The Kansas City Chiefs mount a four-quarter comeback to win the Super Bowl, NFL ratings are up, and Republican senators unexpectedly whip the votes to exonerate President Trump and end impeachment once and for all. We will examine the secret behind three dramatic comebacks. Then, Democrats freak out just hours before the Iowa caucuses, the halftime show highlights the difference between sexiness and porn, and Brexit comes off without a hitch.
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The Kansas City Chiefs mount a fourth-quarter comeback to win the Super Bowl.
NFL ratings are up, and Republican senators unexpectedly whip the votes to exonerate President Trump and end impeachment once and for all.
We will examine the secret behind three dramatic comebacks.
Then, Democrats freak out just hours before the Iowa caucuses, happening in the next, right now I guess.
The halftime show highlights the difference between sexiness and pornography.
There's a huge difference.
And Brexit comes off without a hitch.
All of that and more.
I'm Michael Knowles, and this is The Michael Knowles Show.
Huge win in the Super Bowl, and I don't know anything about football, and I didn't watch most of the Super Bowl, but there was a major win.
The biggest win of the Super Bowl was for us.
We all won the Super Bowl because of how apolitical it was.
The commercials, the show itself, everything about it was not dripping in leftism.
We will examine why that is, because it made the whole thing much, much more enjoyable.
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Big Super Bowl win yesterday, not just for the Chiefs, but for all of us.
The show, the game, the spectacle was not political.
It was not leftist.
It was not anti-American.
It was not protesting the American flag.
It was just football, okay?
There were ads for President Trump.
There was an ad for him, an ad for Bloomberg.
Mostly, other than that, it was free of politics.
The ads, they were fine.
They were kind of hokey.
They were kind of lame.
Well, that's pretty much the definition of television these days.
In the age of new media, almost everything on TV is a little hokey and a little bit lame.
But they were fine.
Why did the NFL avoid politics?
The NFL avoided politics because politics was destroying their ratings.
Leftism was destroying their ratings.
Colin Kaepernick and protesting the flag and all that stuff was causing people to tune out.
And so the NFL made a big comeback.
By getting rid of their political advertising and political themes.
The whole theme of today is comebacks.
Maybe the whole theme of this year is major comebacks.
There was one insane political ad that PETA, the animal rights organization, wanted to put out.
The NFL refused.
They said no.
We'll get to that one in a little bit because it's truly unbelievable.
So you had two ads, basically, that were political.
Trump and Bloomberg.
Now, I want to take a look at those before we get to the biggest comebacks, because those two ads show you completely different strategies, completely different approaches to politics, and I think maybe why President Trump is going to have the advantage in November.
You know, yesterday was Groundhog Day, too, so we're all making predictions here.
I think if we're just judging by these two political ads, Trump is going to have the advantage in November.
So here is the Trump ad.
It's a 30 second spot touting his criminal justice reform.
I'm free to hug my family.
I'm free to start over.
This is the greatest day of my life.
My heart is just bursting with gratitude.
I want to thank President Donald John Trump.
Whoo!
Hallelujah!
Thank you, thank you.
Thank you.
I'm Donald Trump, and I approve this message.
Okay, so that's the ad, right?
It's this woman who has been in prison for a long time for running a drug operation and then Trump lets her out of jail and this is supposed to be a reason to vote for him in November.
I personally don't like this law.
I hated his criminal justice reform, also known as the jailbreak bill.
I think it's been dishonest.
I think it distorts justice.
It's my least favorite thing he's done, probably.
However, from a political perspective, this is a great ad for the Super Bowl.
The reason this is a great ad for the Super Bowl is because it does not irritate Trump's base enough to cause them not to vote for him.
I'm not gonna not vote for Trump because he passed one kind of stupid law that doesn't really matter that much.
However, it's got a lot of crossover appeal.
It's got a ton of crossover appeal to independents and even some moderate Democrats.
So it's a big tent political ad for the Super Bowl, which is one of the biggest TV events of the year.
This ad also has an explicitly racial appeal.
So the Democrats obviously have been making race identity politics one of the most important aspects of politics for the past several decades.
When it comes to the Super Bowl, that is how they injected politics in it, right?
Colin Kaepernick said that he was protesting police brutality and racial discrimination in law enforcement.
He wasn't really protesting that.
was really protesting the American flag, which we found out when he protested the Betsy Ross flag on a pair of Nike sneakers when he became the Nike spokesman.
So we know he's being dishonest, but at least what they were saying overtly was that these protests at the NFL were about racial discrimination.
And then what Trump is doing is appealing to an issue that is more or less about racial discrimination in the criminal justice system.
It's a very smart way to get in there and flip the script on the usual leftist identity politics.
Also, it's a broadly popular issue.
So-called criminal justice reform or springing criminals from prison, especially if they're nonviolent drug offenders, which I think is a...
Kind of meaningless term, but nevertheless, these are not people who've gone in and murdered somebody.
They've dealt in drug crimes.
Of course, I think that all drug crimes are violent because they cause violence in the countries of origin, and they do actually cause violence in the United States.
However, neither here nor there, when people hear non-violent drug offense, they want mercy for that person.
They want a little leniency.
It's a popular issue, so Trump goes for the popular issue.
Okay, compare that ad to To the other political candidate's ad of the Super Bowl, the other billionaire from New York, Mike Bloomberg.
Here it is.
George started playing football when he was four years old.
He would wake up every Saturday ready for the game.
That became our life.
He had aspirations about going to the NFL. On a Friday morning, George was shot.
George didn't survive.
I just kept saying, you cannot tell me that the child that I gave birth to is no longer here.
Lives are being lost every day.
It is a national crisis.
I heard Mike Bloomberg speak.
He's been in this fight for so long, he heard mothers crying.
So he started fighting.
When I heard Mike was stepping into the ring, I thought, now we have a dog in the fight.
I know Mike is not afraid of the gun lobby.
They're scared of him.
And they should be.
Okay, it goes on a little bit.
You get the gist.
This is pretty much the polar opposite type of political ad as President Trump ran.
We'll get to how and why in a second.
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So Bloomberg airs this ad, which is the opposite of the Trump ad.
The Trump ad, criminal justice reform, very sympathetic-looking person, crossover appeal just ideologically, just broadly popular.
The Bloomberg ad is about taking your guns away.
It's about depriving Americans of their Second Amendment rights.
This is an extremely polarizing issue.
This may be the most polarizing issue in the entire country, and I am including abortion in that.
I'm including very controversial issues.
Gun rights, it's a unique issue.
Generally, it's a losing issue for the gun grabbers because even among Democrats, there are some people who are very serious about keeping their Second Amendment rights.
I mean, this is a basic civil right guaranteed by our Constitution.
On the issue of gun rights, everybody knows exactly how they feel about it.
There is no ambiguity whatsoever.
When you're talking about something like criminal justice reform, people don't exactly know how they feel.
It's kind of a new issue that's being discussed.
On the right, you've got libertarians who tend to be a little more favorable toward leniency.
So there's even debate among the right.
The left tends to want more leniency in criminal justice.
So it's much more complicated.
it's much less black and white.
Even worse for Mike Bloomberg, who's trying to win the Democratic nomination, and he's spending a lot of money doing it, this alienates some of the earliest Democratic voters.
So what are the early Democratic states?
It's going to be Iowa.
That caucus is happening tonight.
Voters are going to the polls in Iowa right now.
You've got New Hampshire.
You've got Nevada.
You've got South Carolina.
Just those first four states are maybe the most pro-gun states that you're going to get to in the presidential primary.
What Why on earth would you lead with this polarizing issue?
It's just a loser of an ad.
It's an approach that just doesn't take into account practical politics.
Now, we need to take Mike Bloomberg seriously.
We need to take him seriously because he's got a lot of money.
There's a report out right now.
Mike Bloomberg so far has spent $200 million of his own money in the first five weeks of his campaign.
Now, that matters.
It doesn't always matter how much money you spend.
That matters because the DNC is corrupt.
So the Democratic National Committee, we've known this for years, it's run by party elites who stole the nomination from Bernie Sanders last time.
Bernie Sanders is rising up in the polls right now.
This time, the DNC is changing their debate rules to allow Mike Bloomberg in.
Mike Bloomberg would not qualify for the Democratic debates unless the DNC changed the rules.
Now, other candidates have not qualified for the debates.
Tulsi Gabbard, Cory Booker, Julian Castro.
That didn't matter because those guys didn't have a ton of money to donate to the DNC.
Two days before he jumped into this presidential race, Mike Bloomberg donated over $300,000 to the DNC specifically.
he just maxed out what you can give to the party.
And then surprise, surprise, the DNC changes the rules to let him in.
Now, why is the DNC willing to do that?
Is it only for the money that Mike Bloomberg is paying?
Maybe that's part of it.
The other reason is because they're looking at Joe Biden and they're saying Joe Biden, who's the other old moderate guy in the race, he's collapsing.
He's falling apart.
We can't rely on him to be our nominee and to beat Trump in November.
So if Biden collapses, Mike Bloomberg is willing to take the moderate lane and he could do pretty well.
Now, President Trump is taking this seriously.
Even though Mike Bloomberg has not great political instincts and he aired this very dumb ad during the Super Bowl that's not going to help him at all, He's got a lot of money, mayor of New York, he knows how to work the system, and he's got a workable system in the Democratic National Committee that he can use to his advantage.
So President Trump did a pre-Super Bowl interview with Sean Hannity, and he went straight after Bloomberg.
Now, pay attention to Trump's line of attack on Mayor Mike.
Michael Bloomberg.
Very little.
I just think of little.
You know, now he wants a box for the debates to stand on.
Okay, it's okay.
There's nothing wrong.
You could be short.
Why should he get a box to stand on, okay?
He wants a box for the debates.
Why should he be entitled to that?
Really?
Then does that mean everyone else gets a box?
Does that mean everybody else is going to get a box?
A little mini-mic?
He started calling him mini-mic.
He's going after Bloomberg's height.
We all know it's improper, it's wrong, it's mean, it's crude, it's childish.
But in terms of political attacks, this is probably one of Trump's best attacks.
First of all, Mike Bloomberg is quite petite.
I have met Mike Bloomberg, I've been at events with Mike Bloomberg.
The websites that say that Mike Bloomberg is 5'8", or 5'9", or 5'10", are just simply lying.
He is not that tall.
He is a very petite man.
Now, that's fine.
There have been very impressive shorter people in history.
Napoleon Bonaparte being one example, James Madison being another example.
However, the reason this attack was so smart is not because Trump is making fun of the guy for being short.
It's because it's baiting Mike Bloomberg to respond in kind.
And when Mike Bloomberg responds in kind, he looks degraded.
He looks like he's down in the dirt with Trump.
The attack works.
Trump did this so successfully to virtually every Republican in 2016.
Okay, Mike Bloomberg.
Trump calls Bloomberg short.
Bloomberg takes the bait and totally screwed up the answer.
Bloomberg spokesman said, quote, Trump is a pathological liar who lies about everything.
His fake hair, his obesity, and his spray-on tan.
Bloomberg just lost all the moral high ground.
Bloomberg just got right down in the muck with Trump.
The GOP candidates in 2016 did the same thing.
They took Trump's bait and they degraded themselves.
The whole argument that they were making, take someone like Jeb Bush.
Jeb Bush made this pitch, which was, Donald Trump is juvenile, he's cruel, he's crude, he's undignified, he's disgusting, right?
Now, I, Jeb Bush, I am this serious, mature, dignified person.
Okay, they could have made that argument, except when Bush would degrade himself.
I remember one specific moment, one specific moment, 2016, Jeb said something that was a little more Trumpy, and Trump laughed at it.
And Jeb said, yeah, was that high energy enough for you, Donald?
And Donald said, yeah, pretty good.
And Donald put his hand out low by his side, as if to get a low five.
And Jeb Bush, like he had just gotten the approval of the bully on the playground, gets so excited, he kind of jumps up a little, and he smacks Trump's hand with a high five.
And right there, Jeb lost his whole campaign.
And he lost his whole campaign because the only reason to vote for Jeb Bush is that he is the boring, mature, serious adult.
And Donald Trump baited him into looking more childish than he.
Another example of this, Marco Rubio.
Donald Trump starts...
Calling all the candidates' names and Little Marco, Lion Ted, Low Energy Jeb.
And Marco Rubio was getting irritated by this, but he was trying to maintain that dignity.
He was trying to maintain those talking points, the memorized 30-second speech, as Chris Christie called it.
And then when he was getting desperate toward the end of the primary race, Rubio wanted to mix it up, so he starts taunting Donald Trump like he was Don Rickles, like he was doing an insult comedy routine.
He made fun of Trump's hand size, insinuating that another part of Donald Trump's anatomy was a little small.
He started making fun of his physicality, and Marco fell apart.
Because now all of a sudden, you didn't just have one crude, undignified candidate and one serious foreign policy establishment guy.
You had two undignified, childish candidates.
And if you're going to pick one of them, you're obviously going to pick Trump.
Because at least Trump is authentic.
He's not trying to do something else.
I think Donald Trump actually made fun of him.
He said, yeah, Rubio was out there doing his Rickles routine, but it's not going to work.
You know, you can't out-Trump Trump.
That's what happened here.
I think there are a lot of moderate people, especially moderate Democrats, who would really like Mike Bloomberg.
Very successful guy, very moderate, very acceptable.
And yet, if Bloomberg is going to go out there and be like, hey Donald, you're fat and ugly and stupid, ha ha ha, then alright, if you've got two brash, tough-talking New Yorkers who are undignified, give me Trump.
At least Trump has a good track record, right?
He's got a great economy, great foreign policy.
I'll take the devil I know rather than the devil that I don't.
So, notice how Trump goes after the other candidates compared to Mike Bloomberg.
He doesn't go after Bloomberg on issues.
He goes after Bernie on issues.
We'll see that in a second.
He doesn't go after Bloomberg on guns because President Trump knows that guns are a tricky issue, right?
He knows the lesson that Mike Bloomberg doesn't know.
Mike Bloomberg decides to lead during the Super Bowl everybody's watching by talking about how he hates your guns and he's going to take your Second Amendment rights away.
Immediately going to alienate half the audience.
Trump doesn't do that, even though Trump has the opposite position on guns, right?
Trump says, I'm going to defend your Second Amendment, but he knows if he airs that ad, he's going to alienate half the audience.
If he goes after Bloomberg on his signature issue, guns, going to lose half the audience.
So instead, he calls him short, he calls him weak, and in the process of that, he makes Mike Bloomberg degrade himself.
Much smarter strategy.
He saved the issue attacks in that same pre-Super Bowl interview for Bernie Sanders.
Here he is.
Bernie Sanders.
Well, I think he's a communist.
I mean, you know, look, I think of communism when I think of Bernie.
Now, you could say socialist, but did he get married in Moscow?
And that's wonderful.
Moscow's wonderful.
You don't think necessarily, well, whatever.
But you don't necessarily think in terms of marriage, Moscow.
And it's wonderful.
I'm not knocking it, but I think of Bernie sort of as a socialist, but far beyond a socialist.
There's the issue attack.
There's the ideological attack.
Bloomberg is short and weak, and he's going to irritate Bloomberg so much that he's going to implode.
Bernie is a communist.
He doesn't call Bernie an old, crazy-haired, wild man, right?
He calls him a communist.
Goes after what he thinks, as he should, because Bernie is a communist.
Trump, as always, is painting this picture.
He got married in Moscow.
And then you hear, well, he didn't get married in Moscow.
He...
Did his honeymoon in Moscow?
Yeah, honeymoon, marriage, whatever.
The guy loves Moscow.
Okay, and Moscow's a fine place, but communist.
And you're just getting this image of Bernie so excited.
He loves the Soviet Union so much that he's getting married there.
He's honeymooning there.
Bernie is surging.
We're going to see tonight if Bernie's support is real because Bernie is now at the top of the heap in Iowa.
Now, if Bernie doesn't win in Iowa...
It's a whole new race.
If Bernie does win in Iowa, if he's got momentum into New Hampshire, that is a serious problem for the establishment.
If Joe Biden does collapse tonight in Iowa and later in New Hampshire, Bloomberg could be the guy.
He's got the money.
He's got the media, right?
He actually has a media outlet called Bloomberg.
His chief competition for this moderate lane would be Mayor Pete Buttigieg and Senator Amy Klobuchar.
Neither are ready for prime time.
The Democratic establishment is so nervous about this.
John Kerry, former Secretary of State and failed presidential candidate in 2004, was overheard at a Des Moines hotel just over the weekend, suggesting that he might run for president.
John Kerry got clobbered in 2004.
Now, he's denied this.
He actually tweeted out a very profane quote.
I don't know how else to put it.
It was clearly a mistake that he tweeted it out.
He deleted it later, but he wrote, quote, As I told the reporter, I'm absolutely not running for president.
Any report otherwise is effing or categorically false.
I've been proud to campaign with my good friend Joe Biden, who's going to win the nomination, beat Trump, and make an outstanding president.
Then he deleted that, because clearly someone drafted it up and jokingly wrote effing, right, instead of categorically, and then they tweeted that out.
Think about how desperate the Democrats must be for John Kerry to have an opening in this race.
Think about how pathetic that is.
John Kerry got clobbered by George W. Bush 16 years ago.
16 years ago.
This would be like if in 2012...
The Republican Party was in such disarray that they got Bob Dole to run again.
Bob Dole ran, got the nomination in 1996, lost to Bill Clinton.
It would be like if 16 years later, 2012, he ran for president again.
We didn't exactly have a winner in 2012.
We had Mitt freaking Romney.
But still, at least we had a kind of new candidate, a younger candidate.
It would be absurd.
If the party were in such bad shape that Bob Dole were running again in 2012, you'd be in immense trouble.
And that is what we're seeing here among the Democrats.
So, I think in so much as there was politics in the Super Bowl, the Republicans did much better.
They just played it much smarter.
Other than that, the Super Bowl was not terribly political.
They made a big point of this because they're finally seeing their ratings come back after years of falling apart post Colin Kaepernick.
And they just didn't want to ruin it.
There was one ad that the Super Bowl rejected that was so, so offensive, so absurd that they just dismissed it outright.
That was from PETA. It was PETA comparing black people to animals.
We will get to that in a second.
First, I've got to say goodbye to Facebook and YouTube.
And sorry guys, because you're going to miss my halftime show thoughts.
And I have many thoughts about the halftime show.
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We'll be right back with a lot more.
Before we get to the halftime show, which is visually rather interesting, I've got to talk about which is visually rather interesting, I've got to talk about this ad that the Super Bowl and the NFL rejected.
This was an ad by PETA comparing black people to animals.
Take a listen.
I will narrate you through this ad.
So you've got a little bumblebee flying, and then the animals start kneeling.
You can see a little bear.
Bear standing up, then the bear kneels down.
A little fish swimming in the water.
The fish kneels down.
Wolves, foxes, they take a knee.
A disgusting tarantula and a gross little rat kneel down.
Sheepdog kneels down.
Little pig kneels down.
You can hear this star-spangled banner in the background.
Reminds you of that Colin Kaepernick protest.
All the animals kneeling down.
Now the bald eagle itself is kneeling down.
Symbol of America.
And the final line is hashtag end speciesism.
So this is so bonkers.
I've seen PETA make this argument before.
I remember I saw it in college.
They had a PETA protest in college, and they had these big billboards, and it showed African chattel slavery, like full-on African men in chains in the 19th century, and then cows on a farm.
And they were saying, you know, see, when you really think about it, aren't those the same thing?
And in order for those to be the same thing, then black people have to be animals.
Those have to be the same thing.
And I remember standing there with several of my friends, most of whom were liberal, by the way, and were just looking at it like...
Have you people lost your minds?
Do you understand how horribly offensive this is?
Now, from PETA's perspective, they don't think it's offensive.
Any reasonable person would look at that and say, hey, you're calling black people animals.
Like, maybe don't do that.
But from PETA's perspective, because they like animals much more than people, they're saying, no, no, we're just saying all species are the same.
And so they all need to be treated exactly the same way.
That's what they're drawing a direct comparison between racism, which was ostensibly the purpose of the flag-kneeling Colin Kaepernick protest, and speciesism.
In other words, we shouldn't draw any distinctions between races because we're all children of God.
And likewise, we shouldn't draw any distinction between human beings and spiders because we're all the same thing, really, when you think about it.
Now, this isn't true at all.
The reason that we treat animals differently than human beings is because human beings have will and intellect and animals do not.
This is the same reason, by the way, that we don't arrest a fox if a little fox rapes another fox in the wild.
Animals rape each other all the time, right?
But it's not really rape because...
Animals don't have free will and intellect, so it's not like they're violating some moral law that they're aware of.
They have a conscience telling them to act in accordance with the transcendent moral order and then they decide to sin by transgressing that.
No.
Do we arrest a wolf for eating another animal?
No.
Do we charge the bear with murder against the salmon?
No, of course not, because animals are different than people.
PETA couldn't see it that way.
I think the NFL very wisely saw the blowback that they would get from that ad.
PETA incredibly released it on their own, and they're rightly getting blowback for that as well.
Absolute craziness.
But good on the NFL, because the NFL has saw that over the past two years, Since they cut out the flag kneeling, they got past Colin Kaepernick, their ratings started to creep back up.
When Colin Kaepernick protested the American flag on TV, and then a whole bunch of other NFL players started to protest the flag, the NFL ratings tanked.
All the defenders of Kaepernick, all of the leftists said, oh, they're only tanking because people aren't watching as much TV. It's a coincidence.
It's not about the flag protest.
Well, okay, then how do you explain the NFL ratings coming back?
In 2018, 2019, ticking up 5% year over year.
It's because they got rid of that.
So the NFL wised up.
They even had a tribute to the American flag before the game.
I walked through a county courthouse square on a park bench, an old man was sitting there.
I said, your courthouse is kind of run down.
He said, no, it'll do for our little town.
I said, your old flagpole has leaned a little bit, and that's a ragged old flag you got hanging on it.
He said, have a seat.
And I sat down.
Is this the first time you've been to our little town?
I said, I think it is.
He said, I don't like to brag, but we're kind of proud of that ragged old flag.
Well, that sure is a different tune from what we've been hearing from the NFL the last few years.
The last few years have been the American flag is awful, we've got to protest it, we're going to protest the star-spangled banner, we're going to protest the symbol of our country.
Colin Kaepernick protesting a flag from the Revolutionary War, long before we had police departments and alleged police brutality.
Now, all of a sudden, we're getting the most sentimental pro-America flag wave, and I'm proud of that ragged old flag.
Might as well have George Cohan over there marching, saying it's a grand old flag.
It's a high-flying flag.
Now, what this teaches us is actually very hopeful.
It's that you can turn things around.
You can make a comeback.
It's not over until it's over.
Whether that's in sports, whether that's in politics, whether it's for our country.
The Chiefs were losing the game yesterday and then at the very end of the game they turned it around and they won.
President Trump was losing the game in 2016.
99% chance Hillary was going to win and then guess what?
We won.
Looked like we were careening into leftist decay and then turned it all around.
The NFL was completely collapsing.
They were in free fall.
And then they just got rid of all their nonsense, this anti-American stuff, started waving an American flag every so often, realized that sports always have something to do with national unity, national loyalty, brought that back.
And guess what?
They turned that around as well.
That's an important thing for us to remember as we lament our culture falling apart, our politics falling apart, our government falling apart.
You can turn it around.
They were going to impeach Trump, remember?
They impeached Trump.
Then they weren't going to kick him out of office.
They didn't have the votes for that.
But they were going to drag this out for months and months and months.
And guess what happened?
At the very end, a few Republican senators changed their mind.
And we got the end of impeachment, which we'll get to in a second.
But before we move on from the Super Bowl, I do want to just mention this halftime show, which is getting a lot of traction around.
This involved Shakira and J-Lo.
You can pretty much sum the halftime show up in two seconds.
Here it is.
There it is.
It's just Shakira and J-Lo shaking their money makers.
That was the halftime show.
Look, not the worst halftime show in the world.
I'll take it over Nickelback.
But it also showed us something about art and about culture.
This whole show, especially the J-Lo side of it, was explicitly pornographic.
It involved a stripper pole, grinding, crotch grabbing, some rope was involved.
Both Shakira and J-Lo are incredibly skilled dancers and performers.
They're incredibly hot.
It's unbelievable.
J-Lo is, I think, 50 years old now.
Shakira is 43.
They were moving like they were teenagers.
I mean, they're just incredibly skilled performers.
And yet, the show wasn't that sexy.
Even though it was all about sex, it still wasn't that sexy.
It reminded me that...
Pornographic is actually the opposite of sexy.
It seems like they would be the same thing, but they're actually opposites.
I'll give you an example.
I was in Cuba a couple years ago, and we went to one of these old-timey Cuban shows, kind of the Ricky Ricardo stuff, you know, where the women come out in the big costumes and they're kind of moving their hips.
They're not actually showing you that much of their body, but the way that they're moving, the things that they're slightly revealing and then putting back away, create sexiness.
Sexiness comes from what you're not showing as well.
It's the reason that a woman in a bikini is sexier than a woman who's completely naked a lot of the time.
Why is that?
It's because when you just show everything, it's all out there.
In many ways, it's grotesque.
People generally don't all look that good naked.
But when you're hiding something, then your imagination is doing the work.
It's the reason why you never want to see the monster in the horror movie.
The minute you see the monster, it's all clear to you.
You don't have anything left to imagine or anything left to be excited about or anything left to dread or any of that.
But when the monster is in the shadows, you can't.
Then your imagination is doing so much more work.
It's the reason that modern poetry is trash and older poetry that has constraints is good.
It's the reason that slam poetry is like the death of art because there's no limitation on it.
There's nothing constraining it.
Whereas an Elizabethan sonnet has all of these rules that you've got to play within and the constraints actually give much more creativity.
Our culture has become increasingly pornographic and much less sexy the whole time.
And it's just a lesson, I think, for young people and performers to keep in mind is that You need a limiting principle in all walks of life.
If you just throw it all out there, if you just get so graphic and grotesque, then you're actually losing a lot of what you're going for in the first place.
You've got to restrain yourself.
You've got to have some rules.
You've Because the imagination has much more power than our limited physical bodies.
That was just my take on it.
I'm not saying, look, it could have been a worse halftime show.
I know a lot of conservatives are railing against the explicit nature of it.
Think of the children.
Oh, the children will be traumatized.
That's not my primary concern.
I mean, it's true.
You don't want kids to be seeing these very graphic things at a family sporting event.
But...
My concern is beyond the children.
My concern is just that it's actually not achieving what it says that it will achieve.
In the same way that the sexual revolution actually now means that fewer people are having sex.
It's having the opposite effect of what it said it was doing.
And that's so often the case with leftist cultural movements.
There was another huge comeback, which happened just after we went off air on Thursday, which is that President Trump is about to be exonerated.
President Trump is almost certainly about to be acquitted in his impeachment trial.
There were four senators, four Republican senators who could have tanked this impeachment, made it go drag on for weeks and weeks and weeks with more witnesses and John Bolton testifying and Hunter Biden testifying and the whistleblower testifying and Adam Schiff testifying.
Or they could have all ended it.
You know, I'm doing this show with Senator Ted Cruz called Verdict with Ted Cruz.
And he comes from the Capitol each night, comes on over, and we talk about what happened in impeachment.
So we had been chatting the night before this vote last week.
And he said, oh yeah, it's probably going to drag on.
It looks like we're going to get some witnesses.
We'll see if we can move some senators.
Four senators here.
Mitt Romney, Susan Collins, Lisa Murkowski, and Lamar Alexander.
Those were the four.
Republicans had about 47 votes.
They needed three people to flip.
I'm sorry, rather, the Democrats needed three or four people to flip, and then they could have dragged out this impeachment question.
If they only got three people to flip...
Then we would have had a 50-50 vote on more witnesses.
We don't know how that would have resolved.
The Chief Justice would have been dragged into it any way he chose, whether to vote or not to vote, or to let the motion die.
It would have created a real constitutional problem.
So they were going to try to drag out these votes.
Now, what happened?
Mitt Romney and Susan Collins both said they were going to vote for more witnesses.
So the Democrats just needed to get one more to make it to 50-50 or two more to make it to 51-49.
The other two were Lisa Murkowski and Lamar Alexander.
Lisa Murkowski is an independent.
She's a moderate from Alaska.
It's a purple state.
She had to go home and face her constituents.
Lamar Alexander was retiring, so he actually didn't have that constituent problem.
Lamar Alexander, though, as Senator Lindsey Graham and Senator Cruz were telling me the other night on the Verdict podcast, Lamar Alexander really cares about the institution of the Senate.
He didn't want to see the institution of the Senate lose respect and credibility.
Now, when, in particular, Lindsey Graham and Ted Cruz were trying to work the room and try to work the senators and get them to come over and vote against witnesses, they had to use different tactics.
They had to convince Senator Murkowski that it was in her interest to go and vote against witnesses and that would help her with her constituents.
They had to convince Senator Alexander that it would hurt the credibility of the U.S. Senate if he voted for more witnesses.
Those are totally different lines of attack.
They had to know that Mitt Romney and Susan Collins were lost causes.
And Susan Collins, again, purple state, she's in an election year, you can kind of understand it.
Mitt Romney has no excuse.
He's just a jerk.
He's just an absolute jerk.
He's in a very conservative state of Utah, and he's still a jerk.
But even his jerk vote tells us something about this process, which is that the individuals matter.
It's the lesson I've learned most on the Verdicts podcast with Senator Cruz.
We think that going into these impeachment proceedings, everything is pre-planned.
Everything is scripted.
Nothing happens in real time.
It does.
The left tells us in history, individuals don't matter.
It's all just big trends.
It's all going to play out inevitably.
We don't really have free will.
We do.
The individuals do matter.
If Ted Cruz and Lindsey Graham had not been trying to persuade Lisa Murkowski and Lamar Alexander, then very likely we would have witnesses this impeachment trial would be dragging on.
If Mitt Romney didn't hate Donald Trump and if Donald Trump hadn't been kind of mean to Mitt Romney and if Mitt Romney, frankly, hadn't started it Then Romney very likely would have voted to acquit President Trump, would have voted against further witnesses, wouldn't have even had to worry about this other stuff.
The individuals here are really important.
They're really important to politics.
And I guess that kind of plays in with the whole theme of the day, which is making a comeback, which is that an individual really can make a difference.
And you really can change the course of the game, the course of the trial, and the course of history.
So what happens now?
Democrats are going to try to derail this.
We had the vote last week against more witnesses that, for all intents and purposes, ended the discussion.
Now you're going to have some proceedings this week.
And then on Wednesday of this week, you're going to have the final vote of whether to convict President Trump and remove him from office and prevent him from running in November, because if a president's been impeached and removed, he can't run for office again.
Or are they going to vote to acquit and say that he's not guilty?
It almost certainly will be the latter.
There's no evidence that Trump committed any crime.
The Democrats in the House aren't even charging him with a crime.
So the Democrats will try to derail it.
The Senate will probably vote to acquit.
And then I think the Democrats will try to impeach him again.
They can impeach him again.
They can impeach him for something else.
They didn't charge him with a crime this time.
They probably won't charge him with a crime next time.
But I think they will vote or at least attempt to impeach him again.
Why?
Because this is the first time we've ever had a fully partisan impeachment in American history.
And if it's a fully partisan impeachment, there's actually a bipartisan movement against impeachment.
But if it's fully partisan, they'll just keep doing it.
Because it doesn't matter if Trump commits a crime or not.
They're just going to vote for it.
Joni Ernst, Republican senator, thinks the same thing.
She said, quote, I think this door of impeachable whatever has been opened.
Joe Biden should be very careful.
What he's asking for, because, you know, we can have a situation where, if it should ever be President Biden, that immediately people, right the day after he would be elected, would be saying, well, we're going to impeach him.
We might be in the era of impeachment, as one of President Trump's lawyers, Ken Starr, said during the arguments.
We might now be in a position where impeachment is just a regular tool of partisan politics.
That's a sad situation to be in, but the Democrats started it.
We can't unilaterally disarm.
They could change it.
Individuals matter in politics, but they need to show that they can change it.
One way that they could do it would be during this Senate vote on Wednesday, if some Democrats vote to acquit the president, if they make this a bipartisan acquittal, if they do that, then that might go a long way toward ending this age of impeachment before it really begins, one can hope.
Before we go, got to talk about another huge comeback.
That would be Brexit.
Brexit has officially happened.
Britain has officially left the European Union.
Are you okay?
Are you alive?
Has there been mass death, mass starvation?
No, it's fine.
Everything is fine.
They told us it would be awful, and now it's fine.
They told us we would die.
Everybody's okay.
We're already obviously dead from tax cuts and the repeal of net neutrality, but we were all really supposed to die from Brexit, right?
Except it didn't happen.
Everything's fine.
And the most telling headline is from the New York Times.
New York Times posted yesterday, quote, What if Brexit works?
Britain is remaking itself again.
The shape of its society and economy and its place in the world are very much up for grabs.
Britain's departure from the EU on Friday drew a mournful reaction for many people who have long viewed Brexit as consigning their country once the vanguard of Europe to a future of economic mediocrity and geopolitical...
But there are many others who view Brexit as a day of liberation, when Britain, unshackled from the bureaucracy of Brussels, will stride into a future of economic innovation and vigorous, clear-eyed politics, a moment of national renewal.
Disruptive change can be beneficial for a country, said Tony Travers, a professor of politics.
That is, in a sense, what Brexit has accomplished.
After three and a half years of debate, the question, what if it works?
We had been told for certain it won't work.
We had been told that if Trump was elected, we'd all die.
The economy would collapse.
We'd go into World War III. It'd be nuclear holocaust.
We had been told Brexit would kill us all, right?
And then it did not happen.
They were wrong.
There's a headline from the New Statesman in June of 2016.
The headline was, That there is just a path in the future.
We are heading toward progress.
What you want, what you desire, what you think about does not matter.
What you individuals do does not matter.
History is marching inevitably toward progress.
It's in the very name progressive.
And William F. Buckley Jr., when he started National Review in the first issue, he said a conservative is one who stands athwart history yelling stop.
And individuals have done that before.
They've turned it all around.
They've come from behind in the game, in politics, in the impeachment trial, in the history of the world.
We're seeing that happen over and over and over.
And it does appear that we are at a period of renewal.
We are at the dawn of something new.
Whether that something new will turn out well or turn out poorly is not written in stone.
It's not inevitable.
The individuals will matter.
We have a chance to come from behind, but we've got to take that chance.
All right.
All right, that's our show.
I'm Michael Knowles.
This is The Michael Knowles Show.
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