Welcome back to Antiwar Radio, it's Chaos 92.7 FM in Austin, Texas.
We're streaming live worldwide on the internet, chaosradioaustin.org and antiwar.com slash radio.
And today is Constitution Day and we've been talking about the brutality of the American empire in its occupation of the Middle East.
And you know, this is something that hopefully all Americans, but I know all libertarians go through is trying to review American history and figure out, you know, when was that Palpatine moment when the American Republic became an empire?
Was it when we refused to disband NATO at the end of the Cold War and marched onward in our unipolar moment?
Was it the Cold War itself and the refusal of Truman to dismantle the military-industrial complex and all the great military power that had been built up to defeat the Nazis and Imperial Japanese?
Was it McKinley and Roosevelt, their conquest of Cuba and the Philippines?
Maybe Abraham Lincoln and his conquest of the South, James K. Polk and his conquest of Mexico.
Never mind all the wars against the American Indians, maybe, maybe, The Republic became an empire back in 1789 on this day when the Constitution itself was ratified.
I'm not certain.
This is something I like to go back and forth.
Of course, I left out Woodrow Wilson, but we'll get to him.
But I have on the phone Tom Woods, Thomas Woods.
He is the author of the Politically Incorrect Guide to American History and Who Killed the Constitution, the Fate of American Liberty from World War I to George W. Bush.
And of course, he's got a brand new one out, which is called We Who Dared Say No to War, which is co-authored with Murray Polner.
Welcome to the show, Tom.
How are you doing?
Thanks, Scott.
Good.
I'm a big fan of the show.
Well, thank you very much, sir.
Hey, listen.
Well, that's kind of fake, because you and me are friends.
But you're all over my iPod, Scott, so I must like the show.
Okay, well, that's something, because I've got people who actually love me who won't listen to it at all.
There you go.
Okay.
No, so seriously, when did America turn from republic to empire, Tom Woods?
What do you say?
Well, I don't know.
I think I'm going to take kind of a more middle-of-the-road position, you know?
I'm like Walter Moderate Block, I guess, on this one, because I guess I'm...
Walter Moderate Block?
Is that his middle name?
That's what he tries to call himself when he's feeling in his more conciliatory moments.
Well, I mean, I do think that a lot that went on in the 19th century is pretty reprehensible, but that I do think, nevertheless, there's a qualitative change in the late 19th century.
Just when you listen to the rationales being given for what was called the large policy abroad, when you listen to Teddy Roosevelt, but also when you listen, you know, pretty much to the whole mainstream of the political establishment of the 1890s, the consensus was that, you know, if we want to be one of the cool countries, we've got to have overseas possessions, we've got to have naval bases and coaling stations dotting the Pacific so that we can have a forward position in Asia to grab a chunk of the trade over there.
I mean, there are a lot of people living in China.
Imagine if they all bought a pair of shoes, that sort of thing, and we're going to need to force our way into this.
But beyond that, there is this sort of sense, especially on the part of people like TR and his followers, that really, unless we want to be one of these, you know, pathetic, sort of what Moe Szyslak calls, you know, loser countries, you know, we have to be a great power and we've got great responsibilities and blah, blah, blah.
All the rhetoric that we hear, you know, even today, really began to be ramped up in the late 19th century.
So I'd say that's pretty much the death knell.
You know, it's funny, as you were saying that, it reminded me of Hawaii, and I thought, oh, you know what?
There's a great quote from a speech about Hawaii, and so I'm sitting here Googling it while you're talking.
I was listening, too.
I can do that.
And it actually is something I post on the antiwar.com blog in response to your call for old antiwar speeches.
And it's this speech by, it's an argument over whether to steal Hawaii from the people of Hawaii or not.
And there's some great stuff against empire here, but the argument for empire, to me, just really stands out here.
This is the kind of language which, I don't know, I guess the pollsters would probably have this rewritten nowadays, but this is what James F. Stewart of New Jersey said in denouncing the let's not conquer Hawaii congressman.
He said, the silly argument of national isolation, the outgrowth of fear and timidity, is lame and impotent.
Every nation must at all times be prepared to protect its citizens and interests abroad.
And in order to do this, we must have mid-stations as bases of supply and resort, in order that our just resentment against foreign nations may be sure and certain of management and control.
And on the other side, with tearful solicitude for our constitution, and knowing our tender regard for that majestic instrument, interpose it as a bar.
Our country has arisen from lusty youth to vigorous manhood.
We must share the responsibilities as well as the blessings of modern civilization.
We must participate in the world's destiny.
Boy, I don't think you'd find anybody this side of John McCain who would actually speak that openly about, you know, that kind of blatant, mindless machismo in denouncing the constitution as it forbids us from acting like the British.
That is such an unbelievable passage, and yet you know that if somebody had read that aloud at the Republican convention, it would have elicited huge cheers, and anyone who had any misgivings about it would, of course, have been, you know, a bleeding-heart liberal, you know, who hates America and all this nonsense.
You know, when I think about the 1890s, you know, I always – there's one little episode that I like, which was when – you know, because sometimes I've actually had a couple people – back when I used to teach American history, I had a couple people ask me, what would happen – this is obviously a purely hypothetical situation – but what would happen if, let's say, Congress voted to declare war, but the president didn't want to go to war?
What would happen then?
And so, you know, so part of my answer has always been, well, that would never happen, right?
But suppose it did.
Well, in fact, in the 1890s, that almost happened, because Grover Cleveland was, in fact, facing people who did want, prematurely, in his view – or he probably would have preferred not at all – to go to war over the subject of Cuba, to go to war with Spain, already even before the McKinley presidency, and he was dead-set against this.
So he said to them, yeah, you go ahead and declare the war, but I'm not going to mobilize the troops.
So I thought, hey, that's a good president.
That's how we need executive authority exercised in this country.
Boy, yeah, that's got to be the exception that proves the rule there, huh?
Well, and beyond that, my friend Kevin Gutzman and I, we just wrote this book, Who Killed the Constitution?
And I mean, here we are, as you and I are talking, it's Constitution Day, which I don't know if you saw on the Lew Rockwell blog earlier, but I defined Constitution Day as the day on which federally funded educational institutions are unconstitutionally required to teach about the Constitution.
I mean, that's how screwed up this situation is.
Yeah, and that's the only one day a year that they ever would dare.
Yeah, right, right, right.
So, in fact, I noticed that Auburn University, right across the street here, is sponsoring a lecture on the Constitution, and I'm sure they're paying the guy a pretty penny.
And, of course, I'm thinking, look, I could have just crossed the street giving you the lecture for half the price, but, you know, that's quite all right, I have a perfectly good livelihood as it is.
But when we did this book, you know, it's hard not to talk about foreign policy.
And a lot of times you'd think the readership of a book called Who Killed the Constitution would be, you know, conservatives who, you know, who are supposed to be so devoted to the Constitution.
But, you know, look, when it comes to foreign policy, it's just laughable.
I mean, they're not even – to say they don't obey the Constitution, it's just not – it doesn't really even come close to the situation we're facing here.
We're coming up against the limitations of language to convey how far we are from it.
And so, you know, one thing that's particularly annoyed me is this neocon line about how, you know, the President doesn't really need anybody's consent.
I mean, if he wants to ask Congress for some, you know, dim-witted resolution, he can do that, but he's not required to, he's the Commander-in-Chief, he can just deploy troops anywhere he wants.
And I've been arguing against this position a lot, as a lot of people have, I've been arguing against it for years, and when I argued against it about four years ago in my Politically Incorrect Guide to American History, this took some people by surprise because they picked up my book thinking, well, this will be a great neocon book.
And you know, and I condemned presidential war powers, and so I had Max Boot come after me.
Now, the very fact that the guy's name, which he chose for himself, by the way, is Max Boot, almost tells you what you need to know about him.
The fact that he's a foreign policy advisor to John McCain tells you a little bit more.
But Max Boot went after me and said, boy, this Thomas Woods, he just doesn't know his American history.
Doesn't he know that hundreds of times Presidents have, you know, declared war, gone to war, deployed troops, and not consulted anybody, and boy, this guy's just, you know, some kind of a bozo.
Well, it turns out that when you actually look at the historical examples that people like Boot and the neocons have in mind there, when they claim that there are hundreds of examples of this, well, you look through it, and you actually look closely at their claim, they start reducing it to like a hundred.
And then when you look at those hundred, they're including things like, you know, five cattle rustlers cross the border into Mexico, and ten American soldiers chase after them.
And they count that as a foreign intervention authorized by the President without congressional authorization.
If that's what they're going to count, I will happily yield them those examples.
My point is that before 1950, you didn't have hundreds of thousands of Americans being sent halfway around the world by the President.
No, you certainly didn't.
And the fact is that if every President since George Washington violated the bounds of Article 2, precedent doesn't override the Constitution.
I've read it, and it doesn't say precedent overrides this anywhere.
Yeah, exactly.
If people should just get in the habit of ignoring this document, then you can just throw it away.
No, of course not.
But what's interesting is, in fact, how scrupulously previous Presidents observed this understanding, whereby the Congress declares the war, which then the President then supervises once it's been declared.
I mean, George Washington understood it this way.
So any moves he made against the Indians, he kept as purely defensive, because that would require, anything more would require congressional authorization.
People sometimes list the quasi-war with France as an example of a presidential war.
But again, that's not true.
That was all congressional statutes that President Adams had to follow.
And in fact, there was an example of a ship captain that had, in fact, harassed – the rule was you could go after ships coming from France, but not going to France in this quasi-war with France.
Well, there was a ship captain who got in trouble, because instead of listening to Congress, he listened to the President, who authorized the capture of ships going to France.
Well, Congress hadn't authorized that.
So when this ship captain captured this ship going to France, he actually wound up being sued and going to court, and the ruling came down against him.
And the argument was that Congress makes these decisions, and it doesn't matter that the President issued you some order that was not in conformity with congressional statute.
He had no authority to do that.
And so you're liable for damages.
So I mean, this is like another country, right?
This sounds like a country from Mars.
But this is the actual America.
This is the real America.
And you see this precedent.
You see it also in the way Jefferson handled the Barbary pirates.
He didn't just do everything on his own.
Everything was purely defensive.
And he said, I'm not going to launch any attacks, whatever, until I get congressional authorization.
And you go all through the 19th century and into the middle of the 20th century.
So you do even – even though, as you say, Scott, you don't need precedent on your side, it is so overwhelmingly on the side of the original Constitution that it's no wonder that you have to reach around for these crazy examples in order to find counter-examples.
But what's also revealing is that here we have neocons under George W. Bush looking around for all these excuses as to why it's okay for the President to do these things.
But the Democrats did the same thing.
Of course, Bill Clinton, in 1999, when he bombed the Serbs over Kosovo, he did that even in the face of a direct congressional refusal to authorize the bombing.
He just went ahead and did it.
So it's bipartisan.
But beyond that, when Harry Truman really got the ball rolling with this presidential supremacy thing, when he went to war in Korea without getting a congressional declaration of war, and Senator Robert Taft, Mr. Republican – so the world is turned upside down here – Mr. Republican stood up in the Senate and said, now wait a minute, I mean, the claims the President is making are obviously ahistorical.
He obviously doesn't have this authority.
Well, who stood up and defended Truman?
The liberals.
Arthur Schlesinger, Jr., a historian you should never read, by the way, the complete hack, waste of time.
And Henry Steele Commager, two mainstream establishment liberals who defended Truman, and now the neocons defend Bush.
Very few people will consistently say, whether it's a president of my party or my ideology or not, he does not have this authority, period.
And he clearly doesn't.
I mean, Article I, Section 8 is the list of the powers of the Congress.
Clause 11 is their war powers.
And then the rest of them reserve to Congress all the powers concerning the rules of war and how it's conducted and everything else.
All it says about that in Article II, the President's job description, is that he shall be the Commander-in-Chief of the Army and the Navy when called into the actual service of the United States by the Congress.
That's what it says.
And you know, people always say, oh, well, you know, the President can do whatever he wants in foreign policy.
Everybody knows, hey, that's the Constitution, the President's prerogative in foreign policy.
But correct me if I'm wrong.
All he has the authority to do is appoint ambassadors and sign treaties that need the confirmation and the ratification of two-thirds of the Senate before they have any force whatsoever.
And he's the Commander-in-Chief when called into the actual service of the United States.
Does he have any other power over foreign policy that is, what, written between the lines in there somewhere that I can't find, or what?
No, I mean, in terms of powers that he would unilaterally have, I mean, that's pretty much exhausted.
And even, as you say, even those, some of those are not purely unilateral.
So it's important to remember, you know, when you're faced with such a direct contradiction between the historical record of the early America and the text of the Constitution on the one hand, and recent, let's say the past 60 years or so, practice on the other, the difference is so great that it's no wonder that people probably just assume, partly because they don't know much history, this is just the way it's supposed to be, or they would at least assume that there must at least be some historical constitutional arguments on behalf of the system we have now.
I mean, it has to at least be debatable.
But on this, at least on this constitutional question, it's not even remotely debatable.
And when Mitt Romney, and I can't even believe I'm wasting the time of your program to mention a guy, an empty suit like Mitt Romney, but when he said in that Republican debate, when he was asked about, you know, do you think you could just go to war on your own authority?
And he said, you'd have to ask his lawyers.
I mean, I thought to myself, anybody who even thinks this is a debatable issue is unqualified to be president.
Because if you look at...
Well, that's what Giuliani said, too.
Giuliani said, lawyers, nothing.
I'll do whatever I feel like.
Congress, be damned.
Yeah.
Yeah, absolutely.
But when you look at the drafting of the Constitution, the ratifying of it, the history of the early republic, early court decisions, it's all on the side of the president doesn't have this authority, and trying to take him down a peg.
And what's worth remembering, too, is that, of course, when the Constitution was being debated, you had opponents of the Constitution who were concerned, among other things, that the president, as envisioned in this new Constitution, might be too powerful.
And so one of the arguments that so-called federalists who supported the Constitution made to reassure these skeptics was specifically to point out that the president under the Constitution lacks the power to declare war.
Now, one way that the neocons have tried to wiggle out of this thing, where, you know, we can clearly see in the text of the Constitution, as you point out, Scott, that it, you know, it says that, you know, Congress declares war.
One way they've tried to weasel out of this is through this argument by John Yoo, who was the deputy assistant attorney general for a couple of years in the Bush administration.
Now he's a law professor, and he clerked for Clarence Thomas.
John Yoo tried to argue that, really, declarations of war in the 18th century were just understood as declaratory.
They were just statements to the world to let everybody know, let the enemy know, let your own country know, let other countries know, that a state of war exists.
But he argued that a declaration of war didn't actually amount to the initiation of hostilities.
It was just a notification.
Well, in fact, it turns out that it could mean that, but in the 18th century, it also could mean the initiation of hostilities.
And when we remember that Federalists used this argument to reassure Anti-Federalists, don't worry about this president under the Constitution, he won't have the power to declare war.
If John Yoo's interpretation is correct, then we're supposed to believe that supporters of the Constitution were reassuring skeptics by saying to them, oh, don't worry, the president doesn't have the authority to issue declaratory statements.
Even Congress can issue declaratory statements.
All the power the president has is to actually send the country into war.
Oh, that would reassure people, right?
It doesn't make sense.
The argument they're making does not make sense, but they're counting on people not really paying attention, I think.
Well, and here's the thing, too.
In the larger sense, we have this theory here, and I don't mean to sound too patronizing or whatever, but it does sort of cut to the core of the idea, like it says in the Declaration of Independence, that people are born free, we allow these governments to exist for the purpose of protecting our rights, and they're bound by this social contract, this Constitution, which is the supreme law of the land.
No laws that contradict it may stand unless you amend the Constitution and change it.
The law is the law, the English language means what it says, et cetera, et cetera.
If that's not true, then I guess we know we're so far already off of even the idea of the Constitution really limiting the power of the government.
We just look at the size of our government and its activities compared to what it was when they created this thing.
If you took one of the founders out of their grave and brought him here and said, check out all this, and by the way, great Constitution, we still have it, they would laugh in our face and say, no you don't, what are you talking about?
I guess the question is, what are we supposed to do, just get a new Constitution that gives them all this unlimited authority so it's legal, or figure out some way to make them pretend to at least obey the law, I don't know.
Yeah, look, it's a difficult question, Scott.
I only wish I knew the answer.
In my opinion, look, there's no way to get them to follow the Constitution.
Apparently a majority of Americans are either not interested, or feel paralyzed, or frankly like the system we have now.
So there's not much you and I can do, Scott, other than tell the truth as we see it.
But for me, I still think the Constitution is useful, because for people who may not quite realize exactly how badly we've gone wrong, but have some kind of inchoate sense that something just isn't quite right, pointing to the Constitution can be a real wake-up call for a lot of people, to say, look at how absurdly remote we are from this obvious model.
You know, today, the past few days, and week, this doesn't pertain to war per se, but we've had the President deciding that he's going to bail out this and that company, and this and that mortgage outfit, and whatever, and it doesn't even occur to anybody, well wait a minute, does he actually have the authority to do that?
No one even cares.
It doesn't even come up, right?
Well, I think that's why they don't, because they say, listen, this Constitution is from 1789, and it couldn't possibly provide for all the wonderful things that we need our government to do for us.
We don't want to really throw the whole thing out, because we kind of like the Bill of Rights, and we're kind of worried about what might replace it, but come on, it's 2008.
We need an all-powerful President who can bail out insurance companies and mortgage firms, or else the whole society will collapse.
Right, right, right.
So we need an all-powerful President who can bail out his friends, you know, on Wall Street or something, but then let's pretend to be shocked and surprised when he also wants to listen to your phone calls and, you know, look in your window or something.
Yeah, and torture people.
Yeah, and torture people.
So, I mean, you know, it seems to me that people who for years have been arguing that, you know, the Constitution is supposed to be this flexible document that changes with the times, well, you know, now they see George W. Bush, and now they're upset the Constitution isn't being obeyed.
Well, you know, look, you haven't got a leg to stand on, as far as I can see.
I mean, the whole point of the Constitution, if we're going to have one, is that it would have to be read according to the original meaning of the text, or otherwise, what is the point?
Jefferson said you may as well have a blank piece of paper for a Constitution.
Yes, it means that the federal government won't be able to give you free money and do all these other things, but it also won't be able to do a lot of the really nasty, rotten, immoral thievery and killing that it's responsible for.
But again, this idea that we're supposed to have a flexible Constitution, what that really means, I mean, of course, in a sense, we do have a flexible Constitution.
You can amend it if you want to change it, but what that really means, when people say we need a flexible Constitution, they're really saying we need a dead Constitution that can't restrain the government.
We need a Constitution that the government can decide and will tell us what its meaning is according to what it needs to do.
Well, all right, but if you expect to live in a free society under that arrangement, you're sadly mistaken, and it's exactly this type of system the American revolutionaries fought against.
The British had a living, breathing Constitution.
It was an unwritten document that the British government would have to tell you from day to day what it meant, and it might be the opposite of what they told you the previous day, and Americans decided we're not going to live under something like this.
We want a fixed rule that we can change from time to time if absolutely necessary, but that otherwise we're going to follow to the letter so we don't wind up under this type of tyranny, and well, well, well.
Look where we are.
Yeah, and you know, that's such a good point that, hey, it says right there in Article 6 or 7 or whatever, here's how you amend it.
You can amend it.
People act like you couldn't or something.
They pretend that even the amendment process itself is too complicated and archaic and difficult, and so why not just let Congress pass a law?
Hey, no, it's funny because, well, like you're saying, you're picking on the conservatives basically for being at least as bad as the liberals with, you know, you have the liberals have their whole living constitution doctrine, which as you say means simply that it's dead and they can do whatever they want, and it's the Federalist Society, Samuel Alito and John Roberts who are now on our Supreme Court, the strict constructionists opposed to all this judicial activism.
They are the greatest champions of the president's war powers, and in fact, I'll tell you a funny story.
John Roberts, the day before he was interviewed by George W. Bush in the White House for his nomination for his job to be Chief Justice of the Supreme Court of the United States of America, the day before that job interview, he, as part of a federal three-judge panel, issued a ruling saying that, yes, George Bush can abduct and torture and kidnap and completely make up out of whole cloth military tribunals for whoever he wants.
See, that doesn't surprise me at all.
You're right that it's these so-called conservative Supreme Court justices who also happen to be presidential and executive supremacists, and they've got their own version of the living constitution.
They're going to read into it what they want to read into it.
You know, I mentioned, and by the way, on the Federalist Society, they have all independent chapters at various law schools, and I've spoken at some Federalist Society chapters where there's a preponderance of libertarians who are good guys.
So there are some good guys in that Federalist Society, but I understand exactly the type that you have in mind.
On this subject, this John Yoo fellow that I mentioned who has been involved in the Federalist Society, you know, he's kind of spun out some kind of novel theories about presidential power, and my co-author of Who Killed the Constitution, Kevin Gutzman, met him years ago back in the 1990s, and, you know, and they got to talking, and my friend found out that Yoo was working on a major article on presidential war powers, and looking at the framing of the Constitution and the state ratifying conventions and what light this can shed on that subject.
Well, Kevin Gutzman happens to be an expert on the Virginia ratification process, so he said to Yoo, you know, listen, I'll send you my work, and, you know, that can be a help.
And Yoo said, oh, that'd be wonderful, I'd love to see what they had to say.
You know, he never wrote to Kevin again, never corresponded with him again, never talked to him again, because, of course, Kevin's research finds exactly the opposite of what Yoo wants to find.
He wants to find an American history in which it's normal for presidents to behave unilaterally, so it's not even just that, well, maybe Yoo's just ignorant or he hasn't read the right books.
I mean, somebody sent him the truth with, you know, with citations to all the relevant primary literature, and he completely disregarded it in his scholarly work.
So, you know, I hate, Scott, to be the bearer of, you know, cynicism here, but I'm afraid some of these people are not purely motivated by truth alone.
You know, I wonder about that ambition and avarice and things like that maybe coming into play, because, of course, this guy, John Yoo, he helped J. Bybee and William Haynes and David Addington, these are the men who conspired to break American law and American law enforcing, well, separate American laws have nothing to do with treaties, plus American laws enforcing the Geneva Conventions in this country, which forbid kidnapping and torture.
And, in fact, you know, there's a famous debate that Yoo had with a guy from the Notre Dame Law School Center for Civil and Human Rights, and Yoo was asked, this was in about three years ago, Yoo was asked, if the president deems that he's got to torture somebody, including by crushing the testicles of the person's child, there's no law that can stop him?
And Yoo responded, no treaty.
And then his interlocutor said, also no law by Congress.
That's what you wrote in the August 2002 memo.
And Yoo's reply was, I think it depends on why the president thinks he needs to do that.
So, if there isn't adequate reason for the testicle crushing, then, you know, maybe we might say something, but, you know, and what really, you know, ticks me off, by the way, that was the sound of me slamming the book down on my desk, but what really ticks me off about this is how many, you know, frankly, supposedly religious people have latched on to this Bush administration and been such big supporters of it, want to have a repeat of it on steroids with John McCain.
You know, I'm sorry, but, you know, I mean, I'm on record and I've written a lot of books about Catholicism, you know, involved in the church a lot, and, you know, I'm sorry, but you don't qualify for membership if you think this is morally acceptable.
I mean, you just don't.
There have to be some criteria, and it's not just abortion.
There has to be some criteria to make you a member of the church, it seems to me.
And this ought to be one of them, you know, no crushing of testicles of children.
You know, I mean, this kind of thing.
And that people have been able to get away with portraying themselves as great, you know, as religious people, whatever, is such a moral atrocity, in my opinion, which is why yesterday on LewRockwell.com, I wrote that article called Pro-Lifers for Murder.
Got a little hate mail for that one, but that was the point.
I wanted to provoke these people who deserve provocation.
Yeah, well, and the ones who write to denounce you, you should ask them, does it count as an abortion if a Republican drops a bomb on a pregnant woman from the sky?
Yeah, I know it.
It is just unbelievable.
It is just unbelievable, and I'm particularly sensitive to this, because, you know, back when I was, you know, I don't know, an early college student, I've confessed this a few times before, so this is not a complete Scott Horton scoop here, but, you know, I was basically a neocon without knowing it.
I just sort of figured, well, I know I don't like the Democrats, I know I basically believe in a free market economy, so I guess that means I'm a Republican.
I mean, I was not intellectually creative enough to think of any other alternative, so I guess I'm a Republican, I guess I like Rush Limbaugh, I guess I support the Persian Gulf War.
I mean, I just sort of took all these things as my natural issues, and for me, you know, war was like a great video game beamed into my home that I could enjoy, you know, while having a snack, and anybody who would try to point out to me the unthinkable and unspeakable human suffering that was being brought about by these things was, in my view, just missing the point.
You know, the righteous American government is raining down justice on the bad guys, you know, what are you, some kind of a liberal?
And so I see shades of my former self in so many of these Bush administration addicts that I just, it particularly sets me off, you know, when I encounter it, that, no, look, I was there, people, and, you know, I have to believe that, you know, like me, you can be reached.
I was reached, somebody persuaded me I was wrong, and so that's why a lot of my articles and my stuff, I pitch to that segment of the population, hoping that maybe some of them still have an independent enough mind that they might listen.
Geez, I was going to say, just wait until, you know, Democrats are in charge next year, and then all these people will be clamoring to become our friends as enemies of the state, but boy, I guess I'm not so confident that's going to happen now.
They may be, you know, all the Amen Corner for the McCain years coming up.
Yeah, no, I know, and, you know, I just had Anthony Gregory on my own program the other day, and he said, he put it so well, he said, you know, because, of course, the Democrats are such a pathetic excuse for an opposition party, and he said, look, the Democrats are not going to succeed if they come up as the somewhat elitist, somewhat anti-bourgeois sellout party, which is exactly what they do.
I mean, they go out of their way to try to offend the sensibilities of the vast majority of Americans, you know, with their stupid attacks on Sarah Palin, who is not beyond attack, by the way.
She should be attacked, but not for the stupid, bozo reasons.
Oh, you know, she lives a bourgeois lifestyle or something, and this is just absolutely idiotic, and then, you know, again, what was it that made Barack so popular?
You know, his anti-war view, which now he wants to repudiate.
It's like, I mean, seriously, it's like there's some demon somehow running these campaigns So whoever's running the Bob Barr campaign, for example, you know, who wants to lose votes, apparently, seem to be running Obama's campaign.
Why can't they run a simple, crummy, 30-second ad showing just clips of McCain as an insane lunatic?
Why should McCain be ahead among independents, for heaven's sake?
Independents are supposed to be, you know, the sober, clear-thinking, normal Americans.
They're way, like, by 15 percentage points, they're for McCain.
Why don't you run that clip about, let's stay in Iraq for 100, 1,000, or 10,000 years?
Why don't you run that over and over and over again?
Why don't you run McCain claiming that he can walk through Baghdad neighborhoods completely unarmed?
That was a complete lie, and he's just living in a dream world.
Why don't you compile that into an ad?
No, no, no, no, no, we just have to run sloganeering ads.
I mean, amazing scum, like, you and me could run a far better campaign than any of these hacks, don't you think?
Oh, yeah.
Well, you know, the Democrats, the thing is about them is they're pathetic, and there's not really much to sell there.
Yeah, yeah, yeah, I mean, why can't, you know, an anti-war position does not have to be a turnoff to the electorate, if it's explained correctly.
Look, you know, it's an embarrassment.
We are totally isolated in the world.
We've expended, where we're going to be expending in the long run, trillions of dollars on the basis of a war that we all know, every general knows we shouldn't have fought in the first place.
There's no way that it's, quote, liberal to point out what is obvious to the whole world.
Now, let's return to the America that we know, you know, our founding fathers would be proud of.
I mean, just that.
What's so hard about that?
I don't know.
Well, Ron tried it, and it didn't sell.
But then again, if it was Barack selling it, Barack's a hell of a salesman, you know.
Ron stumbles when he talks sometimes.
Yeah, I know.
Well, these are a whole lot of what-ifs, but, you know, we'll see what happens in 2012.
I mean, it depends on whether the Democrat or the Republican wins.
But in 2012, maybe we'd get an interesting- I can't believe I'm still interested in politics now.
You know, I was never interested in, you know, 1990s, you know, Dole versus Clinton, who cares?
But because of Ron Paul, you know, now I've got kind of like that glimmer of hope that maybe- Well, and because John McCain's pure malevolence and ignorance, and he's making this interesting, usually there's not a dime worth of difference.
And I don't think there really is in policy, but just in terms of, like, who might wake up in the morning angry and start a war, there's a difference in who's running for office this time, I think.
Well, I think former New Mexico governor Gary Johnson is going to run, if Obama wins, he's going to run in 2012.
And he's not perfect, but on this stuff, he's very- I mean, he's probably the only non-interventionist on the stage, so he'd be somebody to keep an eye out for.
Yeah, he was definitely an anti-drug war guy, I remember that.
Yeah, yeah.
All right, well, listen, I really thank you for your time.
I guess the answer to the question, who killed the Constitution, is the politicians and the American people who let it happen right in front of their eyes.
I'm sorry we're all out of time, but there's a whole bunch more stuff I wanted to ask you about.
But anyway, it's always good to talk to you, Tom.
Thanks a lot, Scott.
All right, folks, that's Tom Woods from the Ludwig von Mises Institute, author of The Politically Incorrect Guide to American History and Who Killed the Constitution.
And the brand new one is We Who Dared Say No to War, which is a history of American anti-war writing going back to the very beginning there.
And as soon as I actually read that book, I'm going to interview Tom and Murray Polner, his co-author, all about it on this show.
