Ep. 411 - Vacationing With The Taliban
Episode Stats
Words per Minute
184.11012
Summary
Trump cancels secret talks with the Taliban just days before the anniversary of 9/11, and critics take credit for it. But is it really as bad as they say? And why did the president cancel the talks in the first place?
Transcript
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The good news is President Trump scrapped plans this weekend to hold secret talks with the Taliban at Camp David just days before 9-11.
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The bad news is President Trump had previously made plans to negotiate with the Taliban at Camp David just days before 9-11.
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We will examine foreign policy follies from Bill Clinton to Donald Trump.
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Then, as partisans on the left and right jump in to attack President Trump,
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as Trump gets a new primary challenger in the Republican Party,
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we will agree with his credits with one caveat.
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President Trump is the worst president in recent history, except for all of the other ones.
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I'm Michael Knowles, and this is The Michael Knowles Show.
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He said democracy is the worst form of government except for all the other ones that have been tried.
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President Trump, he is the absolute worst president we've had in recent history,
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And we will get to that in one second, particularly with this Taliban blow up,
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All right, now we'll talk about less important matters like negotiations with the Taliban at Camp David,
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President Trump, we got word a couple days ago.
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Actually, I think it was yesterday morning the story broke.
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President Trump canceled what were secret talks planned with the Taliban just days before the 18th anniversary of 9-11.
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And he does deserve credit for canceling those talks,
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but he does deserve some criticism for planning the talks in the first place.
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Unbeknownst to almost everyone, the major Taliban leaders and separately the president of Afghanistan
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were going to secretly meet with me at Camp David on Sunday.
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Unfortunately, in order to build false leverage,
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they admitted to an attack in Kabul that killed one of our great, great soldiers and 11 other people.
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I immediately canceled the meeting and called off peace negotiations.
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What kind of people would kill so many in order to seemingly strengthen their bargaining position?
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If they cannot agree to a ceasefire during these very important peace talks
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then they probably don't have the power to negotiate a meaningful agreement anyway.
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They probably don't have the power to negotiate a meaningful agreement anyway.
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How many more decades are they willing to fight?
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Now, just this tweet shows you President Trump's political acumen,
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which is he is blaming a Taliban attack that killed one of our soldiers.
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He's blaming that attack for calling off the peace negotiations.
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The Taliban have been killing our soldiers for 20 years.
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is President Trump responding to an attack or is he using the attack as an excuse to get out of the meetings?
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I think it's pretty clear that it's the latter.
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It's a perfectly good way for him to get out of having these meetings.
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The decision to disinvite them was a good meeting.
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It shows, reportedly, a divide in the Trump administration between Mike Pompeo over at State Department and John Bolton, who is the national security advisor.
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But we shouldn't narrow in on why this was such a mistake in the first place, why it was such a mistake to invite them.
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They should all be put to death as quickly as possible, every last one of them.
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The only way that I could get behind this meeting happening is if Trump invited them all into a room and then personally shivved every single one of them.
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They are little devils, all of whom who should be executed by the United States.
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Of all of the bad actors in the world, the Taliban are probably the most unrepentant terrorists out there.
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However, they worked directly with Osama bin Laden.
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They have the most direct connection of any group in the world to al-Qaeda and to the 9-11 attacks.
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Most egregiously of all, these talks were scheduled just days before the anniversary of 9-11.
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This was politically potentially a disastrous situation, even if the talks had gone well, even if they somehow got everyone in the room,
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the president of Afghanistan and the Taliban and the president of the United States,
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and they said, okay, we're going to stop the war in Afghanistan, we've come to this political solution, even then it looks bad.
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Because you were inviting people who were responsible for 9-11 to U.S. soil, to the presidential retreat.
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This is as prestigious a place as there is in the entire country, just days before 9-11.
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And by the way, the talks wouldn't have gone well.
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They wouldn't have gone well, as President Trump concludes in his tweets,
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because there is no evidence whatsoever that the Taliban can negotiate in good faith.
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They are demons, they are devils, and they should all be wiped off of the earth.
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Only God can judge, but the United States can arrange the meeting, and we have done that with the Taliban,
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I don't know how to put too fine a point on it.
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But I found even in the 19 years or 18 years since the invasion of Afghanistan,
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people don't really know a lot about the Taliban itself.
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The Taliban are a terrorist group that took over Afghanistan in the mid-90s.
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After they took over, everything got even worse.
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You'd think things couldn't get worse in Afghanistan.
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Infant mortality in Afghanistan rose to the highest level in the world.
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A quarter of all Afghanis died before the age of five under the Taliban.
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In just one case, they stole UN food supplies from 160,000 hungry and starving people.
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Quote, four political and military weapons as a weapon.
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They would sell them into sex slaves to help prop up their regime or their pseudo regime.
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They instituted strict Sharia law that flogged women for being seen with men in public who were not their own relatives.
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The Taliban have accounted for 80% of civilian casualties in Afghanistan in recent years.
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Taliban murdered aid workers, murdered journalists.
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They harbored, helped, and supported, and fought alongside Osama bin Laden before, during, and after the 9-11 attacks.
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Because all of that, you can say everything that's true about these little devils, the Taliban.
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But the question that President Trump is trying to solve is the political question.
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There is a lot of misinformation, a lot of bad common sense going around.
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We'll get into what it really looks like in Afghanistan, what a future looks like there, how we could ever come to some terms with the Taliban.
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There is a common refrain, a common canard out there, that Afghanistan is unconquerable.
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It's what happens when people don't study history for a long time.
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Many people have conquered Afghanistan over history.
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The Taliban conquered Afghanistan just 25 years ago.
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You certainly can conquer Afghanistan, but two, and now it's looking like three groups,
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have failed to conquer Afghanistan very conspicuously.
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The English, the Soviets, and probably the Americans.
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The English failed to conquer Afghanistan in the 19th century.
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The Soviets failed to conquer Afghanistan in the 20th century.
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And the Americans, it looks like, have failed to conquer Afghanistan in the 21st century.
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We didn't fail to conquer Afghanistan because it's unconquerable.
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We failed to conquer Afghanistan because we don't want to conquer it.
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Of all those three, the only ones who really wanted to conquer it were the Soviets.
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And even then, they were just fighting a proxy war in the Cold War with the Americans.
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We don't want Afghanistan to be the 51st state.
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We don't want Puerto Rico to be the 51st state.
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If we want to invite anyone to Camp David for peace negotiations, we should probably invite the Prime Minister of Denmark so we can talk about how we're taking Greenland from them.
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Because we have been in Afghanistan for a long time.
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Now we recognize the head of state in Afghanistan.
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He's the head of Afghanistan, but is he really?
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The Taliban is coming back and reconquering territory.
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Certainly we should not be in direct official talks on U.S. soil with the Taliban.
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It just doesn't make any sense because we don't recognize the Taliban as the legitimate government of Afghanistan.
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As long as it serves our interests and gets our troops home and makes us safer, we'll negotiate with anybody.
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I'm not saying we need to play by the Marquess of Queensbury rules here.
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However, statecraft and diplomacy are a very ugly thing, or they can be ugly, but it's hard to see the upside here.
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What's the upside of negotiating with the Taliban on U.S. soil?
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What's the upside to negotiating with the Taliban at the presidential retreat?
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You'd probably see the Taliban walking down the street on 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue.
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But you're going to get press even if they go to Camp David.
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Again, direct negotiation with the Taliban on U.S. soil directly undermines 20 years of American war efforts.
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It undercuts our actual national policy, which is to recognize the leader of Afghanistan as Ghani,
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Left, right, and center, everyone is irritated that we would have these despicable, disgusting devils,
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all of whom should be killed and burned in hell, the Taliban, on U.S. soil,
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days before the 18th anniversary of 9-11, in which they were complicit.
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What does this tell us about the Trump administration?
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The political significance that's being reported on now, so take it with a grain of salt,
00:15:18.080
but this does ring true, is that this is a fight between the State Department and John Bolton.
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It's a fight between Mike Pompeo and John Bolton, who is the national security advisor.
00:15:29.540
The State Department generally has a kind of reputation for being more liberal and preferring diplomacy,
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and, you know, John Bolton has a reputation for wanting to bomb everyone who's ever looked at him
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I'm with Bolton on this, if the reporting is correct.
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There was a big upside to the talks with Kim Jong-un, and I supported those talks with Kim Jong-un,
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and I continue to support the Trump outreach to North Korea.
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But there was no upside to the Taliban talks, so it was good on the president to call them off.
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But President Trump needs to be very careful not to make the mistakes of Barack Obama,
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which is being so excited about getting out of Afghanistan that you make mistakes,
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and you bog us down in Afghanistan even longer.
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When you negotiate from weakness, when you give up too much leverage,
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you put yourself in a more dangerous position than you were in the first place.
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It seems that he sided with John Bolton, which is a very good idea.
00:16:45.660
You know, democracy is the worst form of government,
00:16:48.640
except for all of the others that have been tried.
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President Trump, who we can criticize when he does wrong.
00:16:56.380
You can say, you can go out there, believe the mainstream media narrative,
00:17:00.500
and you can say President Trump is the worst president in recent memory,
00:17:05.060
except for all of the other ones that we've tried.
00:17:07.880
That holds for the presidential candidates running against him in the Democratic Party.
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That holds for his opponents in the Republican Party who are trying to primary him.
00:17:16.420
It's a joke, but they're still trying to do it.
00:17:23.460
Fortunately, in this case, he corrected that mistake before it actually occurred.
00:17:28.980
But overall, it seems like he's doing a pretty decent job.
00:17:32.580
You don't just need to take my word for it here.
00:17:35.200
You can even listen to James Mattis, who is Mad Dog Mattis, former Secretary of Defense,
00:17:41.340
widely admired by the country on both sides of the aisle.
00:17:44.120
Now, he is in some ways defending Trump here, and he's criticizing Barack Obama
00:17:49.440
because American policy in the Middle East is very, very complicated.
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There's a bombshell new book that Mattis has dropped.
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The left was hoping for a bombshell book savaging the Trump administration.
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that it's not just President Trump bungling the Middle East.
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Secretary of Defense James Mattis has this new memoir out,
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and it's getting played because he's attacking Obama in it.
00:20:49.460
And here's Mattis explaining why he won't attack President Trump.
00:20:52.340
I prefer having parted from the administration over matters of policy,
00:20:58.000
a disagreement, and I laid those out in the letter.
00:21:01.540
I think that what I now occupy are what I call the cheap seats.
00:21:05.620
I'm not responsible, so I can sit on the outside,
00:21:08.920
and frankly, it frustrates me sometimes to see people who speak so authoritatively
00:21:14.520
when they don't know the back-channel things going on
00:21:17.120
and when they have no responsibility for the outcome.
00:21:20.280
So the French call it a devoir de reserve, Christiane,
00:21:26.520
The President, the Secretary of State, the Secretary of Defense,
00:21:36.420
by representing contrary views or something like this.
00:21:40.580
There will come a time when it's right for me to talk about strategy and policy.
00:21:55.920
Don't forget, Mattis was built up by President Trump as this great, incredible guy.
00:22:01.220
He started going after him once Mattis left as Secretary of Defense.
00:22:10.800
There are some people in politics who hold themselves with the pretense of dignity.
00:22:21.120
He says, I just don't think I should be attacking the sitting president from the cheap seats.
00:22:35.500
Christiane Amanpour, who Drew calls Christiane Amanpour journalist on CNN.
00:22:47.020
I think it is so despicable when former administration staffers start attacking their boss.
00:22:53.660
You know, in Dante, in Hell, he writes Dante's Inferno.
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He divides up Hell between all the different sins and all the different sinners.
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And then as Dante's going down through Hell on his way to Purgatory and then up to Heaven,
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he's going down and he meets and he speaks to all of the different sinners.
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So you have sins of the flesh, you know, early on, sins like lust, that sort of thing.
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And then as you get lower, you get worse and worse sins, more evil sins, more wicked sins.
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And at the very bottom, you have fraud and deception, people who are traitors at the very bottom.
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And in the lowest circle of hell are those people who betray their benefactors.
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They are the ones who are in the three-headed mouth of Satan being chomped down for eternity.
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Judas, Brutus, and Cassius, those who betray Christ, those who betray Caesar, being chomped to death.
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That is in Dante's mind, in the Christian imagination, the Christian understanding, the worst sort of sin in Hell.
00:24:03.640
It tells you a lot about politics, that that is the main thing.
00:24:06.120
You go and you work for a guy and then you immediately leave and start trashing him and stab him in the back.
00:24:11.120
I remember this during the Bush 2 administration.
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The minute he left, he goes out and he writes a tell-all memoir about how terrible Bush was.
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And this has happened a lot in the Trump administration.
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I actually like Anthony Scaramucci, but he did exactly the same thing.
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Other people have left the administration, stabbed the guy in the back.
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Mattis is not going to debase himself to put himself in the lowest circle of Hell.
00:24:44.140
Because what Mattis is talking about in that interview is he does have a responsibility to give his thoughts on strategy.
00:24:58.980
He would just read a lot of books and go fight and kill people.
00:25:01.180
So there is a time when he needs to give his thought on strategy, but he's not going to do it to the sitting president.
00:25:09.940
He just came out and savaged Barack Obama's handling of Iran, specifically something we didn't know about, an Iranian plot to bomb a cafe in Washington, D.C.
00:25:24.140
He said that there was a plot backed by Iran to bomb a cafe in Washington, D.C.
00:25:30.000
And after this was foiled, Eric Holder, the attorney general, and Robert Mueller, yes, that guy, you remember Robert Mueller of the Mueller investigation, he was FBI director.
00:25:40.480
They came out, they held a press conference, and they treated it as a law enforcement matter.
00:25:45.480
Okay, we caught these criminals who tried to bomb a cafe.
00:25:48.480
They didn't treat it as a matter of statecraft, of foreign policy, even though it was backed by Iran.
00:25:55.840
He says, quote, had the bomb gone off, those in the restaurant and on the street would have been ripped apart, blood rushing down sewer drains.
00:26:03.540
It would have been the worst attack on us since 9-11.
00:26:07.380
I sensed that only Iran's impression of America's impotence could have led them to risk such an act within a couple miles of the White House.
00:26:15.640
Absent one fundamental mistake, the terrorists had engaged an undercover DEA agent in an attempt to smuggle the bomb,
00:26:22.640
the Iranians would have pulled off this devastating attack.
00:26:26.380
Had that bomb exploded, it would have changed history.
00:26:30.900
Why did the Obama administration play down this attack?
00:26:38.600
They were negotiating from a position of weakness.
00:26:42.120
They totally misjudged America's role in the world and our role in relation to our adversaries abroad.
00:26:49.820
Mattis goes on, he says, quote, in my military judgment, America had undertaken a poorly calculated long shot gamble.
00:27:00.660
At the same time, the administration was lecturing our Arab friends that they had tried to accommodate Iran as if it were a moderate neighbor in the region
00:27:09.100
and not an enemy committed to their destruction.
00:27:17.260
So while everybody today is going and criticizing President Trump for attempting to hold these Taliban negotiations,
00:27:24.380
by the way, I'm one of the people criticizing him for that.
00:27:34.120
You're coming off the heels of a presidential administration that downplayed what could have been potentially the deadliest attack in the United States,
00:27:42.040
the most significant attack in the United States, since September 11th.
00:27:46.080
And they did that because of their own bungled, idiotic view of foreign policy.
00:27:51.780
Now, President, or rather, James Mattis goes on to defend President Trump again.
00:27:56.300
And you'll see, in just the way that Democratic strategists, different candidates are talking about the left and the right right now,
00:28:06.920
We are in extraordinarily trying political times abroad and with trying political times at home.
00:28:13.860
And in this, President Trump, with all his warts, I think comes out as the least bad option,
00:28:20.280
which makes him, by definition, the best option.
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You get Another Kingdom, which is, by the way, that's coming out pretty soon.
00:28:44.920
We're working on season three of Another Kingdom.
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Important every single day as this 2020 election goes onward.
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Make sure to get that Tumblr or you will drown.
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So it's very important for me to heat up my Leftist Tears.
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This is, everyone has their own hot toddy recipe.
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You know, they throw a little dash of whiskey, a little bit of honey, maybe some kind of tea or water.
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For me, the secret to a really good hot toddy and the way to really clear yourself out is to add that little saline solution, which only comes, if you want the very best, in the form of Leftist Tears.
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Mattis doesn't only go out and say, I'm not going to criticize Trump.
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He doesn't only go out and say, I'm not going to assail the Obama administration for their idiocy, but he actually defends President Trump against some attacks that he judges unfair and that I judge unfair on MSNBC, specifically attacks that President Trump has undermined NATO since his inauguration.
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In the last two and a half years, we've seen our alliances weakened in NATO, certainly in Asia and in Europe.
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You know, Andrea, if you take a look at current events, you can always see the tensions because that's what grabs your attention is the tensions in those alliances.
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However, right now, you see a NATO that I think we're into the fourth straight year or fifth straight year of the nations, almost all of them increasing their defense budget.
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So I could say quantitatively, NATO is actually stronger today.
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Those tensions have always been there in NATO where the American presidents, I remember all the way back to President Clinton when I became aware of this issue.
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President Clinton, President Bush, President Obama, all saying the same thing President Trump is.
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The way I carried the message to NATO when I first went there as a secretary of defense was I've sat in this room and you've heard this message before.
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But the American people are saying they will not care more about your children's future than you care.
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And this is the key here, not just to defend Trump, though I think he has been very unfairly attacked on his handling of NATO.
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He has achieved longstanding U.S. goals with regard to NATO by taking a tough line on it.
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He's done everything exactly right on NATO and the attacks on his handling of NATO in particular are completely unfair.
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But I actually don't, that's sort of secondary in Mattis' remarks.
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What I'm interested in is he says that he's heard these kind of statements before.
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He's given these kind of statements to NATO before.
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Certainly since the Clinton administration we've heard this.
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When it comes to foreign policy, presidents come and go and the foreign policy challenges remain the same.
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And the national interests of different countries tend to remain the same.
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And they tend to supersede the individual politicians and personalities who are in there.
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So when it comes to Afghanistan, you can't just blame Trump.
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You can't just blame Bush who invaded Afghanistan.
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These are problems that, that have spanned decades and decades and centuries and centuries.
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You know, in the United States, who are we going to blame for this 18 year war we've had in Afghanistan?
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Bill Clinton is the one who failed to take action against Osama bin Laden, who then successfully launched an attack on September 11th,
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which dragged us back into that war in Afghanistan.
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Because when it comes to war, your opponents have a say too.
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If Clinton or Bush had responded to the bombing of the USS Cole by, by bin Laden,
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if, if, if Clinton had responded forcefully to the first World Trade Center bombing in 1993,
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And our strategy in Afghanistan might look very different today as well.
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So if you're going to attack a Trump on this, that's fine.
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But make sure you, you give him his due and you give the correct criticism to his predecessors as well.
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He may be the worst president that we've had in recent memory.
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He's, it also, this kind of criticism that's coming in, when you look at his opponents on the left and the right,
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I mean, even David Axelrod, who was the chief strategist for Barack Obama, is coming out against Joe Biden.
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He's coming out against the Democratic frontrunner.
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It's one thing to have a well-earned reputation for goofy, harmless gaffes.
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It's another, if you serially distort your own record, Joe Biden is in danger of creating a more damaging meme.
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This was directly in response to Joe Biden lying about his, his record on the Iraq war.
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Kind of like John Kerry said, I was against the war before I was for the war.
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Joe Biden is now saying he never really supported the Iraq war.
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The Bush administration lied to him about the Iraq war and what it was about, and he didn't really mean it.
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This is what I really like about David Axelrod.
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He is a really good political analyst because he's not a hack.
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But then when he turned into an analyst, he really became a serious analyst.
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And this is a big issue for Biden, which I've been calling for weeks and weeks now.
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It's not about the sort of things that politicians say to, to make people like them, to make them seem more sympathetic.
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You know, Joe Biden lied about the death of his wife and daughter, tragic death of his wife and daughter.
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He baselessly smeared the other driver involved in that car accident in 1972 of being a drunk.
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The death haunted that driver until 1999 when he himself died.
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And then immediately afterward, Biden smeared him as a drunk.
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I mean, he's willing to tell these really deep lies.
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And so goofy Uncle Joe who can't remember the details, that's one thing.
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But Joe Biden, who's willing to tell all of these really serious, vicious, awful, needless lies, that's a different thing.
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So you're going to run against President Trump because he has a unique relationship with the truth, let's call it.
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He exaggerates his crowd sizes at his inauguration.
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If you're going to run against him on that, on the question of lying and honesty and integrity, you probably should be honest yourself.
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You know, even the most allegedly nice, moderate, Midwestern, Christian, Democratic candidate, Pete Buttigieg, is a radical.
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He's unlikable when it comes down to it compared to President Trump.
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Here is Buttigieg, who only exists, his entire raison d'etre is to troll actual Christians by saying,
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Actually, Christianity is the opposite of what you think it is.
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He's now defending post-birth abortion, not just abortion, not just abortion until the point of birth,
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actually abortion after birth as both biblical and Christian.
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Here he is on the radio show The Breakfast Club.
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Now, right now, they hold everybody in line with this one kind of piece of doctrine about abortion, right,
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which is obviously a tough issue for a lot of people to think through morally.
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Then again, you know, there's a lot of parts of the Bible that talk about how life begins with breath.
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And so even that is something that we can interpret differently and take up me too.
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But I think no matter where you think about the kind of cosmic question of how life begins,
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most Americans can get on the board with the idea of, all right, I might draw the line here, you might draw the line there.
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But the most important thing is the person who should be drawing the line is the woman making the decision.
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Absolutely. And I think that if you're a man who's against abortion, you haven't gotten the wrong woman pregnant.
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I mean, wife. I'm just saying, you know, I'm just saying we've had some slip ups and I've had a few.
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There he is. There's the Christian candidate, Pete Buttigieg.
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Pete Buttigieg is the worst kind of anti-Christian because he just totally perverts and distorts and inverses the very gospel message.
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He says, there's some language in the Bible about life having a relation to breath, which of course there is.
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I mean, in the very beginning, God creates the world on his own breath, right?
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And he creates the, on his breath, he creates the world.
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And how does he create the world? By speaking it through the word, which is the incarnate God.
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Here are some other lines just to criticize if Pete Buttigieg, or just to clarify, rather, if Pete Buttigieg is watching.
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God created man in his image. In the divine image, he created him.
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The act of creating human beings is to create them in God's image.
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In Genesis, be fruitful and multiply, not be fruitful and then slaughter the baby before it's born.
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I have brought forth a man with the help of the Lord.
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Genesis, truly children are a gift from the Lord.
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Quote, because they ripped open expectant mothers in Gilead,
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exactly in the way that Pete Buttigieg is encouraging people to do.
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You knit me in my mother's womb, nor was my frame unknown to you when I was made in secret.
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You have been my guide since I was first formed.
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Until Pete Buttigieg rips me apart with forceps and a vacuum.
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God, from my mother's womb, had set me apart and called me from his grace.
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I'm actually just quoting different lines compiled by Father Frank Pavone,
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who's a terrific guy, head of Priests for Life.
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So many biblical references, but Pete Buttigieg doesn't care about that,
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because he's a fake Christian and an anti-Christian,
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the worst kind of heretic, a terrible radical, and an awful jerk,
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I did a whole episode about how Pete Buttigieg is such a jerk.
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These are the guys who say that they have some kind of moral credibility to criticize Trump,
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and he's slept with a lot of women, cheated on his wife.
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Buttigieg, perverting the very word of God itself to justify slaughtering babies.
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You know, he's not a member, it seems, of any sort of formally constituted church,
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so he can't be excommunicated, but he certainly should be.
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Buttigieg, those are the guys to the left of Trump.
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I didn't even get into the guys who are considered the actual sort of mean, crueler, radical types.
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He has a new primary challenger in the Republican Party.
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Mark Sanford, former governor of South Carolina,
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former congressman from South Carolina's 1st District,
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so that he could go cheat on his wife with his mistress in Argentina.
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Here is Mark Sanford making his announcement on Fox News Sunday.
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I think we need to have a conversation on what it means to be a Republican.
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I think that as a Republican Party, we have lost our way, and I'd say so on a couple of different fronts.
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I'd say first and sort of the epicenter of where I'm coming from is that we have lost our way on debt and deficit and spending.
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You know, one of the hallmarks of the Republican Party and the conservative movement has always been how much do we spend?
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I mean, it was Milton Friedman's notion of the ultimate measure of government is how much it spends.
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The president has called himself the king of debt, has a familiarity and comfort level with debt
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that I think is ultimately leading us in the wrong direction.
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We can get into those numbers, but the numbers are astounding.
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Just take, for instance, as a data point, this last debt deal that adds $2 trillion of additional debt to our country
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over the next 10 years, adds a third of a trillion dollars in new spending,
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So I'd say the epicenter of where I'm coming from is we have got to have a national conversation
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and a Republican conversation on where are we going.
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What an unbelievable, even if you're, I mean, it's so absurd that this man is running.
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This man is maybe the biggest laughingstock of politicians in the country.
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He's up there with Rod Blagojevich and a few other disgraced governors.
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But even if he's going to do it, to roll out this campaign and basically say,
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I'm running for president, vote for me because Trump spends money irresponsibly, who cares?
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I mean, what he's doing here is he's running a campaign from 2010 in 2019.
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You had the debt and the deficit as central political issues.
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Mitch Daniels, a guy who I tried to get to run for president, talked about the new red menace,
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this one consisting of ink, how the debt was the big ticking time bomb.
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I agree with that. I think it's a very important issue.
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I was working in politics to try valiantly or as valiantly as we could to fix that problem
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and everybody failed. All those politicians who tried to fix the debt failed.
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Paul Ryan made good attempts to do it and he failed.
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There is no political appetite to fix the debt and to fix the deficit.
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No. What I think the smarter people and the wiser observers of politics concluded is
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that trying this fiscal only approach, we just talk about the debt, just talk about the deficits,
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don't talk about anything else. One line that a lot of people were using at the time was social truce.
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We're going to forget about the social issues for a second. We're going to put that on pause
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and we're going to fix our debt and deficit. That approach is not workable. That approach is
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fundamentally misguided. What we learned from that failure is that we need to fix the culture
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in order to fix the fiscal situation. The pro the first problem is cultural. Andrew Breitbart called
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it politics is down from culture. And what we know from Russell Kirk and many others is that politics
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is down or that culture rather is down from religion. This guy, Mark Sanford and a lot of other old
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guard establishment types did not get the memo and they're still running on the same tired platitudes.
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The other reason that this is ridiculous. Notice I'm, I'd like to dismantle Mark Sanford's candidacy
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simply on the policy arguments that he's making simply on the way that he's waging it. There's also
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the character question, which is that this guy has absolutely no credibility. He's, he's running a
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campaign based on responsibility, right? That's basically what he's saying. President Trump has been
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irresponsible in office. So elect me and I will be more responsible. Elect me, Mark Sanford,
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the guy who literally stopped showing up for work for weeks and then lied about where he was. People
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said that he was on the Appalachian trail. Actually though, I, Mark Sanford went all the way to
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freaking Argentina to cheat on my wife with my mistress in South America. Vote for me. Responsibility.
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Sanford 2020. Are you kidding me? He is, he is cartoonishly irresponsible. One of the least
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responsible politicians in recent history. Who are Trump's other challengers? Joe Walsh. Joe Walsh
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is running. He's a one-term congressman. He was kind of a tea party guy. One of the most
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bombastic personalities in that era of politics. He's running because Trump is too mean in his
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tweets. Joe Walsh has sent far, far more offensive tweets than President Trump. Joe Walsh has been far,
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far Trumpier even than Trump. And now he's running and saying, vote for me because I'm not as Trumpy as
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Trump. As of five minutes ago, before that time, I was much more Trumpy. No credibility at all. And then
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the other guy running is Bill Weld, who's a liberal Republican, totally liberal Northeastern
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Republican, who is going nowhere. He ran as the vice presidential candidate on the libertarian ticket
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in 2016. He's the other guy. These are the jokers. I get it. I get the argument when you say
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President Trump has done bad things. Okay. Yeah. He's done a few things I disagree with.
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Called him out for it. Yeah. Yeah. That's why we need to elect Mark Sanford instead.
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What on earth are you talking about? And I don't think this is really going to matter because a
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number of states are canceling primaries right now. And the anti-Trump forces, the guys trying to run
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guys like Mark Sanford and Joe Walsh and Bill Weld are furious about this. Bill Kristol, whom
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personally I still like, but he's really lost it on this Trump thing. He is shocked, offended,
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terrified. He's comparing this to, you know, tin pot dictatorships in the banana republics. This is all
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going around on Twitter because states are canceling certain primaries for the GOP. This has all
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happened before. This has happened many times before. Arizona didn't hold a Democratic primary
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in 2012. Why? Because Barack Obama was going to do it. 1996, Arizona didn't hold a primary in the
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Democratic Party because Bill Clinton was already the president. Kansas didn't have a Democratic primary
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in 96. And, uh, South Carolina, uh, didn't have a Republican primary in 1984 when Reagan was running
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for reelection or in 2004 when Bush was seeking a second term. Uh, South Carolina also skipped in 96
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and 2012 on the Democratic side. And in 1992, when there actually was a really serious primary challenge,
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not a Mark Sanford primary challenge, like an actual one between Pat Buchanan and George H.W. Bush,
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several states that year skipped the Republican primaries. Buchanan didn't whine about it.
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Bush won it fair and square. This is totally normal. It's happened many times before.
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All of it requires context. Even when you're talking about bringing the Taliban on vacation
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with you to Camp David, which is egregious and I'm glad it didn't happen. When you're talking about
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wars in Afghanistan, when you're talking about Trump's personal behavior, it's just this attitude
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that we have in this country. Now we can so clearly see everyone else's faults,
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but it's very difficult to see our own faults. We judge everybody else on their actions. We judge
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ourselves on our intentions. We're plucking the little speck of dust out of our neighbor's eye.
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Well, we have a giant plank in our own eyes. Again, just like the fiscal situation, just like
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the military problems that we've had overseas and foreign policy. This is ultimately a cultural
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problem. What do we want as a people? What sort of people do we want to be? You can't blame that
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on your politicians. They are a reflection of you. You've got to fix that in yourselves. Can we fix
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it in ourselves? That's ultimately the question that's going to be on the ballot in 2020. That's
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our show. Tune in tomorrow. In the meantime, I'm Michael Knowles. This is The Michael Knowles Show.
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If you enjoyed this episode, and frankly, even if you didn't, don't forget to subscribe.
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And if you want to help spread the word, please give us a five-star review and tell your friends
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to subscribe. We're available on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, and wherever else you listen to podcasts.
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Also, be sure to check out the other Daily Wire podcasts, including The Ben Shapiro Show,
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The Andrew Klavan Show, and The Matt Walsh Show.
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The Michael Knowles Show is produced by Rebecca Dobkowitz and directed by Mike Joyner.
00:48:16.020
Executive producer, Jeremy Boring. Senior producer, Jonathan Hay. Our supervising producer is Mathis
00:48:21.640
Glover. And our technical producer is Austin Stevens. Assistant director, Pavel Wydowski.
00:48:27.380
Edited by Danny D'Amico. Audio is mixed by Mike Coromina. Hair and makeup is by Jesua Olvera.
00:48:33.200
And our production assistant is Nick Sheehan. The Michael Knowles Show is a Daily Wire production.
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