Chaos ensues in the Iowa caucuses as Democrats fails to tally up the votes. Mayor Cheat Buttigieg declares himself the winner even though no official votes have come in, and he’s not polling at the top in a single state. Actually, Bernie Sanders is polling at the top—not just in Iowa, but also in New Hampshire, and he’s running second in Nevada and South Carolina, where Joe Biden’s alleged “firewall” is collapsing. We will examine how an unaccomplished communist rose to the top, why party elites are trying to steal the nomination from him again, and how the Democratic Party fell apart.
Then, the peerless and pioneering Rush Limbaugh announces a diagnosis of advanced stage lung cancer. We will see what the reaction to his announcement means for Rush and his enemies. Finally, a lone Democrat turns against impeachment, and rich, liberal, white women pay bigots to call them racist over dinner.
If you like The Michael Knowles Show, become a member TODAY with promo code: KNOWLES and enjoy the exclusive benefits for 10% off at https://www.dailywire.com/Knowles
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Chaos ensues in the Iowa caucuses as Democrats fail to tally up the votes.
Mayor Cheet Buttigieg declares himself the winner, even though no official votes have come in at all, and he's not polling at the top in a single state.
Actually, Bernie Sanders is polling at the top, not just in Iowa, but also in New Hampshire, and he's running second in Nevada and South Carolina, where Joe Biden's firewall is collapsing.
We will examine how an unaccomplished communist rose to the top of the field, why party elites are trying to steal the nomination from him again, and how the Democratic Party fell apart.
Then, the peerless and pioneering Rush Limbaugh announces a diagnosis of advanced stage lung cancer.
We will see what the reaction to his announcement means for Rush, And his enemies.
Finally, a lone Democrat turns against impeachment, and rich liberal white women pay bigots to call them racist over dinner.
All that and more.
I'm Michael Knowles, and this is The Michael Knowles Show.
What a night.
What a night!
I'm sorry if I look underslept.
I was sitting in my studio until one in the morning with Senator Ted Cruz.
We were supposed to do our podcast together, and we couldn't because the Iowa caucuses did not give us the final tally.
So about one o'clock, I saunter over to the hotel bar in D.C. just to try to find any news.
There are no results whatsoever.
The Democratic Party completely bungled this.
And then, and then, the best part of all, Mayor Pete the Cheat Buttigieg comes on stage and without any official votes in, declares himself the winner, vindicating every single thing I've been saying about this guy for several years.
We will get to Mayor Pete's fake victory speech.
We'll get to what this means for the party in 2020.
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I bet they wish they typed in that URL in Iowa last night because it was an absolute disaster.
Unprecedented, really.
There have been problems in Iowa the last few years.
Actually, Iowa may lose its favored position as the first in the nation voting.
This was by far the worst.
What happened?
The caucuses are already very, very complicated.
A caucus is not like a primary vote.
When you go to vote at a poll, right, you walk in, you give them your ID in some places, in some places you don't even have to do that.
Then you go into a polling booth, you either write in the candidate you want, you pull the lever, you leave, right?
That's not what a caucus is.
In a caucus, Especially the Democratic caucus, which is the most complicated.
You show up and you sit at tables and you try to persuade people to vote for the candidates you like.
Then you move to your own separate corners of the room.
So maybe the Bernie guys go to the northwest corner and the Biden guys go to the northeast corner and so on and so forth.
Then, if one candidate doesn't meet the threshold of voters, let's say they don't get 15% of the voters, then all those guys get freed up and they've got to go to different corners of the room or they can remain independent and unaffiliated.
It is, at its best, working absolutely perfectly.
It's almost impossible to understand how a caucus works.
Then add on to that, that the software, the app that was being used to report the results at each caucus location, mysteriously broke down.
Whoopsie daisy.
So we have no idea who voted for whom.
We still have no idea.
Now...
That would be enough to say maybe something crooked is going on here.
Maybe it's incompetence.
Maybe there's a conspiracy at foot, right?
Now, add on to that this little fact.
The company that made the app that reports who voted for whom at the Iowa caucuses is called Shadow Incorporated.
If you were to write a Hollywood script about stealing the Iowa caucuses and you had to pick a company name for who stole the Iowa caucuses and you chose Shadow Incorporated, Hollywood producers would tell you, nah, that's too on the nose.
That's too obvious.
You've got to be a little more subtle than that.
So you've got Shadow Incorporated makes this dodgy app that doesn't work.
Shadow Incorporated is staffed by the veterans of Hillary Clinton's campaign.
What is Hillary's nickname?
Crooked Hillary, one of the most corrupt figures in American politics.
It gets better.
The company that owns Shadow Incorporated is an even more mysteriously named acronym.
That's the name of it, acronym.
It's the most vague, enigmatic, mysterious name you could think of.
And then here's this little juicy tidbit at the end.
The campaigns of Pete Buttigieg and Joe Biden, the two establishment types trailing in Iowa in recent weeks, both made payments to Shadow Incorporated.
They have used Shadow Incorporated, the company that made the app to count the votes, as a vendor for their campaigns.
They've paid them money according to reports today.
Really, really dodgy.
And then the pièce de résistance, the cherry on top of the crooked sundae.
Mayor Pete Buttigieg just declared himself the winner last night.
No votes were in.
No evidence that he won at all.
No evidence he got a single vote.
All the polls in recent days showed he wasn't winning in Iowa.
And yet he just goes up there and declares himself the winner.
Here's Mayor Pete in his own words.
What a night!
Because tonight, an improbable hope became an undeniable reality.
We have to stop right there.
What does that mean?
An impossible hope became an undeniable reality.
Those are just words mashed together that don't mean anything that Mayor Pete says like they have a lot of meaning.
An impossible hope.
What is the impossible hope?
Is to win the Iowa caucuses?
It's not an impossible hope.
Somebody wins the Iowa caucuses every single year.
It's not impossible.
Someone's gonna win it.
Then a bunch of people are gonna lose, but someone's gonna win it.
That's not an impossible hope.
What's the undeniable reality?
that Pete Buttigieg won, that is the most deniable statement you can make because we don't have any votes in yet.
An undeniable reality.
I have been saying this about Pete Buttigieg for months, since the beginning of his campaign.
He is the worst of these candidates.
He is slimy.
He is unctuous.
He is dishonest.
He is smarmy.
He is sanctimonious.
He is my least favorite candidate.
I would take Bernie Sanders over Pete Buttigieg.
I would take Elizabeth Warren.
Over Pete Buttigieg.
I would take Julian Castro and abortion rights for men over Pete Buttigieg because the guy is just so dishonest.
He made a really big miscalculation last night trying to pretend with no evidence that he won Iowa.
He goes on to explain how he is about to stroll into New Hampshire victorious.
So we don't know all the results.
But...
We know, by the time it's all said and done, Iowa, you have shocked the nation.
Because, by all indications, we are going on to New Hampshire victorious. we are going on to New Hampshire victorious.
- Yes. - By all indications, we are going into New Hampshire victorious.
That isn't true.
By no indications is he going into New Hampshire victorious.
Not one.
Not one vote.
This was a major miscalculation.
Some people are saying it was politically brilliant.
They're saying it's politically brilliant because no one's really paying that close attention to the Iowa caucuses.
And the only headline they're going to see is, Buttigieg is the winner.
Buttigieg says he's the winner.
And so it's going to give him the illusion of winning, even though very likely he came in, what, third or fourth place?
Who knows?
We don't have the numbers, but there's no evidence that he came in first.
So they're saying, look, he's just going to fake it till he makes it, and that's going to send him into New Hampshire looking good.
It's a mistake.
It's a big mistake, because people actually are paying attention to the Democratic Iowa caucuses.
Namely, the primary voters.
And by the way, primary voters pay a lot more attention to politics than general election voters.
Your general election voters are your kind of normal people.
It's about half the country who shows up to general elections and they pay a little bit of attention and so maybe you could pull one over on them.
primary voters actually care.
They care a lot more.
They're more tuned into the party politics, especially in this field where there's so many different candidates, especially in Iowa, especially in New Hampshire, Nevada, South Carolina, these early states that are going to really matter and probably decide who gets the nomination.
Pete Buttigieg went into Iowa.
According to the imperceptive, right, Not according to me.
I've always known that guy's a snake.
But according to the people who were not perceiving it, he was hopeful.
He was young.
He was earnest.
He was a guy you could trust.
He's just telling it like it is, right?
Happy old Mayor Pete.
American as apple pie.
He's leaving Iowa looking like a loser and a liar and a crook.
It's the only way to describe it.
If you really won, then you can wait for the votes to be counted.
If you really won, right?
Most likely Bernie Sanders, judging by all of the polls going into this thing.
You can wait for the voice of the voters to be heard.
If you are really earnest and honest and up-and-coming and hopeful, and we're going to turn a new page in America and unite everybody, I think?
He's calling attention to the fact that he's apparently got some financial relationship with the app company that mysteriously broke that was supposed to count the votes.
It just doesn't look good.
And Buttigieg is too undefined a candidate to risk that.
One of Trump's big advantages in 2016 is everybody knew who he was.
He had basically 100% name recognition.
Everyone watched him on network television for 10 years.
Everybody watched him on the tabloids and in real estate and in pop culture for 30 years before that.
Nobody knows Mayor Pete.
He's the mayor of a small town.
So every new data point that defines him is going to really, really matter.
And he's now allowing himself to be defined as a slippery guy, unctuous, oily, maybe crooked.
Maybe he's got a weird financial relationship with the app.
Maybe he's trying to cheat the voters out of their nominee.
Maybe they're trying to cheat Bernie Sanders, which is what happened in 2016.
By all indications, we're going to New Hampshire victorious.
There's no indication because we don't know what happened in Iowa.
To sum it up, CNN, to their credit, summed up.
Better than any other network, any other outlet, what the Iowa caucus has looked like last night when one of the precinct captains, one of the guys who's got to call a hotline now to report the votes, is on the phone with CNN's Wolf Blitzer, and he's trying to handle both of these at the same time, and it all falls apart.
We'll get to that in a second.
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You're going to need that liquid IV energy boost when we're waiting up for the next three weeks to get the results from the Iowa caucuses.
So just to give you a sense, if you weren't waiting up all night, CNN has one of the precinct captains on the phone.
The precinct captain is also on the phone with the hotline that had to spring up to try to report the vote tally after this weird app went down.
Take a listen to the chaos.
They tried to, I think, promote an app to report the results.
The app, by all accounts, just doesn't work.
So we've been recommended to call into the hotline, and the hotline has not been responsive.
Have you gotten any explanation, Sean?
Sean, have you gotten any explanation at all as to what's going on?
No, I have not.
No.
I'm just waiting on hold and doing my best to report the results from my precinct.
What are you hearing?
I know you're listening to a conversation from the Iowa Democratic Party.
This is a real coincidence, Wolf.
I just got off hold just now.
So I've got to get off the phone to report the results.
Alright, go ahead and report your results.
Can we listen in as you report them, Sean?
Yep.
Alright, let's listen.
Okay, hi.
Hello?
They hung up on me.
They hung up on me.
Okay, I've got to get back in line on hold.
They just hung up.
That's so frustrating indeed.
Sean, we're going to stay in close touch with you.
She hung up.
They hung up.
He was waiting on the phone for an hour to try to report these results.
And they hung up, and we got to hear it on national television.
This is the most honest and news-breaking broadcast I've ever seen on CNN, so kudos to them.
This is a big deal for Iowa, because Iowa is the first in the nation state to start choosing these presidential candidates.
It's hard to imagine that they keep that after this year.
This was just such a bungle.
And it very well might be incompetence.
Because the Democratic Party has this long record of corruption, the Democratic Party has this long record of ignoring the will of their own voters and having party elites choose the nominee.
Because the Democratic Party has a very recent history of rigging the election in favor of Hillary Clinton instead of Bernie Sanders.
This thing looks crooked, whether it is or not.
Bernie Sanders was going into Iowa at the top of the heap.
In many ways, the Democratic Party has been refashioned in the mold of Bernie Sanders, and the voters have been pulling for him in many of these early states.
He's got a huge lead in New Hampshire.
And the fact that the tally went down, that nobody knows what's going on, the fact that there are some reports of financial relationships between Biden and Buttigieg and the app company, it just stinks to high heaven.
And if you thought that the Bernie bros were incensed before and they sensed corruption before, just wait until they move on to New Hampshire.
Joe Biden, meanwhile, is completely falling apart.
Even if the Iowa vote doesn't end his candidacy, And there's a lot of evidence that the Biden team thought that they were going to do very poorly in Iowa.
They were trying to tamp down expectations all day.
In New Hampshire, they might fall apart.
Joe Biden just did an interview with Savannah Guthrie on NBC. And even NBC, even the mainstream media, even Savannah Guthrie, pushed Joe Biden to answer any questions about his son Hunter and the clearly corrupt relationship between Hunter and the Ukraine and possibly the corrupt relationship between Joe Biden and Ukraine.
Joe Biden not only refuses to answer, he snaps at the host.
Has it occurred to you that there's a certain irony here, that here the president is accused of and has acknowledged wanting to get information about your son Hunter and his dealings with Ukraine, and this process of impeachment has ensured that everyone knows about Hunter's dealings with Ukraine?
That's a good thing, and no one's found anything wrong with his dealings in Ukraine, except they say it sets a bad image.
Well, do you agree that it sets a bad image?
Yeah, and my son said that.
Do you think it was wrong for him to take that position, knowing that it was really because that company wanted access to you?
Well, that's not true.
You're saying things you do not know what you're talking about.
No one said that.
Who said that?
Who said that?
Don't you think that it's just one of those things where people think, well, that seems kind of sleazy?
Why would he have that job if not for who his father was?
Because he's a very bright guy.
I guess the question I'm kind of asking is, was it right?
His appearance?
Yeah.
Yeah.
Well, he said he regretted having done it.
Yeah.
Speaks for himself.
He's a grown man.
Are you going to predict a win tomorrow night?
I don't predict wins because I'm superstitious, but I predict we'll do very well.
You don't know what you're talking about.
You don't know that there was a crooked relationship between Hunter and Ukraine.
Yes, we do.
Yes, we do.
Hunter Biden is a degenerate who got kicked out of the Navy for doing drugs, who has destroyed his personal life, who gets in bar fights, who drunk drives everywhere, who has basically no professional credential.
And he was being paid a million dollars a year to sit on the board of a Ukrainian energy company while his daddy was the vice president of the United States and the point man on Ukraine.
Hunter Biden was being paid about three times or more than three times what board members of ExxonMobil get paid to sit on the board of this crooked company.
The company is so crooked that just before Hunter Biden was invited to join the board, the government of the United Kingdom froze their assets because they suspected such corruption.
There are many reasons to ask this question.
Joe Biden needs to give an answer.
He would do much better to just admit that it was wrong and move on.
Back when the media were backing Joe Biden, back when the establishment press was behind his candidacy, then it made sense for Joe Biden to ignore these questions and to obfuscate and to try to distract people.
But now the media have turned on him The media have turned on him because he's an extraordinarily weak candidate whose eyeballs explode on debate stages and whose teeth fall out of his mouth and who starts talking about corn pop and kids rubbing his legs and who can't finish an English sentence.
I hate to put it that bluntly, but that's where it is.
He's simply passed his sell-by date.
And so the media have turned on him.
The party elites have turned on him.
I was speaking with Senator Ted Cruz on our show Verdict the other night, and he said that one of his biggest takeaways from the impeachment trial was how the Democratic Party elites had given up on Joe Biden.
That's why the House Democrats threw him under the bus during impeachment, is because they just felt Biden didn't have it anymore.
So everybody's turned on him.
They don't think he's got what it takes to win.
Now he's got to get aggressive.
Now he's got to confront these problems head on.
He's not going to have a media apparatus that's carrying water for him anymore.
The current strategy for the Biden campaign is to lose slowly.
It's just to lose as slowly as you can and then hope that somehow you haven't lost enough that you lose the nomination.
It's kind of the Romney strategy in 2012.
It's just weak sauce, and it's not going to last very long, especially when you've got a highly motivated base for Bernie Sanders.
They're still doing everything they can to steal this from Bernie.
Not just Mayor Cheat, not just old Joe Biden, not just the Democratic establishment, but even the press.
There was a poll that came out just before the Iowa caucuses.
Des Moines Register poll.
This was the Des Moines Register final poll before the Iowa caucuses.
And they wouldn't release it.
Why wouldn't they release the numbers?
We finally got it.
The numbers finally leaked.
The numbers were Joe Biden down all the way at 13%.
Mayor Cheet Buttigieg, 16%.
Elizabeth Warren, 18%.
and Bernie Sanders in the lead at 22%.
They didn't like that.
They didn't like that poll going into the Iowa caucuses.
This poll was conducted with CNN and Seltzer & Company.
Seltzer & Company was the pollster in charge here.
According to FiveThirtyEight, according to really top pollsters, they had an A-plus rating.
Okay, this was no minor polling company.
Now, the excuse was that some respondent to the poll didn't see one of the names, and so better to just get rid of the poll.
Again, after all these coincidences, it's really hard to believe that, and And even if I can believe that because I do think that the Democratic Party leadership is incompetent.
It's going to be very hard for the supporters of Bernie Sanders to believe that, whoops, they made a mistake that hurt Bernie.
Whoops, they made another mistake that hurt Bernie.
Whoopsie-daisy, whoopsie-daisy.
Oh yeah, and all of 2016, that was a big mistake that hurt Bernie.
They're just not going to believe it.
And if they keep this up, if they don't give Bernie his due, you're going to see a fight at the Democratic National Convention, the likes of which we haven't seen probably since the 1960s.
We've got so much more to get to, including the shifting gears from the Democrats over to the right wing.
Really, really sad news from the peerless Rush Limbaugh.
We will get to that in a second.
We will get to why the left just loves humanity and hates humans.
And we will get to one little bit of hope from a Senate Democrat.
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Moving on from chaos in Iowa to really, really sad news.
From the golden EIB microphone and the peerless Rush Limbaugh, who has talent on loan from God and does his job with half his brain tied behind his back.
Rush Limbaugh announced yesterday on his show that he has been diagnosed with advanced lung cancer.
This news was so big that, you know, over the past two weeks that we've been working all kind of crazy hours and I've been up in the middle of the night recording the show with Senator Cruz and working and doing this show during the day.
And so I try to get any bit of sleep I can.
I was getting an hour of sleep yesterday.
I just laid down and sweet little Elisa wakes me up because this news was so shocking.
And the news was the great Rush Limbaugh has this very, very serious illness.
Everybody's praying for Rush.
Rush is praying for Rush, and we'll get to actually the significance of that in a second.
I want to get to the reaction first.
CNN tweets out, CNN Breaking News tweets out, quote, Rush Limbaugh, the most prominent political radio host in the U.S., says he's been diagnosed with an advanced stage of lung cancer.
Here are just a handful of replies, and these are not the worst replies.
These are not...
A few fringy replies.
This is indicative of most of the replies to that tweet from random Twitter accounts.
Who knew racism was a carcinogen?
Hell has his seat warmed up.
Oh, karma is good.
Love this.
He had it coming.
I'd tell him thoughts and prayers, but Rush has been rendered deaf by years of opiate abuse.
Rotting from the inside, as many have suspected.
Wasn't even just random accounts that were spewing this bile at Rush.
Reza Aslan, a CNN contributor, sometimes CNN contributor, tweeted out, ask yourself this simple question, is the world a better place or a worse place with Rush Limbaugh in it?
Tariq Nasheed, who's another blue checkmark leftist on Twitter, tweeted out a gif of a guy dancing in celebration because Rush Limbaugh was diagnosed with cancer.
Not one of these people has ever listened to Rush's show.
No one.
They've listened to one or two minutes that were taken out of context and posted on left-wing hate sites like Media Matters, but they've never listened to the show.
Not a single one of them.
Even what they're saying is incoherent.
Who knew racism was a carcinogen?
When has Rush Limbaugh ever said anything racist?
Actually, on the Rush Limbaugh program, the only other guy that anybody knows of is Bo Snurdly, his producer, who's black.
Not a lot of evidence that he's a racist.
Hell has his seat warmed up.
This from people who very likely don't believe in heaven or hell.
Oh, karma is good.
Love this.
He had it coming.
He had it.
Why did he have it coming?
Because he said hateful things.
According to you, well, did he say anything as hateful as that?
He had it coming.
I'd tell him thoughts and prayers, but Rush has been rendered deaf by years of opiate abuse.
So making fun of a guy for being deaf, he actually does have hearing difficulty as a cochlear implant.
And because he did, he did suffer from opiate abuse.
He was addicted to opiates.
And yet these are people who would accuse you of ableism if you ever made a comment about somebody who had a disability like Rush.
Who would accuse you of being a monster if you mocked somebody for struggling with drug addiction.
And yet they do both.
They do both to Rush.
Rotting from the inside, as many have suspected.
Who's really rotting from the inside?
Probably the people who are sending out those tweets.
None of them has ever listened to Rush.
That's why they can say these things.
But why does the left hate Rush?
They hate him in particular.
We will examine why, and we'll examine a really hopeful note from Rush in his masterful statement on the diagnosis.
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We'll be right back with a lot more.
Why does the left hate Rush Limbaugh so much?
There's a game called Cards Against Humanity.
It's a very stupid game that millennials pretend is kind of funny.
But it's not even really a game.
It's just there are sort of grotesque things written on cards, which are kind of funny or amusing the first one or two times that you read them.
But then they're not really funny afterward because we've all heard the jokes and they're kind of just non sequiturs.
So anyway, one of the grotesqueries on the cards is...
Is Rush Limbaugh's soft profanity body.
And it's kind of like Mad Libs, but for millennials who don't know how to play poker.
And Rush gets singled out, even in that.
Rush gets singled out all the time.
They don't really go after the other radio guys or the other podcasters.
It's just Rush.
And that's because Rush is the king.
The left hates Rush because he's effective.
He invented the whole genre of talk radio.
He's so good at it.
He was the first conservative to beat the mainstream media.
He did it by inventing a new medium.
He did it by being funny.
He's just very entertaining.
And he did it by telling the truth.
He is...
By far, the most insightful political analyst on radio.
I'm friends with some of the other ones, and they're great too.
But Rush is number one.
There is no number two.
And they hated him for it.
They hated him for getting around the mainstream media.
They hated him for being effective.
If he weren't effective, they wouldn't waste their time on him.
Now, lots of people are wishing ill on Rush.
On the left, right, and a little bit of these random Twitter people, but even some prominent leftists.
Many conservatives are insisting that he'll beat this.
They're saying, you'll beat this Rush.
Don't you worry.
You'll recover.
You'll be back in shape in no time.
I hope so.
I don't know that.
I'm not sure that He'll beat it forever.
I mean, everybody dies eventually.
We're praying for him.
We hope that he'll beat it.
But no one here gets that alive.
I don't think the thing to focus on is even whether Rush can prolong his career two years or five years or ten years.
I think the thing to focus on is that Rush has already accomplished in his life more than virtually anybody, right?
Other than a handful of people throughout history, he's accomplished a lot more.
And the thing to focus on is what he talked about in his statement announcing this.
Rush, fortunately, has a long view of life, not merely confined to the 70 or 80 years that we get while we're here, but the longer view, the eternity view.
He said he doesn't talk about it much.
But he did mention it in his announcement.
He mentioned his relationship with God.
I've had so much support from family and friends during this that it's been tremendous.
I told the staff today that I have a deeply personal relationship with God that I do not proselytize about.
But I do, and I have been working that relationship tremendously, which I do regularly anyway, but I've been focused on it intensely for the past couple of weeks.
That's a beautiful statement.
Life is a preparation for death.
Rush seems to take that seriously.
People who are religious.
I can speak as a Catholic.
We take that seriously.
Life is a preparation for death.
How long do you get on earth?
If you're lucky, 70, 80 years.
By the scale of eternity, that's nothing.
That's the blink of an eye.
Obviously, we should pray for Rush.
I hope he's around for another 20 or 30 years.
The guy is so great.
I just love listening to him.
We don't need to be quite as worried about Rush.
We should be far more worried about the people wishing ill upon him.
I don't mean that in some kind of cliché way or sentimentally or, oh, these people have problems.
Imagine how twisted you've got to be inside, how tense your guts have to be, how perverse your soul has to be to say the kind of things that Reza Aslan or Tariq Nasheed or any of those Twitter accounts said about another human being wishing death upon somebody, wishing suffering, celebrating somebody's cancer diagnosis.
You've got to be so messed up inside.
Your life has got to be a misery.
And if you take the long view of life, then it doesn't look like it's going to get any better once we've shuffled off this mortal coil, does it?
Rush could use our prayers.
The people cheering on Rush's illness could use our prayers more.
Rush actually, in the same broadcast, talked about the other side of this, not just the sorrow or the grief or the anger or the resentment.
He talked about joy.
He mentioned it on his show.
He mentioned an article that just came out by left-wing reporter Ryan Lizza.
And the cancer diagnosis, the reaction to his cancer diagnosis on the left really drives this point home.
The article by Ryan Lizetz in Politico said, The unexpected joy at a Trump rally in Iowa.
On the cusp of beating two articles of impeachment, the president's fans were in a celebratory mood.
Meanwhile, somewhere, there was a Democratic race taking place.
I had not been to a Trump rally since the 2016 campaign, and the first thing I noticed Thursday night when Donald Trump and Mike Pence spoke at Drake University in Des Moines was how much more joyous the event was for his supporters than what I remember from four years ago.
In 2016, perhaps because Republicans were out of power and Trump was running purely against the system, his crowds often had an undertone of anger that bordered on menacing.
But with Trump in power presiding over peace and prosperity on the cusp of beating two articles of impeachment and dominating the news when it should be the Democratic candidate's moment to shine, his fans seemed in a celebratory mood.
He is surprised by the joy at the Trump rally.
Now he says that the Trump rallies are totally different now than they were in 2016.
I don't think they are.
I think maybe Ryan Lizza and some leftists are looking at it differently now than in 2016.
In 2016, they said it was menacing, terrifying, horrifying.
Oh no!
A Republican might be elected president, right?
It's terrible because we were told in 2016 that if Trump got elected president, the sky would fall.
I mean, literally, the sky would fall because global warming would kill us all.
We would have an economic collapse.
We'd start World War III. We'd be at war with North Korea.
We'd have Russia would take over our country.
I mean, all this kind of craziness.
And then Trump got elected, and what, three, four years later...
Everything's great.
Everything's great.
It's awesome.
The economy's good.
We've got peace abroad.
They told us that Trump had started World War III. Well, I guess we won World War III when we took out the top terrorists in the world, the leader of ISIS, the top Iranian terrorist, another leader of ISIS just this past week.
I mean, it's just, things are good.
And so Ryan Lizza now can look at the Trump rally without this hysterical fear that the left was ginning up in 2016.
And he says, oh, look, those guys are happy.
Those guys are joyful, even.
Huh.
I haven't seen that before because the left doesn't really seem to have a lot of joy.
They seem to be pretty bitter, pretty angry, pretty crooked in Iowa.
Joy is an important thing in politics.
C.S. Lewis defined joy as not a feeling or an emotion like happiness.
Happiness is fleeting, right?
You're not going to be happy forever.
But joy is something greater and deeper and more enduring.
It's sort of like...
An unanswered question, the pursuit of that would be similar to joy.
And I think conservatives just tend to have that in politics a lot more.
Part of that is because we don't expect politics to solve all of our problems.
We actually know that politics won't solve all of our problems.
We don't think that you can perfect human nature.
We recognize humans are all broken and flawed, and that's just the way it is, and we're going to try to fit our politics to reality.
Rather than try to perfect human nature, because those utopian schemes to perfect human nature have led to some of the worst atrocities in history.
There's a feeling of gratitude.
Hey, look, we were on the brink.
We almost had President Hillary.
Oh, heaven forfend.
And now we don't.
And we got this kind of funny guy in the Oval Office, and he tweets weird stuff sometimes, and that's kind of entertaining, and also the economy's great, and everything seems to be fine.
That's when you approach politics from gratitude.
That's when you approach politics from levity.
Chesterton said that the angels can fly because they can take themselves lightly.
The left can't take itself lightly.
The left can't even turn down the partisan rancor for five seconds when a guy that they don't like listening to gets diagnosed with cancer.
They have to celebrate that.
For what?
For what?
Does that make you a better person?
Does that make you flourish more?
Does that make you thrive?
Does that make you happy?
I don't think so.
I don't think so.
And that joy that Ryan Lizza and some left-wingers are seeing at Trump rallies, maybe that's an evidence that something has gone wrong in their own worldview.
Maybe there's something lacking in their own political ideology.
Maybe rather than looking down on those people at Trump rallies, like the CNN anchors the other day who laughed at them, mocked them, those idiots, those rubes, they can't spell, they can't read maps, rather than that, maybe they ought to try to learn a thing or two from the guys at the Trump rallies, because the guys at the Trump rallies, on the one hand, seem to know how to win elections a little bit better than the left-wingers, and they seem to know how to live life a little more joyfully, more gratifyingly.
Speaking of the left learning from the right, there is a glimmer of hope from Senate Democrats.
Just one, actually.
Senate Democrat Joe Manchin.
Joe Manchin, West Virginia.
He obviously comes from a conservative constituency.
Joe Manchin is considering voting against the impeachment and removal of President Trump.
He would be the lone Democrat to do it.
Here's why.
He said, quote, Never before in the history of our republic has there been a purely partisan impeachment vote of a president.
Totally true.
Removing this president at this time would not only further divide our deeply divided nation, but also further poison our already toxic political atmosphere.
I see no path to the 67 votes that would be required to remove President Trump.
However, I do believe a bipartisan majority of this body would vote to censure President Trump.
In other words, pass a resolution saying he's a no-good bad boy, but not remove him from office.
Censure, he says, would allow this body to unite across party lines.
Joe Manchin doesn't want to vote to remove the president because he's afraid it's going to cost him his re-election in West Virginia.
He is right, though.
This is the first purely partisan impeachment we've ever had.
Purely partisan impeachments are a very bad idea.
It's not designed to work that way.
The president is not supposed to be removed just because another party won another branch of government.
It's supposed to be bipartisan.
That's why it requires 67 votes in the Senate to do it.
That's why we've never had a partisan impeachment before.
I agree with Manchin that if Nancy Pelosi, instead of pushing for impeachment, had pushed for censure just to say that Trump is a no-good guy, they could have gotten some Republican votes.
Definitely in the House, maybe in the Senate, too.
They're not going to do that, though.
They're going to vote now on whether to acquit the president or whether to remove him from office.
And Joe Manchin has to make a choice.
If he had the political courage to vote against the removal of the president, and maybe if he convinced one or two of his Senate colleagues from more conservative states, Kyrsten Sinema or maybe Doug Jones, Democrats in conservative states, you might have a chance of kind of bridging that divide and turning down the partisan rancor.
It's probably unlikely, but Joe Manchin could do a lot, so he should take his own advice and try to do it.
Before we go, I have to get to this.
This story is just too good not to get to.
There are groups of white women, white liberal women, who are paying $2,500 to confront their own racism and privilege.
By inviting two activists, Regina Jackson and Syrah Rao, Syrah Rao in particular, has expressed absolute contempt for white people on Twitter.
They're inviting these two activists to come over to these dinner parties called Race to Dinner and yell at them for being racist and bigoted.
$2,500.
I would do it for $2,000.
If these women want to invite me over to their homes for me to call them bigots, I would gladly do that, and I would charge significantly less than Jackson and Rao.
I hope they do that.
Obviously, this is insane.
This is a silly thing.
I mean, it's talking about the height of privilege, too.
If the whole point of this dinner is so that you can confront your privilege, then gathering all your wealthy white women friends and paying a ton of money to basically be entertained, to have a show put on at dinner, is probably not the best way to get rid of your privilege.
But beyond just making fun of these women, I want to point out that it expresses a natural...
A natural longing.
It is a religious longing, actually, because these women are racist in some way.
I'm using racist in the way that it's used colloquially today, which is bad.
Racist has become a synonym for bad or evil or wicked.
That's why people will call Rush Limbaugh a racist.
I don't think he's ever made a racially bigoted comment in his life.
But what they're really saying is, you're bad.
You're immoral.
I don't like you.
Or they do it all the time to conservatives who have no evidence whatsoever of any kind of racial hatred, but they'll say, you're racist, as a synonym for bad.
And these women are bad, because no one's good but God, because we all recognize that we sin and all fall short of the glory of God all the time, right?
That's it.
What they're acknowledging with these dinners is original sin.
And they're trying to gussy it up and make it seem like it's some novel concept that progressives discovered.
No, we've always known about original sin.
We've always known that human nature is broken.
Actually, that's the insight that conservatives have, that liberals just can't seem to grasp or not grasp fully.
You know, in traditional Catholic practices, what you would do is instead of paying a couple of random huckster activists to come over to your home for almost three grand and yell at you, you would show up to church and strike your breast and say, mea culpa, mea culpa, mea culpa.
mea maxima culpa.
My fault, my fault, my most grievous fault.
You would go to confession.
If you were in the Da Vinci Code, you'd smack yourself on the back with the discipline, right?
You recognize that you have sinned and you need to do some penance for that sin.
This is true across all religions, including the religion of liberalism, including the religion of leftism.
Everybody's got to serve somebody, okay?
The lie that secularism or liberalism is somehow irreligious or not religious, it's just not true.
It's simply a different religion.
And so, on Rush Limbaugh's point about joy, Ryan Liz's point about joy, right?
On how we confront questions of life and death and grief and sadness.
On questions of how we organize ourselves.
On questions of running the damned Iowa caucus.
You're going to have a worldview.
The question is, what worldview are you going to have?
Are you going to have one of transparency, of dealing with reality, of taking the long view, of recognizing your own faults and taking responsibility for them?
Or are you going to blame it on somebody else?
Are you going to force your problems on somebody else?
Are you going to allow yourself to rot from the inside?
Those are the questions.
That's what's being debated right now.
We're using political language to do it.
But really, as Cardinal Manning said, at bottom, all human conflict...
Is theological.
They're debating that out.
And if those debates go as well as the Iowa caucuses, I don't think that they're going to come to any saving conclusions anytime soon.
But we can hope.
Let's see.
I'll be back tonight on Verdict with Ted Cruz, the number one podcast for a full week in the United States.
And I'll be back here on my show tomorrow.
I'm Michael Knowles.
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