Somehow the story of how U.S. troops killed ISIS leader Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi has gotten even better as President Trump declassifies a photo of the dog who chased him down. We will examine what the photo means as most Americans ignore the strategic and symbolic significance of this very good boy. Then, Pete Buttigieg eats Kamala Harris’s lunch in the 2020 Democratic primary campaign, and it’s all Joe Biden’s fault. We’ll take a look at the latest polls. Finally, a leftist admits and defends the lawlessness of the latest impeachment push in the Dumbest Article on the Internet Today. Date: 10-29-2019
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Somehow, the story of how US troops killed ISIS leader Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi has gotten even better as President Trump declassifies a photo of the dog who chased him down.
We will examine what the photo means as most Americans ignore the strategic and symbolic significance of this very, very good boy.
Then, Pete Buttigieg eats Kamala Harris' lunch in the 2020 Democratic primary, and it is all Joe Biden's fault.
We will take a look at the latest polls.
Finally, a leftist admits and defends the lawlessness of the latest impeachment push in the dumbest article on the internet today.
All that and more.
I'm Michael Knowles and this is the Michael Knowles Show.
Good to be back here in La La Land.
We had a good time speaking at Kennesaw State University and the University of Florida, and then debating Clay Aiken.
I'm sorry, I mean Chris Hahn in Nashville at Politicon.
You can check out that full debate from Politicon on the Daily Wire YouTube channel.
It was a lot of fun.
Good to be back, even though I'm evacuated from my home.
Still, I'm having a much better week than ISIS is because the United States is absolutely obliterating ISIS.
We are getting even more good news on that today.
We got the news two days ago that the president made the decision to go forward with a raid that killed the leader of ISIS, Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi.
Now we've got more details on that raid, specifically on one of the dogs who was involved in chasing down Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi.
We don't have the name.
That has not been declassified by the president.
But we do have a picture of him.
And what's so great about this picture of the dog is he looks, on the one hand, like a really Sleek, absolute killing machine.
You know, he's got really lean and looks like he's ready to go.
On the other, he looks like a big, silly dog with his tongue hanging out, smiling.
And I love the idea of him being this really good-natured dog who just happens to love chasing down and eating terrorists.
So there's this really like, oh, hey, hey, hey, Dad, hey, can I go chase down that ISIS terrorist today?
Huh, huh, okay, great.
You know, and he chases him down into a cave.
So this is a terrific way to celebrate.
I love Trump's decision to tweet out this pic of the dog.
Because not only do we have the pic of the dog, I think we've now declassified some video footage of the dog chasing down Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi.
Do we have it?
Okay, so that was either footage of the raid on Baghdadi or it's a clip so that was either footage of the raid on Baghdadi or it's a It's definitely one of those two.
We'll have to check with the team handling the classification of these videos.
Either way, great way to celebrate.
People kind of went after Trump because they thought this was frivolous and you shouldn't be tweeting out pictures of dogs.
And some people even tried to pretend that this would put U.S. soldiers in harm's way if you tweet out a picture of a dog that killed a terrorist.
Obviously, it's not one of the greatest things about putting out this picture of the dog is that it doesn't put any soldiers in harm's way.
If he tweeted out a picture of the soldiers who went in there and killed Baghdadi, that would put a big target on their backs.
But tweeting out the dog is a great way to nod toward the soldiers who did it, but not actually put a soldier in any danger.
I like it too because it gives more details on the raid.
And this is satisfying to us because we will never see al-Baghdadi's body.
I mean, what happened is you had these U.S. special operators come in and they...
Certainly just wrecked this guy very quickly, and he ends up getting splattered all over cave walls, and then they basically threw him into the ocean.
So we're never going to see his body, we're never going to see photos of this thing, but at least we now have an image of it, and this is important because it satisfies our longing for justice, but it's not gruesome.
It actually is gruesome to see a terrorist splattered all over a wall, but it's not gruesome to long for justice.
It's not vengeance, exactly.
It's justice that we want.
It's the opposite of gruesome.
Because everybody loves pictures of dogs.
That's half of what the internet is for.
The other half, obviously, is for pictures of cats.
But there's another reason that this photo is really important, and it actually serves a strategic objective, and it also tells us something about Trump's foreign policy.
We'll get to that in a second.
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So, three reasons why this picture of the soldier is so terrific.
Doesn't put soldiers in harm's way.
It gives us some details on the raid and satisfies that desire we have to know about it and to kind of picture the justice that's being exacted.
The third reason is the strategic reason, which is that...
The dog serves special significance here, carries real importance.
You'll remember in Trump's announcement on Sunday, President Trump invoked a lot of dog imagery, not just the imagery of the dog hunting down Baghdadi, but the imagery of Baghdadi dying like a dog.
Here's President Trump.
He died after running into a dead-end tunnel, whimpering and crying and screaming all the way.
The thug who tried so hard to intimidate others spent his last moments in utter fear, in total panic and dread, terrified of the American forces bearing down on him.
Baghdadi was vicious and violent, and he died in a vicious and violent way as a coward running and crying.
He died like a dog.
He died like a coward.
The world is now a much safer place.
He died like a dog.
And Trump has reiterated this time and time again.
And there's a contradiction here.
Because on the one hand, we're exalting the heroism of this very, very good dog who hunted down Baghdadi, and then we're hearing about the cowardice of dogs.
But what is permeating all of the narrative is this canine imagery.
I don't think this is just a coincidence.
You know, Trump...
Actually does choose his words carefully.
I know he gets assailed all the time for using loose words, and he exaggerates, he talks like a New Yorker, but he actually uses very precise words.
He doesn't use words elegantly, but he does use words carefully.
That is how Trump has been a successful communicator for 40 years.
That's how he's been successful on TV and in the tabloids and in the press and in politics.
You saw this in his letter to Turkey.
When he wrote that letter to Turkey, which said...
We should have a good deal.
Don't be so stupid.
People will look at you like the devil if you make a bad deal, but if you work with us, you'll make a good deal.
That letter to Turkey was written in a very elementary style using small words and simple concepts.
That was to communicate to a broad audience.
You see it in the nicknames.
Trump doesn't just choose random, arbitrary words for his political opponents.
He hones in on that perfect nickname that sticks with them forever.
So, Crooked Hillary.
He tried out a few others.
He tried Low Stamina Hillary.
That was no good.
There have been other nicknames for Hillary in her 40 years in politics.
Crooked just sticks like glue.
Sleepy Joe.
He didn't go for Creepy Joe.
Creepy Joe was the obvious choice because when he gave him the nickname, Joe was doing all those shoulder massages.
He used a word that rhymes with Creepy Joe, so it invokes it, but it's sleepy to show that Joe doesn't have any endurance, that Joe is falling apart, that he's old, that he's past his prime.
And that has actually been the enduring attack on his campaign.
You saw it with Little Marco and Low Energy Jeb.
These are very careful words, and you're seeing it here in the imagery about the dogs.
Why?
Because in Islamic culture, dogs are considered filthy.
Dogs are impure.
Dogs are evil in the modern Islamic conception of them, ritually impure.
The mere sight of a dog during prayer can be considered to negate the prayer of the faithful in Islam.
Why is this?
Because historically in Islam, dogs would eat the trash in the cities.
This is true in many cities, but especially true as Islam moved out of the desert, moved out of these nomads, and moved into the great big cities of the Islamic world.
The dogs were relied on to eat the trash and keep people safe.
However, as the connection between the proximity to garbage and filth and trash became associated with the spread of disease, dogs were looked on as filthy because they were the ones eating all the trash.
So what Trump is doing here is, in his initial statement, he's saying...
Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi did not die as a great martyr.
He didn't die courageously.
He died like a dog, like the filthiest thing you could possibly imagine.
And then when he releases the photo, it's almost worse than releasing a photo of Baghdadi's blown up body.
Because if he releases the photo of the dog, he says, your great terrorist leader was run down and chomped away at by a dog, by the filthiest thing, like a rat, like a cockroach, comes and eats his body.
It's so offensive.
You saw this during the Bush administration, during the abuses at Abu Ghraib prison.
A lot of the abuses surrounded around dogs.
The jailers, the Americans, you know, the soldiers would...
Would drag the inmates around like a dog on a leech.
There would be dogs there because this was offensive to the terrorists.
Tells us a lot about U.S. grand strategy.
Big difference from Barack Obama here.
President Trump is playing to win as opposed to the Obama strategy which was playing not to lose.
What's the difference?
Barack Obama and Donald Trump campaigned on a very similar foreign policy.
They both campaigned against Bush.
They both campaigned against the Iraq war and against wars in the Middle East.
Now, Obama campaigned on getting us out of the Middle East.
And how did he try to do it?
By leading from behind, by not disturbing the status quo, by going into Libya, by going into Syria.
The old joke was, if I vote for John McCain, we're going to get another war in the Middle East.
And they were right.
I voted for John McCain.
We got more wars in the Middle East.
That was the strategy.
Obama says, I'm going to get us out of the Middle East.
Somehow we're more involved at the end of his presidency than before.
Trump doesn't want to fall into that same trap.
So Trump decides he's going to go in and lead from the front.
He's going to go in and kill ISIS and then he's going to leave.
He's not just going to manage threats.
He's going to go in and fight them.
The left has tried to insist that this is somehow a bad thing, that this would lead to the reconstitution of ISIS, right?
So they would say, okay, Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi is out and that doesn't matter at all because now they're just going to replace him with some new guy.
So this actually started earlier.
They said, if we pull out of northern Syria, ISIS is going to reconstitute itself.
A week later, we kill the head of ISIS. They say, well, if you kill the head of ISIS, you're just going to get another head of ISIS. Well, guess what?
We killed the head of ISIS, then we killed the next head of ISIS, too.
We just got reports yesterday that the spokesman for ISIS, a guy named Abu Hassan al-Muhajir, A close associate of Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi has also been killed in a raid launched by U.S. military with info from the Syrian Democratic Forces.
A U.S. official who was interviewed on Monday said that Abu al-Hassan al-Muhajir, quote, would have been one of the potential successors to Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, and he said it could be anywhere from a few days to a few weeks before the Islamic State announces a new leader.
Look at the connections here.
Look at the connections between the foreign policy of just the past few weeks, the decision to move the troops out of northern Syria, the raid to kill al-Baghdadi, the raid to kill the spokesman for ISIS, who could be the next guy.
Where did the raid to kill the spokesman for ISIS take place?
Took place in northern Syria.
But I thought we were withdrawing from northern Syria.
What does this tell us about our reporting on American foreign policy and the Trump doctrine?
We'll get to that in one second, then we'll get to 2020.
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So, we kill the spokesman for ISIS, the likely successor to Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, in northern Syria.
Are we really supposed to believe that the decision to pull out of northern Syria and its timing had nothing to do with these two highly targeted and very well-prepared missions?
It's not like they just decided one day, okay, we're going to go in and kill al-Baghdadi.
They'd been prepping this for a very long time.
Tell us about this Trump foreign policy.
Because the decisions were obviously related.
In many ways, it looks like a fake-out.
Looks like two weeks ago we said, we're going to get out of northern Syria, and then everyone expects us to get out of northern Syria, and then we go in and take out our two biggest targets.
What it tells us is that Trump wants to get much more specific about foreign policy than the prior eight years.
He doesn't like a nebulous foreign policy.
He likes it to get real specific.
You know, Trump actually talked about this.
He said, I don't want to just take out ISIS. I want to take out al-Baghdadi.
And if you're not doing it, figure out how to do it.
Here's Trump.
He should have been killed years ago.
Another president should have gotten him.
But to me, it was very important.
I would say all the time, they'd walk into my office, sir, we killed this leader at a low level, this leader.
I said, I never heard of him.
I want al-Baghdadi.
That's the only one I know now.
I want al-Baghdadi.
Get him.
And they got him.
Get al-Baghdadi, then they got al-Baghdadi.
That's what he's saying.
I don't care about these huge operations with names I don't know.
Why are we in there if you're not going to go kill the top guy?
You know, frankly, if they had put more focus on this during the Bush administration, I think there would have been a much less significant blowback against the Bush foreign policy in the Middle East, which then became the Obama foreign policy in the Middle East, if they'd just gone in and gotten bin Laden.
It would have been a lot easier to sell it to the American people.
To say, look, we have this enemy, we're going to go there and kill the enemy, and we're going to stay for a little while and make sure that other threats don't crop up.
That's what Trump is trying to do.
He's trying to avoid the mistakes of the Obama administration.
There is virtually nobody who is currently advocating for a Bush administration-style democracy in the Middle East foreign policy.
So the difference between the left and the right now is the left is more or less supporting the liberal consensus, letting the State Department do whatever they want to do, staying in the Middle East, international, liberal world order.
The right is saying we need to have specific objectives.
If we're going to deploy troops to Syria, we need an objective.
You know, we did this raid by using the intel from the Syrian Democratic Forces and then using U.S. military to go in and execute it.
But even the Syrian Democratic Forces, I had to remind myself, I said, who are they?
Okay, I guess they're our friends in the region.
But they're not the Free Syrian Army, which we used to support but no longer support.
And they're not the YPG, which are the Kurds, but they're the Kurds that we fought alongside and now we've pulled out and we're not fighting alongside.
But they're different than the Iraqi Kurds who we really like.
They're very different from the Turkish Kurds who nobody likes.
Obviously, that's a very nebulous, complicated situation.
We don't have...
Exactly a strategic interest in just maintaining the status quo in the Civil War.
We do have interests in the region and we're going to execute on them.
This is ruffling a lot of feathers among careerists in D.C. Ruffling a lot of feathers among careerists, specifically the State Department.
There are three kinds of people in Washington, D.C. There's the talent.
Those are the elected guys.
There are the appointed people who come and go with the talent.
And then there's the bureaucracy.
Guess who has the power?
Guess who's going to be there the longest?
The talent comes and goes.
The appointees come and go even faster.
It's those careerists, the career guys in the State Department, not just the State Department, but at every level of the federal government.
They are going to be there, so they can outweigh the people who come and are elected and then are voted out of office.
They can outweigh the appointed people who are set to run those departments.
They will be there forever, and they have a vision of what U.S. foreign policy is going to be, and they are going to push back against the electeds who come in and want to change it.
Well, Trump is pushing back even harder against that.
He's getting really specific.
When Obama killed Osama bin Laden, when he made that decision for that raid, there were no photos.
There was no imagery.
We didn't get a whole lot of details.
There are some movies, Zero Dark Thirty, that sort of thing.
But we don't really know a whole lot about it.
When Trump made the decision to get Baghdadi, he told us a lot about it.
Now we have Zero Bark Thirty.
Now we know about this dog.
Now we know about what it looked like.
He got really specific, really personal on operations, on beefs, on solutions.
This is no more, we don't want to ruffle feathers, we want to maintain the world order.
This is Trump holding up a picture and saying, we chased you down like a dog with a dog, because you're filthy, disgusting animals, you ISIS terrorists, and we're going to go in and kill more of you.
So, don't think that we're maintaining any sort of status quo.
And don't think that you can predict what we're going to do.
Because the moment you think we're going to leave northern Syria, we're going to turn right around and go right back in and kill your top guy.
That specificity is going to rattle norms.
Maybe it's a good thing to rattle norms.
Speaking of rattling norms, turning from the foreign front into the domestic front.
On the 2020 campaign trail, Joe Biden is falling apart.
Joe Biden just did an interview with 60 Minutes, trying to resurrect his campaign, trying to prove he's with it.
He can barely answer a question.
The Democratic Party has had Jack Kennedy, Bill Clinton, Barack Obama.
This is your third run for president.
Why Joe Biden?
Well, because I think, as I said, we need somebody who on day one knows exactly what to do, can command the world stage.
No one wonders whether I know a great deal about these issues in foreign policy and domestic policy.
They're things I've done.
And that might be one of the criticisms, too, that you're offering essentially four more years of an Obama-like administration.
Yeah.
Well, let me tell you something.
I love the fact that all of a sudden the Democratic Party doesn't think Obama was that great a president.
I find that fascinating.
Some have asked, why hasn't President Obama endorsed you?
You guys served together for eight years.
Because I want to earn this on my own.
Did he offer to endorse you?
No, we didn't even get there.
I asked him not to.
He said, okay, I think it's better.
I think he thinks it's better for me.
I have no doubt when I'm the nominee, he'll be out in the campaign trail for me.
I don't, you know, look, I'm my own man, but I'm also the extension of Obama, unless you don't like Obama, but it's kind of weird that you don't like Obama.
But I didn't want him to endorse, even though I am the extension of him, but he doesn't like me.
Where are we again?
What's happening?
Where am I? Joe Biden falling apart.
This is providing a major opportunity to a dark horse presidential candidate.
And this is seriously hurting another presidential candidate.
We will get to who it is and why.
We'll get to the dumbest article on the internet today.
But first, I've got to say goodbye to Facebook and YouTube.
By the way, if you want to stay up to date, over the past week, you know, I've gone and given two speeches and did that debate.
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If you head over there, I'll be posting links to that full debate and some of our YAF speeches over the past week.
We've got some more speeches coming up in the future.
So head on over there.
Also go to dailywire.com.
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We will be right back with a lot more.
So Biden is falling apart.
He's really, he's not just losing steam in the polls.
He's not just losing steam on television.
He's not just losing steam in the donation department, in the finance department.
Other candidates are gaining from this.
Elizabeth Warren obviously has become more or less the front runner in the race, but there's another candidate who's really gaining on, on Biden.
That's Pete Buttigieg.
Pete Buttigieg, just a couple weeks ago, was nowhere to be seen.
He was way back by the bottom of the pack.
Now, a Suffolk University and USA Today poll has Mayor Pete in third place in Iowa.
That is five points off of Joe Biden's first place lead at 18%.
And that is four behind Elizabeth Warren's position at 17%.
Bernie Sanders is actually fourth in Iowa, according to this poll, at 9%.
Now, that's not the end of it, because there's another poll from ISU and Civics showing Buttigieg in second place.
It's 20%.
20% of people in Iowa saying that Pete Buttigieg is their first choice in the Iowa caucus.
Buttigieg was right behind Warren at 28%.
Sanders at 18%.
Biden at 12%.
Iowa is really going to matter because all these national polls, all of this horse race is going to change the minute you actually have people going to the ballots.
The only polls that matter are on election day.
So you've got Iowa first in the nation.
Iowa goes in.
There are Democratic strategists and Biden appointees, Biden advisors, who are speaking off the record, but it is being reported, who are nervous about a third or fourth place finish in Iowa.
Joe Biden's entire campaign is premised on electability.
The minute that Joe Biden turns up third or fourth in Iowa, I mean, frankly, even second, his campaign is very likely finished.
It's not even finished before then.
But even that, those aren't the only numbers.
Buttigieg, Warren, and Bernie Sanders are also leading the pack in cash on hand.
Cash on hand right now, all three of them had over $20 million.
Sanders has the most cash on hand, $33.7 million.
After that is Warren at $25.7 million.
After that is Buttigieg at $23.3 million.
Biden, do you know how much cash on hand he has?
$8.9 million.
Absolutely brutal.
Way back in the bottom of the pack.
He's got well less than half of the cash on hand that Buttigieg has.
Nearly a third.
Really bad news for Biden, because Biden is also burning cash at a very fast rate.
It's not sustainable.
So Buttigieg, who is kind of going around in the wind, initially he was the moderate candidate, then he ran to the left.
Now he sees that as Biden falls apart, his lane is going to be the moderate lane, so he's going moderate again.
He is shooting up through the roof.
What this means is there's not a whole lot of room for Kamala Harris.
Kamala Harris, she bragged on TV recently.
She said, I'm a top-tier candidate.
She's not.
She could have been a top-tier candidate.
She's approached top-tier candidacy, but she just hasn't.
Now she's getting desperate, so she's playing the last card she's got.
She's playing the race and gender card.
I have also started to perhaps be more candid talking about what I describe and what I believe to be the elephant in the room about my campaign.
What is that?
Electability.
What do you mean?
Electability.
You know, essentially, is America ready for a woman and a woman of color to be president of the United States?
America was ready for a black man to be president of the United States.
And this conversation happened for him.
There is a lack of ability or a difficulty in imagining that someone who we have never seen can do a job that has been done, you know, 45 times by someone who is not that person.
This is so pathetic.
She has nothing left, so she's playing this cheap argument.
There's nothing to the argument.
America has already elected a black president.
Twice.
America nearly elected a woman president last time.
The female candidate got more votes than the male candidate.
She just never heard of Wisconsin and couldn't point it out on a map, so she lost the presidency.
America is perfectly ready.
For people on the basis of race or sex.
They're just not ready for Kamala Harris because she's a terrible candidate.
And she's a spineless politician who's not only personally bad on the campaign trail, but is completely unaware of what she stands for, regularly lies about seemingly trivial aspects of her biography, and she can't get the Democratic nomination because she spent years throwing people in prison.
That's why.
They're ready for black people.
They're ready for women.
They're just not ready for Kamala Harris because nobody wants her to be president.
That's it.
That's what it's all about.
She was a really good candidate on paper and then she opened her mouth.
And she's a bad candidate in person and she's coming to grips with this reality.
That is going to leave her a Without really much of a lane.
We're still seeing the lanes shape out.
So Buttigieg, he could become a leftist by the end of the campaign again.
He doesn't stand for very much.
He blows in the wind.
Same thing with Liz Warren.
Is she going to go for Biden's voters?
Is she going to go for Bernie's voters?
Is she going to be the hardcore class warrior?
Is she going to be the moderate Harvard professor?
But both of them have some real political skills.
Kamala Harris doesn't quite have that yet.
And so she's falling apart.
This is not yet a totally ossified three-way race.
People have said the race is over.
It's going to be Warren.
The race is over.
It's going to be...
It's not.
We don't know who it's going to be because Democrats are dissatisfied with the choices.
By the way, if Kamala Harris is saying America isn't ready for a black woman president, Kamala, you're not running in the general election yet.
You're not trying to convince America.
You're trying to convince Democrats.
So what you're really saying is Democrats are not ready for a black woman president.
Now, I don't think that's true, but that's the argument she's not making.
That would be the honest argument, but she can't even make that because she's just playing a cheap, race-hustling, sex-hustling political trick.
Another note on all of this, on this disingenuous sort of politics.
At Politicon, over the weekend, the idea of Politicon is you're going to get both sides together and they're going to talk to each other.
So you've got these people on the left, you've got these people on the right.
And I'm all for that.
I'm happy to talk to just about anybody and we can have an honest debate.
And I'm not going to, it doesn't mean I'm going to be really sweet and nice and conciliatory and give up whole premises.
I'm not going to do that, but I'll at least...
Try to have a nice sense of humor about it and be amiable and polite about it.
The left can't do it.
The left doesn't know how to do it.
They pay a lot of lip service to it.
But then, when it comes down to brass tacks, they really seem not to like half of their countrymen.
One of the best events of the weekend, unfortunately I wasn't able to go, was James Comey.
Former FBI director, universally reviled man, absolutely pompous and a creature of the swamp in Washington and so unbelievably self-important and really violated norms and laws in his efforts to get Hillary Clinton elected president, which ended up backfiring and probably helped Donald Trump even more.
James Comey, he comes out and he says, look, we have a lot in common.
We've got to come together.
It's this really conciliatory sort of tone that he strikes.
And I said it when I sat here with the first question you asked.
We have a set of values that are at the core of this country that hold this place together.
I try to explain to kids something that most of you know.
We shouldn't exist.
We don't have the normal human glue that holds this country together.
We don't have common ancestry, common language, common faith.
We have nothing in common except a set of values.
That's the glue in the United States of America that holds Republicans, Democrats, and Independents together.
Well, that's not quite true.
I like what he's trying to do here.
He's trying to say, we need to come together and like each other more.
And the only thing we have in common is a set of values.
That was once true.
We did used to share, in many ways, a set of values.
And we shared some fundamental institutions and we shared a culture.
That's not really true anymore.
When you have major entertainers, major sports figures, major leftist politicians...
Actually disrespecting the American flag itself, we don't have shared values.
We don't.
The most basic value we could share is a love of country and a respect for our country.
And we don't share that anymore.
It's not just some fringy people now who are protesting the American flag.
It's millionaire athletes on national television being applauded by rank-and-file leftists and being applauded by leftist politicians.
Disrespecting the flag.
If we don't share the flag, we don't share very much at all in the way of values.
We also don't share many political values.
That's why we have a right and a left in this country.
That's why we have two political parties.
The political parties are not separated based on geography, really.
They're not, or primarily at least, they're not separated based on race, primarily.
They're not separated based on sex, primarily.
They're not separated based on the kind of clothing you wear, primarily.
They're separated on ideas.
The right supports our founding principles.
The right supports conserving this American tradition.
The right supports, in America, limited government.
The right supports protecting the political liberties that we've inherited in our traditions.
And the left opposes that.
The left wants to rip that down.
The left wants progress.
So the left supports broadly on the economic front, socialism, on the cultural front, a tearing down of our cultural traditions.
And those are differences.
That's fine.
Phyllis Schlafly, when the conservative movement was beginning, said that we need a choice, not an echo.
So we have a choice between those things.
We don't share all that much in the way of values.
Would that we at least shared a love of country, a respect for the country, a respect for our countrymen, and a reverence for our history and the great men and women who went before us who gave us this wonderful country of ours.
We used to share that.
We don't really share that anymore.
I mean, we can't even tolerate that sometimes the other guy wins the presidential election.
Because in the same breath where James Comey says, we all share this together, we're all one, kumbaya, break out the bongos.
In the same breath, he says that if Trump is re-elected, he's going to move to New Zealand.
What if he wins again?
Will you still believe that?
I will be, from my new home in New Zealand, I will...
But I still will believe in America.
So it's a joke.
He's telling a joke.
He's not going to really move to New Zealand.
But in that joke, there's a lot of truth.
There is a lot of truth there because James Comey, throughout the 2016 campaign, with a lot of his friends in the FBI and the DOJ and the bureaucracy, interfered in our presidential election, tried to stack the deck in favor of Hillary Clinton.
Really, we're not willing to let the American people make their own choice.
And they've been trying to overturn that election ever since through absolutely lawless behavior.
So, look, we can joke and say, I'm going to move out of the country if the other guy wins.
James Comey has actually worked to undermine our institutions of government, to undermine faith in our institutions, faith in our republic, faith in the legitimacy of our elections.
That's a very bad thing.
And that's what the left does.
They say, kumbaya, let's all come together.
Let's be really tolerant of one another.
Let's really love one another.
Except for those awful conservative, racist, fascist, bigot, terrible people.
They are not deserving of anything, but are scorn and derision.
They're deplorable and they're irredeemable.
We've got to send them out of the country.
It's not how you come together.
I actually would prefer the opposite of what James Comey is proposing.
What James Comey wants is a lot of soft words and nice, smiley, saccharine rhetoric to pretend there aren't real philosophical and ideological differences in this country, while at the same time he maligns half of his countrymen.
I want the opposite.
I want to be very honest about the divisions we have in this country.
I want to be crystal clear.
I want extremely clear rhetoric that shows the different choices that we have in elections.
And at the same time, I want us to share some love of our countrymen and a basic respect for our countrymen and a basic love and respect for our country itself.
That's kind of the opposite.
It's not that sweet, soft, saccharine language.
But it's much more respectful because honesty is respectful, because the truth is respectful.
I think James Comey in many ways is pretty exemplary of the left.
You see this in an article that was published in USA Today.
It's the dumbest article on the internet today, which is really saying something.
It's a defense of the same lawlessness.
It's a defense of the same kind of saccharine politics.
It's a defense of the same nebulous kind of politics that so much of the Trump era is about destroying.
So much of the Trump era is about making things more clear.
This article defends the lawlessness of impeachment in explicit terms.
It says, you don't have to break a law to be impeached.
Trump's defenders need a better argument.
It's defending, it says, look, impeachment doesn't have clear criteria.
It's whatever we want it to be.
The founders made clear that an impeachable or convictable offense need not be a crime.
Hamilton said it applied to the misconduct of public men.
The tactics some Republicans are using to defend President Donald Trump against being impeached or indicted by the House and convicted or removed from office by the Senate include confusing the public about what these terms mean.
One thrust is to suggest that for a president to be impeached, he must have committed a crime.
Not all crimes are impeachable offenses, and not all impeachable offenses are crimes.
An abuse of power occurs when a president reaches beyond the understood limits on his governing or violates the constitutional requirement That the president take care that the laws be faithfully executed.
The whole point, and all that ridiculous mixture of words, that word salad there, what the author in USA Today is saying is that the president can be impeached for maladministration, for doing a bad job at his job, for not executing the laws in a way that is expedient or the way that we would like him to.
The founders and framers of our Constitution explicitly rejected this argument.
The entire premise of this article is untrue.
You don't need to take my word for it.
You can read about it in Federalist 65, which specifically takes up the question of impeachment.
You can read about it in the debates between George Mason and Thomas Jefferson and Alexander Hamilton and James Madison.
George Mason, for instance, wanted to make impeachment much easier, wanted to be able to impeach the president for maladministration, for not being that good at his job.
The founders...
Who won this debate said the president needs to commit treason or bribery or other high crimes and misdemeanors.
A crime is essential here.
And the reason for that is because we don't want to make the executive branch subject to the Congress.
We don't want congressional supremacy like what we now see in the United Kingdom.
We want three separate, co-equal branches of government.
That is how the United States will function best.
That is how it has functioned best.
The left wants to gloss over that, wants to completely confuse the issue, and make the question of impeachment in the founders' minds the opposite of what it really is.
We need to get rid of that ambiguity.
We need to make things crystal clear.
We need a basic...
Love of our country and respect for our founders and not to pretend it's the opposite of what it is.
You know, there was, this seems sort of unrelated, but it's an unbelievable video going around and I think it does tie in.
There was a rapper named YG. Who is YG? I have no idea, nor do I especially care.
This rapper YG was on stage and he invites some guy up on stage and he says, hey, I asked you if you like Trump or not and you said you didn't know.
So I want you to say right now, F Donald Trump, F the President of the United States.
And the fan that he brought up on stage had a lot of guts and a lot of clarity.
I spotted you out in the crowd.
I asked you if you Donald Trump, you said you don't know.
So since you don't know, I need you to make up your mind tonight.
I need you to say your name.
I want you to state your name because I know your mama, your daddy, your grandmama, your grandfather is watching.
I want you to state your name and yell out Donald Trump.
No, you won't.
Get his ass out of here.
Get him out of here.
You won't say F the President of the United States.
Imagine, by the way, imagine if this were a country music concert and the country music star calls up some fan out of the audience and says, hey, I asked you if you like Barack Obama and you said you didn't know.
I want you to say right now on stage F Barack Obama.
Could you imagine the headlines that that would get?
Of course, it would be insane.
But you don't get that with the left.
We're beginning to see that clarity.
So much of the Trump era is about this clarity.
No more nebulous missions.
No more we don't know what our interest is here.
No more nebulous kind of politics.
We don't know what the left and the right think.
No more nebulous government administrators.
That ambiguity...
Is going to persist for a long time, but we're beginning to see in stark light the real differences in this country, the real interests that we have outside the country, and the real differences within them.
Those differences, that clarity, does not reflect very well for the left.
Maybe that's why the right is picking up this strategy in the first place.
That's our show.
I'm Michael Knowles.
This is The Michael Knowles Show.
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