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On this episode of The Big Show® we take you back to last night’s 74th Annual Alfred E. Smith Memorial Foundation Dinner where Rob offers a first hand report. The guest of honor was former Defense Secretary (and Marine Corps legend) James Mattis and, of course, the main topic in the hall was the current situation in Syria with Turkey and the Kurds. (The General’s full remarks can be watched on the Fox News Facebook page.)
Then it’s off to the City by the Bay with Heather Mac Donald, where she recounts buying fentanyl on the streets and how a great American city has fallen hostage to its homeless population.
To wrap things we cover the current state of the 2020 race for the White House, including Elizabeth Warren’s “zinger” on gay marriage.
Music from this week’s show: I Left My Heart in San Francisco by (Who else?) Tony Bennett.
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Two points, not related:
1. I thought I heard Peter Robinson pronounce Erdoğan with a [g]. That’s “spelling pronunciation.” ğ is a bit like the gh in English neighbor, i.e. it represents a sound that has disappeared in the modern language. Erdoğan is [erdo(w)an], with w as a transitional semi-vowel after the second syllable.
2. I found Elizabeth Warren’s “joke” not at all amusing; indeed, I thought it vicious–and cynical. Like Peter Robinson, I am a traditional Catholic (oh, why must we say “traditional”?) , but having come of age in the 1960s, I experienced the West’s “cultural revolution” and saw it all, including friends who drew surprise, dismay, then sympathy when they came out of the closet. Several died of AIDS, including one who told me, in a gentle tone: “We don’t really seek or demand approval; we just want to be left alone.” He was surely well-meaning but naive…The mood is now not even that of the (once) ironic comment of old: Tolerate me or I’ll kill you.
I have long been convinced that the left deliberately promotes Alice-in-Wonderland causes simply as a means of intimidating ordinary people. “Your idea of marriage is meaningless, and if you feel at all discomfited as you maneuver your way past a drug addict sprawled on the streets of San Francisco, you are a fascist.” It’s O’Brien in 1984 asking Winston, whom he is torturing, how many fingers he is holding up.
I think I heard something about Warren’s having none of Hillary Clinton’s “baggage.” Well, let’s see now. She’s a house-flipping, pseudo-Cherokee, Pow-Wow-Chow plagiarizing, multi-millionaire socialist, who’s told lie after demagogic lie…But perhaps none of that is baggage; it may indeed all be an asset…Winston pathetically asks O’Brien whether Big Brother really exists…Elizabeth Warren is Big Sister, who is both a reality and a total illusion.
I have always wondered about this. Until about 1995 it was “leave us alone and we don’t need any “het” institutions like marriage”. Then it completely changed.
I want to know what usually happens to people that lie about EEOC stuff.
Similarly, she’s lied like crazy on all of her bar memberships, including practicing without a law license in Massachusetts.
Heather Mac Donald is just… magnificent.
I’ve never heard of anyone actually getting a penalty or punishment for that. I wouldn’t be surprised if any claims of improper benefits would somehow be viewed as/twisted into some kind of attack on the programs themselves, which Cannot Be Allowed.
Perhaps somehow similar to what Heather Mac Donald (and I both) commented on regarding “death” (actually murder) rates of blacks and Hispanics.
This is just a fact: both Warren and Harvard got one hell of a lot of value or money from it. Both monetary and Harvard got to check off boxes with the government. Warren got into the freaking Ruling Class for utterly no good reason. It’s outrageous.
They ought to get Howie Carr on about this. He knows all this stuff chapter and verse.
Plus how much can anyone lie to the bar so much?
You are an idiot if you try to live and honest upstanding life. Michael Walsh has been on this show. What is he wrong about? Angelo Codevilla. David Horowitz. I follow the financial system, it’s breaking down there too. Everything is just a gigantic scam. Act accordingly. Don’t listen to people that don’t get it.
Trump is on a Mission From God.
Discuss:
I am almost through with Richard Epstein’s podcast where he takes down Elizabeth Warren. Just devastating.
It’s also really good at taking down single-payer. God help us if we go down that path.
“We are going to guarantee housing as a human right.”
As it’s been said many times, anything that causes you to force someone else to do something isn’t a right. I can speak, worship, defend myself, etc. without causing others to do anything. A “right” to housing, three meals a day, healthcare, etc. isn’t.
When the government goes beyond actual “public goods” it is very hard to stop bad things from happening. One example is education. Any normal economist will tell you that education isn’t a real public good. Look at what has happened to it. It has all kinds of mafia and communist characteristics now. It’s a racket and it’s a system for propaganda. Minnesota is just unbelievable.
I can’t listen to this, but here is another one:
I am just curious if @roblong and @peterrobinson what they think of George W Bushs invasion of Iraq, which is really the cause of so many problems. Is it a failure? Are they carrying water and defending that President the way Trump people now defend Trump over Syria?
Cause even now I know lots of people who cant admit that the invasion was a mistake.
My old barber was from Kirkuk, Iraq and he had this to say about the invasion. “They killed Saddam 15 years ago, and the power is still not on in my home town.”
Thousands of Americans dead, tens of thousands of wounded, countless dead Iraquis. Iran having its strongest rival brought low, the rise of ISIL, massacres of the Yazidis. The true source of all the recent bipartisan acrimony from a time of once great national unity. The Syrian civil war and the rise of Erdogan, and the refugee crisis that swamped Europe and led to Brexit.
Was it worth it, to invade a country based on intelligence that the CIA never even interviewed the source Curveball.
I suppose I am getting a bit off my point, but we demand a level of handwringing from Trump supporters that we never allowed to be done against W during and even after his Presidency was over.
One million “likes” for Tory’s post. Perfect.
They should have just built a freeway from Tehran to southern Lebanon.
You seem to be missing a crucial fact. When Trump is impeached and removed, the succession goes to President Pence, not to “Elizabeth Warren or Joe Biden or” some other Democrat.
If the Democrats had been willing to remove Clinton, the result would have been President Gore, who would then have entered the election as the incumbent President with all the advantages thereof. Instead of losing a squeaker, Gore could have won. The Democrats hurt themselves by their resistance.
Trump (one of the two most heavily disliked candidates ever) squeaked out a win because he was running against Hillary (the other of that most disliked pair). That was when one could only speculate about what Trump would do with that power. Now we know, and the Democrats will be certain to make sure every swing voter knows about how loose-cannon Trump disregarded available knowledge and wisdom, preferring instead, on an impulse, to suddenly accommodate an Islamist’s desire for ethnic cleansing.
In any baseball game, when the lead pitcher starts giving the other side home runs, the smart team knows it’s time to retire that pitcher and put in a relief pitcher. Why would you think that doing so is “Unilateral Disarmament” instead of recognizing that a player who is now causing great harm needs to be replaced?
Trump chose to enable ethnic cleansing.
Very thoughtful, well stated, good points, but with just one relevant inaccuracy.
Israel isn’t the only liberal democracy in the region.
“Since 2014, an island of religious freedom has risen in the Middle East. I mean Northeast Syria. Its Autonomous Administration grew up in the wake of Assad’s forces fleeing in 2013.
“Kurds, Arabs, Syrian Christians, Yazidis and other minorities all worked together for once. They built from the ground up a free and fair government. It embraces multi-ethnic governance, freedom of religion and equality and freedom for women.” (here)
Instead of supporting liberty, Trump opened the door to Islamic ethnic cleansing.
A positive resolution never depended on America imposing our own solution. Instead, our presence could have been used to promote negotiations between the Democratic Autonomous Administration and the Syrian government. By withdrawing, Trump forced the DAA to seek Syrian support from a position of desperation on any terms possible. If liberty is extinguished, that disaster is Trump’s travesty.
I did say IF Trump is removed, and President Warren or Biden is elected next year… you changed If to When, and seemingly ignored the rest. Maybe because you applied When to Warren or Biden being elected too, but I didn’t. However I don’t think Pence would necessarily win as “incumbent.” It would be easy to call him “tainted.”
It was not the invasion, it was the de-Baathization and attempt at nation-building.
Not sure what you mean here, Tory, but that doesn’t matter. We had a war. We had a conditional ceasefire with Saddam. He did not meet the conditions. Ceasefire cancelled. Same war, different day.
Everyone makes a big deal of the WMD. In the conditional ceasefire agreement, Saddam was supposed to publicly* turn over or destroy the WMD and programs we knew he had. He didn’t do so. But that was only one small violation of the conditional ceasefire.
By the way, we also have only a ceasefire with North Korea, which they have violated several times. The war is still on, though, last I checked.
* This might not be the proper term, but certainly openly as far as we were concerned: opened to inspections, viewing, etc.
Saddam Hussein tried to simultaneously convince the U.S. that he didn’t have WMDs (to end the sanctions), and Iran that he did (to keep it from taking advantage of Iraq’s weakened state).
Didn’t work, though, did it.
Another reason to not expect a “populist revolt” in places like San Francisco is that many of those you might expect to participate, have already left the state, if they could.
Dictatorships suffer from the “hare-brained scheme” problem, because no one dares disagree with the boss. Stalin’s one-sided love affair with Hitler is an example: Uncle Joe refused to believe his own spies when they warned him the Fraternal Socialist Ally was about to attack.
In Saddam’s defense, Bush Senior’s leaving him in power at the end of the Kuwait War convinced him that, whatever Bush Junior might say publicly, the U.S. would never actually overthrow him.
Eventually we learned that there were thousands of old WMDs (chemical weapons) lying around Iraq. I am guessing this had more to do with bureaucratic ineptitude than malevolent intent.
Looks like gullible, naive, Rob has unfortunately fallen prey to what is worst about our Church these days, as exemplified by His Eminence the feckless Cardinal Dolan. Faithful Catholics know that despite whatever money he raises it’s not worth the cost that his mealy-mouthed version of the Faith has meant to the spiritual well-being of his flock. Fortunately he is not on the list to lead the USCCB because there is nothing worse than a politician masquerading as a prelate. The Church is sick and doesn’t need jolly old fools more interested in shaking hands with rabidly anti-life power elites than preaching the Gospel.
Only the old stuff was left behind because the new/good stuff was spirited away to Syria etc.
However it’s a good point about keeping the schools open etc. If that truly is at the expense of his soul – but how could God not forgive under the circumstances? – then we should be grateful for his sacrifice. Would it really be better to have a “holy prelate” who “preaches the gospel” but leave all the poor/minority children to the tender mercies of the inner-city public schools and teachers unions, etc?
The Long Poll: I predict that not only will Klobuchar-Buttigieg win decisively carrying the Upper Midwest, Georgia, Florida and Arizona, they will take the Senate as we lose Senate seats in Arizona, Colorado, North Carolina, Maine, and maybe even Montana.
The Trump era will be over, and we will win in 2024 with Nikki Haley running with a Republican Governor.
I can confidently predict that IF the Democrats win in 2020, either narrowly or decisively, it will NOT be with a Klobuchar-Buttigieg – or Buttigieg -Klobuchar – ticket.
(And if they don’t win, it still won’t have been a Klobuchar-Buttigieg – or Buttigieg -Klobuchar – ticket.)
You mind elaborating on that?
This is interesting when you click through
How can we possibly win in 2024 when int he history of the United States after the term limit amendment was passed the people of the United States have always (with just one exception) given the Presidency to the same party for two terms.
It’s pre-ordained – if the Dems win in 2020, they’ll hold the Presidency until 2028.
The only way we get “Klobuchar-Buttigieg” in 2020 is if they get married and hyphenate their names.