05/18/07 – Thomas Woods – The Scott Horton Show

Alright folks, welcome back to Anti-War Radio.
I am your host, Scott Horton, and our next guest today is Thomas E. Woods.
He's the author of The Politically Incorrect Guide to American History, and he's a senior fellow at the Ludwig von Mises Institute.
Welcome to the show.
Thanks, Scott.
Good to talk to you.
I want to play for you this clip real quick from the Republican debate the other night.
This is Rudolph Giuliani.
Okay.
Sir, your question, please.
Mrs. Griffin, what do you plan to do about crime in our city?
A lot.
Because that's what Jesus wants.
9-11 was bad.
I agree with that.
I can't believe how easy this is.
Mrs. Griffin, what are your plans for cleaning up our environment?
9-11.
Mrs. Griffin, what about our traffic problem?
9-11.
I'm so glad that was a family guy and not actually Giuliani.
I thought, Scott, I don't want to have to listen to this again.
I know, that's what I was thinking, too, man.
And every time I hear it, I can see his beady little eyes through those glasses, too.
But really, that is how easy it is, isn't it?
Just get up there and wave your bloody shirt, and that's it.
And the funny thing is that it's not even that Giuliani is just adult and doesn't get it.
He's just a corrupt guy.
I mean, he's very intelligent.
So he knows how to exploit an audience of rubes, basically.
He knows the code words.
He knows that this was red meat for him.
And he knows that no rational thought is necessary or, in fact, allowed.
Yeah.
It's funny.
I kind of wish I had a time machine.
I could go back and be a fly on the wall and watch this guy convict people in federal court back in the day.
I mean, I don't care about Rudy's history as a prosecutor, inventing charges against people.
I mean, he's just the way you would think.
It's all self-promotion for Rudy.
It's not the pursuit of justice or anything like that.
He couldn't care less about that.
You know, I've already trademarked this, so don't anybody rip it off, but I already have a new bumper sticker with a picture of Giuliani on it that says, I already miss George W. Bush.
Yeah, I know.
And here I am missing Clinton.
I just can't imagine there could be a time that I couldn't miss.
Remember the good old days of George W. Bush, when we had only one or two crazy wars?
Yeah.
Well, I just spent the last hour talking with Michael Schoyer, so I don't think we really need to completely beat to death the actual argument they were having.
But at the end of the day, basically the deal is Ron Paul was right that the reason Al Qaeda even exists and has followers and attacked the United States on September 11th is that American foreign policy is a significant contributing factor to that.
And Rudolph Giuliani was not just wrong, but portrayed himself as an absolute idiot when he declared that he'd never even heard that before.
Right.
I mean, of course, there are whole books on this.
I mean, anybody who studies international affairs knows about it.
So, in effect, if anyone had really been listening to what he's saying, he's in effect saying, I am woefully unqualified to serve as president.
And I don't even know basic concepts when it comes to international relations.
But one interesting thing of the many things that have happened in the wake of this debate involves what happened in Michigan.
I don't know if you've mentioned this or not, but you're probably familiar with the chairman of the Michigan GOP threatening to go to the RNC and start spreading petition around to top Republicans to get Ron Paul ousted from all future debate because of his comments on 9-11.
Now, two things to say about this.
I mean, number one, the Michigan GOP apparently has no problem with candidates who flout Republican positions on every issue you can imagine.
That's fine.
But if you're against the war, along with 70% of Americans, well, then that's completely unthinkable.
But the beautiful thing is the Michigan GOP offices have been so bombarded with calls, not only by Ron Paul supporters, but just by people who believe in, you know, simple fairness and common sense.
They've been bombarded with calls, emails, faxes, to the point where yesterday they had to send employees home the middle of the day they could not function.
They had to unplug the phones.
The guy's Blackberry is full of messages.
So that today, somebody emailed to tell me that he called the Michigan GOP to protest this unbelievable outrage against Ron Paul and was told that the chairman has decided to drop his campaign against Ron Paul.
I don't think the guy had any idea what he was going to unleash when he threatened to do that.
No idea whatsoever.
Right, and just think about what that reveals.
If it had been Mike Huckabee or Duncan Hunter or somebody who had said something unpopular and had been, you know, they were attempting to marginalize one of them, there's no grassroots support like that for people like them.
Right, I mean, to me, that really says something, and the accusation that Ron Paul's campaign or supporters of Ron Paul stacked these internet votes or text message votes or whatever, that, you know, as a lot of people have pointed out, that requires me to believe that John McCain, with a war chest, you know, larger than the GNP of some countries, has never thought to try to manipulate a ball or something.
Right.
But what's really interesting is that, well, why is it that even if I assume that that's true, which I don't, but even if I did, what does that tell us about Ron Paul and the depth of the support for him, that people will, people actually feel passionate enough about him to bother, whereas nobody seems to say, you know what, I've got to drop everything and vote for Tommy Thompson in this poll, and why is that?
Right.
You know, there's an unanswered question, I think, that deserves to be considered.
Right, and, you know, I don't know what the numbers are.
I guess if you somehow, you know, mail the copy of a republic, if you can keep it by Ron Paul to everybody in America, he might not win over everybody.
Maybe he'd only win over 10 or 15 or 20 percent or something like that.
But if his ideas could have a fair, get a fair hearing, then it would be much more interesting.
And, you know, Scott, there was a new report.
It shows that that 20 percent, or the 15 or 20 percent that do agree realize, wow, this guy is really something special.
This is not Duncan Hunter or Tommy Thompson up there.
This guy, as Lew Rockwell says, is the best congressman in American history.
Yeah, there's no question about it.
I mean, he's obviously not a hack.
He obviously believes what he's saying.
He can't be bought.
You know, even people on the left, I think, can look at this guy and say, you know, I may not agree with him on everything, but he's obviously got far more integrity than anybody running on the Democratic side.
You know, even Obama, who sounds like an anti-war candidate, you read between the lines of what he says, and in effect, very little would change under him.
You'd have to be terminally naive to believe otherwise.
But with Ron Paul, well, he really would be able to turn around and do some good.
I thought it was very interesting, by the way, when the New York Times wrote this big piece on Giuliani, and they did not mention Ron Paul's name.
They said Giuliani had this very good response when, I kid you not, another debater made some comments on 9-11.
And the rest of the article goes on and on about Giuliani, another debater.
So Ron Paul doesn't even get a mention, even though he's the source of the controversy.
So it's almost as if the New York Times isn't even trying to seem impartial.
I mean, it's so obvious.
When they pull a stunt like that, in effect they're saying, well, you know, we have approved Giuliani for you people.
If you want Giuliani, we could live with that.
But we haven't approved Ron Paul.
The New York Times doesn't want Ron Paul, so we're not going to mention him.
It's just almost eerie what's going on.
I mean, am I living in an Orwell novel, or am I maybe living in a Kafka novel?
I can't decide.
Yeah, it's one of the two.
And you're right.
I mean, they...
Well, at the end of the day, Madison's structure allows for us to just go ahead and support Ron Paul anyway.
We can all vote for him no matter how much money we have or don't have.
But the way it's set up is that the top fundraisers, the people who are on Lockheed's payroll, basically, the military industrial complex and other special interests like that, they bankroll the major candidates.
And in the mass media, they don't make any secret whatsoever of the idea.
I mean, it's not even subtle.
I mean, they will tell you in one sentence, America is the greatest democracy that ever existed, et cetera, et cetera.
And by the way, you can either choose from Edwards, Hillary, or Obama on the Democrat side, or McCain, Giuliani, or Romney on the Republican side.
And the rest of these people are all just the sideshow and will never talk about them, will never take them seriously, will never act as though any of you are taking them seriously.
You have your choices.
And this is...
They keep saying, first time since 1918 or 16 or whatever it was that you had all these presidential candidates, open primaries, basically, on either side where there's not a president or a vice president running for election.
And here we're going to mix it up.
And especially right as we're killing hundreds of thousands of people around the world in the name of giving them democracy.
And yet here's our democracy.
You can choose from these three members of the war party or these three members of the war party for your two candidates.
And then you can choose one of the two of them.
Well, yeah, I mean, that is exactly the situation that we have.
And, you know, when we sometimes we gripe about how bad the education system is, people just...
I mean, you know, I taught college for seven years in New York, and I saw the product of the education system.
They have no ability to question anything.
They will believe any press release you give them.
People say the education system has failed.
No, it hasn't failed.
It has succeeded beyond the wildest dreams of this regime because it has produced the most compliant people in the world, in effect, who will accept everything they're told about almost everything that matters.
It's just downright shocking.
And unfortunately, when you have a population like this that doesn't have the background to be able to counter what they're being fed, or either that or they're just lethargic or not paying attention, it's much easier for the establishment to get away with this and say, well, you can choose between this guy and then this other person who is three inches away from him politically.
I mean, there are, though, I think there is a minority of people that is starting to wake up, is starting to pay attention and say something isn't quite right here.
This does have kind of the feel of a sham here.
And the more people who can be awakened to that reality, the better.
And your program does such an important job with that.
And all the alternative media, even Democracy Now on the left, I think, does some important work.
I just emailed them today and I said, you know, why don't you write about or pardon me, why don't you speak more or at all about Ron Paul?
Because I said he's the only candidate in either party with the guts to ask a simple question like, if we were bombed and starved to death, you know, would we respond to that?
And I said, now, the mainstream media only wants to distort this guy, isn't telling the truth about stories the mainstreamers mangle or ignore the whole point of your existence?
Now, maybe they'll follow up on this, maybe not.
But if they don't, then they just don't know a good story when they see it, because you're not going to get another Ron Paul for an awfully long time.
And, you know, it's funny, you talk about how unable or unwilling the American people are to question these things.
I have to say in my own, I guess, naivete, when I saw that debate, obviously, I was screaming and yelling at Giuliani as he paraphrased the questioner and not Ron Paul when he was denouncing Ron's statement and that kind of thing.
But by the time it was over, I went ahead and wrote on my blog, Ron Paul wins again.
The best Giuliani could come up with is they hate us for our freedom and not even Doofus McDumbass believes that anymore.
And yet, no, I was wrong.
Doofus McDumbass does still believe that, apparently, in 2007, halfway through.
It is still absolutely shocking and amazing for someone to say, no, they don't hate us for our freedom, they hate us for our foreign policy.
Right, exactly.
And, you know, somebody just emailed me today in response to one of my articles, making a point that I hadn't even thought of, pointing out that Ron Paul said in the debate, at least in the debate, he said, you know, what would you do against Osama?
And he said, well, I'd go after him.
I wouldn't launch some war in Iraq.
I'd go after Osama.
Now, why is Ron Paul made out to be some appeaser or this and that when he actually said, well, we can justly pursue the mastermind of these attacks.
The only thing he's against is the Iraq War.
But apparently they have still conflated the Iraq War with the war on terror in people's minds when the only connection there is, is that the Iraq War has obviously made the terrorist menace and the number of people involved in it, obviously made it worse.
I mean, at this point, I don't see how anybody can deny that.
Right.
And it's interesting that you bring that up today.
We're featuring on Antiwar.com Bush's Tora Bora Bull by Paul Sperry, and it's about how George Bush refused to carry out the mission that Ron Paul and the rest of the Congress, with only one exception in the House of Representatives, authorized him to carry out.
And that was to get bin Laden and the people responsible for the attack.
And it is absolutely clear.
And I don't know if you saw this article yet today, Thomas Woods, but it's up there on Antiwar.com.
It's called Bush's Tora Bora Bull.
And it's about how the goal of the invasion of Afghanistan was to overthrow the Taliban and create a new government.
It's direct quotes from military guys saying, catching Al Qaeda, killing Al Qaeda, bombing Al Qaeda, catching bin Laden is not our mission.
Our mission is to fight the Taliban, who, by the way, tried to warn us of the impending attack two weeks before, and to let Osama bin Laden go.
Well, what more can be said at that point?
What more can be said?
You wonder if even that will get through to the hardcore flag-waving types who think that that's what being an American is all about.
You just constantly make excuses for the regime you live under, and that makes you a good American.
What would Thomas Jefferson have thought of that?
What kind of ticks me off more and more about the usual way this is discussed is that this is portrayed as a conservative versus liberal thing.
You know, the conservatives are for the war, the liberals are antiwar.
There's so much wrong with that, I don't even know where to begin.
Typically, the mainstream liberals were all for the war.
I mean, I thought Bill Moyers showed that pretty well in that great documentary.
The New York Times was all for the war.
The Washington Post was all for it.
All the mainstream liberals.
Hillary Clinton was almost berserk for the war.
Justin Raimondo wrote a great piece called Hillary the Hawk.
And of course, now she's beating her breast.
Oh, if only I had known.
If only I had known that this wasn't a wise war.
Well, you know what?
Ron Paul knew.
Anybody with an internet connection knew.
Somehow Hillary Clinton didn't know.
So it's not a matter of the liberals are antiwar.
If only that were the case.
Now, the hard left, the really hardcore left, like on Counterpunch.org, now they're good.
They are antiwar.
And then meanwhile, the conservatives.
I have an article on LewRockwell.com today showing that Russell Kirk, who is arguably the founder of American conservative thinking in America after World War II, Russell Kirk was antiwar.
Before he died in 1994, he had had an opportunity to live through the first Persian Gulf War.
And you should read what he has to say about it.
He was absolutely withering on this.
In private conversation, Russell Kirk, the founder of the modern conservative movement in America, said George H.W. Bush should be strung up on the White House lawn as a war criminal.
Now, what would the people at National Review and the Weekly Standard have to say about that?
Yeah, exactly.
And in fact, well, I have your article open here in front of me.
I want to read a quote out of that.
But first, tell me a little bit about Russell Kirk and the foundations of the modern American conservative movement after World War II.
Who is this guy Kirk for the young people in the chaos audience?
Right.
Well, Kirk is probably considered to be one of the three key traditional conservatives.
And I'm taking this from George Nash, who wrote a great book on the history of conservatism in America.
And he identified Russell Kirk, Richard Weaver, and Robert Nisbet.
And I've shown elsewhere that Weaver and Nisbet were also anti-militarist.
So it's not just Kirk.
Early on in Kirk's writings, he condemned the military draft, for example.
But Kirk was a scholar of some renown.
But he's particularly known among conservatives because he wrote a book in 1953 called The Conservative Mind.
And it has gone through, I don't know, six or eight editions by now.
And it's sort of considered to be the book that a young conservative should read, The Conservative Mind.
And he wrote for National Review for many years and Modern Age and all the sort of typical conservative type outlets.
So he was respected by everybody.
And to this day, almost any conservative foundation will honor him or hold conferences talking about his thought.
But as I show in the article, you know, they don't want to talk about his foreign policy views.
And so if they're having a Kirk conference and you raise your hand in the back of the auditorium, you say, well, what about Kirk's opposition to the Persian Gulf War?
They'll pretty much all stand there, you know, pulling at their collars, clearing their throats, looking for the exit.
You know, nobody wants to bring this up.
But to me, I would say it's pretty relevant.
Because is Russell Kirk a liberal?
No.
In fact, he's probably the most illustrious conservative you can think of intellectually here that we have.
And yet National Review a few years ago, you remember, wrote this article condemning people like Pat Buchanan and Sam Francis and so on as unpatriotic conservatives because they oppose the regime.
That makes you unpatriotic because you're against the gang in the White House.
Well, my question is, you're going to call Russell Kirk an unpatriotic conservative?
Is Russell Kirk not good enough for National Review?
I mean, give me a break, right?
Yeah, absolutely.
Not only was he against it, and not only did he compare George Bush Sr. to Woodrow Wilson and some of the other worst liberal Democratic presidents in American history, but I like this is the quote that you bolded here from a Russell Kirk speech after the first Gulf War.
Quote, We must expect to suffer during a very long period of widespread hostility toward the United States, even, or perhaps especially, from the people of certain states that America bribed or bullied into combining against Iraq.
In Egypt, in Syria, in Pakistan, in Algeria, in Morocco, in all of the world of Islam, the masses now regard the United States as their arrogant adversary.
There it is now.
So what I go on to say there is that, well, I guess to the propagandized automatons out there, this means Russell Kirk is blaming America for terrorism.
I mean, again, only an imbecile could possibly interpret it that way.
If you have an IQ above 50, you understand he's simply saying that if you want to run around the world playing empire, people might get upset at that.
They don't get starved to death and sanctioned and bombed and sit around thinking, my gosh, what a shame that we have so displeased the US government.
Some of them actually get angry the way we would get angry.
This is Kirk's point.
But apparently, in the modern conservative world, you're not even supposed to think this, much less write it down.
There's his big sin.
He also wrote it down.
So it seems to me that should be a wake-up call for conservatives.
However, it won't be.
I know that for a fact.
Nothing apparently will wake them up.
They're much more interested in what's Michelle Malkin writing about on her blog than they are about what did the founder of conservatism have to say about this.
That's the mentality.
And I can understand and sympathize with people on the left who say there's no conservative today.
I can respect intellectually.
These people are irrational through and through.
I'm very sympathetic with that claim.
I'm sorry that it's come to this.
I feel like apologizing.
I'm sorry.
This is from the author of How the Catholic Church Built Western Civilization.
You don't sound like any pantywaist liberal to me.
Right, right, right.
And of course, the left had fun with my politically incorrect guide to American history.
But the fact is that on the war question, I feel much more at home with somebody like Kirkpatrick Sale than I do with either John Kerry or Bush or Cheney or any of these people.
Who I just have utter contempt for.
And I always thought, by the way, that it was a little disappointing that, all right, so I wrote the Politically Incorrect Guide to American History.
Very provocative title.
Very sort of in-your-face, anti-leftist sort of book.
But there were enough clues in there if you were really looking.
You know, about where I stand on the war question.
Because I denounced the powers that presidents have claimed to wage war on their own and send troops anywhere around the world.
I absolutely denounced that.
Sean Hannity would never denounce that.
I went after Clinton's foreign policy.
There was no real space, unfortunately, for Bush, but that's going to be rectified in my next book.
But basically, there wasn't a single American war in that book that I cheered.
And so you might think, maybe the left would look at that and say, well, you know, I don't agree with this guy on taxes or whatever.
But at least he's somebody in the right wing who isn't a crazed, warmongering fanatic, and I'd rather have this guy than them.
And unfortunately, I didn't get that.
I didn't get that response at all.
But, well, you know, we'll see what the future holds, I guess.
Right.
Well, and, you know, maybe they just didn't get a chance to know you well enough.
Because they do seem, many liberals seem to like Ron Paul.
Boy, they sure do.
And God bless those people for having open minds in this culture we live in where people are just taught that, you know, conservative, bad or good.
Or liberal, bad or good.
Like, whatever.
I mean, just labels are thrown at you and then they just start throwing mud and there's no thinking involved.
So the fact that some on the left have seen through this and just listened to the guy, I think speaks very well for them.
And by the way, this Saturday night at the Texas History Museum at Congress Avenue and Martin Luther King, there will be a Ron Paul campaign event.
I'm not working for him.
I'm not hawking it.
I'm just announcing a fact that it's $100 a ticket to get in the door to come out and support Ron Paul this Saturday at the Texas History Museum on Martin Luther King and North Congress Avenue.
You mentioned Michelle Malkin there, Thomas.
And, you know, she's going on Fox News.
Her and John Gibson did a whole thing yesterday announcing, well, see, and this is how it works.
I love how this works, right?
American foreign policy contributes to the reasons they hate us and want to attack us.
Oh, OK.
So America is ultimately responsible for the attack by provoking the people who attacked us.
And then that goes to America's responsible.
And then that goes to America did it.
And so by the time Michelle Malkin goes on the John Gibson show yesterday on Fox News, there it was that Ron Paul is a 9-11 conspiracy theorist who thinks that Dick Cheney shot a missile at the Pentagon and the rest of this ridiculous crap when that's the furthest thing from what he said.
And in fact, as you pointed out, he explicitly said, I think the military's mission ought to be to find bin Laden and kill him.
Right.
Right.
I know this was unbelievably shocking that even by Fox News standards, that something like this would happen, that and it wasn't even like it took a while to provoke her into making this claim.
Within the second or third sentence out of John Gibson's mouth, they were already saying that Ron Paul, the conspiracy theorist, whatever.
I mean, he obviously isn't.
He's never said that.
He's said, no, I dismiss these theories.
I believe that we were attacked the way the story goes.
And we have to go after bin Laden.
He's never said any of these things.
This was just an absolutely it was such a blatant lie that I think they probably figured that nobody would think that they would lie that blatantly.
You know, maybe they would distort a statistic here and there.
But would they ever actually say the exact opposite?
I mean, the exact opposite of the truth.
But that is exactly what happened.
And I have to say, give them credit.
There's a left-wing media watchdog group called Media Matters.
Now, I say this.
I'm not a supporter of theirs.
They've been pretty mean to me in the past, as a matter of fact, but I'll give them credit where it's due.
They have been on this from the beginning about not only Giuliani's misinterpretation of Paul, and it wasn't even he knew he was misinterpreting, for heaven's sake, but also the media, but with CNN and others, continued that false spin.
They have covered this whole thing.
And I don't know if they've quite yet gotten to that excerpt on Fox News, but it wouldn't surprise me.
They've really been good.
So the funny thing is that a lot of people on the left have stood up just out of a sense of basic fair play.
And again, I think that I think that's a very, very positive thing.
Well, you know, you mentioned accuracy.
Pardon me, Media Matters for America.
You mentioned accuracy in media and reporting, Cliff Kincaid, who might as well be Michael Ledeen to me.
He's such a warmonger, as far as my best information, anyway.
But I saw an incredibly good article that he wrote about Ron Paul this morning, saying, hey, you stop distorting what this man said.
Exactly.
In fact, Scott, it was such a good article that I thought to myself, gee, I must have, I guess I was thinking Cliff Kincaid was somebody else, because certainly the guy I remember wouldn't have written this.
And I honestly thought to myself it must be somebody else, because I'm pretty sure Justin Raimondo of antiwar.com was on MSNBC, on Michael Reagan, or on Ron Reagan's old show, against Cliff Kincaid.
I remember Justin saying, oh, Cliff, come on, you're such a propagandist, whatever.
So I thought it can't be the same guy, but even somebody like this has the decency to say, if you're going to criticize Ron Paul, why don't you criticize something that he actually believes?
Yeah.
And how hard is that?
And, you know, this ought to be something, too, for the 9-11 kooks out there, and there are a lot, that Ron Paul doesn't believe it.
And you know what?
If Ron Paul did believe it, he would be your number one champion, and he would say it on the House floor as loud as he could, as often as he could, until they ran him out of power for it.
He's looked at your case.
You think he hasn't looked into all the conspiracy kookery?
He's looked into it, and he said, no, this isn't right.
So that might be a clue for you, because of all people, the 9-11 kooks know that Ron Paul is an honest man, and if he thought that they were right, I mean, he's publicly questioned the official story of the Oklahoma City bombing.
He hasn't, you know, come to wild conclusions, but he's publicly questioned prior knowledge and others involved in that attack.
He's not a coward.
Ron Paul, if he believed for an instant that Dick Cheney or anybody else did 9-11, he would be saying so.
Yeah, no, of course you're right.
Of course you're right about that.
I mean, I think a lot of the 9-11 conspiracy folks, you know, they're not necessarily bad people.
I think these are people who, you know, they're saying things that are not supportable, and I think they feel alienated from their government.
They feel like they're always being lied to, but they're drawing from that, I think, erroneous conclusions, because we're always being lied to.
Every single thing is a lie.
Well, not every single thing is a lie.
So I think, unfortunately, they're taking a healthy skepticism to an unhealthy extreme.
Looking back, for example, on what the Pentagon would say during the Cold War, they weren't always just telling lies.
I mean, the communists were doing terrible things.
I mean, sometimes they lied, but sometimes the enemy is such a rotten, it can be so rotten to you, there's no need to lie about it.
So, yes, you should be skeptical, but you also have to be reasonable.
Yeah.
Now, this is actually exactly what happened yesterday on The View.
I don't know if it was the Lew Rockwell blog or where I found this.
And by the way, for anyone out there who is interested, and Ron Paul wants to know more about him, and particularly keeping up with current events regarding Ron Paul, the blog at LouRockwell.com is updated every minute with breaking news on this.
I can't get anything done, Scott.
I'm posting on Ron Paul all day.
Yeah, I'm having a hard time myself.
I didn't get my interviews posted until midnight last night because I had to write an article.
I was going to explode if I didn't write something.
That's exactly how I am.
Okay, but no, yesterday on The View, the red-headed lady, who I don't know her name, and I honestly have never even seen that show before except for the YouTube clip I saw last night.
Rosie O'Donnell kept her big fat mouth shut for about a good five minutes at least.
And the dumb blonde, who knows nothing except the slogans that she's able to regurgitate.
And the red-headed lady were having a conversation about Ron Paul and Giuliani and the debate they had.
And the red-headed lady was saying, well, now look, y'all, I mean, look, you know, she was very careful to say, look, Ron Paul is not saying this, he is not saying this, and he is not saying that.
All he's saying is that we've got to look very carefully at our policy and whether we're making matters better or worse and this and that.
And she was doing really well until Rosie O'Donnell jumped in and said, yeah, American soldiers are the terrorists, and yeah, why do you think they shipped all the steel away to China?
It's because there were bombs inside the towers and nah, nah, nah, nah, nah.
And takes a very good discussion of Ron Paul that the view audience, I'm certain, barely ever has a chance to entertain these kinds of ideas.
And then, you know, wonderful for Ron Paul, big fat stupid Rosie O'Donnell has to open her mouth to help him.
Well, true, true, Scott, but I think that on net it's still a positive, it's still a plus for him, because I think people at this point have probably made up their minds about Rosie.
They haven't made up their minds about Ron Paul, and as you say, there was a lot of reasonable commentary made there.
I mean, this is not in any way crazy.
In fact, if anything, the crazy view would be the idea that, you know, you can impose sanctions that starve half a million people and no one will be upset about that or no one will want to avenge themselves.
It's funny, the same people who say that won't answer Ron Paul's question.
Suppose you lived under these sanctions.
Do you think Americans would just sit back and say, well, you know, that's the way the world is, we got sanctions.
Well, they would pride themselves on how quickly we'd rise up and fight against it.
Well, why don't you give that same credit to other people?
That's just, that's all he's trying to say.
Of course, look at how we reacted to September 11th.
We gave George Bush a license to kill anyone he wanted, you know, basically.
And, yeah, you know, it's actually funny.
There's a fake news reporter on The Daily Show named Asif Mandy, or Mambi, and he's the best one.
He's absolutely hilarious.
And when Condoleezza Rice said, oh, look what's happening in Lebanon, yeah, it's a bad day, but, you know, it's also an enormous opportunity.
These are the birth pangs of a new Middle East, etc.
He did a report, quote, unquote, live from Baghdad for Jon Stewart, where he said, yeah, you know, he's speaking as an average Iraqi, and says, yeah, you know, we look at all these daily bombings that go on around here all day, the bodies stacked up on the side of the road, and, you know, never seeing our family members again, or even knowing what happened to them.
And we think, eh, well, you know, basically like you people thought of September 11th, a bad day, but a great opportunity, right?
And Jon Stewart goes, no, I'm sorry, that's not how we look at September 11th at all.
And he just kind of shrugs and goes, I don't know.
That's how we look at it, you know.
No, that's absolutely perfect.
That's absolutely perfect.
But, you know, it's good that you raised the daily show issue, because I've been a little disappointed that, you know, why would Ron Paul not be a perfect guest for that show, right?
He's a maverick.
Right.
He's given an anti-war message.
He's obviously speaking common sense.
And he's speaking to the very people that Colbert would have made mincemeat out of.
What's the problem?
Is it because he's a libertarian?
I mean, like, why?
I don't see why he wouldn't have been on the next day or as soon as possible.
They didn't even cover it, actually.
Neither of those shows, in their coverage of the debate, they talked about torture, but they didn't even bring up the biggest highlight of the debate at all.
Yeah, people need to keep...
I've heard that the Comedy Central boards are flooded with people saying, this is the most obvious news item for your show in maybe a year.
Why are you not pursuing this?
I mean, something does not add up here.
Why would you not immediately pursue this?
It's a fascinating issue.
Somebody finally tells the truth to the American people.
I mean, maybe Jon Stewart wants to have a monopoly on telling the truth to the American people, but surely we could have a second person, you know, right, come on the show.
Right.
So let's see.
Let's see what we can do about that, if anything.
Yeah, you know, I have to wonder, and maybe it's not their fault at all, but is there anybody at the Ron Paul campaign who is calling The Daily Show and trying to get him on?
Do they have savvy media people who even know that there's such a thing as a Colbert bump and that they got to get it?
Yeah, you know, it's a good question.
I mean, I know a few people in his office, but I don't know the people running the campaign.
Maybe they do, maybe they don't.
I don't know.
But just to be on the safe side, I think I'm going to remind them when we get off the phone.
Right.
I mean, it's so important.
And, you know, in case anybody at the Ron Paul campaign is listening to this later on or something, you should know that.
In 2006, every single congressman and every single challenger to a congressman who appeared on the Colbert Report won their election.
I did not know that.
That is important.
And believe me, you know, Colbert pointed it out.
That is really good.
Well, then we definitely got to do something about this.
And again, even to people who don't necessarily agree with Ron Paul on everything, we can all agree that for a change, we won't just get a bunch of clones giving rehearsed answers.
You know, we might actually get a real live human being.
That's worth doing.
And also, frankly, the fact is that, sure, Ron Paul wants to scale back this, cut that.
But on his own authority as president, he can't really do those things.
He needs the consent of Congress.
But what he can do is precisely the thing that unites true left and true right, which is he can keep the country out of war because lately that's what presidents have been doing on their own.
They have been conducting foreign policy on their own.
He can keep us out of war.
And, okay, so then you elect Democratic congressmen and you try to prevent them from abolishing the IRS if that's what makes you happy.
But at least we'll stay out of war and we can discuss these other matters peacefully.
You know, step one is we've got to stay out of all these unnecessary wars.
Absolutely.
I actually just wrote an article titled Drop Everything and Stop This War for Will Griggs' new magazine, The Right Source Online.
You know, we can argue about abortion and schools and the border patrol and everything else in the whole world.
There are a million issues.
Social security.
You know, let's have a good...
I can't wait, actually.
I really can't wait.
Let's have Thomas E. Woods Jr. from the Ludwig von Mises Institute to have you on to talk about social security and what's to be done with it.
And I think that'll be a very important discussion.
Let's have it in a year or two when this bogus war has come to an end.
Yeah, I couldn't agree more.
And I agree with Lew Rockwell that people who are on the right, so to speak, where I consider myself to be, we should extend a certain rhetorical tolerance to people on the left who are anti-war over this issue.
But I would hope that that would be reciprocated.
I mean, you know, look, we have a lot to gripe at each other about.
But as you say, this is the issue of our time.
And enough's enough.
Let's see what we can do to bring it to a happy conclusion.
Yeah, absolutely.
And now I'm sitting here Googling around trying to...
Oh, I did find it.
Hey, listen right here.
I got that clip of Asif Mamvi here.
You're going to love this.
Okay.
I was going to ask you about World War II, but we don't have time to get in on that.
Okay.
I hope I have QuickTime installed.
Oh, God.
I guess I can't play it.
Oh, that's a shame.
Well, wait.
Maybe I can.
Let me try it one more time.
What the hell?
Nope.
Okay.
I guess I will ask you about World War II.
You're a conservative kind of guy, somewhat on the right.
You think America shouldn't have gotten involved in World War II?
Make your three-minute case.
Oh, for heaven's sake, Scott.
This is a...
Come on.
You can do it in three minutes.
If I can, you can.
It's very hard.
Well, you know, this is almost an impossible issue to discuss, because instantly you're accused of being, you know, unsympathetic to the plight of the Jews who perished in the millions, even with the American intervention, I might add.
There are a lot of historians who argue there were other ways of resolving this matter, or Europe responding earlier, or this or that, or simply just not giving lend-lease aid to the Soviet Union, for heaven's sake.
I mean, let the Red Army get bogged down a little bit so that when the war is over, you don't have a Stalinist-controlled Eastern Europe.
I mean, the fact is that at the end of the war, Czechoslovakia, we'd presumably gone to war to help defend, and Poland, well, Czechoslovakia didn't become a full-fledged communist until about 1948, but Poland's a communist country.
I mean, you know, yes, obviously, any civilized person is glad that the Nazis are gone, but I mean, you're going to tell me that there was no alternative to a so-called solution that brings 50 million deaths, I mean, that there's no solution to this other than that.
And beyond that, I mean, if you're going to complain about the military-industrial complex and it's got this terrible hold on our society, well, you know what, where did it come from?
Where did it originate?
And it originated in World War II.
So if you want to be politically correct and fashionable and get invited to all the fancy cocktail parties, well, you can talk about how glorious and wonderful it is to go engage in total war and draft millions of people from your population and send them over there and all that.
But the fact is that did more than everything else in American history put together to build up the military-industrial complex that now apparently can never be dismantled, can never be dismantled.
So my view would have been, give no support to anybody in the conflict, let it get bogged down.
And, you know, it seems to me that given that the United States was obviously not in any danger, you know, then you see what's what.
But ultimately, I mean, Hitler did pretty much what he wanted to do in terms of slaughtering people regardless of what happened.
But to me, the interventionist case simply means that you spread the violence even further.
And frankly, Hitler's putting together an empire that is so far flung, it would be impossible, basically impossible to hold this thing together in the long run.
So I mean, these are just very, very scattered thoughts off the top of my head.
But when I look at the fact that American society was permanently changed by this thing, and the power that the government got over the whole society, and the entrenched nature of the military-industrial complex, I can't just join in and say this was a glorious good war, even if clearly good things did come out of it.
The fact is, we are still saddled with the consequences of this thing.
And the fact is that the regime now uses this and to see all the glorious things we can accomplish through war, they use this as a propaganda piece from now until the end of time.
I mean, these are additional factors, I think, that account for something.
Right, yeah.
David Beto on this show not long ago called it the military-industrial consequence, accidentally, coined the phrase in the middle of a sentence where it just kind of came out that way.
That is the truth.
We fought the glorious war against pure evil and turned ourselves into an empire, and apparently we can't ever turn it back again.
And in fact, and it's worth noting, by the way, that Harry Truman was not exactly an extremist, and his view was, you know, you let the totalitarian powers battle it out, and you say, hallelujah, that they're doing it.
Right.
That's what Hoover said.
Stay the heck out of that.
That's what Hoover said, too.
Let them fight.
Right.
And nobody, or no normal person is saying Hoover is insensitive or whatever, no normal person is saying that.
He's a statesman in retirement who's thinking about the real-world consequences of all this.
All right.
We're all out of time.
We're, in fact, a minute over, and I expect to be kicked off of here any time.
Okay.
So, everyone, Thomas E. Woods Jr. is a senior fellow at the Ludwig von Mises Institute.
He wrote how the Catholic Church built Western civilization and the politically incorrect guide to American history.
And if you hang on the phone right there, I found the clip.
So here's that clip from the Daily Show if we don't get kicked off the air here first.
This has been Anti-War Radio.
See y'all back here Monday.
Welcome back to the show.
Ladies and gentlemen, the carnage in Iraq, Israel, Lebanon.
It's almost beyond imagination.
A lot of people feel that we're spiraling towards a much larger regional war, but does the inevitable mushroom cloud have a silver lining?
Every crisis has within it danger, but every crisis also has within it opportunity.
And this president is determined to seize opportunities.
This is a moment of intense conflict in the Middle East, yet our aim is to turn it into a moment of opportunity.
What we're seeing here, in a sense, is the growing, the birth pangs of a new Middle East.
Birth pangs.
For some perspective on how these comments are being viewed in the Middle East, we're lucky enough to be joined by an expert in Middle Eastern affairs, an experienced journalist from the region who can bring us a unique perspective for less than half the price of an American reporter.
He is Asif Mandvi.
He joins us from Beirut.
Asif, thank you for joining us.
Do the people of the Middle East share this administration's clearly more optimistic view of the conflict?
Oh, absolutely, John.
It's not often that an entire region is given this kind of chance.
Every day, the cafes and outdoor markets of the Middle East explode in anticipation.
They're like children on Christmas morning, from what I'm told.
It's very exciting.
Really?
The violence and the instability doesn't color that view?
No, no, not at all.
As one gentleman told me while standing in the smoldering remains of what was once his village, you can't get hummus without mashing some chickpeas.
Really, because when I see the news, Asif, when I see the news, people are really, they seem angry.
People are screaming angrily.
Yes, well, what did you expect?
The Secretary Rice said, we're going through some birth pangs here.
And you know how people tend to scream and say things they don't mean when they're in labor.
It's like, how could you do this to me or death to America?
Once the baby arrives, all is forgiven.
What we're going through is exactly like that.
I mean, we all understand it in exactly those terms.
Asif, I'm not, forgive me for asking this.
Are you okay?
Oh, yeah, I'm fine.
That was just an improvised explosive opportunity.
I believe it was filled with what sounded like the flying shards of a better tomorrow.
I can't wait to see what will rise from the ashes.
I hope it's a parliament.
There's no resentment there that these changes that are being brought were perhaps foisted upon this region?
No, no, not at all.
Over the years, we've grown accustomed to thinking of ourselves as you think of us.
Tiny abstract drops in an oil field of possibility.
Whether redrawing our borders without regard for ethnicity or religion or experimenting with unfamiliar forms of governance, we always welcome a chance to test the latest theories of your political scientists.
That's an incredible way to look at a terrible situation.
Well, I'm sure it's no different from the way your nation views the events of September 11th.
Tough day?
Great opportunity.
I don't think we really look at it like that.
Oh, well, I guess not everyone knows how to respond when opportunity knocks their house down.
Joe?
Thank you very much, Asif.
Asif Manvi, everybody.
We'll be right back.
All right, folks, thanks for listening to Antiwar Radio.
Here's some music for you.