Sorry I'm late.
I had to stop by the Wax 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 had.
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 us, he died.
We ain't killing they army, but we killing them.
We be on CNN like Say Our Name been saying, saying 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 Jimmy Bovard.
Oh, it didn't work.
I was hoping I'd get an ah-ah-ah out of you.
No, no, I'm just sitting here thinking, what the hell is that?
You sound like my aunt.
I mean, that's about the only person that calls me that.
That and a girlfriend from the 1980s.
Oh, okay.
Well, I was just trying to get an ah-ah-ah.
I think I got one.
Well, you know, hey, it's a Friday, you know.
I'll try to be funny later.
It's James Bovard, Jim Bovard.
The great Jim Bovard.
How about that?
The author, Jim Bovard.
Just a country boy.
The keeper of the blog at jimbovard.com.
And the author of a great many books about the government sucking.
Going back to the Reagan years.
Okay.
Public Policy Hooligan is still the most recent one, right?
Or you had a compilation of FFF articles?
This is one that FFF put out a year or two ago.
Public Policy Hooligan is a lot of fun.
And of course, Attention Deficit Democracy and the Bush Betrayal and other things like that.
Terrorism and Tyranny and Freedom in Chains and Feeling Your Pain.
And lots of great stuff.
This one is at, this is an article, not a book.
It's at the American Conservative Magazine.
It's about some stuff that you remember from back when.
William Barr.
That's the new Attorney General.
He's already confirmed, right?
No, he's not been confirmed yet.
But he went to his hearing, right?
Yes, he's had his hearing.
I think he'll probably get confirmed early next month.
In spite of my best efforts.
William Barr's connection to Ruby Ridge defending FBI snipers.
What fun.
It takes me back.
So tell us all about white separatist Randy Weaver.
You're to understand that prefix to mean man devoid of rights and fair game along with the rest of his family.
Go ahead.
Tell us the story.
Well, yeah.
The Barr was Attorney General during the time that federal marshals killed Sammy Weaver, Randy Weaver's 14-year-old son.
And when FBI sniper killed Weaver's wife, Vicki, standing in the doorway of their cabin as she held her baby.
So going back to the white separatist thing, a lot of folks have fixated on that as if it's proof that he was guilty of horrendous things.
But he's someone who moved from Iowa to a isolated mountaintop in northern Idaho.
And back in 1993, when the feds brought him to court, they had this tangled, this kind of bizarre indictment.
And one of the things was that the fact that he moved from Iowa to northern Idaho proved that he was conspiring to have a violent confrontation with the U.S. government.
You know, northern Idaho, it's not really where you'd want to go if you wanted to have a violent confrontation with much of anybody except for Barrs.
So, but that was the federal narrative.
And happily, a group of Idaho citizens had the gumption to throw it out of court and find Randy Weaver innocent on almost all charges.
Yeah.
And you know, the reason I start with that, too, is because they really did use his name and that title for him every time he was referred to in virtually any American mass media in the 1990s, always.
And of course, it was true that he was a white separatist.
And you know what?
They were even honest in that they didn't call him a white supremacist.
He really was just a separatist.
And even then, he was really lousy at it because he worked with a black guy at the local garage in town as a mechanic and got along fine with him.
Well, yeah.
Yeah.
Something that the media has often sought to do was portray him as a white supremacist, which is a whole different thing.
If you're a white separatist, OK, so you go live on your mountaintop.
OK, big loss to society.
If you're a white supremacist, that would imply that you might be taking active steps to suppress or attack other groups.
But even then, they would use the former to mean the latter anyway.
They would make it sound like he was leading the burning cross, you know, KKK parade against somebody when he didn't do anything to anybody.
Yeah.
Well, I mean, yeah, I mean, he was, you know, I'm happy, happy not to have a neighbor like him.
He had some nasty ideas, but, you know.
By the way, I met him one time at a right wing convention in Denver, Colorado.
And I'm sure there's FBI pictures of it.
Right.
So might as well fess up.
And the only thing I could think of really to ask him was what did he think of Alan Bach's book?
And he said it was, other than his, the best account of it, which must be true because Alan Bach's book is great, by the way.
Ambush at Ruby Ridge, it's called.
But anyway, so yeah.
And I'm sorry, because it's important.
I started with the character of this guy because of the way they demonized him to justify what they did to him.
But when I say he really didn't do anything to anyone, I mean, that really is right.
This started as an entrapment of him, not even to prosecute him, but just to use him against somebody else.
Right, right.
It was a federal ATF, an undercover agent made a huge effort to get him to sell him a sawed off shotgun, which Weaver eventually did because he was basically out of money.
Shouldn't have done it.
Weaver said that he made sure the length of the shotgun when he sold it was not too short under federal law.
And he said that the undercover agent then sawed off more of it.
And that was how he got charged.
I don't know who's honest or who's lying.
I mean, certainly the undercover agent told a lot of, made a lot of false statements.
And a defense lawyer had fun putting him on the witness stand during the Weaver trial saying, OK, let's make a list of all the false statements that you made.
I guess this is maybe a typical tactic for defense lawyers, but, you know, didn't help the dude's credibility.
Yeah.
Well, I'll tell you what, too, about Box's book, Allen's book is, and I guess, you know, it's not his case.
It's the defense lawyer's case at trial.
They really make a compelling argument.
I don't know if they prove it, but they sure make, I guess, a more credible argument to me than the other side of the story.
That the marshals on the first day there when they shot the dog and shot the 14-year-old son in the back, that one marshal shot the other.
It was some kind of stunt role and fire kind of a deal and shot his buddy in the back.
And so a big part of the whole demonization of him, because it was the family friend, too, who was with the boy.
They tried to blame him for taking the shot and then blew up this whole thing basically in order to cover for this level of jackassery on the part of the marshals who were then just following up basically from this original jackassery by the ATF.
Yeah, and the important thing, the marshals were dressed in camo.
They had high-powered weapons with them.
They were trespassing.
They didn't have a search warrant.
They didn't have an arrest warrant.
They were just out snooping around on the Weaver's property, and they'd made a big deal of citing in their firearms before they trespassed.
So it wasn't, you know, it wasn't like they were going there to sell Girl Scout cookies.
Yeah, certainly not.
Now, here's where we get to William Barr, is that there was this, I won't say unprecedented, but at least for the most part, I guess, unprecedented that they would do this officially in this way, where the rules of engagement were changed to essentially war powers.
Go ahead and kill these people if you see them, rather than, you know, which before the only restriction was reasonable.
Just yell waistband.
You can kill anyone you want.
But in this case, they made these, well, explain that and then the role of William Barr in that.
Yeah, well, the FBI, the marshal service gave a lot of false information to the FBI, painting Weaver and his associates as some kind of incredible threat.
The marshals made a lot of false statements that misled the FBI, but the FBI had no excuse.
The FBI sent in their snipers, and basically they were given orders to shoot them if you see them.
As far as the adults, because of surveillance, they were aware that the adults almost always carried guns if they're outside the cabin.
And so the rule was, if you saw them carrying a gun, it was okay to shoot them with no warning.
I mean, keep in mind, I mean, the folks there had not been indicted on deadly charges.
So they were just kind of, but you had the FBI sniper, Lon Horiuchi, basically hiding a couple hundred yards away with a 10 power scope, who opened fire.
He first shot Randy Weaver in the back when he was out of his cabin.
And then as he was, Weaver and his, Kevin Harris were heading back to the cabin, the sniper shot Vicki Weaver as she was standing in the doorway of the cabin.
So, and killed her almost instantly.
And then, well, I'll ask about Barr again in a second, but before that, the guy that killed her, Lon Horiuchi, he was also at the undercover house and also driving one of the Bradleys or involved in riding in one of the Bradleys during the final day of the Waco siege and the massacre there on April 19th, 93.
Yeah, there was, he was at Waco, but he was, he was certainly the, he was the linchpin at Ruby Ridge.
They had Senator Arlen Specter held some hearings in late 1995 on Ruby Ridge, did an excellent job.
And a number of the other FBI snipers, some of them took the fifth amendment and others said, you know, that, you know, that they were basically shocked at the rules of engagement because as a, as federal, as a Justice Department investigation found, the, it was a rule that violated the constitution because the federal agents don't have a right to go around shooting people just on suspicion unless they're posing a deadly threat.
Yeah.
Well, and there were spent rounds on the floor of that undercover house across the street from the Branch Davidian so-called compound there from April 19th.
And I don't think the investigation ever went further than that, but I've seen the pictures of them, which were taken by the Texas Rangers, I guess.
Yeah.
Yeah.
That's, there were a lot of things that got swept under the rug at Waco that we still don't know the facts of, but looking back at Ruby Ridge, yeah, the William Barr tie-in, he was attorney general during this, Barr had told the New York Times that he was not directly involved.
Two years later, the Washington Post had a piece about how the top officials at the Justice Department had at least 20 phone contacts concerning Ruby Ridge in the 24 hours before the FBI gunned down Vicki Weaver, including two calls that involved William Barr.
So his innocent bystander routine took a hit on that.
And it was interesting.
There was a, in Barr's, part of what provoked my article last week was that Barr had to fill out a questionnaire for the Judiciary Committee on his nomination to be attorney general.
And it talked, and one of the things he had to list was his, his pro bono activities, quote, serving the disadvantaged.
And the, the, you know, looking at the details of that, it turns out that the person that Barr spent the most time helping was Lon Horiuchi, the FBI agent who gunned down Vicki Weaver.
I thought you were going to say Cap Weinberger, but that's later.
Oh, that's a whole different story.
That's the, you know, that might have something to do with his nomination.
I don't know.
Wait, let's get back to that, because this is such an important point, because I remember this from back then, too, that Idaho filed criminal charges against this guy.
And then the Justice Department swooped in and said, we have supremacy clause right to steal this guy and move him to the federal court system where we find that we don't have a case against him and let him go.
Yeah, well, it was the, I'm not exactly dead certain on this, but the gist of it was that the feds claimed that they had the supremacy clause prohibited Idaho from trying the federal agent in Idaho courts or in local courts.
And the feds were obviously not going to try him because, you know, he was a FBI agent.
And part of what William Barr did was organize other former attorney generals and other top officials to support the FBI sniper.
And it was interesting to see the type of arguments that they made in court in their briefs, in their amicus briefs, because it basically would have given unlimited power to federal agents, which you would think would be controversial in this day and age, but then again, I've been wrong before.
Yeah, well, clearly not.
And you know what?
Here's the thing about Ruby Ridge and Waco, too.
The only thing notable about them really was, well, I guess kind of two things.
There were these giant federal raids, but especially just that there was a siege.
That on the first pass, the suspect didn't surrender to custody, one way or the other dead or alive.
And so the cops ended up camping outside for a few days in the case of Ruby Ridge and for six weeks in the case of the Davidians.
But otherwise, cops do this to people all day, every day, in every county, in every city, in every jurisdiction in this country.
Bradley Balco says 50,000 SWAT raids a year.
And so never even mind everything that doesn't count as a SWAT raid, but it's still that level of violence committed against regular people.
Thousands of people killed every year, right?
At least 2,000 something people killed by the cops every year in this country.
Yeah, I mean, I would be careful in using blank numbers on the number of people killed because some of them are killed in the process of robbing a bank or stuff like that.
So I would not want to mix those in.
I don't think it's most.
I wouldn't say it was most, but take a step back.
Part of what made Ruby Ridge special was you had the arrogance, you had the lies, and you had the feds come in there and basically put a siege in around them.
But there were a lot of folks in that part of the country that did not look kindly upon the feds coming in and killing the boy and killing the mother.
And so you started to have a lot of people coming to that area who were supporters of Randy Weaver or who were concerned or opposed to the feds coming in and killing people.
And so the feds had their siege circle around the Weavers, and all of a sudden things were getting a little hot for the feds because you had a lot of more people coming in and kind of circling them.
And it's interesting folks, there's a lot of chatter these days about a second civil war and stuff like that.
There are some people saying that the feds could dominate any area that they chose to.
Well, the feds would not be able to control northern Idaho very easily because the folks there are not going to bow down.
And the kind of federal agents that they would send in there would sort of be like the IRS revenue agents that were sent to Rocky Top Mountain in Tennessee.
Never seen again.
Oh, I should learn the legend of that.
Do you have an article about that?
Rocky Top.
I'll look it up.
Scott, so you don't know Bluegrass?
No, I don't know a damn thing.
I'm just an interviewer, dude.
I don't know anything.
All right.
You're in Texas.
Bob Wills.
Okay, Bob Wills, you know, right?
Who?
No.
Bob Wills.
Texas Playboys, famous band, 1930s and 40s.
Yeah.
But you know what, though?
I'll update what you're saying on the other thing, which is that at that Bundy deal, which later on the federal judge found in their favor and threw all this out because they found that the Bundys were telling the truth that the feds had snipers positioned all around them just to start the thing off.
And that was when they called the militia out, and that was quite contrary to what the FBI had claimed up until the time that it was proven in court.
And the judge actually, I mean, imagine that, that the judge found in favor of them on all of that.
But at the time, and this was like a scene out of a movie.
It really was.
I don't know.
I guess I should go back and look at the different YouTubes of it and what have you.
That's a good idea.
And there's plenty.
I mean, there's certainly footage of the one guy, essentially the militia.
I don't know who all this sort of instant militia that grew up there and what all different groups, but one of them was in a sniper position up on the overpass.
And then most of them were down in this culvert, essentially down next to the highway.
And the cops, and they were in full hostage rescue team SWAT gear with at least submachine guns, right?
HK MP5s or whatever, this kind of thing.
And they started coming and I guess they had vehicles with them and what have you.
And they came up against this militia of armed men, too, that was bigger than them.
And they stopped and it's a miracle that nobody fired.
They stopped and held their horses and then they retreated and said, let's not, somebody called it off and said, let's not do this.
There was almost a full scale battle right there and they backed down.
And then after that, it was like, well, now what are you going to do now?
You can't arrest the guy at all, you know, or at least not for that time.
But that was really a scene.
And like you're saying, in the case of northern Idaho here, it turns out that, yeah, it makes a difference whether your population have rifles or weapons.
Or whether they don't.
Well, and it's going back to the Bundy case.
I wrote about that for USA Today last year after the federal judge basically threw out the charges.
And the FBI had misled the judge and the court and everybody else for at least two, if not three years, about the presence of a lot of FBI snipers surrounding the Bundy property at the time.
The Bundys called in their allies to give them some protection.
So there were a lot of other false falsehoods in that case by the feds.
And I was happy to see the judge, you know, give a hearty smacking to the Justice Department and the FBI on that.
Yeah, I mean, that was definitely.
And, you know, at the time, because it was a dispute over the use of federal land and all that, it wasn't very, it wasn't as clear cut to me exactly what this man's legal position was and all that.
But yes, it's that's something which I and I, I don't think I wrote about it on even on my blog or on social media at the time.
It was the first confrontation because, you know, Bureau of Land Management rents this, that, the other.
Yeah, I mean, it's a much simpler case than some of the other confrontations.
But yeah, I mean, it really does turn out that, you know, whether people, you know, find themselves in alignment with the Bundy family culturally or not, that this really was a fight that the government picked the federal judge.
Imagine that the federal judge found against the federal cops and for the civilians in this case, because they found that these guys had way overly militarized the situation from the very get go.
And that was, I think, the major reason that the judge cited for dismissing the charges and all of that.
It was a lot of false statements by the FBI and misleading claims.
That was a huge part of the case dismissal.
And, you know, the thing is about the cultural split is as a libertarian, I don't have to pick any of those sides.
And so I'm only always on the side of the victims against the cops, you know.
But so in this case.
I just assumed that you were on the side of the Mormons.
Yeah.
I mean, whichever side, whether it's, you know, Saddam Hussein or Vladimir Putin, I'm always against whoever the U.S. state is against.
In this case.
Yeah, I'm pro Assange and I'm pro Bundy.
But no.
So in this case, it seemed like the perfect time for Black Lives Matter types to say, see, the cops treat us unfairly like that all the time.
That's what we're talking about, too.
And for the Bundy types to say like, hey, we know what they mean when they complain.
Like the Branch Davidians had hung a sign out their window that said Rodney King.
We understand, you know, Bridge.
That's true.
A true thing.
People can look that up.
And and yet, you know, what was and this is just unfortunate and maybe it was inevitable, Jim.
But I saw people and it was an honest misunderstanding.
It wasn't even that stupid of a misunderstanding.
It was an honest misunderstanding that some of the Bundy people had these signs against the BLM, against the Bureau of Land Management.
And these urban black anti-cop activists thought that they were being denounced, that Black Lives Matter was being denounced by these people who were not paying attention to Black Lives Matter at all.
You know, who should have been on their side, who should have seen.
Oh, I get it.
The enemy is the state, not each other.
That's pretty easy.
But anyway, that was just so unfortunate.
I remember arguing with on Twitter with a Black Lives Matter activist and and her saying to me, look, they hate us.
They're against us.
And I was like, oh, you know what?
It's just a misunderstanding.
It's the federal cops is what that means.
It's an agency, the Bureau of Land Management.
Oh, you know, like they're just like you, only different, but the same, you know.
Anyway.
And that's why you left Twitter.
That's part of it.
Yeah.
Is arguing with idiots.
I got.
But believe it or not, I have better things to do.
Too many to juggle.
Right.
But to take a step back, there were I saw a lot of comments on Twitter at the time.
Some of the court decisions came down in the various Bundy cases by basically a lot of, I guess, liberal left folks would like to see them shot dead.
I mean, there was there was a lot of, you know, bloodlust and disappointment.
The feds did not kill those people.
So, well, it's the same thing that we saw in 1993 when, you know, when there were a lot of people who were happy that a lot of the Branch Davidians died.
We've seen some other federal standoffs.
There was a standoff in 1996 in Montana with a bunch of, you know, farmers home deadbeats called the Freeman.
And I have a memory of having dinner with a friend and his colleagues who was a colleague of his was an army psychiatrist who was just emphatic that the feds should just go in there and kill those people because they had disobeyed orders.
And I was thinking, well, you know, that's not a good reason to start killing innocent people who haven't been convicted.
But there is, you know, there's there's a certain segment of society that just howls for blood when folks don't bow down to the government.
And it's on both sides of the aisle or on all sides, not all sides.
It's something you'd almost never hear from a libertarian or someone who is principled, liberal or conservative.
Right.
Hey, a big shout out and a thank you from me and Sheldon Richman to the guys and girls in the Tom Woods Facebook group who recently made a very generous donation to the Libertarian Institute.
We sure appreciate it.
Thanks, guys.
Yeah, I mean, I really don't get it.
Why is it easier to suffer the cognitive dissonance of saying that when cops attack white guys with guns, they're jackbooted thugs.
But when they attack black guys with guns, there are hero cops saving civilization from the criminals.
Just because you're not black, you can't see from the other side for just a minute.
Or like you're saying in the other example, where the cops are going after some white guys and on TV and then not it's not always just racial, but the left in general rally behind that.
And that includes, you know, racial minorities to like embracing finally like you get a taste instead of see what we were arguing, see what we were saying to.
Because in that especially, you know, which one got me, Jim, was the biker slaughter, the second Waco massacre in 2014.
And nobody gives a shit, do they?
And it was such a perfect time.
It was right at the heat of the Mike Brown and all of the Black Lives Matter stuff.
And it was the perfect opportunity for the black police activists to say anti, you know, police killing activists to say, see, man, they do it to you.
They do it.
This is exactly what it feels like.
It sucks.
Let's work together.
We want to go to your protest and with you, you know, and then also like how hard should it really be for these Mexican and white bikers mostly to say, oh, no wonder that's what these blacks in St. Louis are complaining about.
That this is what it's like to be hunted down and sniped by these lawless police with no accountability whatsoever.
No right for your side of the story whatsoever, even for the survivors.
That's not an opportunity for people to see each other's side and to form, you know, an alliance to say, you know, to address the real problem here, which is the lack of accountability for cops.
And they're training that their lives are that much more important than ours.
And that anybody puts their hand near a waistband, blow their head off, better safe than sorry, which is maybe that's good enough for occupying Palestine, but not for any kind of free society.
Right.
So what's the status on the Waco shootings from a few years ago?
Is that has that still been covered up because I've you know, I haven't followed it closely, but it sounds like that the cops kind of lost control there.
It's sort of like a yeah, it was the cops that did the killing.
It was the cops that started firing.
I did, you know, at least the vast majority of it.
And there's I'll tell you, it's I forgot exactly which publication.
It may have been GQ, but the reporter's name is Nathaniel Penn.
And so his article and I interviewed him about it.
And this is, you know, I don't know, two or three years ago.
But and that's the latest that I know of it.
I really should try to find another further investigative piece.
But essentially, the cops had these guys all surrounded with rifles and they just started firing into the crowd and killing people.
Yep.
Well, it's amazing that that hasn't that the controversy did not get traction on that, because, I mean, you know, there's there's lots of bikers who are difficult folks.
And again, I wouldn't want to have them as a neighbor.
But I mean, that doesn't give the the police the right to kill them.
And it sounded like that.
And there was so much cover up going on as far as the so many different elements of that.
I'm just amazed that the government got away with as much of the cover up as they had, as far as I can tell.
Well, that's true.
Yeah.
No, there was, you know, this outrage where they just, you know, rounded up and arrested and indicted everybody.
You know, as in order to try to cover up what they were doing.
And the whole thing is completely ridiculous and the worst way.
Ridiculous.
You know, it almost made me cynical.
Yeah.
And, you know, I shouldn't say the second Waco massacre, because I know there have been previous Waco massacres, too.
But the second in my era.
Sure.
Sure.
Anyway.
Well, listen, so this is the new attorney general.
Oh, you know what?
So wait, as long as I got you and I don't think I'm on anybody else's interview time.
Can I keep you for a minute?
Sure.
So let's talk about when George Bush senior was a lame duck and pardoned all the Iran Contra guys.
And it was Barr that helped them do it.
Right.
You got it.
You got it.
Yeah, it was.
That was something I wrote about last month in USA Today.
And I was happy.
There was another one by you about this.
I couldn't find it this morning, man.
I'm sorry.
Go ahead about that.
Well, USA Today is hard to find.
I'm making a joke, actually, you know.
But anyhow, so I was you know, there was all the tributes to George Bush last last month when he died.
George H.W. Bush.
They had that funeral service in which he was compared to Jesus and George Washington.
And I was happy to get a piece in that, you know, that came out on the day before the funeral that said, look, you know, this is this is.
There's a lot more to this story.
You know, here's somebody ramped up the drug war, a lot of other abuses.
And the pardon stuff could set up a precedent for what Trump's people could do to kind of save Trump's tail if he needs to do that.
So but, you know, everybody seemed to have forgotten Bush's pardons.
But Bush saved his own tail with those because a number of the people who would who he pardoned could have turned state's evidence against him justifiably.
Well, and speaking of which, there's this new Seymour Hersh piece.
Let's see if I can get him on later this afternoon.
The vice president's men in the London Review of Books that came out last week.
Did you see that?
No, I haven't seen that.
But Hersh does wonderful stuff.
Oh, yeah.
No, you got to read it.
So I'd be really interested to know what you think of it since you were reporting on what was going on in D.C. during that time and I was just a kid back then, not to call you old or anything, because I know I am.
Hey, you know, elder abuse.
I get no respect.
Yeah.
But anyways, so the way he portrays it is totally different than the way I ever understood it before through my own ignorance.
Or I don't know if anybody ever told it this way before or what.
But he just says that the entire Ron Contra operation that was operating out of the vice president's office was a completely different animal than what was going on at CIA.
And that it was essentially proto JSOC working for Bush senior through an admiral on the staff of the Joint Chiefs of Staff.
And they had these extremely, completely deniable missions against the Soviets all around the world, including in Latin America.
And that they were the ones who burnt the Ron Contra operation by the CIA because they were, you know, thought Casey was stupid and reckless.
And they had their own operation against Ortega that they were pursuing in Nicaragua, that they thought he was messing up and this and that.
So.
Interesting.
I should check that out.
What publication was that in?
It's the London Review of Books, the vice president's men.
OK, there was the Hirsch had a very nice memoir that came out, I guess, last year.
I did a long piece review of that for American Conservative and there were so many good things in Hirsch's book.
I mean, he's very, very worth reading.
Yeah, I really need to get that.
I have so much to read.
So little time.
Caffeine, that's the answer.
But that does raise something.
I forget if this was something that I read in your USA Today piece or something else about Barr.
It wasn't just the pardons, but it was also some of his decisions about, I guess, almost in a David Addington fashion, these kind of rulings or agreements about the plenary and unlimited and unitary and this and that commander in chief type powers of Bush Sr.before the Bush Jr. years ever came.
Right.
Yeah.
Yep.
That's something I read about.
I don't have any.
I haven't dug into it.
But yeah, there are lots of reasons to be concerned here.
I wonder why.
Well, I don't know.
Seems like a big mistake for a guy like Trump to appoint George Bush Sr.'s guy.
But I guess he's just banking on this guy says that presidents can do whatever they want.
And so I'll just have to go with that, even if he's Bush Sr.'s guy, something like that.
What a compromise to have to make.
I don't know.
It's I was you know, it seemed like there were a lot of other folks who could do it.
We'd be better for the job would not have some of the taste that William Barr has.
But, you know, there's all kinds of stuff going on in the background at the White House.
I have no idea what they're doing.
Yeah.
I don't think they do either.
All right.
Well, listen, I'm going to keep reading your articles about what comes out.
OK, well, thanks.
Thanks for having me on.
Thanks for the chat.
And I hope you stay out of trouble.
And Rocky Top, Tennessee, you got to you got to hear this song.
It's a great kind of anti-government song.
Cool.
All right.
Well, I will check that out.
It's in my notes.
It's in your notes.
All right.
That's good place for it.
Thanks, Jim.
All right.
Thanks, Scott.
Good luck.
All right, you guys.
That's Jim Bovard.
Jim Bovard dot com is his website.
Also USA Today where he's on the editorial board there.
And you can find him at the American Conservative as well.
This one is there.
It's called William Barr's connection to Ruby Ridge defending FBI snipers.
And seriously, read his books to attention deficit democracy is my favorite one.
But they're all really good.
I wish that I was on a rocky top down in the Tennessee hills.
Ain't no smoggy smoke on Rocky Top, ain't no telephone bills.
Once I had a girl on Rocky Top, half bad, the other half good.
Wild and mean, but sweet as soda pop, I still dream about that.
Rocky Top, you'll always be home sweet home to me.
Good old Rocky Top, Rocky Top, Tennessee, Rocky Top, Tennessee.
Once two strangers climbed on Rocky Top looking for a bookshed still.
Strangers ain't come down on Rocky Top, I reckon they never will.
Corn won't grow at all on Rocky Top, dirt's too rocky by far.
That's why all the folks on Rocky Top get their corn in my jar.
Rocky Top, you'll always be home sweet home to me.
Good old Rocky Top, Rocky Top, Tennessee, Rocky Top, Tennessee.
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.
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I've had years of cramped up city life, traveled like a duck in a pit.
All I know is it's a pretty life, can't be simple again.
Rocky Top, you'll always be home sweet home to me.
Good old Rocky Top, Rocky Top, Tennessee, Rocky Top, Tennessee.
Rocky Top, Tennessee.
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