everybody talk. geraldo says i'm good at it. anyway, have something to say, call the number on your screen. 877-225-8587. that's all the time we have left this evening. as always, thank you for being with us. see you back here tomorrow nigh night. ♪ >> tucker: good evening and happy monday. we're enjoying ours, and welcome to "tucker carlson tonight." the battle over health care is far from over, but already a big chunk of the left has had a full psychotic break. sounds like overstatement, but it's real as you'll see at the prospect of obamacare repealed. just yesterday, andrea mitchell of nbc went on "meet the press"e and suggested the american health care act was somehow a scheme by white men to destroy everybody else. watch. >> let's talk about women. when we looked at the rose garden and the celebration of this on thursday, they were mostly all men and white men at that.

no diversity. >> tucker: ooh, white men, worst kind.te then there was kurt eickenwald.. how could we forget kurt eichenwald, who dropped this on twitter, "i hope every g.o.p-er who voted for trumpcare see a family member get a long-term condition, lose insurance, and die." when asked why he wanted people to die for his political beliefs, eichenwald added this, "because i want them to be tortured." keep in mind, he works at msnbc now. his venom exceeded by singer and actress bette miller. she tweeted this: just like that. and finally, there's congressman debbie dingell of michigan who, like mitchell, was very hung up on the whiteness of republican lawmakers trying to change health care. here she is. >> i just sort of watched in shock, the picture in the rose garden after what happened.

i really wanted to cry. and when i say it's not a game, they are treating it like a game, but for the people that i represent and for people acrossg the country, it's not a game. the point that i was trying to make and then you see that picture in the rose garden, you realize who it is, that is celebrating this and then hear that it's the 13 white boys, sorry to say it that way, that are going to be doing this incentive, i get very concerned. >> tucker: the white boys. this is clearly no longer a debate over policy, but healthar care or anything else. it's something else entirely different. but what exactly is it? don calloway, democratic strategist and former missouri state representative, joins us tonight to perhaps explain. great to have you tonight.ep so if you could kind of imagine a scenario in which -- maybe you can't, but i'll toss it upup there. there were 13 filipino lawmakers voting on a piece of legislation. you had a sitting member of congress go on television and say you know what, filipinos are doing this. that's appalling. i don't think she'd get far.

>> i don't know. that's a hypothetical, but the reality of the matter is the republican party at its highest> ranks of leadership has a diversity problem and lack of diversity, be it ideological diversity or racial diversity, gender diversity, it makes us all poor because you're not necessarily getting the perspective one needs when attacking something as big as infrastructure, tax reform, or health care. these are big challenges. >> tucker: it was just announced that anyone who disagrees can't be a member of the party. disagrees on roe v. wade. you're telling me that diversity is lacking. >> that's not exactly true. >> tucker: we choose to have the views that we have.ru wee we don't choose to be the color that we are. it's something that happens to us. so the agreement that we've had for a long time is a good agreement. we're not going to judge people on things they can control. accidents of birth, including race. so what does this have to do with the health care bill?s >> it's that you don't choose to be white. i didn't choose to be african-american, but you do choose who your party leadership is, and the republican party har chosen to have 13 white men in

the room when creating a system that will control 1/5 to 1/6 of our nation's economy. that is a tangible choice made by the republican party.on tangible choice made by the n trump administration to have a room full of white men deciding on women's health. >> tucker: a room full of white men decided on obamacare. the democratic caucus -- and i'm not being about what color i am or what you are, it's about the principle, judging people for what they do and the decisions that they make rather than by the color of their skin. the content of their character, you could say. why is it bad that these people are a specific color? does that color make it hard for you to make wise decisions? >> it represents a lack of diversity in perspective and that lack of diversity of perspective is hard to think that they're making the best policy for our entire country.ec you and i live in washington, d.c., we can't walk six blocks without seeing a variety of rainbow shades of all different types of folk, and that is a microcosm of our country.

the republican party has not recognized that. o >> tucker: i lived in d.c. as a kid and it was a majority black city, and the city government was majority african-american. do you think they were making less good decisions because they were almost all one color?nt >> i don't know -- i didn'ter study d.c. politics. what i do know is that the policy represented the greater diversity that we've seen in our country. the republican party if you look at the representatives and the leadership of that party, and i'm friends with will hurd. i have great faith in what they contribute to the republican party, but they are not right now at the top ranking decision-makers of leadership. >> tucker: but you're not allowing for the possibility that people are individuals and they reach their own, not necessarily in reference to the group, whatever group you think they belong to. it's because they're each one created by god to make his own choices? >> this is not individually about race, this is a lack of

ideological diversity and diversity of perspective. lack of diversity of experience. >> tucker: those are all real arguments, the race part is grotesque. >> it's not. race is a part of diversity.s, ideological, gender diversity. diversity of perspective and diversity of experience, and you have to take that diversity of experience into account when making a policy as important as health care. >> tucker: what concerns me here is we're opening up a can ofo worms, and i get part of what you're saying, but you think diversity in perspective and background and opinion is really important. i believe that and the companies i've run that way. but i also think that if you're creating a rhetorical dynamic t where it's okay to attack people because of their skin color which is exactly when debbie dingell was doing, it's exactly what she was doing. >> she said white boys. that's a bad statement. that's a statement that someone of her stature and someone that has been in the game as long as she has should know better than that. i would not use the phrase. i disagree with the premise that

these people are being attacked because of their skin color. the republican party and the policy that emanates there from is being attacked because per se doesn't include substantial diversity that looks like the country. >> tucker: so i'm just saying, and i'm sure this does occur to you, but if you have a>> politil conversation where one group is starting to attack another group on the basis of its race that you could wind up with a country where all groups start attacking other groups on the basis of theirs, you could wind up with a really divided, dangerously so, country. >> i think we disagree on the premise that people are being attacked on the basis of race. i think democrats are pointing out, rightfully so, the lack of racial diversity in the republican party decision-makini structure and that's not wrong to point out.iv >> tucker: obvious question, if you had a jury that was 100% samoan, would you be able to reach a just conclusion? >> if my client was not samoan, they probably didn't get a jury.

of their peers. >> tucker: i don't want to live in a country -- the former president comes out recently, in think today, and says racial issues have never been better in america and i know that you want to think you left the country a better place than you found it. that's just a flat out lie. y there's no measure by which that's true, and if we're having this conversation now that suggest that it's not true, it's ridiculous. >> the premise here and the premise for the entire discussion we're having is that white america is under attack, and that's what i find to be fundamentally not true. >> tucker: i'm not makingg the case that white america's under attack.am i'm making the case that the society that we're trying to live in is one in which people are judged by what they do, by the choices that they make, not judged by legal characteristics over which they have no control such as their race or their height or their eye color for that matter, and if democratic leaders, liberal leaders are all of a sudden forgetting thatt lesson and pushing this race stuff on the country. >> race is an immutable characteristic, you're absolutely right. what we do have control over is how many people we include in making policy, making real

decisions that are going to affect all of us, not just whity men. and the republican party, i have friends across the board. but in concerning the c leadership, who's in charge of making policy that emanates from not only the federal government but in the states, it has failed at the concept of including everyone. >> tucker: would you acknowledge that people of the same color can have dramatically different motives while remaining authentic? you look at supreme court justice clarence thomas, who was attacked for daring to have views different from the majority of people who looked like him, that's awful. >> i don't think he is attacked for having views that are's different. you look at tim scott. he has the wide and broad respect of the african-american community and he is a staunchly conservative republican.ic i've known him for years when he was in columbia, the state legislature, so i think clarence thomas is a very special case with the vitriol with which he'w chosen to carry out a lot of his policy, and he's a hard man to understand. >> tucker: i think he's gottenoh most of the vitriol and i would ask you this.

when you're a public servant, dh you think that you have a duty to represent your fellow citizens first, second, andnt third, or do you think you have the duty to represent people who look like you too? >> you have a duty to represent your fellow citizens, which ise the problem with the republican party not including everyone because black folk are their fellow citizens too. gay and lesbian folks are too. >> tucker: i'm not here to defend the republican party, which i think is really damaged in a lot of ways. but i have got to be completely honest, it's a little much considering the democratic party has officially exclusionary policies based on race for how it chooses delegates, for how it allocates power, for how it sends money, and certainly in the presidential nominating contest. you can't imagine that that's not a massive factor in who gets chosen. >> the leadership is chosen by a popular improper vote, however the democratic party has chosen to put in institutional measures to rectify historical inadequacies and historical mistreatment. so does that mean that it's

based upon race? to some degree, yes, but ultimately the democratic party has said we want diverse representation and will take measures to foster that. >> tucker: thanks for coming on tonight. former acting attorney general sally yates came to capitol hill today to testify before the senate subcommittee on alleged russian interference in last fall's election. remember when putin showed up and cast a ballot for you? for more on what happened, we go to trace gallagher. >> when u.s. intelligence agencies spy on foreigners who happen to be talking to american citizens, the names of the u.s.i citizens are supposed to be hidden or minimized and should not be viewed unless they are specific to national security reasons to do so. uncovering the names is called unmasking, so now listen to ther back and forth between republican senator chuck grassley, former acting attorney general sally yates and former director of national intelligence james clapper. watch. >> did any of you ever review classified documents about the members of congress had been

unmasked? >> yes. >> you have. can you give us details here? >> no, i can't. >> ms. yates, have you? >> yes, i have, and no, i can't give you details. >> neither could give details. later in the hearing, she said she alerted the white house that the national security advisor michael flynn was not being honest with vice president mike pence about discussions flynn had with the russian ambassador concerning u.s. sanctions against the kremlin. and that made him susceptible to blackmail. listen to her again. >> it was clear from the vice president and others that they were repeating what general flynn had told them. and that this was a problem. because not only do we believe that the russians knew this but that they likely had proof of this information. >> michael flynn was of course fired for not telling his bosses

about his talks with the russians. today, president trump tweeted quote, "biggest story today between clapper and yates is on surveillance." presumably the president's talking about him being surveilled. he goes on to say, "why doesn't the media report on this? #fakenews." the president also said the russia-trump collusion story is a hoax. >> tucker: thanks, trace. time now for "news abuse," we bring you the highlights of america's fading and rotten media establishment. macron was elected president of france yesterday and according to "the new york times" which was exultant, we have press censorship to thank for his election. last week, the candidates emails was leaked to the internet. the press did little reporting on their content. in part because french law prohibits campaign reporting the last two days before an election, but it didn't stop there. even after the blackout ended, most media outlets in france

ignored the leak in effect andut its contents. as "the new york times" put it, "the news media heated in admonition by the government's campaign regulatory body, not the published false news." no one alleged the emails were false, they were real, which was why they needed to be suppressed. "the new york times" implied that america could benefit from a similar arrangement here. "france does not have a mainstay of the british and american media landscape, a thriving tabloid culture and right wing broadcasters. the national front does not have the equivalent of bill o'reilly or sean hannity. the right wing commentators whoo help to shore up trump's presidential bid."nn so the french government bullied news outlets to withhold potentially relevant information from fringe voters just days before the election. -- french voters. the country lacks diverse media viewpoints and america's most prestigious news outlet is applauding all of this? the world has gone crazy. nearly 50 years ago, "the new york times" sued the federal

government for the right to publish leaked military papers that were classified, the pentagon papers, and they won that case. w today, its reporters love the power of censorship to defeat politicians they don't like. we have fallen a long way and we're going still. it took about a decade, but we finally have an authoritative in-depth look on president obama's past. someone finally did the legworke just ahead, we'll talk to david garrow, the pulitzer prize winning author of "rising star,k the making of barack obama." also, the nsa collected data on more than 150 million phonecoun. they said only a few dozen terrorists. l up next, we'll talk to the man who is one of the nsa's top lawyers.ai stay tuned. the shelf to treat your tough nasal allergies... ...listen up. unlike pills that don't treat congestion, clarispray covers 100 percent of your nasal allergy symptoms. clarispray. from the makers of claritin.

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>> tucker: two years ago, they passed legislation that was used to curb monitoring americans' phone call.or the law didn't seem to have stopped the nsa.rt according to a report released recently, despite having warrants targeting 42 suspected terrorism suspects, last year the national security agency managed to collect 150 million american phone call records.s, what is the nsa doing and does it justify the massive violation of your privacy? stuart baker was a general counsel at nsa, thanks for a lot for coming on. we have fewer than 50, according to the nsa, terrorists in our sights, yet 150 million americans have their metadata collected. >> 150 records were picked up, not americans.

>> tucker: 150 million. >> million. nsa is doing exactly what congress told him to do. it said we want to keep this program, but when they set up the program, they set it up more or less to address a problem that they had seen with the 9/11 attackers.es when they identified a terrorist haven in yemen and they saw phone calls coming in, they didn't realize they were coming from the united states. so nsa said we need to find anybody who's in touch with the terrorists outside of the united states, and we want to, as you'd expect, if you're investigating somebody who's in touch with a terrorist, you want to know who they are in touch with in the united states and who both people are in touch with. so when you do the math, that turns out to be close to 150 million.

>> tucker: doubling a penny every day for a month. >> exactly.p it's like that one grain, two grains, four grains on a chessboard and you end up with all the grain in the world. >> tucker: everything you've said sounds reasonable, and i want to believe it because i love the country and i know good people working for the government. but i also know people who work in the congress who say it's supposed to be overseeing nsa, providing oversight, and we s can't get information that we request from nsa. they just don't send it to us. is there actual oversight? >> that does not sound right, at least as far as the intelligence committee is going. >> tucker: i've heard this from two different members of the intelligence committees within the last two months. >> i'm not aware of any reason why nsa would not provide r anything that their overseers ask for. the entire culture of the national security agency is focused on obeying the law, compliance with the law, and i remember walking through with the attorney general, walking through and she stopped by a soldier, said to the soldier what do you do if you find an

american communications in the stream of intelligence? and he gave exactly the right answer. and afterwards, the attorney general said you're not supposed to ask a question if you don't know what the answer's going to be. i said i knew exactly what the training here was going to be, what that guy had been through, and i knew he knew the answer and i'm surprised. >> tucker: but you sort of wonder, i wonder a lot of things about nsa, but one is how would we really know? so it's obviously highly technical and highly classified, and if i'm a member of congress on one of the committees andy i call over and say i'd like to see this, and i'm sure i'm getting those things? >> this is the hardest problem with intelligence, gotta be secret, and yet you want in the democracy to be sure that the government runs it and the intelligence committee is not running the government. the way we solve that ore addressed it as least is there are multiple independent and

rival centers of power all whom think their principal job, job one, is to make sure that the intelligence committee and in some cases nsa don't violate the law. there's the justice department thinks that's their job, the general counsel and nsa think that's their job.ep there's a privacy officer in nsa who think's that their job. two intelligence committees who think that's their job. the fisa court thinks it's their job to write unheard on nsa. all of them are independent. all of them are going to make their careers.s. they can find a violation of the law and all of them conduct investigations at various times. it's not perfect. but probably the most investigated agency that i can think of. >> tucker: when james clapper was running american intelligence went before congress and said we're not spying on any american citizens, and it turned out he was lying. did that shock you? >> yeah, i think he either

misunderstood the question. the real problem was he didn't back down. he didn't admit he'd gotten it wrong. it was a trick question because the man who asked the question knew exactly what the answer was and he was trying to get the director of national intelligence to say something that would make the newspapers. it was an unfair question.e >> tucker: are you spying on americans? that seems pretty straightforward. >> but he would've had to say, not surprisingly, i can't answer about what i'm doing here in open session. he provided plenty of information. in a closed session. i'm not here to defend what he said, i'm certainly not defending his insistence on doubling down on it. >> tucker: but as a reasonable person, you're confident in hiss good faith. >> yeah, i am. he's a career guy.h. he served many republican as well as democratic administrations. >> tucker: thanks for joining us. appreciate it.

a charity decided to help people by pointing out that obesity is linked to cancer in some studies. now they're being denounced for something called fat shaming. we'll talk to a shrink going after them. next. one with our allstate agen, and i know that we have accident forgiveness. so the incredibly minor accident that i had tonight- four weeks without the car. okay, yup. good night. with accident forgiveness your rates won't go up just because of an accident. switching to allstate is worth it. but so we don't have tormin wad to get clean. charmin ultra soft gets you clean without the wasteful wadding. it has comfort cushions you can see that are softer... ...and more absorbent, and you can use up to 4 times less. enjoy the go with charmin. ostriches don't really stick their heads in the sand. a peanut is not a nut. and a real john deere...

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>> tucker: one of the largest charities in the u.k. is being attacked for having the gall to say that being fat doesn't just sap your energy and hurt your dating prospects. it's also bad for you, accordinh to researchers. charity cancer research u.k.

put up an ad in the underground in london warning that obesity, after smoking, is a leading preventable cause of cancer and for that bit of health advocacy, the charity is being denounced not for bad science and maybe engaging in that, who knows, but for something called fat shaming. one of those denouncers is psychologist bethany marshall, and she joins us tonight. thanks a lot for coming on. i am not the kind of person whol would attack people for their weight. i'm not that interested. i struggle with cheeseburgers myself, so i'm not judging. but i also think that scientists ought to be allowed to present the conclusions they reach without being attacked by interest groups, and you seem like one of the interest groupso >> on the other hand, first of all, this is good science. you said you weren't sure about the science. there's a link between cancer and obesity. the problem is the body shaming and the blaming. if they want to blame, i have no problem with blame. why don't they blame manufacturers of sugary soda drinks? fast food restaurants that cluster in poor neighborhoods?

i think the problem with this ad campaign is whoever came up with this really does not understandh the link between psychobiological and psychological factors in obesity. for example, if you have an obese mother, you're much more likely to become obese.n if you grew up in a poor neighborhood, you don't haveuc access to fruits and vegetables or good nutrition. let's say you have a more sedentary lifestyle, or in my field, because i'm a psychoanalyst, let's say you're a victim of childhood trauma, childhood sexual abuse and because of that, you unconsciously walk around in a fat suit because you feel that that's the only way you can avoid being sexually abused, the object of sexual intention. >> tucker: you're getting too deep for me, i may drown here. again, i'm not attacking fat people. i think the reason they put those ads up is that fat people, like cigarette smokers, are unpopular and unfashionable

and fashionable people hate them for aesthetic reasons. but that aside, i think that you're making an argument for alcoholism as well. people are predisposed to it. they have all kinds of psychological reasons for it, but we don't excuse alcoholism. we say don't drink so much or get help or something. why is that different? >> but when we warn about alcoholism, we actually hope that people find resources. the problem with this ad a campaign, first of all, is that sort of that hangman type look to the ad. i don't know if you notice that. did you ever play that game in the third grade where you try to guess the vowels and consonants and then if you get it wrong, then you're hung? i think there's sort of aet sinister aspect of this. i think that when we help people with alcoholism, we hook them up with support groups. in this ad, is there any phone number? is there any support group? is there anything that helps point a person? >> maybe we're overthinking a little bit.

speaking from my own extensive experience on this, i noticed that when i drink a ton of milkshakes and don't get out of my chair, i tend to gain weight. there is free will involved in this equation. i know for a fact, let's not pretend that people just sort of gain a lot of weight because p they don't know why. >> i'm no stranger to a doughnut myself, but it's actually more complex than that. one of the things we know about people who suffer from compulsive overeating is that they have a buildup of feelings outside of awareness that can only be neutralized by an act. so let's say if you were raised by a malattuned mother, someone who doesn't understand your feeling state.by every time you cry, every time you're upset, she puts the w bottle in your mouth or feeds you. you might grow up into an adult that whenever you're upset, hungry, angry, lonely, tired, you drink, you eat, so it's because you don't have a good

understanding of your underlying feelings. >> tucker: i get it. i believe everything you are saying. i totally get it. on the other hand -- i think a lot of the psychobabble stuff may be true, but it doesn't answer the basic question which is, at what age are you responsible for your own life? is there a cut off? is it 30, is it 40, is it 50? at what point do you stop saying my mom did this to me and start taking responsibility for your own actions? p is there an age? >> that's an excellent question. i suppose that we help our children take responsibility for themselves. are you a dad? don't you help your kids take responsibility for themselves? >> tucker: if my kids ever have problems and say mom was mean to me, you can't do that. i'm sorry. you're 30 years old. you're doing this. stop it. >> here's a problem with the ad. of course, we'll have to take responsibility for ourselves. but what if you're obese, you're unaware of the factors that have led to the obesity, you're a victim of childhood sexual abuse, you're humiliated, you're

ashamed, you stand in front of that sign, now it makes you feel even more ashamed. what are you going to go out n and do? you're going to go and eat even more. so it's the tacticoi that i'm arguing with. it's not the fact that people shouldn't take responsibility for themselves, but you cannot scare people into losing weight. >> tucker: that's not true. you can scare people into anything. i've been scared into losing weight.gh trust me. i've got to say, even if i'm argument against you, i know the people who put this ad up are not people i would want to have dinner with. i just know that. so i'm arguing against my own position. dr. marshall, thank you for joining us tonight. great to see you. >> thank you.po >> tucker: a massive thousand page biography of president obama's early years just came out.t. it's definitive and has a lot of facts and information.io stuff you should have known but didn't. we'll talk to the book's pulitzer prize-winning author. in case you want to lower yourid cancer risk, lena dunham has put out a very interesting list of

tips for slimming down. you won't believe what they are. is that the weirdest story of the day? maybe. our panel is here to decide. de. ♪

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there's a better option. the capital one venture card. with venture, you earn unlimited double miles on every purchase, everywhere, every day. not just airline purchases. seems like a no-brainer. what's in your wallet? >> tucker: after close to a decade of waiting, we have finally received a book with all the information about barack obama. it might have been good to know before he was elected president. the book is called "rising star." it is an exhaustive thousand page look at the formerr president's life prior to being elected. the book's author, david garrow, joins us now. thank you for coming on. >> thank you. >> tucker: so the question is, many questions, but you found material in this book nott previously uncovered during his entire presidency, his years in the senate, the fact that he was a subject of a number of books. what did it take you to find this? >> it's remarkable that someone could twice be elected president of the united states, serve

eight years, and huge pieces of his earlier life remained undiscovered. and it's not just a girlfriend. it's his closest intellectuall companion, his closest friendlo from harvard law school, the person who actually helped edit his autobiography memoir, "dreams from my father."hi it's remarkable that journalists back in 2007, 2008. didn't do this basic legwork back in 2007, 2008. >> tucker: in the book, you say that the former president reached out during the course of his political career to a number of people who might have given interviews and leaned on them not to talk to journalist because they might hurt him. do you think that was part of theto problem? >> the barack obama from 1985 to 2002 in illinois was a wonderful progressive politician. i'm a progressive democrat myself. but the barack obama that we saw

in the white house, the one we see nowadays is a fundamentally different person from who he was in the 1990s. and it's that intellectual and political evolution that is what this book really discovers and captures. >> tucker: so i know you're a man of the left, and i've always thought of you that way, and with that in mind, i was struck by the epilogue to the book, the 40 or 60 pages at the end where you sum up what you've learned about president obama, and i think it's fair to call it very negative, very tough on him. are those judgments that you made after collecting all the evidence, and were you surprised to read that conclusion? >> i was surprised at how the obama presidency turned out, and it is a critical epilogue from the perspective of a progressive democrat. when barack was in illinois,

he was an outspoken proponent of single-payer health coverage, an outspoken critic of the patriot act and the intelligence community and the cia. so the obama that we have seen as president has been a dramatically different person. up through 2002, barack lived a very modest, humble, middle-class life. now here we are in 2017, and we see him hobnobbing withh celebrities and musicians and billionaires, getting $400,000 in speech. he's a very different person today from who he was from 1985 through 2002 and that's what this book explains. >> tucker: so i think it's fair to say you look at him more closely than any living person perhaps other than his wife and you reached the conclusion in the epilogue that he is -- i

think i'm quoting pretty much more or less a hollow man. you're not sure what at the center of him. >> as a progressive democrat, i'm disturbed and perplexed that he has changed so dramatically over the last 15 years. we look at his record back in illinois in the 1990s up to 2002, you would think we knew who he was. but he has turned out to be a different person then we would have projected. >> tucker: do you think he's a good person? >> he was certainly a very good person from 1985 till 2002. but the desire to succeed, the desire to win, the need to become president changed him. fundamentally changed him, and that to me is a fundamentally sad story.

>> tucker: you write that michelle obama was not his first choice for a wife. explain the criteria he used to make that decision on who to marry.a >> from 1986 through 1991, barack had a very intense, important, formative relationship with a woman whoer was half dutch, half japanese. a wonderful woman, woman who like myself, was an academic, a scholar. journalists never discovered her back in 2007, 2008, but anyone could have by walking into the library of the university of chicago and who also lived at barack's address. but it's not just her. his closest friend in law school, rob, who helped him write and edit and hone "dreams from my father," they were these formative people in barack's early life who american

journalism failed to discover for years. >> tucker: it seems like at key points in his life, obama made decisions that were not -- i not human decisions. he seemed to make decisions -- basedng on political calculation going back a long time, including who he married, and it's a coldness at the center of the guy that is striking.hi >> i think there is an ambition, a deep, profound political ambition, which barack articulated as early as 1987 to the people with whom he was closest then and that ambition was a formative part of his life. joining jeremiah wright, trinity united church of christ was a part of that too.

>> tucker: the last question, you describe yourself as a progressive, as a man of the left. "the new york times" has attacked your book savagely in a review, and the main problem appeared to be that you criticized st. obama at the end of your book. given that your book has this critical assessment at its end, are you surprised that the left can't deal with that apparently? >> i think in today's culture and today's politics, unfortunately, we sometimes see partisanship trumping -- a verb i like -- trumping professionalism. i'm an academic, a scholar, historian. it's sad "the new york times" gives into partisan fervor, butt i am playing a long game. t i'm a scholar. this book will be the authoritative account of barack obama's prepresidential life. i believe for decades to come. >> tucker: that is without question true, and good for you for doing all the work required to produce it. thank you. w mtv just handed out new acting

awards in hopes it will break down gender roles. it that the day's weirdest story? there's competition. "top that" is next. whoa, this thing is crazy. i just had to push one button to join. it's like i'm in the office with you, even though i'm here. it's almost like the virtual reality of business communications. no, it's reality.

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>> tucker: time now for "top that." as you know, every day, all sorts of bizarre things are in the news. what's the weirdest? we created a panel to make that choice. joining us tonight, catherine lyons, managing editor at famous d.c. and erin mcpike, white house correspondent for ijr. catherine, you first. >> if you insist. lena dunham is making headlines. she's firing back at "us weekly" for using a picture of her d on the cover of their magazine without her permission andee associating it with the headlint

"20 slim do are using." she did not want to be associated with this headline, so she posted on instagram. she posted the image and a veryo lengthy caption saying that she has her own reasons for diet and weight loss and that she is associating her own with anxieto disorder and mocking the magazine, basically attributing it also to politics and planned parenthood cuts, and she's just -- >> tucker: planned parenthood cuts caused her to lose weight? is that a recognized weight loss technique? >> apparently, according to lena dunham. she's blaming politics. >> tucker: hasn't helped me at all.g >> scaring you into losing weight. >> tucker: can you beat that? >> mtv movie awards last night gave a gender-neutral actingke award not for the first time, for the third time. they did it again in 2006 and 2007.

last night they gave it to emma watson for "beauty and the beast." and here's the issue with that. this is ostensibly about women's empowerment, this could be good, but it's about women's empowerment and they give it to a disney princess. >> tucker: who is genderless, so how could it be empowering women if it's not gender specific? >> they gave the reward in 2006 and 2007. they brought it back the year after the first female nominee for president lost to a man. so that's why i think theyte brought that award back. but it's all about identity politics, people bring up identity politics when it's convenient for them. think about the rose garden ceremony, the victory lap after the house vote on thursday and a lot of liberals were upset because the picture was mostly white men and there was one woman in the picture. u the question was how could these guys know anything about women's health? i had a problem with that particular thing. sure, it was optically bad but there's only one democratic

woman on the senate foreign relations committee. there are zero republican women, and has anyone ever said a thing about it? no, they don't deal with women's issues. >> tucker: the gender-neutral part, that's not identity, the lack of identity, right? >> you see the point. they're bringing it up after last year's election. >> tucker: i don't evenhe understand your story but i know i'm against it. [laughter] but i like it. yours has lena dunham in it so you can't win, i'm sorry. you win, and you get today's participation trophy. >> weight loss is the last thing that needs to be politicized, it's the last thing that we have. >> tucker: thanks both of youu very much for joining us. coming up next, sometimes it's a company's brilliant effort to curb greenhouse gases by changing the world's eating habits. you're probably not going to like it, but your pet frog might. stay tuned to find out what that means.

♪ ♪ i'm dr. kelsey mcneely and some day you might be calling me an energy farmer. ♪ energy lives here.

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a cloudless day. burgers on the grill. maybe a few beers. here's the bad news.ou liberals hate virtually everything about that picture. very much including the warm weather and burgers, they are bad for the environment. how? stop asking questions and have a bug. have an insect. the left wants you to eat insects.ft new scientific paper says in order to cut greenhouse gases, people ought to start eating bugs. replacing half the world's meat consumption with mealworms and t crickets would cut farm land use a third, for reasons they never bothered to explain. of course it wouldn't be good for farmers. if science commands it, obviously we will do it. but you first. if i'm going to give up grilled meat for worms, i will need leonardo dicaprio to show me the way. i am in. let us know. that is it for us tonight.

tune in every night at 8:00 p.m. to the show that is the sworn enemy of lying, pomposity, smugness and groupthink. dvr it if you can. good night from washington. our friends at "the five," next. ♪ >> hello, everyone. i am kimberly guilfoyle. alongside juan williams, jesse watters, dana perino, and greg gutfeld. it is 9:00 in new york city, and this is "the five." ♪ former president obama just can't help himself. his presidency was one of the most politically divisive times in history. the former commander in chief seem to have a convenient case of amnesia when he lectured about the current political climate.ve >> our politics remain filled with