02/04/16 – Sheldon Richman – The Scott Horton Show

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Hey, I'm Scott.
It's my show, The Scott Horton Show.
All right, next up is our friend Sheldon Richman.
The author of 10 million articles about why the libertarian answer to everything is the right answer.
To everything.
Welcome back to the show.
How you doing, Sheldon?
I'm doing fine.
Great to be back with you.
Very happy to have you here.
Hey, everybody, did you know that Sheldon is now a regular columnist at AntiWar.com?
Yeah, no, it's true.
And he also has his own great blog, which is called Free Association at SheldonRichman.com.
What a great name for a blog, am I right?
Latest piece is Cruz and Rubio Heirs to Bush-Obama Militarism.
But first, let's talk about Rand Paul.
So what do you think about Rand Paul, Sheldon?
Well, I'm not surprised, I'm sorry to say.
I mean, his campaign had been disappointing all along.
While he said some good things here and there and, you know, during his short Senate career, he did some things like protest the NSA.
I just think that never got translated into a clear campaign that gave people a reason to vote for him.
He made too many concessions.
He was terrible on the Iran matter.
I mean, he was worse than terrible.
He'd say regime change has bad consequences.
But, you know, that was just too weak.
Now, you know, maybe a pure Rand Paul foreign policy plank wouldn't have attracted a lot of voters and support these days.
I don't know.
But he did not give it a try.
He just got, I think, lost in the crowd.
And I'm not surprised by what happened.
Yeah, well, it's exactly what I predicted, that trying to be everything to everybody will leave him nobody or nothing to nobody.
I said it right the first time.
But then, you know, I was worried that maybe I was wrong.
What the hell do I know?
He's the one who's got himself elected to the Senate somehow.
I sure didn't.
So maybe if he does promise Sheldon Adelson to bomb Iran or declare independent Kurdistan for Israel or whatever the hell, then, you know, maybe that'll make him some money.
And then, you know, maybe Republicans who, after all, love blood more than anything else, maybe they would be, you know, appeased and think, well, geez, I think he's good on blood.
And I think he might be a little better on taxes or something like that.
But no, it just didn't take.
He failed exactly like he deserved to.
So I think.
But the question is, what lesson did he learn?
Did he learn the lesson that if only he'd been more like Marco Marco Rubio all along, things would have been better off and he'd be in third place now?
Or is it possible that he could learn that what was wrong with Ron wasn't his radicalism?
It was just that no one had heard of him before.
And so he was starting from nowhere.
Yeah, I don't know what lessons he's not asking me what lessons to learn from it.
So I hope he's asking people who would give the sort of answer you just gave.
Then if he was more like his father, he would have maybe.
Now, of course, you know, let's let's keep things in context.
His father had big crowds and generated a lot of enthusiasm, but he only came in third in Iowa.
Listen, as libertarians, we all know that we all know that we are the minority.
There are more communists in America than there are libertarians.
We know that the best that we can do is try to lead the best of the left and the right to the best positions on the most important issues.
We can't convert them all.
We know that we know that no one named Paul could win a presidential nomination in generations.
But that's not the point anyway.
You know, and as good as Ron's ground game was, they just call Rove stole it from his ass anyway, wherever he had the delegates to really, you know, the ground game to really get it done.
They just ripped him off because this is a corrupt evil empire.
That wasn't the point.
They were never going to let Ron or Rand be the president.
The point was to to move the ball forward as far as liberty and especially the arguments on, again, the most important issues.
Wars, torture, spying and lawlessness and all this horrible bankruptcy that it all engenders and the rest of it.
So anyway.
Yep.
But so, yeah, he ran as Jeb and then he failed like Jeb.
If only Jeb had Rand's, you know, whatever good qualities and would have the decency to go ahead and quit now.
But apparently he won't.
But so so if it's not going to be Jeb, it looks like the nomination is going to go either to Trump or to Cruz or to Rubio.
So you want to take us through one at a time.
What you see in these guys.
Not what you see in them like you love them, but what you see about them.
That's important.
I meant to say.
Right.
Well, the piece I posted today is on Cruz and Rubio.
And what I try to argue there is that the differences between them are not terribly significant.
I mean, the only one we can really find, the only difference we can really find is Cruz, at least at this point, is saying regime change in Syria would would backfire.
Of course, he's right about that, that it would backfire in the sense that it would it would leave bin Laden nights or worse running, running Syria, at least running rampant in Syria.
And he's right about that.
But on everything else, you know, I don't see a difference between him and Rubio on the on foreign policy.
If you look at his website, he's got a whole page on how how strongly we must support Israel in every possible way.
He's forgiving all kinds of money and military equipment to Israel, but not a penny to the Palestinian Authority, he says.
And I don't see it.
The neocons are not going to.
Neoconservatives are not going to object to that.
The language is very much like Rubio's, who the neocons seem to be gravitating toward.
You know, he wants to.
Well, famously, he's called for carpet bombing ISIS, he says, to see if the he can make the sand glow at night.
That sounds that that sentence just overflows with Christian benevolence.
Very happy to hear that.
Well, you know, he had gotten in a little bit of trouble, right, when he had he had used the term neocon a couple of times and said, I don't believe in all these crazy neocon missions.
And he got attacked by some neocons at the Weekly Standard in the or at least the National Review twice.
Eric Edelman and others had complained.
But did you see the piece by Rosie Gray about how and Ali Gharib had one, too, about how the neocons were making nice and Cruz was making nice with them again?
Yeah, I thought that was more marketing when he when he named the neocons and even used the term America first, which I'm sure someone must have said something about privately, like you better watch that.
You're going to get called a German sympathizer.
Yeah.
Sympathizer, which was the smear on the American First Committee, of course, back in the.
Cruz is in bed with Merkel.
The 30s.
So I thought that was just marketing.
And like you say, we don't hear him say that anymore.
And I'm not surprised that the neocons would be making peace with him.
I mean, it's possible to get the nomination.
And like I said, his position is not terribly different from Rubio's.
And I you know, and I go through in the piece, I go through some examples of that, especially about the Middle East.
And they're both, of course, want to, you know, not take any guff from from Putin.
You know, they got to sound they're going to sound like they're strong and hawkish and and willing to confront Putin if necessary.
He seems more.
Cruz is more interested in confronting Putin over Ukraine.
I think Rubio has talked about confronting them actually over Syria with an with a no fly zone.
So, you know, a libertarian interventionist is not going to be happy about either one of those.
And the point of my piece was to say it's not worth staying up all night in our arguing with people over who would be less bad, Cruz or Rubio.
Trump is interesting in this way.
He he sometimes strikes a pose that makes him seem more of a realist when he has said, hey, let Russia fight ISIS.
And I think he's also said it probably is not a good idea to knock off Assad.
And he has talked about arms going to bin Laden types, bin Laden type.
So, you know, he's made actually some good individual points.
But but overall, there's not there's nothing to comfort a non interventionist.
He wants the as he puts it, bomb the bleep out of ISIS.
That does that sounds a little bit carpet bombing, if you ask me.
And while he doesn't talk about making sand glow, he wants to take the oil.
But that's you know, no one ever examines him on that.
I mean, it's not like oil sitting there with a bunch of barrels on a shelf and you run in, grab them and leave.
You're going to take the oil.
Don't you have to stay?
That sounds like quagmire to me.
How come no one's asked him about that?
He never gets asked.
That's because he intimidates reporters.
Reporters are afraid to ask him.
All right.
Hold it right there, Sheldon.
We'll be right back.
I was Sheldon Richman after this.
Hey, I'll Scott Horton here.
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Welcome back to the show.
I'm Scott Horton.
It's my show, The Scott Horton Show.
I'm talking with Sheldon Richman.
And yeah, we're talking about Donald Trump at the break.
But we're just talking about the right side of the political campaign for this interview so far, mostly.
About Trump and Rubio and all this.
And we're skipping around.
I'm a very disorganized sort.
But right now we're talking about Trump and the whole thing about take their oil.
Yeah, it sounds like occupation to me.
And, of course, the Islamic State, Sunnistan, is where the least amount of oil is.
I mean, I guess there's some there.
But most of the Iraqi oil is down in southern Iraqi Shiastan and up in Kurdistan and near Kirkuk, which is being fought over.
But it's, I guess, basically nominally now under the control of the Kurds.
So what he's talking about is starting the Iraq War all over again against our allies that we've been fighting for since 2003.
To take the oil from them and then occupy their land and all of that.
So he's clearly thought this out.
He also said he's going to find the meanest son of a bitch general at the Pentagon to just go in there and decimate him.
You know, like we're just supposed to imagine the meanest armored division ever rolling into Mosul.
OK, so we're back to carpet bombing and the ground equivalent.
Exactly.
Yeah, Jeb was trying to climb on board with him, too.
Yeah, I think that the lawyers have way too much to say about how we fight the war.
Yeah.
Jeb, just stay quiet over there.
That's a little conservative line.
Get the lawyers off the backs of the general.
Please clap.
That's a little conservative line.
Yeah, you just stole my line.
I was going to say.
Oh, man.
Oh, man.
So there's not a lot to choose from.
And, you know, we can't even count on Bernie Sanders to raise this stuff.
I mean, he will mention Hillary.
I know we're now over to the Democrats.
But stick with Trump here for a second, though.
Stay with Trump here for a second, though.
Because so the thing is about him, there's a debate going on.
I don't know what's a debate about it, really, about whether he's a realist or not.
And I guess, you know, he's a nationalist.
Right.
So he's not quite a neoconservative.
He comes from kind of a different tradition than that.
But it doesn't make him a realist in the sense of like George Kennan and John Mearsheimer and all of that kind of thing either at all.
No.
Two things on that.
Josh.
Is it Josh Rogan over at Bloomberg?
Seth Rogan.
Over at Bloomberg had a column claiming that he's actually a realist, that he actually is a doctrine, that there's a Trump doctrine.
But it was a very unpersuasive article.
I mean, he quoted a couple of people who know Trump saying, oh, yeah, he's thought all this out.
He's got an integrated doctrine.
We're supposed to take our Rogan's word for it or what Rogan took their word for it.
So that was unimpressive.
I'd much rather look at Stephen Waltz piece in Foreign Policy from just the other day.
I think it's linked today at any war or either today or yesterday about where he discusses five of the candidates, some of them we've already discussed.
And you'll see that you probably already read it.
But anybody who looks at it now will see that Trump is not a realist in that in that sense of the people you named.
He's sure he's not he's not a neocon.
He doesn't talk about launching a worldwide crusade to bring democracy, the liberal democracy to the world.
No, he doesn't talk about that.
He doesn't say that.
But but, you know, he's not he's not trustworthy.
We don't know what he would do in power.
First of all, we know he's sort of an egomaniac.
So that's not the kind of person I think a realist would want.
That's kind of what Waltz says or what a non interventionist would want.
I don't think he thinks there are any limits to what he can do and who knows what he'll decide to do tomorrow.
You know, I, you know, I find it weird that people think his greatest virtue is that he speaks his mind.
Well, the question is, which mind is he speaking today?
He's taken many positions on the same topic in the recent past.
He's he's had contradictory positions.
So so I don't understand how we how anyone can claim that he speaks his mind.
What he does is he tells people what they want to hear and maybe that they think that's speaking his mind.
And on foreign policy, I wouldn't trust him for a moment.
He wants to have the biggest military is going to spend a ton of the military.
He says that at the same time, he says he's the least militaristic candidate in the race.
And then he says he's going to the military is going to be so powerful that no one will dare mess, quote, mess with us.
How does he define mess with us?
If China wants to take over those on what uninhabited man made islands, is he going to say that's messing with us?
I don't I wouldn't trust a guy for a second.
Yeah, no, I'm with you.
I mean, everything he says is a whim.
And it's clear he doesn't mean anything.
He says and it's clear that he's got, well, no sympathy for any other human on the planet or what position they might be in.
So that doesn't lend to the idea that he's going to be a very peaceful type of a president at all.
Yeah, it's troublesome.
And he doesn't want to pay for the war.
Yeah.
He's going to bomb Mexico.
And now the thing with Rubio, do you think he reads or anything or he's just he's got his talking points and he says them?
Or does he really believe all the insane things?
Because he basically just sounds to me like a parroting puppet of Bill Crystal.
But he does.
He sounds like a kid reading a book report kind of thing.
You know what I mean?
He sounds like he's reading some stuff he memorized.
I don't know him.
I never met him.
And I don't know anybody who knows him.
I've heard it said he's not too bright.
He's good at memorizing lines.
I'm a little disturbed.
I'm very disturbed, I should say, by his campaign slogan, which is always behind him when you see him speak, a new American century, which, of course, is a crystal phrase.
Right.
What was it?
What was the organization?
PNAC?
Yeah.
The Project for a New American Century.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Project for a New American Century, which was a neocon.
Does it still exist or have they metamorphosed?
Yeah.
No, it's changed now.
But it's still the same old guys.
Right.
The same.
So that was a neocon project to promote.
Well, you know what?
Right now they have the John Hay Institute and they have this other one is Beacon Global Strategies, which, again, it's just Eric Edelman.
That's all it is.
Eric Edelman, the guy from the Office of Special Plans that lied you into war with Iraq.
So, you know, I don't know why this doesn't get more attention.
I guess it's because for most people, it doesn't even raise an eyebrow.
But the slogan, a new American century, you know, if Putin was running for reelection and his slogan was a new Russian century, what would the neocons be saying about that?
I mean, there's something that's so arrogant.
It's this American exceptionalism on steroids.
You know, should Mexicans regard the century as the new American century?
Should the French or the Canadians?
Should anybody?
I mean, how arrogant is that?
It's not just they're not just saying, hey, for Americans, it's going to be the new American century.
No, they mean for the world, it's going to be the new American century.
That sums up in one phrase all that's bad about American foreign policy and this attitude that, you know, we're the indispensable nation and everybody.
And as George H.W. Bush put it after Iraq invaded Kuwait, what we say goes.
Well, you know, I wonder about Rubio, man.
I thought, well, he's got his little Herman Cain blip moment and a little flash in the pan and then he'll be gone again.
First of all, because white American Protestant conservative Republican voters, they're not going to turn out to vote for a guy with an O at the end of his name because they're, you know, at least soft bigots.
They don't hate Catholics.
They don't love them and trust them.
Wait a second.
Are they going to be fooled by the Z at the end of Cruz's name?
Well, I don't know.
I mean, that's a good question, too.
And they're down to slim pickings.
I understand it's not easy to be a conservative Republican right now.
He's a Cuban-Canadian.
Can you trust a Cuban-Canadian?
Yeah, whose candidacy is in direct contradiction of the Constitution.
I say that with tongue firmly in cheek because I think Trump, Trump just shows how pathetic he is when he tries to make a big issue of that.
Well, I don't know.
It is the letter of the law, but it's just the Constitution.
So it doesn't mean anything.
No, the letter of the law says you've got to be a citizen and a natural born citizen is one who didn't need to be naturalized and he did not need to be naturalized.
He's been voting all his adult life, right?
Well, no, I read a thing in The Washington Post said he did have to be naturalized.
He just went through the quicker process to be naturalized.
But he was naturalized.
So he was born in Canada.
Well, I'd like to see that.
I'll send you the thing in The Washington Post.
The thing in The Washington Post says that, like, hey, I'm no Obama birther.
That was based on a ridiculous thing that he was born in Kenya.
But if he had been born in Kenya, then that would be a problem.
Sorry, that's the law.
Even if his mom wasn't American.
His mother, his mother, his mother, we're getting off on a tangent now, but his mother was an American citizen.
And the English common law and the English law that preceded the United States said that you were a subject of the king if your parents were subjects of the king and you were not even if you were not.
Well, that's the point argued in The Washington Post piece.
I'll send it to you.
Yeah.
But I think I think I know.
I think that that's that woman from Delaware Law School.
I've seen it said that she is wrong.
She just doesn't know what she's talking about.
But anyway, we're not going to settle this.
It makes sense to me.
If your mother cares, the Constitution is an entirely dead letter anyway.
And Cruz isn't going to win the nomination anyway.
He's too much of a bastard.
He might have done OK in Iowa, but he's not going to.
I don't think he or Rubio is going to go much.
I don't know.
I don't know.
I mean, Rubio is just the same as Lindsey Graham.
Lindsey Graham got no support, you know, so I don't know.
And now we're out of time.
Sorry for wasting it on the birth of debate.
Thanks, Sheldon.
Sheldon Richmond dot com, y'all.
Thank you.
Hey, you own a business.
Maybe we should consider advertising on the show.
See if we can make a little bit of money.
My email address is Scott at Scott Horton dot org.
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