The Hugh Hewitt Show

Senator Ted Cruz opened the show today:

Audio:

01-12hhs-cruz

Transcript:

HH: On the night of the State of the Union, drama developing today as two Navy boats have ten American sailors in the custody of, you got it, the Iranians. I’m joined by United States Senator Ted Cruz, candidate for the presidency. Senator Cruz, welcome, Happy New Year to you, great to have you. What do you think the President should say about these Iranians and these sailors tonight?

TC: Well, Hugh, great to be with you, and Happy New Year to you as well. This is obviously late-breaking, and we’ll still seeing the developing fact. Certainly, our prayers right now are with the sailors and the families of the sailors. And I think what the President should say is that the sailors are coming home, and they’re coming home right now. Now I don’t know that he will say that. And the fact that Iran feels emboldened enough to capture two U.S. Navy ships and to take ten sailors into custody is really a demonstration of the unbelievable weakness of the Obama-Clinton foreign policy. We have a commander-in-chief where the bad actors in the world have learned that he will not stand up to them. Remember, this is the same Barack Obama who has sent Iran, or is trying to send them $150 billion dollars. And when you follow the path of appeasement, it only emboldens the bad actors. And our prayers are that these sailors are released, and they’re released quickly. Continue Reading

Very recently tweeted:

BREAKING: Pentagon says 2 Navy boats in Iranian custody but Iran tells US that crew will be returned ‘promptly’ – AP

— CNBC Now (@CNBCnow) January 12, 2016

I’m getting that Jimmy Carter/Iranian Embassy vibe all over again.  This is an act of war on the day of the SOTU address.  What’s the over/under that it will not come up this evening?  This is the Iranians demonstrating in no uncertain terms just how weak Obama is.

To say we live in perilous times would be an understatement.

The great liberal trope about religion is that while we are free to practice our religion, there has to be limits because anyone who believes anything so fundamentally must end up in armed conflict of some sort.  In other words they think religion is a good thing when it is personal belief, but it is another thing altogether when it hits public policy – then it can only be divisive.  There is another great liberal trope, “All you need is love.”  The problem with the first trope is that they think religions are all pretty much the same, which they most assuredly are not.  The problem with the second trope is that they fail to define love in any serious way – it is just a warm, fuzzy feeling.  Because of this over-generalization and poor definition these two tropes are now in deep conflict with each other and the western world stands on the brink of disaster.

The sexual assault situation in Germany is Exhibit A.  Bret Stephens has a great piece on that issue this morning.  Letting the refugees in was an act of “love” as the left ill-defines it.  Indeed love demands that the refugees be helped, but it does not demand that you do so at the cost of social order.  Surely there is a way to offer them aid without allowing women to suffer what happened in Cologne and elsewhere.  But then, if you think all religion is more or less the same you have no expectation of something like that happening.

Trying to make all religions fit into the same box results in the contorted language we see after any Islam-motivated violent act.  Consider Dorothy Rabinowitz on Philadelphia this morning as Exhibit B.  Surely we can recognize that there is a religious/ideological component to this violence, even if the specific ideological issue is not universal to the religion.  But to do that would make one religion better than another and that would violate the ground on which the personal boundaries for religion trope is built

These tropes formed in the American culture over matters of politics and personal, primarily sexual, morality without people realizing that in the broader world they could get our women assaulted and our men just dead. Continue Reading

The audio:

01-11hhs-cotton

The transcript:

HH: Joined by United States Senator Tom Cotton, who will be, I assume, in the audience tomorrow night for the State of the Union. Are you going to the State of the Union tomorrow night, Senator?

TC: I will be there tomorrow night, Hugh.

HH: And are you taking your wonderful wife? Or is she staying home with the baby?

TC: She’s going to be home with little Gabriel.

HH: Okay, so I was going to say, you could put Gabriel to sleep, though. I’m pretty certain that if you took Gabriel to the State of the Union tomorrow, he would sleep.

TC: I’m pretty sure he would sleep. Or he might cry.

HH: (laughing) What do you expect to hear out of the lame duck president’s last State of the Union?

TC: I don’t know what to expect, Hugh. Based on some media reports, it sounds as if the President’s going to try to put a positive gloss on his last seven years. I think that’s going to be hard to do. If you look around the world, the United States’ position has been collapsing everywhere. Allies no longer trust us, our adversaries no longer fear us. If you look at countries like Syria and Iraq and Iran, you see the smoking ruins of Barack Obama’s foreign policy. And if you look here at the United States, pretty much everything that Republicans predicted about Obamacare has come to pass. People have lost their health insurance, premiums have gone up, deductibles and co-pays have gone up. Hardly any part of it has worked as the President predicted, but as Republicans had promised. So it’s going to be tough for him to put a positive gloss on his record tomorrow night, but I expect he probably will try. Continue Reading