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Sept. 9, 2019 - The Michael Knowles Show

48:14

Ep. 411 - Vacationing With The Taliban

Trump scraps plans to meet with the Taliban at Camp David days before 9/11. Then, the President gets another completely meaningless primary challenger. And Pete Buttigieg remains a big jerk. Date: 09-09-2019 Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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	The good news is President Trump scrapped plans this weekend to hold secret talks with the Taliban at Camp David just days before 9-11.
	The bad news is President Trump had previously made plans to negotiate with the Taliban at Camp David just days before 9-11.
	We will examine foreign policy follies from Bill Clinton to Donald Trump.
	Then...
	As partisans on the left and right jump in to attack President Trump, as Trump gets a new primary challenger in the Republican Party, we will agree with his credits with one caveat.
	President Trump is the worst president in recent history, except for all of the other ones.
	All that and more.
	I'm Michael Knowles and this is the Michael Knowles Show.
	Winston Churchill said it of democracy.
	He said, democracy is the worst form of government except for all the other ones that have been tried.
	President Trump, he is the absolute worst president we've had in recent history, except for every single other one.
	And we will get to that in one second, particularly with this Taliban blow up, a totally self-inflicted wound.
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	Use the promo code MKS. All right, now we'll talk about less important matters like negotiations with the Taliban at Camp David, the presidential retreat.
	President Trump, we got word a couple days ago, actually I think it was yesterday morning the story broke, President Trump canceled what were secret talks planned with the Taliban just days before the 18th anniversary of 9-11.
	And he does deserve credit for canceling those talks, but he does deserve some criticism for planning the talks in the first place.
	So what happened?
	President Trump tweeted about this.
	He explained the entire situation.
	He tweeted out, quote, unbeknownst to almost everyone, the major Taliban leaders and separately the president of Afghanistan were going to secretly meet with me at Camp David on Sunday.
	They were coming to the United States tonight.
	Unfortunately, in order to build false leverage, they admitted to an attack in Kabul that killed one of our great, great soldiers and 11 other people.
	I immediately canceled the meeting and called off peace negotiations.
	What kind of people would kill so many in order to seemingly strengthen their bargaining position?
	They didn't.
	They only made it worse.
	If they cannot agree to a ceasefire during these very important peace talks and would even kill 12 innocent people, then they probably don't have the power to negotiate a meaningful agreement anyway.
	That's the key.
	They probably don't have the power to negotiate a meaningful agreement anyway.
	He concludes, how many more decades are they willing to fight?
	That's the question.
	Now, just this tweet shows you President Trump's political acumen, which is, he is blaming a Taliban attack that killed one of our soldiers.
	It just happened last week.
	He's blaming that attack for calling off the peace negotiations.
	The Taliban have been killing our soldiers for 20 years.
	There's nothing new about this attack.
	So the question is, is President Trump responding to an attack or is he using the attack as an excuse to get out of the meetings?
	I think it's the latter.
	I think it's pretty clear that it's the latter.
	But I think it's wise for him to do that.
	It's a perfectly good way for him to get out of having these meetings.
	The decision to disinvite them was a good meeting.
	It shows reportedly a divide in the Trump administration between Mike Pompeo over at State Department and John Bolton, who is the national security advisor.
	We'll get into that in a second, but we, we shouldn't narrow in on why this was such a mistake in the first place.
	Why it was such a mistake to invite them.
	The Taliban are the worst people on earth.
	They should all be put to death as quickly as possible.
	Every last one of them.
	The only way that I could get behind this meeting happening is if Trump invited them all into a room and then personally shivved every single one of them.
	They are little devils, all of whom who should be executed by the United States.
	Of all of the bad actors in the world...
	The Taliban are probably the most unrepentant terrorists out there.
	They worked directly with Osama bin Laden.
	They have the most direct connection of any group in the world to Al-Qaeda and to the 9-11 attacks.
	Most egregiously of all, these talks were scheduled just days before the anniversary of 9-11.
	It's almost cartoonish how bad the timing was.
	This was politically potentially a disastrous situation.
	Even if the talks had gone well, even if they somehow got everyone in the room, the president of, of Afghanistan and the Taliban and the president of the United States, and they said, okay, we're going to stop the war in Afghanistan.
	We've come to this political solution.
	Even then it looks bad because you were inviting people who were responsible for 9/11 to U.S. soil, to the presidential retreat.
	This is as prestigious a place as there is in the entire country, just days before 9-11.
	It just looks like a victory for them.
	It looks like they're gloating.
	Absolutely terrible.
	And by the way, the talks wouldn't have gone well.
	They wouldn't have gone well, as President Trump concludes in his tweets, because there is no evidence whatsoever that the Taliban can negotiate in good faith.
	They are demons, they are devils, and they should all be wiped off of the earth.
	Only God can judge, but the United States can arrange the meeting, and we have done that with the Taliban, and we should do that with the Taliban.
	They do not have any redeeming qualities.
	I don't know how to put too fine a point on it.
	People don't know this, though.
	People don't know a lot about the Taliban.
	They know a lot about ISIS. They know a lot about Al-Qaeda.
	ISIS spun off of Al-Qaeda.
	Al-Qaeda was harbored by the Taliban.
	But I've found even in the 19 years or 18 years since the invasion of Afghanistan, people don't really know a lot about the Taliban itself.
	Who are the Taliban?
	The Taliban are a terrorist group that took over Afghanistan in the mid-90s.
	After they took over, everything got even worse.
	You'd think things couldn't get worse in Afghanistan.
	They did.
	Infant mortality in Afghanistan rose to the highest level in the world.
	A quarter of all Afghanis died before the age of five under the Taliban.
	They committed war crimes with impunity.
	They stole U.N. food supplies.
	In just one case, they stole UN food supplies from 160,000 hungry and starving people, quote, for political and military weapons as a weapon.
	They have run sex slave networks.
	They would abduct their own people.
	They would sell them into sex slaves to help prop up their regime or their pseudo regime.
	They instituted strict Shri law that flogged women for being seen with men in public who were not their own relatives.
	The Taliban have accounted for 80% of civilian casualties in Afghanistan in recent years.
	Taliban murdered aid workers, murdered journalists.
	They harbored, helped, and supported, and fought alongside Osama bin Laden before, during, and after the 9-11 attack.
	They are the worst people on earth.
	Now, how do we deal with them?
	Because all of that, you can say everything that's true about these little devils, the Taliban...
	But the question that President Trump is trying to solve is the political question.
	We've been in Afghanistan now for 18 years.
	How much longer are we going to stay there?
	How do we get out?
	What is the resolution of this conflict?
	There is a lot of misinformation, a lot of bad common sense going around.
	We'll get into what it really looks like in Afghanistan, what a future looks like there, how we could ever come to some terms with the Taliban, but...
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	Type in Knowles, K-N-W-L-E-S. That is Stamps.com, and then you enter Knowles, K-N-W-L-E-S. So what do you do about Afghanistan?
	There is a common refrain, a common canard out there that Afghanistan is unconquerable.
	You hear this on the left, you hear it in the center, you hear it on the right.
	It's folly to go into Afghanistan.
	It's unconquerable.
	No one's ever conquered Afghanistan.
	That's just simply not true.
	That is unhistorical.
	It's what happens when people don't study history for a long time.
	Of course Afghanistan is conquerable.
	Many people have conquered Afghanistan over history.
	The Taliban conquered Afghanistan just 25 years ago.
	You certainly can conquer Afghanistan, but two, and now it's looking like three groups have failed to conquer Afghanistan very conspicuously.
	The English, the Soviets, and probably the Americans.
	The English failed to conquer Afghanistan in the 19th century.
	The Soviets failed to conquer Afghanistan in the 20th century.
	And the Americans, it looks like, have failed to conquer Afghanistan in the 21st century.
	We didn't fail to conquer Afghanistan because it's unconquerable.
	It's not like we lost a war.
	We failed to conquer Afghanistan because we don't want to conquer it.
	Of all those three, the only ones who really wanted to conquer it were the Soviets, and even then, they were just fighting a proxy war in the Cold War with the Americans.
	We don't want it.
	We don't want Afghanistan to be the 51st state.
	We don't want Puerto Rico to be the 51st state.
	We might want Greenland to be the 51st state.
	We'll have to see how those go.
	That's the art of the deal.
	If we want to invite anyone to Camp David for peace negotiations, we should probably invite the Prime Minister of Denmark so we can talk about how we're taking Greenland from them.
	That's a point for another day.
	We don't want Afghanistan.
	We don't want to bring it in.
	We don't want to build a country there.
	We don't want to bring our country there.
	So what do you do about it?
	Because we have been in Afghanistan for a long time.
	Now we recognize the head of state in Afghanistan.
	His name is Ashraf Ghani.
	He's the head of Afghanistan, but is he really?
	The Taliban is coming back and reconquering territory.
	And the Taliban sure doesn't recognize him.
	So what do we do?
	Certainly we should not be in direct official talks on U.S. soil with the Taliban.
	It just doesn't make any sense because we don't recognize the Taliban as the legitimate government of Afghanistan.
	Now look, I'm all for realpolitik.
	We can negotiate with anybody.
	As long as it serves our interests and gets our troops home and makes us safer, we'll negotiate with anybody.
	That's fine.
	I'm not saying we need to play by the Marquess of Queensbury rules here.
	Statecraft and diplomacy are a very ugly thing.
	Or they can be ugly.
	But it's hard to see the upside here.
	What's the upside of negotiating with the Taliban on U.S. soil?
	What's the upside to negotiating with the Taliban at the presidential retreat?
	I guess you couldn't do it at the White House.
	You'd probably see the Taliban walking down the street on 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue.
	They're walking up.
	You'd probably get some press about that.
	But you're going to get press even if they go to Camp David.
	Direct negotiation with the Taliban on U.S. soil directly undermines 20 years of American war efforts.
	It undercuts our actual national policy, which is to recognize the leader of Afghanistan as Ghani, And it irritates everybody in the country.
	Left, right, and center, everyone is irritated that we would have these despicable, disgusting devils, all of whom should be killed and burned in hell, the Taliban, on U.S. soil, days before the 18th anniversary of 9-11, in which they were complicit.
	Trump realized this and he called it off.
	Good.
	I'm glad to hear it.
	What does this tell us about the Trump administration?
	The political significance that's being reported on now, so take it with a grain of salt, but this does ring true, is that this is a fight between the State Department and John Bolton.
	It's a fight between Mike Pompeo and John Bolton, who is the national security advisor.
	The State Department generally has a kind of reputation for being more liberal and preferring diplomacy and politics.
	John Bolton has a reputation for wanting to bomb everyone who's ever looked at him cross in the history of his life.
	Pompeo reportedly wanted the talks.
	Bolton did not want the talks.
	I'm with Bolton on this, if the reporting is correct.
	I'm not against talks generally.
	There was a big upside to the talks with Kim Jong-un, and I supported those talks with Kim Jong-un, and I continue to support the Trump outreach to North Korea.
	I pointed that out at the time.
	But there was no upside to the Taliban talks.
	So it was good on the president to call them off.
	You know, he wants to get out of Afghanistan.
	We all want to get out of Afghanistan.
	But President Trump needs to be very careful not to make the mistakes of Barack Obama, which is being so excited about getting out of Afghanistan that you make mistakes and you bog us down in Afghanistan even longer.
	That's what Obama did.
	When you negotiate from weakness, when you give up too much leverage, you put yourself in a more dangerous position than you were in the first place.
	Fortunately, President Trump woke up to that.
	It seems that he sided with John Bolton, which is a very good idea.
	This is the general theme here, though.
	You know, democracy is the worst form of government, except for all of the others that have been tried.
	President Trump, who we can criticize when he does wrong.
	You know, we've criticized him a few times.
	He made a few missteps.
	You can say, you can go out there, believe the mainstream media narrative, and you can say President Trump is the worst president in recent memory, except for all of the other ones that we've tried.
	That holds for the presidential candidates running against him in the Democratic Party.
	That holds for his opponents in the Republican Party who are trying to primary him.
	It's a joke, but they're still trying to do it.
	And that holds even for past presidents.
	Trump has made some mistakes.
	Fortunately, in this case, he corrected that mistake before it actually occurred.
	But overall, it seems like he's doing a pretty decent job.
	You don't just need to take my word for it here.
	You can even listen to James Mattis who is Mad Dog Mattis, former Secretary of Defense, widely admired by the country on both sides of the aisle.
	He is in some ways defending Trump here and he's criticizing Barack Obama because American policy in the Middle East is very, very complicated.
	As Dr.
	Johnson said, all shallows are clear.
	We'll see.
	There's a bombshell new book that Mattis has dropped.
	The left was hoping for a bombshell book savaging the Trump administration.
	What they got was exactly the opposite.
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	So don't take my word for it that it's not just President Trump bungling the Middle East.
	These problems started a long time ago.
	President Trump inherited a lot of problems.
	He's trying to resolve what is basically America's longest running conflict.
	Secretary of Defense James Mattis has this new memoir out, and it's getting played because he's attacking Obama in it.
	He's not attacking President Trump.
	And here's Mattis explaining why he won't attack President Trump.
	I prefer having parted from the administration over matters of policy, a disagreement.
	I laid those out in the letter.
	I think that what I now occupy are what I call the cheap seats.
	I'm not responsible, so I can sit on the outside.
	And frankly, it frustrates me sometimes to see people who speak so authoritatively when they don't know the back-channel things going on and when they have no responsibility for the outcome.
	So, the French call it a devoir de reserve, Christiane, where you have a duty to be quiet.
	The President, the Secretary of State, the Secretary of Defense, they have big responsibilities right now.
	And I don't believe that I add anything to it by representing contrary views or something like this.
	There'll come a time when it's right for me to talk about strategy and policy.
	When might that happen?
	I will know it when I see it.
	But will it be before the next election?
	I can't say that.
	I love Mattis.
	The guy is just so in control of himself.
	Don't forget, Mattis was built up by President Trump as this great, incredible guy.
	Then Trump started attacking Mattis.
	He started going after him once Mattis left as Secretary of Defense.
	And Mattis, just as a class act, the guy holds himself with such Dignity.
	There are some people in politics who hold themselves with the pretense of dignity.
	They pretend to have class.
	Mattis really does seem like the real deal.
	He says, I just don't think I should be attacking the sitting president from the cheap seats.
	He says, well, when will you?
	I'll know it when I see it.
	Well, will it be before 2020?
	No.
	I'm not at liberty to discuss that.
	I'm not going to give it to you, Christiane Amanpour, who Drew calls Christiane Amanpour journalist on CNN. He's just not going to give it to them, and he's exactly right not to.
	So he won't hit Trump.
	This is the right decision.
	I think it is so despicable when former administration staffers start attacking their boss.
	You know, in Dante, in Hell, he writes Dante's Inferno.
	He divides up hell between all the different sins and all the different sinners.
	And then as Dante is going down through hell on his way to purgatory and then up to heaven, he's going down and he meets and he speaks to all of the different sinners.
	So you have sins of the flesh, you know, early on, sins like lust, that sort of thing.
	And then as you get lower, you get worse and worse sins, more evil sins, more wicked sins.
	And at the very bottom, you have fraud and deception.
	People who are traitors at the very bottom.
	And in the lowest circle of hell are those people who betray their benefactors.
	They are the ones who are in the three-headed mouth of Satan being chomped down for eternity.
	Judas, Brutus, and Cassius.
	Those who betray Christ, those who betray Caesar.
	Being chomped to death.
	That is in Dante's mind, in the Christian imagination, the Christian understanding, the worst sort of sin in hell.
	That is what you see regularly in politics.
	It tells you a lot about politics, that that is the main thing.
	You go and you work for a guy and then you immediately leave and start trashing him and stab him in the back.
	I remember this during the Bush II administration.
	Scott McClellan was press secretary.
	The minute he left, he goes out and he writes a tell-all memoir about how terrible Bush was.
	And this has happened a lot in the Trump administration.
	People leave and they stab him in the back.
	Omarosa did that.
	I actually like Anthony Scaramucci, but he did exactly the same thing.
	Other people have left the administration, stabbed the guy in the back, and Mattis is not going to do that.
	Mattis is not going to debase himself to put himself in the lowest circle of hell.
	Very admirable.
	He will, however, hit Barack Obama because what Mattis is talking about in that interview is he does have a responsibility to give his thoughts on strategy.
	This is a dignified guy.
	He's spent a lot of time in the U.S. military.
	He's a very learned guy.
	They called him a monk warrior, I think.
	He's never got married.
	He would just read a lot of books and go fight and kill people.
	So there is a time when he needs to give his thought on strategy, but he's not going to do it to the sitting president.
	He will hit Barack Obama.
	He just came out and savaged Barack Obama's handling of Iran, specifically something we didn't know about, an Iranian plot to bomb a cafe in Washington, D.C. So, here's Mattis' account of it.
	He said that there was a plot backed by Iran to bomb a cafe in Washington, D.C. And after this was foiled, Eric Holder, the Attorney General, and Robert Mueller.
	Yes, that guy.
	You remember Robert Mueller of the Mueller investigation.
	He was FBI director.
	They came out, they held a press conference, and they treated it as a law enforcement matter.
	Okay, we caught these criminals who tried to bomb a cafe.
	They didn't treat it as a matter of statecraft, of foreign policy, even though it was backed by Iran.
	And here is Mattis' account from the book.
	He says, quote, had the bomb gone off, I sensed that only Iran's impression of America's impotence could have led them to risk such an act within a couple miles of the White House, absent one fundamental mistake.
	The terrorists had engaged an undercover DEA agent in an attempt to smuggle the bomb.
	The Iranians would have pulled off this devastating attack.
	Had that bomb exploded, it would have changed history.
	Why did the Obama administration play down this attack?
	Because they were desperate for the Iran deal.
	They were negotiating from a position of weakness.
	They totally misjudged America's role in the world and our role in relation to our adversaries abroad.
	Mattis goes on.
	He says, quote...
	In my military judgment, America had undertaken a poorly calculated long-shot gamble.
	He's talking about the Iran deal.
	At the same time, the administration was lecturing our Arab friends that they had tried to accommodate Iran as if it were a moderate neighbor in the region and not an enemy committed to their destruction.
	That is a major, devastating mistake.
	So while everybody today is going and criticizing President Trump for attempting to hold these Taliban negotiations, by the way, I'm one of the people criticizing him for that.
	Keep this in mind.
	You've got to keep the context in mind.
	Politics is all about context.
	You're coming off the heels of a presidential administration that downplayed what could have been potentially the deadliest attack in the United States, the most significant attack in the United States, since September 11th.
	And they did that because of their own bungled, idiotic view of foreign policy.
	Now, President, or rather, James Mattis goes on to defend President Trump again.
	And you'll see in just the way that Democratic strategists, different candidates are talking about the left and the right right now, you see the context of all of this.
	We are in extraordinarily trying political times abroad and with trying political times at home.
	And in this, President Trump, with all his warts, I think comes out as the least bad option Which makes him, by definition, the best option.
	We'll get to that in a second.
	We'll get to how politics is complicated.
	We'll get to what that means for 2020.
	First, I've got to say goodbye to Facebook and YouTube.
	Head on over to dailywire.com.
	What do you get?
	You get me, you get the Andrew Klavan show, you get the Ben Shapiro show, you get the Matt Walsh show, you get to ask questions in the mailbag.
	That's coming up on Thursday.
	You get Another Kingdom, which is, by the way, that's coming out pretty soon.
	We're working on season three of Another Kingdom.
	You get all of it.
	And you get the Leftist Tears Tumblr.
	Important every single day as this 2020 election goes onward.
	Make sure to get that Tumblr or you will drown.
	Go to dailywire.com.
	We'll be right back.
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	Mattis doesn't only go out and say, I'm not going to criticize Trump.
	He doesn't only go out and say, I'm going to assail the Obama administration for their idiocy, but he actually defends President Trump against some attacks that he judges unfair and that I judge unfair on MSNBC, specifically attacks that President Trump has undermined NATO since his inauguration.
	In the last two and a half years, we've seen our alliances weakened in NATO, certainly in Asia and in Europe.
	You know, Andrea, if you take a look at current events, you can always see the tensions, because that's what grabs your attention, is the tensions in those alliances.
	However, right now, you see a NATO that for, I think we're into the fourth straight year or fifth straight year of the nations, almost all of them increasing their defense budget.
	So I could say quantitatively, NATO's actually stronger today.
	Now, there are political tensions.
	Those tensions have always been there in NATO, where the American presidents, I remember all the way back to President Clinton when I became aware of this issue, President Clinton, President Bush, President Obama, all saying the same thing President Trump is, you've got to pay more.
	The way I carried the message to NATO when I first went there as a secretary of defense was, I've sat in this room and you've heard this message before, but the American people are saying they will not care more about your children's future than you care.
	You've got to pay your fair share.
	Absolutely right.
	And this is the key here.
	Not just to defend Trump, though I think he has been very unfairly attacked on his handling of NATO. He has achieved long-standing U.S. goals with regard to NATO. By taking a tough line on it, he's done everything exactly right on NATO and the attacks on his handling of NATO in particular are completely unfair.
	But I actually don't, that's sort of secondary in Mattis' remarks.
	What I'm interested in is he says that he's heard these kind of statements before.
	He's given these kind of statements to NATO before.
	Certainly since the Clinton administration we've heard this.
	And that's the issue.
	When it comes to foreign policy, presidents come and go and the foreign policy challenges remain the same and the national interests of different countries tend to remain the same and they tend to supersede the individual politicians and personalities who are in there.
	So when it comes to Afghanistan, you can't just blame Trump.
	You can't just blame Obama.
	You can't just blame Bush who invaded Afghanistan.
	You can't even just blame Clinton.
	You can't just blame Bush 1 or Reagan.
	These are problems that have spanned decades and decades and centuries and centuries.
	You know, in the United States, who are we going to blame for this 18-year war we've had in Afghanistan, longest U.S. conflict in history just about?
	Bush invaded, sure.
	Obama said he was going to end those wars.
	He didn't end those wars.
	He expanded that war in Afghanistan.
	Trump said he was going to end the war.
	He hasn't managed to do that yet.
	Clinton doesn't get off the hook, though.
	Bill Clinton is the one who failed to take action against Osama bin Laden, who then successfully launched an attack on September 11th, which dragged us back into that war in Afghanistan, because when it comes to war, your opponents have a say, too.
	If Clinton or Bush had responded to the bombing of the USS Cole, By Bin Laden.
	If Clinton had responded forcefully to the first World Trade Center bombing in 1993, the world might look very different today.
	And our strategy in Afghanistan might look very different today as well.
	So if you're going to attack a Trump on this, that's fine.
	But make sure you give him his due and you give the correct criticism to his predecessors as well.
	He may be the worst president that we've had in recent memory.
	But what about all the other ones?
	He's...
	It also, this kind of criticism that's coming in, when you look at his opponents on the left and the right, it does seem they're quite a lot worse.
	I mean, even David Axelrod, who was the chief strategist for Barack Obama, is coming out against Joe Biden.
	He's coming out against the Democratic frontrunner.
	He sent out a tweet over the weekend.
	He said, quote, It's one thing to have a well-earned reputation for goofy harmless gaffes.
	It's another, if you serially distort your own record, Joe Biden is in danger of creating a more damaging meme.
	This was directly in response to Joe Biden lying about his record on the Iraq war.
	Kind of like John Kerry said, I was against the war before I was for the war.
	Joe Biden is now saying he never really supported the Iraq war.
	The Bush administration lied to him about the Iraq war and what it was about, and he didn't really mean it, and he's just lying.
	He's lying about his support for the Iraq war.
	This is what I really like about David Axelrod.
	He is a really good political analyst because he's not a hack.
	He was a hack for much of his career.
	But then when he turned into an analyst, he really became a serious analyst.
	And this is a big issue for Biden, which I've been calling for weeks and weeks now.
	I said it's not about the little lies.
	It's not about the sort of things that politicians say to make people like them, to make them seem more sympathetic.
	It's not about the glad handing.
	It's not about the kisses on the forehead.
	What it's about are the pathological lies.
	What it's about are the serious lies.
	You know, Joe Biden lied about the death of his wife and daughter.
	Tragic death of his wife and daughter.
	He baselessly smeared the other driver involved in that car accident in 1972 of being a drunk.
	The police found the guy totally innocent.
	The death haunted that driver until 1999 when he himself died.
	And then immediately afterward, Biden smeared him as a drunk.
	I mean, he's willing to tell these really deep lies.
	And so goofy Uncle Joe who can't remember the details, that's one thing.
	He can get past that in a campaign.
	But Joe Biden, who's willing to tell all of these really serious, vicious, awful, needless lies, that's a different thing.
	So you're going to run against President Trump because he has a unique relationship with the truth, let's call it.
	He exaggerates his crowd sizes at his inauguration.
	Okay, who cares?
	If you're going to run against him on that, on the question of lying and honesty and integrity, you probably should be honest yourself.
	And Joe Biden simply is not.
	And David Axelrod calls it out perfectly.
	You know, even the most allegedly nice, moderate, Midwestern, Christian, Democratic candidate, Pete Buttigieg, is a radical.
	He's unlikable when it comes down to it compared to President Trump.
	Here is Buttigieg, who only exists, his entire raison d'etre is to troll actual Christians by saying, hmm, I'm more of a Christian than you, hmm.
	Actually, Christianity is the opposite of what you think it is.
	I'm a real Christian.
	I'm not one of those Christians.
	He's now defending post-birth abortion.
	Not just abortion.
	Not just abortion until the point of birth.
	Actually, abortion after birth as both biblical and Christian.
	Here he is on the radio show The Breakfast Club.
	They hold everybody in line with this one piece of doctrine about abortion, which is obviously a tough issue for a lot of people to think through morally.
	Then again, there's a lot of parts of the Bible that talk about how life begins with breath.
	And so even that is something that we can interpret differently.
	I'm pro-choice.
	Me too.
	But I think no matter where you think about the kind of cosmic question of how life begins, most Americans can get on the board with the idea of, all right, I might draw the line here, you might draw the line there, but the most important thing is the person who should be drawing the line is the woman making the decision.
	Absolutely.
	And I think that if you're a man who's against abortion, you haven't gotten the wrong woman pregnant.
	I'm just saying, we've had some slip-ups.
	I've had a few.
	There he is.
	There's the Christian candidate, Pete Buttigieg.
	Pete Buttigieg is the worst kind of heretic.
	Pete Buttigieg is the worst kind of anti-Christian because he just totally perverts and distorts and inverses the very gospel message.
	He says there's some language in the Bible about life having a relation to breath, which of course there is.
	I mean, in the very beginning, God creates the world on his own breath, right?
	And he creates on his breath.
	He creates the world, and how does he create the world?
	By speaking it through the word, which is the incarnate God.
	Here are some other lines, just to clarify if Pete Buttigieg is watching.
	God created man in his image.
	In the divine image, he created him.
	Male and female, he created them.
	The act of creating human beings is to create them in God's image.
	In Genesis, be fruitful and multiply.
	Not be fruitful and then slaughter the baby before it's born.
	I have brought forth a man with the help of the Lord.
	Genesis, truly children are a gift from the Lord.
	The fruit of the womb is a reward.
	Doesn't sound very pro-abortion to me.
	The prophet Amos condemns the Ammonites.
	Quote, because they ripped open expectant mothers in Gilead exactly in the way that Pete Buttigieg is encouraging people to do.
	In the Psalms, Psalm 139, you knit me in my mother's womb, nor was my frame unknown to you when I was made in secret.
	Psalm 22, you have been my guide since I was first formed.
	From my mother's womb, you are my God, until Pete Buttigieg rips me apart with forceps and a vacuum.
	God, from my mother's womb, had set me apart and called me from his grace.
	St.
	Paul writing to the Galatians.
	I could go on and on and on.
	I'm actually just quoting different lines compiled by Fr.
	Frank Pavone, who's a terrific guy, head of Priests for Life.
	You can just Google his article on this.
	So many biblical references, but Pete Buttigieg doesn't care about that because he doesn't care about the gospel because he's a fake Christian and an anti-Christian, the worst kind of heretic, a terrible radical, and an awful jerk, which I have been calling for a long time.
	I did a whole episode about how Pete Buttigieg is such a jerk.
	These are the guys who say that they have some kind of moral credibility to criticize Trump.
	Because Trump has been married multiple times and he's slept with a lot of women, cheated on his wife.
	Not defending any of those things.
	Those are all terrible things.
	Politics requires context, though.
	Look at Pete Buttigieg, perverting the very word of God itself to justify slaughtering babies.
	How absolutely despicable.
	You know, he's not a member, it seems, of any sort of formally constituted church, so he can't be excommunicated, but he certainly should be.
	Buttigieg.
	Those are the guys to the left of Trump.
	Those are the nice guys to the left of Trump.
	I didn't even get into the guys who are considered the actual sort of mean, crueler, radical types.
	How about Trump's challengers to the right?
	You know, President Trump now has.
	This is big news today.
	He has a new primary challenger in the Republican Party.
	This one, the most ridiculous one yet.
	Mark Sanford, former governor of South Carolina, former congressman from South Carolina's 1st District, and former lover boy who abdicated his office so that he could go cheat on his wife with his mistress in Argentina.
	Here is Mark Sanford making his announcement on Fox News Sunday.
	I think we need to have a conversation on what it means to be a Republican.
	I think that as a Republican Party, we have lost our way.
	And I'd say so on a couple of different fronts.
	I'd say first and sort of the epicenter of where I'm coming from is that we have lost our way on debt and deficit and spending.
	You know, one of the hallmarks of the Republican Party and the conservative movement has always been How much do we spend?
	I mean, it was Milton Friedman's notion of the ultimate measure of government is how much it spends.
	I think as a party, we've lost our way.
	The president has called himself the king of debt, has a familiarity and comfort level with debt that I think is ultimately leading us in the wrong direction.
	We can get into those numbers, but the numbers are astounding.
	Just take, for instance, as a data point, this last debt deal that adds $2 trillion of additional debt to our country.
	Over the next ten years, adds a third of a trillion dollars in new spending, and really there wasn't conversation on that.
	So, I'd say the epicenter of where I'm coming from is we've got to have a national conversation and a Republican conversation on where are we going.
	What an unbelievably misguided announcement.
	What an unbelievable...
	Even if you're...
	I mean, it's absurd that this man is running.
	This man is maybe the biggest laughingstock of politicians in the country.
	He's up there with Rod Blagojevich and a few other disgraced governors.
	But even if he's going to do it, to roll out this campaign and basically say, I'm running for president, vote for me because Trump spends money irresponsibly.
	Who cares if...
	I mean, what he's doing here is he's running a campaign from 2010 in 2019.
	2010, you had the rise of the Tea Party, you had the debt and the deficit as central political issues.
	Mitch Daniels, a guy who I tried to get to run for president, talked about the new red menace, this one consisting of ink, how the debt was the big ticking time bomb.
	I agree with that.
	I think it's a very important issue.
	I was working in politics to try valiantly or as valiantly as we could to fix that problem and everybody failed.
	All those politicians who tried to fix the debt failed.
	Paul Ryan made good attempts to do it and he failed.
	There is no political appetite to fix the debt and to fix the deficit.
	So what do we conclude from this?
	To give up?
	No.
	What I think the smarter people and the wiser observers of politics concluded is that trying this fiscal-only approach Just talk about the debt.
	Just talk about the deficits.
	Don't talk about anything else.
	One line that a lot of people were using at the time was social truce.
	We're going to forget about the social issues for a second.
	We're going to put that on pause and we're going to fix our debt and deficit.
	That approach is not workable.
	That approach is fundamentally misguided.
	What we learned from that failure is that we need to fix the culture in order to fix the fiscal situation.
	The first problem is cultural.
	Andrew Breitbart called it.
	Politics is down from culture and what we know from Russell Kirk and many others is that culture is down from religion.
	This guy, Mark Sanford, and a lot of other old guard establishment types did not get the memo and they're still running on the same tired platitudes.
	The other reason that this is ridiculous, notice, I'd like to dismantle Mark Sanford's candidacy simply on the policy arguments that he's making, simply on the way that he's waging it.
	There's also the character question, which is that this guy has absolutely no credibility.
	He's running a campaign.
	Based on responsibility, right?
	That's basically what he's saying.
	President Trump has been irresponsible in office, so elect me and I will be more responsible.
	Elect me, Mark Sanford, the guy who literally stopped showing up for work for weeks and then lied about where he was.
	People said that he was on the Appalachian Trail.
	Actually though, I, Mark Sanford, went all the way to freaking Argentina to cheat on my wife with my mistress in South America.
	Vote for me.
	Responsibility.
	Sanford 2020.
	Are you kidding me?
	He is cartoonishly irresponsible, one of the least responsible politicians in recent history.
	Who are Trump's other challengers?
	Joe Walsh.
	Joe Walsh is running.
	He's a one-term congressman.
	He was kind of a Tea Party guy.
	One of the most bombastic personalities in that era of politics.
	He's running because Trump is too mean in his tweets.
	Joe Walsh has sent far, far more offensive tweets than President Trump.
	Joe Walsh has been far, far Trumpier even than Trump.
	And now he's running and saying, vote for me because I'm not as Trumpy as Trump.
	As of five minutes ago, before that time, I was much more Trumpy.
	No credibility at all.
	And then the other guy running is Bill Weld, who's a liberal Republican, totally liberal Northeastern Republican, who is going nowhere.
	He ran as the vice presidential candidate on the Libertarian ticket in 2016.
	He's the other guy.
	These are the jokers?
	I get it.
	I get the argument when you say, President Trump has done bad things.
	Okay.
	Yeah, he's done a few things I disagree with.
	Called him out for it.
	Yeah, yeah, that's why we need to elect Mark Sanford instead.
	What on earth are you talking about?
	And I don't think this is really going to matter because a number of states are canceling primaries right now and the anti-Trump forces, the guys trying to run guys like Mark Sanford and Joe Walsh and Bill Weld are furious about this.
	Bill Kristol, whom personally I still like, but he's really lost it on this Trump thing.
	He is...
	Shocked, offended, terrified.
	He's comparing this to, you know, tin pot dictatorships and the banana republics.
	This is all going around on Twitter because states are canceling certain primaries for the GOP. This has all happened before.
	This has happened many times before.
	Arizona didn't hold a Democratic primary in 2012.
	Why?
	Because Barack Obama was going to do it.
	1996, Arizona didn't hold a primary in the Democratic Party because Bill Clinton was already the president.
	Kansas didn't have a Democratic primary in 1996.
	And South Carolina didn't have a Republican primary in 1984 when Reagan was running for re-election or in 2004 when Bush was seeking a second term.
	South Carolina also skipped in 96 and 2012 on the Democratic side.
	And in 1992 when there actually was a really serious primary challenge, not a Mark Sanford primary challenge, again an actual one between Pat Buchanan and George H.W. Bush, several states that year Skipped the Republican primaries.
	Buchanan didn't whine about it.
	Bush won it fair and square.
	This is totally normal.
	It's happened many times before.
	All of it requires context.
	Even when you're talking about bringing the Taliban on vacation with you to Camp David, which is egregious, and I'm glad it didn't happen.
	When you're talking about wars in Afghanistan, when you're talking about Trump's personal behavior, it's just this attitude that we have in this country now.
	We can so clearly see everyone else's faults But it's very difficult to see our own faults.
	We judge everybody else on their actions.
	We judge ourselves on our intentions.
	We're plucking the little speck of dust out of our neighbor's eye while we have a giant plank in our own eyes.
	Again, just like the fiscal situation, just like The military problems that we've had overseas and foreign policy.
	This is ultimately a cultural problem.
	What do we want as a people?
	What sort of people do we want to be?
	You can't blame that on your politicians.
	They are a reflection of you.
	You've got to fix that in yourselves.
	Can we fix it in ourselves?
	That's ultimately the question that's going to be on the ballot in 2020.
	That's our show.
	Tune in tomorrow.
	In the meantime, I'm Michael Knowles.
	This is The Michael Knowles Show.
	I'll see you then.
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