11/21/12 – Sheldon Richman – The Scott Horton Show

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Welcome back to the show.
I'm Scott Horton.
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Our last guest on the show today, last but not least, not at all, it's our friend Sheldon Richman from the Future Freedom Foundation.
Welcome back to the show.
Sheldon, how are you doing?
I'm doing great.
Nice to be with you again.
Thanks.
Well, very happy to have you here.
By the way, what's your new title at the Future Freedom Foundation?
Vice president and editor of the monthly publication, which is called Future Freedom.
Great.
There you go.
The Future Freedom.
That's the monthly journal, and you're vice president.
All right.
Very nice.
So we hope nothing happens to Jacob Horenberg.
We're all big fans of his.
I'm not sure we have the same constitutional line of succession as the U.S. has.
Oh, yeah.
There you go.
Well, whatever's in the contract, you know.
None of my business.
But anyway.
Hey, let me talk about how great the new Future Freedom Foundation website is for just a second, because, you know, everybody's website gets redone from time to time and whatever, except FFF.
And I'm afraid that there maybe even are people who have decided that they're just not ever going to that website again because they just can't figure out the damn thing or something.
Forget all that, because it's brand new and improved at FFF.org, right?
Yes, it really is.
They did a beautiful job.
And I can't claim any credit because it was done before I actually came on the staff.
But it's been long in the works and it looks good.
It's dynamic.
And, yeah, it has leapfrogged into the 21st century.
Yeah.
And, hey, listen, this is really important because FFF has been around for a while.
That's one of the things that was a bummer about the website.
It had been around for a while too, too, too long.
But the good news is that this website has a generation worth of articles, you know, proving that this crew at FFF.org are right about everything, always.
It's incredible.
The archive's going back to the end of the Cold War era, right there at, you know, when I was in junior high.
Yeah, well, you know, Jacob Hornberger has been at this a long time.
I believe it started up in 1989.
And he has been dogged and scrappy, never without a huge, you know, amount of resources.
But it's unbelievable what he manages to get out of the small, you know, meager resources that he does have.
And he's got great people writing for him right along.
And I'm proud to have been a regular contributor to the monthly publication and his op-ed program since the early 90s.
So I came in a couple of years late, but I've been writing continuously.
Hey, and I can honestly say here that, yes, I am a paid shill for the Future Freedom Foundation.
I'm very happy and very lucky and very grateful that this show is sponsored by FFF.
But it didn't even occur to me that, oh, I better, you know, devote some time to talking about that because of that.
I really am that excited because I really think the Future Freedom Foundation is, you know, among the very best that the libertarian movement has to offer.
Of course, you and Anthony Gregory and Jim Bovard and so many other great writers, Winnie McElroy and Jacob himself, who writes every day, I think, you know, pretty much without fail.
You guys are absolutely indispensable.
And I truly, personally am that excited to see a new website at FFF.org, partially because the old one was so bad, but especially because the new one is so good.
And there's just got to be, I don't know, however many tens of thousands of pages worth of awesome libertarian writings here on all subjects for, as I was saying, a generation going back.
So this is just an absolute treasure.
You can tell, you know, how long Jacob Hornberg has been at it just the fact that he owns FFF.org.
You know, let's talk about, you know, on the ball.
He must have got that in 1994.
Well, yeah, that could be.
He was in there early.
And as far as the association with your program, of course, FFF is really proud of that.
It's a natural fit.
We're interested in what you're interested in.
And that's one of the great tributes to Jacob is that he's been fighting for a non-interventionist foreign policy and full respect for the Bill of Rights, you know, and free immigration.
You know, just punching away at that without letting up and ending the drug war.
And the stuff that people find most controversial about libertarianism, those are the things he, you know, wants to make sure he's hitting hardest of all.
Right.
All right.
Now, speaking of which, you know, that's kind of the same angle here, too, the big, you know, media symbol.
Well, the Gaza thing kind of pushed it out of the headlines.
But, you know, the big lie, I think, or anyway, I guess your article says you agree, is that David Petraeus was great in every way.
He was the greatest general ever.
He's our George Washington of the 21st century and all of these wonderful things, except that one time that he cheated on his wife was the only thing he ever did wrong in his whole life.
But other than that, what a great guy.
And the problem with that is, to me, it's not just letting the guilty get away with it, which is how it's always going to be.
But it means that we have such thick layers of mythology that our policies are based on that it just portends a terrible, you know, medium term future ahead.
Well, that's right.
And it's really been almost comical to watch the coverage of this since it broke, oh, last week or whenever it was a week and a half ago, I forget now, to watch people like Andrew Mitchell having to, you know, report this tragedy.
And it's so terrible because we've got this blot, this one blot on an otherwise great man, heroic man, no interest in examining what he really presided over in Iraq and Afghanistan.
There's just this mythology that he, you know, won the Iraq war with his surge and put the Afghan, the floundering Afghan effort on the right track with, you know, with his counterinsurgency program that was, you know, bolstered by Obama when he first came in in the first year, 2009.
And so he had the sterling record.
And, of course, he gets approved for the CIA, 94 to zero in the Senate.
Nobody asks him about what he did in Afghanistan or what he did in Iraq.
And so what?
It takes an extramarital affair to bring the guy down.
It just shows you how screwy everything is.
Well, you know, you've been at this longer than me.
And I guess, you know, if we went back to the first Gulf War, maybe it really was just as bogus or something.
But when I compare the media as bad as it was in the Clinton years, because I was, you know, that's when I was a teenager and paying early 20s and paying a lot of attention to compare that.
It seems to me like the media had to all sort of, you know, cut half of their tongues off, half of their writing fingers in the run up to the Iraq war, because they all knew they were lying and they all knew they were covering for liars.
And they all knew that basically they had to simply drop the premise that really they were there to tell the people the truth about the government.
They were there to tell the people what the government wanted.
And I mean down to the last man in the major media.
This was all internalized.
And I think it sort of led to, it just seems like to me, it led to this sort of overall retardation of the media where now we're left with just a bunch of Brett Bears and Chuck Todd's.
That's all we got is a bunch of people who wouldn't even know a decent question, much less a follow up if it hit them over the head, you know?
Right.
I mean, they have this view that foreign policy is, you know, the state embodied, it embodies the state, which is almost like this mystical entity.
And you can't ask really very tough questions about it.
And there's a presumption that what it's doing is the right thing, is a good thing.
And that even transcends party.
I mean, even if you think a lot of the media types, not counting the Fox people, but the media types are Democrats.
They were kind of the same way with Bush too.
There's this deference, which is a disgrace to like earlier traditions of journalism, which we saw themselves as adversarial.
There's very little adversarial work being done on foreign policy.
There's this idea that politics stops at the water's edge.
And they think, okay, that means we as reporters shouldn't be asked very tough questions because these are things happening beyond the U.S. border.
I always liked the old line by Felix Morley, who was a great classical liberal and actually an editor at the Washington Post in the 40s and 50s, who said, you know, politics stops at the water's edge only when policy stops at the water's edge.
But policy does not stop at the water's edge, he added.
So therefore, we should be as hard hitting on that as anything else.
Now, you know what's interesting about this is that Iraq to the side, because they never mentioned those benchmarks again.
Just, oh, we didn't meet the benchmarks?
Forget the benchmarks.
But in Afghanistan, it seems like there sort of is a recognition, maybe only in the silence about it, that the counterinsurgency strategy did fail.
You know, Kelly Vlahos had that great article about how John Nagel, who was, you know, Mr. Coyne, is now going to be the head of a boys' school somewhere or something.
He's not going to be the deputy secretary of defense.
He's not getting promoted.
None of these people are.
They failed.
And yet, the guy who was in charge of it all still gets away scot-free, you know, like the Teflon don.
It wasn't Petraeus's failure, even though they sort of, at least, don't they admit that it was a failure in Afghanistan?
They don't have anything to call a victory there.
Well, they don't.
They're not admitting it's a failure.
Remember a few months ago, we had that unclassified report by, you probably remember his name.
Was he a lieutenant, Daniel, somebody or other?
Well, I mean, that was almost a year ago now, but there was, just a couple of months back, there was an official unclassified report that was, you know, basically admitting the same thing.
We haven't accomplished any of the things that we set out to accomplish.
Well, it hasn't focused, it hasn't filtered to the media, because we're not hearing that, right?
Yeah, you have to Google it.
You have to know to search for it.
They're not talking about Afghanistan at all.
They're not talking about Afghanistan.
It's like, you know, if Obama announces sometime in 2012 that the troops will be out in 2014, the media then says, okay, we don't have to cover that anymore.
It's as if it was already over.
Right.
But then again, though, I mean, there is at least a little bit of that, you know, in D.C.
Michelle Flournoy, for example, she didn't hang around to be promoted to Secretary of Defense.
She went home to spend time with her family, you know.
She was one of these people from the Center for a New American Security.
So there at least is some kind of, I don't know, maybe it's not a recognition.
Maybe it's just a factional power struggle, and some different generals have asserted themselves or something.
Who knows?
But it does seem like the Coindonistas are not the, you know, cause celeb that they made themselves a couple of years back when they started the escalation, you know.
I don't know if that counts as accountability, but I'll take it, you know.
Well, it's sort of like the dog that didn't bark, right?
Right.
The media is not saying, hey, American people, this is a failure.
It's just like, let's not talk about it.
Those people can drift away from Washington.
We don't need to tell the public this has been a failure.
Just tell them once in a while the truth, you know, coming out.
So that's still the media falling badly down on the job.
And that's why, you know, they have this impression of Petraeus as this unbelievable military mind who then, you know, was going to go and run the CIA the way it should be run.
And then it took something like this to drive him from office.
And the fact is, in the mainstream media, we're not going to hear about the bad things that Petraeus did and what he allowed to happen on his watch.
Hey, by the way, what do you think about the whole palace intrigue here?
Was this just the FBI completely out of control?
Or do you suspect that somebody at the Pentagon or at the CIA put them up to it and said, hey, would you get rid of this guy we don't like for us?
Or was it Obama that did him in?
And what do you think?
Well, I don't really have any sense of that.
You know, I'm not really up on the scuttlebutt about, you know, inside the FBI and inside the CIA.
So, yeah, I don't have any sense of that.
I don't even have an educated guess about what was going on.
It might just be exactly what the way it's been described to us, right, that this woman complained about harassing emails and turned it over to somebody who then, you know, got an investigation in motion and all of a sudden Petraeus' name surfaces.
So, you know, I don't know.
I don't have a sense of it.
The official story, it sure is ironic, isn't it, the head of the CIA being brought down by, according to their narrative, an FBI completely run amok, right, where, well, it turns out there was no threat.
But, geez, maybe there was a leak in this Petraeus' email thing.
And, no, there actually was no breach in Petraeus' email.
He wasn't hacked.
Oh, but, you know, it looks like his girlfriend might have a classified but innocuous document on her computer.
Nothing that – or, anyway, that's paraphrasing the Washington Post.
I don't know how innocuous it was.
Anyway, it's just the FBI a long way from investigating any kind of crime that was alleged to have been committed, you know.
Right.
I await the judgment of Phil Giraldi and Eric Margulies and, you know, people you know very, very well.
I'll defer to them after they do their investigations.
I'm looking forward to their conclusions.
I only like to imagine that it's, you know, something really interesting going on rather than the plain old Occam's razor.
But, either way, I'll settle because I sure like having the guy fired and disgraced.
Now, then again, let me ask you about this because you could have an opinion about this.
I don't know how informed you'd really have to be.
Can he overcome the – never mind any of his failures that we've been talking about here, but just the sex scandal thing, the only one that counts on TV.
Can he overcome that and still run for president in 2016?
Maybe with Rand Paul as his vice president or something.
Yeah, I don't know.
My first reaction when all this broke was, well, there goes the guy's presidential ambitions.
But, you know, who knows?
People have risen from ashes before, right?
Yeah, I mean, and this isn't the 1960s, you know.
I would bet against him if I was a betting man.
But, you know, who knows?
Strange things have happened.
Will he challenge it?
You know, are you looking forward to a 2016 Hillary versus Petraeus race?
That would be very interesting, wouldn't it?
Boy, yeah.
Talk about no daylight.
Well, that's right.
The whole thing is – well, sorry, I told that one a million times.
Oh, well, I'll say it again.
On Futurama where they have the two clones running against each other, Robert Johnson and John Robertson.
And the one guy is saying, well, I think your 0.3% tax reduction was reckless.
And the other guy says, well, I say my 0.3% tax reduction was not reckless.
I will make a prediction right now that we will not hear his name in connection with presidential politics.
Oh, good.
Well, we have been hearing it for so long now.
I sure hope that's over.
I mean, he started leaking that back in, what, 2006, you know, or 2007 at least, you know.
Yeah.
Someday.
That's my hunch is that that's done, over and done with.
Yeah.
All right.
Now, what's a libertarian to make of this situation in the Gaza Strip in five minutes?
Well, I'm glad there's a ceasefire, which I guess – I'm not sure if it's taken effect yet, but will be.
And I hope it holds.
I mean, it's just terrible that innocent people are getting killed, you know, on any side.
I mean, I don't want to see noncombatants.
It's terrible.
Hit by rockets or mortars or anything like that, bombs, drones.
But I think we have to keep the full context in mind.
This is not some conflict between two evenly matched parties with, you know, matching legitimate grievances.
I mean, that's just wrong.
You know, so many people think they can walk into the middle of a movie and believe they understand the plot.
And that's what's happening here.
The Gazans are treated like caged animals by the Israeli government.
It was the Israelis who described Gaza as an open-air prison once Sharon pulled out troops and the settlers back in the middle of the last decade.
And we forget that to our peril.
These people are totally under the arbitrary control of the Israeli authorities in terms of freedom of movement, trade, things like that.
They're packed into a small area about twice the size of Washington, D.C.
It's like 1.7 million people.
And they're undernourished because they don't have the freedom to import whatever, you know, food and other materials that they want to get from outside that they barely need, medicines and other things like that.
So this is a very bad situation.
And Israel is not willing to talk to them in good faith.
This also goes for the Palestinians on the West Bank.
The situation seems a little more desperate in Gaza, although it's bad on the West Bank, too.
And when you treat people like that, I don't think you should be surprised when they look to a group like Hamas or even worse people for some sort of leadership and help.
I mean, I'm no fan of Hamas.
I'm no fan of the even more violence-prone factions there.
I don't like the idea of firing rockets towards civilians.
I think that's horrible.
It's not legal under moral law or international law.
But you drive people to that when you treat them the way the Palestinians are treated.
And that's the thing we cannot forget.
We should not be talking about this as if it were two parties who are evenly matched and both have legitimate grievances.
It's just not accurate.
And it leads to bad conclusions and it leads people to support very bad things, like Israel responding to rockets in a way disproportionate manner.
And people say, well, people have to defend themselves against missiles and rockets.
And that's just the wrong way to look at it.
It's amazing to me.
It's almost like I can imagine if it was a James Bond movie or whatever, that the evil villain is a mad psychiatrist who's just doing an experiment about how full of crap can an aggressor's state be in crying victim as they slaughter people and convince people and actually get away with that.
I mean, it's just absolutely amazing.
It really is.
To me, I'm floored by it, actually.
You know, this goes back many years.
The Israelis and their friends in the U.S. have always been very good at playing the American public.
We know that.
Apart from campaign donations and the clout of AIPAC and the other parts of the Israel lobby, they've played the public relations game very, very well and the Palestinians haven't.
And that takes its toll.
And that's why most people are sympathetic to the Israeli side when they know nothing of the facts.
They know nothing of the facts.
All right.
Hey, thanks for your time.
It's great to talk to you as always, Sheldon.
Appreciate it.
My pleasure, Scott.
Anytime.
Bye-bye.
All right, Sheldon.
That's the great Sheldon Richman.
FFF.org.
He's the vice president there at the Future Freedom Foundation.
Thanks, everybody, for listening.
We'll be back here on Friday.
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