All right, y'all, welcome back to the show.
It's anti-war radio.
I'm Scott Horton and our next guest on the show is David Bromwich.
Writes for the Huffington post.
He's a professor of literature at Yale university, and I'm clicking on his name here, trying to get to the bio so that I can tell you the name of his edition of Edmund Burke's selected writings edited by Dave Bromwich on empire, liberty, and reform, and he's the co-editor of the Yale university press edition of on liberty, man, I should read that.
Welcome back to the show, David.
How are you?
I'm fine.
Thank you, Scott.
Uh, well, I'm very happy to have you here.
And, uh, you have a great article, uh, at the Huffington post today.
It's, uh, running in the viewpoint section at anti-war.com.
And, uh, like our last guest, Matthew Rothschild, uh, and his article, it concerns the war in Libya.
Yours is called the bipartisan case against us involvement in Libya.
And that really is one of the most astounding things about this, uh, particular part of America's war in the middle East is, uh, the opposition of the Republican party, wouldn't you say?
Um, yeah, I, uh, it is true.
The Republicans historically have been, uh, closer to voting for wars, uh, not unanimously, but with a huge majority of them than the Democrats have on the other hand, right now, the Republicans are out of power and to attack the foreign policy, including the war policy of an opposing president is, is, uh, always the thing to do.
It's surprising to me, given the sort of cult of Obama and the, uh, extreme loyalty Democrats have felt toward him that as many Democrats have did, uh, also, uh, uh, have opposed the war or said that they questioned his power to, uh, conduct it without, uh, approval by Congress.
Yeah.
You know, it really is strange that, uh, aspect, I wonder if, um, you know, Republicans now even 55% of turning against the Afghan war, according to the latest Pew poll, I wonder if, if it, you know, registers that, oh, wow.
We were just like Obama bots only for Bush.
And, oh, wow.
If this wars in Afghanistan is wrong in 2011, then that means that people who've been opposed to it all along have been right this whole time.
What are we doing fighting a war for Karzai over there?
Is there ever, and, and, and can the, uh, can't the, uh, you know, Obama fans out there see the Bush loyalists in themselves?
You know, I'm afraid, uh, the Democrats tended to be skeptical about, uh, these wars, Afghanistan and Iraq under Bush.
And the Democrats tend to be credulous or at least apologetic about the wars.
Now that Obama is leading them, whereas Republicans are more critical, uh, it would be a relief to see some principle on both sides so that people see what they oppose is the wars and not just the person leading them, but, uh, this could be the beginning of that.
I hope it is the beginning of that.
I don't know.
It seems to me, and I have my own particular one percenter type point of view here that doesn't necessarily match up to what anybody else thinks, but it seems like the, uh, basis for the ultimate unraveling of the liberal conservative Republican Democrat divide in this country is set that it, you know, not to sound too much like a Marxist preaching class war, but you have, you know, the very richest people who control the state who are virtually, you know, unanimous in their, um, you know, one party statism up there, the bailout state, the, you know, corporate welfare for agribusiness and for the big insurance companies and for the military industrial complex.
Uh, the, our government is captured by these few, uh, very special interests, I guess.
And then there's the rest of us.
So it just seems to me like this whole country rock and roll split has got to just fall apart in the face of such an obvious contrast between the interests of the people who run the state and everyone else in our side.
Yes, I agree.
And I think that, uh, it's symptomatic that Goldman Sachs, uh, contributes huge amounts to both parties.
Um, Wall Street is very careful to contribute to both parties.
Obama was their candidate in, uh, 2008 and he probably will be in 2012, but if they get a, you know, plausible looking Republican, like, well, I won't, I won't prejudice anyone, but they'll certainly go both ways and it's not, it's not a hard thing to see anymore.
But the, uh, uh, you know, people in power in the system work the system by playing to, uh, the prejudices of left liberals, um, you know, gay marriage and affirmative action and things like that, uh, which are, uh, stimulating, uh, causes for people on the left and on the right, they go for abortion, immigration and so on.
And they can continue to divide the country along predictable lines and get into power people who are sympathetic to money.
Um, and Obama turns out to be, uh, very much one of them, uh, at least in his policies, in his words, he is self contradictory, but it is the policies that matter.
Well, I'm going to probably end up saying this over and over again, and I know it's not possible in the reality we live in David, but I, I think just for the thought experiment purposes, it's instructive kind of sorta maybe as close as I can get to insight anyway.
And that is that Kucinich ought to join the presidential race and he ought to attack Obama unremittingly from the left and destroy him and then get the nomination.
And then, uh, he and Ron Paul, after Ron Paul succeeds in getting the Republican nomination ought to run together and form a new party, us, and then on the other party will be them.
And then we'll know who's who for a change.
Yeah.
Well, there was the idea floated, you may know, or may remember of, uh, a, uh, John, uh, John Kerry, John McCain, bipartisan ticket, uh, right.
We can have Obama Palin.
It would be perfect.
More war, more inflation, more taxes, more no knock entries into people's houses.
Yeah.
Uh, I would, I would, uh, I think I would vote for Dennis Kucinich if he had a plausible, uh, or if he ran any kind of primary campaign against Obama.
I think his chances are small.
Unfortunately, I don't think Ron Paul's chances are great either, but they are, especially with regard to foreign policy, whatever you think of them on other causes, um, they're fairly close together in their anti-interventionism, their anti-imperialism, and they are honest.
Um, they are, they, they speak a much larger proportion of the truth than the leaders of either party.
Right.
Yeah.
I mean, I think that's really the important point too.
I disagree with Dennis Kucinich on quite a few issues with Ron Paul on a few, uh, fewer certainly, but, uh, both of them are decent, honest men, simple as that.
And if you look at the Republican primary debates back in 07 and 08, there was Gravel and Kucinich were the two honest guys.
And then the rest of them were the devils up there.
It was as obvious as that to me.
I don't know.
I'm biased against Democrats anyway, as, as well as Republicans.
All right.
Well, so on the, um, on the issue of the current war, uh, Matthew Rothschild was on the show just now, editor of the progressive magazine, uh, talking about Dennis Kucinich showing up these Republicans big time, he's already talking about maybe it's time for articles of impeachment against Barack Obama for this war in Libya.
Yeah.
Talk about proven principle right there.
That'd be a great debate point for those two in the primaries, don't you think?
Well, the, the, the word has started to come up.
The word impeachment has started to come up.
Nancy Pelosi, you may remember magnanimously quote, took it off the table unquote after the democratic victory in 2006.
So there was no more talk of that among Democrats, uh, impeaching Bush in 2007, 2008, uh, it'll probably get farther with the Republicans because of the tea party and the more.
What to say, feverish, impassioned, uh, tone of their politics.
But, uh, you know, I don't think it's gonna, gonna go much anywhere.
Um, but there's no doubt that what Obama has done, the claim he has made, uh, for his authority to, uh, continue this war by saying that it does not constitute the introduction of us forces into hostilities or, uh, situations where imminent hostilities are indicated by the circumstances to claim that he is not involved in such a war in, in Libya is astonishing.
It is, it is up there.
It is right on a par with, with George W.
Bush saying that waterboarding is not torture.
Yeah.
All right.
Well, we'll have to leave it there to go out to this break.
It's David Bromwich, professor of literature at Yale.
And we're going to talk about English and the war on it a little bit more when we get back.
Everybody hang tight.
We'll be right back.
It's anti-war radio on chaos and LRN.
Medicine became medication.
Information became directory assistance.
The dump became the landfill car crashes became automobile accidents.
Partly cloudy became partly sunny motels became motor lodges.
House trailers became mobile homes.
Use cars became previously owned transportation room service became guest room dining and constipation became occasional irregularity.
All right, y'all welcome back to the show.
A little bit sensei Carlin there for you.
I am a student of the George's Orwell and Carlin when it comes to language and manipulation of language.
I'm talking with David Bromwich.
He's a professor of literature at Yale knows a little bit about English.
I think, and I don't know if you know, David, but one of George Carlin's, part of his background that made him so good at that was that his mother was a leading light on Madison Avenue at the dawn of the post-war era.
And so around the house all the time was this discussion about how do you BS people into giving you their money?
And so he was just so inoculated with this manipulation that he was able to turn it right around and explain to people how it worked so well.
And, and, you know, from the, I think I'm trying to remember which order I read it in, but I remember being so impressed in 1984 at the scene where the neighbor comes out and says, guess what?
Guess what?
The new edition of the new speak dictionary is out the 11th edition, and it has fewer words than ever before.
And, uh, you know, that, uh, that's what Carlin said, you know, was, uh, you think in language, so the more they can manipulate the language and thinking, the more that they can control your thoughts and, and here we are, we're at the ultimate argument ad absurdum now, right?
Where torture is enhanced interrogation, just like the Germans called it during World War II and, uh, and war isn't war.
It's a kinetic, uh, something or other kinetic military action.
And now, uh, the Obama white house has added, uh, to their lexicon.
Um, what's it called?
Limited military action.
Yeah.
The Bush people went for hyperbole overstatement.
Uh, uh, you know, big cartoonish, um, characters of evil, the war on terror.
Uh, Obama's continuing, uh, the Bush Cheney strategy in that war to such an extent that Cheney and people like Michael Chertoff and Michael Hayden, uh, now praise Obama regularly, but he, his language is more bureaucratic and, uh, gray, sometimes euphemistic.
So, you know, the war on terror has become, I don't know, this war we're in, or they, they called terrors, uh, the overseas contingency operation.
Yeah, right.
I mean, so there's, it's very, it's very bureaucratized under Obama.
Um, Bush was a megaphone.
Obama's sort of padded, padded walls.
And the truth is buried under jargon as Carlin would say.
Well, the word war is intelligible to most people.
And if you multiply it, and I reckoned, uh, not counting all the many operations that are going on all over the world by us special forces and agents, but we're in six wars now where we're doing a lot of shooting missiles and sometimes troops on the ground to six wars.
Um, so if you count them, uh, that gets kind of peculiar because people, Americans, um, even though we've been in a lot of wars in the 20th century and the 21st, um, they don't like to think of it as a country.
That's just in the business of fighting wars, but off our own soil.
Um, that's pretty much the profile of the U S they, they don't want us to think about that.
Well, and war really shakes the hell out of the rest of our society where, you know, we keep this up for too long.
It's pretty much all we have left is that we all clap at the airport for the soldiers or whatever.
Yeah.
It's the only thing that makes us Americans anymore.
It's not the bill of rights.
That's for sure.
Yes.
Uh, I, I'm, uh, you've observed that too.
There, there's, uh, been an elevation of, of, uh, two job descriptions in, in my lifetime, in my recent lifetime.
And that is a big money-making businessmen and military officers.
Uh, they're at the top where it used to be.
It seemed to me that, you know, people in respectable work of all kinds and sort of, um, saluted each other, so to speak.
Right.
Well, you know, uh, Chomsky had this propaganda model.
There's a, actually I'll recommend it's an excellent documentary, uh, named after the book, manufacturing consent, where he kind of talks about, uh, the goal posts, you know, in, in TV propaganda, especially in how, um, all of the lie is unsaid it's the unsaid premise of every discussion, uh, you know, what is to be done about Saddam Hussein and all the things that underlie that are never, they never have to prove it.
And so then they bring on a Republican consultant and a Democrat consultant to talk about whether we should bomb them now or in a little while.
Yeah.
Well, and besides the tricks of euphemism and overstatement, um, you've got a regular kind of rhetorical procedure of, I don't know what to call it, maybe conversion, um, where the subject, uh, changes its nature, changes its face, um, and we're talking about, uh, killing terrorists as a kind of game.
I saw, and I hope I have the right newscaster that I'm about to name, but I think it was Candy Crowley, um, you know, asking two of her guests, expert guests, they were supposed to be.
Um, well, if you, if you could have your druthers, which terrorist would you like to assassinate next?
And, you know, she may not have used the word assassinate, but kill next, get next.
What's the word we use now?
Um, take down, that's the euphemism, take, take off.
And, uh, uh, what was unstated there was whether assassination by presidential or military fiat is constitutional or moral.
Um, and whether this is something went off to talk about, uh, the way you talk about who do you want to put in for a pinch hitter if you're the Yankee manager, it's the, there's a whole problem about tone of the conversation that relates to this too.
It's not just the use of words.
Yeah.
Well, and the, uh, the way the goalposts are set, Tom Woods always says that, uh, if you, if you are not within the consensus, uh, that lies between Mitt Romney and Hillary Clinton, then you're an extremist.
And so we don't have to listen to you.
So like, for example, all of us who were right about the Iraq war all along, nobody ever says, okay, well, David Bromwich, you're promoted.
We're going to have you on as the regular guest now, since we, all of our expert guests were wrong and you had it right.
No.
And especially they are not promoted in government.
Um, I'm one of the people who actually hoped that Obama might make Chuck Hagel, um, his secretary of state or secretary of defense, just because he was talking about bipartisanship.
But in fact, he did not appoint, uh, one dangerous looking liberal on domestic policy, and he did not appoint anybody anti-war, uh, on foreign policy.
It was, it was that conventional.
Um, can I add one thing about my article?
If you've got a moment, uh, this is relates to the use of language because it, I just figured out after I wrote it too late to put anything in it.
Um, where the state department lawyer, Harold Coe and the white house lawyer, uh, Robert power may have gotten their idea that they could defend Obama on Libya with the idea that he's not really in a war, the language of the war powers act talks about hostilities, the introduction of American, uh, combat forces into hostilities, uh, or situations where hostilities can be expected.
Now in 73, after being lied to by, by Nixon for five years, and before that Johnson for five years, what the Congress had in mind was to, was to make, uh, the criterion harder than just armed conflict.
They meant anything that could lead to armed conflict.
That's why they use the word hostilities.
But I think that what the president's lawyers have done is turn it around and say, Oh no, hostilities means only if we're being harmed.
So they're using hostilities, so to speak, as a, as a, as a hostile, as an adjective, instead of a noun.
Like Bill Hicks used to say, a war is when two armies are fighting.
And what they want us to believe is that by hostilities, the people who passed the war powers act really meant only putting our soldiers into harm's way into what, what, what, what, uh, sex harassment lawsuits call a hostile work environment.
As long, as long as they're not in a hostile work environment, it's not hostilities C, which is the exact opposite of what the war powers act means, but it's a very lawyer-like twist.
Well, and you know, we still don't know what it is yet, but I think it's pretty easy to imagine the, uh, uh, two senators, I think both Democrats have indicated that there is a secret interpretation of the Patriot Act that would blow us all away that we have no idea what it, what they say that language says.
Yes.
Ron Wyden is one of those two.
Um, but this, on this question of, of, uh, whether Libya is a war, you may find some interesting divisions, including senators, because I noticed that Dick Durbin, former Illinois senatorial colleague of Obama, uh, and a friend of his actually said, uh, this does not pass the straight face test.
You can't tell me with a straight face that Libya isn't a war.
And of course Obama did it because he thought he'd be out of it in a few days, you know, but it didn't work so fast.
And now he's caught up in the usual blundering sophistry of the last many presidents who have to figure out, uh, how their abuse of power can be justified, uh, in language that is apparently, uh, truthful.
Yeah.
Well, you know, it's funny too, because I imagine a big part of his believing that it could be over so quick was, uh, I think it was Fred Reed that wrote at lourockwell.com that, uh, you know, all a military officer ever has to say is can do, sir.
And so there you go.
He said, can you guys do this?
And they said, yes, sir, we sure can.
We're the USA.
And he went, all right, well, let's get it done then.
And he had France and England telling him that.
Right.
Yeah, exactly.
Uh, well that just, you know, whenever the guys chant while they're marching matches what the president of France says, you know, it's right.
All right.
We got to go, but thanks very much for your time as always, David.
Good talking to you.
Bye bye.
David Bromwich, everybody.
Look at his article on Huffington post today.
