11/19/15 – JP Sottile – The Scott Horton Show

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Hey, I'm Scott, welcome back.
It's my show.
Next up is J.P. Sotilli.
The News Vandal.
Newsvandal.com, that's his site.
Here he is writing at ConsortiumNews.com.
Neocons make Rubio their favorite.
Really great article, we're running it today on Antiwar.com as well.
Welcome back to the show, J.P., how you doing, man?
Good to be with you.
It's great that these guys always come up with a new project.
I call this the Project to Elect a New American Centurion.
Because you know Marco Rubio, he's all about truth in political advertising, which does set him apart from most political advertising.
Marco Rubio, a new American century.
Doesn't it just have a familiar ring to it, Scott?
It sure does, it sounds absolutely horrifying.
And you're right, he is absolutely honest.
Wears it on his sleeve, says Hillary and Obama's war in Libya only failed in the degree to which it wasn't big enough.
Should have invaded instead.
And also criticizing Republicans within his own party for not being forceful and belligerent enough about creating that vacuum in Libya and then going in and filling it, I assume, with nation-building U.S. troops.
I mean this is kind of the riff that's going on inside the Republican Party, which is so fascinating, is that Rubio is positioning himself or being positioned or a combination of the two things to be the chief establishment alternative to Trump.
And Trump, who Reason pointed out, has sort of a hyper-belligerent isolationism, sort of a militaristic isolationism.
But Trump has been decidedly against putting U.S. troops on the ground, invading 10,000 strong force that Lindsey Graham wants into Syria and has criticized the vacuums created by Obama and Hillary's intervention.
I'm calling it Obama and Hillary, their intervention in Libya.
And of course the great neocon success, the great neocon achievement, the toppling of Saddam Hussein.
Well, and their toppling of the Ba'athists' power over about half of the landmass of Syria, too.
Yeah.
For that matter.
Well, you were talking about Sy Hersh earlier in your show.
Oh, yeah.
And I just keep coming back to the piece that ran, was it last?
I think it was last spring about the rat line of weapons coming out of Benghazi from the fallen regime of Gaddafi through Turkey into Syria.
And the United States, why was the CIA annexed there in Benghazi?
Was it because they were monitoring weapons shipments?
But we don't want to talk about Sy Hersh's report, and we just kind of forget about that and write that off.
Right.
Judicial Watch has the documents now, the best work Judge Napolitano has ever done, and he's written a lot of great essays.
But his stuff, he's done original journalism on those Judicial Watch documents and what all they show about Hillary hiring Qataris as her cutouts to help run the gun operation there in Libya, et cetera, like that, and knowing full well, conceding that it's illegal.
That's why we're doing it this way.
It's undeniable and this kind of thing right there in it.
So no doubt about that.
But so now wait, let's rewind back to the start of this article and what it's really about here is Jeb.
Jeb's horrifying failure, horrifying from the point of view of Jeb and horrifying from the point of view of the power elite.
Could anyone have predicted that he would be this horrible at running for president?
He is just absolutely a dud, and it's really something else.
I mean, I've been saying, yeah, just wait till Jeb comes as kind of a cliche for the last four or five years, and now it's looking like, jeez, I don't know.
And I guess, you know, Bill Kristol and all them, maybe they're the proof that Jeb is still in it if they've given up on him.
But the neocons have decided on Rubio, which just goes to prove, again, how completely idiotic they are if they think that Rubio is ever going to take off and become a popular candidate among the American people.
He's just not, and especially among Republicans when he's got a vowel at the end of his name.
He's Hispanic, for Christ's sake.
The only thing they like about Trump is that he hates Mexicans, and they're going to nominate a guy named Rubio?
I mean, anybody who thinks that is stupid, or they're so caught up in political correctness that they can't even identify their neighbors as bigots when they are.
For Christ's sake, Rubio and Cruz are Hispanic.
They're not going anywhere in the Republican Party whatsoever.
And the fact that Bill Kristol thinks so is the final proof that's all you need.
So, you know, we ought to be talking about Carson or whoever else, because it sure as hell is not this clown.
Well, I mean, this to me is the fascinating part of this.
One, it's really about the litmus test, interventionist or isolationist, right?
Rubio made a little bit of hay in the last debate, accusing Rand Paul of being an isolationist.
And inside the Beltway, this is the ultimate litmus test on either side of the political spectrum.
You know, you can't be called an isolationist within the Democratic Party either.
By the way, Hillary giving her sweeping speech on the heels of Jeb's sweeping speech yesterday, Jeb saying he was going to rebuild the American military, which is something that Rubio has been saying he's going to do for a long time, because, you know, you've got to rebuild a military that outspends the next 10 countries combined.
You've got to rebuild that.
Always got to rebuild.
Hillary today ramping up the rhetoric saying, you know, we need to have more troops, but I don't really want to have an invasion a la Lindsey Graham into Syria.
So everybody's sort of picking up on this interventionist meme, right, which is there.
And if you are against intervention in any way, shape or form, you get blacklisted inside the Beltway.
And I think inside this bubble, Scott, they're looking at Rubio and they're saying, well, you know, he kind of hits all the marks.
He's young.
The tech industry likes him.
He's a fresh face.
Maybe he can get Hispanics.
Oh, and by the way, he has his own plan to rebuild America's military to the tune of a trillion dollars over the next six to 10 years, in addition to the trillion dollars plus in defense related spending that the United States already spends, which is apparently not enough, particularly according to Max.
Don't call me Jack Boot over in commentary, who says we do not have a serious defense budget.
Which is great.
I like the nickname and what a clown that guy is.
And I mean, it's a great job he does of setting the standard, you know, putting down the mark of this is what us idiot neocons believe.
Well, you know, Scott, I do put out this thing called the rundown five days a week and I read it every morning.
I go to a lot of different sources and I force myself to go to commentary every day.
What they're saying.
And you look at Max Boot and Noah Rothman and the hysteria of it is amazing.
And I think this is one of the things that I find fascinating about the entire Rubio candidacy, because circa 2006, when the project for a new American century finally pulled the plug, that's when the war in Iraq was finally going very badly.
Public opinion was going the other direction and the neocon agenda seemed to be in retreat.
And, you know, they went back to the American Enterprise Institute.
They went to the Weekly Standard.
They went to commentary.
They pen their little petulant columns and they've been kind of biding their time, but not really, because I think all along they felt, look, if Jeb is the is obviously the best way into the executive branch again, at least that's what they identified.
Jeb wins.
His foreign policy team is made up of Wolfowitz and company.
We'll get right back in.
We'll pull the plug on the Iran deal somehow, maybe by putting in additional sanctions and trying to derail that.
And really, you know who they're really after?
You know who they really, really, really don't like?
It's Putin.
It's Russia.
It's the Cold War.
I mean, they don't like Iran and they wanted they they'd like destabilizing the Middle East.
But I'll tell you, they really, really want to lay down the law with Putin.
And of course, Rubio says if he is elected, he will treat Putin like a gangster.
Yeah.
Well, and by the way, just for the quotes, if people look at Trevor Tim's recent piece at the Guardian, not to take away from what you've written here, J.P., but at the Guardian, he has these, you know, extended block quote after block quote after block quote of all the different Republican candidates on their complete Russia insanity.
I encourage people to go look at that.
Republican presidential candidates would jump straight into war with Russia.
He says we'll be right back in just one sec, J.P. and everybody with J.P. and just say, hey, I'll Scott Horton here for MPV Engineering.
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All right, you guys, welcome back to the show.
It's my hilarious show, the Scott Horton show.
I'm talking with J.P. Sotili.
Man, you got to read this article.
It's really great.
It's at ConsortiumNews.com.
Neocons make Rubio their favorite.
And come on, brain, help me out.
We're running this today at Antiwar.com, right?
Yeah, today at Antiwar.com.
You can find the link.
This clown, Marco Rubio, who couldn't tell you the difference between Sunni and Shia, Iran, Saudi Arabia, the Islamic State, his ass from his elbow, or a hole in the ground.
And who's even a worse warmonger than Rand Paul, if you can believe that.
J.P., so you were saying at the break there that, you know, these neocons, yeah, sure they hate Iran, but who they really hate is Vladimir Putin in the Kremlin in Moscow, and that if Jeb or any of these right-wing clowns become the president, then surely we're doomed as they all come straight back to power.
But so then, of course, well, you can say whatever you want, or you could answer my question along the lines of, how much better off are we stuck with Hillary Clinton, Victoria Nuland, Robert Kagan's wife's best friend, the lady who put her in charge?
Well, and as you probably remember, I wrote about the agricultural interests who were salivating over getting into and exploiting what used to be the breadbasket of the Soviet Union.
That would be the fertile black soil of Ukraine.
Now, wait a minute.
Tell me again the title of that article, because I really want people to go back and look at that.
Well, I can't remember what the title was on Consortium News.
It was The Corporate Interest Behind Ukraine Putsch.
That's right.
That's how Bob Perry, the great Bob Perry, Robert Perry – I'm telling you, Consortium News, that guy is something else, one of the guys who broke Iran-Contra.
But this – it shows you how ossified the thinking is among the neocons because they are still in many ways fighting the Cold War.
I think in the 1990s they were sort of wandering around in the wilderness.
Luckily for them, I guess you can put it, the Islamic fundamentalism that the United States, Saudi Arabia, the CIA developed to fight the Soviet Union ended up giving them the gift of the opportunity to continue to spread their global – their idea of global hegemony, because that's really what this is about, right?
Full-spectrum dominance by the United States of the entire planet, all the way from microbes to space.
They want to dominate everything militarily.
But the thing about Islamic fundamentalism is, as we've seen, it flares up but then it goes away.
It flares up, it goes away.
Russia is always going to be there and Russia has the one thing that makes them not as susceptible to full-spectrum dominance as most other powers and that's a massive nuclear arsenal.
So one of the things that Iraq proved is that if you don't have WMDs, you are very likely to be targeted.
If you have WMDs like North Korea, you can kind of stay there protected.
Their thinking about Russia I think does trace all the way back to the 50s, the 60s, the 70s and the founding of the neocon movement.
But here's the irony.
What are the pass keys to dealing with the Islamic State?
Hmm, Iran and Russia.
Go figure.
Right, of course.
Well, that's why the U.S. has been on the side of the mujahideen since 2007.
As you mentioned before, that Hirsch piece, the redirection.
And that's another one at Consortium News, by the way, that's running right now, Lost on the Dark Side by Alistair Crook, which is great about all the horrible ironies and who's fighting on whose side here.
But, Scott, I want to mention something else too about this Rubio campaign that I think is really important.
And the National Journal has done a lot of reporting on this and there are three organizations that are trying to do something about it, Democracy 21 and the Campaign Legal Center and Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington crew.
They're all pointing out that Rubio's campaign is being funded and propelled by something called the Conservative Solutions Project.
Again, these guys love projects, right?
Project to a New American Century, Conservative Solutions Project.
Conservative Solutions Project is a 501c4 social welfare organization, according to the IRS.
That means that their primary charter to have this exemption, this nonprofit exemption, is that they are there to promote social welfare.
What this also means is that all of their donors can remain secret.
The amounts that the donors give can remain secret, unlike super PACs, right, where you can spend unlimited amounts and you can't coordinate with a campaign, but you can spend all the money you want, but you have to disclose.
There's no disclosure on this 501c4 organization designation.
Well, the interesting thing is that Conservative Solutions Project, which also has an agenda for American exceptionalism on their website, which sounds a heck of a lot, like Marco Rubio's project to rebuild America's military, one thing they've been doing is spending a lot of money running ads for Marco Rubio, $3 million worth of ads touting Rubio's anti-Iranian stance, anti-Iran nuke deal stance over the summer, another $3 million in ads showing Rubio at the Iowa State Fair.
They're slated to spend, they've already purchased $2 million worth of ads.
That's $8 million worth of ads total.
And here's the language from the IRS.
The promotion of social welfare does not include direct or indirect participation or intervention in political campaigns on behalf of or in opposition to any candidate for public office.
Huh, that's funny.
Well, the spokesperson for the Conservative Solutions Project, a guy named Jeff Sadowski, he says, no, no, no, we're actually promoting social welfare.
We're not just about promoting Marco Rubio.
We have a couple other ways we're promoting other Republican candidates.
But here's the funny thing.
Jeff Sadowski does double duty as spokesperson for the Conservative Solutions PAC, which is the pro-Marco Rubio PAC, which also has raised money, $16 million, in addition to the $15 million that the project has raised.
And he's doing double duty for both, even though neither of these things are supposed to be coordinating with Marco Rubio's campaign, but they seem to be because Marco Rubio's campaign hasn't had to spend much money because the project, which is a nonprofit social welfare organization, has been doing all of the ad buys and Marco Rubio's official campaign has not had to spend any money practically at all.
But so you do know it is public who's given to the PAC, if not the project, right?
And that's right.
So here's the thing.
So you have the usual suspects, right?
Sheldon Adelson is actually rumored to have given or is slated to give to the project.
Now, that would not be disclosed.
But all of the people who have been given to have been giving to the PAC are probably also giving to the project.
And you've got, you know, Norman Brauman.
He's a sort of an auto dealer magnate from Florida who has also been a champion of Rubio his entire career.
And I believe Rubio's wife is employed part time with Norman Brauman's family foundation.
And then you got Paul Singer, Paul Singer, who publicly endorsed Rubio after the CNBC dumpster fire debate.
He says he's going to give ten million dollars.
Now, that's the public giving.
Well, we don't know because the project, which is all nondisclosed giving, has also raised close to 16 million dollars.
We don't know who gave to that.
I mean, was it a billionaire hedge fund political kingmaker?
Seth Klarman is at Home Depot founder Bernard Marcus.
They've been pumping huge amounts of money into anti Iran candidates over the last two election cycles.
We don't know if they've given, but boy, that sucks because I love that store, man.
But now I got to go to Lowe's and then you got to go to Lowe's.
But so here's this is the thing.
There's this subterfuged additional campaign, which, by the way, is illegal.
And the amazing thing to me is that although you have these organizations petitioning the IRS for an investigation and National Journal doing the reporting, here is Rubio cruising along and nobody's pointing out in the mainstream media.
Surprise, surprise.
The fact that he has this wholly illegal campaign promoting him.
But, you know, JP, the part of this that bothers me the most is that people are just pissing this much money away.
I mean, this is fortunes that could save the lives of dying people there.
Well, any of these guys have convinced themselves that they could possibly sell Marco Rubio to the American people is just amazing to me.
I almost can't believe that anybody believes that.
And I guess I could see them trying to run the stop Rand front like they have anything to fear from him.
But Rand Paul, I don't.
That is one of the great sort of anomalies.
He seemed to this seemed to be a great election cycle opportunity for him.
He's running as Jeb Bush.
He's running as he starts his campaign in front of a battleship.
I mean, come on.
You know, I mean, that's not you're not going to keep your libertarians.
And I think this is the fascinating thing about Trump.
Here you have a guy who is not running in the Sheldon Adelson primary, a guy who says he wants to work with Putin, Putin and a guy who called both Bush and Rubio puppets.
He is a string list candidate.
And boy, has he upset the establishment's apple cart.
Yeah.
All right.
That's it.
See you all tomorrow.
Thanks, JP.
JP.
So till you go.
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