Welcome back to Antiwar Radio on Chaos 92.7 FM in Austin, Texas, ChaosRadioAustin.org to stream it live.
And our guest today is Alan Bach.
As I was telling you guys yesterday, he was the first guy I interviewed on the Weekend Interview Show, I believe the weekend just a couple of days after the statue of Saddam Hussein fell, I think it was April 9th, 2003, and got this interview show rolling back then five years ago.
He is the Senior Editorial Writer at the Orange County Register, and he writes Eye on the Empire for Antiwar.com.
Hi, Alan, good to talk to you again.
Good to talk to you, Scott, been way too long.
It's been way, way too long, and I'm not sure how I ever got out of the habit of interviewing you on the show all the time, but hopefully I can get back into it.
Sounds good to me.
It's a good one.
Hey, listen, last night, I actually went back and listened to that very first interview, and I have to say, I think you and I both deserve a hell of a lot of credit for how smart we are compared to everybody else.
After five years of nonsense from everybody else, going back and listening to this interview, just a couple of notes I took, turns out, as we discussed in the interview, they attack us not because we're free, but because our troops occupy their deserts.
We talked about the split between the realists and the neocons, and the Project for the New American Century, Doctrine of Remaking the Middle East, and all that.
You talked about the danger of trying to create a democracy in a society like Iraq, where what's going to happen?
The majority is going to get themselves elected and lord it over everybody else.
We talked about Somalia, and how it was working great back then, when they had no government.
We talked about how all empires fall, because it's just too expensive and too counterproductive.
Boy, oh boy, everybody got it wrong, and everybody now, it seems, as you talk about in your most recent article, are celebrating how wrong they got it, but some of us got it right back then, didn't we?
Well, you know, and we weren't alone, Scott.
There were Ted Carpenter and the guys at Cato.
They got it right.
Yep.
Ivan Eland at the Independent Institute got it right.
Yep.
Michael Shoyer, who wrote the book Imperial Hubris, who was the CIA's point man for Bin Laden during the 90s, he got it right.
Stop, Ritter got it right.
A retired CIA guy got it right.
You know, a lot of people did, but the ironic thing is, you know, it's Bill Kristol, who got everything wrong, who now has the prestigious column at the New York Times.
And the guys that got it, Scott Ritter got it right, for heaven's sake.
The guys that got it right are still sort of, you know, out on the margins.
I guess it shows that, you know, the empire is still powerful enough that the best way to have a big career is to serve the empire.
Well, you know, George Bush never can really pronounce it right when he tries to say it, but there is that phrase that, well, I guess Hamilton said it, and Malcolm X helped make it famous, too, that if you stand for nothing, you'll fall for anything, and maybe it really is the case that it's only people who are ideologically libertarians or leftists or rightists of some fashion or another who can withstand a propaganda assault like what happened in 2002, that the rest of the people who don't really have any, you know, strong political ideology that they can compare and contrast what's happening against, they just get buffaloed right along.
Well, the one thing that gives me a little bit of hope is that this war has turned out to be so disastrous, and I say that in face of the fact that maybe things seem to have gone a little bit better over the last year, but over the last few weeks, they sure haven't.
And even with what's happened in the last year, with the mild decline in violence, you know, the opinion polls still show the percentage of people that think this war should never have been started, which is the key thing.
It's much more difficult to talk about how you get out of it.
But the idea that it should never have been started, those numbers stay firm at 65-70%, and maybe the next time they try to talk us into a war, it won't be quite so easy.
Right, yeah, I guess you would expect in normal times to see public approval for things like this going up during times when, well, you know, like for the past, I guess, six months or so, you've had falling levels of violence and so forth.
Well, you know, I made fun of all the people at Slate and the New York Times that, you know, they had their symposiums about all these people that got it wrong, these liberal hawks, whatever they are.
But I do want to talk about one guy that did something I think useful in the Slate symposium, and that was William Salatin.
And instead of talking about why he got it wrong, he tried to come up with a few lessons about next time.
And some of those I think are really worth thinking about.
Question authority is one of them.
Suspicion can become gullibility.
When you think the world is full of bad people, you think, you know, you really have to do something about every single one of them.
Beware of mission creep.
You know, Salatin says he was originally in favor of putting some teeth in the U.N.
Weapons Inspection Program, but all of a sudden that escalated into a real war.
Yeah.
That was one of the things we talked about in that last interview five years ago.
Well, not the last one, but in that first interview five years ago on The Weekend Interview Show.
You know, and he also says it's easy to hate the tyrant who's thumbing his nose at you, but it's hard to see the possibility of a worse alternative behind him.
Those are things to remember.
Every time they start trying to, you know, stir us up into supporting a new war, I don't know if we're going to have a move toward military action against Iran before Bush leaves office or not.
Well, that was another thing I wanted to ask you about.
Well, you just wrote an article about it.
Fallon's gone.
You point out in the article that Lawrence Korb told you that he believes that Secretary Gates and the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Admiral Mullen, that they agreed with Fallon that they were opposed.
Is that not enough to keep Dick Cheney back?
I should hope so.
It's not quite what he deserves, which is probably an orange jumpsuit as a war criminal, but at least it'll probably keep him on his leash.
I do hope, you know, these neoconservatives are just relentless in their belief that the way to fix something is to invade another country, that military action can solve every real or imagined problem in the world, and Cheney sure seems to have gone along with them.
You know, back when, in the 70s and 80s, you know, don't recognize him anymore.
But I do think that, you know, the military people, you know, they know that they're the ones who have to, you know, whose blood gets shed, whose friends get killed, even at the leadership level, you know, the generals don't generally get killed, but they feel a kinship for the people that do get killed.
And they understand.
I would love to have been a fly on the wall at the Joint Chiefs of Staff meeting with Bush last week.
I'm sure that they gave him an earful about how the Iraq War has hollowed out the army.
Morale is down, recruitment is more difficult, you know, they have to face these questions every day.
Bush worries about his legacy.
They have to worry about the military as an institution.
They know that as an institution, the military is in deep trouble right now because of the Iraq War.
And the last thing they want is to get into another war that's going to end up hollowing out the military even more, and maybe even breaking it for good.
Well maybe they can follow the Somalia model and have Azerbaijan invade for us or something.
But what would Azerbaijan want to do?
Well, I'm sure that they'd be just as successful installing a government as the Ethiopians have been in Somalia operating on our behalf there.
Yeah, they probably would be.
In fact, let's talk about that a little bit, because you covered Somalia back before this war, and how basically the fall of the central state in that land was working out.
They had relative peace and security for the first time in 20-something years there.
You know, it's really, when you look at Iraq, I just read the proofs of Ted Carpenter's new book that's coming out.
When Western internationalists try to build a nation, sometimes the nation doesn't want to get built.
I think that's what's happening in Afghanistan right now.
They don't want to be a centralized nation like Western Europe.
You know, they're pretty happy with their tribes and their tribalism and their, you know, we call them warlords.
What they are is regional leaders.
And Somalia had exactly that kind of a situation, you know, where particular tribes had long been dominant for centuries, you know, the tribal leaders took care of things.
A central government they simply didn't need or didn't want.
And you know, why should we impose that model on societies that have ancient models that have worked for centuries and maybe even thousands of years in some cases?
You know, we think that the Western nation state is the be-all end-all of political models.
I'm not sure it's working that well for us.
It almost seems like, well, if you stand for something, you're willing to murder as many Africans as possible to make it a reality, I guess.
Yeah, I guess so.
You just turn that right around, you know.
And that is the thing, too.
It is almost a religious belief in the central state.
How could people exist without the central state?
And you know, after all, the Old West was nothing but gunfights at high noon all day every day, right?
Actually, studies have been done of the Old West, and the murder rate was lower in the Old West than it was in almost any modern American city today.
So it isn't necessarily the case that you need strong central authority to keep everybody else from killing each other all the time, because only they have the right to do the killing.
Well, I certainly think that's the case, that a strong central state, in most cases, exacerbates the problems that it's theoretically supposed to solve and institutionalizes violence as a way of life.
Well, and I think this is probably one of the reasons that you oppose the war, too, is your libertarian understanding of how government works and how the consequences, unintended and otherwise, that can come from government action, you just apply those same principles that you'd apply to the war on poverty, the war on drugs, and turn that to the war on Iraqis.
It's really the same thing, right?
To me, it's very similar.
Well, yesterday on the show, the guest was talking about how the battles of Fallujah, the first and second battles of Fallujah in 2004, in the spring and then again in November 2004, how this really was the start of the civil war, because they brought the Shiite army with them to attack Fallujah, and they created so many refugees, all those refugees had to go to Baghdad, and so in order to give them a place to stay in Baghdad, the Sunnis started cleansing Shia out of their neighborhoods in order to make room for all the refugees from Fallujah.
And then, of course, tit for tat, came back the other way, and this is how all this got started.
And if we remember back at the time, the story was, well, this is going to break the back of the insurgency, and everything's going to be great after this, when in fact it was the start of a whole new set of problems.
Well, you know what, I think we still haven't, we, they, excuse me, they still haven't figured out what the deal is with an insurgency.
When you kill one person as an occupying force in a country that's already divided along religious and ethnic lines, you kill one person, you create ten new enemies.
And so, you know, all his friends, his relatives, they become angry at you, and want to get back at you, want to have revenge.
So it becomes an escalating cycle of violence rather than something that ends violence once and for all.
And you know, the rule is, there's only been, an insurgency only has to survive, it doesn't have to prevail.
Right, and that's what's happened just this last week, right, when the Saudis won some battles against the Iraqi army, but then before the American army got their act together, they kind of fell back and called it off.
So they lived to fight another day, but they have demonstrated that the Iraqi government, which is not really a government, it's really a sort of a, well, a gang, a mafia, whatever, you know, they decided to attack in Basra, you know, to show the other Shiite faction, the Sadr-type faction, rather than the Badr-type faction, you know, what for, and probably to set up a situation so that the central government forces could have a chance to win local elections, which they've scheduled for October.
Because they know that the local officials that they've installed there have no popular support at all, and that the Sadr forces would win an election.
So they decided to try and decimate the Sadr-oriented forces, and they ended up discovering that, you know, they couldn't do that.
So the Iraqi government, or that particular faction of Shia, has been dealt a setback, the Sadr forces live to fight another day, and, you know, there's more and more people that are ready to kill somebody as a result of this kind of violence.
Yeah, you know, actually at the beginning of that first interview five years ago, I asked you, well, everybody's celebrating the fall of Saddam, but, you know, isn't this a case of the ends justify the means?
After all, a lot of people have already died, and before anything got started, this is just a couple of days after the statue of Saddam was pulled down by the Marine Corps and the Iraqi National Congress in that photo opportunity, and you said, well, you know, I like Aldous Huxley better when he says that the means that you use determine the ends, that when you use violent and destructive means, you get violent and destructive ends, there's really no way around that.
You know, I wish that weren't, you know, well, maybe I don't wish that weren't true, because I'm not very fond of violent means, but, you know, to me, it's as true as the law of gravity.
You know, use violence, you get more violence.
The quote was so good, well, when you said it, I mangled it just now, but when you said it, it was so good, I put it on a bumper sticker and made some money, actually.
Oh, well, good for you.
I guess I probably owe you about 50 bucks or something.
Well, maybe we should do a thing at Antiwar.com called Why I Got Iraq Right, and we'll just feature you and Justin Raimondo and Lou Rockwell and Jacob Hornberger and Ivan Eland and Ted Carpenter and get everybody who knew better, and have them write about how superior they all are.
Maybe we should.
You know, I want to mention one other thing that I did here at the Register that I don't think anybody else did, you know, with the encouragement of my editor, Kathy Taylor.
I spent about a week, and that's really about all it took.
Not that I became an expert on Mesopotamian history, but, you know, I immersed myself in the history of the region for about a week and read several books and went online and, you know, discovered that, for example, during the time of the Ottoman Empire, what we now call Iraq was three different provinces, because it was populated by three different religious and ethnic entities.
Right, right, it was Kyrgyzstan, Baghdad, and Basra.
And, you know, when the British took it over, you know, they created totally artificial boundaries.
You know, all that stuff was not that hard to dig into and find out, but almost nobody, at least in our Pentagon, even though I'm sure there were people, you know, somewhere in the Pentagon that knew this stuff, there were people in the State Department that knew this stuff, but the guys that were ready for the war, you know, didn't even think it was important to learn the history of the region and have a notion of what kind of problems might develop after an invasion.
You know, I don't want to say this just, you know, to take credit, more to cast shame and aspersions on those who failed, but I was sitting in the Chaos Radio garage with a microphone in my hand, doing pirate radio in 2002, asking all these questions and answering them correctly.
You know, all these experts and six-figure salary people, they couldn't spend a week with a Google machine like you did?
And I'll tell you this, too, Tom Clancy, who's one of the best-selling authors of, you know, Pulp Fiction books, you know, Jack Ryan, Harrison Ford as the hero CIA agent who saves the day all the time and all that, which, you know, the entire G. Gordon Liddy audience reads, you know, everything the guy writes.
The whole Washington, D.C. goofball set, they read all these novels, and he had just come out with a novel that began with the Ayatollah of Iran using an assassin to shoot Saddam Hussein in the back of the head.
And when the Ba'ath government fell apart, guess who inherited Iraq?
Iran.
Why?
Because they had this massive Shiite majority in the south that had just been waiting all this time to come to power.
And now the problem for the Ayatollah was, now he's got to run Iraq, too, which is already difficult enough to be an Ayatollah in Iran.
And the story goes on that way.
I mean, this is the kind of thing that was known in popular fiction before the war.
I don't know.
I just don't see how anybody has an excuse.
These people can even show up at Slate with a straight face and say, well, gee, I meant well, but...
Yeah, you know, I thought Bush would be competent.
You know, whatever gave you that impression that that was going to be a possibility.
Man, yeah.
And, you know, George Bush is right, really, in the end.
September 11th changed everything.
I remember the week before, everybody hated George Bush.
Everybody.
The only people who supported him supported him because they hated Al Gore so much, and they just wanted the Clinton-Gore years to end.
And so I guess they'll support Junior as a default.
But everybody thought he was a clown.
Everybody thought he was an idiot.
Everybody was just holding his breath, hoping he didn't do anything too stupid.
The Onion ran an article, like, in the middle of the summer called The Americans Just Realized George Bush is Actually the President.
Oh, my God.
And then all of a sudden, on September 12th and 13th, oh, wow, he's my leader.
Oh, he handled September 11th so well.
And on and on, just parroting whatever TV says.
He grabbed that bull by the head and looked almost human.
Yeah, and it's like, here's a guy who fled in cowardly terror, to paraphrase Francis E. Deck, to Louisiana, and then to an underground base in Nebraska, and didn't get back till 637 o'clock that night to D.C., and this is him acting heroic and brave, and our great leader, this was what won everybody over?
Fleeing in terror to Nebraska?
We are a forgiving people, aren't we?
I'm sorry, I'm just ranting and raving at you, trying to get a response.
I don't know, it just seems silly to me.
I looked at that and saw it for what it was that day, cowardice.
If it had been me, even if there were still hijacked planes in the air, I would have said, well, good, put some F-16s on my wingtips, and we're going back to D.C. right now, so I can go on TV and tell the American people that it's cool.
And, you know, that's what I would have done.
The idea that he let his Secret Service or whoever, Dick Cheney or whoever, tell him to go and flee to an underground bunker in Nebraska, to me, he ought to have resigned the next day just for that.
You would think so, yeah.
That's going down in world history as among the most shameful and cowardly acts ever, I think.
Well, if I have anything to do with it.
Well, I guess the important thing is to write the world history.
Right, see, that's my problem, is I'm too lazy to write.
I just sit here and talk to this microphone.
I need to write all this stuff down so it counts, so I can link back to it and say, see?
Okay, let me ask you about John McCain.
You wrote an article recently about John McCain and his militarist mindset, and one of the things that you pointed out that I thought was really important was that his grandfather was actually one of the guys who helped build the Imperial American Navy under Theodore Roosevelt back in the days.
Well, Alfred Thayer Mann was the guy who was the great theoretician of American sea power, said that sea power is what creates great powers and great empires, and Theodore Roosevelt, who was nothing if not an activist president, believed that and built the Great White Fleet, and it was one of John McCain's grandfathers who was part of that Great White Fleet that went around the world to demonstrate to the world that this fledgling little country over in the Western Hemisphere was now ready to take its place as one of the great world powers.
Theodore Roosevelt was in love with the idea of fighting, really.
His famous quote that everybody quotes is, the man in the arena with the blood on his face and the sweat is better than the spectator.
I thought the famous quote was, I hate the gooks, I will hate them as long as I live.
Oh, I'm sorry, I was talking about John McCain.
But he comes from a family that has, he's the third generation of the family that has celebrated the idea of an American empire, the idea that America has to be the world leader, and that it gets that way by undertaking military action.
So he may give a nice little speech saying, my idea of foreign policy is collaborative and we'll work with our allies, we're not going to be the cowboy.
He's more of a cowboy than Bush, as far as I can see.
Bush may have hollowed out the military so that he won't be able to do as much as he might like to, but his instincts are to be more militaristic than Bush.
Oh, well, we can celebrate something about Bush then, if he's damaged the military to the point that it might hinder McCain's ability to beat everybody over the head with it.
That might be the only good thing you can say about the guy.
So, yeah, he really does seem to believe in fighting just for its own sake, just for the glory and the honor of it.
Eric Margolis on the show a couple of weeks ago said, listen, you go to war, you use your soldiers in order to accomplish political objectives, not just to fight for fighting's sake, not just to win just because you got into something, and so therefore you have to be the last guy standing no matter what.
McCain, from the time, this book that Matt Welch wrote, McCain, The Myth of a Maverick, is really a worthwhile thing.
McCain, from the time he was a kid, would get into fights for the sake of getting into fights.
When he was a schoolboy, when he was at Annapolis, during almost all the time when he was in the Navy, he was the guy that was going around with a chip on his shoulder looking for a fight.
That's his personality.
It still is his personality.
In the article you say that he even screamed at you guys at the Orange County Register one time.
Yeah, he did.
What happened there?
I can't even remember what the issue was.
It was something we thought was sort of a minor...
We asked him a question, but I think he took it personally, and whenever he takes something personally, and particularly if there's a certain amount of truth in what might be a criticism of him personally, he flies off the handle.
Until I read Matt Welch's book, I would listen to people who said, maybe he's experienced being tortured as a prisoner of war.
No, he had this personality way before then.
Interesting.
It's a personality that's sort of got a hair-trigger temper, and throw a punch before you think about it.
He's not the kind of guy that...
What you would want in a president is somebody who's able to assess a situation, that is, if you want to have a president at all.
But if we've got to have one, you want someone who's going to be able to assess a situation cold-bloodedly, look at the pros and cons, and think beyond not just the immediate consequences of striking back, if you think somebody has offended you, but beyond that consequence to the tertiary and quaternary consequences.
Think strategically, not emotionally.
So even where Bush is completely incompetent, at least he's actually got an objective he's trying to achieve, rather than just starting a war just to have one.
Well, maybe he does.
I question even that.
The objectives in Iraq have changed over time.
Originally it was to get rid of the weapons of mass destruction, and then it was to...
I'm not sure what it is.
Maybe he still buys into the old PNEC, New American Century, people that think you can establish a democracy somewhere in the Middle East and therefore transform the whole region.
I think somewhere he has that somewhere in his head as what eventually he hopes is going to happen as a result of this war.
But the objectives of the war are just really fuzzy.
That's the other kind of problem with this kind of war.
How do you know if we've won?
McCain talks about victory, but how do you define it?
Is it simply enough stability that the Shia and the Sunnis and the Kurds aren't at each other's throats?
Is it a de facto partition where they each have their section of the country and there's enough oil wells in each section that they don't have to fight over that?
Something about 14 bases.
Forever.
How would you define what a victory in Iraq is?
I don't think anybody that's in favor of the wars has yet come close to it.
Which means that in their minds, we're just there.
Right, well, we can't leave now because Iran will take the South.
Yeah, we can't leave for now because Iran will take the South or the Shia and the Sunni will be at each other's throats and kill too many people.
There will be instability.
The Iraqi army, is it ever going to be ready to run things?
Is the fact that you have an army that's ready to control the people ruthlessly?
Yeah, I think I just came up with an idea for a slogan for the Obama fans.
Whenever they want to contradict John McCain, they can all just yell in unison, Oh yeah, and whose fault is that?
I don't know if you saw, but we have the Charles Goyette interview at the top of the page today at Antiwar Radio with, let me get the guy's name right if I can here, it's Aram Rostan who wrote this book about Ahmed Chalabi.
And they talk about how this guy was an Iranian spy.
The INC's offices were in Tehran, and they cover the, I think, likelihood, at least strong possibility, that the neocons were in part duped into this war by assets of Iranian intelligence.
After all, they are the ones who have benefited most.
They certainly are, and you'd think that, as paranoid as they claim to be about Iran, they might have been a little more skeptical.
But, again, you know, I hate to be too crude, but I think when they think about war, you think about the editorial offices of the Weekly Standard sitting around in a circle jerk.
They do seem to only talk to each other, or listen to each other anyway.
And, you know, war is what gets their nuts off.
It's really...
Yeah, as long as they don't have to be anywhere near it.
Yeah, that's the other thing.
You know, all of these guys, you know, not that I have anything against draft dodgers.
I was one myself.
Yeah, but you're not a hypocrite.
That's the difference.
Hey, at least Michael Ledeen gave up his son.
Well, he's still alive, but at least Ledeen's son is serving, I think, last I heard.
That's what they call it, serving.
But, no, the rest of them, you're right.
They're just a bunch of the softest-handed wussies this side of the Pecos River, or that side, I forget which side of the river I'm on, and yet they're the biggest warmongers in the hemisphere.
Yeah, I mean, you might have a teensy-weensy bit of respect for them if any of them had ever served or, you know, made sure that their sons or daughters served or, you know, even if they've gotten into a fight when they were in school, for God's sake.
Yeah, anything.
Or even mugged by reality or by imagination or anything.
Okay, now, on McCain, I haven't read Welch's book, but I have read a couple of articles by him about McCain.
And one of the things that he focuses on is, well, I guess if you can call it an ideology, is McCain's belief system that just places Washington, D.C. and the American flag at the center of the universe, it seems like.
You mentioned in your article that, to him, the purpose of all this government action, foreign and domestic, is to increase or perhaps even to perfect the American people's belief in their government.
Well, you know, that's another thing that he gets from Teddy Roosevelt.
I forget who it was that said about Teddy Roosevelt.
You know, I don't know whether he believes in this or that, but what he really, his actions say that what he believes in is government.
And of all the characters in American history, McCain has made it clear that Teddy Roosevelt is his ultimate hero.
Well, and the Weekly Standard guys keep telling him, you know, you really remind me a lot of Teddy Roosevelt.
And that's, of course, a way to feed into his ego.
And with this flap-doodle national greatness conservatism that they started talking about in the late 90s, you know, that sort of coincided with McCain becoming a viable possible presidential candidate and trying to consolidate what had never been an organized political philosophy beyond sort of a generic patriotism and enthusiasm for the military.
So as a consequence of, I think, two things, the fact that he got caught up in the Keating scandal or the savings and loan scandal of the late 1980s and decided that, you know, reform of government and reform of the appearance of evil is the way to save him and people like him from himself who were tempted.
And that kind of reform, you know, never seems to eliminate the real moral hazard, which is these government programs that bail people out when they make mistakes.
You know, it's to, you know, create a separation, a formal separation between the people that make the decisions and the people that give the money so that it appears that it's not corrupt.
Because in fact, you know, the whole savings and loan thing was corrupt from beginning to end and was started because the government was guaranteeing deposits, which means the savings and loan people, you know, had a license to be irresponsible.
Right.
Yeah, I love seeing them on TV say, well, we have to have the Federal Reserve so that the people will have confidence without ever explaining that the reason they can't have confidence without the Fed is because the bank doesn't have any of their money.
It already gave it away to everybody else.
So that's why we need the Fed, because we're all guilty of fraud.
See?
But anyway, you know, so the whole, you know, idea of national greatness, which means a government-led project.
You know, they couldn't think of the moon, you know, go to the moon.
But, you know, something, something, and a war is, you know, sort of the quintessence of a government-led project to promote the idea of national prestige and national greatness.
National greatness.
Government greatness.
And in fact, you know, he takes it further, too, where he even disdains people who don't work in government jobs.
I remember two or three times, at least, he attacked Mitt Romney for being a businessman.
And in one of the debates, he said, yeah, Mitt Romney, you know, he's real rich and he used to work at these companies, and I bet those companies had to fire people before.
Like, man, what are you talking about, John McCain?
You're crazy.
I don't know.
I don't understand.
I don't think he understands at all what it means for people to make decisions on how to spend their money without having that decision made for them.
Like you say, he grew up this way.
He's never had a job in the private sector.
Never.
And even his wife's fortune is a fascist beer distribution cartel.
Yeah.
Yeah, if there had been a free market in beer in Arizona, his wife's father would never have been that rich.
Yeah, oh, and there's nothing like a free market in beer anywhere in this country.
I've learned that lesson.
I'm trying to remember the guy's name, actually, at the Independent Institute, who wrote a whole great study on this about how it's all about the distribution.
Most states, anybody can make beer, but you can't get it on the shelves.
And it's the Anheuser-Busch cartel that he married into, right?
Something like that.
I don't remember if it was Anheuser-Busch or Coors.
Yeah, one or the other.
Anyway, same difference.
So, yeah, here's a guy who has never had a job in his life that people weren't being forced to pay him and who actually disdains us regular people who go about our transactions voluntarily.
And create the wealth that people like him can then become parasites from.
Right.
Yeah, what a great guy.
Well, I sure hope he loses, Alan.
I'm actually really worried.
I mean, I guess I can't say I'm really scared or something, but I am worried that John McCain will become the president because I think that, well, I think he's a lunatic.
I think that's why they call him the maverick.
It's the wrong adjective.
But I do think that the guy is certainly not to be trusted with that much power, not that anyone can be, but certainly not John McCain.
Less than almost anybody else that's still standing.
Yeah, I mean, I literally would take a prison guard at random or something.
Somebody who's just brutal with no education, who maybe would have some skepticism about their own decisions or something.
John McCain is just too much of this my way or the highway, I don't even want to hear your dissent.
And even when his arguments make no sense at all, like you said, he says we have to achieve victory but never defines it.
And yet can't stand the idea that you or I would criticize him for his half argument.
Yeah, I think he's the most dangerous of those that are remaining.
That's saying a lot with Hillary Clinton in there.
And Barack Obama too.
I don't even know.
I still don't know what to make of Obama.
Yeah, I don't either.
So I'm just going to go with the default that he's as dangerous as Zbigniew Brzezinski and his buddies on his foreign policy staff.
Because I can't tell what he's about either.
I mean, all he ever talks about is abstractions and sunshine and nothing that I've ever heard.
Change and goodness.
The future.
The children.
Hope.
All right, got to have hope.
Hey, thanks very much.
Alan Bach, everybody.
He keeps his eye on the empire at antiwar.com slash Bach.
He's the senior editorial writer at the Orange County Register.
And he's also the author of Waiting to Inhale, The Politics of Medical Marijuana and Ambush at Ruby Ridge, which I highly recommend to everybody.
Thanks a lot for your time today, Alan.
Let me do one more thing before we go.
Let me promote my own blog, which I have because I have a 22-year-old son who knows how to set these things up at www.alanbach.com.
That's right, and in fact, you can also find Alan Bach's blog in the blog role at my blog, thestressblog.com as well.
Just click right on his name there.
Hey, thanks a lot for your time.
Hey, thank you, Scott.
Talk to you soon.
Do it again soon.
Yep.
