All right, y'all.
Welcome back to the show.
It's anti-war radio.
I'm Scott Horton.
And our first guest on the show today is Jack Hunter, the Southern Avenger.
He writes for the American conservative magazine, and he keeps a website at southernavenger.com and he's on the radio in Charleston, South Carolina.
I forgot the name of the station.
I don't have it in front of me.
Welcome back to the show.
How's it going?
Hey, Scott.
Always good to talk to you.
Uh, very happy to have you here.
So, uh, let's talk about Ron Paul and this whole, uh, Republican presidential thingamajig.
I think first and foremost, the most important point to me is that we still have another year and a half of this to go, man.
Isn't it great.
It is great.
It's great.
All right.
So now here's the other thing is they can't say, well, Ron Paul was right all along and we've all been wrong all along, but they're all just trying to rip him off and copy him now, as you wrote in your most recent piece, Ron Paul won the debate, doesn't matter how well he did, particularly in that debate or whether they all bowed down or anything like that, or admitted that he was right.
And they were wrong.
They were all ripping off his stick the best they could.
And that means he's already won.
Well, that's exactly right.
I wrote my most recent column at the American conservative, which is called Ron Paul won the debate.
That it is true that Mitt Romney and Michelle Bachman, who the pundits and observers of this debate out there giving such high marks did do well in that presidential style that is so important to pundits and voters.
They came off as presidential, their style.
My argument was though, who represents the substance of what the GOP represents right now?
The ideas talked about on that debate stage this past Monday in New Hampshire, when the gentleman who was a Navy veteran stood up and said, look, I'm a Navy veteran.
I have three sons serving overseas right now.
Osama Bin Laden is dead.
When will we be getting out of Afghanistan?
On that debate stage, you heard people trying to explain to this gentleman that we are getting out of Afghanistan as soon as we possibly can.
Even Mitt Romney said that it is not the job of America to fight for the independence of other nations.
Well, excuse me, Mitt Romney.
In 2008, you thought that the precisely the job of the U.S. military was the fight for the independence of other nations via your support for the Iraq war.
I bring that up because every issue you could possibly imagine that Ron Paul was talking about in 2008, whether it was his economic warnings and how he tied it to the Federal Reserve or his foreign policy warnings, he was mocked by the Republican Party and many in the Republican audience.
This time around, not only are the candidates saying the same thing, but the audience members are asking questions that are far more sympathetic than what Paul has been espousing for 30 years than certainly 2008.
Ron Paul might not have won this particular debate purely, but more importantly than that, he's winning the debate.
The larger things that we argue about within the Republican Party, what's right and what's wrong, it's far more closer to what Paul has always believed than we were in 2008.
And that's far more important than what happened Monday night or the next debate or the one after that.
Yeah, absolutely.
Well, and of course we know that Mitt Romney will say whatever he has to to try to get the power, right?
But the point is that he thinks that this is what he has to say.
Funny little side note, the people of Afghanistan are fighting for their independence from the United States.
I'm sorry to be the only one to notice that or something.
Well, a guy like Mitt Romney and most politicians say what you will about our neoconservative friends, they do have a philosophy.
They believe we should be all over the world all the time, whether it's unpopular, whether we have the money to pay for it.
Lindsey Graham and John McCain right now think we should be in Libya and Syria and probably Iran and so on and so on.
They are consistent.
A guy like Mitt Romney and most Republican politicians say what they think they're supposed to say.
If it's 2008 and they're supposed to beat their chest over support for the Iraq war and what they might do to Mormar and Medina, John, that's what they'll say.
If it's 2012 and everybody's worried about the national debt, you have a Navy veteran father asking you when you're going to get out of Afghanistan.
Mitt Romney, being the cheap political opportunist, switches gears and says, well, yes, we need to get out of Afghanistan.
Well, wouldn't it be funny how Lindsey Graham ran straight to the home of big government, liberal interventionism and collective security, the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, which has been waging war for almost 100 years now.
But anyway, he went straight there to denounce the House speaker on Libya and all of the Republicans in the debate for not saying, hey, look, we must win in Afghanistan against terror.
And here's why.
That's exactly right.
He expects from mainstream Republicans that they do what they did in 2008.
They support all war for any reason, even when it doesn't make any sense whatsoever.
That's what Lindsey Graham stands for.
That's what he expects out of a guy like Mitt Romney.
And quite frankly, so do many of the neoconservatives.
Danielle Plekka, who works for the American Enterprise Institute, had an interesting piece in the Politico two days after the debate that said she's basically said when Mitt Romney made those comments about Afghanistan, which were a complete reversal of what he had said before.
Her email was bursting at the seams with her fellow neoconservatives saying, hey, I thought Romney was one of us.
Why is this guy saying this?
This is undermining our efforts in Libya and Afghanistan and so on and so on.
And they were right to be upset.
That was their guy.
Romney has completely changed.
Now, how this relates to Ron Paul is, you know, these politicians say what they think they're supposed to say.
If they think they're a conservative Republican and conservative Republicans believe A, B and C, then they subscribe to A, B and C.
Well, A, B and C changed since 2008.
A, B and C in 2008 might have been Bush, Cheney and Rumsfeld, total neoconservative, big government Republicanism.
Now it's a lot closer to Ron Paul and Rand Paul or Justin Amash or Walter Jones.
And that shift is happening.
And the neoconservatives and the GOP establishment, who are not always wanting the same, but often are, do not like it one bit.
Well, this is a little bit redundant from the other day, but I got to throw in here.
I hope John Bolton gets in there, man.
I want to see a real fight.
And at least that guy knows what he believes.
I can't wish anything well for any political future for John Bolton.
Oh, well, I didn't mean that.
I just want him to run.
Well, you know, you do have some neoconservative believers on that stage.
Rick Santorum, you'll notice.
I mean, you talk about a Bush Republican, a guy who believes in big government under a Republican brand.
You've got it in Rick Santorum.
He was quick.
If you remember, the gentleman in the audience said, and I thought this was funny.
This was only one of the two foreign policy questions of the entire evening for the audience.
The gentleman said, look, with our debt crisis, can we afford these military bases all over the world?
Rick Santorum was quick to explain why we had to have all these bases all over the world, no matter the cost, because he thinks it's important for America's security.
I'm sure that gentleman didn't like the answer.
And a lot of people in that audience were scratching their head.
But once again, Rick Santorum is a true Bush Republican.
He's not going to be swayed from that.
So they're on that stage.
Newt Gingrich is the same thing, but he's deft enough to know he has to change his position sometimes to move forward.
Remember, he was for the Libyan war before he was against it.
Yeah.
Well, I'd hate to even really waste any time on Newt here, but I guess it's worth noting that, you know, if there was someone up there with, if not the intelligence to put the argument together, at least the experience in making the argument about, you know, the neocon view of the American empire and why it has to be that way, you would think it would be him.
So, and I would think that he would have tried it, you know?
Well, he knows it's not a winning issue this time around.
Look, when John McCain went in in 2008, before the economy went south, he planned on running as a war hawk and just basing his entire campaign on that, because his domestic policies conservatives did not like.
And when the economy went south, he was forced to talk about fiscal issues.
That was not his strong ground or strong suit in his mind.
And he was absolutely right.
In Bush's party in 2008, as long as you wanted to bomb the hell out of people for no reason, sure, you could get through the primary and win the nomination, hopefully the presidency, at least in their eyes.
That doesn't work anymore.
It doesn't jive.
It doesn't fly.
People are seeing beyond that.
That's what upsets a guy like Lindsey Graham, when he finds himself in the minority and cheering for what's going on in Libya.
Could you imagine John McCain on that debate stage Monday night, making the case not only for staying in Afghanistan, which is, Republicans are 50-50, if not even more so, leaning towards leaving, but John McCain on that stage making his case for why we should be in Libya right now, when you have even John Boehner asking questions, Republicans as milk-toasted and useless as John Boehner taking the opposite position, he wouldn't make it.
And that just shows you just how far we've gone in the direction of Ron Paul in a matter of four years.
And as you said earlier, Scott, this is, we've got a year and a half of this to go.
It's great, man.
It's, you know, and, and this is what I was predicting from the moment I read on Lou Rockwell's blog that Ron was forming an exploratory committee for president back in 2007, is that, wait a minute, you know, he's right about everything.
How are they going to handle this when he's going to have such a big platform to say all this stuff that is so obviously right in the face of the rest of these guys, it's going to be a real problem for them.
And this time it's just triple or worse for them.
It's Jack Hunter, y'all, the Southern Avenger from the American conservative magazine and southernavenger.com.
We'll be right back after this.
All right, y'all.
Welcome back to the show.
It's anti-war radio.
I'm Scott Horton.
I'm on the line with Jack Hunter, the Southern Avenger.
He's a radio show host in South Carolina, writes for the American conservative magazine and keeps a website at southernavenger.com.
Now, Jack, before the break we're talking about how the Republicans are in a lot of trouble.
If you know, I would have said that the only intellectual leadership that they have whatsoever, it would be, you know, Newt Gingrich, you know, inside the party, I guess, Rush Limbaugh on the radio or whatever.
But other than that, I mean, their highest ranking political officer is Mitch McConnell, for crying out loud.
He's the antithesis of charisma.
I mean, these guys, they got an end of knowledge and depth.
They have nothing, really.
And even Newt Gingrich isn't willing to stand up to Ron Paul on the foreign policy issue at this point.
I wonder, you know, how this is going to play out.
It seems like he's just going to absolutely dominate.
Who's the one candidate who's even been in the military?
Who's the one candidate who actually understands economics?
Who's the one candidate who's been right about all this stuff for 40 years?
Right.
Well, the true philosopher on that stage is Ron Paul.
If we're talking about Bob Taft and Barry Goldwater and that sort of Republicanism, which is the traditional American conservative tradition, is Ron Paul.
Unquestionably, not only is Newt Gingrich not representative of that, you know, he has his reputation of being the smartest guy in the room.
He's no dummy for sure.
But Newt Gingrich, when you break it down, is really pretty much a right wing New Dealer.
His heroes are guys like FDR.
He has this very futuristic, you heard him talking about the space program the other night, his entire career.
If you look at him, he has this very futuristic America can do anything.
And there's nothing wrong with that, except what he wants America to do is often at the expense of the federal government and to sort of support these sorts of things.
But conservatives should not be surprised, for example, that Newt Gingrich was in favor of the individual health care mandate.
They should not be surprised when he's on commercials with Nancy Pelosi supporting Cabin Trade and so on.
He believes in government having an activist role just for things Republicans might be a little bit more sympathetic to than Democrats.
That is FDR style big government liberalism only under Republican brand.
That's what Gingrich has always stood for, which is also why he supports the neoconservative foreign policy.
He thinks his country is great to the extent that we can flex our military might all over the world.
That's not what traditional conservatives would consider what makes America great.
I don't care if you're talking about Russell Kirk or even a guy like Ronald Reagan.
You know, the neocons love to say that Ronald Reagan is their guy.
Ronald Reagan's foreign policy, the Wall Street Journal today would call isolationist.
Here's a guy who only had three military interventions his entire career, his entire presidency rather, no prolonged military action.
And the only time he did something that was obviously stupid, the situation in Lebanon and Beirut, he immediately pulled the troops out when he realized it didn't make sense.
What would they say now?
Cut and run, an appeaser, isolationist.
Well, they said that then you can find Norman Fedoris, the neoconservative writer at Commentary magazine, when Ronald Reagan, for instance, met with Mikhail Gorbachev.
He said that Ronald Reagan was like Neville Chamberlain in 1939 in Munich and we were appeasing the enemy and so on and so on.
So this stuff never changes.
If you're talking about a traditional conservative Republican philosophy, Ron Paul embodies that.
I'm sorry.
Yeah, well, a couple of things there.
First of all, if you get Ron Paul's book, A Foreign Policy of Freedom, there's a great series of speeches about Lebanon and they basically go like this.
Ronald Reagan, don't intervene in Lebanon.
You're probably going to get bombed or something.
It's going to be terrible.
You don't know what you're doing.
And then Ronald Reagan, you put our Marines in Lebanon.
You ought to get them out of there real quick right now before something bad happens.
And then, oh, man, Ronald Reagan, I told you something bad was going to happen.
Would you please do the right thing and get the troops out of Lebanon?
And then, hey, congratulations, Mr.
President, you did the right thing and got our guys out of Lebanon, just like I told you you should.
Those speeches are right there.
No, Reagan was the kind of person and obviously Ron Paul was right about that from beginning to end.
Reagan was the kind of person who would think, reflect and act accordingly.
It wasn't about, oh, are my constituents going to think I look weak?
Am I going to worry about what Norman Dorick says in Commentary magazine?
He says, no, you know, I made a big mistake.
In fact, he called it the biggest mistake of his entire administration.
By the time the end of his presidency, he reflected and he corrected the mistake.
Would George W.
Bush have done that?
Would he look at Iraq after we knew everything that was told us was a lie?
Absolutely not.
Would President Mitt Romney do that?
Hell no.
So the big difference there is worth looking at.
Yeah, well, you know, and as far as Newt Gingrich and how close he is to the neoconservative viewpoint, there was a time in 2003 where I was still a bit confused about neoconservatism.
I was looking at the AEI website and I saw that Pat Robertson and Newt Gingrich and all these other people, John Bolton, were members of it.
And but I was I had access to Jim Loeb, who's been hunting neocons for two generations in a row now.
And so Jim Loeb broke it all down.
How no Pat Robertson and and well, leave him aside for the moment.
We all know who he is.
But but John Bolton and Newt Gingrich.
These are right wing nationalists who are in alliance with the neoconservatives against the old kind of realist faction, centrist, you know, Council on Foreign Relations type imperialists.
And these guys are much more hardcore, want the U.N. out of the way rather than in power.
But Newt is not one of them.
For him to be one of them, he would have to used to have been a Democrat or a communist.
And he and John Bolton both are Barry Goldwater right wing nationalists.
They just have an alliance with all these ex-commies and ex-Democrats.
Here's the distinction you need to make.
And I'm sure Jim Loeb would agree with this, that when you're talking about right wing nationalists and comparing them to Barry Goldwater, you know, Pat Buchanan, who's a frequent contributor there to Antiwar.com, always makes the point that Barry Goldwater was a Bob Taft Republican, that the Cold War was a different kind of war, a special exception in our history and indeed the history of any nation.
It was very different.
Did Barry Goldwater believe in fighting the Cold War?
Absolutely.
Did he believe with all the military, agreed necessarily with the military interventions after the Cold War was over?
Absolutely not.
He reverted to that traditionally conservative position.
Was Goldwater good on the first Gulf War?
I'll have to go back and look.
But the reason I'm bringing this up, I have a 1990 edition of A Conscience of a Conservative, and Pat Buchanan wrote the foreword to that particular edition.
And he notes in there that after the Cold War was over, that Goldwater went back to the traditionally conservative position.
So I'll trust Mr.
Buchanan on that.
Well, you even had like people like Jude Wanniski, who was himself a neoconservative, became a neopaleocon, basically.
He broke with the neocons and the typical conservatives and went instead with Pat Buchanan and became antiwar as soon as the Cold War was over.
Right.
Well, you even had a neoconservative like Jean Kirkpatrick, who after the Cold War said, can we go back to being a normal country in a normal time?
The older generation of neoconservatives, one of my Irving Kristol, Jean Kirkpatrick, people like that, you know, were more muscular in their foreign policy than what you and I might agree with.
But certainly worlds away than what a Mac Booth or William Kristol or these guys believe today.
I mean, there was a little there was a degree of a little bit more matureness there, if you will, maturity.
Well, you know, I saw Bill Kristol on Fox News saying that Barack Obama is a born again neoconservative, which just means no, a neoconservative, someone who was a lefty and now he's a right wing nationalist warmongering lunatic, just like Bill Kristol's father.
He just inherited, you know, from him.
But so I wonder if that means that the neocons could be all kicked out and forced back into the Democratic Party where they came from.
But it's already happening.
The there was an article of the American Enterprise Institute blog this week saying that the neoconservative need to support Barack Obama and what he's doing in Libya and sort of wagged his finger at the Republicans in the House and the Senate who are saying the exact opposite.
What's interesting about that, the most conservative members of the Republican Party are those asking questions about what the president's doing in Libya and Afghanistan right now.
If you look at the House, of course, there's Ron Paul and Walter Jones and John Duncan.
But there's also, you know, Michelle Bachman's opposed to the war in Libya.
Alan West is questioning what's going on, you know, sort of.
That must really be because their constituents are letting them know.
Am I right?
Well, because Michelle Bachman's instinct has got to be nuke everybody, you know?
Well, no, no.
Well, you know, Michelle Bachman is sort of a mixed bag there.
I think that she's trying to figure out what's right and, you know, is open to suggestion.
Alan West is the more interesting figure there.
You just mentioned, are they hearing it from constituents?
Well, in that particular case, Alan West heard from a lot of a lot of his Tea Party supporters when he voted for the Patriot Act 90 day extension.
He voted to support that.
Well, because of his constituents complaints, which were a lot, most of them came from the Tea Party, according to him.
He went back.
He looked at the situation with the Patriot Act.
He asked some people in government a number of questions, received zero answer.
And so when it came up again here last month, he voted against the Patriot Act.
Guess what?
That's what a statesman does.
They look and they reflect and they make their decisions accordingly.
They just don't do things reflexively.
In the Senate, Rand Paul, Tom Coburn, Jim DeMint are all holding the president's feet to the fire on this Libya situation, the War Powers Resolution.
It is within the not only the Republican Party, but the most conservative members of the Republican Party who are questioning our foreign policy status quo right now.
Who's supporting it?
The Democrats, because they're supporting their president and the neoconservatives who are rallying behind Obama.
Now we're seeing it.
Yeah.
Well, as far as political activism goes, it sounds to me like you're making the case.
This is the year for it.
You know, people can actually make a difference in Congress somehow.
I don't know.
You seem to make a pretty solid case.
I don't know, Jack.
It's an interesting time out there and things are moving in our direction.
So very exciting.
All right.
Well, listen, man, I always appreciate your commentaries.
Everybody, you can read them and watch them in YouTube format over there at the American Conservative Magazine and at Southern Avenger dot com.
Thanks very much, Jack.
Take care, Scott.
