to be president.
I don't want to do this.
I don't want to do this.
And we think he was just kidding.
Or he didn't.
He was playing coy.
You know, he obviously wanted to be president, but he couldn't say that.
And it was just politicking or whatever.
No, he wasn't kidding.
He really did not want to be president.
He took up that job only because rival political factions in the U.S. were already threatening the independence that was won in the American Revolution.
I think some people like to pretend that the political factions, the federalists and the anti-federalists, they sort of sprung up later and that's when the parties began.
Not true.
They began immediately because it's the natural state of politics, as politics should be.
Different people with different visions and different interests organize into different groups and then they try to enact their vision over someone else's vision.
That's the natural state of politics.
We shouldn't wish to get rid of parties.
Political parties are a wonderful thing.
They help us organize our political visions and affect them.
So at this point, the federalists...
Guys like John Adams or Alexander Hamilton, they are begging Washington to be president.
In 1788, Alexander Hamilton wrote to Washington, basically demanding that he do it, basically saying you're going to have to be president.
Washington responded to that letter, and he responded on the quote, I can say nothing because the event alluded to may never happen and because, in case it should occur, it would be a point of prudence to defer forming one's ultimate and irrevocable decisions.
It is my great and sole desire to live and die in peace and retirement on my own farm.
He can't say it much more clearly than that.
He doesn't just say I want to live.
Politicians do this today.
They say, oh, I'm really enjoying what I'm doing.
Oh, I really like running my business.
Oh, yeah, no, I don't want to run for president until the next possible opportunity, and then I'll do it.
Washington is very clear with his words.
He was meticulous.
He chose his words carefully.
I want to live and die in peace here on this farm.
Stop bothering me, Alexander.
He wrote also George Washington.
I should unfeignedly rejoice in case the electors, by giving their votes to another person, would save me from the dreaded dilemma of being forced to accept or refuse.
If that may not be, I am, in the next place, earnestly desirous of searching out the truth and knowing whether there does not exist a probability that the government would be just as happily and effectually carried into execution without my aid.
Leave me alone, leave me alone, leave me alone, leave me alone.
He then goes on to say, This is a guy who spent his entire life getting shot at.
This is a guy who spent his entire life in squalor, terrible conditions, starving, not with adequate clothing, not with adequate ammunition, shooting at people and being shot at.
And he says that's basically a cakewalk compared to making me leave my farm and become president.
You cannot interpret this as some coyness.
He's saying it as clearly as he can.
Now, if Washington had to be president, He wrote that he hoped that at a convenient and early period, my services might be dispensed with and that I might be permitted once more to retire, to pass an unclouded evening after the stormy day of life in the bosom of domestic tranquility.
And he did it.
Some people say they're amazed that Washington didn't go for a third or fourth term.
But anybody familiar with Washington's thoughts on this should be amazed that he accepted a second term.
He just didn't want it.
FDR, if he had lived, probably would have served 16 terms.
He wanted to be a king.
He made himself an American king.
But George Washington really didn't want to do it.
And that is a real attitude to look for in our political leaders.
And here's why.
That's not just some platitude.
That's not just saying, oh, we want the reluctant leader.
Oh, that's nice.
It shows he's kind of got control of himself and his ambitions.
That's actually not why.
Running for president, certainly, holding that office, really holding any political office, but especially those big ones, destroys your family.
You don't get to see your family.
You're lambasted in the press.
Lies and calumny and all sorts of awful things are told about you.
Certain things from your past that you don't want to cut.
Skeletons come out of the closet.
It opens you up to constant assault by just absolute villains.
Maybe they'll find some skeletons in your closet.
Or they'll just make it up.
They'll just completely fabricate things as they do all the time with everybody who runs for that high office.
It entails grave responsibility for the safety and security of your fellow countrymen.
It ages you dramatically.
It depletes your wealth.
Or it should.
You're not supposed to make money in office.
And there are a lot of watchdogs.
And you make money maybe after office if you're Barack Obama or Bill Clinton or somebody.
But it depletes your wealth.
And it obliterates your privacy.
It's just a terrible thing.
It's a terrible, awful burden to do that.
If somebody is eager to forfeit all of those things, he's probably not the man for the job.
If somebody's eager to do it, he would have to be psychotic.
Why would you want to do it when you could live in private life and have a good life?
If you have your life in order, and you've got your Mount Vernon, and you've got your Martha Washington, and you've got your private business, and your business is ideally run out of your home, and you've just got your life in a nice balance, why would you want to sacrifice all of that for a thankless job that will have you pilloried, keep you away from your family, and losing money?
You'd have to be insane.
But a lot of people are insane, and they want to do it, because they want fame and they want power.
And they want to use it for grift and make money afterwards, like the Clintons.
Lots of politicians start running for office right after college or law school in their 20s or 30s.
Running for office is not honorable in and of itself.
It can be honorable.
What George Washington did was honorable and admirable.
The country would have fallen apart if he had not agreed to be the first president.
I'm pretty convinced of that.
It just would have disintegrated.
And all of the hard-fought victories of the Revolutionary War would have been for nothing.
And the country might have ended up worse than it was before.
Or the British would have just invaded again as they did in 1812.
It's not admirable in and of itself.
Bill Clinton is not George Washington.
He's just a crass politician who started running for office in his own mind probably at the age of three and in reality after law school.
Some of the greatest politicians in our history have been citizen legislators.
You know, they've been people who have lives, who have done things in their life and have a nice farm at Mount Vernon and cute little old Martha sitting there stitching up American flags or whatever she was doing and they decide that for the good of their country and because they feel that it's virtuous and it's their duty to help their country, they'll go and do a stint and then they'll go back home and hang out with Martha.
When lifelong politicians all start pilloring a citizen legislator or a citizen executive or one of the guys who's actually doing that, when all these guys who have been in politics since they were, you know, 22, they ran for elective office the first time, they've been in D.C. that whole time, when those guys start pilloring people who are following the model of living a normal life and then doing your duty for the country for a little bit, that's usually a sign that that citizen legislator or executive is the right man for the job.
Important things to consider these days.
Okay, that's our show.
I am heading out, like, right now to get on a plane.
I'm going to Alabama.
I'll be speaking at the Alabama Policy Institute in Mobile tomorrow night.
And that should be a lot of fun by the USS Alabama.
So if you're in the neighborhood, go get a ticket at Alabama Policy Institute.
and then I'll be speaking at Trump University on Thursday.
It's the University of Pennsylvania.
It's his alma mater, but I refer to it exclusively as Trump University.
I think they appreciate that.
And it'll be at Huntsman Hall.
I actually worked for John Huntsman.
We're going to be at the Republican epicenter of the Northeast.
It's going to be, I'll be speaking there on reasons to vote for Donald Trump in John Huntsman Hall John Huntsman is...
John Huntsman Jr.
is the current ambassador to Russia, so I'll probably collude with the Russians a little bit.
And we'll be at Trump University, so come on out if you're there, and it should be a pretty fun talk.
The talk is on reasons to vote for Trump.
I promise it will be quite different than my book.
And then we'll keep the shows going all week.
We've got some great guests this week.
Get your mailbag questions in.
I'm Michael Knowles.
This is The Michael Knowles Show.
I'll see you tomorrow.
The Michael Knowles Show is a Daily Wire Forward Publishing production.
