10/21/16 – Eric Schuler – The Scott Horton Show

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Check out the archives at libertarianinstitute.org slash scotthortonshow.
And speaking of the Libertarian Institute, on the very first day we had an original by Eric Schuller.
He's a regular contributor over at antiwar.com.
And we have another one today on day three here.
Today we're featuring another terrible debate reveals an opening for libertarian ideas.
Maybe we should talk about that for a little bit toward the end.
But first, Hillary Clinton and Syria.
Stupidity or something worse?
And you can find that at libertarianinstitute.org.
Welcome to the show, Eric.
How are you doing?
I'm doing great, Scott.
Thanks for having me.
Good, good.
Very happy to have you here.
And yeah, so stupidity or the plan, huh?
It's the perennial kind of question.
My best answer is, well, I'm pretty sure it's a stupid plan maybe.
But anyway, yeah.
So, well, I'll put it to you this way.
I just interviewed Danny Davis earlier today, former lieutenant colonel in the Army.
I think he had Iraq War experience.
He definitely, you know, he's the whistleblower from the Afghan war.
But he's very recently spent time in Erbil hanging around with the Peshmerga and figuring out what's going on there as best he can and writing about it for the national interest.
And he's going to be blogging for us as well over at the Libertarian Institute, by the way.
Anyway, so we're talking about just how contradictory all this is to oversimplify it, obviously.
Fighting for Iran and Iraq still for the last 13 years.
And yet fighting for Saudi and al-Qaeda against Iran.
And because it's against Iran, in Syria still for five now and maybe more than that.
But if this is an ingenious plot, then I don't get it.
I mean, I guess I can see what they're doing.
Well, you know, Ramzi Baroud has a link to this article in his piece at AntiWar.com today about the Israeli point of view that we want the status quo of endless bloodshed there to reign forever.
I could see that.
But in the broader sense of the regional civil war, it does seem a bit more ad hoc.
But where do you really come down on this?
Well, I think that's a very difficult question because before I had read the speech, these very candid remarks from Clinton to Goldman, I had kind of assumed it was more or less based on ignorance.
In terms of, you know, the Libya war, it kind of seemed like, well, you know, we're not really sure what's going on there.
Maybe we'll drop some bombs.
We'll try to do some humanitarian intervention.
Maybe it'll work out.
And then it didn't.
And well, we did our best.
You know, that kind of seemed how that story emerged, that they really thought they were going to maybe do something helpful.
And, you know, also there was a PR component to it in the Arab Spring.
But they really seemed to think that their plan would work.
And when it didn't, it was just, well, you know, you can't win them all.
But the problem with what we just learned from these releases is that really she's acknowledging all of the counterpoints that, you know, anti-war types would.
Yeah, these moderate rebel groups, they're really not the dominant players here.
Yeah, they're going to take over afterwards.
No-fly zone requires bombing civilian.
Well, not civilian infrastructure, but it requires bombing populated areas and all these things.
And so she acknowledges all this, which I would have assumed would just get glossed over in the policy discussions.
So I'm kind of at a loss to understand what the motivation is, given that the most obvious one and the public one that they lead with is very clearly undermined by their own statements in private.
Right.
Yeah, that's the whole thing, right, is you try to, for me, I sort of imagine the deputies meeting.
I was kind of joking about this with Danny Davis after the show, actually, that, like, if there was a Bob Woodward book about Obama's Syria policy, what is going on at these deputies meetings where this is the policy that they come up with at the end?
You know, is it all just a personal thing about who used to date who over there?
How do they come up with this crap?
And really, because it only makes sense.
It must be that for whatever, you know, internal bureaucratic reason that the deputies don't dare really contradict the principles when it comes down to it or something like that.
Right.
But then, as you say, and I'll ask you actually to go ahead and elaborate, even, you know, read if you really need to.
But but talk a little bit more about this speech and what all's in here, because this really does reveal that, you know, the the best case scenario sort of idiotic group think that we might presume when we're being generous to these people.
Actually, you know, you've got to put that kind of thesis aside.
She basically could be speaking for you or for me or for anti-war dot com and explaining why not to do it when she's explaining that that's what she wants to do.
It's like listening to Gary Johnson talk about heroin.
He gets 15 reasons why we got to legalize it and then swears he never will.
Yeah.
Well, it also reminded me of the scandal that emerged a little while back where it was, you know, the generals had been sort of modifying the conclusions of the ISIS war where you'd have all these reasons go forward.
Yeah.
The war looks like it's going really terrible.
And they've taken over this city in this city.
And then at the end, they say, but, you know, I think we'll win by the end.
I'll be a slight exaggeration, but.
Right.
Yeah.
So, you know, just one of the quotes from the speeches that is pretty revealing.
I'll just read it off here.
I think that we have tried very hard over the last two years to use diplomatic tools that were available to us to try to convince, first of all, the Russians that they were helping to create a situation that could not help but become more chaotic because the longer Assad was able to hold out and then to move offensively against the rebels.
The more likely it was that the rebels would turn into what Assad has called them terrorists and well-equipped and bringing in al Qaeda and its affiliates, which is, of course, exactly what any of us would predict that the longer a civil war goes on, the worse people come to the forefront.
She has a quote that explicitly says that later.
And, you know, this is 2013.
So now, three years later after that, if anything, the trend line is just going to continue.
And now she's.
When in 2013 is this?
What month is this?
This is June.
June of 2013.
So it's before the red line and all of that.
Yeah, just before the red line.
But a long time after the State Department itself had designated Al Nusra as just being a fancy name for Al Qaeda in Iraq and that they put them on the terrorist list.
Right.
And she's specifically calling out Al Qaeda in this.
And so there's no, you know, there's no slight of hand in her private remarks.
And she also kind of dismisses the moderate angle.
I could read that quote out for you, too, if you're interested.
Yeah, go ahead and do that.
OK, so the relevant part there is.
So a lot of so the Free Syrian Army and a lot of the local rebel militias that were made up of pharmacists and business people and attorneys and teachers, they're no match for these imported, toughened Iraqi, Jordanian, Libyan, Indonesian, Egyptian, Chechen, Uzbek, Pakistani fighters that are now in there and have learned through more than a decade of firsthand experience what it takes in terms of ruthlessness and military capacity.
And so, again, you know, it's just the same thing as Obama told us.
No, of course, moderate people don't participate in violent insurrection.
That's not what moderates do, at least not in a modern context where the.
I mean, if somebody somebody might be, you know, politically secular and want to have a representative government to be mad as hell and willing to fight.
But are people like that going to dominate the field when it's a field full of jihadis who don't mind dying at all?
No.
Yeah, exactly.
Yeah, man.
You know, it's funny.
And I'm sorry.
This is a total tangent.
But if I don't say it now, I'm going to forget about it.
This is a speech at Goldman Sachs.
And note how detailed and intricate her explanations is.
Boy, she didn't even leave off anybody except the Afghans when she was mentioning where all jihadis are coming from to help those Zarkawi fights fight in this war.
She's really giving them a detailed briefing about what's going on.
Right.
She's not giving a big speech.
She's basically she's like giving them a classified briefing, you know, more or less in a sense about like, here's what's going on in the war.
Apparently they're very interested in all this very inside baseball stuff that maybe regular Americans would think is not exactly the purview of a bunch of bankers.
You know, I mean, what is right.
What what investments in Syria or Iraq under the rule of Islamic State are they worried about?
Right.
Yeah, I can't answer that one.
Apparently they really want a very detailed briefing.
And she's, you know, very keen to give them a good one.
So for people reading into that, whatever they want, I don't know what to make of it, really, that she would be that detailed with with them as the audience.
I appreciate the fact that she's honest with them.
But why this detailed?
I don't know.
Well, and I appreciate the fact that, you know, I mean, again, like I'm, you know, obviously, you, we know that she's more knowledgeable and smarter than say, like a George W. Bush type, but I'm a little bit surprised to see this, but she really understands the dynamics as well as she seems to.
You know, like you said, she's been reading antiwar.com, I guess.
I don't know.
Well, here's the thing, too, man.
And this will be redundant with the Danny Davis interview, everybody.
But who cares?
Because it's good and it's important.
We know about the email.
There's an email from I think it's Sullivan to Hillary Clinton, Secretary of State, saying, hey, look, boss, AQ is on our side in this one.
Anybody can search me on Twitter and say AQ our side and you'll find it.
And then it was just a few days later that she told CBS and here it's short.
So I'm going to go ahead and play the clip for you.
We know Al Qaeda.
Well, I should say this is February, the end of February 2012.
We know Al Qaeda.
Zawahiri is supporting the opposition in Syria.
Are we supporting Al Qaeda in Syria?
Hamas is now supporting the opposition.
Are we supporting Hamas in Syria?
So I think why, you know, despite the great pleas that we hear from those people who are being ruthlessly assaulted by Assad, if you're a military planner or if you're a secretary of state and you're trying to figure out, do you have the elements of an opposition that is actually viable?
We don't see that.
So there you go.
Horse's mouth at almost the start of the war, just one year into this now five year war there.
Five and a half, almost six year war at this point, actually.
Well, in here, she let's fill her mind.
And in June, when she gives this speech, she has this line that says the other side of the argument, meaning the other side of the argument for intervention.
This speaks from a year and a half, not just half a year later, a year and a half later.
Yeah, a year and a half later.
Yeah.
I'm sorry.
It was a very good one, which is we don't know what will happen.
We can't see down the road.
We just need to stay out of it.
And and so she's, you know, acknowledging, yeah, there's a lot of uncertainty here.
And you square that with three years later that she's calling for a no fly zone.
And it's just.
It's because with her, it's always politics.
We know she knew better in 2002 when she voted for the AUMF for the invasion of Iraq.
But she decided, just like Biden and just like John Kerry, that, boy, I sure don't want them to make fun of me for voting against this war like what happened last time, which bill wasn't in the Congress.
But as governor, he had publicly opposed it and had tried and had to try very hard to live down that shame in 1992 after the glorious first Gulf War, when he was running for president against the first George H.W. Bush.
And so the lesson there was very clear for these more establishment Democrats when it came to Iraq or two, that they weren't going to make that mistake again.
And that was why she decided to vote for that war, just the same as with Biden and the rest of them.
So, yeah, that's that's the real thing about it.
Same as in Afghanistan.
You know, why should we do a surge in Afghanistan and implement a coin doctrine and all this nation building when we know that it can't work at all and that this whole problem is a tribal division.
And we got Cambodia slash Pakistan next door for safe haven for the people we're fighting.
And this can never work.
Do it anyway.
We got to do it anyway.
And that was the side of the argument that she chose.
And probably I'd be willing to bet anyway that it was just as much a political decision as any other thing that geez.
Or how are we going to how are you going to get reelected, Mr. President, in 2012 if Robert Gates and David Petraeus resign?
You know, so, yeah, how many tens of thousands of Afghans got to die for a political decision for her greater ambition?
Pretty easy to see.
Yeah.
And it does seem like there's a very big kind of passive active distinction that gets drawn in politics where the U.S. government does something and it turns out terribly.
Then, you know, the response is, well, at least we tried.
We tried to do something.
Whereas if, you know, in some alternate reality where it did nothing and something bad still happened, that would be the greatest.
That atrocity would be in the news cycle all the time, whereas the other one policy differences.
Right.
That's true.
And, yeah, she even said, you know, Libya, everything would be great there.
It said that they rejected all the wonderful everything that we tried to do for them.
They failed us.
Yeah.
Their fault.
What do you think in terms of I guess in terms of the politics of the current no fly zone?
I'm I'm still a little confused by this because no one's going to attack Hillary Clinton from the right.
That's not possible in a normal election anyway on foreign policy.
So, you know, I guess Assad.
Yeah, he is the everybody's favorite person to hate.
But they.
I don't know.
Are you clear on that?
Like how it even makes sense in the electoral politics of it to be.
I don't know.
She's made the bad.
I think she's made a bad decision, but I think I see the decision.
And the decision is to get the confidence of the never Trump establishment Republicans of the Bush types and the neoconservatives as well.
And she, I guess, mistakenly conflates them with the swing voters and never Trump or don't really like Trump very much type conservatives out in the country.
That what they want to hear is what Robert Kagan wants to hear.
And so and I think she's taking for granted and quite possibly legitimately that liberals are going to vote for anyway.
The base going to turn out anyway because they're going to be so scared of Trump.
They're not going anywhere so she can reach out to the right without risking the left.
And I would like to think that she really is risking the left by doing that and shooting herself in the foot.
I mean, to me, on the face of it, that's what she's doing.
But that presumes that liberals and progressives care about the war at all.
And by the way, I mean, you know, her lack of popularity among the left wing base actually speaks very well of them because it's pretty much her foreign policy above all that they hate.
So much so, you know, it's good to give them credit for that.
They've really given Obama too much of a pass, but at least they really hate her for it.
She's LBJ to his JFK.
You know what I mean?
They're all romantic about him and Michelle and all of this stuff.
But Hillary, you know, she's Lyndon Johnson.
They're stuck with her.
At least he's not, you know, Dick Nixon or Donald Trump.
Yeah, I think that I think that analysis makes sense.
I agree with you that I think she's probably wrong about that because, you know, the people that are opposing Trump on the Republican side, most of it's not really for an ideological reason.
So it's.
Yeah, so I think I think you're right about that and probably not risking as much of the left as we would hope, especially since, you know, it's framed.
And I mean, you saw the four year old boy in the ambulance.
And, you know, it's framed as a humanitarian intervention.
So the left's kind of good with that or like me, not the far left, but enough of it is liberals.
And that's what I break it down.
Liberal to me just means Democrats.
Progressive means a little worse on economics and a little better on empire and cops, I guess, you know.
And then left to that, the socialists you can usually count on to be good on empire and and good on cops and really bad on property rights.
But these are the these are the tradeoffs and the compromises we make to fight the empire.
Our friendships with some of these people.
But but yeah, no, man, she's the worst.
I mean, to watch that debate the other night where she just consistently hawked it up against Trump and outright calling him a puppet of a foreign power and all of this stuff.
And I tend to think that some of that Russia baiting stuff really falls flat because even though Putin and the communism is gone, it's still reminiscent of Red Scare.
You know, the Kremlin kind of still means the Reds in a way, except he's a businessman from New York and she's the one who's the totalitarian.
I mean, he's an authoritarian a lot of ways, but she's the one who wants to raise your kid for you and all this kind of stuff.
Everybody knows that about her, that she's the total statist in every way.
I mean, he might be a Nazi, but she's a commie if it was if she wants to come to that.
And she's trying to red bait him.
It seems to me like kind of a joke on the face of it that.
And in the debate the other night where they're like, wow, you want to let any Mexican just move here?
And she's like Putin, Putin, Kremlin, Putin.
It just seemed really way too practiced.
And yet she debuted it at exactly the wrong moment.
And it came out really hollow.
And like you could hear a pin drop in the room because no one was really nodding along, you know, kind of a thing.
I don't know, man.
And she's just the worst.
Only Donald Trump could lose to Hillary Clinton.
You know, I mean, and vice versa, too.
But it's just amazing that.
That she's even running.
It is one of the more fascinating developments of this campaign.
Think about how poor a job he did of turning that around on her and saying, give me a break.
I'm a puppet of the Kremlin lady.
The only reason you're saying that is because you're pathetic.
And there's nothing about you that you can say about yourself at all that anyone wants to hear.
So you have to make up lies about me, please.
You know, let me tell you about Vladimir Putin.
All right.
I'll handle Vladimir Putin.
You get handled by Vladimir Putin.
We see you, blah, blah.
He could have said that, but he didn't even defend himself well.
He like basically he almost acted like, well, gee, I don't want to contradict you on whether I'm a puppet of the Kremlin or not.
I don't want him to fact check that when actually it's total crap.
You know?
Yeah.
Well, and it's amazing, too, because he he did take part of what you said.
He just took the worst part, which is, you know, Putin just outsmarted you.
Just like Iran, just like Syria.
All of them have just outsmarted you.
And so implicitly he's saying, yeah, no, no, no.
They're trying to manipulate all this.
And they just you know, you're just not good enough protecting yourself.
It's like that is the worst.
That is the worst way to parry that comment.
It's just unbelievable because then he's, you know, implicitly acknowledging, yeah, the Red Scare is totally legitimate.
That's why you need me, which is the exact wrong way to approach it.
Yeah.
And of course, she's going, oh, 17 intelligence agencies, 17 intelligence agencies.
Yeah.
So what?
They get all kinds of things wrong.
You know?
Yeah.
You cited them when you when you fooled me into supporting the war in Libya.
That's what he should have said.
You know, I believe because you cited them then.
And I learned the lesson, man.
Never again.
You know?
Yeah.
Well, it is one of the most fascinating parts of this campaign.
Horrifying in almost every way.
But but yeah, the Republicans now are celebrating WikiLeaks and and Democrats are are scaremongering about the Kremlin.
It's just it's amazing.
All right.
So now let's zoom out this picture of the Middle East policy here, because, you know, this thing's been going on a long time.
And there's a lot of wrinkles and contradictions in it.
You know, we got the military is back in the Kurds.
They're not fighting against Assad.
Seymour Hersh says the Pentagon's been passing intelligence through the Germans to Assad all this time, undermining the CIA and Obama's and Israel and Saudi's plot and Turkey and Qatar.
I say Turkey twice.
All this.
Everybody involved in this plot to overthrow Assad this time.
All this time, the D.O.
D. has been basically refusing to go along with that.
And you can see why.
You know, Mark Perry has that quote.
I'm always quoting them complaining about the Yemen war, which applies to Syria, too, which is when it was a general, I think, that said, well, John McCain complains we're flying as Iran's air force in Iraq.
And that's terrible.
That's true.
But we're flying as Al-Qaeda's air force in Yemen.
What's up with that?
You know what I mean?
And you got even the dumbest military intelligence officer can tell the difference between Hezbollah and Al-Qaeda.
And yet the CIA apparently can't, you know, or at least they've gone ahead and chosen the Al-Qaeda side in this thing.
So and it's also true that Obama has refused to commit to regime change.
I mean, he's let the CIA continue to do whatever it is they're doing, backing and training and funding Arar al-Sham and these other groups all this time, Eric, I guess.
But he's refused to go along with a full scale regime change.
So, you know, maybe the policy really is like the Israelis say, to deliberately bleed both sides.
Maybe that's what Obama wants to do.
Obama didn't.
It's not that he changed his mind.
It's that that was his plan all along, was to just to try to recreate the Lebanese civil war over there.
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Yeah, I think that's a possibility, although it seems to me the most likely case is, I mean, I don't want to give him credit.
I know you don't either, but in terms of kind of the reluctant warrior narrative, it gets exaggerated very easily in terms of President Obama.
But there is something to it that it seems like he's trying to do as little as possible to avoid any sort of fight about it.
And, of course, it doesn't work because they still accuse him of being a peacenik, which is laughable.
But that seems to be a more, I don't know, a more obvious incentive for him to pursue the policy that he has.
Well, yeah, you know, our policy is completely different depending on which side of the PICO line you're on.
But at least I can work on my domestic policy or something like that.
That to me seems like the most likely explanation.
But again, I mean, yeah, you know, maybe.
Yeah, I don't have any other insights from that.
Well, it sure is something to see the Washington Post with Washington's foreign policy elite breaks with Obama over Syrian bloodshed.
Like they're not the ones who cause these people really not know that they've been intervening in this war.
They themselves have been intervening in this war for five years.
That Al Qaeda would have been crushed five years ago if they and their allies hadn't kept backing them all of this time.
And that their old buddy, if not outright, you know, allied best friend Assad would be in power.
And it would be just like the last 40 years of the Assad's ruling Syria that every president since Nixon has been perfectly fine with.
I mean, who are these kooks?
I just don't get it.
Seriously.
You know, oh, we got to stop the bloodshed by bombing Damascus.
And then once the secular Baathist army is destroyed and the government falls, then what?
When everybody knows this was the single worst mistake of Iraq War II, other than invading in the first place, was completely abolishing the state and the army and creating a free for all.
What do they think is going to happen the next day after the fall of Assad?
All the Druze, all the Shia, all the Alawites, all the three or four different kinds of Christians and all these people in a total war of their own home-baked militias against Al-Qaeda will only be at the end of chapter two of this thing, in the beginning of section two.
Right.
It's insane.
Yeah.
And even on its own terms of saving lives by through the no-fly zone or, you know, some other humanitarian intervention.
Again, that's another thing that she specifically addresses in this speech.
And I have that quote for you, too.
So, but the idea that we would like a no-fly zone.
Syria, of course, did have when it started the fourth biggest army in the world.
It had very sophisticated air defense systems.
They're getting more sophisticated thanks to the Russian imports.
To have a no-fly zone, you have to take out all of the air defense, many of which are located in populated areas.
So our missiles, even if we're not putting our pilots at risk, you're going to kill a lot of Syrians.
So all of a sudden, this intervention that people talk about so glibly becomes an American and NATO involvement where you take a lot of civilians.
But, of course, the irony is she's one of the people that talks about this intervention so glibly.
You know what it is?
I think maybe the context of this speech, I didn't read the whole speech.
And I guess it's just excerpts anyway, right?
But it almost sounds like just like the CBS news clip that she's defending Obama's policy that she doesn't really believe in.
She's just taking what she considers she's here explaining the devil's advocate position, where what she would like to do is go to war.
Or maybe this is her private position, it's her legit position, and her public one is just politics.
Yeah, I think that's where I lean on it.
So it is.
Yeah, I'm not sure if she's defending it because she doesn't really have any reason to defend it to them.
Because, I mean, I'm sure she was assuming this was never going to be leaked out or she wouldn't say half the things she said in those.
Still good manners not to directly undercut the president to Goldman Sachs when she just finished being Secretary of State six months ago.
Right?
Yeah, that's true.
That's true.
They do have some more as they observe, I suppose.
I mean, that makes it even worse if I'm right.
I'm just speculating.
But that makes it even worse, of course, if she's this good at articulating the Dove's point of view and still completely disagrees with it.
And, you know, it was a year after that CBS clip I played you was when she put the article in The New York Times saying, well, me and Panetta and Petraeus wanted to do it, but Obama wouldn't let us.
Complaining.
Right.
Right.
So.
Yeah.
And it's and of course, you know, three years later and Russia is more involved than it was then.
Like, do you think the air defenses have gone away?
Oh, that's obviously not true.
So.
Well, and their threats to use them have been renewed as well.
I mean, I think Lori and a couple others, I hadn't read it myself.
I'm so far behind, but they've been quoted on the show.
Oh, I believe it was Gilbert Doctorow was quoting the Russian guy saying, hey, we could shoot down any unidentified plane, which means your stealth planes.
If you try to fly stealth planes, we'll shoot them down.
I was pretty much a direct warning there that that's what an unidentified plane would be.
American military assets dropping smart bombs and that we're telling you now, don't do it.
And really, this isn't just talk.
We're serious.
We will shoot you down.
Yeah.
So.
Well, I think the only thing we can hope for as advocates for non-intervention is sort of that once the politics of this play out and she's elected, if she's elected, that maybe she'll back down.
From this position, because privately, she understands all the reasons it's a terrible idea.
But it seems like that would be a tough pivot for her to make.
Yeah.
Yeah.
And, you know, and when she's in there, hey, man, midterms coming up.
And the thing is, she's so old and rigid in her thinking that, you know, again, sort of like the way she's attacking Trump relentlessly from the right right now.
That, yeah, I think she doesn't really have the smarts to understand.
I guess the people around her don't.
Times have changed a little bit.
Donald Trump went in there and denounced Iraq War II in no uncertain terms and then won an outright majority in a 15-man race in South Carolina a few months ago.
I think these people are tired of seeing their sons get killed over some crap over there that they can't even understand, much less really stand behind.
You know, so.
Yeah.
You know, I think so where maybe the game would change and she could go in there and say, you're damn right.
I'm a woman and I'm a Democrat and I believe in peace a lot more than these terrible hawkish Republicans.
And that's why you would prefer someone like me.
Instead, she's going to be completely married to that old cookie cutter, obvious dynamic that because she's a woman and because she's a Democrat, she has to kill people over time and stay up real late every night making sure they're all dead, dead, dead just to prove what a tough guy she is so that nobody attacks her for being a woman and a Democrat.
It's the same thing Obama's done this whole time.
Right.
And where she could say, no, I'm the peace champion.
That's why you love me.
And everyone would go, hey, we prefer that.
She doesn't know that.
She doesn't have the vision to think that actually she could get ahead if she played it the other way, you know.
So, yeah.
Although, I mean, of course, 70 something years old, too.
So imagine how wrong about everything you'll be when you're 70.
You know, that's a terrifying thought.
I know exactly.
I'm sorry.
But she has shown to be, you know, very politically opportunistic.
So I don't know.
It is hard to imagine that there's some majority.
Only to the right, though, right?
Like, I've never seen her be optimistic.
Oh, no, I guess she opposed the Iraq War surge just barely.
She didn't really denounce it or anything, but she was optimistic toward the Dove side that time.
On domestic policy issues, she would move to the left occasionally.
I mean, left, right or, you know, also to the libertarian.
On, you know, like now she has a much better, at least, public position on the police brutality stuff.
Then, you know, she helped create a lot of the problems that exist or supported them at the very least.
And, you know, marriage equality stuff, too.
That was something she opposed when it was popular.
Now she's for it because it's and, you know, all these things where so.
But you're right on foreign policy.
It doesn't seem like she's had a lot of variability.
All right.
So now, listen, you have this other article here.
And thank you so much for letting me run your stuff at the Libertarian Institute, libertarianinstitute.org, everybody, to find Eric's articles here.
Another Terrible Debate Reveals an Opening for Libertarian Ideas.
Tell us what you're talking about here.
Yeah.
So I guess the thing that was most frustrating in the debate, other than just I seriously, obviously.
You know, it goes without saying neither of us like Donald Trump or Hillary Clinton.
But I did think the debates would be somewhat more interesting than they proved to be just of them trying to hack each other to pieces rhetorically.
And it hasn't really given too much of that, much to my dismay.
But.
So in in that piece, I'm kind of highlighting a few issues where, you know, they're basically pretty close to each other on immigration, Iraq, Syria.
They're promoting two versions of kind of the same policy.
And, you know, so on immigration, Trump is going to talk about the wall and Hillary is going to pivot to Putin to avoid saying she's for open borders, which, you know, so they're both running away as fast as possible from a libertarian position on either of those things.
And it's just showing how because libertarians aren't shackled by the failed legacy of both of the parties, you can have a solution that would be better politically and also obviously much better for the actual people that would be subject to the policies.
Yeah.
Well, that's my thing, too, man.
You know, I think election years, especially presidential election years, create great opportunities for libertarians because anybody who believes in these people at all, unless they're really in on it and really have something to gain from it themselves personally, they get pretty jaded pretty quick because all these politicians are scum and they're all liars.
And and the so-called liberals aren't really liberal and the so-called conservatives aren't really conservative.
And everybody ever believes in them always gets jaded.
And then they start looking around to see, you know, maybe there's something else.
A lot of times people don't pay attention to politics at all, except during a presidential election year.
And then, you know, you got people who are grown adults who are hearing the word libertarian for the very first time this year, just because, you know, in the scheme of things, it's not necessarily front and center in people's discussions.
And so, you know, geez, if if Hillary and and Trump are what the left and right liberals, conservatives, Democrats, Republicans have to offer, maybe there's something else to be interested in here and and something to see.
And I mean, these two especially just so horrible.
So, yeah, it's funny.
Like at the I don't know if you if you watched it, but at the Libertarian National Convention, they gave I forget what the exact word was called, but they and I wasn't there watching on TV, but they gave a Liberty Award to Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump.
Because, you know, there's never been more interest in something besides them.
And to the extent that libertarianism benefits them, whether it's the party or the movement, you know, like that's a great thing.
And obviously not their intent.
But, you know, I'll take it.
Right.
Yep.
Happens every time.
And, you know, I've had I've had leftists say to me, man, you know what?
Almost every leftist I know has run to Obama.
And I'm just standing here with you.
So apparently I'm a libertarian because here you are still the same as you were yesterday.
You know, OK.
Welcome to hating them.
It's easy.
So I got to do everything they say is a lie.
Everything they want to do is wrong and just oppose everything.
And you can never go wrong, man.
It's great.
It's easy.
Yeah, it's perfect.
It's the perfect all encompassing ideology.
No utopia at the end.
Just less violence.
A lot less.
Yeah.
And it's going to be a great opportunity once the election's over.
If it's, you know, if it's Trump's like, OK, now let's be on the same team again opposing the war.
And if it's Hillary, that'll probably be a little harder to make that case.
But yeah, I mean, all these, you know, most of I'm sure yours is the same way.
Most of your social media feed finds mostly liberals and progressives.
And it's, you know, all these people, you know, they're not going to follow the news as closely as we are on foreign policy stuff.
But, you know, we all want basically the same thing.
We want less people to get killed.
And that's a compelling argument.
And they just haven't heard it.
Or they haven't heard it in the right way.
So that's what we're trying to do.
Of course, that's what your new project's trying to do, too.
Well, yeah, see, that's the whole thing, man, is I was going to be real cheap and smug and pivot right to the Institute and self-promotion here.
Because, yeah, that's exactly the whole point.
One of the very first things that we're doing is we're already signed up to work with David Swanson and all the different groups that he's putting together to form a new anti-war coalition to tell the next president no to their first war.
So stay the hell out of Syria, for example.
And that's exactly the kind of thing that we want to do.
And that's another, you know, like you're saying, it's part of election year stuff.
Maybe all these leftists aren't going to become libertarians, but they're all going to become well, not all, but many of them are going to become much more informed about what's going on in the world right now, you know, just as a process of watching what's going on, being involved now.
So, you know, that ought to be able to help us to work with them even two and three and four months from now on.
Hey, remember that war in Yemen that you learned a little bit about last summer?
Well, it's still going.
It'll still be going by then.
It's still going.
We got to stop it.
And you don't have to become one of us.
Just work with us and let's create an alliance.
And Swanson's really got the right idea.
Groups of groups, groups of groups, groups of groups like fractals.
We're a coalition of groups that represent groups of people and groups of businesses and groups of other groups.
Nonprofit this and for profit that and everybody, the Fisherman's Association and the Quilt Lady Bee and everybody.
We want to end this war right now.
And David, I'm David Swanson.
I'm speaking for 50 million people right now who signed up for this.
We're sick of this crap.
You know what I mean?
That kind of thing.
We can do that.
I think we can do that.
He's already doing it.
I'm just going to try my best to glom on and try to get as many other libertarians and any conservatives we can get to climb on board, too.
And I don't know much about that stuff.
The networking stuff isn't my expertise, but I can imagine it, you know, how to get that kind of thing done.
You keep the focus narrow enough that there's really nothing to disagree with, even if your pet issue isn't included.
All we're doing here is opposing the wars and that kind of thing to get everybody on board.
And then use that as a model for Afghanistan and all the rest of the wars, too.
And the prisons and the cops and all the rest is work together to push a libertarian agenda, not just libertarianism itself, but to make America less bloody.
Yeah.
And of course, because it is much harder to, especially in my experience at least, discussing with people that come from kind of the left tradition of some sort.
It's much harder to convince them on, you know, full libertarianism.
But convincing them on anti-war stuff is usually pretty easy, or it should be.
And so it is absolutely, I think it's a great approach to, yeah.
It should have been me then.
I didn't have the idea at the time, and maybe it would have been impossible or something.
But what I would like to see is something like, you know, very early Tea Party, economic issues, Tea Party and Occupy have a conference together where, look, we're not going to argue about the central bank and the boom and the bust at this conference.
What we are going to do is we are going to demand no bailouts for any private banks under any circumstances ever again, if it has to be a constitutional amendment or whatever it is.
And on that we can agree today.
We can go back to fighting about what should happen with the Social Security Trust Fund tomorrow.
But right now, you know, let's amend the Constitution to say that any politician who proposes a bank bailout will be exiled, stripped of his citizenship and banished from the United States forever and all of his kin too.
And then we can use that as a model for moving forward, etc.
So that's the kind of stuff that's got to happen.
I mean, because really, you know, the Tea Party, the economic Tea Party at the beginning before it turned all hate Mexicans and abortions and whatever, and it was focused on bailouts and stuff.
There was a lot to work with there.
And the same thing with Occupy, a lot of common ground.
And unfortunately, no one was able to exploit it well.
And I guess this is a great way to get COINTELPRO'd.
I'm going to have to watch my back on that, but I want to try.
I don't know.
All right.
That's Eric Schuller, everybody.
Check him out at LibertarianInstitute.org.
Another terrible debate reveals an opening for libertarian ideas.
And then there is also Hillary Clinton and Syria, stupidity or something worse.
Both of those right now are still on the front page there in the daily article section there at LibertarianInstitute.org.
Thanks, Eric.
Appreciate it, man.
Hey, Al Scott Horton here.
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