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Rep. Gaetz says Pelosi is refusing to deliver articles of impeachment 'like some demented, non-Santa Claus'

Media pundits, Democrats praise Nancy Pelosi's 'masterful' decision to delay a Senate trial by withholding the articles of impeachment; reaction from Florida Congressman Matt Gaetz, Republican member of the House Judiciary Committee.

This is a rush transcript from "Tucker Carlson Tonight," December 26, 2019. This copy may not be in its final form and may be updated.

MARK STEYN, GUEST HOST: Good evening and welcome to "Tucker Carlson Tonight." I'm Mark Steyn, in for Tucker. I hope you had a terrific Christmas, Happy Boxing Day or as I believe it's known in America, Thursday.

2019 was supposed to be the year of impeachment. The Democratic Party spent years promising it and it looked like they were finally going to deliver. They called witnesses. They held hearings. They summoned academics to deliver dull, pseudo-constitutional lectures to any American bored enough to watch the proceedings live.

And finally last week, they voted to impeach President Trump. And yet, the President still isn't actually impeached. A week after the vote, Nancy Pelosi still hasn't forwarded the Articles to the Senate for a trial as is constitutionally required.

Impeachment has been put on hold, maybe it was all a charade from the start. Or maybe Speaker Pelosi is too busy basking in the fawning, drooling, sycophantic praise of cable news talking heads.

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

KARINE JEAN-PIERRE, MSNBC POLITICAL ANALYST: She has been masterful, legislatively masterful in holding her caucus, controlling her caucus.

NICOLLE WALLACE, MSNBC HOST: She is his kryptonite. She knows how and when to get in his face and point her finger at him and humiliate him in front of generals and other men sitting at the table.

MATTHEW MILLER, FORMER D.O.J. CHIEF SPOKESMAN: For someone who has been vilified by the religious right for years, for his entire time in politics, she is taking the Bible verse, "Love thine enemies as thyself," to heart.

CHARLIE SYKES, MSNBC CONTRIBUTOR: But Nancy Pelosi brought them along, provided them cover and is really one of the most masterful parliamentarians of our time.

JEAN-PIERRE: She is someone that needs to be studied on how you do this right. She has managed to outmaneuver Donald Trump at every turn, and I'm going to quote Cardi B, "She has dog walked Donald Trump" at every turn.

(END VIDEO CLIP)

STEYN: Wow. The masterful dog walker, Nancy Pelosi. That groveling may have been stomach turning, but it's actually an improvement over what Lawrence O'Donnell said on MSNBC earlier this month.

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

LAWRENCE O'DONNELL, MSNBC HOST: Like so much that Nancy Pelosi does in her unscripted bursts of eloquence and moral indignation, this one was multidimensional. There she was standing up against hatred, as her Catholic religion has taught her to do since she was a little girl, and there she was, she seized the moment as dramatically as any fiction writer could have provided for any fictional politician in a movie seen.

You could feel -- you could feel the power.

(END VIDEO CLIP)

STEYN: Feel the power, if you say so. There's no doubt Nancy Pelosi finds all this praise highly enjoyable. Why throw it away by letting the Senate take over the impeachment process and conduct a trial that could make her look bad and silly.

She has a better idea. Already her party is talking about introducing and voting on even more Articles of Impeachment. The impeachment of the week with no Senate trial in sight.

Congressman Matt Gaetz represents Florida. He is also on the Judiciary Committee and he joins us tonight.

Congressman, actually, I think it was on Christmas Eve that instead of the NORAD Santa Tracker, NORAD ought to have an impeachment articles tracker to see how long it's taking to do the 73-feet from Nancy Pelosi's office to the Senate. I think it's somewhere over the jungles of New Guinea right now. Is she actually going to bring this thing home and deliver it to McConnell?

REP. MATT GAETZ (R-FL): Nancy Pelosi appears to be limping through the back nine of the delivery of the Articles of Impeachment, and I think for regular folks in this country, it's quite interesting to see an impeachment with first no crime and no victim.

But now, no transmission of the Articles themselves. Listening to that montage you had of the mainstream media, giving Nancy Pelosi a proverbial cat bath just reminds me that the rest of us ends up stuck with the hairball with this sort of bizarre circumstance where just weeks ago, it was Jerry Nadler and Eric Swalwell saying things like, nothing could be more urgent than this impeachment.

STEYN: Right.

GAETZ: Swalwell called it a crime spree in progress, and now Nancy Pelosi sort of holds the Articles of Impeachment like some demented, you know, non-Santa Claus not delivering the gifts to the children. It's very strange to observe.

STEYN: Well, it's weird, isn't it? The President had a good point in his tweet because according to Jerrold Nadler, Donald Trump is a threat to national security and needs to be removed from office. So I stick it in the bottom drawer and do nothing about it.

GAETZ: Well, it demonstrates that this was a political process from the beginning. We're about to turn over a New Year, a new decade, but we continue to see the same politics just by new means.

And what Democrats have done is they've really cheapened the impeachment process to any disagreement about the utilization of presidential power, or any disagreement at maybe a President's different type of approach to a particular problem set, all of a sudden becomes impeachable.

Now, when they say in their court filings that they're not done investigating Articles of Impeachment, I actually believe them because they have no agenda for the American people. So they are substituting this process, these investigations and impeachment for actual legislation that might improve the lives of the people that we're elected to serve.

STEYN: Well, doesn't that court filing really give the game away? Because it is one continuous investigation, just as Russia led into Ukraine and you know, maybe Trump was on the phone to some guy in Tajikistan and we can put that on hold for next week's impeachment.

I mean, basically they've been doing this actually since before he was inaugurated, and it's worked only in that it's super infused the Republican base for 2020.

GAETZ: I could tell you here in the State of Florida, our support for President Trump is only intensified when we see these efforts to delegitimize not only his presidency, but our political movement for a positive America, for a newfound sense of populism in our country.

And now, I think you can look back to the time directly after Robert Mueller's testimony where they wanted to impeach Justice Kavanaugh. They wanted to impeach Bill Barr. It's like they've got impeachment fever and there's no cure.

How about we turn over the calendar in 2020 and just agree to put the American people first and our country first, not just have the revolving carnival of impeachments with Nancy Pelosi as the ringleader.

STEYN: That makes too much sense, Congressman. You know how it is. One impeachment is never enough. It's like a box of chocolates. You've got to have a second or third. Thank you very much for joining us tonight.

According to a new POLITICO report, top Democrat insiders are beginning to believe that Bernie Sanders may be their best hope of defeating President Trump next year. But how can that be?

For years, the party's talking heads have been saying that Bernie and those like him are unacceptable because they're white men.

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

SYMONE SANDERS, BIDEN CAMPAIGN SENIOR ADVISER: In my opinion, we don't need white people leading the Democratic Party right now. The Democratic Party is diverse and it should be reflected as so in our leadership, and throughout the staff at the highest levels.

HARRY ENTEN, CNN POLITICS SENIOR WRITER AND ANALYST: I will point out though, another white male, I'm very suspect of that this year going into a Democratic primary with women doing well in the African-American base of the Democratic Party. I'm not sure it's the time to dominate a white man.

DAVID GREGORY, CNN POLITICAL ANALYST: Joe Biden understands that this modern Democratic Party is going to sit back and say, really? We want to 76-year-old white man?

(END VIDEO CLIP)

STEYN: Congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez recently endorsed Bernie Sanders. In response, CBS interrogated her, how, they wanted to know could she endorse a person with the wrong skin color?

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

UNIDENTIFIED FEMALE: I'm going to be a little blunt with you, Congresswoman, and don't take offense Senator, but as a woman of color, why back an old white guy? And is this the future of the party?

REP. ALEXANDRIA OCASIO-CORTEZ (D-NY): We have to come together across race, across gender, across generations and across class in order to establish our basic systems as rights.

(END VIDEO CLIP)

STEYN: Senator Sanders himself seems to have noticed what's going on in his party. At a recent Democratic debate, he helpfully reminded the moderator that he had the wrong pigmentation, as well as the wrong age and sex.

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

UNIDENTIFIED MALE: He also said, quote, "If you look at the world and look at the problems, it's usually old people, usually old men not getting out of the way."

[APPLAUSE]

UNIDENTIFIED MALE: Senator Sanders, you are the oldest candidate on stage this evening.

SEN. BERNIE SANDERS (I-VT), PRESIDENTIAL CANDIDATE: And I am white as well.

(END VIDEO CLIP)

STEYN: Jason Nichols is a Professor of African-American Studies at the University of Maryland. He joins us. Professor, the last time we spoke, you were all excited about the minority candidates, the women, the candidates from whom the healthy glow of late middle age had not yet fled their cheeks.

How did it come down that your party is reduced to an almost parodic choice of free geezers? You can get it any color as long as it's white to modify Henry Ford.

JASON NICHOLS, PROFESSOR OF AFRICAN-AMERICAN STUDIES, UNIVERSITY OF MARYLAND: Well, again, here is the thing, I'm more concerned about who is going to better the lives of the majority of Americans that would include people of color.

And also, we have to think about the fact that the Democratic Party, if you listen to the clip that you played with Symone Sanders, she was talking about leadership within the party.

Tom Perez is a Dominican-American from Maryland. We've got other leaders and people who have run for office and more women and people of color in Congress than ever before, and none of them are Republicans, or very few.

So again, I think that the party is diverse. The party is listening to people of color and to women, and that's the strength of the party. But what we need is somebody with conviction and that's where I think Bernie Sanders, he has got a lot of strength because he's been the same his entire career, unlike many of the other people that have run.

STEYN: Well, let me put it this way, though, because the last time we spoke, that was when there was a little bit of chit chat about Bloomberg and you weren't interested in him at all. You've got these three guys who were born during the Chester Arthur administration or whatever it was.

And so you've basically got the moderate geezer, you've got the Soviet geezer, and you've got the nanny state geezer. So it's like a game of conscience. It's dancing with the coot. How can you just have a party where the leading candidate, whatever lane you're looking, are all of these old guys and all the supposedly more fashionable candidates who can't get beyond two, three, or four percent?

NICHOLS: Well, I think again, part of this is about consistency and who has been the same their entire careers. I think, I was excited at one point about Kamala Harris. But one of the things that you saw about her besides running a poor campaign was the fact that she seemed to, you know, assert certain things and then later on, she would have to walk it back.

She couldn't decide what lane she's in.

Biden has been in the same lane for his entire career, as has Bernie Sanders. And I think that that's their strength. And again, I think the problem is, and this is a funny thing about the right, is that the right wing oftentimes talks about, you know, black people wanting black candidates, but you notice -- or black people supporting black people and that being a race based thing, or brown people supporting brown people.

But as you can see, we're more concerned about supporting people that are going to better people's lives, rather than the color of their skin. But I've heard Republicans actually say that if Alan Keyes were white, he would have been President of the United States.

So as a matter of fact, it's the right who is more concerned about the skin color of their candidates than it is the left.

STEYN: Oh, in the spirit of Boxing Day, I think I'll let you get away with that. I'll tell you something. The young people are crazy for Bernie. He looks like Justin Bieber to them. So you may -- you may have a point there. Thank you for that, Professor.

The "Home Alone" movies have become Christmas classics and famously, in "Home Alone 2," a certain future United States President makes a brief appearance.

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

KEVIN MCCALISTER, FICTIONAL CHARACTER: Excuse me, where's the lobby?

DONALD TRUMP (R), PRESIDENT OF THE UNITED STATES: Down the hall and to the left.

MCCALISTER: Thanks.

(END VIDEO CLIP)

STEYN: He ran that hotel pretty well actually in those days. Canadians who tuned in to the CBC to watch "Home Alone 2" to this year, saw a slightly different version of that movie.

In the CBC's cut, Donald Trump was edited out. According to the CBC, the scene was cut to make more time for commercials. Of course, those motives don't exclude each other. If woke capitalism means anything these days, it's that there's no conflict between maximizing profits and maximizing left wing activism and Canada is notorious for those six-second commercials for Celine Dion's Christmas CD.

President Trump is warning California's Governor that if he can clean up his state, then Trump himself may have to step in and intervene. That's coming next.

Plus, Tucker will be here. You don't want to miss this. And we have news of the creepy porn lawyer, just the head.

(COMMERCIAL BREAK)

STEYN: Congresswoman Alexandra Ocasio-Cortez wants to have absolute control over the U.S. economy, the healthcare sector and a lot more. So far, it hasn't happened. And according to AOC recently, that failure means that America must be a backward fascist country.

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

OCASIO-CORTEZ: What we're living in right now is not an advanced society.

A society that allows people --

UNIDENTIFIED FEMALE: Why aren't we calling it fascism? That's what it is.

OCASIO-CORTEZ: It is fascism.

[CHEERING]

OCASIO-CORTEZ: What we have, what we are bowing into as well.

(END VIDEO CLIP)

STEYN: Well, John Daniel Davidson is political editor at "The Federalist" and he joins us. John, do you think AOC actually knows what fascism is?

JOHN DANIEL DAVIDSON, POLITICAL EDITOR, THE FEDERALIST: No, it's just a scare word. It just means that, as you said that the government, the Democratic Party doesn't have control over healthcare, education, major industries, the Green New Deal is never going to happen. That's all it means. It doesn't have anything to do with actual fascism.

STEYN: But actually Mussolini had control pretty much over all of that and he was a fascist. At one point, it would have been unusual for a Member of Congress in either party to say that the United States was fascist.

She also said, which I thought was actually as striking that America shouldn't settle for just being 10 percent better than garbage, which again, would be -- just a few years ago, it would have been an unusual thing for anybody to say about the country they represent in the national legislature. What's actually going on here with where she and her party is sliding?

DAVIDSON; Well, you know earlier in that same speech, she complained about, you know, America not being an advanced society because it doesn't matter how much gold you amass if people aren't taking care of it, it was a perfect illustration of the economic illiteracy of the left, the economic and the historical illiteracy of the left.

Nobody is amassing gold, you know. GDP doesn't stand for gold deposit pile. That's not how the economy works.

STEYN: That's Scrooge McDuck.

DAVIDSON: And that's not how economies measure it. Scrooge McDuck isn't swimming around in piles of gold. Look, the Americans are investing it.

They're creating jobs. That's why, you know, wages are going up. That's why unemployment is down. That's how the real world works. These people are out to lunch on this stuff.

STEYN: There are millions of people all over the world and indeed in America who actually know what fascism is because they grew up under it, they lived under it, and they know the difference.

What's unusual about AOC is that the sort of things she says, seem to be accepted as completely routine by younger voters, essentially by voters in her own age bloc.

DAVIDSON: Yes. It's strange that the left wing of the Democratic Party, the Socialist Democrats that that AOC kind of represents and speaks for that are gathering under the banner of Bernie Sanders now, they don't like America.

They're an anti-American movement within the Democratic Party that's growing in power, and we're starting to see them take over a major political party in this country and it's scary because what they want for America is the opposite of what America is all about, which is freedom, capitalism, prosperity. That's not the America they want.

STEYN: And that's all of which AOC calls garbage. Don't settle for 10 percent better than garbage. That would make a great campaign slogan.

John, thanks very much to you.

DAVIDSON: Thanks, Mark.

STEYN: California has become the left's political laboratory. If Democrats have a new idea they'll give it a test drive out in the Golden State first. The result, America's most unlivable state: Needles and feces piling up in Californian cities. Homeless camps dominate entire neighborhoods of the metropolis.

Now President Trump is threatening to take action. On Christmas Day, the President tweeted, quote, "Governor Gavin Newsome has done a really bad job on taking care of the homeless population in California. If he can't fix the problem, the Federal government will get involved."

Christopher Rufo is a Research Fellow at the Discovery Institute and a contributing editor at "City Journal," and he joins us. Christopher, aside from the politics of it, the homeless situation actually is declining nationwide, but accelerating out of control in California.

CHRISTOPHER RUFO, RESEARCH FELLOW, DISCOVERY INSTITUTE: It is. Over the last 10 years, homelessness nationwide is down about 16 percent. Thirty five out of 50 states have managed to reduce the number of people on the streets.

But what you've seen is very curious. The States of California, Oregon and Washington, you've seen it explode, and this is happening really for two reasons. One, because of out of control housing prices, paired with permissive policies that really enable public camping, public drug consumption, and homelessness almost as a lifestyle.

And now what you have is the situation is really reaching that point of no return in the State of California that have more than a hundred thousand people on the streets.

In Los Angeles County alone, it is now 59,000 people. That's essentially a small population. There is really no feasible plan coming from any political leaders to actually make progress on this.

STEYN: Well, people say California is a nice state to be homeless in because the weather is great, so it's not like being homeless in Maine or New Hampshire, but you notice that Florida and Texas and Arizona don't have this problem. So it's not so much the weather, there's a political factor here, too.

RUFO: Yes, that's about political choice and you can actually see that same principle at play in writ small, where you have cities like Los Angeles, San Francisco, Seattle that have doubled the number of homeless folks in the last few years.

In smaller cities, in the outlying areas that have a kind of a compassionate enforcement approach. They're enforcing the law, they're making homelessness kind of a top policy priority, they have actually managed to reduce it while the bigger cities that have the most progressive, the most permissive policies don't seem to be able to get a handle on it.

And the real lesson from the homelessness crisis is that policy matters.

STEYN: Right.

RUFO: And if you have a policy of unlimited permissiveness, kind of ruinous compassion, you're only going to compound the problem no matter how much money you spend.

STEYN: Well, it's kind of the opposite of what they used to call the broken windows theory, isn't it? It's because there are more and more crimes committed by the homeless population that essentially are unenforced in most California cities. So that they're surrendering ceding control of the streets to this population.

RUFO: That's exactly right. And one study that came out this year detailed in Seattle, Washington, homeless individuals make up more than 50 percent of all police bookings in the City of Seattle, despite being less than one percent of the population.

So what you have is a real denial on the part of civic leaders. You hear in their rhetoric, it's all about housing. We need to just build more affordable apartments that'll solve the problem.

But at heart, what's happening is this is a human crisis. You have the intersection of addiction, mental illness, property crime, and kind of human despair that's being concentrated in these coastal cities.

And like you said, it's a nice place to be homeless, or it's a nice place to be among the very affluent and what you're seeing is that, California is coastal regions are increasingly becoming an almost neo-feudal society where if you're in that top one percent, you're doing great, and then if you are in that bottom, you know, 10 percent, you're just going through the meat grinder of these policies, and you may end up on the streets.

STEYN: And some of those actually, when you say neo-feudal, some neo- feudal diseases are actually coming back too, to those streets.

Christopher, thank you for that.

You've probably noticed the tremendous decline of San Francisco in recent months. Crime, homelessness, garbage, human waste have surged. But ordinary people still can't afford to live there.

We sent a camera crew to chronicle the decline of San Francisco. They found incredible things -- theft and drug dealing in broad daylight, powerless police, local citizens desperately trying to live normal lives amid worsening chaos.

Our new series will show you everything they discovered. "American Dystopia" debuts early in the New Year right here on TUCKER CARLSON TONIGHT. Don't miss it.

Earlier this year, the left rallied to defend the City of Baltimore against Trump. Now, that city is about to have the deadliest year in its entire history. That's next.

Plus, Michael Bloomberg, one of America's richest man. So why is he using prison labor to make calls for his campaign? We'll try to find out.

That's coming up after the break.

(COMMERCIAL BREAK)

STEYN: Over the summer, Democrats acted outraged when President Trump called Baltimore a dirty, dangerous disgrace. But the President's words were totally accurate.

Now, Baltimore is on the brink of having its deadliest year ever. The city is just a few homicides away from eclipsing its recent high of 342 murders per year. And since Baltimore's population is declining, this year is likely to have the highest homicide rate in the city's history.

To fight the violence, the city is considering a desperate measure, deploying special surveillance planes to spy on residents. Rafael Mangual is the Deputy Director of Legal Policy at the Manhattan Institute and he joins us now.

Rafael, just to explain what's going on here, these surveillance planes are basically monitoring citizens from the skies. That's very Orwellian, isn't it?

RAFAEL MANGUAL, DEPUTY DIRECTOR OF LEGAL POLICY, MANHATTAN INSTITUTE: Yes, it does sound Orwellian. I think a lot of what they're going to do is sort of track patterns of drug markets, outdoor drug markets, open air drug markets, which is where a lot of the violence is kind of stemming from in that city.

You know, one of the things that New York City really benefited from when it sort of took on its attack on crime throughout the '90s was that it pushed the drug market indoors. And what that does is it takes potential targets off the street. These are people who are going to be shot at and it raises the transaction costs of certain kinds of crime, and I think that's what they're trying to get a sense of with this surveillance.

STEYN: Well, something like 70 percent of those involved in homicides have derived from the drug trade base basically.

MANGUAL: That's right. Yes. The Baltimore Police released some interesting statistics about its 2017 murder suspects and 70 percent of them had a prior drug related arrest, which is really interesting because a lot of the reform crowd, especially Marilyn Mosby, the sort of progressive prosecutor is really focused on scaling back drug enforcement.

And the idea is that, you know, drug offenses are nonviolent, so these are kind of these innocuous behaviors --

STEYN: Victimless crimes.

MANGUAL: Exactly. What they're failing to understand is that there's a significant amount of overlap between people who are playing in the drug trade and people who are driving the violence in that city, and so drug enforcement can actually be an effective pre-textual attack on violent crime itself.

STEYN: Right. And here's another mind boggling statistic, 36 percent of these perpetrators are actually out on parole or probation.

MANGUAL: At the time of their offense.

STEYN: At the time they then go and kill somebody.

MANGUAL: That's exactly right.

STEYN: So again, why aren't we just -- we have all these tough laws, but the criminal fraternity seems to know that the system is no great threat to them.

MANGUAL: Well, exactly. This is one of the big misconceptions about the tone of the criminal justice debate in the United States, right? The tone gives the impression that the criminal justice system is this overly Draconian kind of Orwellian entity that is oppressing people left and right.

And the reality is, is that in a lot of cities across America, Baltimore being one of them, people are going actually pretty soft on crime. I mean, Maryland as a state has de-incarcerated really significantly and sharply in recent years. I mean, they cut their prison population by 10 percent between 2016 and 2017.

That means more criminals on the street, and I think that's reflected in these numbers.

STEYN: But they keep all these tough sounding law, you know, you're looking at three felonies, you're going to be in jail for 49 years. But the criminals unlike the public know that that, as a matter of policy, those are never enforced.

MANGUAL: Right. They know better. I mean, the reality is, is that the United States have only about 40 percent of felony convictions result in a post-conviction prison sentence, right? That means 60 percent of the time, you're not actually going to prison.

And when you do go to prison, about 40 percent of prisoners only serve about a year of their time, right? So they're back out in the street relatively soon, which is how you can get in a City like Baltimore a situation where you have offenders with 10 priors, and yet 36 percent of homicides are committed by people on probation or parole.

STEYN: Just quickly, is this going to get worse before it gets better in Baltimore?

MANGUAL: I hope not. I hope not. I mean, I think we know what to do. We know how to attack this problem. We have models from cities like New York.

STEYN: New York. Yes. If they just put -- if they just elected the right kind of mayor and administrator.

MANGUAL: I think it's going to take political will.

STEYN: Thanks -- thanks a lot, Rafael. Thank you for that.

Michael Bloomberg entered the Democratic primary late and has his work cut out for him trying to catch up. In a recent ad, speaking of the incarcerated, Bloomberg touted his credentials as a job creator.

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

ANNOUNCER: This guy gets things done. Bloomberg built a global news and information company by taking on the toughest competition, creating 20,000 jobs.

Mike's steady leadership will build an economy where everyone can get ahead.

(END VIDEO CLIP)

STEYN: Everyone can get ahead and when they say everyone, they mean it.

This week, Bloomberg's campaign admitted to employing prisoners in Oklahoma to make phone calls on Bloomberg's behalf.

Robby Soave is a senior editor at "Reason" and the author of the book, "Panic Attack." He joins us now. The Bloomberg campaign has severed all connections with the Oklahoma Penal System. What actually is the objection to what Mayor Bloomberg accidentally found himself doing? Using prisoners to make campaign calls?

ROBBY SOAVE, SENIOR EDITOR, REASON: Yes, I think everyone, right, left and center is going to agree, right, that it doesn't look good. It may be perfectly legal, but I don't think it looks ethical to be using people who are locked up to be making calls on behalf of your campaign.

I mean, what kind of statement is that about your campaign if the people you're getting excited about it, literally, they have no choice to even leave the building? So I don't think that sends an enthusiastic message of a nation ready to fall in love with Michael Bloomberg and convince people to vote for him, right?

STEYN: Yes, no, I hate it when you get campaign calls, but you sort of always assume it's a genuine volunteer, and when it's not, you kind of assume they've paid, you know, out of work actors or somebody to do it.

The idea that it's a guy who is locked up in in jail, and he has got a choice between sewing mailbags or hammering license plates, or making telephone calls for Mike Bloomberg, it doesn't seem like a good comment on the health of his campaign.

SOAVE: No, I mean, maybe in some ways, it's somewhat symbolically fitting for Bloomberg. I mean, this is someone who is -- you know, he's not like an ideological far-left person. He is, I guess, he is a sort of centrist, but centrism can be authoritarian in and of itself.

This is a man who wanted to arrest people for you know drinking extra large soda, for consuming fatty foods, for consuming flavored tobacco products.

I mean you name it, it's not good for you. Mike Bloomberg thinks well maybe you should go to jail for using it or someone should go to jail for selling it to you.

So there's a prison theme underlying this campaign.

STEYN: Right. Underlying his campaign. If I recall correctly, John Kerry wound up having to get rid of his telephone call. They had been outsourced to a call center in Ontario, which last time I checked wasn't an American state, but it is in the dominion of Canada. What do you think looks worse?

Having to have your campaign calls made by Canadians or jailbirds?

SOAVE: I think this is worse. Although, none there are good ideas, right?

You're not creating American jobs in the Kerry case, and you're not creating well-paying jobs because these are people, you know, who are being paid far under minimum wage, and I don't object, by the way, to prisoners having tasks to do rather than kind of sitting in their cells being bored and not sort of bettering themselves or learning anything.

But I don't think working on campaigns is the kind of thing that the prison system should be doing. Again, I think that strikes basically everyone as improper, if not illegal.

STEYN: No, that's not the least bit redemptive. Thank you. Thank you for that, Robby. Although, we should note that he has basically bought himself to five percent in the polls, and all the other people struggling to get to two, three, four percent without his money.

Tucker will be joining us for a special appearance with a great singer- songwriter of "American Pie." Hi, Hi, Mr. American Pie, Don McLean and Tucker, up next.

(COMMERCIAL BREAK)

STEYN: Here he is. Here is Tucker. He just sat down with Don McLean to talk about the meaning of Don's great song, "American Pie." Here's what happened.

(BEGIN VIDEOTAPE)

DON MCLEAN, AMERICAN SINGER SONGWRITER: The day the music died. I started singing bye-bye, Miss American Pie. Drove my Chevy to the levee, but the levee was dry ...

TUCKER CARLSON, FOX NEWS HOST, TUCKER CARLSON TONIGHT: It's been almost 50 years since "American Pie" was the number one song in America, but it's still ubiquitous. It's everywhere. Sometimes its lyrics even get referred to on cable news show.

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

CARLSON: That's the Democratic Party's position, and if you're not sold yet, if you sense there might be a few links missing from that logic chain, Nancy Pelosi has an answer for you. It's not so much an argument as it as a cliched bomb, a dense cluster of familiar phrases designed to convey the impression that important facts are being delivered and profound thinking is taking place.

It's like that old Don McLean song, "Drove my Chevy to the levee, but the levee was dry." It doesn't actually mean anything, but it kind of moves you anyway.

(END VIDEO CLIP)

CARLSON: But then we start thinking about it, we realize maybe that's not fair. "American Pie's" lyrics may mean something. To find out, we go to the man who wrote them. Probably the most famous songwriter in this country, Don McLean joins us tonight. Mr. McLean, thanks so much for coming on.

MCLEAN: Thank you for having me. I watch your show often.

CARLSON: Well, that's really -- thank you. I appreciate that. So what -- this is the question every person who has ever driven on an American Interstate has asked him or herself, where's the levee? And what does this mean? What do the lyrics mean?

MCLEAN: Well, could I just take a moment and explain that there are many poems and songs and folk music certainly that are not particularly exactly prosaic.

CARLSON: Right.

MCLEAN: That's why they're poetry. But I had an idea -- I had an idea for a big song about America, and I didn't want to write that this land is your land or some song like that.

And I came up with this notion that politics and music flow parallel together forward through history. So the music you get is related somehow to the political environment that's going on.

CARLSON: Yes.

MCLEAN: And in the song, "American Pie," the verses get somewhat more dire each time until you get to the end, but the good old boys are always there singing and singing, "Bye-bye Miss American Pie" almost like fiddling while Rome is burning.

CARLSON: Yes.

MCLEAN: This was all in my head, and it sort of turned out to be true because, you now have a kind of music in America that's really more spectacle, it owes more to Liberace than it does to Elvis Presley. And it's somewhat meaningless and loud and bloviating and, and yet -- and then we have this sort of spectacle in Washington, this kind of politics, which has gotten so out of control.

And so the theory seems to hold up, but again, it was only my theory, and that's how I wrote the song. That was the principle behind it.

CARLSON: So you set out to write as you said, a big song about America.

And boy, did you succeed. Fifty years later, you know, it's one of the most famous songs ever written in English and one of the most resilient and resonant. I mean, we're still listening to it every day. What kind of reaction do you get from people to the song now?

MCLEAN: Well, I always -- the song has been part of their lives now. You know, I'm part of their lives and the albums that I made in the 1970s go along with that. But of course the kingpin is the song, "American Pie."

CARLSON: Yes.

MCLEAN: And really all roads lead to Rome in my show. I sing the American Songbook, songs that I've written whether it's "Castles in the Air" and "I love you, so," "Vincent."

CARLSON: Yes.

MCLEAN: "Wonderful Baby." All of these song.

CARLSON: "Winterwood." One of the best.

MCLEAN: All roads lead to "American Pie" at the end, usually, and it's a summing up of everything that's going on. I don't really do a set. You know, I've been doing this for so many years that I kind of make up a new show every night.

But can I just tell you one thing about yourself that I've noticed, and that is that you do something that nobody else does. You get a guest on and then you ask them a core question and I think that nobody else does that. It's a very well thought out question.

And nine times out of 10, the guests can't answer it, which makes it very amusing and fun because you don't get into a whole thing of going everywhere he wants to go, you make him come to that question. And that's very philosophical. That's Socratic. And I love that. I think that's terrific.

CARLSON: Well, I really appreciate that. The basics are what matter to me. I'm a very basic person, like a dog. Don McLean, it is an honor to have you on tonight. Thank you so much. I can't tell you the number of times I've thought about you alone in the car and great to finally meet you. Thanks very much.

MCLEAN: Thank you. Well, thank you for having me.

(END VIDEOTAPE)

STEYN: I'm glad Don McLean mentioned "Wonderful Baby" there. That's a great song. Fred Astaire make a terrific record of that.

It hasn't been a holly jolly Christmas for the creepy porn lawyer. When he was on CNN every day, he came over like a supremely wealthy and successful mega lawyer. But prosecutors now say that was all a sham. All of that coming up, next.

(COMMERCIAL BREAK)

STEYN: The creepy porn lawyer has taken quite a tumble from the days when he was a fixture on CNN. CPL is about to go on trial for attempting to extort Nike, and according to prosecutors, creepy porn lawyer launched his daring criminal enterprise because his lifestyle of fast cars, fancy restaurants and private jets left him $15 million in debt.

Chadwick Moore is a New York journalist and he joins us. Chadwick, people mocked Tucker's precis of this guy, creepy porn lawyer, but in fact, Tucker nailed the essentials of the guy when CNN and all these others fell for him and actually thought he was a credible presidential contender at one point.

CHADWICK MOORE, CONSERVATIVE JOURNALIST: That's very much correct. You know if this guy, creepy porn lawyer was so hard up for cash, maybe he could have just taken to dancing like his former client, Stormy Daniels is doing well while he was appearing on CNN in thousand dollar suits.

I'm sure that the Adonis all-male review at the Rainbow Lounge have been thrilled to have him. As you know, he has plenty of -- plenty of lonely liberal women fans, the same women who I'm sure will be writing him letters in prison should he be convicted.

But you're right that Tucker --

STEYN: You're getting way too vivid here, and I've never been at that lounge, just for the record here. Let me ask you this, Chadwick. I mean, if we must take this man's fate seriously, his lawyers are now arguing that when he demanded that Nike pay him $22.5 million that he was simply exercising his First Amendment rights and shaking down Nike is protected speech.

MOORE: Right. Yes. They're also claiming that this accusation that he had a fast and rich lifestyle is only trying to start a class divisions within for when the jury pool comes. Okay, sure.

But yes, you've have CNN turn this guy into hero. He was their -- he was America's sweetheart for a very long time on CNN. Brian Stelter, obviously, famously called him a very serious contender against the President. Too bad that career never took off the ground because he could have been using campaign donations to pay off his debts -- his alleged debts, I should say.

But he's absolutely a craze to the media, and look at how they dumped and run from him and just, frankly pretend it never happened. That he wasn't on CNN over a hundred times while he was supposed to be representing Stormy.

STEYN: The fantastic thing is he didn't actually file any tax returns between 2011 and 2017 when he was making up to $5.5 million dollars a year, supposedly, so he is a very much a typical Democrat in that sense, Chadwick in that is boundless concern for the fellowmen and all the rest of it. He doesn't want to chip in and pay for it himself. That's the way that goes.

MOORE: He certainly seems to have their fiscal chops especially that extravagant unnecessary expenditures and then trying to muscle a private entity into paying for it, then certainly.

STEYN: Yes, we will follow this and see how it goes. But he is certainly not going to be flying any private jets again anytime soon. Chadwick, thank you for that.

That is about it for us tonight. Tune in each night at 8 o'clock Eastern to the show that is the sworn enemy of lying, pomposity, smugness and groupthink.

And don't forget to DVR the show as well.

Good night from all of us here in New York.

You are in for a treat this Boxing Day, Ms. Tammy Bruce right now.

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