The Washington Post goes after Ted Cruz's daughter for drawing a picture of him as a snake. Plus, Chris Matthews goes off the rocker, and a crazy thing happened on CNN to a friend of mine, Kurt Schlichter, we'll get to all of it on today's show. Ben Shapiro is a conservative commentator and host of the conservative podcast "The Ben Shapiro Show." He's also the host of "The Weekly Standard" and hosts the conservative radio show "The View From The Top" on SiriusXM Radio's Power 99.1. He's a regular contributor to The Weekly Standard, and is a frequent guest on CNN's "The Situation Room". He is also a frequent contributor to CNN and other conservative media outlets, including the New York Times, CNN, NPR, and the Hill, where he hosts a show called "The FiveThirtyEight" and is one of the most influential conservative voices in the country. He also writes for the conservative newsletter "The Daily Caller" and has his own podcast, "The Civility Project," which he describes as "America's Most Influential Person." You can find him on social media: , and . His new book is out now, "Ted Cruz's Family," which is out in paperback! Thanks for listening to Ben Shapiro's show? Subscribe to the show! Subscribe on Apple Podcasts Subscribe on iTunes Learn more about your ad choices and become a supporter of the show by becoming a patron of The Ben Shapiro Podcast! If you like what you're listening to this podcast, leave us a review and/or share it on iTunes or share it with a friend, and we'll send you a rating and review it on your fellow podcasting buddies! if you're looking for a chance to become a fellow Ben Shapiro fan! or subscribe to his other podcasting recommendations, we're listening on iTunes! and other links to other great shows like this podcasting great reviews and more! Thank you for listening and sharing the Ben Shapiro podcast! - Ben Shapiro on The Sixteenth Hour Podcasts - subscribe on iTunes and subscribe on Podchronicity! We'll be listening to The Six Sombrero in the Sixteenth episode of Sixteenth Episode of Six Scented Podcasts on Six Months on Tuesday Morning Coffee and other places on the Four Corners Podcasts and other social media on Six Sigma Podcasts!
00:00:04.000At the end of tomorrow's episode, I will carol you a little bit.
00:00:07.000We do do this in the Shapiro family, so we'll do a little bit of that on tomorrow's episode.
00:00:11.000But today, we have to talk about the Washington Post going after Ted Cruz's daughter.
00:00:16.000We'll also be talking about Chris Matthews going off of his rocker, plus something crazy that happened on CNN to a friend of mine, Kurt Schlichter.
00:00:26.000I tend to demonize people who don't care about your feelings.
00:00:32.000Well, after yesterday, this is the show that you have been schlonging for, as Donald Trump might say.
00:00:40.000The big story of the evening, and very often lately the news breaks in the evening, the big story of the evening last night was there's this cartoonist who's won a Pulitzer Prize, her name is Ann Telmase, I believe is how it's pronounced.
00:01:09.000She's wearing a sombrero with tea bags hanging off of it and she's drawn pictures of Senator Cruz as a snake, like a full-on snake.
00:01:17.000And so she hates Senator Cruz and she despises Senator Cruz and she found an excuse to go after Senator Cruz in Cruz's
00:01:24.000He cut an ad, Cruz did an ad, that aired during Saturday Night Live for his presidential campaign.
00:01:29.000It was actually pretty funny and pretty cute.
00:01:31.000Here is the ad, it's clip number 10 here, and we will play it in its entirety and then we will show you what the Washington Post thought was appropriate to do about this ad.
00:01:39.000Imagine the greatest Christmas stories told by the senator who once read Green Eggs and Ham from the Senate floor.
00:01:46.000"'Twas the night before the shutdown and all through the house, not a bill was stirring, not even to fund a mouse.
00:01:54.000A proven record presents a collection of timeless Christmas classics read by the trusted conservative leader Ted Cruz.
00:02:02.000Favorites such as How Obamacare Stole Christmas and Rudolph the Underemployed Reindeer.
00:02:08.000All of the other reindeer couldn't afford to hire Rudolph.
00:02:12.000Act now and you'll get a leader who does exactly what he says he's going to do.
00:02:16.000In this case, read festive stories like Frosty, the Speaker of the House.
00:02:29.000And eventually, you see he's got his two daughters there, and one of his daughters reads a little bit, and his daughter... They're very cute kids.
00:02:36.000I mean, I think they're four years old and seven years old, and the seven-year-old's an actress.
00:02:39.000I mean, you can see her there doing the googly eyes and being all cute.
00:02:43.000And the reason I was laughing, folks, if you can't see, is because when it showed Frosty the Speaker of the House, it was a picture of Frosty the Snowman holding a glass of wine and a cigar.
00:03:55.000I see two monkeys, one who's smaller and one that is bigger.
00:03:57.000That's right, Antone says that she's going to draw Ted Cruz's four-year-old and seven-year-old daughter as actual, honest-to-goodness monkeys.
00:04:07.000And then she said that Ted Cruz, there's an unspoken rule in editorial cartooning that a politician's children are off-limits, but
00:04:15.000But, when a politician uses his children as political props, as Ted Cruz recently did in his Christmas parody video in which his eldest daughter read, with her father's dramatic flourish, a passage of an edited Christmas classic, then I figure they are fair game.
00:04:29.000In other words, they did something that she doesn't like, and now it's not enough to just draw the kids, she's actually going to draw them as monkeys.
00:04:36.000They're not just kids, they're monkeys.
00:04:38.000And this old bitty, this nasty piece of goods, she has also in the past drawn on the 40th anniversary of Roe v. Wade, she posted, it said this, quote, today is the 40th anniversary of the landmark Supreme Court decision Roe versus Wade, which made abortion legal in all 50 states.
00:04:55.000Every year on this day, the pro-life groups descend on Washington, D.C.
00:04:59.000I live in the area, so I've witnessed these over the years, and it always strikes me how the majority of these protesters are very young children.
00:05:06.000And there's a caption that says anti-abortion activists march in Washington D.C.
00:05:10.000And it shows a fat guy wearing black and a mother wearing white, and they're holding crosses, obviously crosses, with strings that come down, and the strings are connected to small children who are carrying anti-abortion signs.
00:05:22.000So this idea that kids are puppets to their parents, it only applies to right-wingers, because as we've learned when Rush Limbaugh said that, made a joke about Chelsea Clinton looking like a dog back in the 90s and all hell broke loose, you can't make fun of liberal politicians' kids.
00:05:41.000And it's also worthwhile noting this is not a rarity.
00:05:43.000If you remember Sarah Palin in 2008, Andrew Sullivan, who was subsequently invited to the White House, claimed that Trig Palin was not actually Sarah Palin's son.
00:05:51.000Trig Palin was in fact Bristol Palin's son, and Sarah Palin covered it up.
00:05:55.000She wanted to cover up that her daughter had a kid out of wedlock by trying to claim the kid as her own.
00:06:17.000She said, well look, there's the little token in the Romney family.
00:06:20.000So it's okay to make fun of Romney's black grandkid.
00:06:23.000But if you're a Democrat, then you can use kids all the time.
00:06:25.000As we've talked about on the show, we've had videos that we've shown on the show of Democrats trotting out their kids to push gun control.
00:06:31.000You remember during Obamacare, President Obama surrounded himself with children when he signed Obamacare into law, when Nancy Pelosi became Speaker of the House in 2006.
00:06:39.000You remember she got up there with a bunch of children there.
00:06:42.000Not unborn kids, those she kills, but the ones who have already been born, she shows up with in the House of Representatives.
00:06:48.000Holding her giant gavel, trying to show that little girls can do anything except be born if their parents want to kill them.
00:06:53.000But aside from that, they can do anything, including be Speaker of the House.
00:06:56.000So in other words, Democrats will use children as props all the time, but if a politician has his own kids in a joke about Christmas, which
00:07:05.000I mean, I'm not sure how else you do that joke without your kids in it.
00:07:09.000And it's obviously him parodying—and they say it right up top—him parodying his own activities during the government shutdown when he read Green Eggs and Ham during his quasi-filibuster.
00:07:19.000I said that he should have written—that if he really wanted to be effective, he shouldn't have read Green Eggs and Ham.
00:07:24.000Love you forever, which there's no way to make fun of somebody reading Love You Forever because it is the saddest and most poignant book of all time.
00:07:30.000But in any case, Cruz's ad, there's nothing wrong with it, but she puts this out there.
00:08:20.000I'm not going to fire her for doing something that in any other context we would label viciously racist.
00:08:25.000Okay, let's pretend, let's just substitute President Obama's head for Ted Cruz's head in this exact same cartoon, and now we're talking about how the columnist is a vicious racist who ought to be fired.
00:08:36.000And in fact, I'm old enough to remember when, just a few years ago, John McCain compared Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, the frontman for the Iranian dictatorship, to a monkey, and people suggested he was racist for doing so.
00:08:48.000But it's not racist to attack a Hispanic man's kids as monkeys.
00:09:23.000Quote, Ted Cruz obtained new ammunition Tuesday to shoot at his favorite bogeyman, the mainstream media, after the Washington Post depicted his two young daughters as monkey-like characters doing the bidding of their father.
00:09:44.000This was all just a... It was an Admiral Ackbar-type trap, right?
00:09:48.000He was just... He set this whole thing up so that the jaws of genius would shut closed around Antelmeas, and then he could fundraise off of it.
00:09:56.000Here's the headline from Politico, quote, Ted Cruz lashes out at Washington Post cartoonist for drawing his daughters.
00:10:03.000Drawing his daughters, or drawing his daughters as monkeys?
00:10:07.000And also, Lashes Out, that's the headline, the headline is Cruz lashing out, the headline isn't Washington Post has to pull a cartoon after their cartoonist draws a viciously racist, nasty piece of garbage crap like this.
00:10:20.000And by the way, Phil Kirpin, who I believe writes usually for the Weekly Standard, the American thinker, Phil Kirpin, mid-Washington examiner, Phil's a good columnist, and Phil points out, wouldn't it sell more papers?
00:10:32.000Wouldn't it get more clicks if you included the fact that they were drawn as monkeys?
00:10:36.000I mean, if the idea is that this is a traffic business, and I run a website, you know, this is a traffic business, include monkeys in the title, you'll get more clicks.
00:10:43.000If you just say, here's a cartoon that draws Ted Cruz's kids, nobody clicks on that.
00:10:48.000If you say, here's a cartoon that draws Ted Cruz's kids as monkeys, or even clickbaitier, here's a cartoon, you'll never guess how they depicted Ted Cruz's kids.
00:10:57.000Right, that's how you gain clicks, but you don't gain clicks by hiding the lead.
00:11:00.000Right, but that wasn't, it wasn't just political.
00:11:25.000Mediaite, which is a pathetic left-wing site, here was their headline, quote, Well, I mean, if you want to just fly right past that story, that's the way that you would actually bill it.
00:12:25.000So he was fundraising off of it, which is called politics.
00:12:27.000And then the Washington Post ran a piece from Chris Chaliza, who's just exorable, titled, quote, why that now-retracted Washington Post cartoon is a gift to Ted Cruz.
00:12:52.000It's one of the reasons why I actually make a habit of not bringing my- like, people don't know what my daughter looks like because I don't post pictures of her online.
00:12:59.000I don't think it's anybody's business what my daughter looks like or what my wife looks like.
00:13:03.000And let me tell you, my wife is smoking hot and my baby's beautiful, but it's none of your business.
00:13:06.000Because that's my family and it's none of your business.
00:13:08.000And one of the things I hate about the way modern politics now works is I'm supposed to open up my personal life to you.
00:13:13.000My wife has a life, my baby has a life, and their lives really are not much of your business.
00:13:18.000I understand you want to humanize the people who are around you, but this is why you don't.
00:13:21.000Because the minute you humanize the people around you, they immediately get slandered as monkeys.
00:13:26.000This is why it used to be better when the politician's family stayed in the background and it was about the politician.
00:13:30.000It wasn't about the politician's family.
00:13:33.000So bottom line, if you're Trig Palin, you're fair game.
00:13:39.000If you're Hillary Clinton's granddaughter who she trots out at every occasion possible to remind people that she is everybody's abuela, this is something else we'll talk about in a second.
00:13:49.000If you're any child of a Democrat, it's not fair game.
00:13:51.000If you're a child of a Republican, then it's fair game.
00:13:53.000By the way, I mention the Abuela story because it's really ridiculous.
00:13:57.000Hillary Clinton is trying to say that she is Hispanic people's grandmother.
00:14:01.000I don't know many old white women with one child conceived in one act of sex with their husband, maybe the one time they ever had sex, and then they have a child, and then they proceed to take millions and millions of dollars and hide email servers.
00:14:23.000Yeah, I think that that's probably the fairest statement of the day.
00:14:27.000Hillary Clinton is nobody's grandmother, okay?
00:14:30.000The idea that Hillary Clinton is sitting around playing with her granddaughter... I heard from Alicia Krauss, who's my co-host on The Morning Answer, which is a morning radio show that I do out of Los Angeles.
00:14:42.000She said at one point that the way you can tell people, people on the left who don't like kids from the people who do like kids,
00:14:48.000Is people on the left who don't like kids have either zero or one kid.
00:14:52.000If you have more than one kid, that means you actually like kids.
00:14:54.000If you have just one kid, and the reason that you have, and it's not that you have some sort of biological issue so that you couldn't have more than one kid, but if you choose only to have one kid, that's because you wanted a dog or a purse.
00:15:05.000And that is basically, you know, that's how Chelsea is to Hillary Clinton.
00:15:11.000And Hillary is a nasty piece of goods.
00:15:15.000While all of this is going on with Cruz, the headline machine continues to roll about Trump saying that Hillary was schlonged by President Obama in 2008.
00:15:23.000And I have to say, it's highly amusing to me, really amusing to me, that the folks in the media who are very upset about Trump saying the word schlonged... First of all, let's just put it this way.
00:15:47.000Her chief of staff's husband has the second most famous schlong on planet Earth, because Huma Abedin's husband is Anthony Weiner, who texted his schlong out on the internet to everybody.
00:15:56.000Right, so she's surrounded by schlongs at all times, so the idea that she's offended by somebody mentioning a schlong seems a little bit weird to me.
00:16:04.000But, you know, all the people in the media are schmucks, so they're making a big deal out of this whole thing.
00:16:08.000They're kvetching about it, and they're all verklempt over it, and for people who use Yiddish, I mean, this is like, this is such a nothing.
00:16:15.000But it just shows you where the media are, that the number one headline of the day is Donald Trump saying the word schlong about Hillary Clinton.
00:16:22.000But Hillary Clinton lying about Donald Trump, the media,
00:16:25.000Painting Ted Cruz's daughters as literal monkeys, that doesn't even compute for them.
00:16:30.000That doesn't even hit the radar for them.
00:16:35.000By the way, what's amazing is all the same people who say that they're deeply offended by the idea that Obama schlonged Hillary in 2008, which means, you know, screwed Hillary in 2008.
00:16:45.000He says it means beat Hillary in 2008, whatever it means.
00:16:47.000But the bottom line is that in 2008, I don't know if you guys remember this, there was an actual YouTube video.
00:18:45.000Okay, see this is, I was listening to Klavan's show the other day, to Andrew Klavan's show, and he made such a good point about Trump, and I thought this is really true.
00:18:53.000The only person who looks like they're having a good time in this campaign is Donald Trump.
00:18:57.000Everybody else looks miserable, and you can see, folks, if you're not watching, you miss out on half the joy of Donald Trump, because at the very end, the reason that I'm laughing so hard is because Donald Trump starts to punch the air.
00:19:07.000About how he beat up George Stephanopoulos, and he's making a face like he's about to cave in somebody's head, and it's pretty spectacular.
00:19:13.000By the way, I don't know where he buys his ties, but those have to be the most magnificent, widest ties that have ever been created in creation.
00:19:19.000I mean, it looks like he just went out and got a parachute and put it around his neck, but Trump, he really enjoys the fight.
00:19:24.000Meanwhile, you want to see the opposite of Donald Trump in terms of enjoying the fight.
00:19:29.000I want to get over the idea that politics was ever civil.
00:19:33.000I know that there's this idea out there that politics was once a civil profession for the gentlemen.
00:19:38.000And the gentlemen would get together, and they'd be very civil with one another, and they would all discuss policies over a beer and a whiskey, and then they would come up with the best available policy and pass it for the American people.
00:19:50.000And they would never insult one another.
00:19:52.000Instead, they would just sip from their snifters of brandy while wearing cravats.
00:20:01.000All the way back to 1800, the Jeffersonians and the Adams fans were beating the living hell out of each other.
00:20:07.000Jefferson had a guy on his payroll named James Callender, who was the father of muckraking journalism, and was running stories about how John Adams was literally a senile, insane person throwing his wig around the White House.
00:20:18.000Meanwhile, the Adams press was going after Alexander Hamilton, who had allied with Thomas Jefferson.
00:20:24.000And talking and exposing the fact that Alexander Hamilton had been having an affair.
00:20:28.000John Adams said of Alexander Hamilton, these are both founders, right?
00:20:31.000These are the people who are the great civil founders of our society.
00:20:36.000Okay, John Adams said of Alexander Hamilton that he had juices that were so plentiful no whore could suck them off.
00:20:43.000Hey, John Adams said that about Alexander Hamilton.
00:20:46.000Okay, so the idea that politics was ever some sort of clean and decent business is ridiculous.
00:20:51.000And it's one of these things that there are certain myths to American politics that are highly irritating and the media dragged them out every so often.
00:20:57.000So when Trump says schlong, we all have to pretend, oh my goodness, we're so offended.
00:21:01.000Bill Clinton put his schlong in an intern.
00:21:05.000He treated his intern like a humidor, as Kurt Schlichter said on CNN the other day.
00:21:11.000And we're supposed to pretend that there's civility in politics anymore?
00:21:15.000LBJ, going back to the 60s, used to urinate with the door open so people could watch him urinate while he was having political meetings, because LBJ was a disgusting Bulgarian.
00:21:24.000And everybody who's ever written about LBJ knows this to be true.
00:21:27.000JFK was having 18 and sometimes apparently 17 year old interns in the White House pool bouncing around with their shirts off.
00:21:35.000Okay, so the idea that this was ever a civil society, that politics was ever a civil business, it just is not true.
00:21:48.000Okay, Barack Obama says that whites and blacks can't get along, essentially, and that the police departments are full of racists, and then he suggests, in an open letter, that Republicans are not tea partiers, they are tea baggers.
00:22:00.000Okay, for folks who don't know what a tea bagger is, there's gonna be a little graphic, okay?
00:22:04.000What a tea bagger is, according to people like Anderson Cooper, who apparently knows, it's when a dude dangles his testicles over someone else's mouth.
00:22:12.000Okay, that's what a tea bagger is, and that is the reference
00:22:15.000That Barack Obama makes to the Tea Party.
00:23:03.000Okay, so the fact that Trump takes pleasure in all of this, I find endearing.
00:23:07.000Somebody who clearly does not take pleasure in any of this is Jeb Bush.
00:23:11.000Jeb Bush clearly takes no pleasure in any of this.
00:23:13.000Jeb Bush has now cut an ad going after Donald Trump, and he tries to make the case that he is the only one who's willing to take on Trump, as though this is some sort of
00:24:25.000Jeb Bush quickly denounced Trump, tweeting, quote, a true freedom-loving conservative wouldn't be flattered by praise from a despot like Putin.
00:24:32.000Where only Jeb Bush really challenged him.
00:24:34.000He seemed like he was the only one willing to take on Donald Trump.
00:24:38.000And certainly he was the most aggressive in doing so.
00:24:41.000Jeb Bush was the only one who tried to go after Donald Trump.
00:25:10.000There are no live clips of Jeb, because if they showed the live clip of Jeb, you would have to see Donald Trump face-planting him on national television, because that's what happens at the end of that exchange.
00:25:36.000Okay, so now it's time to talk about some things that I like, and some things that I hate.
00:25:41.000So, first, we'll talk about some things that... Let me try to think of something that I like, because I spend so much time talking about things that I hate on this show, and then I'm always caught up a little bit short when it comes time to talk about things that I like.
00:25:53.000I was talking short stories yesterday, and, uh, and for anybody who's never read any O. Henry, you should go out and read O. Henry.
00:27:04.000I love that everybody's in a good mood.
00:27:06.000I hate the fact that after January 1, everyone goes back to being depressed and looking like they want to get drunk at a bar and just die in an alleyway like Edgar Allan Poe.
00:27:23.000Like, one big going-away bash, and then comes January 2nd, like, oh god, there's another year before I come back to Thanksgiving season.
00:27:30.000And Easter's not done up the way that it should be because, unfortunately, not enough religious people live in the United States, so Easter has become about the Easter bunny and egg hunting at the White House or some such nonsense.
00:27:39.000But the paganization of Christmas is something that I really, truly despise.
00:27:43.000And it's not enough just to say Merry Christmas.
00:27:47.000You should know the reason for the season, right?
00:27:49.000The purpose of the season is that Christ was born for you guys, and that is a good thing for humanity.
00:27:54.000It's a great thing for humanity, right?
00:27:56.000Christianity was a boon for humanity because before Christianity, it was all about paganism, and the left really is a pagan ideology.
00:28:03.000It's an ideology that government is God, and if you just pray hard enough and make enough sacrifices to it, government will give you whatever you want.
00:28:10.000So yesterday, we talked about Hillary Clinton saying that government could cure Alzheimer's if we just make the sacrifice of two billion
00:28:33.000The pagan sensibility of the left is on full display, particularly during this season.
00:28:38.000And when people say that Christmas is too materialistic, it is true.
00:28:42.000Christmas has become too materialistic.
00:28:44.000But that is because of what does in fact exist, which is not a full-scale, let's kill the Christians war on Christmas, but the idea that it's offensive for people to say Christmas, it's offensive to talk about Jesus, it's offensive to talk about the message that Jesus brought.
00:28:59.000And the truth is, the only people who are offended by the message that Jesus brought at this point in time are really the folks on the left, because Jesus came to fight paganism, right?
00:29:07.000The fact is that, from the Jewish perspective, I'm gonna talk about a Jew's perspective on Jesus, okay?
00:29:10.000We don't think that Jesus was God, we don't think that Jesus was the Messiah.
00:29:15.000Jesus was probably a rebellion leader who's trying to lead a revolt against the Romans to reestablish statehood, Jewish statehood, in the Holy Land.
00:29:23.000The reason I say that is because the reason that his Jewish followers probably thought he was the Messiah is because those are the criteria for the Jewish Messiah.
00:29:31.000So the whole idea of Messiah as God is something that's foreign to Judaism.
00:29:34.000It's not, it's a graft from other cultures.
00:29:36.000It's not something that comes, there's nothing in Judaism that says the Messiah will come, he will be the Son of God.
00:29:41.000There's nothing like that in Jewish philosophy.
00:30:20.000Make sure that the people you have goodwill toward are not people who want to destroy the all.
00:30:24.000So, let's remember why exactly people celebrate Christmas, and when we're sitting around our Christmas trees, or you are sitting around your Christmas trees, I want to thank you, Christians, for making this, America, a Christian country, the best place on earth
00:31:18.000The point is that what religion does is it makes the profane holy.
00:31:21.000It takes things from paganism and drags them forward
00:31:25.000Into the light so that people can, as Prager says, fill old bottles with new wine.
00:31:30.000And so we should look at the value of the wine, and we should recognize that what's great about the season is the value that the Christmas tree has now attained in the Christian community, not the tree itself.
00:31:41.000You don't love the tree because you're a druid worshiping trees.
00:31:43.000You love the tree because of what it represents about your celebration of the birth of Jesus Christ.
00:31:47.000So, thank you again to Christians, and you have a wonderful Christmas.
00:31:50.000We'll be back tomorrow, just before Christmas, for another episode.