All right, y'all, welcome back to the show.
It's anti-war radio.
And now we go to Jack Hunter, the Southern Avenger.
Southernavenger.com is his website.
1250 AM in Charleston is his radio station.
He writes for the Charleston City Paper and the Political Ticker at rompaul2012.com.
Welcome back to the show, Jack.
How are you doing?
Good to be with you, Scott.
How are you?
I'm doing great, man.
Really appreciate you joining us today.
Big news, Ron Paul's finally making headlines.
Of course, there's a new Pew study out that says that the media critics are right, that they are certainly blacking him out from TV coverage.
But this ought to get him some.
Reading from politico.com this morning or yesterday, Ron Paul to propose $1 trillion in specific budget cuts.
Why don't you tell us what you know about this plan?
That's exactly right.
One writer at National Review's The Corner put it earlier that Ron Paul's about to drop a, quote, reality bomb on the rest of the GOP field.
You know, you've got people out there putting cute, kitschy numbers together, like 999.
You've got people like the former governor of Massachusetts sort of wanting to tinker around the edges and give us stuff that sounds like good business speak.
But finally, you will have a candidate who's actually going to do what the Tea Party says they want done, what grassroots conservatives across this country are demanding of the 2010 elections and as we head into 2012, actual cuts.
Yes, we're looking at cutting $1 trillion from our spending.
No other candidate is even remotely approaching that.
How do we do that?
Well, we'll know the specifics here later today when Ron Paul explains them.
But just to let you know, we are looking at entitlement reform, which you have to look at.
Not reform per se, but that's on the table.
You're looking at cutting foreign aid, for example.
We can't be doing all the things we're doing overseas.
But it is important to stress that the spending cuts, as it relates to Pentagon spending, and they are there, do not hurt in any way, shape, or form our defense capabilities.
Will we not be involved in foreign wars that don't make sense, that cost too much money, that we can't afford?
Absolutely, we'll be getting rid of that.
But at the end of the day, we will still be spending four times as much as China.
We will be spending more than all the countries of Europe combined.
We will still have the strongest national defense in the world, and still saving lots of money.
And I think most Americans can agree with that sort of cost cutting at this particular stage in our politics.
Well, as always, Ron Paul's very existence just reveals the utter hypocrisy and hot air that the rest of these Republican candidates have going for them.
I mean, they really do have not.
You know, we're going to cut out some of the waste in the government.
Yeah, really, that'll save us a trillion dollars.
Yeah, no, we need something that cuts to the core of the problem.
It's the reason that a guy like Dr. Paul talks about the Federal Reserve and weakening the dollar, and somebody like, oh, I don't know, Herman Cain thinks that that's unimportant.
For years, we've had so-called conservative Republicans, and especially in this Republican presidential field, who say they're conservative, they're going to do this, that, and the other, and it doesn't amount to a hill of beans.
It is tinkering around the edges.
If we're going to cut, we need to cut and go big, as big as you can get away with in American politics today.
And I dare say that, you know, most Americans, even people who supported Obama, because they were so fed up with Bush independents out there, are ready for some significant change, and cutting spending and, you know, looking at the Federal Reserve across the board.
I think more than they ever have, at least in my political lifetime.
Yeah, well, that's true, but then again, on the other hand, the Republican voters are at least as bad as Herman Cain and Rick Perry on all of the issues.
You know, Ron Paul, here's a guy who is 100%, and there's just no denying, everybody knows he's got a household name now, and his voting record is a household name, too.
Everybody knows where he stands, against big government, 100%.
And yet, they won't support him, because he's not a narrow-minded, bloodthirsty, genocidal maniac like they are.
Well, that's one way of putting it.
Scott, let me put it to you this way.
If you're going to be comprehensive in your conservatism, no part of our federal government can remain untouched or unlooked at.
You have to look at everything.
Senator Tom Coburn has made the point that if we did cut Pentagon spending, we'd have a more efficient military, because you talk about an area that's completely unaccountable.
It's the Pentagon, absolutely.
When Senator Rand Paul introduced his budget last year, and it was the only really far-reaching, cost-cutting budget that was proposed, how much Republican backup did he get?
Well, he got backup from Senators Mike Lee and Jim DeMint, and a few others, but not very many.
Why?
Because those so-called conservative Republicans that say they really want to balance the budget and really want to cut spending won't look at Pentagon spending.
Well, I have news for you folks.
After entitlements, the Pentagon spending, what they like to call national security spending, which I think is a sort of misterm, is the second biggest problem when we're looking at where to cut, what to do, and what makes sense.
And until conservatives, whether in the GOP base or anywhere else, can understand that, they're not going to be able to get to where they say they want to get.
It's nice rhetorically to say, oh, I'm for cutting waste, or budget, or however they...
Well, you can't do any of that stuff unless you look at Pentagon spending.
This plan that's being introduced today does that, and it does it well.
Well, what are we going to do with these voters?
How do you, Jack Hunter, you write the political ticker.
It's your job, I guess, to expose the conservative Republican primary voting audience out there to this Ron Paul-ian argument, this conservative anti-war argument.
But how can you make any progress?
You know, they came out with the most ridiculous conspiracy theory in the whole world last week of all of the bogus FBI terrorism plots in this country, of which there are dozens.
This is the weakest, and on its face, dumbest of all of them, and the polls say that 50%, that's your voting population you're going for there, Jack, say Iran is our enemy, and we've got to do something about them.
Well, it's funny, the same people who don't believe anything that comes out of the White House, oh, we're going to create jobs, oh, there's global warming, oh, that's poppycock, immediately believe anything like this nonsense about Iran.
It's just funny to me how much they trust the government on one thing and distrust the government on the other.
Look, Scott, you asked me how do you convince people, and that's what I'm in the business of doing, that's sort of my life's goal is to get my fellow conservatives to be comprehensibly conservative, as I said earlier.
You have to point it out in different ways that they'll understand.
I'll give you an example.
In my own state of South Carolina, I have two senators, Senator Jim DeMint and Senator Lindsey Graham.
When Rand Paul's budget came up last year, and it was really the only cost-cutting budget that was offered by any Republican, Lindsey Graham said, well, I won't support that, because I won't support anything that weakens our defenses.
So I asked my fellow South Carolinians, do you think Senator Jim DeMint is weak on defense?
Well, I don't know of one of them that think that, so what is Senator Lindsey Graham trying to say?
You see what I'm getting at?
There's ways of talking to people who it might be a little harder than usual to turn their mind towards what you or I or many of your listeners see as serious, alt-right, constitutional conservatism that does look at these issues.
But there's ways of doing it.
That's just one example.
Well, you know, I mean, I know you understand this.
It's just, it's my frustration trying to work out, you know, how we can get around this fact that, you know, conservatives and Republicans like to say how anti-government they were and how they wanted small government.
They want to get government off your back and this and that all through the 1990s.
And then George Bush became the president and they decided what they really wanted was a dictatorship with a lawless, unaccountable government that can kidnap, wiretap, torture and murder whoever they feel like the definition of the biggest government in the history of mankind.
They all took Jesus off their wall and put a portrait of Dick Cheney up there instead.
And now these are the people who are telling us that they're anti-government and they're conservative and they're for constitutionalism as long as Barack Obama's in power.
But we know how they'll be in a Herman Cain administration.
They'll be a bunch of genocidal madmen just like they still are, just like they have been.
Well, there's always been a streak on the American right with what I like to call authoritarian.
And then there's your sort of libertarian individualist streak.
They're always there.
In other words, conservatives generally like law and order.
They also like individual freedoms and property rights and what's such.
What we saw during the Bush administration, as you just described, is the complete eradication of the individualist/liberty-minded strain on the American right.
It was completely authoritarian.
It was like a dictator type mentality, as you put it.
I keep laughing at so many of the conservatives who rightly go after President Obama for going to war in Libya without congressional authority, which is completely unconstitutional.
You know darn well if George W. Bush had done that in the same manner, they would have been fine with it.
So yes, point taken.
We can't go back to those days, Scott.
It was a terrible time.
All right.
Well, I'm sorry.
The music's playing.
We've got to go out to this break.
We'll have more with Jack Hunter on the Ron Paul campaign right after this.
Check him out at ronpaul2012.com.
All right, y'all.
Welcome back.
It's Anti-War Radio.
Wrapping up here with Jack Hunter, the Southern Avenger and blogger at ronpaul2012.com.
And I'm sorry for being so hard on the right wing warmongers here.
I'm trying to convince them, too.
I'm just not doing a very good job of it because they got me so mad when I saw this Rand poll this morning.
So, oh, Barack Obama lied to me for two days straight.
And so I bought it.
Take my son and go start a war, they said.
Well, Scott, I'm not a fan of the right wing warmongers either.
I'm just trying to make the right less warmongering.
Well, and you know what?
There's so many different ways to go with this.
But it seems to me like Ron Paul's tack of saying, hey, you know, Jesus was a peacenik.
And the Christian tradition is that we don't fight wars unless we absolutely have to.
That got outright boos out loud at Republican debates four years ago.
But it is getting better, isn't it?
Yeah, it's kind of silly to boo our savior, in my opinion.
But you're right.
That did happen.
And he explained that at the Values Voters Summit.
And the reception went really well.
A similar religious type of event that happened a few months before Congressman Paul got the best response of any of the speakers, got a standing ovation.
Because it comes out that he is actually familiar with the Bible.
He's a guy who wears his, as I like to put it, a lot of these politicians wear their religion on their sleeve.
Well, he doesn't do that.
He keeps it in his heart.
And when he speaks honestly about it, fellow Christians can see that.
And they're willing to listen and think about, you know, what would Jesus do in terms of foreign policy?
And it's not about pacifism, as you just noted.
You know, the Catholic Church developed just war theory.
You only go to war when it's a war of defense.
The only defensible war is a war of defense.
And to talk about just those common sense things takes us so far away from sort of the neoconservative, as you put it, warmongering of the Bush years.
That religious people would support that blindly bothered me too, especially coming from the South.
Well, and you know, I mean, part of it is the terrible, scary, bogus threat of Islam.
And the Bush administration's insistence that somehow the September 11th attack, rather than some desperate Hail Mary pass, last gasp attempt to lure us into Afghanistan, was the razor edge of the giant Islamic juggernaut headed this way to enslave all our daughters and the Sharia law and all that.
And they still believe that crap.
Well, I like to put it in real world terms.
I was telling a friend the other day on the 10th anniversary of 9-11.
I was here in DC.
And I was riding the metro, as I often do.
And there was a man, a Muslim gentleman, next to me with a big bag.
And you know, as Americans, we think sometimes we'll, you know, you never know, right?
The 10th anniversary of 9-11, it's a high profile thing.
But this is what's important when we think about these things.
Should we have more to fear?
Are we more afraid of something like that happening or something going wrong because we have more people in Afghanistan or less people in Afghanistan?
I don't know about you, but if we had no troops in Afghanistan or Iraq, I wouldn't have a worry or ever about that happening.
But to the degree that we have troops overseas, which is why these people want to do us harm, that's always going to be a worry.
And as you point out, it's an overblown worry in many cases.
I mean, you know, during the Cold War, we had a superpower with nuclear missiles.
Now we're worried about a guy trying to blow up his underwear on an airplane or a shoe bomber.
Yeah, it's incomparable.
And you know, those on the right or left, quite frankly, Hillary Clinton or Barack Obama will equate this stuff with the Cold War all day long.
You know, it's not only absurd, but it costs too much money.
Yeah, well, and the absurdity of it is really the big part there.
I mean, the Soviet Union occupied a third of the planet Earth.
Osama bin Laden's caliphate was upstairs in the third story bedroom of one house in the suburb of Islamabad.
That's exactly right.
Well, you know, Reagan's former budget chief, David Stockman, has said, and this is his words, the American empire is over.
And what he meant by that is we can't afford what we're doing around the world anymore.
He called the Iraq war a disaster and said, you know, it's time to come home and quit spending all this money.
That's Reagan's budget chief.
That's not exactly a liberal piece, Nick.
And he's absolutely right.
So more conservatives need to start listening and thinking about that.
And besides if Ronald Reagan was here, he would probably say, look, this guy Haqqani is a friend of mine.
Why are y'all fighting him?
That's exactly right.
And despite what the neoconservatives say, people who work for Reagan, people who are close to Reagan, say he would have never went to Iraq.
And his record says the same thing.
You know, if we had a more Reagan-esque foreign policy, we don't have the Cold War anymore.
It would be a lot closer to what you or I want and what the neoconservatives want.
And they are reluctant to admit that.
They don't like to get into the detail, but it's certainly true.
Yeah.
Boy, well, Pat Buchanan was on the show just a few weeks ago and made that case explicitly.
And boy, there was no hedging.
Just forget it.
If Ronald Reagan was around today, his policy would be this, not that.
And he emphasized how by the time, what I guess the day after came out or whatever, he decided he was completely against nuclear weapons.
He wanted to get rid of all of our offensive nuclear weapons and have only defensive ones, neutron bombs for use in space to intercept incoming missiles from somewhere else.
He was- That's exactly right.
In William F. Buckley's last book, The Reagan I Knew, he makes a big revelation that when I noticed that in the 80s, he had Reagan at some dinner and he was toasting it.
Reagan would be the only man who would push the button if it came down to that, the nuclear button.
And in this book, at the end of his life, he said, I was completely wrong about Reagan.
Reagan would have never done that.
He hated nuclear weapons.
That's why he was for, you know, you had to build up.
But what Buchanan was talking about, the defense.
But Buckley said, Reagan would have never done that.
I was wrong at the time.
And I'm so glad that I was, that we had somebody better than that in the White House.
It's totally true.
Yeah.
Well, it's funny Mike wrote in the chat room, it's a starry state of affairs when you long for the days of Ronald Reagan.
Speaking of busting the budget and all that, although, you know, a business with a $4 trillion debt is nothing compared to what we've been through since then.
Well, look, that point is well taken.
I'm not a blind Reagan worshiper.
I consider him a hero.
I like him.
There's things I like about him.
But the point is, a lot of that spending and the defense spending was to fight the Cold War.
And that's what we were talking about earlier.
Whether you agree or disagree with that, there's no way in hell you can compare what the right, with the United States, with presidents like Reagan faced with the Soviet Union and what's going on today with Al Qaeda.
That's sort of the point.
We could debate all day on whether that spending was necessary, blah, blah, blah.
And I don't think it was in many instances, but at the end of the day, Pat Buchanan's right.
Reagan's foreign policy, his beliefs about that area are far closer to what we think than the neoconservatives.
Yeah.
All right, now I'm only hitting you with this because there's no way I'll ever have the chance to ask.
And I don't know if you will, but maybe if I plant this question with you, you can plant it with someone else.
I want someone to ask Mitt Romney, since these wars are so important to America, isn't it a terrible risk for the American people to elect a president such as yourself who has been unable, completely unable to convince his five army aged sons that this war is worth fighting?
How can you convince the American people to give up their sons for this war if you can't even convince your own, Mitt?
Yeah, I think that's a fantastic question that I would love to see it asked, no doubt.
So I don't know if you know anybody in the press corps over there who could ask that, but I think that's a perfectly fair question.
The guy's got five fighting aged male sons.
None of them have a bum knee or anything, as far as I can tell.
Well, you're exactly right.
We'll have to see what we can do about that.
You know, Prescott Bush, he sent his son to go fight the Japanese.
And Joe Kennedy, he sent two of his boys to go fight the Germans and the Japanese in World War II.
That's the American tradition, is these politicians are supposed to sacrifice their sons for their own political goals, you know?
Well, Ron Paul himself is a veteran, and I think he might have a thing or two to add to that if it ever came down.
Yeah, well, and I don't know if anybody's ever asked him this but I would probably be willing to bet that he has encouraged all of his kids and their kids to stay out of the U.S. military.
Yeah, our friend Karen Krutowski has been very clear about herself being a veteran, if I don't have children, but I would say the same thing.
I don't begrudge anybody who goes into it.
And a lot of people go into it to get school and help with college or maybe to straighten them out.
I have a good friend who was not doing too well at life and it did a lot of good things for him.
But the way our government abuses our soldiers by putting them in harm's way when it doesn't make any sense, no, I wouldn't advise anybody to get involved in that.
You know, it's a soldier's job to do his duty.
It is our job as patriotic citizens to question our government when they ask them to do their duty.
And this idea that, oh, we just blindly agree with whatever the government does when it comes to foreign policy, that's patriotic.
Not only is it not patriotic, it's abusing our soldiers.
They know it.
There was a poll last week, one in three Iraq and Afghanistan veterans said both were completely not worth it.
That's high numbers, folks.
You look at the suicide rate just across the board.
We can't keep abusing our soldiers like this.
We can't afford it and they deserve much better.
I'm glad you brought that up because this is something that I'd like you to discuss with Dr. Paul if you get a chance.
It's something that I'm not sure if he's aware of.
You might have to go do a little bit of research and brief him on it.
But the military in the Bush years and continuing in the Obama years has this policy of accusing everyone who comes home shell-shocked of having a personality disorder which disqualifies them from VA care.
And I think that Ron Paul could make a big deal about that in this campaign.
You're right.
I spoke to a veteran of the Iraq war, a veteran of the Afghanistan war just last weekend, both who were actually Ron Paul supporters.
And they were talking about not only the different mental problems that we see that are a result of being in combat and being over there, but were telling me about things I'd never heard of.
Some of our modern weaponry does stuff to people's nervous systems, the way it shakes them around and whatnot.
Anybody who knows a truck driver, they always have spinal problems.
A lot of our soldiers are having worse problems than that because of some of this modern weaponry, things we have never seen.
I mean, there's all sorts of assorted physical and mental problems associated with being in war.
And yeah, it's silly for our government to say, oh, it's a personality disorder.
Well, maybe every once in a while, but nine times out of 10, no, this is what you've done to our soldiers, federal government, sorry.
Yeah, well, and people like to say, oh yeah, well, 50,000 people died invading France.
And so it's no big deal.
They knew what they were getting into when they signed up and that kind of thing.
But I don't think that's really right.
I think that the deal is when they sign up that you guys aren't gonna use me except if you need to.
You're not gonna throw my life away.
If we have to, I don't know, the fantasy comes true and Iran makes a nuke and nukes DC and we gotta go to war with Iran.
Well, if a bunch of American soldiers die in that invasion, those are the breaks, right?
But not if we start the war.
It's never a good argument to say we can be careless with our soldiers' lives and wellbeing just because they volunteered.
We should be thankful that they volunteered and now we have a responsibility to only put them in harm's way when it makes sense.
I can't think of anything more detestable that anybody would put that question that way to you.
I don't even know what to say to that.
Right.
Yeah, I mean, it really is a horrible betrayal.
I mean, and I'm of the opinion and maybe this is, I guess it's partially wrong, but the way I look at the soldiers over there, the army men and the Marines, is that basically they're a bunch of high school kids who got off the football team and their dad and their coach agreed that going into the army was a good idea and so off they go.
And they don't really know anything about foreign policy.
They trust us.
They trust the democracy to work right and to elect people who will choose right and who would only ever put them in harm's way if it was necessary.
They don't, the rest of it's not up to them.
Look, Jim Webb, the Democratic Senator, he's a Purple Heart veteran, Vietnam veteran, Secretary of the Navy under Ronald Reagan has said that the battlefield is the most apolitical environment he's ever been in.
And he and other soldiers are saying every day is just about survival, getting through the next day.
You take your orders because you're a soldier and that's what you do, it's your duty.
You try to get through each day.
This idea that there's so, the sort of the talk radio version that every soldier thinks we should be in Iraq and Afghanistan for a hundred years is not only not true, but it's completely absurd once you actually talk to these people.
Yeah, you have some people like that, but by and large, you have a, an American military that doesn't know what the hell we're doing over there or why they're there.
Right.
All right, now I've already kept you over time, but if I can ask one more question here, I'd like to get your prediction about what, you know, the size of the impact of this new plan to restore America that Dr. Paul has released today.
He clearly is, I'm assuming anyone pays attention to this thing.
He's making a mockery out of the rest of his competition with this plan.
Well, that's exactly right.
The big headline, of course, is that the cuts total $1 trillion in the first year of his presidency.
He's cutting out the Department of Energy, Housing and Urban Development, Commerce, Interior, the Department of Education, gone, and some of their functions like Pell Grants, for example, and Education will be put into another department.
But these are big, bold cuts.
This isn't 999 or 000.
This is real world grownup budgeting, for lack of a better term.
This is not gimmickry.
This is the kind of thing the Tea Party has been waiting for, for anybody who's serious about budget cuts.
$1 trillion is nothing to sort of dismiss.
And that's going to be the headline.
If the Republican Party is serious about cuts, this is your candidate and this is the plan.
If you want more of the same, if you want a Republican version of the guy we've got in the White House right now, then be comfortable with any of the other guys.
Well, and you know, the other guys have real problems.
I mean, Mitt Romney is sort of the de facto nominee until they find somebody better.
I guess, because they're just stuck with him.
And then other than that, every couple of weeks, they change who the new great white hope is supposed to be, whether it's Michelle Bachman or Herman Cain or whoever.
At some point, I wonder after all these phonies just wash out and there's nobody left except Mitt Romney and Ron Paul, I wonder if he really has a chance.
Well, you'll just have to wait and see.
I know our numbers are solid.
We're third nationally in many polls and they can only go up from there.
Herman Cain, for all his recent popularity, is not raising any money.
Conservatives, at least this time around, realize that Mitt Romney is not one of us.
You know, it is anybody's game.
If you want substantive, comprehensive, constitutional conservatism, you've got it in Ron Paul.
If you want Republican versions of Democrat light, which is what people usually settle for, you've got the rest of the field, so people can make their choice.
Yep.
And I'm afraid they will, but we'll have to leave it at that.
Thanks very much for your time, Jack.
I really appreciate it.
Good talking to you, Scott.
Take care.
The heroic Jack Hunter, the Southern Avenger.
SouthernAvenger.com is the website.
And also, check him out at the blog, at RonPaul2012.com.
He writes the Paul-litical ticker.
