06/11/07 – Charles Goyette – The Scott Horton Show

Foreign operations around the world to maintain our empire is now approaching $1 trillion a year.
That's where the money's going and that's where it has to be cut so we can take care of education and medical cares that are needed here in this country.
Governor Gilmore.
All right, my friends, welcome back to Anti-War Radio for AntiWar.com and Chaos Radio 95.9 FM in Austin, Texas.
I'm your host, Scott Horton, and that, of course, was Dr. Ron Paul, clips from the third Republican debate.
And I want to introduce my guest for this hour, the great Charles Goyette, my partner in crime at Anti-War Radio.
Welcome to the show, Charles.
Well, Scott, it's good to be on your show.
I do note, however, that I had to have you on my show in Phoenix so that I could get an invitation to come back on your show.
Oh, come on.
I was going to have you on anyway.
How are you doing?
I'm doing great.
And yeah, that's good.
The AntiWar.com audience is going to have a special treat today, an interview of Scott Horton by Charles Goyette and an interview of Charles Goyette by Scott Horton.
You lucky dogs.
We should just think about doing a two-man show and get it over with.
Yeah, there you go, man.
I'm about to Phoenix.
You got lakes and mountains and stuff out there, right?
Yeah, and we don't have hurricanes, we don't have tornadoes.
A lot of things we don't have that we don't want.
All right, well, for those who aren't familiar, Charles, let me introduce you to them.
Charles Goyette, my friends, is America's most independent talk show host.
They've called him that for years and years, and his record backs it up.
He was on the war party channel, Clear Channel, in the run-up to the war and got canned because he opposed the war in Iraq.
Next thing you know, he's on Air America doing the morning show on the Democrat station.
He's now doing the morning show on 1100 AM KF-NX in Phoenix, Arizona.
One of the most popular shows in that entire market.
And I wanted to ask you today, actually, while I was on your show hanging on through the commercial break there, I heard this spot for Dr. Laura, and I wanted to ask you, if she's such a good mom, how come her son is a sadistic torturer who brags about it on the Internet?
Now, Scott, what are you going to do that to me for?
Scott, what are you going to do?
What are you going to do?
You're going to make me an apologist for Dr. Laura?
You know who else we have on the show?
Is that what you're going to have to do to apologize?
We have Bill O'Reilly on the station.
Oh, well, you don't owe any apologies for that.
What about we have Sally Jesse Raphael overnight?
Do I have to apologize for her too?
She has a radio show?
Yeah, I'm afraid so.
I knew they wouldn't let her on TV.
I'm afraid she does.
Well, those people in Phoenix are sure lucky to have you.
It sounds like the rest of that lineup.
I'm telling you, they don't know what to think.
You know, we bounce, but it's been established.
You look at a great market, just a little radio talk.
You look at a great market like San Francisco.
One of the finest radio stations in the United States is KGO in San Francisco.
They have a pretty diverse lineup of talk show hosts.
You've got to respect them all, whether you agree with them or not, because most of them are pretty well informed, unlike most talk show hosts.
So you get a conservative, you get a liberal, you get an independent, you've got a libertarian or two, you've got some really outspoken anti-war guys on that station, and a couple of Kool-Aid drinking Stepford talk show hosts, Warhawks.
But people will listen to radio stations and have a variety of opinions.
So at least I have a small voice still on the airwaves here in Phoenix.
Yeah, sure.
Well, and there's people from all different walks of life who are willing to listen to people that they disagree with, assuming that it's at least an honest debate.
Personally, I won't listen to Bill O'Reilly or Sean Hannity or anything for a minute, because I know that not only are they wrong, but they're not even going to give a call or a chance to set them straight.
So I'm not even going to bother listening to that.
If I disagreed with you, which I don't, but if I did, I'd still listen to your show, because you're an open and honest guy.
You're interested in what the truth actually is, whether it fits your preconceived notion or not.
Well, I sometimes get some talk show material out of guys like Bill O'Reilly.
Just the other day, I was running something where he was talking about when he was leading his guys in combat in war and what he would do, and I'd tell my guys this, and representing that he was a full-fledged, it wasn't just another armchair chicken-hawk, neocon whack job, but trying to create the impression on his radio show that he was a battle-hardened combat veteran.
Somebody called him up and said, Bill, you were never in combat.
He goes, okay, and the guy says, so why are you trying to create the impression you were leading your guys in this?
You didn't have a gun, you had a pencil.
And he goes, yeah, I was a journalist.
And the caller says, well, you wouldn't want anybody to get the wrong impression now.
You're not trying to mislead people, are you?
And he says, you want to be fair and balanced, don't you?
And O'Reilly says, you can take your fair and balanced and stick it where the sun doesn't shine.
So anyway, it's kind of entertaining to listen to some of these whack jobs sometimes.
Yeah, that is funny.
He must not have gotten the message that the Army is now taking people up to, what, 76 years old as new recruits?
Anybody who supports American Empire can go and join the service right now.
They need warm bodies.
Well, I wouldn't mind seeing him at the recruiter's office, but I'd like him second in line, Scott, only right behind Joe Lieberman.
Oh, thank you.
You're welcome.
In fact, here it is.
Here's the clip right here.
Whoops, the music's still playing.
Hang on a sec.
Let me play you this clip of Joe Lieberman here.
This is the most insane thing.
This is from the Think Progress blog.
Let's take a couple minutes to listen to this, Charles, and come back and comment on it.
And the firmness, as I can tell you, coming back from Iraq, Bob, is that you can't look at Iraq in a vacuum.
What we're involved in here, as General Lutz said to our committee last week, is Iraq is now the main front in the long war we are fighting against the Islamist terrorists who attacked us on 9-11.
In fact, 90% of the suicide bombers in Iraq today killing Iraqis and American soldiers are foreign al Qaeda fighters.
Iran is training and equipping soldiers, Iraqis, to commit and kill American soldiers and Iraqis.
So we've got to see that larger context, and that's why we're committed to helping the Iraqis to stability and victory.
Well, let me just ask you about Iran.
You brought up Iran.
What should we do?
Because we continue to hear more and more of just what you're saying.
What should the United States do at this point about Iran?
It's very important, Bob, because I didn't just go to Iraq.
I went and visited throughout the Arab world and Israel.
What you see throughout the Middle East is Iran in battle basically with us and the moderates, supplying the extremists in Iraq, Hezbollah in Lebanon, Hamas fighting the Fatah faction, our allies among the Palestinians, and of course committing terrorist acts against the Israelis.
I'm not one to say we shouldn't sit down with the Iranians.
I'm glad we did that in Baghdad a while ago.
What we did was present them with evidence that we have, that I've seen, that I believe is incontrovertible, that the Iranians are training and equipping Iraqi extremists to come into Iraq, and they're killing American soldiers and Iraqis.
All right, Charles, I'm sorry.
I can't put you through any more of this.
I'm about to just end it myself here.
There's enough lies in what Lieberman just said to go ahead and probably spend the rest of the show commenting on there.
Well, let me do my piece on it then and make sure that we called everybody's attention exactly the template or the model that he has invoked now and the reason that he has invoked this template.
This is the lead-up to the Iraq war all over again.
Everybody has to remember at this point what a morph job the rationale for the war in Iraq was, how it was a shapeshifter and it kept appearing in new forms.
It was, well, it was 9-11.
Then it was Osama bin Laden and al-Zarqawi.
Then it was weapons of mass destruction.
Before long, it was for the good of the Iraqi people, never mind how many had to die.
And by the way, the coalition was under strict orders not to keep account.
And then it was for our own goods.
We were there solely to sow the seeds of some sort of a Jeffersonian democracy.
Over and over and over again, the rationale for the war in Iraq shifted shape and that no sooner had you repudiated one argument than it was reborn in a new incarnation.
This is exactly what we are seeing now with Lieberman's comments on CBS this weekend with the war in Iran.
First of all, the war of Iran was fought because of the fearsome weapons of mass destruction.
The nuclear weapons, unfortunately, there's no corroboration.
The world is starting to wake up.
We've got an Iran with a nuclear energy development program that is no different than the nuclear energy development program that Rumsfeld and Cheney wanted to tax the American taxpayers to pay for when they were in Ford's White House.
So they have a nuclear energy development program.
The neocons have tried to sell it to us as an imminent threat to the United States.
Apparently that job isn't working.
So it has already now, with Lieberman's appearance on CBS, begun to shift shape.
Now we have to go to war not for their nuclear program that threatens us all, not for the ICBMs that are going to deliver them to our shores because now the world knows they don't have them, but now it's because of what's going on, what the Iranians are doing, what the Americans in the country next door.
The rationale for the war with Iran is shifting shape, and it will continue to shift shape until the bombs start falling.
Yeah, I think you're absolutely right about that, and the reason that the debate has to keep changing is because it's all lies.
I mean, you could hear, you know, I would like to give Joe Lieberman a little bit of credit and say that, well, you know, the guy is prepared to believe any negative thing about Iran, et cetera, but it is obvious here that he is directly lying to Bob Shafer's face deliberately saying things like, well, the vast majority of the deaths of American soldiers in Iraq are due to foreign al-Qaeda fighters.
Iran is sending and training and equipping and nah, nah, nah.
Yeah, well, those of us who have actually read books before know that Iran is not backing al-Qaeda in Iraq.
It's true that al-Qaeda in Iraq is responsible for most of the American deaths or at least the Sunni-based insurgency that's aligned with al-Qaeda in Iraq.
But Joe Lieberman just deliberately, you know, smeared these two concepts together.
If Iran is arming anyone in Iraq, you and I both know, Charles, they're arming our allies, the Badr Corps and the Mahdi Army.
They're not arming the Sunni insurgency.
So Joe Lieberman is a liar, and he knows he's a liar.
Well, I asked my listeners here in Phoenix and across Arizona today to respond in this manner.
If you believe Lieberman's representations, then do you believe that Iran, the leadership of Iran from Ahmadinejad all the way down to the Ayatollahs, to the Iranian people are suicidal?
Do you believe that they wish, they are taking actions, they wish to provoke a war with the United States?
You have to believe that that's the outcome that they want if you believe these representations by the Deacons.
I have to tell you, Scott, I don't know any better way to frame what is going on in the world.
You know, there's that old poem by Robert Burns, the Scottish poet, Oh, would the goodly give us to see ourselves as others see us.
Probably the best way to get Americans for once to stand back and see what we are doing, or the perception of the rest of the world about what we are doing, is Vladimir Putin at the G8 summit.
Over the weekend, the ALDA press conference didn't get any play here in the United States.
Everybody got to see, you know, President Bush drinking a beer and stuff like that.
Nobody got to see what Vladimir Putin really had to say, but what he said was pretty revealing.
He said, you've got one country, one state, the United States, that's overstepping national borders in every way, political ways, cultural ways.
We're viewing the unconstrained, hyper use of force, of military force in international relations.
It's force that's plunging the world into an abyss.
He said, are we safer or not?
More people are dying than ever before, significantly.
More conflicts have not diminished, they have escalated, and his conclusion is this.
It results.
He's talking about American foreign policy, the Bush doctrine, pre-emptive war.
He says it results in the fact that no one feels safe.
His words, he says, this is the way he goes out.
He said, I want to emphasize this.
No one feels safe.
And now, you know, again, I love that example.
Another thing that Putin pointed out in that speech was the brand new Amnesty International Country Report and all of its criticisms about American torture and secret prisons without law.
And damn it, Charles, what does it mean when somebody named Vladimir, the president of Russia, is able to, with a straight face and a leg to stand on, criticize America for our human rights?
Well, you know, even to the extent the American people are psychologically immature, maybe let's be generous and let's forgive them in their rage or their psychological immaturity and their willingness to lash out blindly right after 9-11.
OK, we've been hurt.
We've been struck.
Our leaders say we need to kill a bunch of other people.
They know best whatever they say.
Rather than encountering the 9-11 event in a mature fashion, so they react psychologically in an adolescent fashion, and it's exploited by the administration for political gain.
They put Bush in a bomber jacket so that he could win the midterm elections and, you know, grab back the Senate, increase the Republicans' lead in the House.
So if you want to be generous and you say, well, you know, not all people are psychologically mature, not all people are intellectually—let's give the American people after 9-11 a— I'm sorry, but the event now of 9-11 is five and a half years old, and you see the harvest that we have reaped from the Bush policy so far.
And so now, finally, some sense of maturity, we have five and a half years more to mature, has got to have settled in, and the American people need to— So wait a minute.
Nothing that they have represented has been true.
None of the targets were the targets that we needed to go after.
None of the excuses that they said for the war that they wanted them to have held up.
Maybe we need to reexamine this.
Maybe instead of lashing out blindly, now we've had a five and a half year cooling off period, maybe we ought to look a little more closely at the things they represent us.
Maybe we ought to see the world as others see us.
Nope.
Forget about it.
You know, the polls already say, if starting a war is necessary to prevent Iran from obtaining nuclear weapons, then we've got to do it.
And the fact that this is the same group of lies again is irrelevant to you.
You're right, except nobody makes the other case on the national political stage to the American people.
Nobody, until now.
Right, Dr. Paul.
Now you've got, yeah, one small, still voice has begun to speak up.
I had a guy—I don't know, you know, I understand what a long shot it is.
You and I talked about this on my show this morning a little bit.
I understand that, but I'll tell you, I had a guy call me today, and he said, Charles, when you first started talking about this Ron Paul stuff, I thought you were out of your tree.
And he said, I've begun watching what he's said, and I hear his appearances in these debates, and I've listened to some of the things that are circulated on the internet.
He said he's the only one who has a coherent philosophy that seems to hold together.
Sure, and it just so happens to be the same philosophy as Thomas Jefferson and the creators of this state.
You know, all our traditional heroes.
Well, at least you have one guy voice in it now.
And so, you know, okay, let the normal political handicappers, let all the geniuses, like, who's that guy, every time I turn on TV and I see him on there, I switch the channel— Chris Matthews?
Well, that might be one of them.
I was thinking of that guy who's a Newsweek editor, and he was in the Ford—no, he was in the Nixon administration, the Reagan administration, the Clinton administration.
David Gergin.
Yeah, David Gergin.
I mean, this is the depth of political prognostication.
Every time I see David Gergin, I know I'm going to get nothing but conventional wisdom, no insights, so I turn the channel.
But let me just say this, the conventional prognosticators aside, I understand that the chances of Ron Paul getting elected may be slim.
But I'll tell you something else I understand.
I understand that whether he's elected or not, he has already changed the debate in this country.
Absolutely.
He has made already an indelible, a permanent mark on this society.
I guess, you know, for years and years, you and I have wished that people would pay attention to Ron Paul and what he says, and I have to say, already this campaign has gone far beyond what I expected.
Yeah, I've been very, very happy to.
I agree that it's gone.
He's made a bigger impact already than I would ever have imagined.
Yeah.
Let me ask you a question about that.
It seems to me that since Ron Paul has made such strides so far in the campaign and, you know, has doubled and tripled his fundraising and his YouTube subscribers and all these things, how do we take the next step?
How do we get Ron Paul famous where everybody in America, most of whom are not going to start paying attention to presidential politics for another six months at least or maybe another year and a half, how do we get them to know Ron Paul's name?
How do we make Ron Paul a famous public figure in this country?
Well, I'll tell you what I think that it has to do with, and I'm just guessing, I don't pretend any expertise, but it has to do with really the antidote to a lot of our modern ills.
And one of those antidotes is decentralization, decentralization of power, decentralization of media, decentralization of our intellectual life, our educational institutions and so on.
And I think that with the Internet, we have the prospect of seeing the first highly decentralized presidential campaign in the country.
Do you know this, I believe, and I've known several of the people that are at the top of the Ron Paul campaign organization, the formal organization, as you have and have spoken with them and had coffee with them and so on and so forth, but I believe that there's something new going on, which is a grassroots prairie fire going on in the Ron Paul campaign.
We have guys, Scott, here in Phoenix, that are not involved with the campaign, they don't check with the national headquarters, but they're out there making stencils and making signs in Phoenix, Arizona, that showed up first in Phoenix, Arizona, just an independent bunch of guys, they don't have to report to the FEC, they're American citizens, they spend a few bucks spray painting a sign, who's going to stop them, right?
To whom, to what bureaucrat has control of their free speech?
So just some independent guys, they start making signs here in Phoenix, Arizona, the next thing you know, the signs started showing up in other primary states.
I saw in the New Hampshire coverage, I saw some of their signs there, and so it seems to be a highly decentralized sort of a campaign in the making, and boy howdy, that's what can topple the old moribund arthritic institutional style campaign.
Sure, and you know, even going back to 2004, we saw that Howard Dean, by the time of the Iowa caucuses, Howard Dean, who was a grassroots candidate, he was not the establishment's pick, he was the grassroots candidate, and by the time of the Iowa caucuses, he had raised more money than anyone else.
So we'll see if we can turn all this online support for Dr. Paul into actual financial support, like what happened in the case of Howard Dean, but you're never going to catch Ron Paul yelling yeehaw or whatever into the camera like Dean did, he's never going to give him a moment like that.
I'll tell you something, I've watched all of his public appearances that have been available, and I've known him since sometime in the early 80s, and I just, I have a great sense of confidence and so on in his good judgment.
When he gets posed with what's clearly, and I got to question somebody trying to do him in, I've got my own idea, my own thoughts about how it's best for him to handle it, how he diffuses when they're trying to trap him on something, and yet time after time, he just handles it in his own way, with his own integrity and his own honesty, and he does just fine.
So, you know, he's not a flashy guy, he's not Mr. Slick, he's, you know, he doesn't have Mitt Romney's voice or Taylor, and so on, but I think at some point, the American people have got to say, quick, give him a Mr. Slick, we've had all these packaged ponies, can we get a real human being for a change, who has a record of consistently representing a coherent set of identifiable, understandable principles that are at the root, the foundational principle of the country.
I don't know, Scott, I think that if it weren't for the internet, I wouldn't say that it could happen, but something that's clearly happening is another component of this.
You know, people think, well, you know, he doesn't have the big poll numbers, and we do surveys of this group, Zogby's, and this and that, and AP Ipsos polls and stuff, but you know, the people that control the political process at the grassroots, and particularly in primaries, are not the masses.
Most people don't even vote in primaries.
It's the active.
So I look around and I go, okay, Ron Paul has an army of people, he has a constituency that in every state of the union, does Huckabee have a constituency in Texas, or California, or Oregon, or North Dakota?
Hell no!
Does any of these guys have a constituency anywhere else?
No, Ron Paul has a constituency in every congressional district in this country, and you can tell by the internet activities, and the support groups, and the meetups and stuff, that they are an active bunch, and it's activists that control primaries, activists that turn out and vote in primaries.
Yeah, and you're absolutely right.
Can anyone name, does anyone in Congress or any of the rest of these candidates literally have a constituency in every congressional district in this country like Ron Paul does?
I mean, what you say is not hyperbole.
I mean, that is a fact.
There is not a county in this country that doesn't have someone who absolutely loves Ron Paul and is dedicated to helping spread his message.
Yeah, the Republican Party establishment keeps wanting to deliver up party hacks.
They want to give you guys like Bob Dole.
And so Bob Dole goes out into the heartland and he campaigns in venues all across the country, and he talks the talk of an inside policy wonk.
Well, we invoked cloture on that vote.
You go, what?
That's going to stir love and admiration in the hearts of men?
That's going to get their hearts pounding that you invoked cloture on some obscure vote?
Who cares?
Talk to us about the fundamental principles that made America prosperous, the fundamental principles of America freedom.
And that's what Ron Paul's talking about, so we'll see.
I know I'm in danger of overstating the case, but you know, Scott, it's only because of my enthusiasm, your enthusiasm, and the enthusiasm of others.
Well, I appreciate it.
And look, we can we can both be realistic and optimistic at the same time.
I mean, there's no reason to set ourselves up for, you know, terrible disappointment, but there's also no reason to be naysayers when this thing is taking off so much better than you or I could have hoped.
And, you know, when you talk about the message, the principles of liberty that the country was founded on, what's really important in presidential politics, really all politics, is also it's just the character issue.
And I think you can just take a look.
This is what they said about the Bush-Gore race, right?
Who would you rather drink a beer with?
Or when it was Dole versus Clinton, who would you let babysit your kids?
Would you let Bill Clinton anywhere near your kids?
And so this is the kind of thing that I think we can put this kind of test to Ron Paul, too.
Would you trust Ron Paul if you had your kids or your grandkids and you had to run out in an emergency?
Would you leave him with Dr. Paul?
Hell, yeah, you would.
He's a baby doctor, man.
And would you like to sit down and drink a beer with him?
I sure would.
Well, I'll tell you this, though.
We need to be prepared for the inevitable slime job, because the more success he has, the more certain it is that they're cooking up a slime job on him.
And, you know, you don't have to be guilty of any offenses.
You know the old stories.
There are cognates, there are equivalents in modern politics of saying that, you know, so-and-so is a thespian.
He's a known thespian.
I mean, it doesn't matter what the charge is as long as it's hurled with enough frequency and effective, and it'll stick in the minds of the Stepford Kool-Aid drinking American Bush-supporting electorate.
So the slime job has got to be coming, Scott.
Yeah, well, and we've got to be prepared for that.
I don't want to name them now, but I already know what a couple of these smears are, and I already know how to handle them, so...
Well, we ought to get you plugged into the campaign.
Well, I'm not going to quote Bush saying, bring him on, or anything like that, but the fact of the matter is they don't really have anything on Dr. Paul.
You're right.
They can smear him by calling him a thespian or an obstetrician or something.
Well, yeah, he's a practicing gynecologist.
What kind of man would do that?
Yeah, 4,000 babies.
He's dangerous.
All right, so let me ask you something.
I want help with something here, Charles, that I think that you can explain to me probably as good as anybody else.
You say you've known Ron Paul since the early 1980s.
Obviously, well, I know this from what I know of your background and so forth.
A big part of the reason that you're such a big Ron Paul fan is because of the arguments that he makes about money and about what it means for our country to be borrowing billions and billions of dollars every single day from China, from the American people, printing money out of nothing.
And I know this is a concern of yours.
I know that you understand these international money markets and all these kinds of things.
So help explain to me and to the people out there in the audience, Charles, what's Ron Paul talking about when he says that we're headed towards a financial crisis if we don't get our financial house in order here?
Look, he is the only candidate on the Republican side or the Democratic, for that matter, that really has a grasp of these economic issues or is willing to confront them.
And I guess we've reverted from time to time in our conversation this morning talking, Scott, about the founders.
You invoked the name of Chuck Thomas Jefferson and we talked about our founding documents and so on.
Look, let me just, I mean, how about the simplicity of the concept that a penny saved is a penny earned?
You have Republicans, you have a succession of presidencies now, a succession of presidents that have urged for the numbers to look good for the next election, and there's always an election right around the country, have urged the American consumers to go out and spend, spend, spend.
And because, you know, consumer spending is two-thirds of the economy, we need the numbers to look good through the election in November.
And so there is no more of the belief that a penny saved is a penny earned, but I'll tell you, you can't have capitalism without the formation of capital.
But America, at the direction of our leaders, Republicans and Democratic, has become a debtor nation, and I don't mean just on a political level.
It's true that the political institutions have unfunded liabilities of somewhere in the range, nobody even really knows, but somewhere in the range of $50 trillion that will never be paid.
But the American people have taken the lead and have become borrowers instead of savers themselves.
And, you know, I don't think you need to have a Wharton MBA to understand that a country cannot spend its way to prosperity.
But you only have one person up there who's saying as much.
I've told my listeners and fans, I put it this way, anybody from any party that comes to you in any forum and promises you or offers to give you something, you have to vote no on that person.
Because that person is willing to in debt your unborn grandchildren to pay for the promises that he's making for you.
You've got to vote.
Anybody who offers to give you anything, unless it's Michael Bloomberg and he says, here's my own billion dollars, I'm going to open up my account and give it to you out of my own personal wealth.
So, I mean, Ron Paul is the only one that's talking fiscal sanity to the American people.
I mean, literally the only one.
And what he says is, I've heard him say this a couple of times in the campaign so far, is that because the world continues to accept the dollar as though it's still based on gold, that basically we have the privilege, so-called, to basically print gold.
The rest of the world will keep accepting our dollars up to a certain point.
And this seems to be his big fear is that at a certain point, the central banks of the world are going to decide that the dollar is dropping too fast, that it's not a good investment, and they're going to dump their dollars and invest in euros instead.
And then at that point, we're going to have massive inflation because there are untold vaults full of hundred dollar bills all over this planet.
And now that paper comes back, we're screwed.
All of those bills, all of those paper dollars represent a potential claim on the goods and services of the United States, the property, the goods and services of the United States.
And as they come flooding back, you will see America begin to be owned by foreigners, but more so than that, you'll see your savings, the value of your savings eroded to nothingness.
Economic calamity always represents an avenue for the centralization of power and authority.
You get a strong man on a white horse that will lead us out of the calamity that they themselves have created.
But I'll tell you, it's not something that's going to happen.
It's something that's happening before our very eyes.
I mean, we were talking about Vladimir Putin at the G8 meeting.
Vladimir Putin is talking to the rest of the world, and the rest of the world's already on the same page with him, saying we need a new international monetary order.
What they are saying is the United States is unreliable fiscally, and the danger astride the globe as well, and we need to find alternatives to the U.S. dollar as a reserve currency for international trade.
It's happening before our very eyes.
And if there is an alternative, it's what, the euro or the yen?
Well, I'm not sure.
I think ultimately it's going to be a commodity replacement.
I don't know that there are enough euros.
Sure, we can begin to phase out, but it could be a basket of currencies, commodity currencies, or some other things.
What do you think of the theory that part of this imperial war in the Middle East, part of all this regime change and so forth, is to make sure that oil sales continue to be denominated in dollars?
Well, it's an interesting argument.
I'm not sure that that's it.
Look, I'm willing to accept the representation.
The American people don't really know.
I don't think anybody really knows all the real reasons why we went to war.
But I will tell you this.
There was this strange, almost astrological alignment of various coalitions that all came together at the same time.
There were people that wanted the war because they said it would be good for the economy.
I mean, I can tell you, William Seidman or Larry Kudlow.
Well, yeah, it'll be good for the stock market.
There were constituencies like that.
There were people that really believed in American hegemony and American imperialism that came together for it.
There were people that wanted it for the oil.
I mean, I have in my files, you probably do in yours, the letter from these neo-con whack jobs to Clinton, encouraging him to invade Iraq for the oil.
You had the constituencies that thought a war would be good for Israel, for a greater Israel.
They've all come together at one time, and some were used by others, and others were used by some of their prior ones.
And they all came together in one big, happy coalition.
That was the coalition.
It was the coalition of people that wanted a war for a variety of different interests.
I mean, I will tell you that I believe that Karl Rove had no deeper desire.
It wasn't for Karl Rove.
It wasn't about oil.
It wasn't about the dollar or the threat to the dollar, pricing of Iraqi oil or Middle Eastern.
All it was for Karl Rove was the midterm congressional election.
Let's dress this guy up in a bomber jacket.
He pulls 15 points higher.
But you had them all come together on the same page, at the same time, at the same place, for the unlikely objective of creating a war on false pretenses.
Well, so maybe there's hope there that we won't be able, or they won't be able to start a war with Iran, since it seems like there are many fewer members of that coalition this time around.
Well, I'm not going to breathe easy about that until sometime in January of 2009, if even then.
Look, Buchanan said that pretty well, I thought, Scott.
He said, you've got two headstrong leaders.
You've got Ahmadinejad, who is clearly always trying to stir stuff up and get some domestic political attention and rabble-rouse with the people that put him in office.
And you've got Bush, you've got two headstrong leaders, and you have a confrontation with the United States and Iran that, to all appearances, seems to be inevitable, and you know that the outcome will be a flaming disaster.
Absolutely, yeah.
Zbigniew Brzezinski has gone in front of the U.S. Senate and testified that this has got to be stopped, we're going to own all the land between Israel and India, and we can't do it.
And in fact, in a speech he gave last week, you know, Jimmy Carter's former national security adviser, the Democratic Henry Kissinger, basically, in a speech last week, Brzezinski said he's fearful that Al-Qaeda will stage a false flag attack and make it look like Iran was behind it because they want to give Cheney the excuse to go to war.
And he said not only is he concerned that that's the case, but that he believes that Congress must move immediately to rewrite the War Powers Act and restrict the power of the president to respond to a false flag attack like that.
And I've got to tell you, Charles, when Zbigniew Brzezinski is talking about restricting the war powers of the president in order to stop the next one, there are some serious concerns at some very high levels.
Well, I agree with you that I've got a serious concern, as does Brzezinski about it, as do you, as do many of our listeners and the people that visit antiwar.com.
I think, rather than hoping to get the War Powers Act rewritten, which would certainly be welcome in my view, I think that the first best thing that Congress can do is to rescind the so-called, the rather transparent, thin, and unconstitutional authorization that Congress voted for Bush in 2002.
Because he will rely on that document to further the war with Iran, and they've suggested as much.
But I want to come back to, I think you played a Ron Paul clip before I came on with you, I want to come back to that.
To watch these guys in debate and to stand up like serial madmen and talk about a nuclear attack on Iran, one right after the other, upon what meat does these our candidates feed that they have grown so war-crazed.
And finally, Ron Paul stands up and he says, look, do you understand what these people are saying?
These people won right after another of these guys, they're up here talking about a nuclear strike on a country that has no capability, hasn't threatened us, hasn't harmed us, has no capability to attack us.
Do you understand the madness that we have descended into?
We need to wake up to this.
Yeah, absolutely.
Well, and I'll tell you what, too, if we do, I believe, still, Charles, that we can have that effect.
You talked about rescinding the war authorization from 2002.
Well, Ron Paul and Neil Abercrombie have a bill that does just that on the House floor right now.
And not only do I believe that the American people can force Congress to do what they want, I can prove it.
It just happened last week when the Democrats and the Republicans came together with this immigration bill and the grassroots picked up their telephones, picked up their email machines and said, hell, no.
And it was dead.
And why?
Because congressmen are individuals and they're interested in one thing more than anything else, retaining their own power.
And so when threatened with losing their jobs, they all did exactly what their constituents demanded.
And if we could all just get our act together about this war, we could do the exact same thing there.
Well, the American people, thanks to your efforts, those like you, and actually none more effective than antiwar.com, I'll tell you something.
I don't know what I would have done over the years without the resources of antiwar.com.
I don't know how I could, as one man, have researched, dug up all the stories and read all the news to identify the ones that were important that I needed to know about the way that they have done.
But it's having an effect.
The American people are waking up, I guess, Scott, that it's just a race against time to see whether enough people can be stirred, can come to their senses.
Enough people can be exposed to Ron Paul's message and the clarity of it in time, at least, to hobble this madman before he starts another one of these elective wars.
Well, we sure are happy to have you as part of the family at antiwar.com, and I at least sincerely believe that the more Charles Goyette shows we can put out there, the less likely it is to have the next war.
The more likely it is that Ron Paul's support can be built.
Well, it's been my great pleasure, and I mean it, my really great pleasure to be a part of the effort, and I'm very grateful to you too, Scott, for putting the whole thing together.
Well, thank you.
Charles Goyette, everybody.
He is the most independent talk show host in America.
He hosts the morning show on 1100 AM, KF and X in Phoenix, Arizona.
Thanks very much, Charles.
Thank you, Scott.
Good talking to you.
What's the most pressing moral issue in the United States right now?
I think it is the acceptance just recently that we now promote preemptive war.
I do not believe that's part of the American tradition.
We in the past have always declared war in the defense of our liberties or go to aid somebody, but now we have accepted the principle of preemptive war.
We have rejected the just war theory of Christianity, and now tonight we hear that we're not even willing to remove from the table a preemptive nuclear strike against the country that has done no harm to us directly and is no threat to our national security.
I mean, we have to come to our senses about this issue of war and preemption and go back to traditions and our Constitution and defend our liberties and defend our rights, but not to think that we can change the world by force of arms and to start wars.
Thank you, Congressman.