Iran launches ballistic missiles at Iraqi bases with U.S. soldiers, and President Trump makes a statement, and the media lose their ever-loving minds. With all of the craziness going on in the world, ranging from the situation with Iran to impeachment, you may have noticed that prices of gold have been spiking. Now might be a good time to diversify your assets at least a little bit. And you know who I trust when it comes to diversification of assets? Of course, I'm talking about my friends over at Birchgold! If you haven't yet taken the first step of requesting a free information kit on gold, go ahead and do it! You'll get a signed copy of my book, The Right Side of History, for free! Text "ELISSA" to 474747 during the month of January. You have nothing to lose to take that first step again! Tweet me and let me know what you thought of the episode! Timestamps: 3:00 - Iran's reaction to President Trump's statement 5:30 - Impeachment Speech 6:15 - What's going on with Iran? 7:20 - What does Iran have to do with the situation in Iraq? 8:40 - What s going to happen next? 9:00 11:15 12:00 | Iran's response to the latest? 13:30 14:40 15:20 16:30 | Is this a good thing? 17:10 17 + 17? 18 + 17:30 + 17 + 18? 19 19? 21) 22) Is it a good bet? 15 + 16) Is it not a red flag? #1 17) + + + #1 ? #3? + #5 + +#4 And so much more? & + #2) + #3 & #3) + And so Much More? (And ) (Apostle) #5) & And This & And And This And This Is This? And This To That Also Apteparec The Good And This (And This And And So Much More! # ) And This Is Also A Few Other Things ...
00:00:20.000With all of the craziness going on in the world, ranging from the situation with Iran to impeachment, you may have noticed that prices of gold have been spiking.
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00:01:43.000It lasted about 10 minutes and he said everything that needed to be said.
00:01:47.000We'll go through his actual statement in a second.
00:01:49.000First, the event of last night, which threw everybody into a panic, at least momentarily.
00:01:52.000So after the killing of Qasem Soleimani, which followed hard on the attempt to burn down the United States embassy in Baghdad, an act that was coordinated and ordered by Soleimani.
00:02:01.000And Soleimani had then come to Iraq to coordinate further attacks.
00:02:05.000The fact that the the fact that the Iranians were going to respond after Soleimani was killed, that was inevitable.
00:02:19.000So is the head of the popular local militia front, which was responsible for the Baghdad embassy attack.
00:02:27.000Trump orders the death of Soleimani, and we get these theatrics, these hysterics from the Iranian government, the Ayatollah Khamenei standing in front of the box containing the remains of Soleimani and weeping.
00:02:38.000We get hundreds of thousands, if not millions of people in the streets in Tehran.
00:02:43.000And we get the media losing their minds over all of this.
00:02:46.000Obviously, this is going to be the prelude for war.
00:02:48.000And all of the last 48 hours has been the media basically suggesting that World War III was imminent.
00:02:53.000Well, last night the missiles started flying and the media declared, in the moment, that World War III was upon us.
00:03:01.000According to the UK Daily Mail, Iran's quote-unquote crushing revenge strike against the U.S.
00:03:05.000largely failed to materialize Wednesday as the country launched 22 missiles against two American air bases in Iraq, but failed to kill a single soldier.
00:03:13.000Well, it appears some missiles failed to explode on impact or missed their targets altogether.
00:03:17.000and European intelligence sources said the regime deliberately pulled its punches for fear of provoking a disproportionate response threatened by President Trump.
00:04:04.000So in that sense, this was an escalation.
00:04:06.000But the fact that nobody was killed, that nobody was harmed, that no casualties happened, that basically this appeared to be Iran signaling to its people that it was willing to respond but not willing to go particularly far in order to do so.
00:04:16.000Basically, Iran had been convinced by Trump killing Soleimani that if they went hard back at Trump, that Trump would do something really escalatory.
00:04:25.000airbase without any sort of warning, for example, and they killed some American soldiers, the likelihood that Trump would have then sunk their navy was incredibly high.
00:04:32.000So if you look at Iran's strategic vulnerability in the region, their ballistic missiles are not supremely vulnerable because a lot of them are on mobile launchers.
00:04:39.000They have lots and lots of ballistic missiles that have been developed over the years, and also with the help of Obama-era cash.
00:04:45.000Because remember, the Obama administration shipped $1.8 billion in cash to the Iranians, allowed their $150 billion of withheld assets to flow back into Iran, tried to open the world economy to Iran.
00:04:56.000And Iran was promptly using all of that money in order to build up its conventional assets, its military, its terrorist groups all around the Middle East, stationed around the Middle East.
00:05:04.000They're building up their ballistic missiles.
00:05:05.000So Iran really has sort of three assets that were at its disposal.
00:05:08.000One is its ballistic, well, four, their ballistic missile system.
00:05:12.000Their ballistic missile system, they are not supremely sophisticated ballistic missiles, but they are ballistic missiles, and they are widespread, and they are on mobile launchers, many of them.
00:05:19.000Those would be a little bit hard to take out.
00:05:21.000The second asset is the enormous Iranian Revolutionary Guard, which is a very, very large standing army, but is a conventional army and would have to cross over conventional borders, which would precipitate actual international action against Iran.
00:05:35.000Then, there was the Iranian Navy, which is the weak spot for Iran because their navy is pretty rinky-dink.
00:05:40.000They have a few submarines that might be somewhat hard to locate, but their surface ships are really not a tremendous threat, especially if they don't get to take the first punch.
00:05:47.000And then they have their terrorist groups around the region, All of whom are not really prepared for war.
00:05:52.000Last night, Iran threatened that if there was some sort of retaliation from the United States, that they would activate their terrorist groups like Hezbollah against Israel.
00:05:59.000Hezbollah does not want to go to war with Israel right now because Israel's military has been prepping for this for years, really since the 2007 Southern Lebanon War.
00:06:07.000And so Israel would go in and wipe them off the map pretty quickly.
00:06:10.000So Iran is in a strategically vulnerable position.
00:06:31.000Imagine, in the United States, the equivalent.
00:06:33.000Let's imagine that a foreign actor takes out the Vice President of the United States, the Secretary of Defense, the head of the CIA, and the head of the FBI all in one.
00:06:40.000Because that is basically what Soleimani was.
00:06:42.000And imagine that then there were pictures on television of millions of American mourners in the streets.
00:06:47.000And imagine there are pictures of the President of the United States openly weeping over the corpse of this person, or these people.
00:06:54.000And then imagine that the response was, we fired 22 ballistic missiles, all of which failed to kill anybody who had actually ordered the attack, or any of the soldiers on the other side.
00:07:03.000The American people would rightly consider that to be an act of weakness.
00:07:06.000Well, what happened last night was an act of weakness, and it is now apparent, it's becoming more and more apparent, that it was a deliberate act of weakness because the Iranian government did not want to provoke a serious response from the United States.
00:07:17.000As the Daily Mail is reporting, Iraqi Prime Minister Adil Abdul-Mahdi said that Iran warned him about the attack on the Ain al-Assad and Erbil airbases an hour before they took place.
00:07:27.000And then, Abdul Mahdi turned around and he warned Iraqi and U.S.
00:07:40.000It sounds like the Iranian government basically signaled to the Iraqis, listen, we gotta do something because otherwise it looks like our regime is so weak that we can't even Retaliate in response to the killing of one of our leaders.
00:07:52.000We're gonna fire some ballistic missiles.
00:07:54.000It'll be a lot of sound and fury, signifying nothing.
00:07:56.000Because we're warning you beforehand to get your people out.
00:07:58.000So you get your people out, nobody gets killed.
00:08:00.000We get to claim that we took a crushing response to all of this.
00:08:03.000And then you get to basically claim that we didn't do any damage and everybody goes home happy.
00:08:07.000And that is effectively what happened last night.
00:08:11.000Now, the Iranian government played it up to the hilt, and one Iranian official, the Iranians really did play this up.
00:08:17.000The Iranian state TV was reporting that Ayatollah Khamenei was coordinating the attacks himself, which was supposed to be an indicator of the seriousness of the Iranian response to his MSNBC reporting on that last night.
00:08:30.000We have reports as well from the IRGC that Ayatollah Khamenei, the supreme leader of this country, was in the control room coordinating all of these attacks.
00:08:42.000They're also reporting that Iran's air force has been deployed and they are ready to intercept any attacks from the United States.
00:08:52.000Ayatollah Ali Khamenei then described the attacks as a quote slap in the face of America, but he admitted they were not enough to avenge Soleimani.
00:08:58.000He did a televised address where he promised Iranians the true revenge would be kicking U.S. forces out of the Middle East altogether.
00:09:03.000The problem is that the strategy he just pursued actually made that more difficult.
00:09:06.000So the media were claiming yesterday and basically since Soleimani's killing that killing Soleimani was going to prompt Iraq to throw the U.S. out.
00:09:19.000Only the cabinet can ask the United States to leave.
00:09:21.000There is no cabinet in Iraq because the acting prime minister has been under significant pressure to step down specifically because Iran was dominating his foreign policy.
00:09:30.000In fact, the vote that was taken in the Iraqi parliament was taken with barely a quorum available.
00:09:35.000Every Sunni legislator, every Kurdish legislator boycotted the vote and the vote was non-binding.
00:09:53.000Everybody in Iraq who is not Shia knows that the minute the United States is out, Iran rushes in and takes over every bit of the government.
00:10:01.000So, and having Iranian missiles flying into Iraqi territory trying to kill Iraqi citizens is not a very good way of showing that you don't have territorial aspirations to take over Iraq.
00:10:11.000So actually, this is pretty counterproductive for the Ayatollahs.
00:10:14.000They were put between a rock and a hard place.
00:10:17.000And so they lashed out in the most minimalist way they could, deliberately, apparently, avoiding casualties so that they couldn't give Trump an excuse to go after their navy or go after any of their important military sites.
00:10:29.000Now, the media last night played this as an act of sheer panic.
00:10:41.000If there's a war, the Iranian Navy is gone.
00:10:44.000If there is a war, the United States military is the best war-making force in the history of the world.
00:10:48.000The United States doesn't want war because we don't want to occupy anybody, because we are not interested in a protracted conflict.
00:10:53.000No one, no one, from Tucker Carlson to Donald Trump to me, nobody wants war with Iran.
00:10:58.000No one is interested in a full-scale military conflict with Iran.
00:11:01.000But that means there's not going to be a full-scale military conflict with Iran.
00:11:04.000And this entire situation does give the lie to the notion pushed by the media and pushed by the Obama administration that the only two alternatives were appeasing the Iranians or going to full-scale war with them.
00:11:42.000He says, if America has committed a crime, it should know that it will receive a decisive response.
00:11:46.000If they are wise, they won't take any other action at this juncture.
00:11:48.000So basically they're trying to claim now that they have somehow, that they are the barking dog and they have scared away the United States.
00:12:12.000We also don't know what it means that the Ukrainian Airlines Boeing 737 caught fire and crashed near Tehran, killing all 177 passengers and crew, including 63 Canadians and 3 Britons.
00:12:22.000It is unclear whether, in fact, that plane was shot down, and the black box is not being Is not being released at this point.
00:12:28.000President Trump, for his part, credits the early warning system that had been established for preventing casualties.
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00:14:04.000A hangar at Al-Asad, a sprawling complex 100 miles west of Baghdad that houses about 1,500 coalition forces, was severely damaged, according to a U.S.
00:14:11.000official speaking to USA Today on the condition of anonymity.
00:14:14.000The official added the early warning systems gave U.S.
00:14:16.000forces advanced knowledge that the missiles had been launched.
00:14:20.000We're hearing about the early warning system to cover up for the fact that Iran actually created a back channel to the Iraqi government saying that they were not going to kill Americans.
00:14:29.000So get your guys out right now because the last thing we want is a full-scale war with you guys.
00:14:34.000You get to claim that we were a failure.
00:14:35.000We all go home happy and then maybe we work toward negotiating a new agreement.
00:14:39.000The fact is that what Iran just did forces the Europeans into a bad situation.
00:14:43.000The Europeans would love nothing better than to go back to the failed JCPOA, the Iran nuclear deal negotiated by the Obama administration, that was basically an act of appeasement.
00:14:51.000By the way, that sucker was 10 years long.
00:14:53.000That was set to expire, like, very, very soon.
00:14:59.000And that thing was already going to be defunct and Iran was going to start its nuclear testing, its nuclear missiles program, its nuclear weapons program, right back up in the next couple of years, no matter what.
00:15:08.000So Trump Saying that we need to cut a new deal with Iran and that has to be done on the basis of no more terrorism, no more ballistic missile testing, no more nuclear technology.
00:15:26.000In reality, what it was doing was bribing them with the possibility of greater regional power and economic strength so that one day they could move forward with an actual nuclear weapons program.
00:15:36.000That is why the Democratic takes on all of this are so silly.
00:15:41.000So, in the middle of all of this, the Iranians basically backed down.
00:15:46.000Iran issued all of these sort of empty warnings.
00:15:47.000One of their Iranian leaders tweeted a picture of the Iranian flag.
00:15:50.000supposedly sort of the response to Trump tweeting a picture of the American flag as he treated the Iranian flag because, wow, look at us.
00:16:05.000And then Iran issued further warning saying they're going to attack Dubai, that they were going to attack Haifa in Israel, Tel Aviv, which, of course, is just silly talk.
00:16:13.000And then Javad Zarif, basically the foreign minister who was talking tough just a few moments ago, all of a sudden he is backing down on Twitter.
00:16:20.000He said, Iran took and concluded proportionate measures in self-defense under Article 51 of the UN Charter targeting base from which cowardly armed attack against our citizens and senior officials were launched.
00:16:56.000We have the most powerful and well-equipped military anywhere in the world by far.
00:17:00.000I will be making a statement tomorrow morning.
00:17:03.000Then, this morning, President Trump actually made his statement.
00:17:05.000That's why we delayed the onset of the show this morning.
00:17:08.000He opened by walking out, flanked by his national security team, the Joint Chiefs of Staff, as well as his Secretary of Defense and Vice President.
00:17:15.000And he said, right off the bat, Iran will never have a nuclear weapon.
00:17:20.000The only difference between Trump and Obama is that Trump actually means it.
00:17:24.000See, the thing is that if you say, never, what that means is beyond your term.
00:17:27.000Obama was fine with Iran gaining a nuclear weapon.
00:17:29.000He just wanted them to do it a few years down the line when he thought he couldn't be blamed for it, and he sort of wanted to appease them until that time.
00:17:36.000Trump actually means this thing, and he showed it by killing Soleimani.
00:19:18.000Okay, I'm just making the point that the overblown talk by the media, even in the worst case scenario, was indeed overblown talk by the media, even in the worst case scenario.
00:19:26.000But nobody even wanted the regional war, right?
00:19:29.000It was so funny watching people in the media, ranging from the sort of isolationist right to the radical left, and the mainstream left, suggesting that there were people inside the administration who were desperate for war.
00:19:38.000I saw people tweeting last night that John Bolton wanted war.
00:19:41.000John Bolton, when he was the NSA, wanted something like this.
00:19:43.000What he wanted was, we kill off your worst people, and then you end up, in cowardly fashion, you end up Sending us messages to get our people out so that you don't kill our people because you don't want us to break you.
00:19:58.000President Trump says there will be consequences for the actions of Iran last night, but they're going to come in the economic and diplomatic sphere, which of course is exactly the right move.
00:20:05.000The fact is, now, what are the Europeans going to do?
00:20:08.000And in fact, it's obvious that that's not what is going to happen.
00:20:12.000The fact is that the UK has already come out against Iran.
00:20:15.000Boris Johnson saying the United States has a right to defend its soldiers, saying that he is going to work with President Trump.
00:20:21.000You're going to see the other Western countries come around on this.
00:20:24.000Boris Johnson said today that the United States has the right to protect its troops and told Iran to de-escalate.
00:20:30.000So, this is moving in President Trump's direction.
00:20:32.000It turns out that deterrence has always been and will continue to be good policy.
00:20:35.000President Trump announced this morning that there would, in fact, be new sanctions on Iran.
00:20:40.000And as you'll see, he then urged the Europeans to get on board.
00:20:45.000As we continue to evaluate options in response to Iranian aggression, the United States will immediately impose additional punishing economic sanctions on the Iranian regime.
00:20:58.000These powerful sanctions will remain until Iran changes its behavior.
00:21:06.000Okay, and then President Trump came out and he suggested that other countries need to pull out of the failed JCPOA, the Iran nuclear deal, and it's time to actually negotiate a deal that contains Iran and deters Iran.
00:21:15.000Again, the biggest problem with the Iranian nuclear deal...
00:21:18.000It was not with regard to the nuclear program.
00:21:20.000Yes, it was a problem that the verification procedures, which were heavier than other verification procedures, still were not completely bulletproof.
00:21:27.000The bigger problem was that it basically just said to Iran, OK, you develop as much as you could possibly want to develop your conventional military, your terrorist branches, your economy, and then in 10 years you can develop a nuke.
00:21:38.000That was basically what the JCPOA said.
00:21:40.000And then you had the Obama team declaring victory.
00:21:43.000Which, again, is sort of like a person walks into the doctor's office and says, I have cancer, and also I have a cold.
00:21:49.000And the doctor says, OK, well, here's what we're going to do.
00:22:05.000The fact is that Iran's terrorist threats on the world stage and its growth as a regional power are a significantly greater danger than its mere nuclear program alone.
00:22:13.000It's when the nuclear program is attached to a broader terror threat that it becomes a real threat to the world.
00:22:19.000The Obama administration facilitated the terror threat while, quote unquote, delaying the nuclear program for a certain preset period of time.
00:22:26.000President Trump says, listen, this deal was bad.
00:22:29.000In fact, President Trump suggested in this speech correctly that the ballistic missiles that were fired at this Iraqi airbase could have been paid for by Obama cash.
00:22:37.000Because again, it was the Obama administration stated position that the Iraq that the Iranians could use money from the opened economy and from the United States to build its terror capacity.
00:22:48.000John Kerry used openly admitted this in March 2016.
00:22:50.000He said, of course, they're going to use it for terrorism.
00:22:52.000Sure, they might use it for ballistic missiles.
00:22:54.000Okay, those ballistic missiles were falling on Iraqi and American troops last night, or would have been if the Iranians didn't warn the Iraqis ahead of time.
00:23:00.000Here's President Trump saying other countries need to pull out of this crap deal.
00:23:05.000The time has come for the United Kingdom, Germany, France, Russia, and China to recognize this reality.
00:23:15.000They must now break away from the remnants of the Iran deal, or JCPOA.
00:23:22.000And we must all work together toward making a deal with Iran that makes the world a safer and more peaceful place.
00:23:35.000And in a second, we're going to get to President Trump's conclusion of the speech and some of the other stuff that he said during the speech, which is pretty important.
00:23:41.000Then we'll get to the media response, which again was wildly overblown throughout this.
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00:25:19.000Now the way that you know that this whole thing has de-escalated is that the oil prices actually dropped this morning.
00:25:24.000They had spiked last night in the aftermath of the attack, but More importantly, it was pretty obvious that this was not going to escalate to a giant war.
00:25:31.000Now, does that mean that Iran isn't going to continue acting out?
00:25:33.000American forces in Iraq failed to destroy major energy infrastructure that could have disrupted global crude supply.
00:25:38.000More importantly, it was pretty obvious that this was not going to escalate to a giant war.
00:25:43.000Now, does that mean that Iran isn't going to continue acting out?
00:25:46.000No, of course they're going to continue acting out in low level terrorist ways.
00:25:49.000They will plan attacks in the West that they think cannot be traced back to them.
00:25:53.000They have a longer time horizon than any president.
00:25:56.000Every president basically has a four-year time horizon.
00:25:58.000Iran has a decades-long time horizon, so they can wait a couple of years to quote-unquote retaliate and then claim that the retaliation is in response to Soleimani.
00:26:05.000So this does not end the Iranian threat by any stretch of the imagination, but we have certainly deterred them from taking overt actions like burning U.S.
00:26:13.000and trying to kill American soldiers, at least under President Trump.
00:26:16.000Now, President Trump, at the end of his speech this morning, he suggested, listen, now what we would like to do is come back to the table and renegotiate an improved JCPOA, that includes ballistic missile testing, that includes terror funding.
00:27:07.000Again, the greatest indicator that this deterrent act worked is that the Iranians were notifying the Iraqis that the missiles were coming and that the United States and the Iraqis were able to get out of the way, let Iran save face.
00:27:16.000The Iranians, again, after all of that dog and pony show, after the entire millions in the street outrage, people beating at their breasts, gnashing, wailing of teeth, sackcloth and ashes, the Ayatollah standing over the coffin of Soleimani and weeping his eyes out, the Ayatollah in the command center directing the attacks.
00:27:51.000In this speech, he did not overstate how ineffective the Iranian missile attacks were.
00:27:56.000He didn't try and shove the Iranians face in it, which would again put the Iranians in the position of having to try to do something else in order to save face with their own population.
00:28:03.000He did give them a way out by citing the early warning system.
00:28:06.000He said Iran does appear to be standing down.
00:28:08.000He also said people have been tolerating their behavior for decades.
00:28:42.000Trump said that the failure of the Obama deal Was resulted in additional Iranian aggression and around the Middle East, not just with regard to the United States, which of course is true.
00:28:53.000He called on other countries to join the United States.
00:28:55.000He said he would ask NATO to become more involved in the process, which is perfectly appropriate.
00:29:00.000And he mentioned the fact that the United States is in very strong position to take really crucial sanctions against the Iranians and listen, we are energy independent.
00:29:26.000Because the media, their narrative here was not that deterrence was being reestablished.
00:29:30.000Their narrative is that a madman was leading us to the brink of war with these pitiful Iranians who had of course been converted into the Swiss by the JCPOA.
00:29:39.000That the Iranian nuclear deal had magically turned the Ayatollah Khamenei into a Western European leader.
00:29:45.000Suddenly he was Emmanuel Macron and basically Soleimani was Justin Trudeau, just a little bit more angry with a beard.
00:29:52.000And that was all because of the JCPOA.
00:29:54.000Basically, the Iran nuclear deal had defanged the Iranians.
00:29:57.000And this is why you get Ben Rhodes, who's the architect of the Iran nuclear deal, who lied openly to the American people about the moderation inherent in the Iranian government, that they were about to moderate if only we sent them cash.
00:30:08.000And last night he was tweeting out things like, this didn't need to happen.
00:30:12.000You're right, it didn't need to happen.
00:30:13.000You could have stood up to the Iranians the way Trump did, but instead you decided to pansy out, which is exactly what the Obama administration did.
00:30:19.000The media have an interest in upholding that narrative.
00:30:21.000That is the common thread to the media coverage here.
00:30:23.000The media narrative is that everything was hunky-dory until Trump pulled out of the Iran nuclear deal, at which point Iran randomly started acting nasty again because they hate Trump, and if it weren't for that bad orange man, orange man, bad, bad orange man, then everything would have been hunky-dory in the Middle East.
00:30:36.000That ignores the thousands of dead Americans due to Iranian involvement in Iraq, It ignores the hundreds of thousands of dead Muslims in Syria, backed by Soleimani's play in Syria.
00:30:46.000It ignores the buildup of Hezbollah's military force in the wrecking of Lebanon, which was an Iranian development.
00:30:52.000It ignores the fact that Iraq has continued to be a roiling sectarian hellhole because of the Iranian involvement in Iraq.
00:30:58.000It ignores the attacks on Saudi oil facilities.
00:31:00.000It ignores the consistent monthly attacks, rocket attacks on American bases.
00:31:05.000It ignores the attacks on shipping against non-American targets in the Strait of Hormuz.
00:31:10.000Yeah, the fact is that the Iranians have been pursuing terrorism for literally decades.
00:31:14.000That escalated in the immediate aftermath of the JCPOA.
00:31:17.000Right before Obama left office, the Iranians took a bunch of Americans hostage, right?
00:31:21.000They took a bunch of American military men hostage, and then Trump and then Obama had to basically wheedle it out of them.
00:31:27.000But the narrative again from the media side is that this is all Trumpian craziness.
00:31:31.000So the problem is this didn't result as they wanted it to result.
00:31:34.000If the media had its way, we would be at war right now.
00:31:36.000If the media had its way, Iran would have retaliated much more harshly.
00:31:40.000They would have killed American soldiers.
00:31:41.000I'm not saying the American media are rooting for the death of American soldiers.
00:31:44.000They are rooting for an outcome bad for Trump so that they can prop up their narrative.
00:31:48.000And if that outcome that is bad for Trump involves more American assets being put in danger, they're happy.
00:31:53.000You could see the celebration in media last night.
00:31:56.000The thinly veiled celebration in media last night when Iran started firing the missiles when it turned out it was a big nothing.
00:32:01.000You can see the disappointment this morning.
00:32:03.000Lawrence O'Donnell is a perfect example of this.
00:32:04.000Over at MSNBC, Lawrence O'Donnell actually tweeted, Trump wagged the dog.
00:32:11.000Celebrating the idea that Trump had wagged the dog in order to avoid impeachment coverage, but now he had lost control of the situation.
00:32:18.000And the media need this narrative, because again, the narrative is that the Iranians were perfectly reasonable, that Obama had made them perfectly reasonable, and that Trump just drove them mad because Trump is a madman.
00:32:29.000Jim Acosta over at CNN doing the same routine.
00:32:31.000Jim Acosta, who doesn't know his ass from his elbow, suggesting last night, this is what the experts feared.
00:32:36.000This is exactly what the experts feared!
00:32:41.000By the way, ladies, find you somebody who loves you like Jim Acosta loves him some Jim Acosta.
00:32:47.000The President's attention has been gotten by the Iranians, no question about it.
00:32:51.000And getting back to what I was saying earlier, Wolf, this is exactly what many foreign policy and national security analysts feared here in Washington.
00:32:59.000A lot of Democrats have been talking about over the last 72 hours that the President, by targeting Soleimani, has essentially set this chain of events into motion.
00:33:12.000And the question is whether the President will be able to get on top of it and handle it.
00:33:16.000Well, you know, Jim Acosta looking real sad about that.
00:33:21.000Chris Hayes over at MSNBC doing the same thing.
00:33:23.000It's strategically and morally a disaster to go to war with Iran.
00:33:26.000No one's going to war with Iran, but you're going to have to explain how it's a moral disaster to kill the leading terrorist in the Middle East responsible for literally tens of thousands of deaths, most of them Muslim.
00:33:35.000Before we go, I just want to say this very clearly, that a war with Iran is madness, and it is strategically and morally a disaster in the making, and don't believe anyone who tells you otherwise.
00:33:45.000Again, they're setting up that false narrative again and again, that deterrence is full-scale war, and that appeasement is the only solution, because that was the Obama solution, was impeachment.
00:33:54.000We'll get to more of the media coverage which was egregious, and which, if the media had their way, would have driven Iran to new rounds of actual violence against Americans.
00:34:02.000Because the Iranians are watching the media coverage too.
00:34:05.000And we'll get to more of this in just one second.
00:34:07.000But first, if you're not already a subscriber, you're really missing out, head on over to dailywire.com slash subscribe.
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00:34:42.000So it's all about the narrative, all about the narrative.
00:34:49.000And the narrative absolutely collapsed in on the Democrats last night when the Iranian response was not only ineffectual, but apparently telegraphed to America and her allies to avoid Iran having to up the ante.
00:35:02.000But if you listen to the way Democrats have been talking about all of this again, it is to preserve the Obama-era narrative, defend the precious, Defend the precious at all costs.
00:35:15.000Anyone who watched foreign policy knew that it was garbage from day one.
00:35:18.000This was Neville Chamberlain-esque appeasement of the worst regime on planet Earth.
00:35:22.000And the fact is that the media are fully invested, and so are the Democrats, in defending that garbage strategy.
00:35:27.000And the only way to do that is by declaring that Donald Trump is a madman in trying to re-establish deterrence.
00:35:32.000And that's why you see Nancy Pelosi yesterday Lamenting needless American provocation.
00:35:37.000She tweeted yesterday closely monitoring the situation following bombings targeting US troops in Iraq.
00:35:41.000By the way, her close monitoring involves her going to some sort of fundraising event, I believe.
00:35:46.000She said, we must ensure the safety of our service members, including ending needless provocations from the administration and demanding that Iran cease its violence.
00:35:53.000America and the world cannot afford war.
00:35:55.000What would be those needless provocations?
00:35:57.000Killing the world's leading terrorist Soleimani, a man responsible again for thousands and thousands and thousands of dead Americans.
00:36:03.000And Iraqis, and Syrians, and Lebanese, and Yemenis, and Iranians, by the way?
00:36:10.000Would those be the needless provocations?
00:36:11.000Then there's John Kerry saying, it's a- It's a tragedy that Donald Trump rushed a confrontation.
00:36:17.000If he had been me, he just would have signed a giant check to the Ayatollahs so they could have used it to kill more people, and then declared that peace had been established.
00:36:26.000Here's John Kerry, who's beginning to resemble more and more something from Tales of the Crypt.
00:36:33.000Now we're seeing the repercussions of going back to where we were when we began the process of trying to eliminate a nuclear weapon.
00:36:41.000I think it's a tragedy for the world that instead of diplomacy, this administration has rushed to confrontation.
00:36:48.000And if this develops into a tit-for-tat increased effort, it will become a war That is needless, it didn't have to happen, and it will be a reckless war of choice by the President of the United States.
00:37:04.000Is the President of the United States responsible for Iran being a terrorist entity for the last 40 years?
00:37:09.000Also, here are my medals from Vietnam because I'm a terrible person.
00:37:14.000That man was the 2004 Democratic nominee.
00:37:16.000Speaking, by the way, of the 2004 Democratic National Convention, Michael Moore was tweeting out this morning pictures from Soleimani's funeral with the tens of thousands of people in the street saying, is there any general in America who would get this kind of adoration?
00:37:29.000That guy, Michael Moore, that schmuck who's begging in Farsi, In badly translated Farsi from Google Translate, the Iranians not to hit America just yesterday?
00:37:38.000That schmuck was in a presidential box with Jimmy Carter at the 2004 Democratic National Convention.
00:37:42.000Talk about a party that's lost its way.
00:37:44.000By the way, the idea that Donald Trump rushed to confrontation for a year, he did basically nothing as Iran upped the ante.
00:37:49.000He did nothing when there were attacks in the Straits of Hormuz.
00:37:53.000He did nothing when Saudi oil facilities were targeted.
00:37:55.000He did nothing when an American drone was shot down.
00:38:45.000Joe Biden has been wrong on every major foreign policy issue of his entire career.
00:38:49.000By the way, speaking of Joe Biden, the man can't even keep Iran and Iraq straight.
00:38:52.000He gave a little speech yesterday in which he was ripping on Trump's Iranian foreign policy, and then he just mixed up Iran and Iraq because the dude is barely functional at this point.
00:39:12.000Not only that, the Iraqi parliament did not vote to eject all American forces from the country.
00:39:15.000They issued a non-binding resolution in which literally half the parliament abstained and walked out because it turns out that Shia-dominated sections of Iraq are not fond of the United States.
00:39:26.000But the propaganda that is issued, I mean, I've never, whenever, when it comes to issues of foreign policy, the media just become the DNC.
00:40:18.000It is a giant gaslighting effort that has been pursued from the very beginning by the Obama administration and now it is carried forward a few years and the media are just parroting this stuff as rote.
00:40:27.000Senator Tammy Duckworth of Wisconsin, I believe, she came out and she says that what's happening here is that Iran is winning because Iraq is asking us to leave.
00:40:37.000The Prime Minister of Iraq did not ask us to leave.
00:40:39.000The Prime Minister of Iraq is powerless anyway right now.
00:40:41.000He's the acting Prime Minister because he's been forced into a position of powerlessness by his own population, which feels that he has been kowtowing too much to Iran.
00:40:49.000Here's Tammy Duckworth just saying something that's absolutely untrue.
00:40:53.000The incompetence of this president as commander in chief has actually achieved the end goal that Iran wants in the region.
00:41:00.000You have to remember, Rachel, that we actually since October have had protests in Iraq against Iranian influence by Iraqi people.
00:41:07.000You know, within the space of just a couple of days with this poor decision made by this president, we have now turned that around so that now Iraqi, the Iraqi parliament has voted to kick us out of their country.
00:41:19.000And we have now turned the sentiment into one that is much more pro-Iranian in Iraq and elsewhere in the Middle East as well.
00:41:34.000That the Kurds are desperately mourning the loss of Soleimani?
00:41:38.000The Kurds who are not exactly friends with the Iranians?
00:41:40.000Like, this whole thing is just, it's ridiculous.
00:41:43.000And it's based on bad information, and the media understanding that most people don't understand anything like the complexities of Middle Eastern politics.
00:41:48.000Benjamin Haddad, who is the director of the Future Europe Initiative at the Atlantic Council, and no friend to President Trump, he's tweeted out this thread, and this is exactly right.
00:41:58.000At this time of their presidencies, Trump's two predecessors had started wars in the Middle East.
00:42:04.000The apocalyptic commentary of these last few days has completely ignored Trump's famous reluctance to use force, especially for broad value-based objectives.
00:42:10.000The Soleimani killing was about brutally but punctually re-establishing escalation dominance after Iran stepped up nefarious activities, drone destruction, strike on Saudi Arabia, attack against U.S.
00:42:19.000embassy, and broke an explicit red line with the killing of an American citizen.
00:42:22.000The Iranian response, and especially the Zarif tweet, seemed to show that Iran got the message.
00:42:26.000It had no choice but to respond, but calibrated it in a way that would not cross red lines and communicated that explicitly.
00:42:31.000He said, I'm seeing commentary saying that Trump is backing down.
00:43:17.000More importantly than a win for Trump, it's a win for the United States because, again, the lie was always that the rules of politics and international affairs and force in international affairs ceased to apply when Donald Trump became president and when Barack Obama became president.
00:43:30.000Obama so magically changed the world, magically changed the world, that he could simply sign a check to the Iranians and then they would become wonderful neighbors to everyone around them.
00:43:39.000It was absolute bullcrap from the very start.
00:43:42.000And then Trump comes in, he kills Soleimani, he ends the nuclear deal.
00:43:46.000And then the logic is, well, the world began spinning when Barack Obama was president.
00:43:49.000He had magically changed- so Trump magically changed them back.
00:43:57.000Not one iota, for 40 years, they've been incredibly consistent.
00:44:01.000That tends to happen in dictatorships.
00:44:03.000The fact that the media want you to believe that we were on the verge of World War III here, is demonstrative of the fact that either the media don't know what they're talking about or they're malicious, and I happen to think that it is probably the latter.
00:44:12.000Okay, meanwhile, impeachment is moving forward.
00:44:15.000Nancy Pelosi is now in a debate with Nancy Pelosi about whether Nancy Pelosi ought to release the impeachment charges to the Senate.
00:44:21.000She's being urged by members of the Senate to do so because Mitch McConnell says, I'm gonna continue forward with this impeachment trial without naming witnesses, which of course is exactly what happened under the Clinton administration.
00:44:32.000During the Clinton administration, during the impeachment hearings about Bill Clinton, The Clinton Senate moved forward with the procedure.
00:44:38.000They said, we will name the witnesses later.
00:44:40.000They ended up calling like three witnesses.
00:45:16.000They didn't because Bolton probably was not going to give them what they wanted.
00:45:19.000My favorite element of the whole impeachment debacle is the theatrics surrounding it.
00:45:24.000Yesterday, a bunch of impeachment protesters were walking slowly around the Senate building, wearing shirts that suggested that Trump should be removed.
00:45:35.000That obviously is going to change things radically.
00:45:37.000A bunch of unemployed morons in the middle of the day in Washington, D.C.
00:45:39.000walking slowly around the Senate building.
00:45:42.000First of all, if I want unemployment, unemployable morons walking around the Senate building, we always have senators.
00:45:48.000I actually don't need these people walking around the Senate building in order to push for impeachment.
00:45:54.000I do love the one little girl who's been dragged there by her parents, but at least she doesn't have to go to school today.
00:45:58.000Now that they're walking around the building slowly, under Article 39 of the Constitution, I believe that Trump has automatically been impeached.
00:46:05.000Nancy Pelosi, is going to have to decide today whether or not she wants to release those charges to the Senate.
00:46:12.000McConnell's going to move forward either way.
00:46:17.000Where it moves from here, it's probably a pretty quick disposal.
00:46:20.000Unless John Bolton says something earth-shattering, which is very doubtful at this point, this whole thing is going to basically amount to nothing, and we'll all move on with our lives.
00:46:31.000Okay, so we don't actually have time for things I like today, so instead we'll do a very, very brief thing that I hate.
00:46:38.000Elizabeth Warren appeared on The View.
00:46:40.000And Elizabeth Warren's appearance on The View was garbage as per her usual arrangement.
00:46:43.000First, Meghan McCain had to cudgel her into acknowledging that Soleimani was a terrorist.
00:46:47.000And then Elizabeth Warren started just spewing nonsense about Merrick Garland.
00:46:52.000So here is Elizabeth Warren explaining that Merrick, that Mitch McConnell's handling of Merrick Garland was unconstitutional, which is amazing coming from a lady proposing a wealth tax that is blatantly unconstitutional.
00:47:01.000When President Obama nominated Merrick Garland to be a Supreme Court justice, he, He had a year as a sitting president.
00:47:10.000And when Mitch McConnell just said, sorry, he's not getting a hearing.
00:47:16.000We're not even going to meet with him.
00:47:18.000The Constitution says the president will nominate and the Senate will then offer its advice and consent.
00:47:26.000And you really want it in a confirmation.
00:47:28.000We never wrote it with the assumption that, oh, you've got to say within 30 days and then someone's got to come in.