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, he died.
We ain't killing they army, but we killing them.
We be on CNN like, say our name, and 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 Peter Van Buren.
He wrote a bunch of books like We Meant Well, and something about Tom Joad there.
And then Hooper's War, a novel of World War II, Japan, moral injury, and the story of America there.
Yeah, here he is at the American Conservative Magazine, finding a vaccine for the impeachment derangement virus.
Welcome back to the show.
How's it going?
Doing well, thank you, Scott.
Always good to be back with you.
Yeah, very happy to have you here.
So, well, I have all kinds of questions for you about this very interesting article that you wrote about the impeachment of Trump.
But then, you know, there's this piece in the New York Times yesterday by Admiral McRaven, formerly of the Joint Special Operations Command there, suggesting that, yeah, maybe we don't need to wait that long to get rid of Donald Trump.
You know, McRaven, of course, he's famous.
He's the guy who ordered the guy who ordered the other guy to order that guy to kill bin Laden.
And so he's a great American hero.
But he's written an article in the New York Times on October 17th, that if it was written by a colonel in Turkey or it was mumbled in a bar to a CIA operative in Moscow, I think we'd recognize it for what it was.
McRaven goes on, he starts off by reminding people, the military, that their faith in values is worth sacrificing.
And he talks about clear-eyed, impeccably dressed generals.
And he invokes the Office of Strategic Services.
And then he goes on to say that in talking with the military these days, they believe America is under attack not from without, but from within.
And of course, that's a very not shaded reference to the oath of service in the United States, where you protect the Constitution against all enemies, foreign and domestic.
And then he says quite plainly, if this president doesn't demonstrate the leadership that America needs, domestically and abroad, then it is time for a new person in the Oval Office.
Republican, Democrat or independent, the sooner, the better.
The fate of our republic depends on it.
Now, the rest of us are aware that the election is about a year away when the people get to decide who the next president is.
And I suppose when McRaven is on the Sunday talk shows with a little wink to Jake Tapper, he's going to be saying, well, when I said sooner, the better, of course, I was referring to the impeachment process ongoing.
And you're welcome to believe that.
But on the other hand, take a breath and realize who this is talking.
This is the former head of special operations.
It's a guy whose personal loyalties in that community reach very, very deeply.
And he's on the biggest platform for this kind of thinking in the United States right now.
And he's saying the fate of the republic depends upon sooner, the better, changing the president.
And he mentions that the president is, in fact, attacking America from within.
The fate of the republic depends on it.
And again, you can just kind of write it off.
But, you know, he's not ordering SEAL Team Six into action today.
But convince yourself he's not laying the groundwork for something like that, or at least trying to remind people that he could.
And decide what it means for yourself.
But, again, imagine you're sitting in a bar in Istanbul and a colonel in the Turkish army says something like this.
You'd report that back to Washington as pretty significant information.
Well, and I think, like you say, it can be taken as sort of a veiled threat and a signal to other people and this kind of thing.
But, you know, so here's the deal about this.
I think you and I both have the same problem here.
And I think I've always had more of a negative attitude toward Trump than you have had.
But I really, really have a negative attitude about all the people leading this crusade against him from the center and from the intelligence agencies.
And all of this stuff.
And I'll be damned if they deserve a victory over a guy that won an election that they wish he hadn't won.
And I'm pretty sure, Peter, that I think that I would feel the same way if it was the CIA trying to do this to Hillary Clinton.
That if she won the election, they're still just the CIA.
And that happens to be the very worst organization on the planet.
And how dare they falsely accuse her of high treason with Russia or, you know, this whole kind of thing, what they've done to him.
On the other hand, Ceteris Paribus and all other things being equal.
Is Trump not a dangerous lunatic when he goes, you know, trying to say and believe me, I'm not saying he's the one who picked this fight.
But Pelosi says, yeah, we're going to start holding some hearings to see about impeaching this guy.
And then he accuses her of treason.
Yeah.
I mean, they falsely accused him of treason for three years.
So in a way, turnabout is fair and everything.
But that's kind of insane for a president to say that about the speaker of the House.
Sure.
Sure.
And let me take a step back and say of the many different places I've been thrown out of, fired from or deplatformed over the last three years.
It's often been a mistaken sense that I'm, quote, defending Trump, unquote, or supporting Trump.
And I failed to actually articulate my position, which is which is this, you know, in a word, it's the don't throw the baby out with the bathwater.
Let's talk about Trump and his his pluses, minuses or all his minuses, whatever you want to say.
But we're talking about upending a system of government that has more or less served us for 230 years.
And at the point where we say Trump is dangerous, therefore, and then the next step is it's OK for Admiral McRaven to threaten a coup or therefore it's OK to jerry rig an impeachment process or therefore it's OK to whatever you want to say we need to do about Trump.
That's where my problem lies.
My problem is not in Trump himself.
Trump is not a good president.
We can go into the danger question a little bit more deeply.
But what we're in the process of doing about that, I feel is far more dangerous in the long run.
Trump is going to be gone.
Whether that's a year from now or five years from now, he's going to be gone.
At the end of that, whatever we've done about Trump or to Trump is going to live past him into the into the future.
That's the part of this that's distressing to me is this failure to look past Trump and say when we set this precedent, when we say that the end justifies the means, that leaves us with that as our national credo in Latin on the money for future presidents, whether they're good ones or bad ones along the way.
And that's where my concern is.
I don't give a wit about Donald Trump or what happens to him.
I care very deeply what's going on with our country.
And when we're willing to let the New York Times run an article kind of hinting that a coup wouldn't be the worst thing, call it a veiled thread if you prefer.
When we're willing to allow a runaway train to end up impeaching a president over pretty close to nothing, that is damaging to our country beyond what Donald Trump has done so far and what I can see him capable of doing in the foreseeable future.
Yeah.
You know, I think the whole thing would be different, right, if we were talking about how if we were talking about a situation where it was the people were really insisting that the Congress impeach a president for doing presidential things, right, for right, for doing what George Bush did, torturing people to death or doing what Barack Obama did, starting wars without authorization from Congress, murdering American citizens with CIA drones.
And so but instead what we have is the center in the national security state, you know, doing this to a guy who's perceived as an outsider to protect the very same Bush Clinton consensus that is what really deserves to be impeached around here, which is the reason that he got elected in the first place is because that's how everybody felt about it.
So, you know, it's sort of the opposite of what you would think.
It's like it's like with Russiagate.
It's just like the demonization of Saddam Hussein.
Only in this case, Saddam is our president, not a foreign leader, but our own.
But the attack is led by the same group of liars.
You've called out the 500 pound gorilla in the office, which is let's list up what George Bush did that could be considered dangerous or a threat to the republic.
Let's list up what Obama did.
And then let's list up what Trump has done to date I mean with with the, we'll call them Bush Obama just to just to save a little time but I mean, you know, between the two of them.
You know, Syria, Yemen, Libya, Somalia at the top of that list.
We literally destroyed those countries we killed millions of people we killed thousands of Americans we spent trillions of dollars.
We created a regime of US government torture complete with an offshore penal colony in Guantanamo.
In the case of George Bush we sent the economy into the worst economic disaster since the Great Depression, and then Barack Obama spent $6 trillion bailing out large corporations while allowing average Americans to descend into homelessness.
And yet, nevermind killing Americans with drones, nevermind what happened alongside of all that the growth of the national security state where every one of us is or can be under 24 seven surveillance as the government wishes.
Nevermind all that what we're going to be upset about is.
What is Trump done so far did he start any new wars.
No, he's sort of trying to tamp couple of them down.
The economy is doing well.
But at the end of it all, if you are a historian looking back at this and you make a ledger, you know, which of those presidents has done more actual damage.
And yet, we are ready to throw away the whole democratic ideal and get rid of this president because, because why.
Yeah, well, I mean, it's, there's no question that all of the very worst things he's done has been to continue Barack Obama's policies, and especially in Yemen, where both of them belong in life in prison for what they've done in Yemen, which is by the way, as illegal as it is genocidal and treasonous in the sense that it is a war for Al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula against their enemies the Houthis there.
They both should be buried under the supermax for that.
And you know, that'd be a great way for the Democrats to prove that this is about the rule of law, not partisanship, is they could go ahead and make sure to see Barack Obama and Trump prosecuted for war crimes in Yemen together.
And then sent to prison together and then we could have a whole brand new day over here morning in America.
What do you think?
One of those two men need I remind you, has a Nobel Peace Prize on his mantle place.
Oh yeah.
Yeah, and and is currently revered by progressives as somewhere, you know, between Jesus and Gandhi.
Every time I read another retrospect on the Obama administration.
I realized what an amazing eight years I must have not lived through.
Where were you, Peter Van Buren?
States in terms of race.
But yet, you know, apparently all of this must have developed while I was napping the last three years because it certainly was supposed to be fixed prior to that.
Yeah.
Well, you know, I mean, I think in retrospect, it clearly was a mistake for the American people to see that the first to make it that the first black president was a Democrat.
Because if it had been a Republican, then the right would have spent eight years patting himself on the back about see how racist we're not.
Right.
And that kind of thing.
And what's the left going to do?
They're not going to get more racist.
They're as silly as they are, but they're anti-racist in there at their core of it.
But so instead, what we had, though, was a very partisan incentive where Barack Obama's race got all mixed up with his Democrat-ness and his Muslim sounding name.
And by the way, it was Donald Trump, probably more prominent than any other person in this society, who pushed the whole thing about Barack Obama secretly being born in Kenya and secretly being a Muslim usurper of John McCain's rightful throne and all this.
So, you know, if anybody deserves being treated like an illegitimate president, he probably is the guy.
But it really has done it really did a lot.
Having Barack Obama, you know, the first black president be a Democrat, did a lot to push the right backwards on race.
And, of course, at the same time that the left is getting completely insane on it from their point of view, you know, where all white people are born guilty of being a leader of the Klan or whatever is there.
I was going to say, I feel pretty bad today about that.
Yeah, well, you should.
But no, but then now, so we have in the backlash from that, you know what I mean?
And so if Colin Powell had had the moral courage above someone who gives hand jobs in the bus station, he probably would have been the first black president.
That's right.
He sold out way too quick, way too cheap.
So hope you're listening, Colin.
Yeah, I'm sure he is.
Yeah, he does.
You know, his former chief of staff is a fan of the show.
I know Larry Wilkinson is one of the few people to, you know, have emerged from the Bush administration and been willing to talk honestly about his failings and, you know, kind of realize they were wrong.
The rest of them have clearly profited off of George W. Bush had the audacity to emerge, you know, from his dank cave to even say something bad about us getting, you know, backing out on the loyal Kurds.
Well, not just something he said that this kind of isolationism is a threat to peace.
And then somehow he didn't spontaneously combust.
Satan has that power to not do that.
Amazing.
I mean, Skull and Bones guys got a great contract working there.
No, when you get those three wishes for selling your soul to Satan, if you choose carefully, it really works out over the long run.
Hang on just one second.
Hey, guys, did I ever tell you about libertystickers.com?
It's just nothing but anti-government propaganda for the back of your truck.
I invented most of them, the good ones anyway.
Anti-war stuff, anti-cops, making fun of all the candidates in the upcoming election.
Libertystickers.com.
Hey, guys, check out the great lineup of podcasts we've got going on over at the Libertarian Institute.
There's me, Foreign Policy in Focus with Kyle Anzalone.
Free Man Beyond the Wall with Pete Quinonez, a.k.a.
Mance Rayder.
The Liberty Weekly Podcast with Patrick McFarlane and Keith Knight.
And our newest edition, Jen the Libertarian with Jen Monroe.
Check them all out at libertarianinstitute.org.
Hey, guys, don't you think it'd be cool if you could go to college but Tom Woods was the dean of the thing?
Yeah, well, something like that.
Check out libertyclassroom.com where Tom Woods went and had his pick of all the best professors to teach their courses in the real history and economics that you didn't learn when you went to college the first time around or maybe you didn't learn because you skipped your higher education altogether.
But here's some real American history and some real economics, the kind of stuff that you've been missing.
It's all at libertyclassroom.com.
And make sure to click through the link in the right-hand margin of my website, scotthorton.org.
Hey, man, so I've seen some progressives saying that it's not fair that the minority women of the squad in the House, that they were the ones who were pushing for Trump's impeachment.
But now, I'm sorry, I think it was the New York Times, gave a giant profile to a new group of House freshmen.
And I guess one of them is a senator.
They're the badasses.
And they're all white women.
And guess what?
They're all FBI and CIA.
And they were the ones who came and said, now is the time.
This whole Zelensky thing is over the line, and now we have to move on impeachment.
And they were the ones who convinced Pelosi to do it.
So the controversy is over the white women stealing the brown women's thunder, when my whole thing is, is a bunch of CIA officers in the House of Representatives that are pushing this, huh?
You don't say.
Oh, you know what?
It's because they know so much about how things are supposed to be, and their sense of public duty is offended.
The first thing I want to say is I've never had a nickname.
I've never been part of like a group that's had a nickname like the squad or the badasses.
I've always wanted to have something like that.
So if any listeners had any ideas that didn't involve profanity.
Team Dillow Pro Shop.
Something, I mean, you know, a T-shirt that like a bar that I hung out or something, anything, anything would be fun.
So let's talk about this, this impeachment thing, because it's a runaway train and it's going to crash somewhere.
And I want to actually impeach Trump here on the show, if it's OK with you.
Because the basic, the key evidence against him is this five page MemCon on his conversation with President Zelensky.
Now, first of all, to answer the question that the media, I don't know why they're doing this, but a MemCon is the way that the U.S. government memorializes conversations.
MemCon stands for Memorandum of Conversation.
And it's how it's done.
You can like it or dislike it, but the U.S. government doesn't produce transcripts routinely.
It produces these memorandums of conversation.
It's kind of a thing.
I've written them.
I've read them over my career.
So is everybody else in government above the level of janitor.
And this is all you're going to get.
This is what's usually always routinely done.
It's how it is.
So forget about any of these people who keep saying it's not a transcript or it's edited or anything.
It's just it's how it's done.
The first two pages of the five page document, the first two pages are pleasantries and what have you.
Here is the impeachable paragraph.
I'm going to read the whole thing.
I would like this is Trump speaking.
I'd like you to do us a favor, though, because our country has been through a lot and Ukraine knows a lot about it.
I would like you to find out what happened with this whole situation with Ukraine.
They say CrowdStrike.
I guess you have one of your wealthy people.
The server, they say Ukraine has it.
There are a lot of things that went on the whole situation.
I think you're surrounding yourself with some of the same people.
I'd like to have the attorney general call you or your people, and I'd like you to get to the bottom of it.
As you saw yesterday, the whole nonsense ended with a very poor performance by a man named Robert Mueller, an incompetent performance.
But they say a lot of it started with Ukraine.
Whatever you can do, it's very important that you do it if that's possible.
That is the smoking gun.
Now, if you really, really, really believe that overturning an election three years into a presidency based on that is justifiable, then I don't really know I have much I can persuade you.
You're an ideologue and nothing will tell you.
Well, now, wait a minute.
Maybe he just has George W. Bush's problem where he can't speak in complete sentences.
Lord knows I got the same one.
But it's good on the radio, yeah.
Yeah, it makes me a pretty lousy radio host, but we're substance first here, so it's okay.
But the real point being, though, that, what, if he was more eloquent, then the quid pro quo would be more honest?
But I'm looking for, first of all, quid pro quo has become another magic word.
Anytime you're negotiating with anyone, I mean, whether you're buying a car or you're negotiating with the Ukraine, everything you give, you hope to get something in return for.
And the same thing on the other side.
If you don't understand.
I mean, the argument would be, though, that he can say, well, in exchange, we want you to ramp up your training missions against Russia or whatever, something that's an interest of state rather than his personal political interest, which might include investigating Biden.
Now, the CrowdStrike thing, that is legit.
I don't think there's I mean, not that the servers in Ukraine, I don't know what he's talking about there.
I don't know if you do.
But the thing about the thing about the origin of Russiagate and Ukraine's involvement in that, that is obviously completely fair game.
But the Biden thing and the Biden thing would be, although obviously it's a gray area because he's the front runner on the other side right now.
Right or not?
Come on.
Here's what he says about that, because the paragraph I just read to you did not mention Biden.
It talks about CrowdStrike in the server.
And whether you think that's bullshit or a conspiracy theory is irrelevant.
It's foreign interference in the 2016 election.
The same thing the Democrats are concerned about.
Yeah, but that's not.
Well, but they're trying to impeach him over the Biden thing, not the CrowdStrike.
Let's go to that.
We're now down on page four out of five.
I will ask him to call you along with the attorney general, Rudy.
I'm quoting now.
Rudy very much knows what's happening.
He's a very capable guy.
If you could speak to him, that would be great.
The former ambassador from the United States, the woman was bad news.
And the people she was dealing with in Ukraine were bad news.
So I just want to let you know that.
The other thing, there's a lot of talk about Biden's son, that Biden stopped the prosecution.
And a lot of people want to find out about that.
So whatever you can do with the attorney general would be great.
Biden went around bragging that he stopped the prosecution.
So if you can look into it, it sounds horrible to me.
Now, I don't.
I mean, if I were to say if we were to say the president, the United States should have no interest whether the previous vice president did anything wrong.
We shouldn't look into it, investigate it.
That's that.
We're being told, for example, that the CIA whistleblower worked on Biden's NSC staff.
But we're told that doesn't matter.
But now we're told that it doesn't matter that Biden did something in the Ukraine.
We're not allowed to even ask about it or look at it because Biden happens to be running for president.
I'm just not seeing impeachable high crimes, misdemeanors, all that 18th century verbiage.
I just am not seeing it there.
He wants them to look into this.
He says that.
But guess what?
Nothing ever happened.
There was no quid pro quo, of course, because there was no the Ukraine got the aid that they wanted.
They never even knew it was being held up.
And there was no investigation of Biden.
So we're down to impeaching the president over what you think this sentence means.
Right.
There's a lot of talk about Biden's son, that Biden stopped the prosecution.
And a lot of people want to find out about that.
That is the sentence that the Democrats want to impeach the president three years into his term in the middle of a contentious election season.
That's the sentence.
Well, if you believe that sentence is worthy of overturning an election.
Again, it's very difficult to argue with someone who's that ideologically shut off from from reason.
And, you know, I think, again, the context is everything.
If this was, I don't know, some other president, a Bush or a Clinton family member, for example, sitting up there.
And it came out that this had happened and it was there was implication.
There's a gray area, as you say.
Obviously, there's something to investigate there, at least a prima facie case kind of thing for it.
But at the same time, you are talking about the front runner on the other side.
There could be a scandal there in a way.
But it's not just that this is drowned out by all of the Trump scandal all the time.
It's that it's so obvious that this is a fishing expedition where they're looking to get him on anything.
And they think that this is maybe enough to nail him with.
And that's just, you know.
And that's what my article at the American Conservatives is really all about.
This is the the the runner up.
The plan was was very obvious that Robert Mueller's testimony this summer was supposed to be a capping event, a capstone event on three years of what we call Russia gate.
He was supposed to make an impassioned plea to impeach Trump and lay out the evidence in July.
Congress was going to go home in August and whip up sentiment among their constituents and then come back in the fall.
And we were going to have hearings from now until till the end of the year.
You've got to get this all done, by the way, before the first Democratic caucuses early in 2020.
So you've got to get this out of the way.
You've got you've got about a three, four month window to to to impeach here for it to have the political impact you need it to have.
Now, the problem is, is that none of the Russia gate thing panned out.
I mean, you remember in July we were talking about obstruction and everybody on the Internet was it was an expert on obstruction.
Where's obstruction?
It disappeared.
It's deader than Jeffrey Epstein.
It's gone.
We're not holding hearings on it.
We're not talking about it.
It just went away.
It's it's amazing.
It's like, you know, it's like that little rash that always pops up once in a while and then it goes away again.
It's just, you know, but the idea is, is that that was how it was supposed to play out.
Unfortunately, reality interceded.
And so they needed something and they half created something, something half fell over the transom with the intelligence agency's cooperation.
And it's like, hey, you go to war with the army that you got.
And that's the one we have right now, which makes this an exceptionally weak case.
And and, you know, these guys, these Democrats, they have their heads so far up their own thinking here.
They just can't imagine how this looks to every the tens of millions of people who voted Republican last time.
And, you know, they just and the consequence, how this is going to play out from here.
And people are talking about actual violence and fighting.
And I don't completely write it off.
You know, I think we as Americans generally are.
I mean, the mass of us are well armed, but we're also overweight and diabetic.
So I don't see much.
Well, we got that going for us.
Thank goodness.
I'm sorry I'm late and I got to go.
But thank you so much for coming back on the show, Peter.
It's been a pleasure.
All right, you guys.
That's Peter Van Buren.
Finding a vaccine for the impeachment derangement virus is his latest piece at the American conservative.
All right, y'all.
Thanks.
Find me at Libertarian Institute dot org at Scott Horton dot org.
Antiwar dot com and Reddit dot com slash Scott Horton show.
Oh, yeah.
And read my book, Fool's Errand.
Timed and the War in Afghanistan at Fool's Errand dot US.
