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Oct. 8, 2019 - The Michael Knowles Show

47:29

Ep. 428 - Should We Stay Or Should We Go?

President Trump relocates 50 U.S. troops in Syria, NBC’s Chuck Todd loses his mind, Democrats get caught in more foreign interference hypocrisy, and a hopeful note from Ellen Degeneres. Date: 10-08-2019 Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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	Should we stay in Syria or should we go?
	Should we stay or should we go now?
	If we go, there will be trouble.
	And if we stay, it will be double.
	So come on, let me know, should we stay or should we go?
	We will examine President Trump's decision to relocate U.S. forces in Syria.
	Then, NBC's Chuck Todd loses his mind, what little he had left.
	Democrats get caught in more foreign interference hypocrisy.
	And a hopeful note from Ellen DeGeneres.
	All that and more.
	I'm Michael Knowles, and this is The Michael Knowles Show.
	So much to get to today, but first, let's talk about something really important.
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	My first question today.
	This is just, let me know your answers.
	Let me know in the chat box and on Twitter.
	What should we do in Syria?
	Everybody seems to have a really strong opinion about this, about what President Trump should do with our forces in Syria.
	So just right now, when you think you've got a really strong opinion about this, and you know that you're right, and you know that people who disagree with you are wrong, what should we do in Syria?
	What does anybody know about Syria?
	Could you find Syria on a map?
	I'm not insulting anybody.
	I don't know that I could find Syria on a map.
	People like to think that they have so much more knowledge about foreign policy and the affairs of other nations than they actually do.
	Close your eyes.
	Think about Syria right now.
	Then think about all the countries around Syria.
	Could you name the countries around Syria?
	Where is Turkey?
	Where in relation to Syria is Russia?
	Where is Iran?
	It's very difficult.
	All of this stuff, it seems so simple in the abstract, it's very complicated in the reality of it.
	This Syria decision, which by the way is being completely misreported, or at least misunderstood in the popular conscience, This Syria decision is one of those times where people have a lot more in the way of opinion than they have in the way of knowledge.
	And I would bet you, if you go on, I'm sure, listen, if you're listening to this program, you've got an erudite, you've got a really open-minded way of viewing things.
	But I bet your friends on Twitter don't, your friends on Facebook don't.
	You're going to see people posting all these angry comments and all these strong opinions.
	Probably the stronger opinion Among your friends, the less knowledge they actually have.
	What is the decision?
	A lot of people are saying Trump is pulling out of Syria.
	He's not.
	Trump is not pulling out of Syria.
	Actually, do you know how many troops he's going to be relocating?
	Between 50 and 150 troops.
	Not 50,000, not 5,000, not 500.
	50 to 150 troops.
	Specifically special operators.
	We have 1,000 troops in Syria.
	Not a huge force.
	We have 1,000 troops in Syria.
	He's going to relocate 50 to 150 troops.
	Now, that's not nothing.
	This decision is momentous because Trump is moving those troops to accommodate a Turkish invasion.
	Turkey is going to invade part of northern Syria, and so Trump is moving those U.S. troops to get the troops out of the way.
	Why does it matter that Turkey is invading part of northern Syria?
	I mean, Syria is a complete mess, so who cares if Turkey invades?
	Because Turkey is going to be invading a part of Syria that is specifically controlled by the Kurds.
	And the Kurds are U.S.-allied forces, and they have helped the U.S. fight the war on terror.
	And they've helped the U.S. in Syria.
	And Turkey doesn't like the Kurds.
	Simple enough so far.
	It's getting more complicated, but it's simple enough so far.
	Now it gets a little more complicated because the Kurds, who are controlling this area in northern Syria, currently also control tens of thousands of former ISIS fighters and supporters of ISIS. You have tens of thousands of people in camps and prisons and just areas that they control.
	So if Turkey invades northern Syria, takes over land that is currently controlled by the Kurds, that has a lot of former ISIS fighters in it, that means Turkey is going to be responsible for those ISIS fighters.
	Now you might be asking yourself, why on earth would anybody want to go into these areas with all these former ISIS fighters?
	That doesn't seem like a real prize.
	If I'm looking at real estate, I want to go to Fiji.
	I want to go to Hawaii.
	I don't want to go to some godforsaken sand desert where there are a lot of some of the worst terrorists on earth.
	Why do they want to go in there?
	They want to go in there because Turkey...
	The Kurdistan Workers' Party, which is also known as the PKK. I don't know why.
	I guess in whatever language it's written in, P stands for Kurdistan and K stands for Workers' Party and K stands for Workers' Party.
	I don't know.
	Something like that.
	The Kurdistan Workers' Party is the PKK. Turkey considers the PKK to be a terrorist group and a separatist group, and Turkey has been fighting the Kurdistan Workers' Party for decades.
	And the Kurdistan Workers' Party, unsurprisingly, are allied with the Kurdish forces in Syria.
	Okay.
	Now, we don't really like being put in this situation.
	This is a very difficult situation.
	Why?
	Because the Kurds have been helping us for decades, decades and decades.
	Before September 11th, we had a relationship with the Kurds.
	And they've been very good about the war on terror, and they've been very good at specifically helping us fight ISIS. So we like the Kurds.
	We don't want to abandon the Kurds.
	We don't want Turkey to roll in and massacre the Kurds.
	Also, we have a relationship with Turkey.
	And our relationship with Turkey goes back even further.
	It's very difficult for us to imagine Turkey as some great ally right now, but Turkey is in NATO. Turkey is not just an ally of ours, but they're officially an ally of ours in NATO. Now, when did Turkey enter NATO? It wasn't after 9-11.
	It wasn't just before 9-11.
	This was 1952 they've been in NATO. But what is NATO? What's the purpose of NATO? NATO was formed to fight the Soviet Union in the Cold War.
	The Cold War has been over for decades.
	So what purpose is NATO serving?
	I guess it's to stem Russian aggression into the former Soviet states and Soviet-controlled areas.
	But what sense does this make?
	Now you are beginning to see the problem that we are facing, not just in the Middle East, but in our foreign policy broadly.
	We have two allies who are going to come into conflict with one another in northern Syria.
	The Kurds, who have been wearing the American flag and fighting alongside us against ISIS, and Turkey, which we don't really like very much, and they're in many ways very adversarial to us, but they've been officially a NATO ally since the 1950s, since the early 1950s.
	And NATO might be outdated and there might not be any reason to have NATO in the first place.
	All of that put together, which do we privilege?
	The Kurds or Turkey?
	The Kurds are better allies.
	Turkey is a more official ally.
	And the sad fact of all of this is, the United States does not have permanent or even enduring relationships with sub-state entities.
	The Kurds are not a nation.
	There's no nation of Kurdistan.
	There's no state, rather, is what I meant to say.
	There's no official state in the nation-state system, in the United Nations, in the Westphalian system.
	There's no state called Kurdistan.
	There is a state called Turkey.
	And so we privilege our alliance with Turkey over our relationship with the Kurds, who are certainly a coherent group of people, but they are not a nation-state.
	This gets to the biggest debate of the Trump era.
	You can almost forget all of those details.
	I mean, it's important context to have.
	This gets to the biggest debate of the Trump era.
	It's largely what the 2016 election was about.
	It's largely what the 2020 election is going to be about.
	It's a question much larger than Trump or one or two elections.
	This is a question that will define the next 100 to 500 years of Trump.
	Geopolitics.
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	Very important.
	This whole Syria question, and the Kurds and Turkey and Iran and Russia, which we haven't even really talked about, this gets to the central question of the Trump era.
	And it's a question that we've been kicking around since the end of the Cold War.
	Will the United States be an empire or a nation?
	Are we an empire or a nation?
	Do we favor a system of government around the world that creates an empire or empires?
	Or do we still favor the Westphalian system of nation states, which we've had for 400 years now?
	What is it?
	Neither of these terms are necessarily bad things.
	You'll hear people use imperialism, which is just the form of empire.
	They'll use imperialism or nationalism as pejoratives, as insults, as bad terms.
	You're an imperialist!
	You're a nationalist!
	Neither of those terms are necessarily bad in and of themselves.
	There have been terrific empires in the history of the world.
	The government that we always kind of yearned back to in Western civilization is the Roman Empire.
	The Pax Romana, the Roman peace.
	And there have been wonderful nations.
	Ours, of course, chief among them.
	Obviously, nation-states have protected liberty in a way that other forms of government have not.
	This is the debate, though.
	And there are good arguments on both sides of it.
	So you have Lindsey Graham, kind of the mouthpiece of those who favor a more imperial foreign policy.
	Lindsey Graham is furious at this decision.
	He called into Fox& Friends this morning to voice his displeasure with the president's move.
	If I didn't see Donald Trump's name on the tweet, I thought it would be Obama's rationale for getting out of Iraq.
	So here's what's going to happen.
	This is going to...
	Lead to ISIS re-emergence.
	Nothing better for ISIS than to create a conflict between the Kurds and Turkey.
	The Kurds will now align with Assad because they have nobody to count on because we abandoned them.
	So this is a big win for Iran and Assad, a big win for ISIS. I will do everything I can to sanction Turkey if they step one foot in northeastern Syria.
	That will sever my relationship with Turkey.
	I think most of So, he's coming out there.
	It's a big win for all these awful people, and it's just like Obama.
	That's what he's saying.
	He's saying it's maybe politically helpful in the short term for President Trump, but in the long run, it's a disaster.
	And really what he's implying is that it's based on insufficient determination to go out there and fight our enemies.
	And the brutal twist the dagger, really going to try to needle Trump, is he's saying that if he didn't know any better, he would have thought that Obama had made this decision.
	This was an Obama-esque decision.
	I don't think that's quite fair.
	I think there's an important distinction.
	I think this is actually what Trump is getting at.
	Barack Obama ran as an anti-war candidate.
	And he ran and he said, we've got to get out of Iraq.
	Even though, as the 2008 campaign was going on, we were re-winning the war in Iraq because of the surge.
	Obama comes in, completely screws up our victory in Iraq.
	Then, he launched a bunch of new wars.
	The old joke was, if I vote for John McCain, then we're going to start another war in the Middle East, and they were right.
	I voted for John McCain, and we started more wars in the Middle East.
	So Obama launches all of these new wars, a war in Syria, a new war in Libya, most notably.
	I don't think President Trump is falling into Obama's trap, or at least he's trying not to.
	I think he's doing his best to avoid Obama's trap.
	So President Trump runs on basically getting out of the Middle East.
	He ran on almost the same platform.
	He said, we're going to totally destroy ISIS, then we're getting out of the Middle East.
	What President Trump saw is that Obama ran on that platform, and then he got mired in all of these additional wars.
	And I think what Trump is seeing is, I ran on that platform, I'm going to destroy ISIS, and then I'm getting out of there.
	I don't want my legacy to look as bungled as Obama's legacy, because Obama looks weak, and he looks like a liar, and he looks like he couldn't accomplish what he sent out to accomplish, and Trump doesn't want that.
	He doesn't want history to look on him that way.
	So that's the Lindsey Graham approach.
	That's the empire approach.
	That's what is called the neocon approach, or what is referred to as neocon.
	Rand Paul has a different approach.
	Rand Paul called in.
	He was speaking with Neil Cavuto, also on Fox News.
	I guess this is our foreign policy is just made on Fox News and Twitter.
	That's where we are now in the United States.
	So Rand Paul calls into Neil Cavuto's show, and he is thrilled by President Trump's decision.
	He wants to get out of Syria as quickly as possible, and he specifically goes out and lambasts the neocons, including Lindsey Graham.
	We see the Turks come in.
	A lot of people in your own party, from Lindsey Graham, Marco Rubio, Mitt Romney, Nikki Haley, and on and on and on.
	So this is a travesty.
	It's a bad move.
	It emboldens our enemies.
	What do you say?
	Well, it's kind of like you just listed the neocon war caucus of the Senate.
	So yeah, they always want to stay at war.
	They always think it's the best answer.
	But I would say this.
	I think President Trump recognizes what President Reagan recognized, unfortunately too late in Beirut, leaving three or four hundred people in an area that are vulnerable.
	Could lead to catastrophe, but also doesn't really do anything to secure our national security.
	You know, I'm kind of of the belief, go big or go home.
	You know, two or three hundred people are just a tripwire to get us drawn into something and a tragedy, probably.
	But they aren't enough to do anything.
	In fact, there may be a couple, there may be dozens of people at a time, maybe a dozen here, a dozen there.
	They aren't enough to deter anything.
	And part of the resolution of the war over there has to be people who live over there.
	The Turks live over there, the Syrians live over there.
	He makes plenty of good points there.
	What he's saying is just like in the Beirut bombings, the Beirut attack that killed American troops, even if you only have a small number of troops, 100 or 200 or 300 troops, they become a target.
	And so...
	Even if it's a small number of forces over there, they could bring you into a larger conflict.
	And what Rand Paul is saying is, what are we doing in Syria?
	What's the purpose?
	We're just there waiting for something to happen.
	What is the end goal?
	What does victory look like?
	Why are we there?
	And what he's really saying is, why are we...
	An empire.
	Why are we going out there and governing this empire and tamping down little conflicts and controlling Syria and controlling different parts of the world that have nothing to do with our nation here in the United States?
	What's the point?
	That's what he's asking.
	Now, what's the charitable way to put it?
	Charitable way to put his attacks on the so-called neocons is they're people that want empire, they're people who want nationalism.
	And that's what the debate is.
	I try not to use the neocon label to refer to those who want to carpet bomb various parts of the Middle East.
	Because the term neoconservative used to have a meaning.
	It was the leftists of the 1960s who became conservatives because they realized the bankruptcy of leftism.
	Irving Kristol, for instance, Bill Kristol's father was a neocon.
	And the term became just totally abused in the 90s and 2000s.
	It was used in the 90s and 2000s the way that alt-right is used now.
	It was used just as a way to smear anybody to the right of, say, Hillary Clinton.
	And so I try not to use the term.
	But that's basically what it means.
	And this is the debate.
	So President Trump has made clear he supports nationalism.
	And here is his rationale for pulling out of Syria.
	Why are you siding with an authoritarian leader and not our Kurdish allies?
	Well, I'm not siding with anybody.
	We've been in Syria for many years.
	You know, Syria was supposed to be a short-term hit.
	Just a very short-term hit.
	And we were supposed to be in and out.
	That was many, many years ago.
	And we only have 50 people in that area.
	That's a small sector.
	And I don't want those 50 people hurt or killed or anything.
	I don't want anything bad to happen to our people.
	And I told that to President Erdogan.
	I said, don't hurt any of our people get hurt.
	Big trouble.
	I will tell you this, though.
	We defeated ISIS. So we defeated ISIS, and if Turkey does anything to our troops, we want to get out.
	I suspect that's what's going on.
	I suspect he knows Turkey's going to come into northern Syria.
	He doesn't care enough to create some big war with our ostensible NATO ally Turkey to prevent Turkey from doing that.
	And he doesn't want U.S. troops to be sitting ducks because one or two U.S. troops get killed out there.
	Just one.
	Just one U.S. troop gets killed and all of a sudden you are drawn into this huge conflict.
	And for what?
	Why would that U.S. soldier have given his life?
	What is the purpose?
	What are we doing out there?
	So, Trump goes on in those comments to say his thesis, which is, we want to bring our troops back home.
	It's been many, many years.
	It's been decades in many cases.
	We want to bring our troops back home.
	And I got elected on that.
	Right, he did.
	He's been talking about this for years.
	He's been talking about this not just since the campaign.
	He's been talking about this since 2013.
	In 2013, President Trump tweeted out, quote, What will we get for bombing Syria besides more debt and a possible long-term conflict?
	Obama needs congressional approval.
	Then he tweets out later, What I'm saying is stay out of Syria.
	Very explicit.
	Last year he tried to pull out.
	Here's President Trump announcing that he's going to pull out of Syria.
	We spent, and I was against it from the beginning.
	They try and say, well, maybe not.
	I was against it from the beginning.
	And by the way, we're knocking the hell out of ISIS. We'll be coming out of Syria, like, very soon.
	Let the other people take care of it now.
	Very soon.
	Very soon we're coming out.
	We're going to have 100 percent of the caliphate, as they call it, sometimes referred to as land.
	We've taken it all back quickly, quickly.
	But we're going to be coming out of there real soon.
	We're going to get back to our country, where we belong, where we want to be.
	That was April 4th, 2018.
	We didn't do it.
	And democracy is a fickle thing.
	Democracy, on one day the conservatives say, we want to pull out of Syria, we want to get out of the Middle East, we want to stay in our homes.
	We don't want to go overseas.
	The next day, they say we need to invade every single country on Earth.
	Okay, public opinion shifts.
	I'm not even criticizing the American people.
	That's how democracy works.
	There are good arguments to make on both sides.
	And if President Trump wants to avoid Barack Obama's mistake, then when there isn't a clear decision here, and when public opinion is going back and forth, I think there's really only one maxim he has to follow, which is Sometimes even a wrong decision is better than indecision.
	I think he understands that.
	I mean, he announces we're pulling out of Syria a year ago.
	Then he doesn't pull out of Syria.
	He campaigns on it.
	Then he won't campaign on it.
	He saw what happened to Barack Obama for vacillating.
	Sometimes even a wrong decision is better than indecision.
	At least our allies can go on...
	Decisiveness.
	They might not like the decision, but at least they can plan based on decisiveness.
	That, I think, is what we're seeing here.
	Moving on from serious and momentous aspects of foreign policy to hilarious aspects of foreign policy, I do have to compliment President Trump on his interactions with China.
	President Trump recently, this was a few days ago, but I had to get to it.
	You know, he's being criticized for his phone call with Ukraine, which we all read the transcript of.
	Well, the Bidens also got a crooked deal out of China.
	Joe Biden's son, Hunter, flew on Air Force Two.
	Flew with Joe Biden to China, and then shortly after that meeting secured $1.5 billion in financing from Chinese government-affiliated entities.
	Why?
	Is it because Hunter Biden is such an expert on China?
	No, he's not even as good an expert on China as he is on Ukraine, and he doesn't know anything about Ukraine.
	It's obviously grift.
	It's obviously corruption because his father was the vice president.
	And so they're impeaching Trump.
	A normal politician would say...
	Listen, a normal politician would keep quiet about it.
	Then a more Trumpian politician might come out and say, Hey, listen, we're distracting from the big issue here.
	I didn't mean in the Ukraine call that I was asking for a quid o'quo.
	Here's what I meant.
	He tried to explain himself.
	But then President Trump himself, a unique character in American politics, decides he's not going to stay quiet.
	He's not going to defend himself.
	He's going to double down.
	And so here is President Trump's response on colluding with foreign governments over the question of Biden's corruption.
	Well, I would think that if they were honest about it, they'd start a major investigation into the Bidens.
	It's a very simple answer.
	They should investigate the Bidens.
	Because how does a company that's newly formed and all these companies, if you look at — and by the way, likewise, China should start an investigation into the Bidens.
	Because what happened in China is just about as bad as what happened with With Ukraine.
	So I would say that President Zelenskyy, if it were me, I would recommend that they start an investigation into the Bidens.
	Because nobody has any doubt that they weren't crooked.
	That was a crooked deal, 100 percent.
	He had no knowledge of energy, didn't know the first thing about it.
	All of a sudden, he's getting $50,000 a month, plus a lot of other things.
	Nobody has any doubt.
	And they got rid of a prosecutor who was a very tough prosecutor.
	They got rid of him.
	Now they're trying to make it the opposite way, but they got rid.
	So if I were the president, I would certainly recommend that of Ukraine.
	Absolutely the perfect response to this.
	I guess it gets back to our point.
	Sometimes the wrong decision is better than indecision.
	I don't think this is the wrong decision.
	I think it's perfectly defensible to tell Ukraine to look into corruption and their own interference in the 2016 election.
	And I think it's perfectly right for President Trump to double down on that.
	Because what's he going to do?
	He could apologize and explain himself to the press.
	That's not going to get him anywhere.
	And there's no reason for him to do it.
	He doesn't owe those people $1.
	Word of explanation.
	And so what he does is he goes out there and he makes a joke.
	And even Marco Rubio, who is obviously no particular fan of the president, Marco Rubio was asked about this response from Trump.
	And he just explains to the press, not President Trump's remarks, he explains to the press how stupid the press is.
	Do you think it's okay for President Trump to ask China to launch an investigation of Joe Biden and Hunter Biden?
	I don't know if that's a real request or him just needling the press knowing that you guys were going to get outraged by it.
	He's pretty good at getting everybody fired up and he's been doing that for a while and the media responded right on task.
	You're one of the loudest critics of China and its human rights abuses.
	I mean, is it okay for him to ask and say that?
	I don't think it's a real request.
	Again, I think he did it to gig you guys.
	I think he did it to provoke you to ask me and others and get outraged by it.
	Like I said, I mean, he plays it like a violin and everybody falls right into it.
	That's not a real request.
	Of course.
	I mean, this is now Senator Marco Rubio not acting like a senator.
	He's acting like he's a panelist on Special Report.
	He's acting like a political analyst.
	And he's saying, you idiots.
	If President Trump were going to use the weight of the federal government to leverage all of that and get a foreign power and an adversarial power like China to investigate his political opponents, if he were really doing that, He'd probably pick up the phone.
	If he were really doing that, he maybe wouldn't pick up the phone.
	He'd get some back channel spy to go in and ask.
	And he would basically do it like Obama did it.
	He'd do it like Obama and Hillary and the Democrats did it.
	But that's not what Trump is doing.
	He's forcing the press and manipulating the press to expose their own hypocrisy.
	And it's so obvious.
	I like President Trump a lot.
	He's not subtle.
	The guy's not exactly nuanced, okay?
	Big gold letters, everything he does.
	And somehow the press misses this.
	And it requires Marco Rubio to come out and say, Oh, you people.
	You schmucks.
	He plays you people like a fiddle.
	And he does.
	And believe it or not, that's not even the most ridiculous and outrageous thing that the press has done of late.
	You'll see from NBC's Chuck Todd that just totally showing their cards as...
	Being divorced from reality and so in the tank that all they are is propagandists for the left.
	We'll get to that in a second.
	Then we'll get to a nice note from Ellen DeGeneres.
	It was actually a very nice note for the culture, which so rarely happens.
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	We'll be right back with a lot more.
	Speaking of craziness from the press.
	Yes.
	Chuck Todd on NBC, who at various times has tried to portray himself as a more moderate figure, a more objective figure, just a journalist just going after the facts.
	Chuck Todd made one of the most egregious statements the other day that I saw.
	This isn't the clip that was going around viral where he said, Chuck Todd came out and he said, we're in a national emergency.
	This is a national nightmare because President Trump talked to the Ukrainian president.
	Though Chuck Todd did that too, and it was hysterical and ridiculous.
	But Chuck Todd was doing an interview with John Brennan.
	John Brennan, the old Obamacrone, who has become one of the most hysterical voices of the anti-Trump left.
	And he has John Brennan on.
	John Brennan, by the way, almost certainly complicit in a lot of the wrongdoing that was going on in the federal government's interference in the 2016 election, trying to go after President Trump.
	Chuck Todd goes on there, and he has the audacity, the gall, To say that half of this country, conservatives in this country, are divorced from reality.
	They don't believe reality.
	And Chuck Todd is the voice of the mainstream media and the left.
	But I repeat myself.
	He is the guardian and custodian of reality.
	Here's Chuck Todd.
	Well, here's why we're here.
	We have two sets of realities that live here.
	There is a 40% of the country that is only getting fed one reality.
	Arguably, 60% are getting what I would argue is reality.
	So there's roughly half of the country, a little bit more.
	He says that he represents the majority of the country, the reality side of the country.
	You know, the left and the Democrats and the mainstream media, they represent about 60% of the country.
	I mean, Hillary still lost the election, but, you know, 60%.
	Massive majority of the country.
	And then you have the conservatives, and they are 40% of the country.
	And they just don't get reality.
	They just don't have any connection to reality.
	Let me put that in starker terms.
	The left, which believes that men can just magically become women by wishing it to be so.
	The left, which believes that the sun monster and the weather are going to destroy humanity within 10 years.
	There will be a mass extinction event.
	That's the phrase that's been going around.
	The left, which believes based on nothing that President Trump colluded with Russia to rig the 2016 election in the face of all evidence to the contrary and a two and a half year, $30 million investigation.
	That's the left.
	They are the custodians of reality.
	And then the people who believe that there are two biological sexes, the people who don't think that humanity will be wiped off the face of the earth, Those people, they don't have a connection to reality.
	I'm just trying to work through this in my head.
	The left, which believes that unborn babies in the womb, who have all their little limbs and all their little fingers, and they look like babies and they sound like babies, and by the way, they are babies, that they're not babies, that they're just a random clump of cells.
	They're the custodians of reality, but the right, which believes that babies are babies, they're not the custodians of reality.
	They're disconnected from reality.
	The left, which so often denies reality itself, denies objective truth, which we hear from campus to campus, that there is no truth, there's your truth and my truth, that everything is simply a matter of preference, everything is simply a matter of will.
	They are the custodians of reality.
	But the right, which believes in objective truth, which extols the virtues of objective reality, they have no connection.
	This is...
	Exactly backwards.
	Chuck Todd is talking to John Brennan, one of the most prolific and famous liars and hysterics in the federal government.
	And he is talking to him about they understand reality.
	This is what I mean when I say the left gets things exactly backwards.
	It's not like Chuck Todd is a little bit off.
	It's not like he's just missing the mark a little bit.
	He is getting it exactly backwards and he's getting it exactly backwards from his, from his own position.
	Chuck Todd says he's a journalist.
	He's here.
	He's concerned about the truth.
	He is behaving as nothing but a propagandist for the left.
	Nothing but a propagandist for the Democratic Party.
	Nothing but a propagandist for people who want to overturn this presidential election.
	How often have we played the montage on this show of people talking about Trump's in a corner, the walls are closing in, impeachment is coming, he colluded with Russia, that didn't work, he colluded with Ukraine, even though they're mortal enemies, he did all these things.
	Those people who lie to you 24-7.
	They have the gall not just to keep lying to you through their teeth, but to go on television and say, we are the custodians of reality and you guys have no connection to reality.
	That's the media, folks.
	That's the left.
	And that is why, as I've learned and relearned again in recent weeks, you shouldn't believe everything you read in the newspapers and you shouldn't believe everything you see on TV and you should ignore people like Chuck Todd.
	We're lying through their teeth and just keep on keeping on.
	This is a degree of political fantasy that Chuck Todd is talking about that really boggles the mind.
	That's why I'm so glad that there was a rejoinder to this, because we are increasingly told by the left, anyone who disagrees with you on anything is evil, is stupid, is not worth speaking to, is deplorable, is irredeemable, is all these terrible things.
	By the way, we don't believe that about the left.
	We on the right think that the left is just wrong.
	They just get it wrong.
	They get it backwards.
	They're missing something.
	I don't think they're all evil.
	It's just really wrong.
	I guess some people are evil.
	Some people are evil on both sides.
	There are very terrible people on both sides, to paraphrase the statement of the president's.
	But the left really believes that about us.
	Increasingly, and here's the evidence.
	Ellen DeGeneres was at a Dallas Cowboys game.
	She was there over the weekend.
	She was there hanging out with her friend, George W. Bush.
	I guess she's been friends with George Bush for a while, and they were in the owner's box at the Cowboys game, and they were watching the game.
	They had a nice time.
	And a picture went around the internet of Ellen having a good time with George Bush.
	The left went crazy.
	The left said you're not allowed to be friends with people on the other side of the aisle.
	Here is one guy, Ben Norton, who is somebody who has a blue checkmark for some reason.
	He tweets out, I'm friends with George Bush, boasts Ellen, saying it's good to have friends with different views.
	But this isn't a matter of views.
	It's a matter of crimes.
	Bush is a war criminal with the blood of one million Iraqis on his hands.
	He should be in prison.
	What war crimes did George Bush commit?
	What?
	Can't name them.
	We...
	He was a war president.
	That's true.
	He's not a war criminal.
	This guy, Ben Norton, goes on.
	It's one thing to be friends with people with different political views.
	It's something totally different to be friends with a mass murderer.
	Mass murderer?
	Who ruined millions of lives, destroyed thousands of families, and made children orphans, and destabilized an entire region of the world!
	Exclamation point.
	This is what they always do on the left.
	They say, oh yeah, I'm totally open-minded.
	I can be friends with different people.
	That's fine to be friends with conservatives.
	But you can't be friends with actual conservatives.
	It's always the but, and then it's always what follows.
	They say, look, I'm friends with plenty of conservatives.
	I just am not friends with people who want to protect innocent life and support a traditional definition of marriage and think that we should secure our border and support enforcing our laws and think we should have lower taxes.
	But other than those guys, I'm friends with a lot of conservatives.
	They can't say they're friends with any actual conservatives.
	They're just friends with conservatives in theory.
	The left loves humanity.
	The left just doesn't like humans very much.
	Another leftist, Sean King.
	You know, he's the Black Lives Matter guy, although I think he's in trouble with Black Lives Matter because he's a complete fraud, so he's gotten a little kickback from Black Lives Matter.
	He tweets out, quote...
	It appears many of you may be genuinely unaware that insiders said nobody worked harder to get Brett Kavanaugh on the Supreme Court than George W. Bush.
	He fought for a constitutional amendment to ban gay marriage, and the Iraq War, which was based on a lie, killed millions.
	So the big issue that Sean King has with George Bush is he supported Brett Kavanaugh, perhaps the most milquetoast lawyer in the history of the country, to be on the Supreme Court.
	You can't be friends with somebody who supports a different president having the right to put a Supreme Court justice on the court.
	That's it.
	That's the line.
	And that's increasingly what the left tells us.
	Thankfully, fortunately, Ellen had a different point of view.
	Portia, and that was Charlotte Jones that Portia was talking to, and George W. Bush, and then in front of us was the tallest man in the world, Ellen.
	So I've got to say, when we were invited, I was, you know, I was aware that I was going to be surrounded with people from very different views and beliefs.
	And I'm not talking about politics.
	I was rooting for the Packers, and get this, everybody in the Cowboys suite was rooting for the Cowboys.
	And so I had to hide my cheese hat in Portia's purse.
	And don't get me wrong, I like the Cowboys.
	I love the Cowboys.
	I love all the village people, as a matter of fact.
	But during the game, they showed a shot of George and me laughing together.
	And so people were upset.
	They thought, why is a gay Hollywood liberal sitting next to a conservative Republican president?
	Didn't even notice I'm holding the brand new iPhone 11.
	But a lot of people were mad, and they did what people do when they're mad.
	They tweet.
	But here's one tweet that I loved.
	This person says, Ellen and George Bush together makes me have faith in America again.
	Here's the thing.
	I'm friends with George Bush.
	In fact, I'm friends with a lot of people who don't share the same beliefs that I have.
	We're all different, and I think that we've forgotten that that's okay that we're all different.
	An excellent, excellent point from Ellen, who I've always really gotten a kick out of.
	I think she's just a terrific entertainer, and she's pretty funny, but she's just a great kind of showbiz figure.
	And she comes from a little bit more of an old-school...
	An old school of Hollywood, an old school of politics.
	She's as liberal as they come, but she tolerates people having other opinions.
	She tolerates the complexity of life, and she even enjoys the diversity and complexity of life, which is something that, as a conservative, I certainly do.
	I think that's one of the greatest values that conservatives have.
	Which brings me, I just want to mention this before we go today, to some of the hypocrisy on the impeachment, because we are told, on this impeachment, It's that President Trump asked a favor of the Ukrainian president, and it would help him politically, and this is very bad.
	And we're not sure what law this violates exactly, but it's very bad, and we need to impeach him for it.
	So a transcript just came out.
	I think Tucker Carlson found this.
	It comes out from 2000 from the Bill Clinton Presidential Library, the year 2000, right before a presidential election.
	I think more than anything else...
	Let me ask you something on a much more mundane issue.
	Yesterday, I met with some cabinet members and Rodney Slater said, we put some more ideas down to resolve the airport dispute with British Airways, U.S. Air, and American Airlines.
	Would you take another look at that and see if we can get it done?
	So this is a very minor issue that affects Great Britain and the United States.
	Tony Blair says, I'm not completely familiar with that.
	He doesn't even know about the issue.
	Clinton goes...
	I know you're up to your ears in other things, but we've been dealing with this for years, and it's sort of a big issue here.
	Rodney told me he put some more stuff down on the table.
	In a political season, it would be big over here to get this open sore resolved.
	If you could have somebody take a look at it.
	I've never been seeing a more agitated trying to get it solved.
	Blair says, sure, I'll take a look.
	Imagine if Trump used the words, in a political season, just before an election year.
	I need this favor.
	I mean, this is explicitly asking for a favor.
	Blair says, yeah, yeah, I'll take a look.
	I don't care that Clinton did this.
	I don't think it matters whatsoever.
	I think this is what politics is.
	It shows that there is a little more complexity to these issues.
	And the people clamoring for impeachment now, because Trump did something far less clear than what Clinton did, and what I think virtually every American president has done at some point or another.
	It's not that they're wrong about the other guy.
	It's not that they're wrong about Trump.
	It's not that they're wrong about seeing corruption in the government.
	It's not that they're wrong about not liking how politics is, because politics is very ugly.
	It's like that old quote from Otto von Bismarck.
	It's best not to see how the sausages are made.
	This is something that's true of laws and is true of sausages.
	It's true of meat.
	Best not to see how it gets made.
	Just see it at the end.
	There is great complexity here.
	This is on everything from getting an airport dispute resolved in the U.S. and Britain to the U.S. position in northern Syria.
	There is great complexity here.
	We all lack a lot of knowledge.
	We would all do to have a bit more humility, and most importantly, we would do to have a bit more humility and grace with regard to our fellow Americans, to take a lead from Ellen DeGeneres here.
	And not say, as Chuck Todd says, that half the country is completely lost.
	We can't even have a conversation with them.
	They're totally lost.
	We can't reach them.
	Ignore them.
	Dismiss them.
	Don't dismiss them.
	Even if you think half the country is wrong, talk to them.
	Make some arguments.
	Have a conversation with them.
	Don't think that half the country, like Hillary Clinton does, is deplorable and irredeemable.
	Reality is much more complex, much more wonderfully diverse than...
	Hardline ideologues would have us believe.
	A good note to end on, Ellen DeGeneres says, be kind.
	I would add to that, be humble.
	That's our show.
	I'm Michael Knowles.
	This is The Michael Knowles Show.
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	Copyright Daily Wire 2019.
	Hey everyone, it's Andrew Klavan, host of The Andrew Klavan Show.
	There's a debate among conservatives over whether Trump is doing the right thing by pulling out of Syria, which tells you something.
	It tells you there's a debate among conservatives, not so much on the left, where it's all hate, hate, hate, orange man, bad, no matter what he does.
	We'll talk about it on The Andrew Klavan Show.

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