i'm saying when it comes to cheap ideology, chucking out statements that $50 million is cheap. >> i didn't throw it out, you pried it out of me, you begged me for an answer. >> we loved that so much, we decided to have number two. take a look another this latest rant of president obama which i call the abcs of "snl." >> this whole thing with obama saying the rich don't pay their taxes [ bleep ] and i voted for the guy and i'm a democrat. what else? >> no holds barred interview, hopefully in will be something in between the beeps tonight. a fat epidemic to end all epidemics is striking the nation. and a foiled plot against a u.s. airliner. the would be suicide bomber was actually a double agent working with the cia and al qaeda -- a dramatic twist in this story, it was already a huge success for the cia, now we find out this guy, the suicide bomber, would be suicide bomber was working with the cia. >> that's right, this was a big intelligence success. it's not easy to get a double agent like this into a group like al qaeda and the arabian peninsula. this is a great -- which is very harrah tornado about being penetrated, especially by the saudis. they penetrated the group before. so it would have been very difficult for the saudis and cia who prepares to pull this off. >> here's a big question i was thinking, was this guy a sleeper put into al qaeda in the yemen by the cia or was it another twist? >> it's not clear at this point, we just don't know those details yet. but to get into a group like al qaeda in the arabian peninsula, this guy would have had to walk and talk like a suicide bomber, someone they would give this device to. so it's possible that this individual had some connections to radical networks, someone to vouch for him so that he could gain industry to the group. >> it's a massive coup for president obama, another big victory in the war on terror. >> sure. >> two things, i guess, one the more sophisticated bomb they were working on, but secondly, this whole notion, potentially of having sleepers, agents inside al qaeda? >> will, first i these you look at it, yemen has become the hot new battleground in the war on terror. the cia is executing it's drone program there. i put on my skeptical tinfoil hat here, and say wait a second, all this information is coming from anonymous intelligence officials, we don't know the full story yet, was this someone who infiltrated and came up with the plot, was it more of an entrapment situation, or was it something that he intercepted what was already happening. and for obama, why are they making all these details public in this way? we don't quite know the answer to that, but i'm going to put on my skeptical hat and say, also with these intelligence things will evolve very rapidly over the next few days. >> this was apparently planned to coincide with the anniversary of the death of osama bin laden and it clearly backfired and it has become a victory for the cia and america, why wouldn't they revul all the details? >> there's a limit to their success. and it's possible that they were trying to get this agent into the group to go off to the chief bombmaker, in past plots, it was possible they were trying to get this agency to try and track al-asiri 's movements. they were able to take out a senior operational planner in the group, but they were not able to take out this very dangerous bombmaker who's ingenious at making bombs. >> tell me about the device -- >> we're learning details slowly about what the device was, but it seems to be some sort of underwear type of a device which they were trying to get eventually on to an airliner going into the united states. you obviously saw that before on christmas day 2009 with the ni gearian recruit, that was a very close call. the detonator worked. it was just the main charge, a substance called petn that didn't detonate, and the reason that that probably didn't detonate was that this underwear he had been wearing for three weeks. by ibrahim is someone who has learned from his mistakes, he's grown more sophisticated so the concern is he's still out there and he's making more and more sophisticated bombs. let me ask you a broader question, the tornado of al qaeda is that it's not really one entity. it can be a number of terrorist groups that operate under that mantle in totally different ways. what would you say is going on inside al qaeda as an organization? >> i would guess they're going crazy. the mastermind bombmaker must have found out that his cover had been blown. i would say they're panicking, they're shutting down all their communications which is sort of how they would talk to each other and basically trying to go under ground. they just lost the guy who we killed on sunday was one of the people involved in the u.s.s. cole attack back in 2000. >> but could it be more dangerous for america in the short-term, in the sense that there's no head, if there's no group running the al qaeda show then is there more dangerous for splinter groups that we have no know on the run. you can penetrate a network. how do you stop the one guy that has his own crazy idea. >> look at the week they're having. we had the anniversary of bin laden. a huge -- the biggest success that we have had in the war on terror. and then you have this case that they have, you know, caught this other bomber that was trying to attack the united states, so the fbi officials say. >> thank you both for now. now we're going to turn to our big story, the gay marriage battle. north carolina has voted tonight on a referendum to ban same-sex marriage. president of the family research council is opposed to gay marriage. why are you so opposed to two loving people getting married. >> it's not just me, but north carolina, it looks like 60% of the voters there are poised to adopt the state amendment, that will make 30 states that have adopted amendments that preserve the state of of marriage as between one man and one woman. >> if you look at heterosexual marriage, look at kim kardashian's marriage, which lasted 72 hours? when you look at marriage that lasts that long, clearly the respect for the sanctity of marriage is absurd. then you have a gay couple who's been together 20 years, who love each other, who actually really want to get married and who want to observe and respect the sanctity of marriage, is it. >> you treat it as a celebrity bag extension? >> you know, pierce i think that's a really good question and i a lot of people ask that question of themselves. quite frankly marriage among heterosexuals has not been good, when we see the divorce rate around 50 percent. my beginnings as an elected official, i have been working on marriage law for over 15 years. and the reason it's important, pierce, quite frankly is because public policy shapes the culture. and when we're -- what we're talking about here is not shaping policy or creating policy based upon an individual here or an individual there, but what the social science tells us is best for society as a whole. and it's very clear that children -- >> let me ask you about the social science aspect. >> uh-huh. >> how much more damage can a gay couple do if they're married to the damage they can do to civilization if they're unmarried? >> yeah, again, piers you're asking great questions because those are the questions that are going through people's minds. >> i'm asking you because you're so opposed to it. answer the question. rather than telling me how great all my questions are, answer some of them. >> i am if you'll give me just a second. we have got 40 years of social science research based on public policy change. no fault divorce was a public policy adoption, what that created was a spike in the 1980s. then we had cohabitation. we can't tinker with the definition of marriage and say -- it's going to -- >> do you have -- >> answer the question though, just to press you on the question. what more damage could a gay couple do to civilization -- >> it's the policy. >> if they're just live together. >> further redefining marriage, the reason we have cohabitation at skyrocketing rates is because we have redefine marriage in a way through no fault divorce making it meaningless to many, to the step of redefining it completely. if you're two people and you love each other, that's all that counts. the reason that society has recognized marriage with certain benefits is because the marriage of a man and a woman that creates children and benefits children, that's -- >> you have five kids, right. >> yes, i do. >> what would you do if one of them came home and said, dad, i'm gay. >> well, we would have a conversation about it. i doubt that would happen with my children as we are teaching them the right ways that they are to interact as human beings, we're not allowing them to be indoctrinated by the education system. >> so just to clarify, you would imagine it would be a personal choice they would suddenly make, they would wake up one day and decide they were going to be gay. >> no, i didn't say that. i think it's -- i would 67bd say -- >> you implied it because you said that they have been brought up in a way that it was unlikely they would be gay. my argument to you as somebody who supports gay marriage, is being gay is not a choice. being gay is not something you suddenly wake up and decide to be. so one of your children could be gay. it's not a question of the way you brought them up. it's a fact. >> yes, it is, it is environment, piers. i would agree with you that i don't believe most people choose to be homosexual as being gay or whatever you want to call it. i don't believe that's a choice they wake up one morning and make. i don't think it's genetic, i don't think the evidence is there to support that. i do think it's a product of a happening or environment or things that they are exposed to. i don't think it's a choice. i don't think somebody wakes up and says i want to be this way. i think in most cases it's the result of the environment. >> okay, tony perkins, we will agree to disagree. thank you so much. >> all right, piers, good to be with you. coming up next, talking about agreeing to disagree. i will welcome back jonah goldberg. are you ready for round two, jonah? >> i'm struggling to contain my excitement. i might be a rabid fascist after the break who knows? >> who knows. >> ding ding. today is gonna be an important day for us. you ready? we wanna be our brother's keeper. what's number two we wanna do? bring it up to 90 decatherms. how bout ya, joe? let's go ahead and bring it online. attention on site, attention on site. now starting unit nine. some of the world's cleanest gas turbines are now powering some of america's biggest cities. siemens. answers. 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[ male announcer ] we are insurance. ♪ we are farmers ♪ bum, ba-da-bum, bum, bum, bum ♪ breaking news tonight as cnn projects that north carolina -- the other big story, the return of jonah goldberg is the author of "the tierney of cliches. welcome back, jonah. >> thanks for having me. >> i fear we got off on the wrong foot, we went off on a little bit of a tangent about the story of the day, the -- i have done the gallant, very british thing of inviting you back and we can have round two, predominantly talking about the book this time. >> invited, implored, these are distinctions with a different, but i'm delighted to be back. >> this is the thing i find quite ironic, i think. after our last exchange, there was an assumption made i think by you and then by your army of supporters online, which becomes like a kind of -- like a new invading twitter, facebook online roman army, i was this screaming wet liberal who had been became zeifying the right. because i'm not a screaming wet liberal. i just lap to disagree with you on that particular story. now here's where i'm spin back the premise of your book. it -- >> i'm glad you brought this up, because the one question you asked me on the last show about my book, i gave you the answer, liberals and conservatives are it logical. lib rams don't even admit to it themselves and we went on to falk about the bin laden ad. you seem to be carrying more water for obama than -- you seem to be proving the very point they had made at the beginning of the show. i think it ties into your book. you had dan rather on, you had david axelrod. and the way you interviewed them, it seems to me, again from my cliched conservative perspective. it seemed the way you interviewed them was far less prosecute torl, you didn't question -- >> jonah, listen, i'll put up with this to a certain degree. let's just get it in perspective. i have interviewed far more republican politician this is year than i have democrat. far more. i somewhere interviewed rick santorum maybe a dozen time. newt gingrich six or seven time. ron paul, mitt romney, none of who have a liberal bias to them. i don't have a horse in the race. what i was reacting to was the fact that you came after the tierny of cliches of how liberals cheat. if you raid the book, you say, look, republicans do it too. >> bringing up this commercial with bill clinton and i happen to believe quite strongly, not from a left or right perspective or a screaming fascist or liberal rue. >> here's the thing, i agreed with you. more than once on this point. but you seem to want to put me in a box, saying somehow i was arguing and had no right to do it. the obama ad treated the question of mitt romney. and what i tried to convey to you more than once was that you were quoting mitt romney out of context. you don't he said of course you take your chance -- you didn't even mention the mitt romney part in your ad, and you tried to bully me arguing that -- barack obama didn't have a right to gloat about it. i would tell him go ahead and campaign on this. it's a very impressive thing. >> you must be the least bulliable person ever created. >> i said you tried to bully me, i didn't say you bullied me. you ask me these faith filled question on false premises and you wanted to watch the actual video. >> let's move on to today's issue, because funny enough, here again -- if we only met tonight, and this was the first interview we had done and we were talking about the raging issue of today, which i would argue is this issue of gay marriage, i suspect we would have a lot more in common about this issue than people would expect. but secondly i would be very critical of barack obama. i would say it's simply not acceptable to be president of the united states and to pretend that you are wholeheartedly behind gay rights but not to endorse gay marriage the way the president has. i think he needs to work out this before it damages his reputation further on this. >> i have never once called you a screaming liberal. i just said you proved the point that i gave you at the beginning of that interview. you said i don't believe in ideology, i'm not partisan, then you kept carrying water for the obama perspective that struck a lot of people as unfair -- i never called you a screaming liberal, never called you a fascist, never done any of those things. >> let's talk about the gay marriage issue, because you have got an interesting perspective on this. tell me exactly what your personal view is of gay marriage. >> well, you know, my position is actually a lot like barack obama's except i'm not lying about it. my position is evolving. i was for civil unions when it was a pretty controversial position for a politician to have. not that there was a dire threat to western civilization if gays are allowed to marry. then again i don't consider opposition to gay marriage to be some wholly bigoted and outrageous position to v leave it to the states of california, the people of california wanted to vote to legalize gay marriage, it would be absolutely fine with me. the people of north carolina would want to vote to not have it. that would be fine with me too. >> this is where i think you're quite a contradict try figure, again reading the book, you constantly come back to the fact that the problem with liberals is they don't have an ideology, they talk in cliches, they talk in sound bites, none of it really means anything. when i ask you about your issue of the day, you don't have an ideology do you, you're happy for whatever happens to take its course. but that's not ideology. if i was a liberal responding to that was essential to your block, i would say, okay, jonah, where is your ideology of gay marriage. >> i think with -- i don't consider ideology to be this hide your dogma, are you for limiting government, or expanding go. all this prichbs approximately about -- on this one of my key principles and i have written piles on this, the values and importance of federalism. push all of these issues to the lowest democratic level possible. let people live, the way they want to live in their own communities. i'm a tenth amendment guy. at the same time, just because i have an ideology, i'm a proud conservative, doesn't mean i have to have a lock step position on every single question. i think homosexuals are people. i think they have a right to sort of pursue happiness. a lot of the times the way we talk about gay marriage, we get it wrong. the argument of gay marriage is really the argument about whether or not the state is going to treat these unions as if they're the same as heterosexual marriage. it's a complicated question, at the end of the day, we're going to get around to gay marriage, and it will not be the end of the world. but burke is one of your guys, i think a lot of things take time. >> jonah, we have to take a little bit of time out here, we're going to come back after the break and talk about the book. i want to talk about jfk's quote, nothing to fear but fear itself. >> that was fdr. >> fdr not jfk. jfk is coming too, i've got them all ready for you. 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