Ep. 488 - The Comeback Kids
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Summary
The biggest win of the Super Bowl was for us all because of how apolitical it was. The show, the commercials, the show itself was not dripping in leftism. We examine why that is, because it made the whole thing much more enjoyable.
Transcript
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On second thought, I might not be the right person to tell you.
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The Kansas City Chiefs mount a fourth quarter comeback to win the Super Bowl.
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NFL ratings are up and Republican senators unexpectedly whip the votes to exonerate President Trump
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We will examine the secret behind three dramatic comebacks.
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Then, Democrats freak out just hours before the Iowa caucuses, happening in the next, right
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The halftime show highlights the difference between sexiness and pornography.
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Huge win in the Super Bowl, and I don't know anything about football, and I didn't watch
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most of the Super Bowl, but there was a major win.
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We all won the Super Bowl because of how apolitical it was.
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The commercials, the show itself, everything about it was not dripping in leftism.
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We will examine why that is, because it made the whole thing much, much more enjoyable.
00:01:45.900
And one way that I can do that is by telling you about our friends over at Ring.
00:01:52.640
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00:02:01.700
You might recall that I have been in Washington, D.C. now for about three weeks because we've
00:02:06.840
been covering impeachment on the Ted Cruz podcast.
00:02:09.120
Well, one way that I can feel like I'm not so far from home is Ring.
00:02:16.200
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00:02:29.920
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00:02:38.100
need to start building a ring of security around your home.
00:02:48.320
Big Super Bowl win yesterday, not just for the Chiefs, but for all of us.
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The show, the game, the spectacle was not political.
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Mostly, other than that, it was free of politics.
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Well, that's pretty much the definition of television these days.
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In the age of new media, almost everything on TV is a little hokey and a little bit lame.
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The NFL avoided politics because politics was destroying their ratings.
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Colin Kaepernick and protesting the flag and all that stuff was causing people to tune out.
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And so, the NFL made a big comeback by getting rid of their political advertising, their political themes.
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Maybe the whole theme of this year is major comebacks.
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There was one insane political ad that PETA, the animal rights organization, wanted to put out.
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We'll get to that one in a little bit because it's truly unbelievable.
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So, you had two ads, basically, that were political.
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Now, I want to take a look at those before we get to the biggest comebacks because those two ads show you completely different strategies, completely different approaches to politics.
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And I think maybe why President Trump is going to have the advantage in November.
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I think if we're just judging by these two political ads, Trump is going to have the advantage in November.
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It's a 30-second spot touting his criminal justice reform.
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With gratitude, I want to thank President Donald John Trump.
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It's this woman who has been in prison for a long time for running a drug operation, and then Trump lets her out of jail.
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And this is supposed to be a reason to vote for him in November.
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I hated his criminal justice reform, also known as the jailbreak bill.
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It's my least favorite thing he's done, probably.
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However, from a political perspective, this is a great ad for the Super Bowl.
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The reason this is a great ad for the Super Bowl is because it does not irritate Trump's base enough to cause them not to vote for him.
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I'm not going to not vote for Trump because he passed one kind of stupid law that doesn't really matter that much.
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It's got a ton of crossover appeal to independents and even some moderate Democrats.
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So it's a big tent political ad for the Super Bowl, which is one of the biggest TV events of the year.
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So the Democrats obviously have been making race identity politics one of the most important aspects of politics for the past several decades.
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When it comes to the Super Bowl, that is how they injected politics in it, right?
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Colin Kaepernick said that he was protesting police brutality and racial discrimination in law enforcement.
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He was really protesting the American flag, which we found out when he protested the Betsy Ross flag on a pair of Nike sneakers when he became the Nike spokesman.
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So we know he's being dishonest, but at least what they were saying overtly was that these protests at the NFL were about racial discrimination.
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And then what Trump is doing is appealing to an issue that is more or less about racial discrimination in the criminal justice system.
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It's a very smart way to get in there and flip the script on the usual leftist identity politics.
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Also, it's a broadly popular issue, so-called criminal justice reform or springing criminals from prison, especially if they're nonviolent drug offenders, which I think is a kind of meaningless term.
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But nevertheless, these are not people who have gone in and murdered somebody.
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Of course, I think that all drug crimes are violent because they cause violence in the countries of origin, and they do actually cause violence in the United States.
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However, neither here nor there, when people hear nonviolent drug offense, they want mercy for that person.
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It's a popular issue, so Trump goes for the popular issue.
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Okay, compare that ad to the other political candidate's ad of the Super Bowl, the other billionaire from New York, Mike Bloomberg.
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George started playing football when he was four years old.
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He would wake up every Saturday ready for the game.
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I just kept saying, you cannot tell me that the child that I gave birth to is no longer here.
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He's been in this fight for so long, he heard mothers crying, so he started fighting.
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When I heard Michael was stepping into the ring, I thought, now we have a dog in the fight.
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This is pretty much the polar opposite type of political ad as President Trump ran.
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So Bloomberg airs this ad, which is the opposite of the Trump ad.
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The Trump ad, criminal justice reform, very sympathetic looking person,
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crossover appeal just ideologically, just broadly popular.
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The Bloomberg ad is about taking your guns away.
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It's about depriving Americans of their Second Amendment rights.
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This may be the most polarizing issue in the entire country, and I am including abortion in that.
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Generally, it's a losing issue for the gun grabbers because even among Democrats,
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there are some people who are very serious about keeping their Second Amendment rights.
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I mean, this is a basic civil right guaranteed by our Constitution.
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On the issue of gun rights, everybody knows exactly how they feel about it.
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When you're talking about something like criminal justice reform,
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It's kind of a new issue that's being discussed.
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On the right, you've got libertarians who tend to be a little more favorable toward leniency.
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The left tends to want more leniency in criminal justice.
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Even worse for Mike Bloomberg, who's trying to win the Democratic nomination,
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this alienates some of the earliest Democratic voters.
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Voters are going to the polls in Iowa right now.
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Just those first four states are maybe the most pro-gun states
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that you're going to get to in the presidential primary.
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Why on earth would you lead with this polarizing issue?
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It's an approach that just doesn't take into account practical politics.
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We need to take him seriously because he's got a lot of money.
00:12:30.860
Mike Bloomberg so far has spent $200 million of his own money
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It doesn't always matter how much money you spend.
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So the Democratic National Committee, we've known this for years,
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it's run by party elites who stole the nomination from Bernie Sanders last time.
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Bernie Sanders is rising up in the polls right now.
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This time, the DNC is changing their debate rules to allow Mike Bloomberg in.
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Mike Bloomberg would not qualify for the Democratic debates
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Now, other candidates have not qualified for the debates.
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That didn't matter because those guys didn't have a ton of money to donate to the DNC.
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Two days before he jumped into this presidential race,
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Mike Bloomberg donated over $300,000 to the DNC specifically.
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He just maxed out what you can give to the party.
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And then, surprise, surprise, the DNC changes the rules to let him in.
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Is it only for the money that Mike Bloomberg is paying?
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The other reason is because they're looking at Joe Biden and they're saying,
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Joe Biden, who's the other old moderate guy in the race, he's collapsing.
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We can't rely on him to be our nominee and to beat Trump in November.
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So if Biden collapses, Mike Bloomberg is willing to take the moderate lane and he could do pretty well.
00:14:00.120
Even though Mike Bloomberg has not great political instincts and he aired this very dumb ad during the Super Bowl
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that's not going to help him at all, he's got a lot of money, mayor of New York.
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He knows how to work the system and he's got a workable system in the Democratic National Committee
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So President Trump did a pre-Super Bowl interview with Sean Hannity and he went straight after Bloomberg.
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Now, pay attention to Trump's line of attack on Mayor Mike.
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You know, now he wants a box for the debates to stand on.
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Does that mean everybody else going to get a box?
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But in terms of political attacks, this is probably one of Trump's best attacks.
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The websites that say that Mike Bloomberg is 5'8 or 5'9 or 5'10 are just simply lying.
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There have been very impressive shorter people in history.
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However, the reason this attack was so smart is not because Trump is making fun of the guy
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It's because it's baiting Mike Bloomberg to respond in kind.
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And when Mike Bloomberg responds in kind, he looks degraded.
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He looks like he's down in the dirt with Trump.
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Trump did this so successfully to virtually every Republican in 2016.
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Bloomberg takes the bait and totally screwed up the answer.
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Bloomberg spokesman said, quote, Trump is a pathological liar who lies about everything.
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His fake hair, his obesity, and his spray-on tan.
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Bloomberg just got right down in the muck with Trump.
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They took Trump's bait and they degraded themselves.
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The whole argument that they were making, take someone like Jeb Bush.
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Jeb Bush made this pitch, which was Donald Trump is juvenile.
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Right now, I, Jeb Bush, I am this serious, mature, dignified person.
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They could have made that argument, except when Bush would degrade himself.
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I remember one specific moment, one specific moment, 2016.
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Jeb said something that was a little more Trumpy and Trump laughed at it.
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And Jeb said, yeah, was that high energy enough for you, Donald?
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And Donald put his hand out low by his side as if to get a low five.
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And Jeb Bush, like he had just gotten the approval of the bully on the playground,
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gets so excited, he kind of jumps up a little and he smacks Trump's hand with a high five.
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And he lost his whole campaign because the only reason to vote for Jeb Bush
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is that he is the boring, mature, serious adult.
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And Donald Trump baited him into looking more childish than he.
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Donald Trump starts calling all the candidates' names and little Marco,
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And Marco Rubio was getting irritated by this, but he was trying to maintain that dignity.
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He was trying to maintain those talking points, the memorized 30-second speech,
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And then when he was getting desperate toward the end of the primary race, Rubio wanted to mix it up.
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So he starts taunting Donald Trump like he was Don Rickles, like he was doing an insult comedy routine.
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He made fun of Trump's hand size, insinuating that another part of Donald Trump's anatomy was a little small.
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He started making fun of his physicality and Marco fell apart because now all of a sudden you didn't just have one crude,
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undignified candidate and one serious foreign policy establishment guy.
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And if you're going to pick one of them, you're obviously going to pick Trump.
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He said, yeah, Rubio was out there doing his Rickles routine, but it's not going to work.
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I think there are a lot of moderate people, especially moderate Democrats, who would really like Mike Bloomberg.
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Very successful guy, very moderate, very acceptable.
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And yet if Bloomberg is going to go out there and be like, hey, Donald, you're fat and ugly and stupid, ha, ha, ha, then all right.
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If you've got two brash, tough-talking New Yorkers who are undignified, give me Trump.
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He's got a great economy, great foreign policy.
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He's, I'll take the devil I know rather than the devil that I don't.
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So notice how Trump goes after the other candidates compared to Mike Bloomberg.
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He doesn't go after Bloomberg on guns because President Trump knows that guns are a tricky issue, right?
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He knows the lesson that Mike Bloomberg doesn't know.
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Mike Bloomberg decides to lead during the Super Bowl everybody's watching by talking about how he hates your guns and he's going to take your Second Amendment rights away.
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It's immediately going to alienate half the audience.
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Trump doesn't do that, even though Trump has the opposite position on guns, right?
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Trump says, I'm going to defend your Second Amendment.
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But he knows if he airs that ad, he's going to alienate half the audience.
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If he goes after Bloomberg on his signature issue, guns are going to lose half the audience.
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So instead, he calls him short, he calls him weak, and in the process of that, he makes Mike Bloomberg degrade himself.
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He saved the issue attacks in that same pre-Super Bowl interview for Bernie Sanders.
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I mean, you know, look, I think of communism when I think of Bernie.
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Now, you could say socialist, but did they get married in Moscow?
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You don't think necessarily, well, whatever, but you don't necessarily think in terms of marriage, Moscow.
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I'm not knocking it, but I think of Bernie sort of as a socialist, but far beyond a socialist.
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Bloomberg is short and weak, and he's going to irritate Bloomberg so much that he's going to implode.
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He doesn't call Bernie an old, crazy-haired, wild man, right?
00:21:09.220
And then you hear, well, he didn't get married in Moscow.
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Okay, and Moscow's a fine place, but communist.
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And you're just getting this image of Bernie so excited.
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He loves the Soviet Union so much that he's getting married there.
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We're going to see tonight if Bernie's support is real, because Bernie is now at the top of the heap in Iowa.
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Now, if Bernie doesn't win in Iowa, it's a whole new race.
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If Bernie does win in Iowa, if he's got momentum into New Hampshire, that is a serious problem for the establishment.
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If Joe Biden does collapse tonight in Iowa and later in New Hampshire, Bloomberg could be the guy.
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He actually has a media outlet called Bloomberg.
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His chief competition for this moderate lane would be Mayor Pete Buttigieg and Senator Amy Klobuchar.
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The Democratic establishment is so nervous about this.
00:22:09.160
John Kerry, former secretary of state and failed presidential candidate in 2004, was overheard at a Des Moines hotel just over the weekend, suggesting that he might run for president.
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It was clearly a mistake that he tweeted it out.
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Then he deleted that because clearly someone drafted it up and jokingly wrote effing, right, instead of categorically, and then they tweeted that out.
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Think about how desperate the Democrats must be for John Kerry to have an opening in this race.
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John Kerry got clobbered by George W. Bush 16 years ago.
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This would be like if in 2012 the Republican Party was in such disarray that they got Bob Dole to run again.
00:23:28.980
Bob Dole ran, got the nomination in 1996, lost to Bill Clinton.
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It would be like if 16 years later, 2012, he ran for president again.
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But still, at least we had a kind of new candidate, a younger candidate.
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It would be absurd if the party were in such bad shape that Bob Dole were running again in 2012.
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And that is what we're seeing here among the Democrats.
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So I think in so much as there was politics in the Super Bowl, the Republicans did much better.
00:24:06.500
Other than that, the Super Bowl was not terribly political.
00:24:08.960
They made a big point of this because they're finally seeing their ratings come back after years of falling apart.
00:24:17.960
There was one ad that the Super Bowl rejected that was so, so offensive, so absurd that they just dismissed it outright.
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First, I've got to say goodbye to Facebook and YouTube.
00:24:37.680
And sorry, guys, because you're going to miss my halftime show thoughts.
00:24:40.040
And I have many thoughts about the halftime show.
00:24:41.500
So speaking of halftime, it feels like we're halfway through 2020.
00:24:45.040
But the truth is we haven't even gotten started.
00:24:49.580
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00:25:41.480
And then don't forget to tune in tomorrow for a special backstage.
00:25:46.540
We, I'm so excited for backstage tomorrow because it's been far too long since I've had a cigar.
00:26:10.240
Before we get to the halftime show, which is visually rather interesting,
00:26:14.520
I've got to talk about this ad that the Super Bowl and the NFL rejected.
00:26:20.540
This was an ad by PETA comparing black people to animals.
00:26:33.500
So, you've got a little bumblebee flying, and then the animals start kneeling.
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A disgusting tarantula and a gross little rat kneel down.
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You can hear this star-spangled banner in the background.
00:27:39.120
They had a PETA protest in college, and they had these big billboards.
00:27:42.260
And it showed African chattel slavery, like full-on African men in chains in the 19th century.
00:27:53.500
And they were saying, you know, see, when you really think about it, aren't those the same thing?
00:27:58.240
And in order for those to be the same thing, then black people have to be animals.
00:28:02.500
And I remember standing there with several of my friends, most of whom were liberal, by the way.
00:28:07.060
And we were just looking at it like, have you people lost your minds?
00:28:11.080
Do you understand how horribly offensive this is?
00:28:14.240
Now, from PETA's perspective, they don't think it's offensive.
00:28:16.980
Any reasonable person would look at that and say, hey, you're calling black people animals.
00:28:21.660
But from PETA's perspective, because they like animals much more than people,
00:28:25.840
they're saying, no, no, we're just saying all species are the same.
00:28:30.060
And so, they all need to be treated exactly the same way.
00:28:33.420
That's what they're drawing a direct comparison between racism,
00:28:37.400
which was ostensibly the purpose of the flag-kneeling Colin Kaepernick protest,
00:28:45.100
In other words, we shouldn't draw any distinctions between races because we're all children of God.
00:28:51.440
And likewise, we shouldn't draw any distinction between human beings and spiders
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because we're all the same thing, really, when you think about it.
00:29:02.280
I mean, the reason that we treat animals differently than human beings
00:29:06.060
is because human beings have will and intellect and animals do not.
00:29:12.600
This is the same reason, by the way, that we don't arrest a fox if a little fox rapes another fox in the wild.
00:29:23.080
But it's not really rape because animals don't have free will and intellect.
00:29:27.680
So, it's not like they're violating some moral law that they're aware of.
00:29:30.640
They have a conscience telling them to act in accordance with the transcendent moral order,
00:29:35.000
and then they decide to sin by transgressing that.
00:29:42.180
Do we charge the bear with murder against the salmon?
00:29:46.160
No, of course not, because animals are different than people.
00:29:51.320
I think the NFL very wisely saw the blowback that they would get from that ad.
00:29:55.600
PETA incredibly released it on their own, and they're rightly getting blowback for that as well.
00:30:05.520
But good on the NFL, because the NFL has saw that over the past two years,
00:30:11.840
since they cut out the flag kneeling, they got past Colin Kaepernick,
00:30:17.120
When Colin Kaepernick protested the American flag on TV,
00:30:20.460
and then a whole bunch of other NFL players started to protest the flag,
00:30:26.480
All the defenders of Kaepernick, all of the leftists said,
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oh, they're only tanking because people aren't watching as much TV.
00:30:36.280
Well, okay, then how do you explain the NFL ratings coming back in 2018, 2019,
00:30:47.680
They even had a tribute to the American flag before the game.
00:30:52.880
I walked through a county courthouse square on a park bench,
00:31:00.740
I said, your old courthouse is kind of run down.
00:31:07.580
I said, your old flagpole has leaned a little bit,
00:31:11.060
and that's a ragged old flag you got hanging on it.
00:31:16.020
And I said, Al, is this the first time you've been to our little town?
00:31:23.360
He said, I don't like to brag, but we're kind of proud of that ragged old flag.
00:31:29.780
Well, that sure is a different tune from what we've been hearing from the NFL the last few years.
00:31:37.960
The last few years have been the American flag is awful.
00:31:42.120
We're going to protest the star-spangled banner.
00:31:43.860
We're going to protest the symbol of our country.
00:31:45.620
Colin Kaepernick protesting a flag from the Revolutionary War,
00:31:48.640
long before we had police departments and alleged police brutality.
00:31:53.000
Now, all of a sudden, we're getting the most sentimental pro-America flag wave,
00:32:01.000
Might as well have George Cohan over there marching, saying it's a grand old flag.
00:32:07.140
Now, what this teaches us is actually very hopeful.
00:32:17.560
It's not over until it's over, whether that's in sports, whether that's in politics,
00:32:24.380
The Chiefs were losing the game yesterday, and then at the very end of the game,
00:32:31.940
99% chance Hillary was going to win, and then guess what?
00:32:35.980
Looked like we were careening into leftist decay, and then turned it all around.
00:32:43.180
And then they just got rid of all their nonsense, this anti-American stuff,
00:32:47.420
started waving an American flag every so often,
00:32:49.540
realized that sports always have something to do with national unity, national loyalty,
00:32:58.420
That's an important thing for us to remember as we lament our culture falling apart,
00:33:02.220
our politics falling apart, our government falling apart.
00:33:11.120
Then they weren't going to kick him out of office.
00:33:14.760
But they were going to drag this out for months and months and months.
00:33:17.740
At the very end, a few Republican senators changed their mind,
00:33:21.340
and we got the end of impeachment, which we'll get to in a second.
00:33:25.040
But before we move on from the Super Bowl, I do want to just mention this halftime show,
00:33:34.140
You can pretty much sum the halftime show up in two seconds.
00:33:43.320
It's just Shakira, Shakira and J-Lo shaking their moneymakers.
00:33:51.340
Look, not the worst halftime show in the world.
00:33:54.600
But it also showed us something about art and about culture.
00:33:59.860
This whole show, especially the J-Lo side of it, was explicitly pornographic.
00:34:04.620
It involved a stripper pole, grinding, crotch grabbing, some rope was involved.
00:34:09.360
Both Shakira and J-Lo are incredibly skilled dancers and performers.
00:34:28.580
I mean, they're just incredibly skilled performers.
00:34:35.040
Even though it was all about sex, it still wasn't that sexy.
00:34:38.280
It reminded me that pornographic is actually the opposite of sexy.
00:34:45.000
It seems like they would be the same thing, but they're actually opposites.
00:34:51.360
And we went to one of these old-timey Cuban shows, kind of the Ricky Ricardo stuff, you
00:34:55.080
know, where the women come out in the big costumes and they're kind of moving their hips.
00:34:57.980
And they're not actually showing you that much of their body.
00:35:01.380
But the way that they're moving, the things that they're slightly revealing and then putting
00:35:11.120
Sexiness comes from what you're not showing as well.
00:35:15.000
It's the reason that a woman in a bikini is sexier than a woman who's completely naked
00:35:22.900
It's because when you just show everything, it's all out there.
00:35:28.260
People generally don't all look that good naked.
00:35:31.380
But when you're hiding something, then your imagination is doing the work.
00:35:35.660
It's the reason why you never want to see the monster in the horror movie.
00:35:38.560
The minute you see the monster, it's all clear to you.
00:35:41.360
You don't have anything left to imagine or anything left to be excited about or anything
00:35:47.140
But when the monster is in the shadows, you can't.
00:35:49.240
Then your imagination is doing so much more work.
00:35:51.580
It's the reason that modern poetry is trash and older poetry that has constraints is good.
00:35:56.600
It's the reason that slam poetry is like the death of art because there's no limitation
00:36:03.900
Whereas an Elizabethan sonnet has all of these rules that you've got to play within and the
00:36:08.360
constraints actually give much more creativity.
00:36:11.640
Our culture has become increasingly pornographic and much less sexy the whole time.
00:36:17.420
It's just a lesson, I think, for young people and performers to keep in mind is you need a limiting
00:36:28.720
If you just throw it all out there, if you just get so graphic and grotesque, then you're
00:36:34.380
actually losing a lot of what you're going for in the first place.
00:36:41.780
You've got to leave a little bit to the imagination because the imagination has much more power
00:36:51.760
I'm not saying, look, it could have been a worse halftime show.
00:36:54.180
I know a lot of conservatives are railing against the explicit nature of it.
00:37:05.900
You don't want kids to be seeing these very graphic things at a family sporting event.
00:37:13.740
My concern is just that it's actually not achieving what it says that it will achieve.
00:37:19.460
You know, that it's in the same way that the sexual revolution actually now means that fewer
00:37:27.020
That now actually we're, it's having the opposite effect of what it said it was doing.
00:37:32.860
And that's so often the case with leftist cultural movements.
00:37:38.100
There was another huge comeback, which happened just after we went off air on Thursday, which
00:37:42.660
is that President Trump is about to be exonerated.
00:37:47.120
President Trump is almost certainly about to be acquitted in his impeachment trial.
00:37:53.600
There were four senators, four Republican senators who could have tanked this impeachment,
00:38:01.380
made it go drag on for weeks and weeks and weeks with more witnesses and John Bolton
00:38:05.220
testifying and Hunter Biden testifying and the whistleblower testifying and Adam Schiff
00:38:12.200
I, you know, I'm doing this show with Senator Ted Cruz called Verdict with Ted Cruz and he
00:38:17.660
comes from the Capitol each night, comes on over and we talk about what happened in impeachment.
00:38:21.740
So we had been chatting the night before this, this vote last week and he said, oh yeah,
00:38:29.040
It looks like we're going to get some witnesses.
00:38:30.520
We'll see if we can move some senators, four senators here, Mitt Romney, Susan Collins,
00:38:39.480
Those were the four Republicans had about 47 votes.
00:38:46.540
They needed three people to flip or I'm sorry, rather the Democrats needed, needed three or
00:38:53.480
And then they could have dragged out this impeachment question.
00:38:56.760
If they only got three people to flip, then we would have had a 50, 50 vote on more witnesses.
00:39:04.020
The chief justice would have been dragged into it any way he chose whether to vote or to not
00:39:10.580
It would have created a real constitutional problem.
00:39:13.360
So they were going to try to drag out these votes.
00:39:19.500
Mitt Romney and Susan Collins both said they were going to vote for more witnesses.
00:39:23.280
So the Democrats just needed to get one more to make it to 50, 50 or two more to make it to 51, 49.
00:39:30.180
The other two were Lisa Murkowski and Lamar Alexander.
00:39:44.420
So he actually didn't have that constituent problem.
00:39:47.300
Lamar Alexander, though, as Senator Lindsey Graham and Senator Cruz were telling me the
00:39:51.900
other night on the Verdict podcast, Lamar Alexander really cares about the institution of the Senate.
00:39:57.100
He didn't want to see the institution of the Senate lose respect and credibility.
00:40:00.660
Now, when, in particular, Lindsey Graham and Ted Cruz were trying to work the room and try
00:40:07.840
to work the senators and get them to come over and vote against witnesses, they had to use
00:40:13.900
They had to convince Senator Murkowski that it was in her interest to go in, vote against
00:40:21.440
witnesses, and that that would help her with her constituents.
00:40:26.040
They had to convince Senator Alexander that it would hurt the credibility of the U.S.
00:40:38.220
They had to know that Mitt Romney and Susan Collins were lost causes.
00:40:42.160
And Susan Collins, again, purple state, she's in an election year, you can kind of understand
00:40:51.260
He's in a very conservative state of Utah, and he's still a jerk.
00:40:54.620
But even his jerk vote tells us something about this process, which is that the individuals
00:41:02.380
It's the lesson I've learned most on the Verdict podcast with Senator Cruz.
00:41:06.400
We think that going into these impeachment proceedings, everything is preplanned.
00:41:15.700
The left tells us in history, individuals don't matter.
00:41:26.140
If Ted Cruz and Lindsey Graham had not been trying to persuade Lisa Murkowski and Lamar
00:41:30.640
Alexander, then very likely we would have witnesses this impeachment trial would be dragging
00:41:36.080
If Mitt Romney didn't hate Donald Trump, and if Donald Trump hadn't been kind of mean to
00:41:40.480
Mitt Romney, and if Mitt Romney, frankly, hadn't started it, then Romney very likely would
00:41:46.520
have voted to acquit President Trump, would have voted against further witnesses, wouldn't
00:41:58.060
And that, I guess that kind of plays in with the whole theme of the day, which is making
00:42:01.920
a comeback, which is that an individual really can make a difference.
00:42:04.820
And you really can change the course of the game, the course of the trial, and the course
00:42:13.040
We had the vote last week against more witnesses that, for all intents and purposes, ended the
00:42:20.280
Now you're going to have some proceedings this week.
00:42:22.720
And then on Wednesday of this week, you're going to have the final vote of whether to
00:42:26.640
convict President Trump and remove him from office and prevent him from running in November,
00:42:31.280
because if a president's been impeached and removed, he can't run for office again.
00:42:34.800
Or are they going to vote to acquit and say that he's not guilty?
00:42:43.760
There's no evidence that Trump committed any crime.
00:42:46.160
The Democrats in the House aren't even charging him with a crime.
00:42:52.680
The Senate will try, will probably vote to acquit.
00:42:56.260
And then I think the Democrats will try to impeach him again.
00:43:05.220
They probably won't charge him with a crime next time.
00:43:06.940
But I think they will vote or at least attempt to impeach him again.
00:43:14.040
Because this is the first time we've ever had a fully partisan impeachment in American history.
00:43:18.080
And if it's a fully partisan impeachment, and then it's a, there's actually a bipartisan movement against impeachment.
00:43:26.900
But if it's fully partisan, they'll just keep doing it.
00:43:29.020
Because it doesn't matter if Trump commits a crime or not.
00:43:32.500
Joni Ernst, Republican senator, thinks the same thing.
00:43:35.360
She said, quote, I think this door of impeachable whatever has been opened.
00:43:38.860
Joe Biden should be very careful what he's asking for.
00:43:42.860
Because, you know, we can have a situation where if it should ever be President Biden,
00:43:46.900
that immediately people, right the day after he would be elected, would be saying,
00:43:52.640
We might be in the era of impeachment, as one of President Trump's lawyers, Ken Starr, said during the arguments.
00:44:00.840
We might now be in a position where impeachment is just a regular tool of partisan politics.
00:44:18.120
One way that they could do it would be during this Senate vote on Wednesday,
00:44:21.960
if some Democrats vote to acquit the president, if they make this a bipartisan acquittal,
00:44:29.140
if they do that, then that might go a long way toward ending this age of impeachment before it really begins, one can hope.
00:44:37.120
Before we go, got to talk about another huge comeback.
00:44:43.640
Britain has officially left the European Union.
00:44:58.120
They told us it would be awful, and now it's fine.
00:45:03.380
We're already obviously dead from tax cuts and the repeal of net neutrality,
00:45:06.840
but we were all really supposed to die from Brexit, right?
00:45:11.940
And the most telling headline is from the New York Times.
00:45:23.500
The shape of its society and economy and its place in the world are very much up for grabs.
00:45:27.420
Britain's departure from the EU on Friday drew a mournful reaction
00:45:30.400
for many people who have long viewed Brexit as consigning their country,
00:45:33.920
once the vanguard of Europe, to a future of economic mediocrity and geopolitical irrelevance.
00:45:39.700
But there are many others who view Brexit as a day of liberation,
00:45:42.260
when Britain, unshackled from the bureaucracy of Brussels,
00:45:45.200
will stride into a future of economic innovation and vigorous, clear-eyed politics,
00:45:53.960
Disruptive change can be beneficial for a country, said Tony Travers, a professor of politics.
00:45:59.200
That is, in a sense, what Brexit has accomplished.
00:46:02.860
After three and a half years of debate, the question, what if it works?
00:46:10.600
We had been told that if Trump was elected, we'd all die.
00:46:17.800
We had been told Brexit would kill us all, right?
00:46:25.620
There's a headline from the New Statesman in June of 2016.
00:46:28.940
The headline was, calm down, Trump won't be president, and Britain won't leave the EU.
00:46:32.680
They have insisted, particularly the progressives, the left,
00:46:42.500
What you want, what you desire, what you think about does not matter.
00:46:48.280
History is marching inevitably toward progress.
00:46:52.680
And William F. Buckley Jr., when he started National Review in the first issue,
00:46:56.320
he said a conservative is one who stands athwart history yelling, stop.
00:47:06.420
In the game, in politics, in the impeachment trial, in the history of the world,
00:47:11.920
we're seeing that happen over and over and over.
00:47:13.860
And it does appear that we are at a period of renewal.
00:47:18.460
Whether that something new will turn out well or turn out poorly is not written in stone.
00:47:25.860
We have a chance to come from behind, but we've got to take that chance.
00:47:38.520
If you enjoyed this episode, and frankly, even if you didn't, don't forget to subscribe.
00:47:49.720
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00:47:55.120
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00:47:59.720
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00:48:05.100
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00:48:07.240
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