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Oct. 21, 2019 - The Michael Knowles Show
47:33
Ep. 435 - Trump Is The Worst! (Except For All The Others)

We examine the big picture on Trump and his antagonists, Tulsi Gabbard smacks down an attack from Hillary Clinton, the Left celebrates menstruation, and the Democratic moderates see their opening. Date: 10-21-2019 Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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The walls are closing in on President Trump, if you believe the mainstream media.
But as Trump's opponents are threatening impeachment, we examine the bigger picture.
President Trump may just be the worst public servant in the United States, except for all the others.
Then Democratic presidential candidate Tulsi Gabbard rhetorically grinds Hillary Clinton into a mound of dust.
The left celebrates menstruation, okay, and Amy Klobuchar and the moderates see their opening.
All that and more.
more.
I'm Michael Knowles, and this is The Michael Knowles Show.
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But the walls are already closing in on President Trump.
So that's not just impeachment.
There's two steps to this, right?
There's impeachment, which is if the House votes to impeach him, you know, like happened to Bill Clinton.
And then there is the trial in the Senate.
So once you're impeached, you go to trial in the Senate and the Senate can vote either to remove you from office or not to remove you from office.
What we've always assumed is that the House is going to move forward with impeachment.
They'll probably impeach the guy, but it'll get to the Senate and there's no way that he's going to get impeached in the Senate.
Why not?
Well, because Republicans still control the Senate.
So if Republicans control the Senate, he's probably not getting convicted.
Furthermore, there doesn't seem to be any real legal basis for impeachment.
There doesn't seem to be anything that he's done that rises to the level of high crimes and misdemeanors.
But third, and this has been most important so far, Even among Democrats, support for removal from office nationally, according to one poll, is only 66%.
So that's even Democrats.
That means that if there were no Republicans in the country, if the whole Senate were controlled by Democrats, they still would not remove him from office because support nationally is only at 66%.
Now we're hearing that that is not the case.
Chris Wallace is saying that his highly placed sources in Washington believe that there is a one in five chance that the Senate, run by Republicans, removes Trump from office.
There seems to be a growing number of Republicans in Congress who are, if not breaking with the president, distancing themselves from the president.
And I talked to a very well-connected Republican in Washington this week, somebody whose name you would know well, who says that if The House votes to impeach and it gets to a trial in the Senate.
There is now a 20% chance, he believes, obviously, it's just an estimate, now a 20% chance enough Republicans will vote with the Democrats to remove the president.
Oh, that's just absurd, but let's deal with the issue of Syria.
No, let's deal with the issue of whether Republican, you're losing your support.
Same thing, this comment about a 20% chance is just that the person clearly doesn't know what they're talking about.
Well, hold on.
What about Chris Wallace's very highly placed source?
Okay, I don't want to name any names, but it rhymes with Krill Bistel.
Okay, and he knows that it's a one in five chance that Trump gets removed.
I'm not naming any names, but it might rhyme with Bax Moot.
Okay, I'm talking about Republicans who hate Trump's guts.
So...
So I don't know.
I mean, maybe there is.
There are a lot of Republicans who hate Trump's guts.
Maybe there's a chance that they remove him from office.
As for specific senators, Mitt Romney, who a lot of us forgot was a senator because he was a governor a million years ago and then he was a twice-failed presidential candidate.
Mitt Romney is now a senator and he is signaling that he might vote to remove Trump from office.
And this gets to my big point today, which is on how absolutely terrible and awful and the worst guy in the world Trump is, except for all of his critics.
Mitt Romney wants to remove Trump from office.
That's the big headline.
That's on all the big news sites.
That's not news.
Mitt Romney has always wanted to remove Trump from office.
He gave one of the most hysterical speeches I've ever seen in politics before the 2016 election, telling Republicans not to vote for Trump and more or less to let Hillary Clinton win.
He is constantly campaigning against President Trump.
There's nothing new about that.
Same with the D.C. establishment.
The highly placed Republican Chris Wallace talks to, says he really hates Trump.
Yeah.
You don't say.
Well, I'm shocked to hear that.
So now they're going to remove him from office over a phone call with Ukraine or something like that.
What are the odds that this actually happens?
No matter what you think of Donald Trump, I understand there are a lot of people who hate his guts.
Just looking at the likelihood of removal from office, the mainstream media have been predicting that this guy will get thrown out of office every day since he was elected.
First, he was going to be removed from office because of Russia.
The walls are closing in.
You remember every mainstream media guy said the walls are closing in ad nauseum for two and a half years.
And it was Stormy Daniels, because apparently it's a high crime and misdemeanor to get a little weird with a porn star before you're ever running for office.
Then it was the taxes.
He didn't pay his taxes.
You remember that?
The mainstream media said he never paid taxes for 18 years.
And then my doppelganger over at MSNBC actually got his tax returns.
It turns out he paid a higher tax rate than Bernie Sanders or Barack Obama.
Or he at least paid significantly more in taxes.
And then...
Now it's Ukraine.
Is this actually going to remove him from office?
That raises the two conflicting points about the Trump era.
Trump has a lot of vulnerabilities.
He's lived a very colorful life.
He's done a lot of things that are not something people are very proud of.
He's done a lot of things that bring a lot of shame to a lot of people, opens him up to a lot of political attacks.
The other vulnerability, he is generally unfamiliar with the machinery of government.
This is partly why he was elected, because he's not a career politician.
He hasn't been in Washington his whole life.
The trouble with that is, he has struggled significantly on the legislative front, and he's walked into traps that swampier creatures would have otherwise avoided.
I mean, even just on the legislative front, he nearly repealed Obamacare.
And then he couldn't wrangle the senators, one senator in particular.
He sometimes just walks into these traps that guys who have been in D.C. for a long time wouldn't do that.
And then there's the big vulnerability.
The big vulnerability is actually his biggest pitch to voters, which is that he's a successful businessman.
He's a successful – now, I know that sounds like it's all plus and there's no downside.
There is a downside because specifically, Trump is the owner of a business that was built around his personality.
And the same people who clamor for we need a businessman for president are the same people who criticize what happens when we have a businessman as president.
them.
Conservatives always talk about that.
We need a guy to run this country like a business.
Okay, you got him.
This is Trump.
Trump is the businessman president.
Okay, and the knock on him is that he's going to benefit from the office.
Yeah, I guess everybody benefits from the office.
Whether people are more interested in staying at your real estate properties or you get $200,000 speaking fees after you leave office, everybody benefits in some way.
The way that Trump is going to benefit is he has a business called the Trump Organization.
So he could never put that into a blind trust, right?
He could never totally divorce himself from that business because he is the business.
He's the product.
He is essentially a show business figure.
And in show business, you are the product.
But everything else, I mean, in real estate, he just licenses his name to a lot of buildings.
In casinos, he licenses his name to them.
In neckties that are produced in China, he licenses his name.
So you can't ever have Donald Trump step away from the Trump organization.
Then there's no such thing as the Trump organization.
It's the same thing we saw at the G7. For this G7 summit that's coming up, Trump wanted to host it at his Trump Doral property, and people threw a hissy fit about it.
The reason they threw a hissy fit is because they don't want the president profiting actually funneling taxpayer money into his own pockets.
Of course, we all agree with that.
That would be a terrible thing.
The president would have to make sure if he hosts the G7 summit at his own property that he doesn't make any money on it.
The way he was going to do this was by paying for the whole thing himself.
By not charging anybody a single penny and there's no sign of impropriety.
But that apparently violates the law.
He's not allowed to do this.
He has to charge a base cost.
So then he said, okay, I'll do it at cost.
And then you get the same attack, which is, well, he's going to be profiting.
In some way or another, he's going to be profiting.
That's what happens when you elect a businessman.
I'm not even advocating electing a businessman as president.
I'm just saying, if you want a businessman, that is what you're going to get.
And if you want a career politician, you're not going to have to deal with those kind of things, but who wants a career politician?
The other aspect of the Trump era that this all raises is Trump has all these critics, right?
They're all high and mighty, and they know Trump is the worst guy in the world, and he's terrible, and he slept with a porn star, and he's just a terrible guy.
Except Trump's critics aren't any better.
In many ways, they're much, much worse.
I specifically want to get to Mitt Romney, but before I have savored few things in Republican politics more than savaging Mitt Romney, I've been doing this now for eight years since he ran for president in 2012, So I can't wait to compare Mitt Romney, the great, the glorious, the virtuous Mitt Romney, to that awful, terrible, debased Donald Trump.
We'll get to that in one second.
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Mitt Romney.
Mitt Romney to me is the Trump critic par excellence because he's not just a leftist.
It's so easy to go after leftists and they're always going to go after you and you're going to go after them.
It's not a big deal.
But Romney.
Romney is different because Romney is a snake.
This guy pretends to be Mr.
Conservative, Mr.
Republican, Mr.
Wonderful, Virtuous, Great Guy.
Who does Mitt Romney think he is to criticize Donald Trump?
I'm not saying that Donald Trump is some beacon of virtue.
Donald Trump is far from a beacon of virtue.
But Mitt Romney is one of the oiliest, most deceitful, least admirable politicians in recent history.
He's simply awful.
Just to remind you, in case you forgot who Mitt Romney is, here's just a little retrospective through the ages of Mitt Romney.
So when asked, will I preserve and protect a woman's right to choose?
I make an unequivocal answer.
Yes.
I will preserve and protect a woman's right to choose, and am devoted and dedicated to honoring my word in that regard.
I will not change any provisions of Massachusetts' pro-choice laws.
Look, I was an independent during the time of Reagan-Bush.
I'm not trying to return to Reagan-Bush.
My positions don't talk about things that you suggest they talk about.
Well, they do.
They start talking about those things when you're running in a different election in 2008, and then you say you're severely conservative and you're very pro-life and you're all these things.
Mitt Romney has held two sides of every single issue.
He has nothing even vaguely resembling a vertebrate.
He just moves with the wind.
What good has Mitt Romney ever done for the conservative movement?
Nothing.
What good has Mitt Romney ever done in public life?
Nothing.
He invented Obamacare.
He assailed the legacy of Ronald Reagan.
When he was governor, he wasn't even able to create jobs.
Job growth was awful in Massachusetts when he was governor.
It was 1.5% compared to a national average of 5.3%.
Massachusetts was 47%.
47th out of 50 states during Romney's term.
He then passed a bill to force taxpayers to pay for college for a quarter of Massachusetts high school graduates.
That's that severely conservative Mitt Romney who's just taking taxpayer money, funneling it to children who are statistically elite and...
Propping up this educational institution, which has done very little other than indoctrinated students in leftism for the last five decades.
He was anti-Second Amendment.
He supported the so-called assault weapons ban, tried to take rifles with some of the most popular guns in America out of the hands of law-abiding Americans.
He was pro-abortion, as you saw in that clip, as you heard him say.
He supported scientific research on babies who were killed by abortion.
The best thing that Mitt Romney did as governor of Massachusetts was cut taxes, but he didn't even really cut taxes because he raised fees, which are not only a tax.
They're a secret tax.
They're a dishonest tax.
They're a way to raise taxes when you don't want to have to face voters and say you raise taxes.
So you raise so-called fees, which are much more arbitrary, and he raised fees more than any other governor in the country.
Romney has absolutely no credibility on this.
I can't stand it.
I worked for two of Mitt Romney's opponents in the 2012 Republican presidential primaries, so I don't want anybody to suggest that my attacks on Mitt Romney are opportunistic now because I like Trump and he's going after Trump.
It has nothing to do with that.
I've been calling this guy out since...
I don't know, seven, eight years ago.
And I think only now are people beginning to realize it.
This whole shtick of St.
Mitt, the most honorable, wonderful guy in America, Mr.
Severely Conservative, is total BS. And it's fine if you want to call Trump a BSer.
You know, he's a New Yorker.
He talks that way.
But Mitt Romney is no better.
And in many, many ways...
When you compare his actual policy record, he is so much worse than Trump, who, for all his many flaws, and he has many, many flaws, has actually affected a fairly relatively conservative administration.
Now, beyond all of that, my rant against Mitt Romney aside, President Trump did get some good news as they're talking about throwing him out of office in the Senate.
Also in the Senate, Lindsey Graham, who was President Trump's biggest critic on the Syria decision, The decision to remove some troops from northern Syria which permitted a Turkish invasion which has hurt our allies in the YPG which is a group of Kurds that fought alongside us against ISIS. Lindsey Graham is starting to come around on President Trump's Syria policy.
Here he is.
Let me tell you where I think we are.
Withhold judgment as to what's going to happen in Syria until it's all in.
I am increasingly optimistic that we can have some historic solutions in Syria that have eluded us for years if we play our cards right.
I blame Erdogan for the invasion, not Trump.
But here's what the president told me over the weekend.
Here are our objectives.
To make sure we have a demilitarized zone between Turkey and the Kurds.
The Kurds were the allies who helped us defeat ISIS. They lost 10,000 soldiers.
We've lost eight in four years.
God bless the eight.
But it was the Kurds who did most of the fighting.
Protect our NATO ally, Turkey, from elements of the Kurds that they considered to be terrorists.
A demilitarized zone occupied by international forces.
No Americans, but we provide air power.
The president appreciates what the Kurds have done.
He wants to make sure ISIS does not come back.
I expect we will continue to partner with the Kurds in the eastern Syria to make sure ISIS does not reemerge.
That is in our national security interest and we owe it to the Kurds.
So he says More or less, it's okay.
Last week he was saying this is the, quote, the most screwed up decision I've ever seen.
This week he's saying, hmm, maybe there's actually a little bit to this.
He actually goes on.
He tells Maria Bartiromo, who's interviewing him, that he's actually increasingly optimistic that this could turn out very well.
The big thing for me is the oil fields.
President Trump is thinking outside the box.
I was so impressed with his thinking about the oil.
Not only are we going to deny the oil fields falling into Iranian hands, I believe we're on the verge of a joint venture between us and the Syrian Democratic Forces who helped destroy ISIS and keep them destroyed to modernize the oil fields and make sure they get the revenue, not the Iranians, not Assad, and it can help pay for our small commitment in the future.
And protecting Israel is the number one objective.
We can do all of that with a very small force.
I'm increasingly optimistic this could turn out very well.
He's increasingly optimistic.
That is a big change in tune.
What changed?
We'll get to that in a second.
Then we will get to the greatest little fight I've seen on Twitter in a while.
Tulsi Gabbard versus Hillary Clinton.
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This switch on Syria and Lindsey Graham's reaction is an important one because it shows that initial reaction, people buying into the sort of madness.
Anything Trump does is considered unprecedented and terrible and awful for our allies and uninformed.
Okay, well, sometimes that happens.
But on the Syria decision, on most decisions, what I try to do is I try to take like 10 breaths.
So something happens.
Trump decides to move the troops out of Syria.
And everyone tells me this is the worst decision in the history of the world, and we've never done anything worse as a country.
And I say, okay.
And I breathe in and out about 10 times.
And then I think, what's the alternative?
The alternative is we keep our troops in Syria.
But in that region of Syria, we only had 50 troops, which could be what's called a tripwire.
It could be a way to keep hostile forces out, or it could be a magnet for an attack, as we saw in Beirut during the Reagan administration, after which, what did Ronald Reagan do?
He pulled our troops out of Beirut.
If there were an attack, if one U.S. soldier were killed in that area, especially if it were by Turkey, we could find ourselves in a very terrible war.
Do we want that war?
It's not that Americans back down from a war, but what would the war be for?
What is our strategic interest in Syria?
If you can't really identify one, then perhaps it's time to move those troops out.
Is our interest to overthrow Bashar Assad?
That's what people like John McCain wanted us to do during the intervention in 2014 in the first place.
But we didn't do that.
That was never the policy of the United States.
It is still not the policy of the United States.
I don't think it would be in our interests to do it anyway.
So if we're not going to oust Bashar Assad, then what is going to give the Kurds a better long-term strategy?
Is it going to be to maintain this state of constant civil war?
At a certain point, the civil war has got to end, or at least it's going to change.
Is it in the Kurds' long-term interest to try to create a nation-state?
Is the United States going to get them a nation-state?
I don't think that's very likely.
Are they going to maintain this alliance with the U.S. to the detriment of all other alliances?
Well, it didn't work out great for the Kurds in the 70s or the 90s or in the 2000s or in the 2010s.
So maybe there actually is an interest for the United States in redeploying those troops and Maybe there is an interest in the United States in backing the second largest military in NATO. Maybe the situation is more complicated than it seems.
Maybe Trump is making a bad decision, but maybe that bad decision is actually better than the other decisions at his disposal.
Maybe you think Trump is a bad guy.
Sure, but it's certainly possible he's better than the alternatives.
What is the alternative?
You saw this not just in the Republican Party and the conservative movement, You saw this among the Democrats in the sweetest exchange that I have seen since those 2016 debates in the general election.
Hillary Clinton was on David Plouffe's podcast talking about the 2020 Democratic primary, and she I'm not making any predictions, but I think they've got their eye on somebody who's currently in the Democratic primary and are grooming her to be the third party candidate.
She's a favorite of the Russians.
They have a bunch of sites and bots and other ways of supporting her so far.
Now, when asked if Clinton was referring to Congresswoman Tulsi Gabbard, Democrat of Hawaii, Clinton's spokesman said, quote, if the nesting doll fits, he added, quote, if the Russian propaganda machine, both their state media and their bot and troll operations, is backing a candidate aligned with their interests, that is just a reality.
It is not speculation.
So she's even confirming it.
She's talking about Tulsi Gabbard.
Everyone's been going after Tulsi Gabbard because Tulsi Gabbard is slightly more moderate than the lunatics in the Democratic Party, and they're seeing a Democratic Party turn slightly more in the way of moderation right now because they know they're going to get blown out in the general election.
Otherwise, how do you think Tulsi Gabbard responded to Hillary Clinton?
We will get to that in just a second, but first, before we get to Tulsi Gabbard, before we get to the revenge of the moderates, before we get to National Period Day, We have got to say goodbye to Facebook and YouTube.
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So you have Hillary Clinton, a crook, a twice-failed presidential candidate, someone whose nearest contribution to the American public someone whose nearest contribution to the American public service was lying about being under Bosnian sniper fire.
You You have her, and then you have Tulsi Gabbard, who I think is extreme and leftist, and I would never even consider voting for her, but she just returned from serving our country in uniform.
She is...
Actually a dedicated public servant, and she's far more reasonable on most issues than her fellow Democrats.
Those are the two people, and Hillary Clinton, crooked crone, never did anything for this country, is accusing Tulsi Gabbard, actually put on a uniform, of being a Russian asset, of being a traitor, of being somebody who sold out her country.
Here is Tulsi's response on Twitter.
Great!
Thank you, Hillary Clinton.
You, the queen of warmongers, embodiment of corruption, and personification of the rot that has sickened the Democratic Party for so long, have finally come out from behind the curtain.
From the day I announced my candidacy, there has been a concerted campaign to destroy my reputation.
We wondered who was behind it and why.
Now we know it was always you through your proxies and powerful allies in the corporate media and war machine, afraid of the threat I pose.
It's now clear that this primary is between you and me.
Don't cowardly hide behind your proxies.
She misused cowardly, which is an adjective as an adverb.
That's okay.
We'll forgive her because it's an otherwise great tweet.
Join the race directly.
Oh!
Oh my goodness gracious.
I don't care what's going on in the Middle East.
Nothing could possibly be fierier or crueler or more devastating than that.
Very smart for Tulsi Gabbard.
Tulsi Gabbard is going to finally try to launch her candidacy into the top tier by saying that she is the chief antagonist to Hillary Clinton in the way that Bernie Sanders was the chief antagonist to Hillary Clinton in 2016.
And it might work.
Tulsi had a very good performance at that last debate.
And so as the frontrunner, Joe Biden falls apart, and as Hillary Clinton goes after her, it really could help her out.
Hillary Clinton seriously overestimates her significance in the Democratic Party.
Or rather, I'll put it a different way.
She seriously underestimates how furious the Democrats are at her.
Not for her corruption, not for her decades and decades of lies and misdeeds.
For losing.
She lost to Donald Trump.
She didn't get the job done.
And Democrats are really hard on their losing candidates.
When was the last time we heard from Michael Dukakis?
Do you know, probably many of the listeners to this podcast don't even know who Michael Dukakis is.
Dukakis lost the election to George Bush.
How about Walter Mondale?
Do we hear a lot from Walter Mondale?
No.
George McGovern?
Not so much.
Democrats are pretty hard on their losers.
Hillary Clinton thinks that she's somehow still an important voice in the Democratic Party.
She isn't really.
A lot of people don't like her.
She went on that speaking tour with Bill Clinton.
So she actually had a former president with her.
They couldn't sell tickets.
The tickets were dropping from $300 a ticket down to $6, $9 a ticket.
They ended up canceling most of the tour.
Why?
Well, we have another reason why.
Add it to the list.
State Department investigators have just concluded an investigation into Hillary Clinton's private email server, and they found, how many security violations do you think?
One or two, and that's why it wasn't a big deal.
But her emails, oh, it's not a big deal.
600 security violations.
That's according to newly released government documents.
600 security violations.
Hillary Clinton not only using her own email server to conduct very serious business of the state, but then destroying those emails so she wouldn't have to turn them over to investigators.
Then we only found a lot of those emails because they turned up on convicted pedophile Anthony Weiner's computer because her security was so lax that His then-wife, Huma Abedin, her chief aide, was just letting her emails flow around the whole house, no big deal.
Why didn't the FBI charge her with a crime?
Well, the reason the FBI didn't charge her with a felony at this point was because the FBI agent, who we now know was trying to undermine the Trump campaign from within the FBI, Peter Strzok, edited a key phrase that Thereby removed legal ramifications for Clinton.
The phrase was gross negligence.
She was grossly negligent with her emails, at least, and what Peter Struck did from the FBI was change that phrase to extremely careless.
Let me ask you, what is the difference between gross negligence and extreme carelessness?
A couple decades in an orange jumpsuit.
That's the difference.
Other than that, they're exactly the same phrase.
And the phrase extremely careless was obviously cooked up to get Hillary Clinton out of legal trouble.
People are sick of that.
People really don't like that.
People are willing to tolerate a lot of stuff to get rid of that kind of corruption and those kind of lies.
People are willing to tolerate a brash billionaire from New York who's never worked in the government a day in his life who speaks in a really rough manner, who does things and sends mean tweets that a lot of Americans don't like.
They're willing to tolerate that because they are sick of the corruption.
They are sick of this rotted out political establishment.
Hillary Clinton, obviously, is the sort of symbol of corruption in American politics.
But even guys like Mitt Romney, and I'm not suggesting Mitt Romney is corrupt.
I'm saying he's dishonest.
I'm saying he's a slick used car salesman.
I'm saying he'll say whatever he needs you to say to try to get your vote in whatever election he's running in.
And people are sick of that.
They don't like that.
They like people to speak directly.
They want to be told the truth.
They know politicians are never going to tell them the truth.
But if Trump is going to tell you the truth 27% of the time instead of 7% of the time, they're going to give it to him.
And they don't want radicalism either.
I think this is what the Democrats misunderstood about the 2016 election.
The 2016 election of President Trump was...
Taking a guy, warts and all, because he offered an alternative to a corrosive political establishment.
But it's not like the American people suddenly became these crazy radicals.
What the Democrats concluded is the Republicans became these crazy wild radicals and the only way to win the election in 2020 is for us to become crazy wild radicals.
Nobody wants that.
Nobody wants National Period Day and public celebrations of menstruation from male politicians.
We'll get to that in just one second.
They don't want that.
They just want an alternative to the political establishment.
They might be getting that, and we might be seeing a vindication of my theory here, which is because at that last debate, I said this was revenge of the moderates.
And they're not really moderates, but relative to the other Democrats, they're moderates.
With Joe Biden's campaign collapsing, he was running in the moderate lane.
He had a lock on that.
With that collapsing, that opens up a lane for some new candidate.
Pete Buttigieg, when he first started running for president, He was going to be the kind of moderate, wholesome Midwestern guy, except he's really a big leftist, but he's going to be nice and smile and make you feel good about yourself.
Then that wasn't working, so he started running far to the left.
That was not a great idea.
He's now running back toward moderation because he sees an opening where Joe Biden was, and it's paying off.
According to a Suffolk University USA Today poll, this was conducted last Wednesday through Friday, Right now, in Iowa, this is going to be first in the nation caucus state.
You've got Joe Biden at 18%.
You've got Liz Warren at 15%.
You've got Buttigieg at 13%.
So he's still in third place.
That is way up.
Buttigieg wasn't registering until this last debate.
He wasn't on anybody's radar.
Now he's surged to number three in the state.
And if the trend on Biden keeps going down, then he's within the distance of Elizabeth Warren.
Now, that's only among 500 likely Democratic caucus goers, but there aren't that many people in Iowa anyway.
So Pete Buttigieg having a good time running as this sort of moderate.
He's not the only one.
Amy Klobuchar, too, is now staking her campaign on being the moderate in the race.
You're going to see Buttigieg and Klobuchar trying to grab that position as a moderate because it sets them up in a couple of ways.
This is still anybody's Democratic primary.
All right.
There was a there was a poll out of the Boston Herald in New Hampshire that showed that Warren, Biden and Bernie are more or less tied.
And actually, the top candidate in New Hampshire is someone who's not even running yet, Michelle Obama.
If Michelle Obama runs, she gets 26 percent.
Next candidate gets 20.
The next two get 15.
That shows you that the Democrats are unsatisfied with the current crop of candidates.
So what Klobuchar and Buttigieg are banking on is, hey, there's maybe still a slight chance that I could win this thing.
But even if they don't, even if a leftist gets the nomination, they could be the moderate to balance out the tickets.
So they're running pretty hard.
Klobuchar is running pretty hard by contrasting herself with Elizabeth Warren.
So Elizabeth Warren has these pie-in-the-sky plans, and she's not willing to admit that the way she's going to pay for it is by raising taxes on virtually everybody.
She has the same plans as Bernie Sanders.
How do we know she has the same plans?
Because she stole them from him.
Bernie Sanders at least admits that everybody's taxes are going to go up.
Warren is refusing to do that.
Klobuchar calling her out for it.
I've made very clear how I'm going to pay for everything that I've put out there.
I think that's important because we've got a president that's added trillions of dollars to the debt on the shoulders of our kids and I think we need to make the case.
And as I said at the debate stage, I just think I have a better way.
A way that will insure more people and bring premiums down, and that's with the nonprofit public option.
And it doesn't trash Obamacare.
It builds on Obamacare.
And I think you have to show how you're going to pay for things.
That bill has been very clear from the beginning.
On page 8, it says that it will dismantle our current insurance system.
It says that 149 million people will be kicked off their current insurance.
That's what it says.
And Senator Sanders has been very honest about that.
But I think we have to be honest about that.
All the people in the Senate that was on that stage and others who said they supported it, they signed on to that.
I got a lot of pressure to sign on to it.
I read it and I decided there was a better way and a different way to do it.
Have you ever heard a less inspiring candidate in your life?
Her voice, her whole manner, her whole demeanor is so uninspiring, except what she's saying here actually makes a lot of sense.
What she's saying is we need to pay for things.
We need to be honest about how we're going to pay for things.
We don't need to reinvent the wheel every four to eight years.
We don't need to completely scrap everything we've done before us.
We can build on the last health care system that we have.
And then that health care system, Obamacare, has been changed during the Trump era.
And so we can work on those changes and we can fix it up.
There's actually something profoundly conservative in what Amy Klobuchar is saying.
Not really in her policy outcomes, but in her method of addressing politics, which is evolution, not revolution.
Being somewhat responsible and saying we're going to pay for it by raising taxes here and doing this and I'm going to find the money here and we're not going to reinvent civilization every four years.
We're going to build on what we have.
There's something very conservative about that.
I have to tell you that it kills me to say anything even remotely complimentary about Amy Klobuchar or Pete Buttigieg or Tulsi Gabbard because they're really awful.
I mean they are bad.
They would make the country worse off.
They would take away our freedoms.
They would take away our money.
They would further distort the culture.
They would not be good.
But they're so much better than the alternatives in the Democratic Party that I have to give them a little credit where credits do.
I mean, that's the theme with President Trump today.
Trump, I think, is doing a very good job.
I'm supportive of the guy.
He's not without his flaws, and he's not without his mistakes, and he's made decisions that I disagree with, some that I strongly disagree with.
Still, politics is about choices.
Politics is about choices and politics is about the real world.
How do I know politics is about choices?
That's the definition of self-government.
In politics, we, the people, are presented with choices and we choose one or the other.
We don't get infinite choices.
We're not choosing between things in the abstract.
We're not choosing about things in the imaginary world.
Politics is about choosing things in the real world.
It's not philosophy.
It's not sitting around having a bull session with your friends.
There are real people, all of whom are flawed, and you've got to make choices.
So what is the alternative?
The alternative to Trump is Mitt Romney.
If those are my choices, I choose Trump.
What is the alternative to Klobuchar, Buttigieg, and Tulsi Gabbard?
The alternative is Kamala Harris.
The alternative is Cory Booker.
The alternative are Julian Castro.
So while Tulsi Gabbard was talking about how it's not in our interest to be fighting perpetual wars overseas where we can't really define what victory looks like, while Amy Klobuchar was saying we need to be able to pay for our healthcare plans before we institute them, what were those other candidates, Kamala and Booker and Julian Castro talking about?
They were talking about Menstruation, of course, because it was National Period Day.
The first ever National Period Day.
NPR explains it.
NPR did a big cover on National Period Day.
And the reason for it is, according to the NPR tweet, quote, On average, people who menstruate spend an estimated $150 million a year just on the sales tax for tampons and pads.
Now there's a push to outlaw the so-called tampon tax across the U.S. Hashtag National Period Day.
This is very funny for a few reasons.
One, because NPR presents itself as this very urbane, very sophisticated, very literate outlet.
And they reported that women on average, I'm sorry, on average people who menstruate spend $150 million a year just on the sales tax for tampons.
We must have a lot of billionaires in this country.
If people are on average spending $150 million a year on the sales tax for tampons, gosh, that must mean they're spending a billion dollars a year just on tampons on average.
Now, of course, they don't mean on average.
They just don't really understand how numbers or language work at NPR. But the illiteracy doesn't just stop there because look at the term they use.
The term they use isn't women spend an estimated $150 million a year.
It's people who menstruate.
They didn't even just say women who menstruate, not taking into account younger girls or women after menopause.
The reason they say people who menstruate is because they bought into this gender ideology and they think that men can menstruate.
That's the alternative.
You know, if my alternatives, if I'm a Democrat, my alternatives are Tulsi Gabbard, I don't know if I love her foreign policy entirely, or Amy Klobuchar, you know, she's got that voice and she's not, you know, she just doesn't have a really inspiring...
Okay, it's either that or people who think that men can menstruate.
I'm going to go with the first two.
Kamala Harris tweets out, 1 in 14s have missed class because of lack of access to period products.
That's wrong.
It's time we end the stigma and ensure everyone, no matter their income, can reach their full potential, period or not.
Hashtag National Period Day.
Now, that statistic is completely made up.
The rest of the period movement, which is what they're calling it, say that the number is one in five.
Girls don't have access, one in five teens who don't have access to tampons, haven't gone to class or something.
They're just making it up.
They're citing a survey from Always Brand.
This is what the left does with statistics.
There's lies, damned lies in statistics.
They do the same thing with campus sexual assault.
They initially said when they pushed this campus sexual assault epidemic that one in five women are raped on colleges while they're there.
And then while I was in college, they changed the number.
They said it was one in four.
I said, wait, hold on.
Oh my goodness gracious.
How on earth did it increase so much since we were there?
What sources are you citing?
They never could tell you because they just make it up.
It doesn't matter what the real number is.
Obviously, it's not 1-4 or 1-5.
That would make the campus of Harvard University more dangerous than downtown Fallujah.
There's no way that that is true, that elite Ivy League universities are more dangerous for women than ISIS strongholds in, I don't know, Raqqa or something.
No, that's not the case.
They just say it because it's a scare number and it makes you more inclined to believe their campaigns.
Cory Booker tweeted out, quote, So there is Booker talking about how men can menstruate.
It's outrageous.
Join the period movement for National Period Day and support the fight for menstrual equity.
Menstrual equity is what Booker is talking about.
And then, oh, it wasn't Julian Castro.
I'm sorry.
I misspoke.
It wasn't Julian Castro who tweeted out the stupidest thing about this.
It was Beto O'Rourke Julian Castro has regularly talked about men's gynecological needs, but what Beto O'Rourke tweeted out is, quote, In detention centers and in prisons in big cities and small towns, women across America don't have access to period products they need.
On national period day, men need to join women in demanding real change, which is why I'm supporting the Menstrual Equity Act.
The Winston Churchill of our times, ladies and gentlemen, they're addressing the real problems.
You know, whenever they do these polls, what matters to you?
The economy, foreign policy, energy, immigration, always at the top of the list is menstrual equity, right?
No, these guys are jokers.
And so when you're looking at the Democratic primary, you've got to make a choice.
Who are you going to pick?
Obviously, you're going to choose the people who are more sane than the other.
When you're looking at politics generally, who are you going to pick?
You're going to pick the guy who's more sane, the guy who's more reasonable, the guy who's not blabbering about how men need access to tampons for menstrual equity day.
Does that leave us perfect candidates?
No.
Does that mean we're governed by angels?
No.
The Federalist Papers already told us we're not governed by angels.
We can assail our president, we can assail our public servants as the worst possible people in the world.
The question in politics is, what's the alternative?
That's our show.
I'm Michael Knowles.
This is The Michael Knowles Show.
I will see you later.
I'm going to be speaking tonight, by the way, at Kennesaw State University in Georgia.
We're going to have a whole lot of time as the Men Are Not Women Tour keeps rolling along around the country.
Then we're going to be at the University of Florida in a couple days.
So be sure to check that out.
I'm Michael Knowles.
This is The Michael Knowles Show.
show.
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