Sorry I'm late.
I had to stop by the Whites Museum again and give the finger to FDR.
We know Al-Qaeda, Zawahiri, is supporting the opposition in Syria.
Are we supporting Al-Qaeda in Syria?
It's a proud day for America.
And by God, we've kicked Vietnam syndrome once and for all.
Thank you very, very much.
I say it, I say it again.
You've been hacked.
You've been took.
You've been hoodwinked.
These witnesses are trying to simply deny things that just about everybody else accepts as fact.
He came, he saw, he died.
We ain't killing they army, but we killing them.
We be on CNN like, say our names, man, say it, say it three times.
The meeting of the largest armies in the history of the world.
Then there's going to be an invasion.
All right, you guys.
Introducing Patrick Martin from the World Socialist website, in keeping with the theme of attacking the left from the left and the right from the right.
Very important work here.
A three-part series and then an editorial at the end.
The CIA Democrats.
Welcome to the show, Patrick.
How are you, sir?
I'm fine.
I really appreciate you joining us on the show here and what important work you've done on.
It sounds unbelievable.
How exactly do you want to characterize this?
Not all CIA.
Go ahead and tell us what you're talking about here.
Well, this first came to my attention.
I'm the national, I'm the senior national political writer for the World Socialist website.
I follow the elections and I was reading last fall, a year ago, a blog posting on the Washington Post's website, which noted that two former CIA agents were now running as Democratic candidates for Congress.
I thought this was quite unusual because normally that's not considered a great credential for Democratic politics, small d, Democratic politics.
Secondly, the CIA generally does not allow former agents, because former is always in quote marks, to participate in electoral politics in which their previous activity may become publicly known.
Particularly those who are overseas operatives, which both of these women were.
So I began to follow it and after the FEC reports were filed for the fundraising in 2017, I began to go through them systematically and checking out the websites of candidates.
And it became clear by the time I had begun the initial review of this, that there were at least 50 and perhaps more than 60 former military commanders, state department, war planners, National Security Council officials and actual CIA, FBI and military intelligence agents.
A group of people who, all of whose main credential was national security work, who were seeking the nominations of the Democratic Party in competitive congressional seats.
That is the seats that the Democrats hope to capture from the Republicans in November in order to win the majority in the House.
And if those candidates were successful in gaining the nominations and then in winning the elections, you would have a caucus of former military intelligence people that would have the balance of power in the House of Representatives.
So I began to track this.
I first reported the findings in a series of articles in March, which ran before the primaries.
And then I've been following it during the primaries.
And out of those initial 50 or so, 30 candidates won Democratic nominations in competitive congressional seats, where they have an actual chance to win in November.
And they are the largest single occupational group, more than lawyers, more than state and local legislators, more than self-funded millionaires.
In other words, these are the more typical sources of recruitment for political candidates.
But now a new element has been added.
There's never been this level of participation in the Democratic Party primaries by people with that type of background.
And let me give you the one good example in my neighborhood, which is I'm in Michigan.
And you have in the 8th Congressional District, which covers a large part of the outer suburbs of Detroit stretching to Lansing.
The Democratic nominee for a Republican-held congressional seat is a woman named Alyssa Slotkin.
She was a CIA agent in Baghdad for three tours of duty.
She then became a White House staffer under George W. Bush.
She went on to become a White House staffer and National Security Council officer for Iraq under Obama.
And she then served as the principal assistant to John Negroponte when he was appointed the director of national intelligence.
Actually, that was under Bush, too.
And then Obama appointed her to an assistant secretary position in the Pentagon, where she was in charge of drone warfare and various other nefarious activities.
So after 15 years in Washington from 2001 to 2016, when Obama left office, she then came home to Michigan, where her family is very wealthy.
Her grandfather founded High Grade Foods, which makes ballpark francs.
So she is from a—I don't know her own finances, but her family has millions.
And she is running for Congress and won the Democratic nomination in this district and is now a—at least toss-up, if not a slight favorite, to enter Congress.
She has no political background, no—she hasn't run for dog catcher.
But her credential is that she was in Baghdad during the height of the U.S. invasion and war.
She became the principal briefer for the U.S. ambassador in Baghdad.
And then she went on to occupy high-level planning positions in the National Security Council, the director of national intelligence and the Defense Department.
And that's what the Democratic Party is offering to the voters in this district.
All right, Patrick.
Well, and I guess the real point here is—and I don't know how collectively they can all be described other than just by their occupation.
But it sure doesn't seem, certainly from your reporting here and from anything I've seen, that we're talking about a bunch of Ray McGoverns here or a bunch of Tulsi Gabbards.
I know she's not perfect, but Tulsi Gabbards says, listen, I'm a veteran, and so that's why you have to listen to me when I say we have to stop doing X, Y, and Z.
Whereas, say, Tammy Duckworth says, I lost my legs.
That's why we have to bomb Iran next or whatever her problem is.
Right.
Of the 30—and that's the theme of the last article, which you inquired about—I reviewed their positions on foreign policy and military policy.
And there's only one of the 30 that draws any sort of negative conclusions from his own experience in war, like don't do it again or be more cautious about doing it.
And that one is, perhaps not accidentally, the only one of the 30 who is a rank-and-file combat soldier and who admits to having suffered PTSD as a result.
The others are all officers, operatives for the CIA or military intelligence, special forces people.
In other words, not your ordinary soldier.
Commanders.
And now, is there any discussion of this outside of the World Socialist website?
I mean, I guess Pelosi hasn't commented, but this should have raised a pretty good ruckus, right?
Well, there have been, by my count, three articles in the so-called mainstream press on this topic.
I have more interviews on my article with radio and podcast talk show hosts of a more radical persuasion than there have been articles.
The NBC News ran one article, which was a very interesting—they didn't broadcast it, but they posted it on their website.
And the headline was something like, Their Next Mission?
So, it raised the question indirectly, is this participation of so many military intelligence people in the elections, is it itself an operation?
Yeah, I think that's a very fair question.
I mean, you mentioned their CIA rules say that you're not supposed to do this.
So, in your investigation, have you found that they all got waivers, or does it look like any kind of organized event here?
Well, the CIA is barred by law from spying within the United States.
So, we know that that law is, you know, for the record.
It's never been enforced.
No CIA agent's ever been arrested for spying in the United States.
I think there were even some blatant revisions of those rules during Bush years or Obama years.
I forget now.
After the Church Commission, which in the early 1970s, for your listeners, which exposed such things as CIA assassination plots against Castro, the assassination of Lumumba, and various other such enterprises overseas, this included CIA spying and military intelligence spying on the Vietnam anti-war movement in the 1960s, which was quite widespread.
Since then, there have been executive orders that formally bar the CIA in addition to the legal prohibition.
Now, what I was talking about is that when CIA agents leave the agency, they have to sign – any public reference to their activities has to be signed off by the agency.
If you write a book, they get to read it first, and they get to censor it.
Even top people – I mean Michael Hayden's book had to be reviewed.
Any of these people, when they leave, if they write a book – and obviously somebody who is a dissident like Ray McGovern or Philip Agee, going back further, face efforts to block them from even talking about what they did as agents.
These people – there's two actual CIA agents, Alyssa Slotkin and Abigail Spanberger.
They talk freely about – well, they talk freely about the generalities of what they did.
They don't obviously speak about specific operations.
There is also one FBI agent and three military intelligence agents for a total of six.
Then there are 11 people who were military commanders in either Iraq or Afghanistan, another half a dozen who were civilian war planners.
They worked either in the Pentagon or the National Security Council, and then six or seven other people with similar backgrounds.
I was quite picky.
I mean if somebody had a – we only listed a person as having this background if they acknowledged it on their own websites and made a point of it as a credential.
We didn't do any forensic investigation to determine if Professor So-and-So, who is a cybersecurity expert, is also a contractor for the federal government.
There might well be more such people than 30 we've identified, but these 30 are self-identified.
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Well, you know, if it's part of their panic about Trump that they thought he was just going to abolish NATO and abandon Israel and whatever their most paranoid fantasies were about, you know, how he would actually behave as a president, then I guess that makes sense.
I don't know whether you'd agree, but it seems like if they're doing this because they think they have to corral the left to make sure to protect the Democratic Party from moving too far to an anti-war position as they did back 12, 13 years ago, then that's pretty much unnecessary.
Since most of, I wouldn't say the left, I guess, progressives and liberals, their biggest problem with Trump is they think he's willing to turn America right over to a foreign power and he's not nearly hawkish enough on national security like good heroes like David Frum and Max Boot would recommend we do things, you know?
Yes.
And I'll just say, you know, to put it, to put it bluntly, the notion that Trump is a, is an agent of Russian secret service or the Russian mafia or whatever else is just nonsense.
He's not an agent of Russian oligarchs.
He's an agent of American oligarchs.
He is one.
He is one.
Of course.
And, you know, he's not, look, they, in my, in my opinion, this is a response to two things.
It's, yes, it is a response to the Democratic Party's reaching out to the intelligence agencies through the anti-Russia campaign, through the attempt to outflank Trump on the right.
Their criticism, particularly on foreign policy, is not that Trump is too militaristic and too threatening of fire and fury against anybody and everybody, but that he has been too pacifistic in relationship to Russia and, and as a subdivision of that in relationship to Syria.
They wanted more.
And Korea too?
Well, Korea, yes.
Korea is a little more difficult, different situation because the Korean business is not a peace move.
The Korean business is a get, is a move to get North Korea on our side before the war with China.
It's not, it's an anti-China effort.
It's not a, it's not a win the Nobel Peace Prize for Donald Trump by any means.
Well, I mean, the national security state seems to hate Trump's approval of the talks there and moving forward there because they think it jeopardizes our ability to attack China because we need North Korea as a pretext to have our troops in South Korea.
Well, it's a question of whether you want to have North Korea as a pretext or North Korea as an ally possessing nuclear weapons.
Yeah, either way.
Yes, there are rival, there are rival strategies.
And of course, in relationship to Russia, it's more a question of which country you want to fight first, not do you want to fight?
They both want to fight China.
The Democrats believe that we should fight Russia first before we fight China.
It's not that they're pacifists on the question of China by any means.
Well, they are limited by the H-bombs on the other side still.
So, they want to hem them in and they want to contain them and they want to pressure them and sanction them and threaten them and do everything but fight them really, right?
Yeah, but given that you're in Texas, have you heard the statement by Kay Bailey Hutchinson?
Oh, yeah.
So, in fact, talk about that because I wanted to make sure that somehow that got brought up on this show.
Please elaborate about that.
Because while the Democrats are denouncing Trump for being soft on Russia, his ambassador to NATO, the former senator from Texas, Kay Hutchinson, said last week that if Russia continued to test – I believe these are short-range cruise missiles capable of carrying nuclear weapons.
I'm not sure.
Medium range, but yeah.
Medium range.
If they continued to test such missiles that the United States might have to launch airstrikes to take out the missile installations.
Now, you're talking about launching air raids against a country that possesses the second largest stockpile of nuclear weapons in the world.
Yeah, and they tried to climb down from that, you know, unconvincingly.
And the Russian response was, who authorized her to speak this way?
What in the world?
And it really goes to show the unreality where, you know, I understand they got to BS us all day long.
But when they get that caught up in thinking that their BS is the reality that they're actually dealing in rather than the one where, no, no, no, you can never attack Russia.
Not in a thousand years can you attack Russia.
They just think they can have their way.
And Kay Bailey, boy, what can you say about her?
She doesn't know.
She's reading some lines.
And in fact, you know what?
I wouldn't doubt if she read that line wrong in a Trumpian way where she was supposed to say one thing and it came out a lot tougher than it was supposed to.
If a mid-level Russian or Chinese official—oops.
Well, if a mid-level Russian or Chinese official, to say nothing of an Iranian official, had said something like this about, you know, we have to drop a missile into Chicago or Washington, then you can imagine what the response in the American media and in official Washington would be.
Yeah, absolutely.
And so, yeah, and I don't mean to let her off the hook, but I just figure you can't get worse than the managers of the current American empire when it comes to, you know, just having their act together, even for accomplishing their nefarious ends.
They just aren't very good at what they do.
They also—they take after Trump in the sense that the style is the man.
He engages in bullying, over-the-top rhetoric, because that's part of—when you no longer have the real dominance which America had when it was the number one world economic power, you have to substitute for that bluster, militaristic tub-thumping, and occasionally actually engaging in military action.
That's beyond your capabilities.
Yeah.
So that is— Other than the trumped-up threat—sorry about the pun.
That's a pun from now on.
No one can ever use trumped-up anymore.
But let me— Other than the ginned-up threat of Russian expansionism and all of this kind of thing, we actually don't have any real genuine conflicts of interest with Russia, other than the fights we're picking in Ukraine and Syria and places like this.
There's really nothing to fight about.
I mean, in other words, we could sell Germany more or less gas, but that's a very marginal difference, you know?
Yeah, but I think you're underestimating the danger because it's not just a question of— Oh, no.
I'm only—I'm underplaying any genuine need for the danger.
I'm not saying that one can't be ginned-up, created here in the first place.
The question of the threat of war is a—like any other serious political question, is a class question.
Yes, the ordinary person in Austin, Texas or Detroit, Michigan, the working person, has absolutely no reason to fear or go to war with Russia.
But those who are running the—those who dominate American society, the billionaires, the military intelligence complex and so on, they look at Russia and China from the standpoint of a longstanding national security doctrine, which was laid down after the collapse of the Soviet Union.
Never again can they allow a significant overseas power to threaten the ability of the United States to dominate the world.
Russia and China do that by their very existence.
Russia by—mainly by its military weight and China by its economic power and increasingly its military power.
You can't—if you're going to dominate the world, you have to take out the main obstacles.
And the United States no longer has the ability to dominate the world as it did during the Cold War as the number one economic power as the—or let alone as the moral standing of having defeated Nazism, which did count for something.
I mean, when they claimed to defend the free world, that was always a stretch, but there was a certain plausibility in it having liberated at least some of the Nazi concentration camps.
Of course, the Soviet Union liberated most of them.
But the United States had fought a world war against German fascism.
Now you're talking about the United States playing the role on a world scale of Germany in World War II and World War I.
It's now the power that's discontented, that wants to change things, that wants to make—I mean, the slogan of the Third Reich was Deutschland uber alles.
Well, the slogan in the United States now and in the Trump administration is America first, which the rest of the world sounds pretty much the same in English translation.
Yeah, which it's funny too because Donald Trump doesn't have any idea what that means in the sense of anti-interventionism and trying to refrain from being the world empire back before World War II.
In fact, it was the New York Times reporter David Sanger suggested it to him because he was just trying to hang it around his neck to make him sound like he was a fascist like Charles Lindbergh or something like that.
And it was supposed to hurt him, and Trump took it.
So it doesn't mean anything about like, hey, let's take care of our own problems and leave the world alone.
It means nothing about that at all.
Now it just means screw everyone else in that John Bolton-esque way.
I suspect that Frederick Trump was an ardent supporter of Lindbergh, a pro-Nazi, and certainly a racist and ultra-rightist in the 1930s, and that Donald did not just come across the slogan America first when it was suggested to him.
It may have been— Well, he never used it.
He never used it until David Sanger was like, what do you think about America first?
Do you like that?
You want to repeat that?
And he's like, yeah, that sounds good.
OK, yeah.
And then he started saying it after that.
So that was how it happened.
I just think that's funny because for whatever all that terminology means to you, it means something entirely different to him.
And then I think you correctly portray what it sounds like to the rest of the world, which is we're not even going to pretend to ask it first.
We're not even going to pretend to go through the Security Council or whatever checks and balances.
We're just going to have our way no matter what and in the cruelest way.
And it's interesting, too, to me.
I don't know if you care, but when you describe it in class terms the way you do, it was perfectly compatible with libertarian class theory.
You know, I'm a libertarian capitalist type, but we have our own class theory and it dovetails quite a bit with yours, although it's quite different in a way, too.
But no question about the way that you portray that.
And also at the same time as libertarian, I know that from the world socialist point of view that you are kind of on the outside of left politics.
I mean, people oftentimes conservatives and right wingers and regular Joes just think of the left.
But, of course, there are many different sects on the left and agree.
So, you know, certainly you're attacking the liberals for all of their worst compromises with the empire.
And I sure appreciate your prioritization of that most important issue, the national security state.
One other aspect of the influx of CIA and military types into the Democratic Party, and that is it is also to be understood as a response to the Sanders phenomenon in 2016.
They do not look the Democratic Party.
Makes sense.
Yeah.
Is an important.
Not that he was a great antiwar guy, but certainly represented the kind of Democratic voters who are.
Well, and the and the fact is that to his and no one was more surprised than Bernie Sanders when he became a serious factor in American politics.
Yeah, I agree with that.
He was running.
He was running to be the Dennis Kucinich of 2016.
The gadfly, the person who is going to raise certain issues on the on the fringes and perhaps push the Democratic Party, you know, one percent to the left.
Instead, he tapped into a previously unknown, massive support among young people for socialism, for a radical change in American economic and socioeconomic structure.
Well, and also for anybody but Hillary Clinton in the same way that Barack Obama trounced her in 2008.
Yes, but Obama was always an Obama was part of the establishment.
Of course.
But I just mean from the point of view of the Democratic voters, they wanted the guy who was the outsider no matter what.
But the the the Sanders campaign showed that there was a widespread audience for socialism, that that in the view of those whose professional life is to is to plan the suppression of socialism.
And that that is the main task of the CIA, the FBI and military planners generally is to defend the interests of global capitalism against any threat from the left.
So they see suddenly a threat in their view from the left within the United States.
And I'll tell you, because we have we're among many groups which has won people from the ranks of former Sanders supporters.
The people who supported Sanders didn't support him despite the fact he was called himself a democratic socialist.
That was his number one credential as far as they were concerned.
Absolutely.
I'm sure he moved a lot of people to the left in the way that he meant to do with Hillary.
Right.
I think that I'm sure that happened.
So you have the phenomenon that while there's been massive publicity in this year about the handful of Sanders type candidates like Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, who have won congressional nominations in the Democratic Party, they are vastly outnumbered by the number.
There are more CIA agents than DSA members running as Democratic Party candidates.
Well, I think I don't know about the proof for it all and whatever.
I think maybe you're speculating a bit, but I totally agree with you that it makes sense that part of this of all these people running would be a response partially to Trump, partially a response to Bernie Sanders and that kind of thing.
But so then this brings us back to the conundrum of the broader left where it's really been it wasn't even Barack Obama.
Right.
It was Nancy Pelosi that killed the anti-war movement inside Democratic Party politics after they exploited Cindy Sheehan and that movement of the Bush years to win the midterm elections of 2006.
And then they gave, you know, appropriated all the money for the war and haven't, you know, made a peep about it since.
What was the first declaration that Pelosi made after winning, after she became speaker?
That there was no chance she'd remove Bush from power no matter what he did.
That impeachment of Bush was absolutely off the agenda.
Right.
And then she turned around and she she passed that appropriations bill the next spring.
And that was the end of that.
But so but so, you know, it's it's really hard, isn't it, to keep rank and file liberals and progressives focused on the very worst aspect of American governance, the foreign empire.
And we're talking about millions, more than a million ongoing hundreds of thousands of people killed in these wars across, you know, southern Eurasia at the hands of the USA.
And all I hear about is a bunch of crybaby nonsense from not just, you know, liberals and progressives, but a lot of the left, too.
It's like they've forgotten all about it.
And Cindy Sheehan's still at it.
But there's and Code Pink are still at it.
And a lot of the best journalists I interview, like yourself in this case, are from the left.
And yet, in terms of the mass numbers, it's just out of sight, out of mind.
Well, the Democratic Party has three main focuses in the current election campaign.
There's, of course, the the gender issue, which they've promoted heavily in relationship to Brett Kavanaugh and the whole Me Too operation, which is basically a right wing, anti-democratic small d.
Repeal the presumption of innocence.
Declare that, you know, when someone makes an allegation, the allegation has to be accepted as fact.
No more innocent until proven guilty.
So there's that element.
Then there is the anti-Russia campaign, which is an attack on Trump from the right.
It hasn't gotten very much public traction.
Nobody, nobody cares.
But it's managed to find and it's become embedded in the Democratic Party by means of these candidates.
Why did these candidates get selected?
Why was their way cleared for them?
The Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee practically slotted these people in in many districts, you know, told other people not to run, routed funds towards them, connected them up with.
How does somebody like Amy McGrath, who's never run for political office before, raised four million dollars in a seat in Lexington, Kentucky?
It's important, too, that it's the midterms, right?
That when the mass of political organization really only happens every four years, not every two.
Well, there's going to be- The insiders have more sway in the midterms, I guess.
Well, I think also to some extent they were aware that there was going to be more public interest in this midterm because of the anti-Trump sentiment, which is genuine.
People are horrified by what the government has done.
I mean, the separation of children from their parents, the bullying, the tax cuts for the wealthy and so on.
They knew there was going to be a big influx.
So they want to make sure that that influx is channeled in what they view as the correct directions.
Now, look at yesterday's or perhaps it was Monday's New York Times front page.
There is a major article on the lower part of the front page about how the Democratic Party has now supplanted the Republican Party as the party collecting the most money from Wall Street.
It has become the Wall Street Party.
So the three main characteristics of the Hillary Clinton campaign in 2016, the gender issue, the appeal to the military intelligence apparatus, and the support for Wall Street, have become the three main features of the Democrats' national congressional campaign this year.
We all know how well that worked out in 2016.
Now, they may win the election.
It's not clear.
But if they do, they're winning it by offering a program that arguably is even a further shift to the right.
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I mean, if you thought the Democrats were a lousy check on the Republicans before, and when it comes to the worst stuff, the wars.
It's really a shame, especially when you shouldn't have to be a socialist or a libertarian or have an ideology at all, or be a veteran.
But even if you are a veteran, there's a brand new poll about Afghanistan where the veterans are more anti-war than non-veterans right now.
Anybody ought to be able to tell you that 17 years is a long time to hunt down and kill 400 guys, and that what in the hell is still going on with these wars?
I mean, we ought to be able, any political leadership of any description ought to be able to rally people around that.
And Trump got people to vote for him based on the – not the idea that he was the peace candidate so much as the idea that Hillary was the worst war candidate and was reckless and wanted to expand in Syria and whatever.
And that hurt her.
It was supposed to bolster her credentials, and instead it was an albatross.
It hurt her because it was true.
Oh, sure.
But I just meant she wanted to brag about it, right?
Like that was part of the war in Libya was like, you own this boss, Jamie Rubin wrote.
And it was going to be part of her platform is look at what a credentialed national security state she had.
She didn't learn a lesson from it, that that's what people didn't like about her.
She was laughing about the death of Gaddafi.
Of course, yeah.
One doesn't have to hold a brief for Gaddafi to say that the effect of his overthrow has been to turn the country into hell on earth.
Right.
And it was clearly such a self-interested move on her part and on Samantha Power's part and the rest of them is really a tragedy.
Obama himself said it was a 51 to 49 percent decision to do it, which is nothing less than a pure admission of a war crime, starting an unnecessary aggressive war.
51 to 49.
Not 70, 30 or 80, 20.
Right.
I think for Hillary Clinton, it was probably 99 percent.
Yeah, exactly.
But the thing is that you have to, you know, let me go back to why you had me on in the first place.
Sure.
Yeah.
You've got to look at these people and ask yourself, what does this mean?
You're in Texas.
Gina Ortiz-Jones, you have, you have, you know, as I compared it to Mad Magazine and the 23rd District, you do have literally a spy versus spy election.
Will Hurd is a former CIA agent.
Gina Ortiz-Jones is a former military, I think Air Force intelligence agent.
And that's your two party choice.
And then you have around Austin, you have Joseph Kopser running in the 21st District, who is a West Point guy, Iraq war commander.
And Mary Jennings Hager.
The, the helicopter pilot lady from Afghanistan.
They're running in two districts around San Antonio and Austin.
I want to emphasize here, too, it's again, it's a four part series at WSWS.org.
And I know some of these got weeded out, as you said, what, 20 out of 50 got weeded out, something like that in the primaries.
But you have profiles here, in-depth, well not in-depth, but profiles of the different Democratic candidates, some of them that we're talking about here.
This one is called, it's the second one, the CIA Democrats, a balance sheet of the primaries that have these bios.
Now, of the weeding out process, part of it was inevitable.
In other words, there were some districts that had more than one military candidate running.
Well, just law of averages, some of them are going to lose for whatever reason.
They knocked each other out.
So, Abigail Spanberger won the Democratic nomination in the seventh district in Virginia.
And the candidate that she defeated was a career Marine fighter pilot.
They were the two Democratic candidates.
Well, you know what, part of having the war go on for this amount of time is that literally millions of Americans have been part of the wars.
It's inevitable that this is just- As you pointed out, most of the, or many of the soldiers and sailors and airmen who fought in these wars think they're closer to Chelsea Manning in their thinking than they are to Hillary Clinton.
Absolutely, yeah.
And they really have been, right?
It was in 2005 that three quarters of the soldiers polled said they wanted to end the Iraq war immediately.
It was only a year and a half old at that point, two and a half years old.
But of the 30 that are running as Democratic candidates, none of them is running on an anti-war basis.
Only one of them is even acknowledging that war was highly damaging to American society and to himself.
And the others are not running, they're not running as, I've been to Iraq and I never want to do that again.
They're running as, I've been to Iraq and it was the greatest experience in my life.
I found Jesus in the waters of the Euphrates.
I found my husband in an Apache gunship in Baghdad.
I mean, they all say they're running to celebrate these experiences, these horrific experiences as their credential for rising in American politics.
Fell in love with an Apache helicopter.
It's very chilling.
My God.
Did I lose you again?
I'll tell you what, the Democrats, they're going to be more Democrat than ever after this, it looks like.
And just law of averages and necessarily and that kind of thing, inevitably, as you say, whatever fixed percentage of these people are going to win.
The Democratic Party is going to become that much more of exactly what they already are than they already are.
So if you look up the record of a guy named Seth Moulton, he was elected to Congress from Massachusetts in 2014 in a solidly Democratic district.
He defeated the incumbent basically by running on his military record and as a fresh face.
He then set up a political action committee called Vote Vets, which has gotten a lot of money.
It's been used to sponsor similar type candidates and what went for one or two people in 2014 has now become a big time operation.
Interestingly, $10 million was just pumped into it last month by Jeff Bezos.
Big surprise.
The CIA contractor, Washington Post owner, Amazon owner, zillionaire, until the bubble pops, zillionaire.
Yeah, the richest man in the world until he isn't.
But in any case, this is an indication of the connections that exist behind the scenes between great wealth, between the military intelligence apparatus and the two political parties.
I mean, in earlier years, these types of people would have run as Republican candidates and they did in the first half of the last decade.
There were many such candidates running as Republicans.
Now they're all running as Democrats in part because that's where the action is.
It looks like the Democrats are going to win.
But in part because the Democratic Party is more favorable to them now as a climate, as an environment than the Republican Party.
Well, it just makes all of our job more difficult when they all, as you're describing here, at least so far, all seem eager to be part of the consensus of the status quo that all we need to do is more of the same on all of these horrible issues where everything the US government is doing is wrong and ought to be called off immediately.
So, but anyway, I guess we'll still work at it.
Okay.
That's Patrick Martin.
And check out this four part series at the World Socialist website, the CIA Democrats.
Thanks again.
Thank you.
All right, y'all.
Thanks.
Find me at libertarianinstitute.org, at scotthorton.org, antiwar.com and reddit.com slash scotthortonshow.
Oh yeah, and read my book, Fool's Errand, Timed and the War in Afghanistan at foolserrand.us.
