All right, y'all, welcome to the Scott Horton Show.
I am the Director of the Libertarian Institute, Editorial Director of Antiwar.com, author of the book Fool's Errand, Time to End the War in Afghanistan, and I've recorded more than 5,000 interviews going back to 2003, all of which are available at scotthorton.org.
We can also sign up for the podcast feed.
The full archive is also available at youtube.com slash scotthorton show.
Hey, guys, on the line, I've got Peter Van Buren.
He was at the State Department.
He wrote some books and stuff like that.
The most recent is Hooper's War.
And before that was We Meant Well, about his time working for the State Department in Iraq War II.
That's also the name of his blog, his website, wementwell.com.
And he writes regularly also for the American Conservative Magazine, even though I thought you were kind of a liberal type.
Welcome back to the show.
How you doing, Peter?
I'm happy to be here.
You know, the idea is, is that whatever I've written over the years, it hasn't really changed as much as sort of the world revolves in a different way.
Because there's articles, I mean, I write primarily for something called the American Conservative.
But the articles that I'm writing there are not substantially different than what I've been writing.
It's just that other things have changed.
For example, I've got an article in edit right now, hopefully it'll be out next week for the American Conservative, about economic inequality and looking deep into the roots of that.
And it's a topic that I've been passionate about and been writing about for eight or 10 years.
And yet, it has become a topic that's of broader interest right now.
Free speech is another example.
My belief in near unfettered free speech was once a liberal position, and I wrote for The Nation, and now it's a conservative position.
And I'm basically saying the same thing.
I don't want to make it sound like I'm boring, like I just rehashed these articles.
But it's odd that text that could have run 10 years ago in The Nation or Mother Jones is now running on the American Conservative.
I just can't imagine what's happened out there.
So don't judge a book by its cover, would be the sum here.
Yeah, well, that's what I think, too.
Really each article's got to stand on its own, no matter where it's published and what have you.
And something like an article in favor of free speech probably could still run at The Nation, although maybe not everywhere you might have been able to write that 10 years ago.
Well, in fact, it was in fact that topic that was the breakup between The Nation and myself.
Four years ago, when Trump was inaugurated, there was a famous video of somebody punching somebody in the head.
There's a Trump lover or something, I don't even remember the details because the individuals are not important, but someone punched him in the head on camera.
This provoked a series of people saying it's good to punch Nazis and The Nation ran an article saying basically it's okay to punch Nazis or basically people you disagree strongly with because the republic is in danger and extraordinary means.
And I wrote a rebuttal, which they published as the final piece that they accepted from me.
And the rebuttal was attacked as it was basically a free speech rebuttal that, hey, you don't go around beating up people who you disagree with.
It's not how this was all supposed to work.
And they cut off all contact with me.
They never paid me for the article.
And they now regularly run articles about censorship.
I mean, we call it fact checking in 2020 because that sounds better than censorship.
But in fact, it is censorship.
And that's where their stance is right now.
Yeah.
So it's not fact checking.
Very broadly defined.
Well, you fact check selectively and you say, well, you know, the president said 4.3 percent, but it's actually 4.2 percent.
So this is fake.
And, you know, can't we can't run that ad or anything like that.
I mean, why don't they fact check the rest of the ads?
I don't think four out of five dentists believe my toothpaste is the best.
I want to see some verification.
By the way, in terms of the income inequality stuff, sometime off the air, we should talk about that.
I don't want to talk about economics with you on the air because it's just going to be me haranguing you and trying to convince you to believe everything that I do.
And that would be a terrible interview, but it'd be a really fun conversation sometime, I think.
Yeah.
Yeah.
I'm into it.
Yeah, man.
Hey, listen, let's talk about this whole crazy, weird impeachment thing.
Go ahead and say whatever you want about it.
I'm glad it's over.
I'm sorry that it happened.
I don't think it accomplished anything good for really anyone.
I can't see any good reason to have done it, and I see lots of bad things that have come out of it.
I mean, the history of this, the thing that led to this impeachment, is really a shameful chapter in American political history, and it's worth recounting in kind of a long paragraph.
I mean, we literally started trying to find reasons to impeach Trump from before he was elected.
And, you know, the Washington Post famously ran an article on Inauguration Day saying the impeachment starts now.
That article was from 1917, was highly focused on the Emoluments Clause, and God help you if you want to get into that.
We can.
You know, this idea that Trump is making money and being influenced through his businesses.
That was going to bring him down.
And we all know that that quickly devolved into the dumpster fire that we'll collectively call Russiagate, which was an attempt to get him out of office somehow.
That was just three years' worth of lies, exaggerations, and some of the worst abuses of civil rights by our intelligence agencies, you know, documented.
We now know that the FBI lied in order to quote-unquote legally spy on a political campaign, that they had nothing, that they knew they had nothing.
We know that Mueller had the basics, that there was no collusion, interaction, purposeful planning between the Russians and the Trump campaign.
He had that information almost from the earliest days of the Trump presidency, I mean, as he took over from Comey, and he withheld that conclusive information for a long, long time to try to run this- Such an important point there.
Go ahead.
Into the ground.
Yeah, it is a very important point because he did not ...
The big thing, if you recall, there were people claiming that the Russians had a man in the Oval Office, and that Trump's decision-making was based on orders from Moscow.
This was literally what was being said.
And Mueller knew that was false very, very early on, and sat on that conclusive information for about a year and a half, and then kind of mumbled it on the way out the door.
Anyway, there's still people who act as if it's true.
When that all imploded, by sheer coincidence, something surfaced less than a month later, and it surfaced in the slimiest possible way in the guise of a so-called whistleblower.
Now, I'm a whistleblower.
I put a lot on the line to do what I did, but more importantly, I knew and supported other whistleblowers, including Chelsea Manning, who sacrificed a lot to do what they did and earned that title.
What this kid from the CIA did, he was a leaker.
He leaked the contents of a phone call.
He didn't blow the whistle.
He, in fact, himself had no personal knowledge of what was going on.
I should say he leaked what someone told him were the contents, and he leaked them to a guy, Adam Schiff, who had already established himself as the Democratic pit bull in the Russiagate saga.
And then he hid behind the whistleblower protections.
He's still hidden back there so that no one can really question how this all came to be.
And then we watched the Democrats basically say, well, you got to go to war with the army that you have.
And the army that they have was that Trump said something naughty in a phone call that immediately got conflated into Trump is favoring the Russians again.
If you remember, that was the first sort of sub-theme of this impeachment, was by cutting back the Ukrainian aid, Trump empowered the Russians.
That didn't stick, so they threw another Hail Mary, and this was, aha, Trump is cheating in the election again.
And this is kind of where this has settled out in the world of memes and gifs and Twitter, is saying, well, Trump tried to use the Ukrainians for 2020 to rig the election the way he did in 2016.
They're still trying to tie these memes together.
The House ran a bunch of people, not a single one of whom had firsthand knowledge of any of these things, including allowing a State Department guy to testify that he overheard both sides of a cell phone conversation in a crowded restaurant somehow.
I mean, nobody even stopped to say, how is that even physically possible?
And don't make up an answer.
Let him explain.
Oh, yeah, he held the phone at arm's length and stood on top of a chair, is probably what happened.
I mean, I think they even clarified that actually, no, it wasn't on speaker.
It was up to his ear.
They even admitted that part of it, right?
They kind of took advantage of, well, Trump shouts all the time, so we could.
Anyway, none of that was, all that was ridiculous.
And we were told over and over again through the fall that, well, this is not a trial.
So those rules don't apply about evidence and things.
So fine.
The Democrats call 17 witnesses.
They choose not to pursue their subpoenas into the courts.
Now, this is a critical part of all this.
The idea is, is that if you, Scott, get subpoenaed to testify and you say, I exercise my right to not appear, I don't want to testify, then there is a process where you can be forced to testify.
But you got to go to court.
The court has to force you to do that.
This is ultimately, by the way, what took down Nixon was that Nixon tried to defy the subpoenas, which is his legal right to challenge them.
And the Supreme Court said, no, you can't defy these subpoenas.
You're going to have to testify and turn over the tapes you had made of yourself and things.
And this is what caused the whole thing to fall apart.
But the Democratic Congress in the fall called the witnesses they wanted to call, such as they were.
I mean, witnesses is not even the right word, because witness means you saw or heard something yourself.
These people were doing what's known as hearsay.
And hearsay is not allowed in our court system.
Hearsay is when you say what someone else saw or heard.
So I would go to court and say, well, Scott Horton saw the bank robber.
And the judge would say, why are we listening to this guy?
Find me this guy, Scott Horton, and bring him in here and let him tell me what happened.
Why is Peter telling me what Scott saw?
It's not allowed in courtrooms, but the Democrats said, well, yeah, yeah, this isn't a court.
This is an impeachment proceeding.
So we can do anything we want.
They didn't subpoena John Bolton.
They didn't subpoena Rudy Giuliani.
They didn't subpoena whoever else you think should have been called.
And they didn't go to court and challenge it.
And they made up different excuses, mainly it was going to take too long to actually follow the laws and rules of justice.
They wrapped that thing up in a big hurry and found Trump impeachable.
And then when it came to the Senate, they whined that they couldn't call more witnesses.
It's like, you had 17.
You could have pursued the subpoenas when you had the authority to do so.
You didn't do it.
And now you're trying to trick us all into that being kind of a big deal.
The second impeachment charge, of course, was even worse, is that by exercising his legal right to challenge the subpoenas, Trump was obstructing justice in Congress.
So chew on that one for a while, 1984 fans.
By choosing to exercise a right, you are breaking the law.
That kind of nonsense.
In fact, even Mitt Romney didn't vote for that second article of impeachment about obstruction.
So that tells you how pathetic that actually was.
So the whole thing was terrible.
There was no one in here who should be proud of themselves about any part of this.
If you're just keeping score, then what good did the Democrats accomplish for their party or their election results?
Trump is going to go around waving that newspaper that says he was acquitted from now until November.
And the Democrats are left looking like petulant children running these little stunts.
Hey, girls, let's all wear white to the State of the Union speech.
Oh, yeah, that'll really show him.
And then Nancy tearing up the paper and everything.
These are the little stunts.
They're unimpressive to absolutely everybody.
And yet that's what this process of impeachment yielded.
The worst part of it all is that precedent has again been set and new rules have been created and don't think we've seen the last of this very, very serious part of our constitution upending an election, which is what impeachment is, upending an election for political gain.
Don't think you've seen the last of it.
Hey, y'all may have heard that me, Tom Woods, Dave Smith and a bunch of others are trying to do everything we can to recruit all our friends and audience members to join the Libertarian Party this year in order to support the candidacy of the great Jacob Hornberger.
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Step one, go to scotthorton.org slash LP to sign up for the National Libertarian Party.
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Let me go over this part of it with you.
What about if you could strip away all of this context that you describe and you just go to what we do know from the transcript of the call and from the way Trump has characterized his defense and this kind of thing.
Are you upset at all that Trump was abusing his power in trying to get the Ukrainians to open an investigation into the company or into how Biden stopped the investigation into the company or exactly what we and never mind holding up arms because I know that you know better than arming up a bunch of Azov battalion in the first place.
So never mind that.
But what about just Trump trying to get Biden in trouble?
Isn't that maybe really bad?
If it wasn't Eric Cherimella, the CIA rat who was, you know, behind the whole thing.
You said his name.
Now we're going to have seven more weeks of winter.
Oh yeah.
God help me.
No.
I had this note here the other day.
It was beautiful.
But first of all, of course, this is it's always fun to have these theoretical discussions because in fact, you can't discard the context.
And by the way, when I say Eric Cherimella, this that I'm I really think and no one ever talks about it in this way, but this should be where the exclusionary rule kicks in, as we call it when it comes to warrantless searches, that if the evidence comes from a dirty cop breaking the rules in the first place, then that evidence is fruit of the poison tree and you can't use it against him.
And I say, regardless of all of these other Dershowitzian defenses, the fact that Eric Cherimella is CIA is all you need to know.
And I also wish to add that claiming that that this information that we don't know who the so-called whistleblower was is the biggest pile of hooey in the world.
It's everyone who cares to know this person's name, Eric Cherimella, you know, is has access to that information.
So we're not hiding anything.
You know, everybody flipped out when Rand Paul's said the name out loud.
You know, it's like, you know, this is the least secret thing ever.
So we need to be real about about these things.
And by the way, thank you to Paul Sperry for having the courage to publish the name, which at the time when he published it at Real Clear Politics, he said this name has been an open secret in Washington for four weeks.
It doesn't seem fair that the rest of the American people don't get a chance to hear it and they still won't confirm.
It's crazy the way they're pretending to not know.
What if they had said that you're not allowed to say the name Valerie Plame even after, but everybody already knows her name.
It was already published.
It's already the cat's out of the bag.
What is there to pretend after that?
I would also add, just to clarify for all the Valerie Plame fans in the audience, that there does exist a big difference between a punk like Eric Saramella, who's an analyst who works in Washington and sits in a cubicle, and a field officer who perhaps is known to other people in other contexts by other names.
In other words, let's I would be defending Eric Saramella potentially in another context if he was, say, a field officer who had run agents under the name of Tom Jones.
All of a sudden, people who dealt with Tom Jones who thought he was an American businessman now realize he's CIA.
That's potentially heads will roll.
That was the situation with Valerie Plame.
She was working with people in Africa under different identities.
All of a sudden, all those people woke up one morning to find out that they'd been actually dealing with the CIA, if they hadn't known.
Anyway, there's a big difference between a punk analyst who doesn't leave Washington and somebody who's out there endangering others, perhaps even innocent.
Let's draw that line.
Let's go back to the actual phone call.
This is it.
This is the thing that has escaped most people in talking about the impeachment is that that memorandum of conversation between Trump and the Ukrainian president is the only primary evidence in this entire saga.
It's really the only thing, if you were to move this into an actual courtroom where you had to follow the rules of evidence and the Constitution and all that, it's really the only thing in this process that a judge would actually allow.
Everything else is secondhand hearsay, what have you.
You go back and you look at it.
First of all, there's a difference between saying something is jolly and wonderful and saying something is impeachable or criminal.
We can dismiss that what Trump did in that phone call is wonderful, good, jolly, happy, whatever positive term you want to use for it.
No, I don't think there's anything in there that makes me proud to be an American and break into song.
Let's set that aside.
But let's then look at the next thing.
Is there anything in there that's illegal, that's immoral, that represents an abuse of power?
And again, the bottom line is nothing happened.
And that's such an important part of all this.
Trump in that call did not make any literal trade.
We can argue whether he implied a trade or not.
I might even agree he suggested one, but there's a big difference out there.
And you're talking about overturning an election.
So he didn't make any literal trade offer, number one.
Number two, the reality is that there was no investigation of Biden and the aid was given.
Nothing happened.
And so you immediately in the real world step away from, gee, something happened.
A guy got shot, a company got cheated, a red light was run to this sort of thinking about doing something wrong or conspiracy to do something wrong.
You're in the realm of thoughts and ambition and things like that.
So automatically that weakens everything to the point where I just don't see three years after the voting that we're going to decide that election didn't count.
That's one thing.
And let's go back to your original point about, you know, was Trump trying to learn something about Biden?
I can ask rhetorically, I mean, don't you think that if Biden was involved in something sleazy, don't you think we all would want to know that?
I mean, forget about the fact that he's now basically out of the race and a failure in all possible ways because of, you know, Iowa.
But I mean, the idea is, is that don't you think we want to know that the then sitting vice president of the United States was up to something kind of greasy?
Isn't that information we want to know?
Why would we not want to know that?
The next part of it was that this was all Trump's personal gain.
And there, again, you get, I don't know that you could point to too many presidential actions, you know, since whenever you want that don't have a domestic edge to them.
In other words, President Bush, Obama, Truman, Johnson, whatever, aren't most of their decisions tinged with politics, either to ensure their own re-election or to set their party up?
I mean, we look back historically, I, Johnson randomly crossed a synapse there, you know, most of LBJ's decisions about the Vietnam War seemed to be based on his domestic political considerations.
I mean, it wasn't necessarily aimed at defeating a candidate by name, but it was aimed at positioning him stronger domestically or to give him an edge.
In other words, he could trade actions on domestic policy in Congress for decisions on Vietnam and things like that.
I mean, every president has an eye on his domestic standing when they make decisions, domestic, foreign, whatever.
There's nothing particularly new in that.
So I'm not quite sure where the crime lies.
I mean, the old joke is to have a smoking gun, there's got to be a body on the floor.
And I just, from the beginning, have argued that I don't see this here.
This has all been jerry-rigged.
The Democrats, from the beginning, have tried to take a small thing, a phone call that resulted in nothing particularly happening, and use it as an excuse of something bigger, mainly that, ooh, Trump tried to get foreign involvement in the election once again.
That's my thought on all that.
Yeah, man.
Well, so your article at TAC is about how much the Dems are just breathing all their own smoke here.
Dems don't realize how much impeachment hurts them.
They really are so caught up in their narrative.
They think they've scored all these mortal blows against Donald Trump, and yet.
I don't know, man.
Watching the whole Democratic side of this race and all the TV people scrambling around is a lot of entertainment for me.
And I am not, I mean, honestly, I, as, and I think the Democratic Party should be abolished for the Russiagate hoax, and sort of, kind of, Ukrainegate as a secondary.
But just for Russiagate, the fact that they towed the CIA and the FBI's line on that, and pushed that whole thing, is absolutely unforgivable.
To falsely accuse the President of the United States of high treason with the Kremlin, I'd be taking this exact same stand if they'd done it to Bernie Sanders instead, or whatever it is, which they still might, by the way.
And so, that's just that.
But at the same time, Donald Trump has made George Bush look like Ramsay Baroud when it comes to Israel-Palestine, and has made, has put America in such a subservient position to some, you know, gambling tycoon out of Macau, and his Likud party in Israel, that the Republican Party also should be abolished.
These people should be exiled from America, and with their families.
It's just a disgrace.
And Donald Trump, and Adam Schiff, and John Brennan, and Barack Obama ought to all be rotten in the same Supermax cell together.
That's not good.
I absolutely agree.
I mean, anybody who wants to look at current U.S. politics, and find something good to say, you know, something positive about the process or the system, I mean, you can argue individual policy things, oh, that tax thing did that, and that executive order did that.
I mean, when you look at it broadly, at the system we have, the way our process works, I mean, you have to conclude that we are a cancerous, oozing, pus-gum bit of flesh hanging off what's left of any thought of democracy.
And we don't even hide it well anymore.
I mean, once upon a time, there was at least this kind of gloss of fairness to things.
Now we just out and out say, you know, those results in Iowa weren't quite the way we wanted them to bounce, so we're just not going to count them, basically.
Yeah, it's a technical problem, something with apps.
It's complicated, mom.
You don't understand how computers work.
And then, you know, we're just not going to count those votes.
We've been ginning up this primary in Iowa for how long, and yeah, whatever, we're just not going to count them.
It's like when they have elections in North Korea and, you know, 99.9% of the people turn out to vote for the incumbent, you know, and ooh, they had an election.
We're not even pretending anymore that these things are reasonable or fair or what have you.
I mean, if you can't go on television and explain to an educated person in a couple of sentences exactly what the process in Iowa even is, yeah, people get together and they argue with their neighbors, and then they change seats inside the gym, and like the Bernie people sit over on the bleachers, and the Warren people sit on the floor, and then an hour after that, they move around again, and yeah, that's how it works pretty much.
I don't think it's nuts.
I don't know how they even came up with letting them go first and be so important in the first place, but.
Apparently, I was actually trying to find an answer to that question, and you know, how did this happen?
And like, it was an incomplete answer, but apparently, and maybe if one of your listeners knows better and can correct me, please, but apparently, once upon a time before technology, this caucusing process went on for days, and between the caucusing and the manual adding up of things that it actually took, irony aside, it actually once took Iowa like a week or so to do this, and because of that, they got to go first, because it was going to take them so damn long to come up with their results.
That's fine.
This all goes back to really before the era of the primaries, when all these things were decided at the conventions anyway.
Yeah, and that was another important point for listeners to understand, is that the primaries, as this tool of sorting out is, I can't put a date on it, but it's relatively new.
I mean, not too long ago, I mean, it was literally men in those cigar smoke-filled rooms who would sit there and argue among themselves and say, well, I guess it's going to be Grover Cleveland this year, and that's what everyone was told.
This idea of these competitive primaries, I'm not quite sure when that kicked in.
It's another good question.
I'm going to look that one up.
Yeah, I'm going to think it's like 60s era, I mean, maybe with Kennedy, because like Eisenhower, certainly, they stole it from Taft at the convention there.
Yeah, yeah.
So this is interesting how this has evolved, and it appears the Democratic Party is doing everything it can to de-evolve it so that they can control this once again.
We saw how well that worked out in 2016, where they artificially favored one candidate, and there's many people, I'm not quite sure where my thoughts are, but there's certainly a lot of suggestions that this was not an accident, that this was an attempt to get rid of Bernie that may have backfired on Biden.
I mean, there's lots of stories going around, but it certainly doesn't speak to a party that is dedicated to a completely transparent primary process, no.
Yeah.
Well, and the same people who claim that the national government bureaucracy should be the decider on all issues for all Americans from now on.
They're the technocrats, they're the experts, they know what to do better than you.
And yet, apparently, yeah, not so much.
Yeah, this doesn't make you jump up and say, gee, I want to turn over more power to the central government on how health care works and everything.
I mean, yeah, these are the guys.
I hope the same people that worked on that app in Iowa are the ones, the contractors that get chosen to do the national health insurance app.
So I saw a piece today, and it was in Fox News, and they were gloating.
But still, it was direct quotations.
They were talking about the Maddow show and how she had the leader of the Democratic Party on and was essentially berating him that never mind the bad counting and all of this stuff and all of that problem.
How about the overall level of turnout for all the Democrats at the Iowa caucuses this year were way down from 2016, which was, of course, way down from 2012 and 2008.
The guy's answer, he just retreats behind, well, you can't compare to Obama.
Of course, he was a phenomenon and all of that, which is kind of true.
But what about last time?
You can't even keep up with the numbers of people who turned out for Hillary vs.
Sanders in 2016?
And he had no answer to that whatsoever.
There's no excitement overall.
The level of excitement for Sanders is certainly way down, and everybody else below him.
Brokamp.
They're going to have, if I was a Democrat, if I was a Democratic Party person or whatever you want to call them, in charge of all these things, I would be really, really worried right now about turnout.
Because Iowa, the turnout there was poor, and that's never good news.
The counterargument is, well, look, we're going to win this election with young people and people of color and all that other stuff.
So Iowa's a bad example because it's all dumb white folks.
And there may or may not be anything to that.
But I mean, we all know that historically voting trends are what they are, and that people of color and young people are not reliable voting blocs, whereas the blocs that are known to stick to Trump like glue, the older people and things like that, are very reliable voting blocs.
And, you know, the idea that if you're in any way a Democratic strategist and you're concerned what the weather is going to be on election day and whether that will, you know, whether you'll win or lose based on how hard it rains that day, you're cutting the margins way too short there, buddy.
Yeah.
Well, and all this, it's so obvious to tell just by, you know, on the emotional level of it.
If you go back to 2012, it's so obvious that no matter how many people hate Barack Obama and all of their, never mind how bad he really was, but all the crazy fantasies about how he was the Antichrist sent here by Osama from Kenya to usurp our thing, whatever.
And yet at the same time, a lot of people loved him.
They really loved him.
Nobody loves Mitt Romney.
And that was a margin of victory.
And it was obvious for a year before the election even took place that Mitt Romney can't beat Barack Obama.
Unless Barack Obama falls down the stairs and breaks his neck, he's going to win this thing.
There's no, there's no.
And same thing here.
You look at these Democrats.
People aren't coming out by the thousands to hear Buttigieg and Elizabeth Warren and all excited about hope and change for the future.
The only one that they've got who has that kind of charisma and a chance to beat Trump at all is Bernie Sanders.
And yet, and because he's not really a Democrat, because he's an independent, because he's to the left of them, and because people hate the Democrats, so they're like, oh, hey, here's a guy who pretty much apparently hates them as much as I do, and for a lot of the same reasons, and so, okay.
Which, of course, the party people don't want to understand that.
Everybody really hates them.
That it was some weird Bush consensus that created Trump in the first place, and that the reason everybody likes Sanders is because he's not the one that they want.
And yet, they talk about him on CNN like, oh, he's going to destroy the Democratic Party.
He's probably the only thing bringing new people into it at all at this point.
Folks want to live, I live in New York and I read the New York Times, and the New York Times is absolutely convinced that Trump doesn't really have any supporters.
They're cultists, or they've been lured in, or they've been bought off, or whatever.
They are so wrong, it is unbelievable.
When I visit, my folks live in a retirement community in Florida, and there's, the way that people talk about Trump, and it's mostly older people, so they're actually interested in talking politics.
They're not afraid of it, and worried, and plus they're bored.
Anyway, they have affection for this guy, and I get the same thing when I interact with people from the Midwest.
I have a job that brings me in contact with a lot of visitors to New York City, a day job, and I talk with people.
These folks misunderstand the enthusiasm for Trump.
It comes from a lot of different places.
It certainly is not all based on racism, or, oh, a black guy once got elected, you know.
None of that.
I mean, Ohio voted twice for Obama in two elections, so spare me, that kind of thing.
They see Trump in different ways, but they actually have a connection there.
Affection may not be the right word, but they have a connection that I just can't see any of these Democratic candidates, absent Bernie, and his is kind of a limited group, drawing people.
I mean, Trump fills these stadiums, and people are crazy when they go into these settings.
This is all misunderstood.
It's underestimated, and I think the Democrats are their own worst enemies, as always, but I don't know how many of these brutal losses it's going to take before the party collapses and something new grows from the ashes, or whether they'll just keep being dorks every four years so that Republicans can keep electing people.
Obama was a once-in-a-lifetime politician who came along at a moment in American history where vast numbers of Americans were ready for some kind of change after the mess of 9-11 and the global war on terror.
He came at the right moment in history and happened to be the guy with the most amazing political chops, and to keep acting like that was not an exception, that it was somehow the future, and it isn't.
It wasn't.
Yeah.
Well, and of course, Trump is really an exception like that, too.
I mean, here's a guy who's a superstar.
He's as famous as Elizabeth Taylor at her height, or Michael Jackson.
This is a guy who, he's probably one of the most famous men on earth before he ever stepped into the presidency.
And so, you know, I remember in 2015 I read an article that said, yeah, he was really successful in his 14 seasons of his primetime TV show.
What was it, the job show?
What was it called?
The Apprentice.
The Apprentice.
14 seasons.
As soon as I read that sentence, 14 seasons, I said, oh, that's it.
He's winning.
I mean, I had no idea that that was the case.
I don't watch primetime ABC.
Fourteen years that show was on?
Forget it.
Forget it.
That's surprising.
Yeah, that's, hands down, that's a victory guaranteed.
And I don't, honestly, I don't even know if Barack Obama could beat that if he was allowed to run again.
Yeah.
Well, technically, he can.
You know, there's nothing to stop.
You can't be consecutive three terms.
No, that's the Russian Constitution.
I'm pretty sure the 22nd is.
Really?
Oh, okay.
Well, that's too bad.
I was kind of counting.
What about a robot Obama?
Not the real one.
Yeah, hologram Obama.
They could do that.
Hologram Obama.
Wouldn't that work?
Yeah, probably.
How old is Sasha?
Is Sasha of age yet?
Oh, is that one of the daughters?
Yeah.
You know what?
Yeah, they could do that.
And, you know, hey, they've talked seriously about bringing Michelle Obama in here.
Michelle, yeah.
That's how desperate they are at this point.
You know, hey, once in a while, I might ask Barack for advice, wink, wink.
Yeah, that could be it at the convention.
It could be Michelle versus Hillary in some kind of like studly woman armor.
You know, they both, you know, Michelle has biceps like a WWE wrestler.
I think she would whoop Hillary.
No question.
Yeah.
I don't think there's any question.
And see, but now you're toying with my emotions because this is what I want more than anything in the world is for Hillary Clinton to get into this race.
And I'm kind of scared that I might die laughing.
But I also think that that would be the best way to die.
And that I'm kind of I'm ready to risk it because you're not as much as I used to hate her.
I still hate her as much as I always did.
But now the level of comedy that I am able to get out of her presence is just it's I mean, man, she's like Mel Brooks to me or something.
She just kills me.
Just the thing is that she is in this race.
I mean, she's not technically a candidate, but she's still commenting on things.
She still gets as much airtime as she really wants.
Isn't that funny?
I love it.
Why that?
Why?
You know, that's it.
But I mean, OK, you want to you want to do this right.
Imagine this.
Hillary shows up at the convention in full Joker makeup.
There you go.
And she comes on stage with Bernie and, you know, she's saying, you know, well, Bernie, want to hear another joke?
And then, you know, she shoots him in the face on live TV.
Hey, hey, this is a lady.
People don't remember this.
It's worth looking up.
Also, again, for the yucks, I mean, this is completely real that somebody says to her, they says back in 2008, they go, hey, you know, Barack Obama's already got the delegates all locked up.
You can't win now.
So why are you still in the race at this point?
And she looked right at him and answered.
Didn't skip a beat.
Well, you know, Bobby Kennedy wasn't assassinated until June.
She was sitting there.
Honestly, listen, I'm holding out for the hope that someone will murder this guy for me.
Yeah.
There's always that.
I mean, you know, none of these none of these people running for, you know, Trump, Bernie.
None of these are young people.
I mean, they're all you know, the idea that the bolt of lightning is going to help decide this this race is still not to be forgotten.
It still exists out there.
But I mean, the idea that that you and I, I mean, as people who who who take this seriously and spend more time than we should trying to stay informed about it, that I mean, this is the level of the conversation is kind of a story of its own, that we're what, eight months away from the the election.
And we're talking about heart attacks and assassinations and Hillary and Joker makeup and all these things, because there is nothing serious to talk about.
We can't have a discussion about Trump's policies as president, because you can't and I don't mean this.
But you and I, I mean, in general, it becomes impossible to talk about Trump's policies, because there's no consensus of a fact about their I was just reading a series of things about the the economy here in the United States.
And there's absolutely no consensus on whether the economy is doing good or bad.
It's the consensus is all based on which partisan position the economist is taking.
You've got, you know, on one side of it, Paul Krugman at The New York Times, who continues to plead for a recession to save us from from Trump being reelected.
And then you've got Republicans who were pointing to GDP and job statistics, who just knew job statistics out this morning as we're having this conversation that show that lots of people are working again.
And then we have to argue about whether they're good jobs or right, the right jobs or bad jobs or whether it's Obama's, you know, he actually did it.
There's not even a consensus on these things that we can have a basic discussion about.
Well, let's let's sit down and talk about Trump's economic policies over the last couple of years.
It ends up as an argument over what's actually true.
Never mind.
We get to the point of analysis or opinion.
So you can't have those discussions on the Democratic side.
It's a clown show and you can't really have much of a discussion there.
And if you try, you end up getting into things like, you know, Bernie Sanders wants to remake the entire U.S. economy so that we can go see the doctor.
And that's is that a good idea?
I don't know.
But it's kind of hard to to have a discussion.
I find myself desperately looking for things to write about.
And I go back and I say, what did I write about during Obama's term?
And I would write these that they seem now somewhat ponderous think pieces about whether Iraq and what the plan is with the Soviet, with the Russians and everything.
And, you know, you at least could have that kind of discussion or write those kind of articles.
Now you start to talk about nuclear strategy in North Korea and somebody screams, oh, he just loves dictators.
He just wants to have sex with Kim Jong-un, their boyfriends.
It's like, OK, never mind.
Yeah, well, and you know what?
The right wing is the same way about Obama and his pallet of cash for the Iranian Ayatollah and all their garbage, all their stupid shit.
In these things.
But there there was a little more space during.
Yeah, well, let's talk about something important then that we can segue to right here, which is something that Bernie Sanders has been really good on, which is trying to stop the war in Yemen.
And, you know, just like with Somalia, there's some kind of ratio.
You can't really quantify it, but there's some kind of weird kind of schism here between the level of grief and the level of attention paid by the people who are responsible for creating the violence.
And so, you know, Bernie Sanders, Rand Paul didn't.
Bernie Sanders took the lead and with Mike Lee and some others help, twice got the Senate to invoke the War Powers Resolution to try to stop that thing.
And almost a year ago now, they got the Democrats in the House to pass the same exact wording and everything, got it through conference committee and Trump vetoed it.
It's been five years now and they're no closer to the goal of removing the Houthi regime and replacing them with Mansour Hadi or, you know, restoring Mansour Hadi to power there in Sana'a.
And so, you know, I don't know.
Why don't you say things about Yemen now and how important you might think that is or something?
Well, I mean, we've talked about this so many times that the one thing that most Democrats and most Republicans quietly agree on is more wars are generally a good idea.
And, you know, you can get into argue about the details and things that most of the opposition outside of a few sincere people like you've listed there.
I mean, most of the Democratic opposition to what Trump is doing in Yemen is based on, well, we've got to say something bad about Trump in every context.
So Yemen gets sticky, of course, given that it was Obama that got us involved there in the most recent iteration.
So that's a troublesome thing.
But generally, more war is never a bad thing as far as most of our politicians are concerned.
And that's really it.
The fact that there's no Americans getting killed over there, that we've managed to outsource the whole process is, as you said, a great way to keep it out of the news.
There's no story here because Americans are not directly involved.
We're just helping pay for it and supplying all the weapons and what have you.
We're doing the back office part of this war and things.
There's no point to this war.
It's just a way of kind of bleeding the Iranians a little bit if you're going to try to argue there's some point to it.
It makes the Saudis happy, I guess, that we're sort of helping them.
But I mean, it's a terrible thing that just creates suffering.
It doesn't have any strategic value.
You can't even make a terrible argument.
Oh, blood for oil.
Yeah, at least we get the oil.
You can't even make that kind of argument over this.
It's just a terrible thing where people are killing each other and nobody seems to care enough to stop it.
So it doesn't stop.
And so, yeah, I give Bernie credit for things like that.
But he's that's a different it's almost like a different Bernie.
You know, I don't hear him talk as much.
Maybe I should listen more.
You know, I hear him talk more about other issues on the campaign trail.
That's like Senator Bernie's thing, not candidate Bernie's thing.
Yeah.
Well, which is why he's not the president right now, because if he had only decided to really go after Hillary Clinton for her greatest weakness, which is her foreign policy, then he would have gotten the nomination and he would have beaten Donald Trump.
Ninety five percent or better chance, if you ask me.
I think he would have gotten the Robert Kennedy more than he would have before.
Maybe.
I don't I don't think Hillary would have ever given given him the nomination.
One way or the other.
I mean, literally, if she had to put on Joker makeup and kill him on stage, she would have.
You know what?
I mean, she had to concede to Donald Trump.
Now they had to wait until the next day for her to put her face on to go out there for her to sober up.
Yeah.
Yeah.
The thing about Bernie and I, this is the only little bit that that always kind of nags at me is is that he didn't stand up to Hillary.
Yeah.
Well, he was afraid he wanted.
Look, he ran in the first place to just pull her to the left a bit.
He wasn't trying to really be here in the first place.
And then he was afraid to really hurt her in any way, because then if she lost to Trump, it would be blamed on him, where he had really been trying to win in the first place.
He could have handily defeated her.
And then it wouldn't have even been a problem if he had really gone after her.
I really think so.
I mean, one of those alternate history things, if he had started the campaign with an aggressive stance on her militarism, if he had picked into some of the things that she was doing at the State Department that he chose to ignore.
Yeah, I know the emails, but there was stuff to be worked on there.
It certainly mattered to voters in the end, and it certainly played a role.
And if Bernie had been on one side of that issue, who knows what would have happened early on in the in the campaign?
She might have been perceived weak enough early enough that the money and power started shifting away.
But the fact that he kind of rolled over and it always sits poorly with me.
And it's the one thing that keeps me from from from jumping in to too aggressively, I guess, this time around.
Well, I mean, he would be a terrible president.
There's just no question about it.
The only thing, well, I actually think he's sincere when he says that he would completely reschedule pot on the federal level to no longer any kind of crime, which is really important, is really important.
But also, I think that he'd be marginally better on Palestine.
But I doubt that he'd end any of Obama's wars that Trump has continued every single one of.
I think he probably would, too, for four or eight years.
But I think he'd be marginally better on Israel.
But I can't think of anything else.
Yeah, it's very difficult.
And the Israeli thing is, you know, keep in mind that how powerful the Israeli lobby is and how much pressure and the president can can have his opinion.
But you've still got Congress.
You've still got the great, unwashed civil servant, deep state out there.
You know, the Israelis have been masterful at how they have tamed the United States over the years.
Whether you think that's a good thing or a bad thing, it's a thing.
And I don't you know, you get to the point where it can one is one person.
Could one person really be strong enough to push it in a different direction?
Arguably, probably not.
I mean, unless that's all he wanted to do.
Yeah, I mean, that's the whole thing.
Yeah, we'd take a real dedication.
There's an anecdote, you know, from Ronald Reagan called Begin and said, listen, I really wish that you would back down some of this bombing of Beirut right now.
This is out of control.
And then within 15 minutes, it stopped.
And Reagan said, I didn't know I could do that.
And and then, you know, there was one to where Bush senior in this cost Bush senior, the presidency, according to Philip Wise's analysis, was that he said something like or maybe he had Baker say it for him that, you know, we really wish that we didn't have Yitzhak Shamir to deal with here.
And wouldn't it be nice if they would hold elections so that we could have somebody else?
And they immediately did.
But then they also said, you know, that's not the way it works around here.
The tail wags the dog and we're going to show you and we're going to have a regime change in America next.
So.
But but but, you know, Barack Obama, there was a great one to, you know what, maybe this is somewhere at archive dot whatever, but it seems to be lost to the Internet.
But it was M.J. Rosenberg back in the beginning of 09.
And I'm going to say it was spring, like maybe late spring of 09, April or May or something.
And he had a piece where Obama had scared the hell out of Netanyahu and he was about to start backing down on the settlements.
And then.
Obama blinked first, but according to MJ's sources, Netanyahu was going to blink the next day, like he had arranged his blinking ceremony and everything, and Obama was the one who flinched first and said, OK, well, listen, I'll shut up about that.
If you guys will let me take the lead on Iran, which, of course, they didn't do anyway.
They fought him every step of the way on Iran.
So he traded off the Palestinians when he had the momentum in exchange for Iran.
And of course, didn't get anything for it.
Like like when Rand Paul decided to shut up about Yemen because Trump promised him Syria and Afghanistan and he got neither.
Right.
This is this is a big thing in American politics.
I mean, American foreign policy.
And it was something we often talked about at the State Department is, you know, have we gotten too big?
In other words, by trying to play an active role in everything all the time, you know, do we can we can we actually hold focus anywhere long enough?
You know, and the answer is probably not.
This is why our foreign policy tends to be sort of reactive.
You know, got a crisis.
We better do something for a while and then we'll forget about that place again because there's just too much.
It becomes impossible for one administration, never mind one man, you know, to sort of keep focus on all these these different issues.
And then once you go down to a country level or and say, I mean, for example, when I when I was in Japan, we had this this problem.
The Japanese wouldn't sign this international agreement called the Hague agreement that would make it easier for.
Child custody issues to be resolved and.
You know, we kept saying, look, all we need is the president to mumble this to the prime minister and it's going to get done, but instead it ends up stuck down at these these lower levels.
I mean, it's either important or it's not important.
And the answer was, you know, we got way too many things going on at one time for the president to be worried about this.
And I think that applies worldwide as well.
There's no comprehensive policy on a lot of these places because we're worried about so many things.
Other countries, I mean, you go to Korea, for example, their foreign ministry, they had they had basically three divisions, the division that dealt with the United States, the one that dealt with North Korea, and then the third one, which did everything else.
And it was very obvious who what mattered to them and what was important and where the focus was and where the resources went.
And, you know, the smart folks, as they made their way up the ladder, it was pretty clear which which department they were going to spend their time in, whereas in the United States, we're worried about Mozambique and then we're worried about Iran and then we're over here.
Same thing with Israel.
Right.
I mean, Israel has one portion of its foreign policy bureaucracy dedicated to the United States.
And then there's sort of everything else, things like that.
So this is what holds us back, is the inability to keep focus and particularly to pull focus, you know, to get the president or get the national security establishment to pay attention to something longer than the media span, lifespan of it and not let it go away.
This also leads to things like what we saw with the Ukraine.
You know, one of the things, again, that was exposed by this, this this silliness with the impeachment is how a very small group of people who seem to know each other quite well, you know, we're basically trying to run their own little policy game in the Ukraine.
And they didn't seem to have a lot of adult supervision or oversight, and everyone was kind of surprised that, you know, some seconded colonel gets to make these decisions and these other folks were in charge of this other thing.
But but yet it's made possible by the fact that the president, the Congress, even with good intentions, which don't exist, you know, just can't keep track of all this.
It's too big.
And by trying to do everything, we sort of fail at most things.
I think it's a real problem.
Hey, guys, Scott Horton here for Mike Swanson's great book, The War State.
It's about the rise of the military industrial complex and the power elite after World War II during the administrations of Harry Truman, Dwight Eisenhower and Jack Kennedy.
It's a very enlightening take on this definitive era on America's road to world empire.
The War State by Mike Swanson.
Find it in the right hand margin at Scott Horton dot org.
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Check out Mike's work and sign up for his list at WallStreetWindow dot com.
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Oh, we're not done yet, because when you check out everything he's got at WeMentWell dot com, you see the previously briefly mentioned Chelsea Manning's plight mentioned at the top of the page here.
Who's got the rocks to stand up to government?
And as you said, you cited Manning as one example of the whistleblowers that you stood up for in the past.
And people may not even realize whatsoever that Manning needs sticking up for right now, Peter.
She's in jail and she's in jail because she won't testify against Julian Assange.
Which is her right.
And she's being held in contempt of court.
And she's in jail for standing up for not only her individual right, but also standing up for someone, Julian Assange, who has done so many things to bring transparency.
She's that's a selfless act when when you do it not only for yourself, but for for another person.
And that's the kind of thing that that comes to mind when people start talking about heroes, not the context of, you know, some self-serving partisan testifying to bring down a president he doesn't like or what have you.
This is someone who's chosen to sacrifice her own freedom for someone else.
And damn, does that impress me.
Yeah.
And it's been what, three quarters of a year now or something, right?
Yeah.
Yeah.
She's got a couple of more months.
There is a limit on how long this contempt punishment will last.
And she still has a couple of months to go.
And there's nothing to suggest she's going to change at this late point.
She's going to stick it out.
And when you're willing to go to prison for someone else's principle and for the principle and on behalf of someone else, to me, that's what courage really, really looks like.
Strip away all the partisanship and say the principle of freedom and free speech and transparency matters more to me than my personal freedom.
You have my respect.
And I'm calling that out on my Web page in a way that I'm afraid too many people are either afraid to do or unaware that needs doing.
Yeah.
Or they have some stupid partisan incentive, because even though Manning's leak mostly implicated the Bush regime and was celebrated by the left, Assange helped Russia, helped Trump since then.
And so by the retroactive property of Assange's evil there, then that means that Manning also is to be sacrificed, essentially.
Yeah.
No, she was because when she first got out of prison, she she led the the gay pride parade here in New York City and was a celebrity and everything else like that.
And when Julian Assange was reconfigured by the media as not someone who was taking down Bush, but someone who helped the Russians, well, Chelsea got got lumped into that.
And so they tried to turn her into a crusader for trans rights.
And that kind of didn't work.
And so the hell with it.
Drop her.
She's no longer woke enough to to stand with the rest of us.
So some say, well, and a little bit more information here for people is that it's because what they long denied turned out to be, of course, true, that they had a grand jury and the Obama government had convened it, but then had decided they couldn't really indict without also opening up The New York Times and the rest of their friends to the same kind of restrictions.
But the Trump administration went ahead and readied an indictment for espionage against Julian Assange.
So Manning, who'd already done her time in the brig in military prison for the leak, which she was heroically guilty of, was called in to testify against Assange on what we already know up front is a completely bogus case that they're trying to trump up against Assange, that to be a journalist who asks his source to do something is to now be in conspiracy with that source to break the law and steal the thing rather than just to be a receiver of a leak, which, again, the Obama government said, man, we'd have to indict David Sanger.
So Michael Gordon, you know, the useful ones would be in the same kind of trouble.
So but that's the kind of case that they're trying to trump up against Assange and trying to use Manning and force Manning to essentially elaborate on her previous elocution in military court as to her guilt and what all exactly she did in order to liberate those files of the Afghan and Iraq war logs and, of course, the collateral murder video and the Guantanamo Bay files, as well, and give those to WikiLeaks in order to try to find a way to twist one of her words to implicate Julian Assange in somehow assisting in the breaking in of the computers in a way that they can prosecute.
So, yeah, talk about throwing yourself in front of the train for somebody else.
That's exactly what's going on here.
And it's a very important precedent because we're all we all would be interested to see these indictments, of course, are all sealed against Assange because we're democracy and we can't read them.
But the idea would be that that how the Trump people think they can craft something that's narrow enough to implicate Assange without being broad enough that it gets into the sticky territory of, quote, real journalists, unquote, is a bit of legal fuzziness that we're all kind of amused by.
I think the sad news is, is that working with the British, Assange is going to just rot in prison until he finally realizes what's expected of him, which is to die in jail and save everybody all this trouble.
And Chelsea's just being kind of taken along because she tried to do the right thing in the wrong context as far as the government is concerned.
Yeah.
Well, listen, I sincerely mean this.
Thank you for giving a shit at all about Chelsea Manning and and sticking up for her and bringing the subject up, because this is so important and it just it goes to shame everyone else in all of media and especially in alternative media who can't be bothered.
We'll keep up the fight.
All right.
That is Peter Van Buren, formerly with the State Department, but now he's more of an anti-government extremist type, seems like.
Hooper's War, a novel of World War Two, Japan is his latest book and his latest piece at the American Conservative is called Dems Don't Realize How Much Impeachment Hurts Them.
Thanks again, Peter.
Thank you.
The Scott Horton Show, anti-war radio can be heard on KPFK 90.7 FM in L.A.
APSradio.com, Antiwar.com, ScottHorton.org and LibertarianInstitute.org.
