03/09/10 – Anthony Gregory – The Scott Horton Show

For Antiwar.com and Chaos Radio 95.9 in Austin, Texas, I'm Scott Horton.
This is Antiwar Radio.
And now it's on to our next guest.
It's my buddy Anthony Gregory from the Independent Institute.
He's the editor over there at the Campaign for Liberty and also writes for LewRockwell.com and the Future of Freedom Foundation and a lot of other great things.
Welcome back to the show, Anthony.
How are you doing?
I'm doing good.
How are you doing, Scott?
I'm doing great.
Thanks for joining us today, especially on the short notice thing going on here.
Oh, no problem.
All right, so I'm going to tell you a story.
I'll try to make it short.
So I'm talking to my old friend and he says to me that somebody asked him if he supported Barack Obama.
And he said, no, of course not.
Barack Obama?
Why would I support Barack Obama?
Give me a break.
And then I said, yeah, of course not.
Barack Obama is an evil, bloody-handed, imperialist murderer just like George W. Bush.
And my friend said to me, well, you know, I don't know about all that.
I mean, you know, he's trying to wind that stuff down, right?
I mean, he ain't that bad.
And I thought, wow.
So after a year of murdering people and destroying liberty and stealing trillions and trillions of dollars in the most unprecedented heist in American history, or at least participating in it.
Obviously, Bush started it with the bailouts and whatever.
But with the unprecedented murder and number of wars all at the same time and rights destroyed and dollars stolen, he still ain't quite that bad, really, Anthony, they say.
And apparently that idea has pretty much stuck in the minds of the people who don't read Antiwar.com all damn day like I do.
So it reminded me of this great article of yours, The First Anniversary of Hope and Change.
Hope and Change that you wrote.
We talked about it on the show on the first anniversary of Obama taking power there.
And you really go through like the encyclopedia and just show us pretty much everything wrong the guy's done.
And so I was hoping to, you know, try to spread hatred of Barack Obama and his tyranny out into the ether, you know, to do my part.
So thanks for joining me on the show.
That's what I want to talk about, Barack Obama and the terrible things he's done.
Well, you know, Scott, it is true that, you know, if people support war and if they think the war in Afghanistan is a great thing and all that, then I guess it's hard to show them why they should oppose Obama.
And if people didn't like Bush for anything other than his accent or his swagger, if they didn't like what he was doing to the country, they shouldn't like Obama.
Of course, if people don't like Obama, they shouldn't have liked Bush either.
I mean, it's a cliche that all of us who aren't Republican or Democratic kind of partisans, we like to point out the similarities between the two parties.
But that's the truth.
I mean, the truth is that Obama as a warmonger and as a destroyer of the Bill of Rights and in terms of a lot of his domestic policy, too, he's a lot like Bush.
That won't prove it.
Well, I mean, we've got the, as you like to point out, one of the biggest problems with Obama isn't that he broke a promise, because we like to talk about how presidents break their promises, but that he's fulfilling his promise in Afghanistan.
I mean, the escalation of the Afghanistan war is probably the single worst thing he's doing and has done, especially if you include, of course, his expansion of that war into Pakistan.
Bush started meddling in Pakistan with a little bit of the drone attacks, but Obama has really ramped this up to, this is like a defining feature of the Obama year, or it should be.
This should be what people remember.
This is certainly what they remember in Pakistan.
This is certainly what people recognize throughout the Muslim world as a defining feature of Obama.
He's sending these robots to go slaughter people.
And so the war has expanded.
On the Iraq war, he's just continuing the policy of Bush, which is the Status of Forces Agreement timeline, although I read this week that they might have to stay longer than they thought, right?
Plan B is now Plan A.
Yeah, Plan B is now Plan A, which no one saw that coming.
But even if Obama had done what he was claiming he would do with Iraq, it wouldn't really have been that great, since it wasn't all that different from what it looked like was going to be done anyway, even under Bush or even under McCain.
Of course, we don't know what McCain would have done, for all I know.
He would have been even worse.
But the idea that Obama is this starkly different president in foreign affairs, it just seems so obviously incorrect.
I mean, was Nixon much different from LBJ?
Well, he let fewer Americans die, but he killed a lot more Cambodians.
So the basic policy is the same.
And of course, the thing that's so aggravating about this is Obama's changed the rhetoric.
He's toned down this war on terrorism rhetoric.
But as stupid as the phrase war on terror always was, that wasn't the biggest problem with it, right?
I mean, you could call the policy an ice cream sundae, but if you're slaughtering people, creating more terrorists, bankrupting the country, and trying to hold onto this unsustainable empire, it doesn't matter what you call it.
And he's got this ability to put a new rhetorical gloss over an old policy and make, you know, a lot of the left, well, some of them are very critical, and this is a great thing, but some of them have kind of either come to support what Obama's doing, or kind of ignore it, you know, because now everyone's arguing about health care and so forth.
But this has been a basic continuation of the Bush years, certainly on civil liberties.
Obama has been every bit as bad.
Well, let me add one thing to the wars here, which is the New York Times article about how American special forces and the CIA are about to help the so-called Somali government reinvade Mogadishu from March 5th.
Oh, yeah, well, there you go.
There's all the Somalia.
You know, we had this minor invasion of Somalia last year.
We have sending all sorts of weapons that are ending up in the hands of the insurgents, the bad guys, but often when there's a civil war-type situation or any type of war, the point is they end up in the hands of some belligerent.
Of course, there was the Yemen thing, right?
I mean, the common narrative seems to be now that we got attacked by the Underwater Bomber, or he tried to attack us on Christmas Day, so now we might have to go attack Yemen.
But it seems to be totally forgotten or neglected that the U.S. was attacking Yemen before, and the Underwater Bomber cited this as one of the major grievances, right?
And so, you know, it's like everything's backwards.
It's like they say about 9-11.
Well, if war is a recruiting poster for al-Qaeda, I hear right-wingers say this all the time, then how did they recruit all these people on September 10th?
Well, it's because they want to pretend that the U.S. was just minding its own business, doing nothing wrong, and then just like the Gulf of Tonkin or Pearl Harbor or the USS Maine, those barbarians attacked us with no explanation, no motive, nothing.
Well, you know, I think that's the one time I laughed on September 11th, was when the lady on TV said, oh, now they've awakened the sleeping giant.
Oh, yeah.
You know, like it was Pearl Harbor, and we've been isolationists through all the Clinton years, you know?
Yeah, now, you know.
You see what happens when you embrace isolationism.
Well, this is, yeah, and that's what they, you know, this is the idea that Yemen, were we neglecting Yemen?
No, we were killing people in Yemen, or the U.S. government was killing people in Yemen.
And, you know, Obama's foreign policy is just the total, it's just the total crime and disaster in every way.
Never mind if he's picking with Iran, because we don't have time for that.
But let me ask you about, on the civil liberties thing, you were going to get into the civil liberties Bill of Rights sort of deal.
And it occurred to me when the Democratic Senate and the Democratic House repassed the Patriot Act, and Obama re-signed it into law last week, that I'm used to the Patriot Act.
I mean, after all, it's been around for a long time, and it is pretty much just a permanent feature of American society now.
And what's really so bad about the Patriot Act anyway?
And, you know, aren't you pretty much used to the idea that, well, we just have a Patriot Act now?
Well, you know, of course, on one level, I'll never get used to our liberties being trampled and the Bill of Rights being trampled all these ways.
But on the other hand, I mean, even I start to, you know, Patriot Act is old hat by now, right?
I mean, it's like reauthorizing Social Security or financing the drug war.
And Obama has increased drug war funding, not by some alarming amount, but by some typical amount.
And yeah, this is just part of the American way of life now.
And that's a dangerous attitude, and it's a lazy attitude, and it's an easy one to kind of fall back into.
With warrantless wiretapping, this is the same.
Of course, remember when it was first revealed that Bush had been using the NSA to spy on phone calls and so forth without even going to FISA?
This was a huge issue until the Democratic Congress legalized it with Obama's vote in 2008.
And then all of this stuff's continuing.
You know, we've got warrantless wiretaps now, warrantless spying.
Well, and complete immunity to keep any lawsuit, any discovery, any remedy in the court system whatsoever, never mind criminal prosecution.
And these are felonies, after all.
The FISA statute is a felony statute.
It's not a guideline.
Right, and I remember Obama talking about, you know, when he was a senator, how he would make no mistake, his campaign said, we will vote against any immunity.
But then he voted for closure on that, and now he's president, and we have all that.
We have indefinite detention of dozens of people.
Guantanamo was supposed to be closed by now, but now they're thinking it won't be closed until the end of Obama's first term or after.
Well, now let me ask you about this, man.
You know, Glenn Greenwald has an article today on his blog that says that, damn it, once you sell out your principal and you become Mr. Pragmatism, now you've got no leg to stand on for your arguments.
And then he says, for example, when they did not turn Abdulmutallab, the underbomber from Christmas Day attack, over to the CIA and the military to be tortured, they got attacked by the Republicans, who, of course, their entire line about Barack Obama is that he's a sissy and he has to prove himself as a tough-guy murderer like them all day every day.
But then instead of saying, hey, forget you, pal, the Fifth and the Sixth Amendments are the law of the land in this country, and if you don't like it, you can leave, pal, and my job is defending that Bill of Rights, etc., instead he said, well, all we did was the same thing that Bush did with Richard Reed, the shoe bomber.
And so now, and of course he's already announced, I think he said there are military commissions for many or most or perhaps now all of the foreigners at Guantanamo Bay, rather than civilian trials like they had announced.
But so this brings up the question to me, which is a question that I hear at least subtly underlining the arguments of some of the guests on this show, even, who are documenting and talking about the very same things that we're discussing here today, and that is that, oh, man, poor Obama, he really doesn't want to do all this.
But he's got to deal with Rahm Emanuel, and he's got to deal with Robert Gates and with General Petraeus, and he's got to deal with the Republicans attacking him from the right and trying to accuse him of being a wimp all day long, and so it's just not his fault.
He really is a good and decent man, and we all really want to like him, and it's just all these things that he can't help, Anthony, that are pushing it this way, that are making it this way.
What about that?
How long can I continue to believe in that before I implode in a poof of logic?
I don't know.
Well, it is a shame that the Constitution mandates the president to reappoint the same defense secretary as his predecessor.
Right.
Well, yeah, that's what you say.
He chose these advisors.
He chose to keep so much of the Bush team around to elevate some of the worst ones.
And we see this in foreign policy.
We see this with the Fed and the Treasury, and he's choosing this.
And the thing is, he's the president.
If there's one area where he can unilaterally act, it's foreign policy in terms of bringing troops home and that kind of thing, trying people in court.
The Republicans have a minority in the Senate.
They can't stop him.
Rush Limbaugh does not have, there's no Article 8 in the Constitution that says that the president is bound to do whatever satisfies Rush Limbaugh and does not make him come off as a sissy.
And the thing is, no matter what he does, he's going to be attacked for being weak on terror.
This is one problem with Democrats, is that the political pressure on them to wage war and to kill and to strip detainees of their rights is even greater than it is under Republicans.
Because if, you know, I'm not saying McCain would have wanted to do it, but if McCain had wanted to do it and had said, we're going to try this guy in civilian court, And Democrats would have praised him.
They would have praised him and the Republicans might have still complained and he would have just been, look, I'm a Republican, I'm tough on terror, this is the way you do it.
And, you know, there would be some shutting up about it.
Well, here's the thing, too.
Here's my thing.
I think that, you know, if the public, and because Glenn Greenwald points out on his blog that this is working, right?
I mean, more and more the American people are convinced that we ought to do what Bill Kristol and Liz Cheney say, which, of course, is just their defense of Dick Cheney's torture.
They're just trying to preempt any possibility that Durham is going to indict him or David Addington or anyone else, which is a joke.
It's obviously not going to happen.
But anyway, the politics, the Republican politics is working on the American people.
And it's working in the sense that they see Obama as a wimp and also in the sense that what he needs to do to get tougher, obviously, is what Dick Cheney is saying.
But here's my argument.
If Obama acted tough by standing up for principle, then that would be just as well.
The tough meter doesn't really differentiate, you know, in the minds of the American people.
If he's standing up to the Republicans like a man and saying, no, you're wrong, we saw what you did for eight years, torture and lie and murder and destroy wealth by the trillions, you're the worst people in the world, and I'll be damned if we're going to do our terror war the way you do yours.
If he just said that, people go, wow, that Barack Obama's really got some backbone.
If he took your position, Anthony, everything short of abolishing the presidency itself, but he did so like he really meant it and was standing up to his opposition rather than bowing down before them doing the so-called tough policies, it would work better for making him look tough.
As you say, no matter what he does, no matter who he kills, they're still going to call him a wimp.
Yeah, you're right.
So in other words, he must really, and he's a smart guy and a smart politician, this Obama, which means that he must just be a sick, evil killer because he must know everything that I just said.
Well, he always wanted on the Afghan thing, right?
He always said we need to expand that.
Bush has been neglecting that.
And I think that he really believes that.
I don't know why he—whether he thinks that it's for the sake of America or whether he just wants to flex his muscles, that's his war now.
He's not—in fact, given that the conservatives are now split on Afghanistan, or at least on escalating it, you know, you're starting to hear conservatives say, why are we there?
Given that there are examples where Obama is being more bloodthirsty than even the conservatives are pushing him to be, I find it impossible to believe that he's just a victim of all this.
It's just like, you know, when conservatives defend Republicans for spending like drunken sailors, they always say, well, they have to do that.
Republicans have to do that.
But then when Democrats do it, you know, they complain, and they say they're socialists and so forth.
But Republicans have to do that.
And I guess liberals like to say that Democrats have to be terrible warmongers.
Well, then why would—if a liberal really cares about war and sees it as one of the bigger issues, why would they want a Democrat in power then?
If you know that Obama's going to have to be as bad as Bush, what's the point?
Why rally around him?
Why say he can change everything, you know, and bring forward a world of peace and rainbows and kittens and all this stuff, if when he does precisely what his predecessor did, they act like, well, this was, you know, inevitable.
This is just politics.
And it's not even true, as you said.
I mean, I would say that Obama has more leeway to unilaterally change things than Bush did in terms of the economy, you know.
The foreign policy and detention policy, civil liberties, these are areas where Obama could reverse things with a snap.
And he did start, you know, his first week in office.
He signed some orders, and most of these have turned out to be symbolic.
But he showed that you can do this.
He doesn't need the support of the Republican minority to bring troops home.
But bringing troops home is not his agenda.
His agenda is big government at home and abroad, just like the agenda of Bush was big government at home and abroad.
And part of that is war.
Probably the most important part of that is war.
And so, I mean, what do you expect?
This is a guy who always talked highly of JFK and LBJ.
And Harry Truman.
And Harry Truman.
I mean, if this is what the modern Democratic Party, there's this myth that everything has just gone wrong recently.
And, of course, conservatives love this myth.
Like, Glenn Beck thinks everything went wrong after that coke ad in the early 1980s or whatever.
And older conservatives said everything went wrong in the 60s.
But liberals kind of do this too.
They like to hearken back to, you know, Roosevelt and Truman.
But they don't understand that these guys were big warmongers.
That if you lived under Woodrow Wilson and you did believe in peace and civil liberties, you would have had to hate him more than you hated George W. Bush.
And, of course, I despised all of what Bush did.
Eight years of it.
It was horrible.
But it gets worse than that.
And people have no perspective.
And it's all about sharing on your team.
Yeah, you know, I saw last night.
And it's funny, too, because the further back in time you go looking at the history, the bigger your team gets, right?
So that, you know, I was watching Tom Hanks being interviewed on Stephen Colbert last night all about his new World War II in the Pacific.
And that's all this guy Tom Hanks does is produce World War II movies.
And Colbert even asks him, hey, man, seems like in a way, and, you know, everybody loves to love World War II.
That's what proves that you're a good patriot, especially if you're a liberal like Stephen Colbert in this decade, this time, at the beginning of the 21st century, this era during the first war of the new century, as George Bush called it.
You've got to kind of prove that you're red, white, and blue.
And you do that by worshipping FDR and World War II, the greatest war of all.
But then even Colbert said, jeez, are you helping to romanticize war and make people want to be in war all the time with this?
But it seems like, you know, still, even though he brought it up still there, they both are taking refuge in the greatness of World War II, you know?
Oh, well, everyone loves World War II.
And, of course, you know, if you bring up something like Japanese internment when talking to progressives and liberals, you know, they'll say, well, that was terrible, but the political pressure, you know, FDR had to do it.
Or the ends justify the means, and all the same stuff that they would use to defend what Obama's doing.
But I think that although there has been a distinct shift towards defending all these horrors on the left, the bigger phenomenon on the left is ignoring it.
You know, it used to be that the war was an issue, and by the war I mean all of it.
Iraq, detentions, torture, wiretaps, I mean the whole war, the whole war stance.
That was their biggest bludgeon against the Bush administration.
And now it's become kind of like an embarrassment or something that we can't focus on as much.
They've run out of energy.
I can kind of appreciate how people would, not everyone is like you, Scott, and can care about war passionately for, you know, a full day every day of your life, but it's really been relegated.
It's a secondary thing now.
Just like war was a secondary thing under Clinton.
Of course, Clinton wasn't quite the warmonger that Bush and Obama have been, but when Clinton killed people abroad, we killed people at home in Waco.
They still call that peacetime, you know?
Yeah, that was peacetime.
Even I'm nostalgic for that level of peace.
There's the Eisenhower effect here, whatever you want to call it, where after 20 years of FDR and Truman, the Republicans won the presidency, and they didn't repeal any of it, really.
And so that just meant that the New Deal was permanent, and so on it goes.
And then, you know, Bush, of course, inherited his imperial presidency from Bill Clinton, immediately started bombing Iraq and put his stamp on it, and did nothing but expand the power of the presidency and expand the wars from there.
And now this is what Obama has done, and this is what Glenn Greenwald really documents day in and day out over there at Salon.com, is the Obama administration's ex post facto ratification of everything that Bush has done.
Every time Barack Obama murders somebody or imprisons somebody without charges or spies on somebody, every single George Bush, Dick Cheney, dead ender says, see, now that Obama has the power, he realizes that this is necessary.
And you just can't not rendition people to Egypt to be tortured and whatever, because, you know, etc.
And so now this is, you know, like the Patriot Act, this is all just permanence now.
Guess what?
It'll never be repealed, ever.
That act that created that thing?
Not until America falls.
And, you know, speaking of renditioning, this is an area where in some ways it's gotten worse, because last year we had Obama's first victim of renditioning, a guy named Azar, who was, he wasn't even an accused terrorist.
It was because he supposedly knew about a white collar crime.
He supposedly knew that there was corruption involved in defense contracting.
And so they put him in stress positions.
They said that he'd never see his family, you know, the light and dark stuff, the sleep deprivation.
He must have volunteered to be a witness or something.
Well, but, you know, this is really troubling, because, well, first of all, the idea that corruption and defense contracting is some sort of unusual crime, right?
I mean, there's probably thousands of Americans who are aware of defense contracting fraud, but I don't think even they should be.
I don't think even military-industrial-complex people should be tortured.
But this stuff is going on.
We've got this assassination policy toward American citizens abroad.
And, you know, you talk to progressives today.
Some of them, you've got to give them credit, the ones who have stayed focused on this.
But as a movement, they have a different agenda.
And it seems to me that they spend more time attacking the Tea Parties and Sarah Palin, whom I have a lot of criticisms of, as you know, but they're not the ones who are— they have some effect on the discourse, and some of that effect is probably negative regarding Obama being weak on terror.
But in the end, the real threat to the country and the real threat to people's lives is the government.
And you started to see progressives kind of get this under Bush, where they went beyond just attacking Bush.
They started reading about Vietnam again.
They started—you know, they go to V for Vendetta.
The government should be afraid of the people.
But all of a sudden, you know, criticizing the government should be—is considered some sort of treason.
And it's not—I don't want to speak in too broad terms, because there's no uniformity.
The left is not a monolith.
But the overall Obama movement, which had previously said that it was dedicated to all these high principles, has really just betrayed these principles.
You look at the polls, Americans are more pro-torture than they were at the end of Bush.
They're more pro-war.
They all—you know, I saw on antiwar.com how the 71% think that Iran has nuclear weapons.
I mean, the war propaganda is working better now, because not only did we see this kind of switch with the mask of the empire, which was what Carol Quigley liked to talk about, not only have we seen a new veneer to same policies, but it's a very slick veneer that people think of, oh, well, he's a Chicago liberal.
Right, we have a fresh-faced, energetic new team to carry out the same basic policies, right?
Thank you very much, Anthony.
Thank you, Scott.
Great work.
And unfortunately, you're terribly right.
Yeah, well, he is.
All right, that's Anthony Gregory.
He is soon to be an unprivileged enemy belligerent, but for now he writes at the Independent Institute, that's independent.org, the Future Freedom Foundation at fff.org, and lourockwell.com.
And he's the editor over there at the Campaign for Liberty.